The Englishman

chapter 11

“SHOWTIME!” YVONNE MURMURS when we meet at the top of the stairs three days later.

“Oh, poor you—do you have to teach Fridays? Maybe next—”

“No!” She casts her eyes round, but we are alone in the hallway. “The meeting this afternoon! About the—you have heard about it, haven’t you?”

“About the…rape allegation? Is there a meeting? I didn’t check my email.”

Three hours later, and with half an hour to spare before showtime, I rush to the Eatery to grab something to sustain me through the meeting.

“Mind if I join you?” asks an English voice above my head.

I’m tempted to reply that I do not see why he would want to sit with a woman he suspects of making play with wet eyelashes when she is reprimanded by her department chair, but I manage to wave nonchalantly at the seat opposite mine.

“No, of course not.”

Cleveland sets down his mug and a plate with a bagel on it, pulls out the chair and sits. His mug is less than a foot away from mine. When he reaches for it, I must not stare, even though the memory of that moment in his office when I noticed his hands still pierces me with the ache of guilty longing.

The man is married, and to a large-breasted blonde, and thou shalt not covet him.

Cleveland grins at me and bites into his bagel. It would be the most natural thing in the world to talk about Hornberger and the rape allegation, but my instinct tells me to steer clear of the subject. Tim, Erin, and Eugenia descend upon us, but the elephant in the room is making all of us tongue-tied.

“That carrot cake will be the death of me,” Eugenia groans and nods at my plate with that slightly false note of exaggeration that betrays her effort to fill the awkward silence.

“I know what you mean.” I grin. “Wanna bite?”

“Ah, no, best not—”

“Going, going…gone!” I push the last piece into my mouth and earn a burst of laughter for this lame bit of clownery.

“What do you make of the food here, Anna?” Erin picks up the cue. “Better than at NYU? Worse?”

“Wee-e-ell.” I hurl myself into an answer. “You really want to try and compete with the variety of food available in Manhattan? No gluten-free, lactose-free, low-cal cookies in the Eatery, and there must be a place to get decent cawffee, because this potation here is undrinkable. And not for nothing, but the only pizza I’ve had so far tasted like cardboard with bits of tomato on it—honestly, how do you people survive?”

Cleveland, grinning with appreciation, leans forward on his elbow and rests his chin in his cupped hand.

“On pork and peanuts,” he says earnestly.

“This coffee isn’t so bad?” Erin looks round for corroboration. “I never found it so bad.”

“Oh, I don’t eat peanuts.” I force myself to look into the seawater eyes and affect regret. “They’re very high in cholesterol…”

Tim snorts his derision, while Erin and Eugenia wave over Kristen Thomason and Brenda Dampier and make them sit down at their end of the table.

“Do you eat pork?” Cleveland asks. “I’m just wondering.”

I bite my lip.

“I don’t eat any meat at all, if I can help it. I was kidding about the peanuts, though.”

He grins and glances down at his plate.

“People here find vegetarians very…New York…”

“I’m not actually all that good at being a New Yorker, I think.”

“That’s true,” Tim butts in. “She’s a sweetie.”

I pull a face at Tim, and Cleveland ponders Tim’s assessment of my character.

“But you are a vegetarian,” he says.

“Mm. My landlord showed admirable composure the other day when I wouldn’t eat fried chicken.”

“Your landlord—” He looks up, very intent all of a sudden; and I can see that he is on the brink of further questions.

“You’d love Anna’s place, Cleve,” Tim says. “She lives in a cottage by the woods. Think Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Didn’t you say there is even a patch of bluebells?”

“N-No, they can’t have been bluebells,” I stutter. “It’s too late in the year, my landlord says.”

“You’ll have to wait for the wild daffodils in spring.” Cleveland isn’t teasing me anymore. His bagel lies half eaten on his plate and he is watching me, holding onto his mug as if his hands were cold. “The wild daffs…and the forget-me-nots.”

“Well, if I’ve ever been tempted to run around naked in the rain, it is in this place, that’s for sure.” I know we are both thinking it, so I decide—foolishly—that spelling it out might still the frisson between us. It doesn’t.

