The hallway was cold and drafty. Silently I stood outside the oak-panelled door, softly kicking my heels against the wall. I had endured the first half hour of my wait with a growing apprehension and now, chilled and weary, I could feel the fear gripping me, wrapping itself around my shoulders like a dark December night.

'Come!' summoned the voice within.

I straightened my blazer, skirt and tie, pulled the white socks up to my knees and fearfully entered Mr Parker’s study.

I had been inside this sanctum of my English teacher many times before but its atmosphere – endowed by the ghosts of all the girls who had been there before – never failed to awe me. The room itself was like a mad professor's den. The walls were lined with bookshelves overflowing with learned texts. Novels, poetry, philosophy, history. Books, pamphlets and journals of every description rubbed against each other. Every surface too was covered with yet more tomes, most closed, but many lying open, their pages transcribed with spidery notes written in Mr Parker’s neat, dense hand. Papers were piled on the carpet in precarious towers that almost toppled as I crept past them.

Against the far wall a grandfather clock beat out the seconds to my release from this cell. A gilded mirror, seldom used, I suspect, by my teacher, hung beside it. In the middle of the room was his desk: a vast, imposing slab of mahogany, itself covered with papers. On one corner sat a chessboard with large, carved wooden pieces, which he would move around absent-mindedly as he spoke.

The study was illuminated only by a desk lamp, casting dark shadows around the perimeter and lending the surroundings an eerie intimacy.

'Ah, yes, Dulcima..... Again....' said Mr Parker sternly, setting aside his glasses on the desk.

The lamp bestowed upon his face a halo of silvery light. As always, he was wearing a corduroy jacket, with leather elbow patches, over a white open-necked shirt and dark trousers. He was, I suppose, in his early forties but, to me, he was ageless. Susan, my best friend at the girls’ boarding school to which I had been dispatched so long ago, had once seen him at the swimming pool, and told me that he had a trim, muscled body and that, in her words, ‘he filled his trunks nicely’. He certainly had a handsome face, with dark hair, greying at the temples, and a world-weary air. But such a distant, imposing figure was he in my life that I could hardly imagine that he had a body at all. Although at one time or another many of the girls had enjoyed an unrequited 'pash' for Mr Parker, to me, quite simply, he was an idol and had been ever since I had come to the school. But now, since I had entered the