The Englishman

chapter 19

TRUE TO THE RESOLUTION I MADE on my bike ride, I try my hand at sorting out Selena O’Neal. Muscle in on grad advisement, Giles said. Okay.

“Hey, Natalie. Hey, Selena.”

The two young women are sitting and working at their desks, facing each other, framed by the window and the blue sky behind them. An academic idyll.

“Be great if we had weather like this at the weekend, huh?” I’m about to ask whether both girls’ families will come to Ardrossan for Family Weekend when it occurs to me that this would hardly be tactful. Natalie is showing great strength of character (or a great deal of chutzpah, depending on who you listen to) by showing up in college like this, but Family Weekend is a very different ballgame.

“All weather stations say it’ll be sunny,” Natalie informs us archly. “So it’ll probably be pouring with rain!”

“Mmhmm. Selena, I was wondering whether you had a moment?”

Selena jumps up onto her feet. “Of course, ma’am. Dr. Lieberman.”

“Anna.”

She bobs her head and twists her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a cross between Princess Diana and Rapunzel. This will be much harder than I thought.

“I tell you what, if you have half an hour or so, we could get ourselves a coffee and walk a little?”

Natalie’s beautiful face clouds over. I doubt that coffee with Dr. Lieberman counts as a special treat in Natalie’s eyes, but she is peeved that Selena is getting it. Not that Selena is keen. If she could think of an excuse, she would wriggle out. But I smile at her in the manner of a kind but firm professor, and she has no choice. Ten minutes later we are walking between the box hedges, each nursing a paper cup between her hands.

“Selena, I felt bad about—hey, what happened to your hand?” When she took a sip of the coffee, her sleeve, pulled down to her fingers, shifted a little, and I caught a glimpse of raw flesh.

“No, it’s nothing.”

“Yes, it is, let me see that!” Doubly alarmed, I become vehement. “Have you been in a fight, or what?” The knuckles on the backs of both hands are red and glistening with lymphatic fluid; these wounds are fresh. Four round red marks on each hand.

“I…fell,” she improvises. “I was carrying something and scraped against the…wall of the garage, at home. It’s nothing.” She hitches her sleeves over her hands like oven gloves and nurses her coffee.

“Selena, I’m not stupid. How you deal with stress is none of my business, so I won’t probe. But I feel all the more urgently that I ought to say this, about last week’s grad seminar. Things got a little out of hand, and you may have walked away from it feeling that your topic doesn’t make sense or that your approach doesn’t work. But all you need to—”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t bothered by that,” she interrupts me. She may be shuffling alongside me in her sensible skirt and sensible shoes, ducking her head so as not to have to look down at me, but she is perfectly capable of interrupting a professor.

“Weren’t you? Well, that’s good. What’s your…what did you take away from it, upon reflection?”

Not much, it seems. She tries to convince me that like a good little grad student she listens to all criticism and tries to use it constructively, so appreciative of all the help she gets, such an opportunity, graduate study at a place like Ardrossan—

“Yes, but. Selena.” Aha, there it is, the mulish set to her mouth and jaw. I’ve seen it a few times, but I keep forgetting it because the impression of her dowdy diffidence is so overwhelming. “I spoke to Giles Cleveland about your paper, and it seems to me that you and he do not exactly see eye to eye on the question of whether you should go on to do a Ph.D.”

“You fought with him about me. Natalie heard you.”

If I had a wall to bang my head against, I would.

“We didn’t fight, we had a—never mind that! We are discussing your—”

“I was admitted as a graduate student, therefore I must have the academic ability to succeed,” she interrupts me again. “To tell me I shouldn’t be in grad school when I am in grad school is another way of saying that Ardrossan’s admission policies are determined by the financial situation of the university, and not by the academic potential of the students.”

She is right. She has summarized, in a few brutal sentences, the situation in graduate schools all over the country. But if I agree with her and she repeats it, I am toast. On wheels. I’m in enough trouble as it is.

“These are very general statements. I would like to hear what you feel about your personal situation. Are you enjoying grad school?”

“I couldn’t imagine doing anything else in the world!” she states in a hollow voice, and her cheeks flame.

Oh, of course. The young man in the observatory. Perhaps I should cast a beady eye or two over the male grad students. I briefly consider asking her what her parents would say if they knew that they are coughing up thirty thousand bucks a year so that their daughter, a girl chastely reared in the fear of God, can have it off with some guy in the attic of her department. She would presumably tell me, and rightly, to mind my own freaking business, and anyway, she is paying for her own tuition, isn’t she?

“That is not really an answer to my question.”

“I’m fine!”

“No, Selena, you’re not fine! But it’s your life, and you have—”

“That’s right, it is!”

