Chapter 1 — Arrival

The mist came off the hills in pieces, so St. Mary's arrived the same way. A gate. Then nothing. A wall with the ivy gone brown along the top. Then nothing again, for most of a minute, while the car climbed.

"You'll like the lakes," said the woman in the front seat. She hadn't told him her name. She had a folder with his in it. "There are two."

"That's one more than most places have."

She looked at him in the mirror. "Is it?"

"Where I'm from there's a river," said Koby. "It's the same water all the way along. You can't have a favorite."

"Right," she said, and went back to the road.

They'd been driving three hours. For the first one she'd tried. How was the flight. Was he warm enough. Did he like football.

"Everybody plays football," she had said.

"Do they?" said Koby. "At home they play it in the road. You have to move when a van comes. I'm not good at it."

"Two pitches and two lakes."

"It's something," she'd said, and he'd understood that she meant it kindly and had also understood that she'd run out.

She'd bought him a sandwich at the service station and he'd said thank you and eaten all of it, because his mother had views about that. Afterwards she'd said you didn't have to eat it if you didn't want it, in a voice that suggested she'd been watching him do it.

Since then there'd been the radio. He didn't mind. Nobody had made him talk since Tuesday and he'd started to think of it as a kindness.

The folder had a rubber band round it. On the front, somebody had hand-written a version of his name with the letters in a different order. Then crossed it out. Then written it again. The second one was also wrong, but it was wrong in a nearer way, and he'd decided about an hour ago that this counted as somebody trying.

"Ashar," she said, out of nowhere. "Is that— how do I say that?"

"Ashar."

"Ashar. And that's from—"

"Vellin."

"Vellin," she said. "I don't know where that is."

"No. Nobody seems to."

"Is it near—"

She stopped, because she plainly didn't have the second half of the sentence, and Koby watched the back of her head decide not to look for it.

"It's east," he said, to help. "It's a valley. There's a river down the middle and the villages are all along it."

"Right. And is it— was it—"

"It's all right," said Koby. "You can ask."

But she didn't.

The house came out of the mist all at once and was much bigger than it had any business being. It had towers. He'd been in England ten days and had worked out that the country was mostly smaller than advertised. Here was a building that had gone the other way.

Somebody had carved figures into the doors. Saints, or angels. People with their hands open, worn down at the edges by four hundred years of weather until they all had the same face.

The car stopped. For a second nobody got out.

Then the doors opened and a tall woman came down the steps with her sleeves pushed up, and the day turned into a different sort of day.

"You'll be Koby."

"Yes."

"Ms. Thompson. Not Mrs. There's a Mrs. Thompson in the village and we don't get on." She took his case before he could stop her and weighed it in one hand. "Is this all of it?"

"Yes."

"Good." Which was not what anybody had said yet. "Come in, then. It's cold and I'm old."

She wasn't old. She wasn't young either, but she was a long way off old — old enough, Koby thought, to have young children of her own, and that was as far as he got.

Behind him the woman from the car was saying something about paperwork.

"The paperwork can come in and have a cup of tea like a human being," said Ms. Thompson.

"I really do have to get back."

"That's a shame." It was not the voice of a person who thought it was a shame. "Drive slowly. The lane's a menace and it's mine, so I'd know."

The car went back down the hill.

Nobody said goodbye to him. He noticed it happening and decided not to mind.

---

Inside, the hall went up and up. Light came through the high windows in long slanted bars and the dust moved about in it. It was so unlike anywhere he'd ever lived that he stopped in the middle of the floor and stood in it.

Ms. Thompson stopped too, and let him.

"Quarter past twelve," she said, after a while. "Tour first or food first?"

"Which is better?"

"Tour. If you eat first you'll never find your way back, and then I'll have to send Rodney to look for you, and then I'll have two of you lost."

"Who's Rodney?"

"You'll know within the hour. Everyone does."

The tour took twenty minutes and covered, by his count, about a fifth of the building.

There were two staircases off the hall. He was told to use the left one and never the right one.

"Why not?"

"They're worse."

He waited to see if there was more. There wasn't.

The classroom corridor smelled of chalk and feet. Through the second door a man with enormous eyebrows was writing on a board for a room of children who were, as far as Koby could tell, entirely elsewhere. Ms. Thompson knocked on the frame.

"New boy."

The man looked up. He looked at Koby for slightly too long.

"Bartleby. History." He put the chalk down. "Do you read?"

"Yes."

"We'll see," said Mr. Bartleby, and went back to the board.

"He's all right," said Ms. Thompson, in the corridor. "He was better before the divorce."

"What happened?"

"She took the dog. That's the whole of it, really. Everything else they sorted out like adults and then there was the dog." She turned a corner. "Don't ask him about the dog."

