Excerpt
Ten minutes into her double lesson, by now in a lather of sweat, with a fresh ladder in her tights and a faint smell of damp sheep rising from her rain-sodden Merino wool twinset, Eva emerged from the cloister to find another downpour unleashing itself on to the cobblestones. Ruined hairdo braced downwards to ward off the elements, the Hebrews clutched to her ample bosom, Eva started her third dash across the courtyard, almost running blind into the arms of a camel-coated stranger, who looked distinguished, grizzled and confused.

"Question!" he hailed, with raised right arm, across an invisible sea of wealth and privilege that apparently rendered complete sentences superfluous when talking to damp teachers and other social inferiors. This utterance was enough to startle the forces of physical motion into bringing Eva's forging body to an ungainly halt, at the very moment her mind was deciding that she did not even remotely have time to stop, and equally that she did not at all like this Morse-code-like form of address. She turned her face upwards and sideways, both towards the elements and in the direction of the immaculate camel coat, blurred on the other side of her rain-spattered glasses. A sense of detached, clinical wonder overcame her for an instant at the way an otherwise rational, sensible adult can be trained to obedience like a dog, with a single authoritative syllable from a well-heeled stranger. She also found herself wondering how it was neurologically possible for the body to obey ahead of the mind's decision not to.

"Can I help you?" she heard herself asking, her mind now decorously falling over the precipice that divides normal workaday tension from the silent hysteria of impending burnout, as she pictured the group that should by now have long been intent on the Letter to the Hebrews descending into irretrievable acts of classroom decadence.