“—and you have been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong. All I can encourage you to do is to trust your own judgment and to be honest with yourself about what you truly feel about something. Or someone.”

Good speech. I should memorize it and tell it to the mirror tonight.

“I am! That’s exactly what I am doing!” She seems almost pleased with me for putting it so well. Her face, bare of make-up and exposed by that demure blue headband, beams with relief, and up close I see how white and soft and smooth her skin is, and how her lips are trembling a little.

Well, all right. So this vulnerable, headstrong young woman has fallen into the hands of a scoundrel. But the sex has intoxicated her, and people as inconsequential as a new assistant professor or her study advisor have no chance of getting through to her. Hey, grad school’s a bitch and then you get f*cked by a bastard. Been there, done that. Wait till you are on tenure track. Tenure track is an uber-bitch, and you fall for a lovely man who doesn’t even tell you he is dating another woman before you fall in love with him.





Contrary to Natalie’s cattish prediction, the weather on Family Weekend is dry and sunny. The campus appears in its full glory of undulating shrubbery, surging, orange-yellow-brown masses of leaves, and green lawns already dotted with orange and white shirts, banners, and hats. “Pipe, Plover!” is Ardrossan’s war cry, and apparently the Plovers are expected to trounce their traditional rivals, the Lynxes, who are traveling over from the other research university on the other side of Shaftsboro for tomorrow night’s football game. I’m proud to belong to the Ardrossan Family, despite all the squabbles we recently had, and I bought a long-sleeved Ardrossan U t-shirt especially to go with the dress pants I dug out for this day.

When the door of the elevator opens onto the fourth floor, I almost push my bike into Tessa, who comes running around the corner from the hallway.

“You must come,” she says, heaving, pale as a sheet. She grabs the handlebar, pulls my bike out of the cab, and lets it slide against the wall. “Come, quickly.”

“Tessa, what—” Another smashed window? What?

Oh. My. God.

Now it is graffiti. Across Natalie’s and Selena’s office door, in red capitals about two feet high:


WHORE!


And on the opposite wall:


IF A PRIEST’S DAUGHTER DEFILES HERSELF BY BECOMING A PROSTITUTE, SHE MUST BE BUR


“Jesus f*cking Christ on a cracker…”

“I don’t think more cursing is going to help!” Tessa flings at me, then bites her lip. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry, Tessa. When did you see this?”

“Thirty seconds before you did? People will be up here with their parents today, and—oh, dear!” She is fighting down tears, and I can understand why. We are standing in the middle of the empty hallway, red hatred screaming at us from the walls.

“And what’s that stench?” I walk further along the corridor, where a foul, pungent smell—

“Fish,” Tessa says, sniffing like a pointer. “Rotten fish. Gross.”

“Well, I guess that sort of fits the general idea. If you’re into vulgarities of that sort.”

“Yes,” she says, “but it comes from your office.”

It does. A biting smell emanates from my office door, which has been liberally sprinkled with some sort of fluid. I peek into the plastic box that is screwed against the door to hold essays and notes, and in it are nestling some stinking chunks of pickled herring.

“Here,” Tessa says and holds up a glass jar, using a Xeroxed journal article like an oven glove. “‘Kranz’s Kosher Pickled Herring.’” It had, of course, been thrown into the cart that is still, on the morning of Family Weekend, sitting under the stairs. Smelling of rotten herring.

I dial Lorraine Forster’s number, but the voice that answers is Matthew Dancey’s.

“Anna—are you out of your mind? It’s Family Weekend! I have to make a speech to the parents in less than an hour!”

“Yes, sir, I understand. But unless you want to make a speech explaining why the top floor is displaying graffiti that says—sorry, I’d like to give you this verbatim—” I pull the phone’s cord out from under my desk and walk into the hall. “‘If a priest’s daughter defiles herself by becoming a prostitute, she must be bur,’ I guess he ran out of paint here—I suggest you send someone up here pretty damn quick. Oh, and it says ‘WHORE’ across one of the office doors. Pardon my language, sir, I’m only quoting. And there is the further damage of spilled herring, moldy, pickled herring, which has been slopped all over my office door, so the place reeks to high heaven. Actually, maybe it would be easier to think of a reason why the fourth floor will be closed to all visitors today, only you’d have to inform Modern Languages of that, because—well, it’s their corridor, too.”

I can’t deny that I am enjoying this a little. The customized insult in the form and smell of kosher herring will earn a place in the Lieberman Hall of Fame, and as such it is here to stay. The opportunity to tell Dancey that a wall in his department is displaying the vilest kind of obscenity re the pending rape case, however, is too rare and too delicious not to be savored.

