table. He could hear her perfectly. She could tell from the expression on his face. Why doesn’t he stop me? she thought. Why do they let me go on? Why doesn’t somebody do something, like a thunderbolt strike me, or eternal detention? Why don’t I get under the table and crawl away? And, all the time, she could hear herself talking. “These did in fact start life as peas. But they have since undergone a long and deadly process. They lie for six months in a sewer, absorbing fluids and rich tastes, which is why they are called processed peas. Then—”
Here, Miss Cadwallader turned gracefully to them. Nan, to her utter relief, stopped in mid-sentence. “You have all been long enough in the school by now,” Miss Cadwallader said, “to know the town quite well. Do you know that lovely old house in the High Street?”
They all three stared at her. Charles gulped down a ring of potato. “Lovely old house?”
“It’s called the Old Gate House,” said Miss Cadwallader. “It used to be part of the gate in the old town wall. A very lovely old brick building.”
“You mean the one with a tower on top and windows like a church?” Charles asked, though he could not think why Miss Cadwallader should talk of this and not processed peas.
“That’s the one,” said Miss Cadwallader. “And it’s such a shame. It’s going to be pulled down to make way for a supermarket. You know it has a king-pin roof, don’t you?”
“Oh,” said Charles. “Has it?”
“And a queen-pin,” said Miss Cadwallader.
Charles seemed to have got saddled with the conversation. Nirupam was happy enough not to talk, and Nan dared do no more than nod intelligently, in case she started describing the food again. As Miss Cadwallader talked, and Charles was forced to answer while trying to eat tinned tomatoes – no, they were not skinned mice! – using just a fork, Charles began to feel he was undergoing a particularly refined form of torture.
He realised he needed a hate-word for Miss Cadwallader too. Hot-pot would do for her. Surely nothing as awful as this could happen to him more than once a month? But that meant he had still not got a code-word for Nan.
They took the hot-pot away. Charles had not eaten much. Miss Cadwallader continued to talk to him about houses in the town, then about stately homes in the country, until the pudding arrived. It was set before Charles, white and bleak and swimming, with little white grains in it like the corpses of ants – Lord, he was getting as bad as Nan Pilgrim! Then he realised it was the ideal word for Nan.
“Rice pudding!” he exclaimed.
“It is agreeable,” Miss Cadwallader said, smiling. “And so nourishing.” Then, incredibly, she reached to the top of her plate and picked up a fork. Charles stared. He waited. Surely Miss Cadwallader was not going to eat runny rice pudding with just a fork? But she was. She dipped the fork in and brought it up, raining weak white milk.
Slowly, Charles picked up a fork too and turned to meet Nan’s and Nirupam’s incredulous faces. It was just not possible.
Nirupam looked wretchedly down at his brimming plate. “There is a story in the Arabian Nights,” he said, “about a woman who ate rice with a pin, grain by grain.” Charles shot a terrified look at Miss Cadwallader, but she was talking to the lord again. “She turned out to be a ghoul,” Nirupam said. “She ate her fill of corpses every night.”
Charles’s terrified look shot to Nan instead. “Shut up, you fool! You’ll set her off again!”
But the possession seemed to have left Nan by then. She was able to whisper, with her head bent over her plate so that only the boys could hear, “Mr Wentworth’s using his spoon. Look.”
“Do you think we dare?” said Nirupam.
“I’m going to,” said Charles. “I’m hungry.”
So they all used their spoons. When the meal was at last over, they were all dismayed to find Mr Wentworth beckoning. But it was only Nan he was beckoning. When she came reluctantly over, he said, “See me at four in my study.” Which was, Nan felt, all she needed. And the day was still only half over.
That afternoon, Nan came into the classroom to find a besom laid across her desk. It was an old tatty broom, with only the bare minimum of twigs left in the brush end, which the groundsman sometimes used to sweep the paths. Someone had brought it in from the groundsman’s shed. Someone had tied a label to the handle: Dulcinea’s Pony. Nan recognised the round, angelic writing as Theresa’s.
Amid sniggers and titters, she looked round the assembled faces. Theresa would not have thought of stealing a broom on her own. Estelle? No. Neither Estelle nor Karen Grigg was there. No, it was Dan Smith, by the look on his face. Then she looked at Simon Silverson and was not so sure. It could not have been both of them because they never, ever did anything together.
Simon said to her, in his suavest manner, grinning all over his face, “Why don’t you hop on and have a ride, Dulcinea?”
“Yes, go on. Ride it, Dulcinea,” said Dan.
Next moment, everyone else was laughing and yelling at her to ride the broom. And Brian Wentworth, who was only too ready to torment other people when he was not being a victim himself, was leaping up and down in the gangway between the desks, screaming, “Ride, Dulcinea! Ride!”
Slowly, Nan picked up the broom. She was a mild and peaceable person who seldom lost her temper – perhaps that was her trouble – but when she did lose it, there was no knowing what she would do. As she picked up the broom, she thought she just meant to stand it haughtily against the wall. But, as her hands closed round its knobby handle, her temper left her completely. She turned round on the jeering, hooting crowd, filled with roaring rage. She lifted the broom high above her head and bared her teeth. Everyone thought that was funnier than ever.
Nan meant to smash the broom through Simon Silverson’s laughing face. She meant to bash in Dan Smith’s head. But, since Brian Wentworth was dancing and shrieking and making faces just in front of her, it was Brian she went for. Luckily for him, he saw the broom coming down and leapt clear. After that, he was forced to back away up the gangway and then into the space by the door, with his arms over his head, screaming for mercy, while Nan followed him, bashing like a madwoman.
“Help! Stop her!” Brian screamed, and backed into the door just as Miss Hodge came through it carrying a large pile of English books. Brian backed into her and sat down at her feet in a shower of books. “Ow!” he yelled.
“What is going on?” said Miss Hodge.
The uproar in the room was cut off as if with a switch. “Get up, Brian,” Simon Silverson said righteously. “It was your own fault for teasing Nan Pilgrim.”
“Really! Nan!” said Theresa. She was genuinely shocked. “Temper, temper!”
At that, Nan nearly went for Theresa
