Such a cute lass opposite me on the train, snuggling up against her boyfriend. He must be thirty. She… quite a considerable amount younger.
The suit cover and luggage suggests that they’ve been to a wedding. Stayed in a nice hotel, no doubt. That, on Friday night, she willingly and naughtily seduced him. That, last night, both drunk after the reception, he took advantage of her more forcefully and more thoroughly.
But a different scenario plays out in my mind. For a prefect might well be given permission to leave her school for the weekend and “visit a gravely ill Great Aunt”. And when her housemaster then bumped into her, giggling merrily, swigging champagne and entwined around a gentleman at a wedding reception at the opposite end of the country, at which he too was a guest as an old friend of the bride’s family – her rather different weekend plans would give her momentary cause to panic.
But he’d never know, right? He’d never check?
She wouldn’t find herself called out of her first lesson on Monday morning to report to her headmaster’s study. Lectured about lying. And given the inevitable six strokes on the bare – doubled as a consequence of, and price for maintaining, her prefectorial status…