Two minutes later Dancey is surveying the evidence for himself, surrounded by everyone else who has arrived.

“I hope you weren’t planning on showing your kids where Mommy has her office,” I murmur next to Yvonne’s shoulder.

“Well, not today, that’s for sure,” Yvonne says with a grimace. “This smell is making my throat hurt, do you want to—”

“Good kosher herring is making your throat hurt?” I exclaim in mock outrage. “You anti-Semite! Oy, what next?”

“Stop it, Anna. This is not the right moment.”

“On the contrary, this is exactly the right moment.”

She scans me through narrowed eyes. “You’re furious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m furious. Sorry, I’d love to get out of here, but I have to stay and see what they’re going to do with my door. I didn’t tell you, did I? A week ago they replaced the lock on my door. No one told me, no one left me a new key. I spent all of Monday trying to get into my own office. And now this. Oh, and there was some sort of oily goop on my door handle before, a couple of weeks back.”

“That’s mobbing, Anna, and it’s anti-Semitic. I told you from the first!”

“Well, it’s general a*sholery. And the only thing I hate worse than mobbing and anti-Semitism is general a*sholery, so…we’ll see how this plays out.”

“Anna, if you do meet Teddy and Alethea later on, you will mind your language, won’t you? You have the mouth of a ghetto queen on you.” Yvonne looks at me like a stern mother who understands why her overstrained toddler is screeching but nonetheless has to shut her up.

It is amazing to see how fast the administration of a private university can move if the objective is to shield parents from any knowledge that might confuse them as to where to send their next child. Within minutes of Dancey’s phone call to maintenance, a phalanx of men in overalls has appeared on the fourth floor. The graffiti is not a problem; a fresh coat of beigy-gray might look odd on old grubby beigy-gray, but not obscene. The letters on Natalie’s office door resist the solvent that is used on them, so some posters are found and strategically placed over them. My door is taken off its hinges, placed on a large plastic sheet and scrubbed, using liquid soap and language that would make any ghetto queen blush. I try to keep in the background, but when Larry glares at me, I glare back.

“Will you now stop thinking that I’m doing this myself, Larry?”

“I never said you was doin’ it, ma’am. I’m sayin’ you was havin’ it done to you. Take that Dumpster down, two of you,” he mutters to his young men.

“What, already?” I pout, pushing out my lower lip. “Can’t I keep it a little, to look at and smell?”

He snorts and pulls his mouth to one side. I think I have made Larry the janitor grin.

“Anna?” Tessa appears in the doorless frame of my office door. “Are you coming to hear Giles talk about Raleigh?”

There is a series of pre-lunchtime events in the university book store, and although I know I shouldn’t, I am longing to see Giles. He doesn’t want me, but I know that the sight of him will calm me down.

“You bet! Will you run ahead and keep me a seat?”

Ten minutes later I shunt the men out of my office, push the bike into a corner, lock the door, and gallop down the stairs.

The contrast between the fourth floor and the rest of the building, not to mention the rest of the campus, is surreal. It is warm enough for people to sit in shirts and sweaters on the steps of the stately entrance to the Observatory, on the lawns, and the low brick walls that mark off plots all over campus. This is probably the happiest day of the academic year for the largest proportion of students, and I can’t help but smile at the sight of all these smiling people—nostalgically, because it is now a decade since I was part of this kind of happiness.

On my way to the book store I am stopped by Ross Maher, the football-playing hunk in my Gen Ed class, who in the first session didn’t have the guts to say that Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 1 was about masturbation. You can usually tell parents who did not go to college themselves and for whom it is a big deal to send their child to a place like Ardrossan. Mr. and Mrs. Maher are forthright, unaffected people, and there is no way I will snub them by hurrying off. They tell me that Ross says I am the teacher who first taught him to read properly.

“That’s what you say, isn’t it, Ross? Read properly!” his mom ribs him, and Ross grins in that endearing way only well-brought-up nineteen-year-olds have.

“Mom! You’re embarrassing Professor Lieberman!”

We all laugh, and I protest, “Not at all, tell me more! I can assure you that freshman professors feel as insecure sometimes as freshman students!” This is exactly the right thing to say, and they are very pleased with me when I allow no doubt at all that the Plovers will thrash the Lynxes and wish Ross the best of success in tomorrow’s game.

A group of people seem to have been watching us from the other side of the street. I cross, assuming that they have been admiring the view, but a stentorian male voice addresses me.

“Professor Lieberman? One moment, please!”

Frank Harrison, one of the triumvirate that runs the Harrison family’s business, needs no college deans or department chairs to convey his considered opinion about his daughter’s professors. How, he wants to know, did I intend to respond to the fact that a large portion of the students I was teaching this semester found the material disturbing and my manner abrasive and intimidating?