"Is that a rule?"

"It's a kindness. We've got very few rules and a great many kindnesses. You'll get used to knowing which is which."

"How?"

"The rules get shouted," said Ms. Thompson.

There was a room with a piano missing three keys. The D above middle C and two others, so that a girl practicing in the corner kept arriving at a hole and going round it. She did it twice while they stood there and never once looked annoyed about it, and Koby watched her do it and thought that whoever she was, she had made her peace with something.

"Can't it be mended?"

"It can. It's on the list."

"Where's the list?"

"In my office, going yellow," said Ms. Thompson. "Everything in this building is on a list and the lists are all in a drawer and the drawer is the whole tragedy of my professional life. Come on."

There was a man called Fenn asleep in a chair outside the boiler room with a newspaper over his face, who Ms. Thompson walked past without comment and who Koby later learned was the caretaker and had been for thirty-one years.

There was a laundry with a machine making a noise no machine should make.

"Should it do that?"

"Nope."

"Is somebody coming?"

"Somebody has been coming since February."

There was a boot room with a hundred and sixty pairs of wellingtons in it, and a smell that would live in his nose for a year. There was a games cupboard with a hole in the door that somebody had covered with a poster and somebody else had put another hole through again. There was a corridor of photographs going back to 1911, rows and rows of children in stiff collars, and Koby slowed down at those without meaning to.

Ms. Thompson slowed down with him. She didn't say anything at all until he was ready to go on, and then she said, "1948, that one. That's the year the roof came off," and started walking again.

There was a door she walked past without opening.

There was nobody behind it. He knew that the way he knew where the wardrobe was, which is to say without knowing how, and it told him nothing at all about what was in there, and he wanted to know what was in there.

"What's in there?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"That's not the same as nothing."

"No," said Ms. Thompson. "It isn't."

There was another one, and she walked past that too, and this time he didn't ask, and this time she noticed him not asking. He could tell, because she slowed down for half a step and then didn't say anything about it either, and they went on down the corridor being two people who had each decided to be polite.

"They're stores, mostly," she said, eventually. "Some of them are stores."

"Right."

"Some of them are the sort of room a building this old collects, which is a room that used to be for something and now isn't for anything, and nobody has ever had the afternoon to decide." She turned the corner. "That's most of the west side."

"How many are there?"

"I've never counted."

Koby, who had counted, and who had got to eleven, said nothing at all.

By the end he had decided he liked her, and had also noticed that she hadn't asked him a single question about himself.

"Garden's through there," she said. "You can go out any time between lessons and supper. Two lakes. Both cold. One of them has a bottom you can't feel, so we don't swim in that one."

"Which one?"

"Nobody's sure any more," said Ms. Thompson. "So we don't swim."

"That seems—"

"Careful."

"I was going to say lazy."

She stopped walking.

Koby thought, distinctly and without any particular alarm, that he had probably just ended something.

Then she laughed. It came out of her like a door blowing open, and two girls going the other way turned round to look at her doing it.

"Ten minutes," she said. "Ten minutes and he's insulting the risk assessment. Right. Upstairs. Then food."

The dormitory had eight beds in it and seven of them had things on.

His was under the window, second from the end. There was a locker and a chair and a strip of wall that was his, with four drawing pins still in it from whoever had been there before, arranged in a rectangle where something had been.

Ms. Thompson put his case on the bed.

"That's yours. Nobody else's. If anybody tells you otherwise, come and tell me and I'll have a word, and then they'll be very sorry and you'll be extremely unpopular for about a day."

"Is that a rule or a kindness?"

"That's a warning," she said. "There's a third kind."

She showed him the bathroom, and the fire door, and where the lights went off, and then she stood in the doorway with her arms folded while he opened the case.

There wasn't a great deal in it. Clothes, mostly, and none of them his; they'd been given to him in a building in a city with a woman writing his sizes on a form. Two books he couldn't read. A folded paper bag with nothing in it.

At the bottom, wrapped in a jumper, the only thing that was his, a small green tin.

He put that in the locker first, before anything else, and shut the locker, and after that he unpacked the rest of it quite fast.

Ms. Thompson watched him do it and said nothing whatsoever about the tin.

"Right," she said. "Food."

At the door she stopped, with her hand on the frame, and spoke without turning round.

"There's a telephone in my office," she said. "If there's ever anybody you want to try."

"There isn't anybody."

"Right. Well. It's there."

She had spent two hours that week on that telephone, to three separate departments, about exactly that.

She had no intention of telling him, then or later, and she never did.

They came round the last corner and the noise of the dining hall came down the corridor to meet them.