Graham is in his late thirties, lives with his partner Caroline in a rented cottage out at the Bamford end of the valley, and drives the seven miles into school in a Vauxhall that has been making a noise he keeps meaning to get looked at. He came to teaching by way of two earlier careers neither of which had taken — he doesn’t volunteer the details — and now finds himself, with mild surprise, in a job he is good at. Children like him because he is straightforward and patient and does not pretend to be more interested in things than he actually is. He is, by his own assessment, a competent teacher rather than a brilliant one. He is content with the assessment.
He has no strong opinion about Robert Knight one way or the other, which makes him unusual among the staff. Most of the others have filed Robert somewhere between difficult and concerning. Graham has watched him stand at the edge of group activities with a look of patient endurance and concluded only that the boy did not particularly enjoy being part of a group, which is not, in Graham’s view, a character defect. He has not asked the question that Mrs Jenkins and Mrs Patel have, in different private ways, asked themselves about Robert. Whether his not asking it is a kindness, an oversight, or just a temperament is a thing only Graham knows, and he has not thought about it in those terms.
What he does carry, in the way the morning has settled in him over the years since, is a small intermittent unease about the bike shed. Not about what he saw — he didn’t see much — but about the speed of his own dispatch. Mrs Patel said fetch the nurse and he went, and that was the right thing to do, and he has not stopped wondering whether the right thing was also, very slightly, the convenient thing — whether he went because he was needed or because he was happy not to be looking at Michael Lawson’s mouth and the tooth on the gravel and the way Robert Knight was standing very still, looking at his own hands, breathing in a way Graham did not have language for. Both can be true. Graham has, on the whole, made peace with this.
