Hal in the Pump Room (p. 51)

The mother's enclosure rendered as architecture. Avril "never leaves the grounds anymore" and "rarely travels above ground," preferring to hunch through the off-tunnels between the Headmaster's House and her office — the agoraphobic workaholic of scene 010 shown moving, literally, underground, through the same tunnel system her son uses to hide. The family's whole world has contracted to a sealed hilltop threaded with passages, and mother and son both travel it stooped and unseen, for opposite reasons: she to avoid the open air she dreads, he to reach the covert vent she must never know about. The tunnels are the negative space of the family — where the enclosed mother and the concealed son pass each other in the dark.