He is a big man in a brown blazer and a white-and-orange tie who made sure to position me in such a way that he has the sun in his back and I have to squint up at him; the oldest trick in the book.

“Well, sir, intimidating is a very subjective term, isn’t it? Some people might experience your behavior right now as intimidating.”

There is no way I can stand up to this man. He is literally standing on his own turf, in front of the Harrison laboratory of biochemistry. His family has probably been coming to Ardrossan since it was founded, rising in the world as the university rose in it. I don’t believe for a second that Madeline, who has linked arms with her mother and her older sister like girl football players in cashmere, has felt intimidated by me. I will believe, however, that she has felt pissed off and bored.

“Sir, I’m sure you are aware that since Madeline is of age, I am not allowed to discuss her academic concerns with anyone but herself. If she feels unable to appreciate my class, she may say so at the end of the semester in her evaluation of the course. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I wish you an enjoyable weekend.”

All the seats in the book store are already taken when I squeeze in. Tessa waves at me from the second row and shrugs; I signal that I perfectly understand that she was powerless against the two middle-aged women sitting next to her. The bar tables holding cheese, crackers and white wine in coolers are as popular as the chairs, and one back of a curly head looks very familiar.

“‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker,’” I whisper into his ear.

“Jesus, Anna!” Tim gasps. “Hey—glad you could make it. Will you stand at the back with me and be bitchy?”

“I came here with no other object in mind. Actually, that’s not true. Can you reach one of those clean glasses? I need a drink.”

“Wassup, lady?”

“I’ll tell you later. Who’s on first?”

I get a very straight look from the baby blues over the rim of a wine glass.

“No, I mean—” I have to giggle “—is Giles on first?”

“Naturally,” Tim says. “Oh, no—a*sholes incoming.”

Dolph Bergstrom and Steve Howell, both in orange football jerseys, are edging their way into the store. They seem to be scanning the small crowd, whispering to each other, and I look away a second too late. Steve sees me, nudges Dolph, and both quietly start sniffing. Scrunch up their noses. Sniff again. Inflate their nostrils. Steve gets out a hanky, fluffs it up in a theatrical manner, and pretends to blow his nose.

“What the f*ck are they doing?” Tim frowns.

I turn my back to them, because I am actually close to tears for a moment.

“Adding insult to injury. God, they really are a*sholes!”

“Why, what—”

“Shh. I’ll tell you later.”

The manager of the book store comes on and introduces Giles, whose legs are very long and awkward as he steps onto the stage, and who looks so English in his light gray suit, blue shirt, and burgundy-and-blue-striped tie that the cold hand crushing my heart now digs its fingernails into it.

Tim bends closer to my ear, and I can hear his glee through the whisper.

“The tie…”

Everyone is wearing white and orange and sporting little plovers everywhere, and Giles-sodding-Cleveland comes in his Cambridge college insignia?

Gotta love the man or hate him.

The audience loves him. He keeps his talk about the book short and humorous, belittles the prize he won for it by pointing out that it is awarded by a small group of Scottish academics who otherwise occupy themselves eating unspeakably horrible food, being insufferably arrogant about the English education system, and doing unmentionable things to their sheep. He stresses the good account to which professors put their sabbaticals but advises university provosts to conduct themselves more in the manner of Renaissance monarchs.

“King James I got the first volume of a History of the World; several treatises on politics, warfare, trade and economics; and piles of poetry out of Raleigh by the simple expedient of locking him into the Tower of London for a dozen years. And with that thought…”

Amid the laughter, a second chair is placed on stage for Loren Bonner, host of the ABC Shaftsboro morning show, and the cameraman crouches next to the stage to get a better view.

“Can’t she see that she’s making him cringe?” I speak through clenched teeth, unable to avert my gaze from the spectacle of Giles crossing his arms and legs into knots of discomfiture as Loren sets to work on him.

“She’s enjoying it,” Tim murmurs back. “He has brought out the praying mantis in many a female. My grasp of heterosexual coupling behavior is tenuous, but I think they sense something in him that needs a strong woman.”

“Not all strong women are dominating bitches.”

“Granted, but he attracts the bitches. And they snap at his soft tissue till he yelps.”

With a tiny jerk of his chin he points at Loren, who is leaning in and has wrapped the ringed fingers of one hand around Giles’s wrist. Her long fingers disappear in the gap between his naked wrist and the cotton of the shirt; the claws of her rings must be pressing into the skin of his chest.

