“I’m a bit surprised at your possessiveness,” Martin replied mildly. “The more people studying these documents, the better, don’t you think?”
Of course she didn’t think, and neither would Martin or any other ambitious academic in her shoes. But she held her tongue. Jonathan Martin was a master at his game. He knew that whatever her reputation—and her staunch defense of departmental requirements, her insistence on diversifying the list of acceptable qualifying languages, and a half dozen other hard-fought battles over the years had indeed earned her a fierce reputation—Helen Watt did not make scenes. She might frost an opponent with disdain, yes, but she could be relied on not to shout into the wind. Martin had her boxed, and evidently he’d come personally to deliver his message in order to enjoy it. Helen, it seemed, had rankled him over the years more than she’d known. Under other circumstances she’d have considered this a compliment.
Martin was watching her from behind those rimless lenses. “You’ll be retiring this year, won’t you?” he said. “And we all know these documents will take more than a few months to study.”
“I can still work after I retire,” she said evenly. “I can translate and publish without being on the university’s dole. All I require is ongoing library access.”
Martin smiled again, at a dimmer wattage—his setting for compassion. “It’s not practical, Helen. You’re a practical woman.”
It stung, as of course he’d intended it to sting: the use of her name, the implied intimacy with her qualities, and—after two and a half dec-ades in which she couldn’t recall Martin referring to her as anything but a “scholar” or “colleague”—the reference to her as a woman. All intended to erode the pilings on which she stood.
She watched Martin walk down the hall and, with a dapper knock, disappear into Penelope’s office.
The rare manuscripts room was already inhabited, as she’d expected, by Wilton and his three postgraduates. They were bent over the center table together, two on each side. There was one woman, mousy with pale pink lipstick on her thin lips, and two young men—and of course Wilton himself, barely older than his students. How long had it been since her path had crossed Wilton’s? Perhaps two years—had it been that long since Helen had stopped attending faculty meetings? She noted immediately that all three of the men, including Wilton, had gorgeous hair. Wilton’s was a dark glossy brown and proceeded in ripples from the crown of his head, whorling down to brush his ears. Where did a historian get such hair? Luxuriant without being effeminate. His two male acolytes sported more modest coifs, but it was clear neither was indifferent to style. Only the girl looked wilted enough to be a true work of nature.
Until this moment she’d had nothing against Wilton, except perhaps that he was a type. As a postgraduate he’d laughed heartily and with apparent sincerity at his mentors’ jokes, concurred wittily with the majority at such meetings as postgraduates attended, and volunteered his labors more regularly than any of his cohort. Despite this, he’d been well-liked among his fellow students. Once she’d been sitting on a bench near the entrance to the department, catching her breath unseen before venturing the walk to her car, when Wilton had clasped the shoulders of two other male students not twenty yards from where she sat (so invisible was she) and, jerking his head in the direction of the portly middle-aged secretary who had just passed en route to the car park, muttered something about being able to tell a battle-axe by the number of hooks on her brassiere. “There’s not a female in the History Department,” he’d intoned, “with fewer than three hooks. Our tragedy is not to be in Romance languages. Did you see Castleman’s latest protégé at the holiday party? A silk blouse and straps made of dental floss.”
The others had chortled and Wilton had been in the midst of clapping one on the back when he’d seen Helen on her bench, looking directly at him.
He’d had the decency, she recalled, to color. But she was certain the incident didn’t stay with him long. Such men didn’t concern themselves greatly with remorse. Aaron, she thought, would fit right in. In fact, if he had any sense he’d join their group.
Steeling herself, she stepped past Wilton’s lavishly tressed crew, resolving not to crane her neck in a transparent attempt to learn which documents they were reading. Yet even with her eyes fixed forward, it was a simple thing to tally the magnitude of her defeat. Pencils scratched audibly from Wilton’s table—formerly her table. Four pencils jotting notes; four brown cushions. Wilton’s team was translating four documents at once. She could not possibly succeed on her own in ferreting out Aleph’s story before Wilton’s team did.
She didn’t bother telling herself it shouldn’t matter who was first. It mattered deeply. She wanted to ball her stiff hands and turn all their hair-gelled heads with a harsh cry: This is mine.
She’d stopped walking. Without intending to, she’d turned back, a few paces beyond the end of their table, to face them.
All three postgraduate students were looking at her blankly. Wilton glanced up, offered a vague nod, and had almost returned to his work when he recognized her and froze. After a delay of a millisecond, he offered a pained smile.
He lifted a hand, then—what was he doing?—and offered a casual salute, no doubt meant to appear jovially competitive. Hail, fellow, well met, and may the best scholar win. It was a sporting gesture: nothing personal, of course, but naturally he wouldn’t wish to hear her theories about the documents until he’d established his own . . . after which, it need not be said, he’d be able to claim full credit for them, for there would have been no collaboration.
She let his gesture bounce off the stiff planes of her own face, and fall.
He smiled again, more briefly this time, and with an uncertain tug at one cuff of his blazer returned his eyes to his work.
Helen crossed to the librarian’s desk, where she took a pencil stub and paper slip, wrote the number of the document she wished to view, and passed the slip over the desk to Patricia Starling-Haight.
Patricia glanced at the number. “That’s in use,” she said.
Helen felt her lips part drily with surprise. A few hours in the library, and already Wilton had arrived at the document it had taken two weeks for her and Aaron to reach. She would not have thought her obsolescence would be so swift.
She waited to speak until she was sure she’d mastered her voice. “I’ll take the next document in the catalogue, then.”
Patricia didn’t move. “Why don’t you ask him if you can see the one you want?”
Helen raised her chin. What was the point of all her strict upbringing if she couldn’t at least muster imperious dignity where the situation called for it? “He,” she said, “is not my ally in this matter.”
Patricia’s lips tightened into a small ring of mirth. She lowered her spectacles and stared at Helen. Helen could not recall the last time someone had laughed in her face.
“I was under the impression that he was your sole ally. Frankly it was good to see you had one.”
From across the desk, Helen looked into Patricia’s face. She had been looking into Patricia’s round, staunch face from across this desk, she realized, for two decades. Only now did it occur to her, with an absurd shock, that for all that time Patricia had been looking back.
“Professor Martin,” said Helen in lower tones, “has made his decisions regarding access to the documents. I am laboring alone.”