“Now this is a surprise,” he admits. “I would have bet any sort of money that you despise D. H. Lawrence.”

“I do despise him. Any woman must. But I also love him. It. The novel.”

“I hope you realize,” Tim supplies sotto voce, his eyes trained on our chatting colleagues, “that the female focalizer in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is merely a tool to allow Lawrence to describe male beauty. What he’s surreptitiously doing there is rewriting Forster’s Maurice with the sex left in.”

“Well, the author is dead,” I say dryly, “and I don’t care what motivated him to describe male beauty like that. I’m a heterosexual female, and I think it’s a lovely book. And if you quote me on this, I shall swear I was drunk!”

Both men burst out laughing, and his hilarity does nothing to disperse the warm glow that surrounds Cleveland whenever I glance at him.

The events that follow do.

The Sperm Room is still locked when we arrive, so I decide to make a dash for the john while someone goes for the key. When I return I have no choice but to take the seat Tim has kept for me between himself and Cleveland, who is sitting several seats further down than last time. Our hands are resting on the table top with less than the length of a sheet of paper between them, his fingers twiddling with a university regulation-issue ballpoint. The sight of that lean, restless male hand—contrasting so poignantly with the pale pink cotton of the open shirt-cuff, with the deskworker’s accessories and with my smaller, paler hand next to it—strikes me as so erotic that my belly floods with longing, a sharp, lingering shock of desire. Instinctively I shift my butt and at once curse myself, because Cleveland might think that I feel uncomfortable sitting next to him. He is watching Matthew Dancey welcome Dean Ortega, a tall woman with a boyish figure and an unruly mop of hair, who is accompanied by a judicial affairs officer and someone from Equal Opportunities. My fidgeting makes Cleveland turn round to look at me.

Something is wrong.

I don’t know what it is, but his expression when he turns and sees me sitting there next to him—as if he hadn’t noticed me earlier—is at once scornful and anxious. Cleveland is upset. Upset, and trying to hide it. I have the irrational impulse to clasp his hand and draw it close to me.

Dean Ortega does most of the talking, and what she has to say does not visibly surprise anyone now. She regrets having to inform us that Nick Hornberger has been suspended from his university duties for an indefinite period. This much, precisely, and no more, we may impart to the student body, should we be approached with questions. Any further speculation, spoken or written, runs the risk of being slanderous or libelous, and she trusts that the college can rely on our discretion at this time, as always.

Within these four walls, however, she will tell us that charges of sexual assault have been filed against Hornberger both with the Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel and with the Shaftsboro police department. He was arrested on Wednesday (so it was a plain-clothes policeman!) and released on bail a day later. It is to be expected that the local news will report the case, but we would be well-advised not to believe everything they print. It goes without saying that under no circumstances may we discuss the matter with outsiders, especially not with journalists. She adds that although Ardrossan University’s zero-tolerance policy on sexual misconduct applies to faculty as well as students, we ought also to recall that the accused is innocent until proven guilty—a principle difficult to maintain when so heinous a crime has to be investigated.

“Are there any questions?”

Several hands go up. Erin Gallagher wants Ortega to reassure us—“unofficially, of course!”—that Hornberger has denied the allegation. Immediately the noise level spikes as some people groan at her apparent naïvety, and Ortega evades an answer.

“May we know the plaintiff’s name?” Brenda Dampier asks, and I am surprised that she seems surprised when Sam Ruffin, under cover of the murmuring at Ortega’s refusal, leans over and whispers something into her ear.

“The students are likely to know a lot more about this than we do,” Kay Chang says. “Does nobody else find that a very awkward situation to work in? Is this, for example, a race issue as well as an issue of sexual violence?”

Several nods support this as a valid point, but it is passed over by Dancey, who seems to feel it is time to put in his oar and promptly proceeds to deflect all questions.

“One of this incident’s unfortunate consequences is that we need to find a new chair. A new search committee will be installed in the next few weeks, but you know how long the process takes. Meanwhile I would be prepared to step up from associate chair to interim chair.”

“Having said that—” Ortega raises her voice above the low murmur “—it is customary to ask the department to name an interim chair or to ask whether there are any other nominations. I would then forward this list to the Provost for further negotiations.” Something like a wan smile appears on her haggard face when she adds, “I say ‘list,’ but things being what they are, I’d be content with a list of one. One volunteer.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Sam Ruffin looks round, frowning. “Surely you don’t mean now.”

“Since we are rather pressed for time, yes, I would appreciate it if you would consider the matter here and now. Obviously there will then be talks in private with the volunteers, to sort out the details.”

I do not wonder that Dancey, who is salivating at the prospect of institutional power, advocates this gun-shot method. From Ortega I would have expected a more delicate form of personnel management. The tail of the table is very quiet as the head breaks into subdued but anxious tumult.

My eyes are fixed on Cleveland’s cheekbones. If he clenches his jaws any harder, they will crack.

“Well, if no one else can see their way toward taking one for the team, I would offer my services once again.” Dancey leans back in his chair, trying and failing to suppress a smirk. I realize with a lurch that if Dancey becomes chair, he would make maximum use of all student complaints against me. Dancey as chair is my personal worst-case-scenario.

Go on, Cleveland—volunteer!

So far he has said nothing at all.

Ortega turns to him. “Giles. Could we prevail on you?”

“I’m afraid not, no.”

She raises her eyebrows at his calm but categorical reply. “Some people might feel that you owe the college one or two favors, Giles. Would you care to explain why you won’t even consider offering your services in your department’s hour of need?”

“No, I’m sorry, Holly, but I don’t want to explain. I have my reasons, and they weigh heavily. Perhaps we can leave it at that.”

Something is wrong. I knew it! He is now as immobile as he was fidgety before. Very still, he sits there, one hand clasping the wrist of the other as if he had to steady himself. I can tell that he is desperately trying not to offend Ortega. But I can also tell he will not budge.

“Giles, you were going to go up for full now, weren’t you? Maybe the college will scratch your back a little over that, if you scratch theirs.” Elizabeth Mayfield has largely kept out of the debate, and her voice is as placid as always, but she clearly agrees with Ortega that Cleveland ought to feel obliged to take over from Hornberger. Perhaps to protect the department from Dancey’s rule?

Cleveland says nothing. But because I am sitting next to him, and because I am looking toward the head of the table as if I were interested in them rather than him, I can see a dark patch appearing under his left armpit.

“This does look like a rather blatant case of cherry-picking, Giles.”

I don’t know how Cleveland is able to withstand the combined glares of Elizabeth Mayfield and Holly Ortega, but he remains silent. Shrugs his shoulders.

“You have to count me out. I’m sorry, Elizabeth.”

Never in my life have I more keenly craved inclusion among a group of knowledgeable insiders than after Ortega and Dancey send us on our way with the strict reminder not to encourage rumor, and we disperse toward our various floors and offices. As if accidentally, I trail Tim, Eugenia, and Erin, and halfway through the great hall Yvonne and Joe Banks catch up with me.

“Anna, I’m taking bets on how long before the full story appears in the papers,” Joe says. “I give it twenty-four hours.”

We laugh, and Erin turns round.

“Nervous tension releasing itself in laughter?” she guesses.

“I need to release my tension into a beer or three,” says Tim. “You coming?”

The following two hours in the Astrolabe are far and away the most informative I have yet spent at Ardrossan, even if afterward I feel I need to take a shower to rinse all the sleaze out of my hair and off my skin.

“In a way it doesn’t matter what happened and whether it was a rape,” Tim says. “If there’s a stink and the media smell it, the damage is done. It’s very clever of Hornberger’s bit of stuff to go to the police as well as to the campus authorities.”

“Clever?” Erin lashes out at him. “Honestly, Tim, could you possibly be more biased in this matter? We’re talking about a rape allegation!”

“Or a rape allegation,” he points out.

