The Englishman

chapter 28

I FEEL TENSE AND FORLORN in New York, but I dread coming back to Ardrossan. I dread it so much that the night before my flight I can’t sleep, and on the day itself I can’t eat.

Even my cottage is no safe haven.

There are traces of cigarette ash on my porch, and I sweep up a crunched-up cigarette rolling paper. Perhaps Jules was sheltering here again and tried her hand at rolling her own. Whatever, I’m not having it. Events at the Observatory—Hornberger’s intrusions into my office, Corvin’s senile guerilla attacks—have affected me more than I had thought, and my nerves are still raw. This is what paranoia must feel like. How does this ash get onto my porch? Was this towel not clean when I left, and now it’s limp and grubby? Did Karen not give me four brown eggs before I left, and now there are two brown and two white ones? There’s nothing for it; I must talk to Karen about Jules.

“So I guess you’ve seen it. I’m sorry, Anna.” Karen is crouching by the chicken pen with a pair of pliers. Sheltering criminals seems to have become second nature to me, because for a weird moment I think she is talking about the bobcat that got the chicken, and my impulse is to deny all knowledge of it.

“Well, have you spoken to her about it?” I ask.

“Lorna? No, I haven’t seen her for weeks. But I know that she is terrible tore up about it all. She does have very strong feelings about…well, everything, really, but especially moral issues.”

“Lorna? What are you talking about?” Never mind Jules rolling cigarettes on my porch.

Karen stands up and pushes her hands into her back as if it hurt her. Like this, standing straight and pushing her belly out, her pregnancy is beginning to show.

“The report in the newspapers?” Now she is as confused as I am. “I’m surprised the university managed to keep it quiet for so long; a professor accused of raping a student, and what’s more, the stepdaughter of an important man in the city—that’s a big story.”

“Was it in the papers? No, I didn’t know that! In the Shaftsboro Times?”

“Yes, Saturday. