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at Benedict.
    ‘He can piss off then,’ said Benedict.
    ‘Oh, he’s really quite an interesting chap,’ said Dora. ‘A bit serious. His wife’s come too; she’s something of an artist.’
    ‘I don’t want to be “controlled”,’ snarled Benedict.
    I do, thought Cecilia, wishing for homework timetables, lists, prize-giving days, a punishment book. She pictured a volume of rules in glowing leather on a lectern in the main hall. She imagined the serious James Dahl, tall and erudite, teaching her.
     
    ‘Are there other well-known ghosts, or – metaphorical hauntings . . . in literature?’ Cecilia asked Mr Dahl, her new English teacher, as the class discussed Banquo.
    ‘ Woo hoo ,’ called out a boy with a peroxide fringe.
    ‘Well,’ said Mr Dahl, addressing his desk and twisting his head a little away from the row of faces in front of him. His dark lashes seemed to form a protective veil as he looked down. ‘It depends on what one construes as a “ghost”. You could do no better than to start with Wuthering Heights .’
    ‘Seen the film. Crap,’ commented another boy. Cecilia winced. James Dahl ignored him. He spoke, instead, of Henry James and Wilkie Collins, of W.W. Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare and Washington Irving, compressing his words into a series of near-stutters followed by short runs of impassioned fluency as he ruminated upon the subject, seemingly forgetting who had asked him the question.
    A former English master at a boys’ public school in Dorset, James Dahl had been brought in as head of the English department to introduce some discipline and to improve the school’s lacklustre results in a subject in which the governors felt it should perform, though its risible science grades were a source of indifference. The former head of English had died, inspiring a predictable flurry of rumours about drug addiction, overdoses and suicide. James Dahl, his style so opposed to the Haye House ethos, was persuaded by a promotion with a considerably raised salary, an ambivalent desire for the first real professional challenge of his life, and the offer of a position for his wife.
    His arrival was treated with disbelief, followed by protest and mirth.
    ‘Jim!’ they called out in class, encountering a quashing lack of response. ‘Jimbo. Jimmy-Boy!’
    English classes, conducted until that point in Haye House’s usual lounging and matey teaching style and dedicated to creating experimental narratives in a variety of media, were now formal sessions, and pupils were indignant that the new geezer should gag them with his offensively prehistoric methods. James Dahl taught as though he were instructing his own desk, holding an ongoing dialogue with its surface, eyes lowered and gestures occluded, his hair falling over his forehead, his manner hesitant and refined. Yet after the initial catcalls and outbursts of rebellion, comparative peace descended on his classes: an air of concentration and even of industry.
    In an atmosphere of such tradition, Cecilia Bannan excelled. She was soothed to almost tearful relief that she had stumbled across a chance of a formal education. She revelled in his observations and comparisons; in the historical contexts he encompassed; in his clearly instinctive understanding of rhythm and scansion; she stored the Latin phrases he occasionally used, scribbling them on a corner and looking them up later. She had already taught herself some Latin; she had learnt the Greek alphabet to exercise her mind. She wondered whether she was a genius. Or hosting a brain tumour.
     
    The Dahls’ two sons were boarding at school in Wiltshire. Elisabeth Dahl, a trained art teacher who had spent the majority of the previous decade raising her sons, had accompanied her husband to Haye House to fill a position as a housemistress for Neill House, the scuffed and echoing red-painted series of bedrooms, common room and kitchen facing the lower stretch of Dart that