I throw myself between them. “It is certain, though, is it? That it’s Natalie Greco?”

Apparently so, and Joe and Erin not only confirm that she is by no means Hornberger’s first fling with a student, but that his reputation preceded him when he came to Ardrossan twelve years ago.

“Nick may not be able to keep his hands to himself, but I cannot believe he’s capable of violence.” Joe lifts his glass to his mouth, sighs, and sets it down again without having drunk. “What do you think?”

It is no fun, gossiping about rape.

“I cannot believe even Nick is stupid enough to use violence,” Tim says.

“In other words, you believe Natalie is stupid enough to ruin her own reputation by pulling this preposterous allegation out of thin air?” Erin is a forthright woman, but I have not yet seen her so vehement.

“Why should he force one into bed if three others will hurl themselves under him? It makes no sense!”

“You only say that because you refuse to understand, Tim! Rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power and humiliation!”

“Who knows what kinds of power games Nick and Natalie had been playing,” Eugenia agrees. “If he really raped her, it was to degrade her, and to satisfy some perverse impulse that has little to do with…ordinary sexual desire. Whatever that is.”

“Well, I’ll be sorry if she turns out to be the victim in this—” Tim shrugs “—but Natalie Greco is a spoilt, manipulative little bee-yatch who brought the chair and the Dean of Studies down on me in her very first semester here because I wouldn’t accept her essays after the deadline.”

“But that doesn’t mean she would fabricate a rape allegation!” Erin is exasperated. “Did you never see The Accused?”

Was it predictable that the men would doubt the truth of Natalie’s charge against Nick Hornberger, while the women tend to believe it? Like television detectives we argue all sides of the case, and—for all its fruitlessness—cannot bring ourselves to stop speculating.

I make an ingenuous bid to steer the debate into another direction.

“So, will Dancey get the chair, do you think?”

“What is it with Giles?” Erin promptly fires up. “Someone needs to shake some sense of responsibility into that man! Elizabeth is right, he’s been picking the cherries out of this job, and now he won’t pull his weight!”

I catch Yvonne watching me, and I’m almost sure that she is covering up for me when she asks, “How do you mean, picking cherries?”

Now everyone is looking at Tim, but Tim—and I must say, I love him for this—shrugs and purses his mouth.

“It isn’t a secret,” Erin takes over, clearly annoyed at Tim’s misplaced loyalty. “A year ago they gave him leave to teach at Stanford for a semester to see whether he liked it well enough to stay there—this is extremely unusual and set a few tongues wagging! And last semester they allowed him to bring his sabbatical forward, and he spent that in England.”

“Well, he can spend his sabbatical anywhere he wants, can’t he?”

“Yes, of course he can! It’s just a little galling to see how some people get break after break, while others—I mean, I used my sabbatical to prolong my maternity leave by a semester!”

“Each to his—or her—own, Erin,” Eugenia says gently. “That was your decision, and Giles did a lot of admin before he left, you know he did. Sure, the Stanford fellowship was a favor, but I know for a fact that he only got half his salary during the semester in England, although theoretically he might have had a full one.”

“Big deal—for those with private funds!”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” Joe says. “You say you’d prefer him to Dancey, but Giles has a pretty idiosyncratic way of doing things, and if he took the chair and decided to go all English on us—that wouldn’t exactly be helpful either.”

“How do you mean, go all English?” I ask.

He was away for a whole year? What about his wife? But this I cannot ask.

“Well, as long as it’s just his own research and teaching, it doesn’t matter—after all, Diversity with a big D, right? But I’m not so sure his style is really suited to leading this department. Just my two cents, guys.”

“You might not notice it so much, Anna,” Eugenia adds, “coming from British universities yourself—Tim, are you not eating those nachos?”

“Help yourself.”

“I’m shameless, I know,” she sighs, pulling Tim’s plate toward herself. “He comes across as not caring very much. Giles, I mean.”

“It’s the traditional British policy of non-interference.” Tim can’t, after all, stay out of the fray. “What you call caring, he calls mollycoddling.”

