“All other figures in the tableau are the aspiring servants of this central trio. They are used as foils, scapegoats or canned laughter.”

Julia has a peculiar flat way of delivering her lines sometimes, as if somebody has forced her to read them and she wants to make clear her private feelings of contempt.

“The depressing fixity of this tableau,” she says in conclusion, “makes it clear to us why girls value reincarnation and reinvention above all things.”

Monday

There are no counseling sessions about Bridget’s death. A flag is retrieved from the sports cupboard, ironed, and hauled to half-mast where it spends a glum week slapping against the rusted flagpole. The girls move around the campus in a vast ghostly drift. They are ashamed that they feel nothing and so respectfully they affect to feel very much. They self-consciously contemplate their own mortality as they watch the raindrops travel down the glass. They sigh and take too long in the toilet cubicle, and say to each other, “I think I need to be alone for a while.”

“It’s the little things,” Julia hears a girl say to her friend while they wait in the line for the tuck shop. “It’s the little things that you remember.”

In assembly the counselor says, “Bridget was a very special person.” He says special in the same way he says important, cupping his lips around the word as if he is trying to suck an acorn and unwittingly conferring its opposite meaning. In the auditorium, girls who never knew Bridget nod their tremulous assent and pluck at the sleeves of their neighbors for support.

In the staffroom the teachers discuss a memorial for Bridget. Somebody suggests a mural. Somebody suggests a commemorative plaque in the music corridor, to honor her commitment to the jazz band. The weeks go by.

In the meantime Isolde’s sister, Victoria, returns to school.

Friday

“You and Julia seem to get on very well,” the saxophone teacher says after Isolde has trundled in and unwrapped her scarf and pulled off her mittens.

“Yeah,” Isolde says. She flaps her arms about. “God, it’s cold!”

“Do you see her much around school?”

“I guess,” Isolde says. “The seventh formers have their own commonroom and their own study lounge and stuff. We’re not allowed in. Hey, I tracked down some of the recordings of that guy we saw—they’ve got a whole bunch at the library.”

“Good,” the saxophone teacher says. “And?”

“Awesome,” Isolde says. “Made me want to start playing with other people, like properly.”

“You could join Julia’s underground band.”

“She’d be way better than me,” Isolde says. “Hasn’t she been learning for ages?”

“She’s sitting her letters this year,” the saxophone teacher says. “I must say I was so pleased you two got on so well. Is she a friend of your sister’s at school?”

“God no,” Isolde says with a snort. “Victoria’s friends are… I was going to say brain-dead. No. They’re just… much more girly.”

“Julia’s not girly?”

“No way.”

“What’s the opposite of girly?” the saxophone teacher asks, thinking to herself that only matters of social hierarchy or branding ever produce this sort of conviction in her students.

Isolde reflects for a moment, twirling her necklace around her finger. “Hard-core,” she says at last, pronouncing the word definitively, as if to deny all other options.

“So Julia is hard-core,” the saxophone teacher says.

“Hey, there was something I was going to ask you about one of the albums I got out,” Isolde says, reaching down to rummage in her bag. “I brought it along.”

The saxophone teacher scowls. She wants a performance. She wants the lights to change, becoming the red tail-glow of Mr. Saladin’s car, and she wants to see Isolde all lit up red for a second before Mr. Saladin kills the engine and the lights go out and Isolde is sitting in the low half-light of the streetlamp in the darkened car, and she wants to hear Isolde say—

“It’s just the voicing on this particular track,” Isolde says now, unearthing the disc and flipping it over to find the track title. “Do you mind if I play it?”

“Of course not, go ahead,” the saxophone teacher says, sitting down gracefully and watching Isolde stab at the stereo and insert her disc. She masks her disappointment, reaching over for her cooling cup of tea and watching Isolde feel for the power button, sweeping over the dials on the stereo front with light patting fingertips as if she is blind.

Isolde turns the volume knob and the music begins and, as it does, the lights change, the overhead bulb fading to black in time with the upward swell of the saxophone. The two of them are in perfect darkness for a moment, and then the lights come slowly up again. They are now reddish and warm, dim and pocketed as if cast by scattered lamps in booths and tables at a backwater bar. The music is lazy and chromatic and low. The saxophone teacher lets out a little sigh of contentment, and settles back to watch.

“When we walked away from you,” Isolde said, “this is the tune we heard, coming out of one of those little smoky afterward bars in the alleys by the Town Hall. There was a gig somewhere, not the kind of jostling sweaty gig where everyone’s fighting to use their elbows, but just some three-man band jamming away the hours in a quiet bar. Julia turns to me and says, Do you want to get a drink? and I must have nodded because the next thing we’re pushing open this foggy door and walking into a warm late-night café—”

Isolde pushes the volume knob up a little bit and the music swells, as if a door has just been opened—

“—and they’re playing drums and double bass and keyboards, all of them barefoot and happy, and the drummer is leaning over to talk to the man at the bar while he plays.”

The saxophone teacher nods as she pictures the bar in her mind: she knows it very well, the stained diamond pattern of the wallpaper, the dark paneling that ends in an elegant lip at shoulder-height, the reddish brass lamps collared to the wall and bleeding artful fingers of rust in downward rays. It’s Patsy’s favorite place to sit and drink, and the sax teacher has spent hours in that sticky shadowed corner over the years. She can see the ornate plaster frame of the mirror behind the bar, chipped gold and peeling, and the brass plaques on the lavatory doors, spotted gray with age.

“We walk in,” Isolde is saying, “and Julia says sit down. She’ll order drinks for the both of us, so I go and fold myself into a corner booth, peeling off my coat and my scarf and checking my reflection in the dark glass of the window by the door. I watch as she leans over the bar and says something to the barman, and she picks up her change and two glasses, and he waves his half-cut lemon at her and says, Get away from me! and they both laugh. She slips into the booth and says, Sorry, I didn’t even ask, is red okay? And I don’t want to say that mostly what I drink is vodka or rum mixed with fruit syrup to mask the taste, and the only time I’ve had red wine is when we stole a bottle from Nicola’s mum and decanted it into half a bottle of Coke so you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

Isolde’s mouth is dry. She wets her lips.

“I take a sip,” she says, “and it’s foul, fouler than when we mixed it half with Coke and drank it under the bleachers on the rugby field. I ask Julia if she’s turned eighteen yet and she looks a bit annoyed, as if she’d rather talk about something else. She says she has, last week. It was her birthday last week. I say the wine is good. Then we start talking about you, what we think of you, probably because you’re the only real thread of connection between us.”

The music is crooning and uncomplicated. The saxophone teacher can see it: the cheerful aging three-man band, stepping with their bare feet over the yellow extension leads, the double-bass player nodding and smiling over the glossy wooden shoulder of his one-legged woman-shape, the pianist leaning in and out of the light, the drummer dropping down to a one-handed beat for a couple of bars as he reaches over to take a drink from a sweaty beaded glass of beer, golden under the tasseled fringe of a lamp.