Starting in April was always going to pose its own set of problems. Someone else’s desk. Someone else’s reputation. Someone else’s class goddammit. A mostly all female staff room. All girls up there on the ‘hill’. Like a fortress overlooking the sea it was.

He’d passed it a thousand times whilst training but never figured he would get there to actually teach. Anyway he was young and gifted and musical and hell…a man! That should keep the girls’ attentions. Even if the cello wouldn’t.

Damn good show we are THE school, we most definitely are the Headmistress had said so. Proud to be able to equip fifteen of them each with their own practice rooms. Yet despite the inevitable ‘plethora’ of flutes, as she had put it, there were ‘quite a few brave young string quarteters in the making.’ He’d get used to the clipped vowels somehow and had already decided that Who Is Sylvia was better taught in its original German. So many thoughts that the ride up the gravel hill to this foremost of girls’ private schools seemed prematurely over.

Hand through tussled sun kissed thrown back oh so casual hair. Tie carefully chosen but caught up and blown permanently over one shoulder by sea air. A quick nod of his head to The Head and he was there in front of his first class.

~Good morning Cello Twelve.~

Good morning Sir. Fumbling with the register he didn’t dare look up and struggled still further with the Felicities, Roxannes, Gundradas, Chalices and oh….Susanna. Well thank the lord for small mercies he mumbled and then looked up.

~Susanna?~ He raised his voice and then heard footsteps like a beaten timpani click clacking along the corridor.

The Felicities all seemed to giggled, shuffle and then sigh. But Susanna simply sidled into the room, then her chair, then sat looking at him. Her burning dark brown eyes (and orange, or was it really flame red hair?…..the palest of palest white skin and high cheek bones…..round full lips) and a mad crazed broken pavement of a down trodden soul looking out from behind them.
~Morning Sir……I’m….’~

~Sorry?~ he snapped in what he thought was perfect completion of her broken English.
~No…Susanna Sir,’ and everyone laughed because of course she wasn’t sorry at all and was most certainly and always would be his………

He looked down at Cello Twelve’s Register for somewhere else to put his eyes and noted the word Portugal next to her name.

He thought of interval discussion, or tonal variation, of the necessity always of cutting down vibrato but simply wrote: Counterpoint. Wrote it in chalk and underlined it…tapping the board as if to match the word. Doing one rhythm in his head and picking out the spaces in between in white.