“Non-interference by a nastier name is appeasement!” Erin snaps.

“Laissez-faire,” I correct her, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Disastrous in world politics, maybe, but in education there’s a lot to be said for it. I don’t know whether Cleveland is like this, but I know a number of lecturers in England who don’t believe in…well, in teaching.”

“I don’t particularly like teaching, either.” Joe shrugs. “Necessary evil.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that.” I fumble for an explanation. “I mean that they don’t believe in teaching as organized, explicit instruction. In fact, they believe that good students shouldn’t need teaching. They expect their students to get on with it, and they only interfere if you go off the rails or find yourself in a hole. They’re catchers in the rye. Sort of.”

“Sounds like a well-reasoned excuse for laziness, if you ask me.” Erin frowns. “And it’s exactly the sort of bull Giles comes up with.”

Joe leans his elbows on the table and puts his fingertips together in a gesture I find irritatingly complacent. “It’s two fundamentally different systems and cultures. And if he doesn’t want to adapt to those differences, he can’t teach at an American university—simple!”

“Well, they are wooing him to stay.” Erin drains her glass and reaches for her purse. “I understand why, he’s tipped for the top, yadayada. I like Giles—don’t get me wrong. But he’s totally biting the hand that feeds him, by being so stubborn about this. If Bob Morgan doesn’t come back, Dancey will make sure that Medieval Literature is taken out of the curriculum and the next professorship goes to modern American Lit. But why should I care about that if Giles doesn’t?”

“He got another break at the beginning of the semester, remember?” Joe reminds us. “Not having to be here for the first week of term?”

“Yeah, but—” I look at Tim, and again he shrugs. “He was in Scotland, Joe. He won a prize for his book on Sir Walter Raleigh. A quite prestigious prize, actually.”

“Then why didn’t he say so?”

“Because there’s something devious about Giles.”

“Erin!” Tim explodes.

“All right, not…devious.” She lifts her hands in a gesture of capitulation. “But he’s not straight!”

“Yes, he is,” Tim mutters.

“No, I mean—infuriating boy!” She cuffs Tim on the shoulder. “Up-front! You can never tell whether he says what he means, or whether he means what he says. And all he cares about is his own research! His crop of graduates is consistently smaller than that of any other subfield because he can’t be bothered to waste time advising. Well, he would feel it’s time wasted!”

Tim shakes his head in exasperation but decides to let it go.

“And Dancey, what does he—”

Erin interrupts me. “Now he is all bad.”

I look at the others for a rebuttal of this blunt assessment.

“He thinks he’s God,” Joe says. “He wants to shape the department in his own image. Don’t they all? And wouldn’t you?”

“He keeps dropping these ominous hints about Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Erin, you said this is about Bob Morgan’s job, but is there more to it?”

I can tell just by the expression on Tim’s face that there is more to it.

“Listen, guys,” I add a little severely, “one of the reasons I applied for this job is the excellence of Ardrossan’s Early Modern Studies program. If Dancey is scheming to pull the plug on the English Lit side of that, where will that leave me?”

“It’s a game of dominoes.” Tim at last seems ready to give me a comprehensible answer. “For twenty years and more, Rich Westley and Bob Morgan were a fixture in this department—Bob with his Medieval English Language and Literature, Rich with his Native American Culture and Dialects. Cultural Studies was big. These days—who cares? The pendulum is swinging back to hard science. The worst-case scenario—from your point of view, Anna—is that the professorship of Medieval English Literature will be re-designated as something like Aesthetics and Cognitive Science, to operate as a docking station for the new Center for—whatsit?”

“Institute for Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology,” Joe says.

“Hornberger’s baby.” I nod. “Dancey told me about that. He suggested Dolph and I convene a conference there, about Renaissance art and neuroesthetics.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, but I mean…like hell.”

“Don’t be stupid, Anna!” Erin reaches over and grabs my wrist for emphasis. “This was Dancey’s offer to join his camp! With Dancey, it’s very simple. You’re either for him or you’re against him. And you can’t afford to be against him.” She turns to her colleagues. “Don’t you agree that was an offer Anna can’t refuse?”

