And there it was: the first turning point in our difficult, dangerous story. It’s so easy for me to identify it as such, for if Marta had acted on her clear impulse in that moment – to push Genevieve so that she toppled, lit cigarette in hand, from the seat we had not offered her, out of the open window, hurtling to her death on the lawn below – all of what we went through would not have happened, could not have happened, and perhaps we would have been able to find happiness, even as scholarship pupils, at one of the most exclusive schools in the country. If not happiness, then at the very least a quiet, bearable existence.

I’d been so focused on my academic work that I hadn’t had many friends at my school in Hackney, and so I’d found the idea of inbuilt – even enforced – camaraderie at boarding school appealing. A few months later, as my father and I had first approached High Realms in his cab, along that broad drive lined with stately plane trees, I’d felt as though my imagination was being coloured in, to a vividness and a grandeur that exceeded all my expectations. I’d felt thrilled. But as soon as we had entered the bustling Atrium with its dozens of portraits and towering staircase, my excitement had fallen away. I’d looked up and around; I’d seen the hundreds of students who exuded their confidence and beauty even more than their affluence, and I’d felt tiny. I’d felt as though I didn’t know anything, that nothing had ever happened to me, that nothing would ever happen to me because I was insignificant, unworthy. I’d hoped to metamorphose as I stepped through the door – but compared to this tribe of elegant, technicolour creatures, I’d felt monochrome, inexperienced and dowdy.

They had appointed themselves moral arbiters in a world without morals, with a system that worked only for the strongest. We already knew that we were not the strongest, and I felt a deep sense of dread about the fact that I had chosen this place as my home for two whole years: a world whose understanding of good and evil was entirely and terrifyingly its own.

As I looked around I felt a familiar, bittersweet pang: an assault of beauty and fear. It happened to me so often at High Realms, among the old buildings and those endless, rolling grounds. I’d be walking along a corridor, or playing hockey, or sitting in Chapel, and a particular impression would present itself – a shaft of light on honey-coloured stone, a chord from the organ – and I’d be shot through with the beauty of the place: its austere elegance, its unapologetic oldness, its proud belonging in its surroundings. I’d be struck with a powerful incredulity that the beauty was mine to behold, not just for a minute or a day, but for two whole years. The other side of this wonder was overpowering fear. Such majesty made me scared that it was somehow unreal, some kind of trick, and not for the likes of us – that we were being mocked by sheer aesthetics. I was fearful that, in blessing us with this beauty, the world would also have to take something away.

Can we sense tragedy, before it happens? Is there an obscure murmur, a flicker of the light, a tremor in even the oldest and sturdiest of buildings?