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meandered past the end of the grounds. She also taught a limited number of sculpture and graphics classes in Haye House’s art department, and a small spare studio was at her disposal. She had studied sculpture at Chelsea School of Art, later specialised in typography, and still produced large canvases incorporating hand-painted lettering. Elisabeth, like James, was an anomaly at Haye House; one who, with her understated elegance and almost chilly expectation of good behaviour, could only instil a modicum of restraint in an institution that occasionally threatened to implode.
    ‘And what does your husband do?’ Elisabeth Dahl, an angular eyebrow raised, asked Dora one day in the staffroom: an underheated section of the school into which pupils were apparently free to wander at will. She wore a dark grey suit and a thick silver bracelet. Dora gazed at her clothes. Elisabeth habitually twisted the classical lines she adhered to, mixing tweeds or precisely cut trousers with bright stones, or large opals, or a weapon of a brooch.
    ‘He – he trained as an accountant,’ said Dora, giving herself time to think. ‘He . . . makes pots. Quite amateur stuff,’ she said hastily, reddening at her own treachery. ‘In comparison with . . .’ she said, nodding at Elisabeth. ‘And we have – we let out lots of the barns around the house and so on to people. Artisans. The unwashed.’
    Elisabeth laughed. She gave Dora a look of open curiosity. Dora went to the staff lavatories, where she pressed her hand to her forehead in shame, self-censure tangling with fury at Patrick, who had recently developed a scheme to make paper from bulrushes and was paying hippies to help him wade into the mud to harvest the plants before hammering and dampening them into dung-hued pulp. He appeared to work ever longer hours while bringing in diminishing profits.
     
    Every weekday morning, Dora navigated the sunken, scrambling lanes that led from the moor to Haye House, the only classical music teacher in a school that employed the part-time services of four guitar instructors, two saxophonists and one tabla tutor who could double up as a modern-dance coach. Dora collected neighbours’ children on the way, piling them on to laps, stuffing them beside her cello into the luggage space of the ancient estate car whose heater was broken and windscreen wipers limped. This and a mildewed VW camper van were kept at Wind Tor, tax and insurance unpaid. The moment an engine was heard coughing into life in the silent valley, a beard or muddy hem would appear in hope from behind the foliage.
    As the term went on, Dora became increasingly anxious to leave promptly for Haye House.
    Almost ideologically lenient over the years, she started to insist that her children gather on the front path by eight twenty. This changed to eight fifteen. Cecilia stood there trying to neaten Tom’s hair and shivering: Cecilia her transformed daughter, an alarming child-woman who would surely attract boys with this sudden blooming. Benedict was now tall and scabrous, still radiating the gruff self-consciousness of late adolescence.
    ‘Chill out, Mum,’ he said.
    ‘Has the snow plough been?’ Dora asked, looking anxiously up the lane as the moorland snow swept in.
    ‘We can’t tell yet,’ said Cecilia, idly sucking pieces of Tom’s hair.
    ‘Has anyone heard it?’ said Dora.
    ‘Honest, Mum, you can’t hear it from down here,’ said Benedict. ‘It’s a big fucker but we’re too far down the hill.’
    Early on those winter mornings they piled into the car, children’s breath an oat-scented fog, and Dora double-declutched on the snow-covered lane leading up from the valley, grinding up it in first gear, occasionally begging Benedict to sit on the bonnet to weigh down the front wheels; and in the yellow headlamp light and semi-darkness they moved in fits and starts through that ice-changed land towards tabla-playing with Jesse; towards nervous awareness in the corridors;