They agree. Reluctantly, but unanimously.

“I don’t think it was an offer,” I say, drowning. “It felt more like a taunt. And the whole idea behind it is to pull the rug out from under my own discipline!”

“If we want to remain at the cutting edge, we need to reinvent ourselves!”

“Wait, so are you telling me that Dancey and Hornberger will trade in Medieval Literature and the Piedmont Center for Area Studies for a share in this new Institute for Cognitive Science? Is that the deal?”

“Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” Joe shrugs, and the others avoid my eyes.

“If any of this can still be stopped, it’s by a department chair who will take on Dancey and make sure that Medieval and Renaissance Studies isn’t bled dry.” Erin counts some money onto the table and slips on her jacket. “It would have been in Giles’s own interest to take the chair. See what I mean when I say he doesn’t care?”





Maybe it’s because I had too much coffee too late in the day—one before the faculty meeting, two in the Astrolabe—or maybe it’s because the events of the day are whirling around in my head and gnawing at the lining of my stomach like tiny lampreys, but it’s almost two in the morning, and I am still at my desk, brooding over the pregnant anatomies. Like Christian martyrs who present to the worshipping observer the body parts that they have sacrificed for their faith, these female figures peel away the layers of skin, fat, muscle and tissue from their bellies to present a view into their wombs. The point of these images is not the fact that babies grow in women’s bellies; the point is that they show how they grow. The gift that these naked, dissected ladies make to the beholder is the gift of knowledge, both physical and metaphysical.

Gift, in German, means poison. The etymology is not as crazy as it appears: geben means “to give,” and “that which is given or administered” is a gift. Could be a lump of money, as in Mitgift, dowry—or could be a dose of poison. A gift can be an ambiguous thing, a two-edged sword; a donation can have strings attached. Donation, my foot. Hornberger was instrumental in acquiring the necessary funds. What Dancey neglected to mention, of course, was that the new Institute for Cognitive Science has poisoned the atmosphere in the English department. How would I have voted on this issue, assuming there ever was a vote? Not sure. At any rate, I would have examined this gift horse’s mouth extremely carefully.

Hang on—gift, present. That reminds me of the text my mother promised to send me about my father’s birthday present, and that reminds me that on my way home my phone slipped off the passenger seat when I braked and under the seat when I accelerated again. An excellent excuse to go downstairs, grab the flashlight from the key rack in the hall, and take a stroll to my car.

It isn’t as dark as it usually is. There is light and the sound of a car and voices. I tell myself that burglars would not leave the motor running, but it seems very late, on a weeknight, for the Walshes to have guests. Cautiously I peer round the corner of the main house and see Howie behind the wheel and Pop assisting Karen from the door to the car. Karen is wearing an anorak over her nightgown, woolen socks, and boots; Pop is in his pajama jacket and jeans, and I know that this is not good. They are keeping their voices down, presumably on account of the girls, but I can hear Karen’s panic when she tells him to put one towel down on the seat and to hand her the other one.

The car drives off, and when Pop turns to go back into the house, he sees me standing just outside the pool of light cast by the porch light.

“I’m sorry—I wasn’t prying—I forgot something in my car.” I feel I must justify my presence at such a dramatic moment in the lives of people I hardly know. He looks at me, an aging man in jeans that slip down his paunch, his face gray and deeply lined, and he nods his permission for me to pass.

“Sir!” I can’t help but whisper when he is about to disappear into the house. “Is it…the baby?”

I’m wary of his anger at my intrusion, but he looks at me again and nods. Just that. He has done what he can do, and now it’s out of his hands—like the seeds that he plants and tends and that may still be blighted.

I feel very sad and foolish as I retrieve my phone and slowly walk back to the cottage. I haven’t the heart to return to my desk and the images that are covering it. Sometimes my academic pursuits reveal themselves as precisely that: purely academic. Real Life is happening elsewhere, and it frightens me.