Mrs Crabtree is sixty two. She has a face I want to call pinched, though if I were being particularly vulgar I'd say it looked more like a slapped arse. Anyhow, it relaxes naturally in a way that conveys permanent displeasure. She tuts and sighs - mannerisms we on the staff read as impatience with what she sees as our inferior ways. I find I am in no mood to psychoanalyse her. If she has vulnerabilities that make her act this way I find I am happy not to go looking for them.

The girls call her names behind her back, but to her face they are shamefully deferential. She tuts at me now, and then she sighs. She has important minutes to write up and I am standing at her desk, asking for a badge that says my name on it. This is ridiculous, but without my badge the school procedures dictate I should not be on the premises, because I might be a dangerous stranger wearing a rubber-mask disguise, wanting to abduct children. I have left my badge at home, you see?

"But you should not have taken it home, Mr Hunter."

This is true. The procedures would tell me this I suppose, but I have not read them. They consist of several thousand sheets of A4 and I really do not have the time, nor the inclination to memorise them. I wonder if it's expected of us. I wonder if Davinia can quote them back to me blindfold.

I should have left my badge in the rack Mrs Crabtree keeps by her desk. This way she knows who is and is not in, before they ring her with their grovelling excuses. Normally I would smile, and trot out an apology, but I am not in the mood for Mrs Crabtree this morning. Lillian is waiting in the house alone, for the devil to take her. Meanwhile, Mrs Crabtree is creating a drama out of trifles.

"Will you make me a new badge or not?" My voice has an edge to it, like the knife Lillian hides in her bosom. My impatience surprises us both.

It will take ten seconds to print a piece of paper with my name and picture on it, and slip it into the plastic wallet with the clip. But her stubbornly self-important manner tells me she will not do it, not right away, and certainly not at my bidding.

"I shall have to speak with Miss Barkwell," she tells me.

I wish she would, for then I might be rewarded with the much promised spectacle of Davinia stabbing her through the neck with the heel of her Stiletto.

Mrs Crabtree waits.

I wait.

"Are you going to speak with her or not?" I ask.

"As soon as she comes off the telephone."

I feel angry and humiliated, so I take a piece of paper from her desk, write my name on it, draw a big frowny face beside it, fold over the top of the paper and tuck it into my breast pocket.

"You could perhaps inform me of Miss Barkwell's decision later on?"

I have never stuck two fingers up at Mrs Crabtree before. I normally consider it beneath me, but I do it now - metaphorically speaking of course. I would never actually stick two fingers up at a woman.

The children find my badge amusing.

So does Davinia, which is odd because I had always supposed she was without a sense of humour.

I'm in the playground. It's lunchtime and the rain has dried up. The air is filled with the jangling squeals of several hundred children at their leisure, a good number of them making a mess of their shoes by splashing in puddles. I have not the heart to stop them even though the dinner ladies have warned me there'll be hell to pay at home-time when the parents see the state of their offspring. But all they want to do is splash in puddles and I am tempted to similarly lift my spirits by joining in.

I'm cold, my mind flipping between my charges and the thought of a woman lying in a pool of blood, when I get back. Also, strangely, the thought of a daughter lost to a life of sin in some hellish urban backwater, and a son stepping on a tripwire that will take his legs, for no good reason that I can see. It may already have happened, so what good does it do to reconnect with it? Surely it's better not knowing.

My God what's happening to me? When did I become so,… passive.

"I'm afraid it's a poor likeness, Mr Hunter." Davinia's holding out a mug of tea for me. This is also unexpected.

"A poor likeness you say?"

"The frowny face on your badge" she explains.

"Oh,.. I would have thought it the perfect likeness of a depressive."

"Not at all. Frowny faces are generally just useless whiners. You'd have been better drawing the lips in with a straight line. Inscrutable. Unknowable. Armoured. Then I might have recognised you instantly. But this,… " she gestures to the badge. "This is not you at all. You are growly and grumpy, Mr Hunter. Mrs. Crabtree has even complained to me that you were abusive to her. If I wasn't so impressed I would have to tell you off about it."

"Mrs. Crabtree? Don't tempt me."

"I've been watching you, Richard."

"That makes a change."

"You see? How grumpy you are! Anyone would think you did not love me any more."

Was that a hint of a smile? Is she,… teasing me?

"Miss Barkwell - children have big ears and loose tongues."

"Yes,… but such a delightful innocence, don't you think?"

"Tell me, have you been teaching long?"

"I'll ask you this just once, not that I expect you to answer truthfully."

"Oh?"

"Are you in any trouble?"

"Of course not."