If this were a scene in Ally McBeal, I would be Lucy Liu, spewing fire. I am the dragon, Giles is the virgin, and I’m saving him from the clutches of the Wicked Witch.

Giles has rid himself of the transgressing fingers by gesturing with one hand while keeping the other wrapped firmly around his waist, hugging himself. Because he is so articulate, speaking in beautiful, well-turned sentences, and because he holds his long limbs in that blue cotton and gray wool so very still, apart from that expressive hand, he does not come across as uneasy. Reserved, yes, that goes with the accent, introverted, intellectual, but also amusingly self-deprecating, which Loren doesn’t get at all. I think it is perceptive of Tim to have picked up on the vulnerability in Giles that alerts the praying mantises and the dominant bitches.

So where is the reason he has not told me he and his wife split up? Is she here? Who is she? I daren’t look around to see whether I can identify a woman in the audience who is watching him with that look of tender amusement that I am trying so hard to keep from my own face.

Jenna, the fan from the graduate seminar, has a question.

“I read on the IMDB website that the book is going to be turned into a film? That is so awesome!”

“Thank you—yes, since the hype of all things Tudor seems to continue, the BBC is thinking of jumping on the bandwagon and doing something similar. A mini-series, something along those lines. I say may.” Giles gives his answer in as neutral as voice as possible; not arrogant or condescending, just as if he were genuinely uncomfortable with it. Tim whistles under his breath.

“The sneaky f*cker,” he murmurs. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Tessa, too, turns round to us and makes the face of an astonished cartoon character. I roll my eyes and shrug back.

“That sounds wonderful,” Loren says, picking up her cue. “Is that something you will be involved in? Will you be writing the screenplay yourself?”

“Lead actors?” one of the ladies next to Tessa butts in. “Perhaps you might convey the preferences of the reading public to the casting officer!”

Giles smiles at her. “Well, what are the preferences of the reading public?”

This leads to cheerful palaver among the audience as they debate the question. The bookstore manager and her assistant appear next to Tim and me.

“I thought this one would be a dull Brit,” the manager says. “If I’d known he’d charm rings around them, I’d have put him last!”

I have to hide the delighted smile on my face from the store manager on my left, from Tim on my right, and from Dolph and Steve across the room, so I check my phone.

Know that bust of Abigail Adams?

“Oh, my God! Tim, I have to go. I think my friend is here, my friend from New York!”

I jostle my way out of the store, as eager and excited as if I were a freshman and my parents had come on a surprise visit. The campus is very crowded now; the smell of tailgate barbeques is wafting through the air (I fight down the memory of rotten fish), in the distance the band is playing the Ardrossan song; someone seems to have brought a banjo. I run across Library Square, and the tall figure with the glowing red hair sticks out a mile.

“Reenie! Irene!”

She sees me, and I could cry, I am so relieved to have her here, a familiar face, someone who knows me.

“But, Professor Lieberman! This is so sudden!” She grins and catches me as if I were her little sister. I know I am overreacting, but I can’t help myself.

“Oh, Ashley, take me away! I’m sick of it! I’m tired of it! Oh, Ashley!”

This makes us both laugh, and although she is playing it cool, I can see how pleased she is that her surprise was a success.

“That bad, huh?”

“No, no, it isn’t. Well, today is—wait, what are you doing here, anyway? You should have told me, I could have—”

“Didn’t know till Wednesday. Listen, I don’t want to rain on your parade, though. What were you doing when I burst onto the scene?”

“Never mind—you’re here! You’re here!”

We get one or two odd looks, Red Irene in her dark teal skirt suit, strutting at five foot ten inches in her heels, Anna-Banana in her white Ardrossan U t-shirt. We are both used to it. I can persuade her not to go back to the book store—I wouldn’t mind her meeting Tim, but there are other dangers—but to stroll along the river promenade toward the stone arch bridge instead.

“Gee, Anna, you were right. This place is beautiful!” I cue her.

“Well, it ain’t too bad.” She nods graciously.

“Thanks, that’s all I wanted to hear. So how are you? How is everyone? What are you doing here?”

She is accompanying Jacques on a business trip to Washington. He flew in on Thursday and has meetings all day today; she took the first flight to Shaftsboro this morning and will join him there. I guess it would be ungrateful of me to be disappointed that she has not come down merely to see me.

“But tell me how you are!” she exclaims. I am always a little suspicious when Irene starts exclaiming, because it is often a cover for something that is troubling her. But I know she isn’t ready to tell me, and there is too much to see and too much else to talk about.

We amble up the hill toward the Observatory, and I decide not to tell her of the fishy events of this morning. I am still too upset and confused to talk about it to an outsider, and to one who I know will tell me she told me so. I don’t need that. I show her round the Observatory, including—with bated breath—the fourth floor; and she does not comment on the fresh paint and the bouquet of solvent intermixed with Eau d’Herring. The garbage cart is gone, too, so there is nothing that needs to be explained away.

