ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan. They are allowed to cross the invisible line to prove this. Everyone is allowed to cross the invisible line to be nasty to Brian Wentworth.
Nan paused here. Up to then she had been writing almost as if she was possessed, the way she had been at lunch. Now she had to think about Brian Wentworth. What was it about Brian that put him below even her?
Some of Brian’s trouble, she wrote, is that Mr Wentworth is his father, and he is small and perky and irritating with it. Another part is that Brian is really good at things and comes top in most things, and he ought to be the real boy, not Simon. But SS is so certain he is the real boy that he has managed to convince Brian too.
That, Nan thought, was still not quite it, but it was as near as she could get. The rest of her description of 2Y struck her as masterly. She was so pleased with it that she almost forgot she was miserable.
Charles wrote, I got up, I got up, I GOT UP.
That made it look as if he had sprung eagerly out of bed, which was certainly not the case, but he had so hated today that he had to work it off somehow.
My running shoes got buried in cornflakes. I felt very hot running round the field and on top of that I had lunch on high table. I do not like rice pudding. We have had Games with Miss Hodge and rice pudding and there are still about a hundred years of today still to go.
And that, he thought, about summed it up.
When the bell went, Mr Crossley hurried to pick up the books he had been marking in order to get to the staff room before Miss Hodge left it. And stared. There was another note under the pile of books. It was written in the same capitals and the same blue ballpoint as the first note. It said:
HA HA. THOUGHT I WAS GOING
TO TELL YOU. DIDN’T YOU?
Now what do I do? wondered Mr Crossley.
At the end of lessons, there was the usual stampede to be elsewhere. Theresa and her friends, Delia, Heather, Deborah, Julia and the rest, raced to the lower school girls’ playroom to bag the radiators there, so that they could sit on them and knit. Estelle and Karen hurried to bag the chillier radiators in the corridor, and sat on them to cast on their stitches.
Simon led his friends to the labs, where they added to Simon’s collection of honour marks by helping tidy up. Dan Smith left his friends to play football without him, because he had business in the shrubbery, watching the senior boys meeting their senior girlfriends there. Charles crawled reluctantly to the locker room to look for his running shoes again.
Nan went, equally reluctantly, up to Mr Wentworth’s study.
There was someone else in with Mr Wentworth when she got there. She could hear voices and see two misty shapes through the wobbly glass in the door. Nan did not mind. The longer the interview was put off the better. So she hung about in the passage for nearly twenty minutes, until a passing prefect asked her what she was doing there.
“Waiting to see Mr Wentworth,” Nan said. Then, of course, in order to prove it to the prefect, she was forced to knock at the door.
“Come!” bawled Mr Wentworth.
The prefect, placated, passed on down the passage. Nan put out her hand to open the door, but, before she could, it was pulled open by Mr Wentworth himself and Mr Crossley came out, rather red and laughing sheepishly.
“I still swear it wasn’t there when I put the books down,” he said.
“Ah, but you know you didn’t look, Harold,” Mr Wentworth said. “Our practical joker relied on your not looking. Forget it, Harold. So there you are, Nan. Did you lose your way here? Come on in. Mr Crossley’s just going.”
He went back to his desk and sat down. Mr Crossley hovered for a moment, still rather red, and then hurried away downstairs, leaving Nan to shut the door. As she did so, she noticed that Mr Wentworth was staring at three pieces of paper on his desk as if he thought they might bite him. She saw that one was in Miss Hodge’s writing and that the other two were scraps of paper with blue capital letters on them, but she was much too worried on her own account to bother about pieces of writing.
“Explain your behaviour on high table,” Mr Wentworth said to her.
Since there really was no explanation that Nan could see, she said, in a miserable whisper, “I can’t, sir,” and looked down at the parquet floor.
“Can’t?” said Mr Wentworth. “You put Lord Mulke off his lunch for no reason at all! Tell me another. Explain yourself.”
Miserably, Nan fitted one of her feet exactly into one of the parquet oblongs in the floor. “I don’t know, sir. I just said it.”
“You don’t know, you just said it,” said Mr Wentworth. “Do you mean by that you found yourself speaking without knowing you were?”
This was meant to be sarcasm, Nan knew. But it seemed to be true as well. Carefully, she fitted her other shoe into the parquet block which slanted towards her first foot, and stood unsteadily, toe to toe, while she wondered how to explain. “I didn’t know what I was going to say next, sir.”
“Why not?” demanded Mr Wentworth.
“I don’t know,” Nan said. “It was like – like being possessed.”
“Possessed!” shouted Mr Wentworth. It was the way he shouted just before he suddenly threw chalk at people. Nan went backwards to avoid the chalk which came next. But she forgot that her feet were pointing inwards and sat down heavily on the floor. From there, she could see Mr Wentworth’s surprised face, peering at her over the top of his desk. “What did that?” he said.
“Please don’t throw chalk at me!” Nan said.
At that moment, there was a knock at the door and Brian Wentworth put his head round it into the room. “Are you free yet, Dad?”
“No,” said Mr Wentworth.
Both of them looked at Nan sitting on the floor. “What’s she doing?” Brian asked.
“She says she’s possessed. Go away and come back in ten minutes,” Mr Wentworth said. “Get up, Nan.”
Brian obediently shut the door and went away. Nan struggled to her feet. It was almost as difficult as climbing a rope. She wondered a little how it felt to be Brian, with your father one of the teachers, but mostly she wondered what Mr Wentworth was going to do to her. He had his most harrowed, worried look, and he was staring again at the three papers on his desk.
