the Headmaster’s waiting room

Avril's office has no door — she took it off "for simple enclosure-reasons," her phobia of being closed in — and the scene quietly works out what a doorless office actually means: total audibility, no boundary, the Dean of Females conducting a delicate interview about being "touched by a tall person" in full earshot of a waiting room. The book gives the etiology in the same breath: "She has little sense of spatial privacy or boundary, having been so much alone so much when a child." So the openness reads two ways at once, which is the whole Avril paradox — a wound (the isolated child who can't bear enclosure) that operates as surveillance (a room you're always already inside). And it sits directly across from Charles Tavis's office, whose double doors, outer opening out and inner opening in, give his vestibule a "jaw-like quality": the usurper behind a mandible, the mother behind no door at all.