“What’s up there?” she asks, pointing at the stairs to the dome.

“The old observatory, but it’s not—actually, why not. It’s pretty cool. Come on.”

Making light of the fact that the key to the dome is kept in a box of tissues in front of it, I unlock the door for her. The dome is flooded with sunlight, beams of dust are dancing in the air, and the old glass panes distort the light so that the air itself seems to be whirling.

“Wow…” She turns on the spot, her head tilted back.

“I know. I wonder why the college hasn’t spruced it up, as a museum or something. These things—” I run my hand along one of the telescope stands “—must be a hundred years old, maybe more.”

“This is a place for secrets.”

“Well, Reenie, funny you should say that…”

Of course she relishes the story about Selena and her night-time lover.

“He’s bound to be an absolute assclown,” she says definitely. “And she’s writing her thesis about the devil? Bound to be the guy. Anyone devilish among your male grad students? Unless she’s making it with a professor, too.”

“Oh, come on. They can’t all be having affairs with professors! Anyway, Selena isn’t—”

I had been wandering aimlessly around the room, curious to see what it was too dark to see when I first came up here. There are two folded rugs on the old sofa; they look new and smell new, too. And on the little washbasin there is a small wash bag with a toothbrush sticking out of it. A bar of soap, and a disposable razor blade.

“Someone sleeps here?” Irene asks, looking over my shoulder.

“Possibly, although this doesn’t look like—eew!” I drop the razor into the washbasin.

“What?”

“This was not used to trim a beard,” I say through clenched teeth. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Blood?”

“Naaah…don’t ask.”

At the bottom of the stairs, as if to illustrate my story, Selena O’Neal is staring up at us, white as a sheet.

“Dr. Lieberman! I thought—”

“Hmm? You thought I was someone else?”

“I thought there was no key to the observatory!”

“Oh, but everyone knows where the key is kept!” I say airily. “Even I do! Sorry, Selena, could we just get past?”

The hallway is empty, except for Natalie Greco, a couple of girls I don’t know, and Mrs. O’Neal. They are viewing what is left of the evidence, and one of her friends sees me and whispers something to Natalie. She casts me a quick glance, undecided whether to address me or not.

Mrs. O’Neal has no such qualms.

“And what do you make of all this, Dr. Lieberman?” she demands of me.

“I’m sure my guess is worse than yours, Mrs. O’Neal,” I reply smoothly, glad that Irene has disappeared into the ladies’ room.

“Someone hates this poor girl! As if she hadn’t been through enough!” She bends down to me and lowers her voice. “Father’s dead, you know, he was much older than Natalie’s mother. She—the mother—has taken up with a new man. He’s a bank manager in Shaftsboro. Plenty of money, but—well, you can imagine.”

“Was her father a clergyman?” I ask on a hunch.

“Yes, why?” Lorna appears not to have been told about the quote from Leviticus on the wall. “Yes, he was a church minister, a highly respected man, and a very charismatic preacher. Lung cancer, bless him.”

Natalie has made up her mind to step in front of me. All these towering females, I’m getting tired of having to look up at everyone.

“What do you have to do with this?” she blurts out.

“Nothing at all, I would have thought. What do you think?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what to think!” She flicks back her long mane with a sound that is close to a “Humph!” Natalie, I am beginning to suspect, is a little annoyed with me for stealing her limelight.

“It must be two different…things.” Selena has followed us and offers her opinion, possibly to erase my impression of how flustered she was just now. “Unconnected. It’s possible.”

“I don’t see how they could be connected,” I point out.

“You think it’s a coincidence?” Mrs. O’Neal asks, still belligerent.

“That seems equally unlikely, I agree.” My non-committal friendliness frustrates them, but I will not be drawn out.

“What was all that about?” Irene murmurs when we are walking down the stairs.

“Hate graffiti on Natalie’s office door this morning.”

“Which one was Natalie? She’s the one who says she was raped, right?”

“The one in the sexy dress. Selena’s the one in the attic.”

“Odd. I would have said the other way round.”

It strikes me for the first time how odd it actually is. Ninety-nine out of a hundred uninvolved bystanders would guess that Selena was raped and Natalie is having clandestine sex in unconventional surroundings.

“That dowdy girl, the one who has sex in the observatory, has fallen for a very bad man.” Irene clicks her tongue. “She would never have given in to the nice boy in her poetry class. She hates herself for what she’s doing. She’s has self-hatred steaming out of every pore.”