She nods. "That tells me everything I need to know."

"Look, I'm sorry if I've been,… morose recently. It's true, I have things on my mind. I'll try to do better."

Davinia is perhaps thinking things are not working out so well as I had hoped with my internet bride. Is she pleased by this? And if she is pleased, what does it mean? I discover I would like to talk to her, confess all to her, have her somehow save me, and Lillian from what is surely coming. This is an insane thought, and very dangerous, so I strike it from my mind immediately.

"I shall apologise to Mrs Crabtree, of course."

She takes a cheeky sip from the cup before handing it over. "Don't you dare," she tells me, then walks away.

At that moment, Rufus Donnoley and Lizzy Sitwell collide. They bang heads, then Lizzy goes down and grazes her knee. Davinia steps around her, looks back pointedly at me, and I step in. I notice Davinia does not walk away as she might once have done, after delegating responsibility, but holds herself stiffly aloof and looks on awkwardly.

Lizzy is howling. Rufus is on the verge of it, his grubby face about to buckle. He's not hurt - just upset that he has hurt someone else. At what point, I wonder will he grow out of this? Perhaps Davinia is right. There is something amoral in their ways, but beneath it an innocence that I wish we could hold onto as we grow.

If it were my knee, I'd press my handkerchief to it, but of I cannot touch Lizzy without opening myself up to ridiculous charges of abuse. All I can offer her are comforting platitudes, while I wait for the appointed first aider to come, who similarly can do little else but wait for the thing to stop bleeding of its own accord, while deciding whether or not it merits a Medovac to Middleton A+E. And while we wait, Davinia steps in, kneels down to Rufus and shocks me with her smile, for there is a sympathy in it, struggling to break through, but a sympathy all the same. "It's all right, Rufus," she tells him. "It was an accident."

Rufus blinks, uncertain - and clearly as puzzled as I am to hear such sweetness coming from Miss Barkwell's lips. Is it a trick? She's aware of our consternation and jumps up, embarrassed, as if she expects us to start laughing at her. I notice how her long hair brushes Rufus's face. He's startled by it - thinks perhaps he has heard the voice of angels, and been touched by their wings.

Meanwhile I wince, and wonder at what point I should tell her Rufus has more head lice than can be accommodated on his scruffy, unwashed head, and that by now, a goodly number of them will have hitched a ride on Davinia. It does not matter how brightly we shine our image, you see? We shall always end up being tarnished by life.

I will apologise to Mrs Crabtree. She will see it as a weakness, but I can't help her with that. For me there is a greater dignity in it, and small things are important now.

It seems a small thing too, when Davinia calls me into her office later in the day, sending a teaching assistant to cover my class. She has the telephone in her hand. She's pressing it to her brow and appears to be struggling again with ripples of emotion. She looks up as I enter, bites her hip: "Richard. It's the care home - your father,… "

I take the telephone.

"Hello?"

A soft vortex comes from a point in time, long distant, and opens out into a future of uncertain emptiness, and I am struck by the feeling that there is no longer a generation between me and my own death any more. I listen to the voice on the telephone explaining the facts of the matter. It's the Matron, though I had hoped it would be Chelsea. I sit down uninvited, thinking Davinia will forgive my familiarity this once. She's eyeing me awkwardly, wondering perhaps if I shall cry. I won't. Not with her. I shall cry later, in Durleston, by the beech tree, with Lillian's arm around me, her face snuggled into my neck. I give her back the telephone.

"My father has passed away." I tell her.

"Yes."

"I'd better,… "

"Of course,… yes,.."

"Get back to my class."

"What? No, Richard,… . Go home."

"I'm fine. There's nothing I can do just yet."

"Go home,… "

I nod, thank her, and make to leave, not sure where my path leads from here. She's around the desk in a flash and catches my sleeve. For one confused moment I think she's about to embrace me. I don't know if I'm delighted by the prospect or horrified – but she just stands there, trying to read me.

"Richard, why didn't you say?"

"Say what?"

"That your father was so ill. I understand now - I'm sorry. Go,… go. But you should have said."

It's as I'm walking home I am overcome by the feeling that being comforted by Davinia is like being wrapped in sandpaper. She cannot do it, but something has changed in her. She has become conscious of herself which is the first step in wishing she could be something other than what she is. Is it better then to derive strength from a deluded version of yourself, or to collapse into weakness at your inevitable frailty? The only certain thing in life is that it will get you in the end and it seems all the business in between is nothing more than a game of useless posturing. It doesn't matter how you play it, so long as you discover a way of deluding yourself that you are happy in the mean time.