“You can tell that at a glance? You’re quick.”

“I’m a family lawyer. I have to be able to tell that sort of thing.”

“She does hate herself. Harms herself, too, she scraped her knuckles—wait. Oh, wait a minute!”

I run back up the stairs, four flights, and arrive panting on the fourth floor. Selena is standing alone in the corridor looking down toward my office.

“Selena, would you mind—” I hold out my hand, and because I am so rattled and out of breath, she obeys automatically and gives me hers. I clasp her wrist tightly so she can’t pull back when I push up the long sleeve of her tunic, all the way up over her elbow. When she sees what I’m doing, she struggles and her wrist slips from my grasp. But I have seen what I thought I would see.

“Dr. Lieberman! What are you doing?” Mrs. O’Neal hovers in the door of her daughter’s office.

“Nothing,” I say, still heaving. “Selena?”

Selena’s face is like cast iron. “It’s nothing, Mom.”





“I worry about you, Banana,” Irene remarks when I pick her up on the second-floor landing.

I’m too upset to trust myself to speak. In the great hall a tour of the campus is just about to start, and a crowd of people is milling about, waiting, looking at the paintings by students from the art department that are shown here because of the light. A tall, blue-shirted figure stands out, and every fiber in my body rushes toward him.

“Wait a sec, Reenie.”

“What, again? Okay, I’ll get myself a coffee over there.”

“Giles—”

His face lights up when he sees me, and through all my shock and anger I am desperately sad that this smile doesn’t mean what I thought it meant.

“I know this isn’t the right moment, Giles, but could we—sorry. I should first say—you were really good, earlier, in the…in the bookstore. Very funny.”

“Thanks. Sometimes Americans like me.”

Last time I looked into his eyes, it was to offer him sex. I think he remembers that.

“A BBC series, huh?” I have to say something, or we’ll stand here forever, gazing into one another’s eyes.

“It may all come to nothing.”

“Tim was a bit miffed he didn’t know about it.”

“He called me a sneaky f*cker. To my face.”

“Yes, to my face, too. But I wasn’t going to repeat that.”

“Not to hurt my feelings?”

God, I wish he’d stop smiling at me like this!

“Actually, not to get Tim into trouble.”

“Speaking of trouble,” he says, turning serious.

“Giles—could we talk about Selena again? You know the other day some windows were smashed up on the fourth floor?”

“Yes, Tessa said—”

“That was Selena. With her naked elbow, like this.” I punch the air with a sharp, horizontal jab.

“She did what?”

“And there’s more. She—sorry, I don’t want to pour this out here and now, just to ask, can we talk about this? Soon? And there’s more, still—not about Selena, but—well, I’m—”

“Flapping.”

“Yeah, I’m flapping.”

And I’m so in love with you, and I want to tell you my worries and hear what you have to say, and I want to share my life with you!

“Talk now. I have time till the concert.”

“No, I can’t. I—have a friend waiting.” I will not introduce him to Irene.

“Right, then, let me know when it suits you.” Withdrawing almost imperceptibly.

“I will, thanks. I appreciate it, Giles!”

“Who is that?” Irene, a cup of coffee in hand, is staring past me across the crowded room as if she had seen a ghost.

“Who is who—oh. The gray-haired guy?” But she knows me too well. If anything, my harmless reply makes her more suspicious.

“Yes, the gray-haired guy! Are you sleeping with him?”

I know my face is flushed with the wine and the rush and the mayhem, but at this, my temples start throbbing.

“No! And will you please keep your voice down!”

Irene sets her jaw, but goes on staring.

“Who is he?”

Flustered, I turn my back to Giles, who is doing the agreeable with a group of parents.

“Giles Cleveland. Stop interrogating me, Reenie. And stop staring at him.”

“And who is Giles Cleveland that I have heard so little about him? Nothing, to be precise. Zilch. Zip. Nada.”

“A colleague.”

“I met him before.” I can hear the bombshell in her voice.

“Don’t be absurd. You can’t have.”

“Excuse me, but I have. Here, I can produce evidence: he has a thin scar that runs from the corner of his eye to his ear, like a crow’s foot, only longer. Sort of like a professor of literature who was in a bar fight. Sexy.”

“Yeah, I know.” My own voice sounds hollow to me. “Okay, tell me—where?”

“At that conference about whatever-it-was in London. When we were supposed to be on a girls’ trip around Europe and you schlepped me to school because you had to give a paper.”

“Anglo-American Writing Between the Wars?”

“That’s the one. I’d been sitting next to this cute guy—chap, don’t you know, something of a dish,” she says, imitating a posh English accent, “who was really impressed with your paper. Don’t you remember? I tried to point him out to you afterward, but he was gone, like Cinderella, and didn’t even leave a slipper.”

“That was Giles?” My stomach churns as if I had eaten rotten herring for lunch. “What was it he said? Something—wasn’t it something about young academics giving better papers than the big names?”

“Yeah, I outed myself as a totally clueless tourist, and he laughed at me for wasting my time at stupid conferences instead of going shopping or sight-seeing. Wise guy. Sexy smile, though.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Well, he said that your paper was the only worthwhile one he’d heard that conference, and that one could tell that you loved what you were talking about, unlike the old codgers who just do it because they have to and bore everyone stiff.”

My fingers are trembling so badly I have to set down my cup for fear of spilling the coffee.

“He said that?”

“Yes, I definitely remember he said ‘bore everyone stiff,’ because that made me wonder whether he’s the type who goes—what do you call that? Conference hopping. Mind you, he wasn’t hitting on me or anything. I sort of expected him to hit on you afterward, but apparently his pumpkin was waiting. Speaking of which, is he married?”

“Divorced. But—”

“And is he hitting on you now? Come on, I could totally see that he is!”

“Irene, he doesn’t even—I’m not even sure he—where are you going? Don’t!”

She storms past me, and before I can wrestle her to the ground and kick her under a table, Giles—who is momentarily between parents—has seen us. I think it is fear that I see flickering in his eyes for a few moments, and I don’t blame him.

“Hey, there!” Irene charges at him, hand outstretched. “Remember me? I guess not, why should you? London, the July before last? A conference on—what was it again?” She turns to me, pulling me closer by my sleeve.

“Queen Mary, Lockkeeper’s Cottage. I do remember,” Giles says, and I can tell that he does. A line from Lady Chatterley’s Lover comes into my head. Sir Clifford, her husband, says something—can’t remember which scene this is from—with the suavest English stiffness, for the two things often go together. I doubt Irene can tell, but Giles feels extremely uncomfortable, either because she is doing her loud-mouthed New Yorker, or because she caught him being complimentary about me. I can’t even process that yet, on top of all the other events of the day. Giles knew me? Well, not knew, but Giles heard me give a paper, in London, last year? So when the search committee shortlisted me, and when we first met and I was so insecure because I thought he hadn’t been involved in my appointment, and when he was a condescending jerk about my work—he knew all along who I was?

“We weren’t introduced at the time,” he says to Irene. “Better late than never, eh? I’m Giles Cleveland.”

They shake hands, and before she can make things worse, I butt in.

“Giles, this is a yuchna from the planet Klutz, who is impersonating my friend Irene from New York.”

“Is that so?” He smiles blandly, but I can tell he is mustering his defensive troops. “And from that far away it is you’ve come to see Anna at Ardrossan?”





“Was he…making fun of me?” Ten minutes later Irene still has not recovered from being stumped.

“Yeah, well. A biseleh.” I could not suppress the beam of delight on my face if my life depended on it.

“He’s like…an eel! A gray eel with a stick up his ass!”

“No, he’s English, that’s all. It’s partly an act. The upper-class English schoolboy. They grow into six-footers, hone their bodies with all that rugby and rowing, and then play on our maternal instincts with their awkward charm. On British women it doesn’t work half as well as on us. You either can’t stand them because you think they’re effeminate and moody and emotionally constipated, or you fall for them.”

“I must be more British than I thought,” she grumbles. “Have you fallen for him? But why am I asking? I can see that you have!”

“I don’t remember the falling. Where do you want to go for dinner, Reenie?” I pointedly change the subject. “Bernie recommends a Mexican place to which I haven’t been, or we could try Cajun, then you’d have something to tell Jacques about, or—”

“I can’t.” Irene doesn’t often look embarrassed, but now she does. “I gotta be back at the airport by four thirty.”

“You’re not flying back today!”

“Yup. Sorry, Banana. Jacques wants me at this working dinner he has tonight.”

“Well, call him and say you’ve found me in a madhouse and you have to stay the night at the tomato farm to set me to rights again. You haven’t even seen the tomato farm yet!”

“I would so much love to, really I would!” She’s not lying, either. “But these people tonight are really important for Jacques, and things have not been going so great between us, so…this is our quality time. Our quality time together is a business dinner he has in Washington with two guys from San Francisco. Care to guess what our problem might be?”

This is where the exclaiming earlier came from, and the brittle gaiety that she’s had all day. I would have wormed it out of her earlier, if—well, if I hadn’t spent the day in a madhouse.

I am very sorry to let her go so soon, but I can’t pretend that it is Irene that I brood over when I cycle back home. Or the herring, or the graffiti.

Giles knew me?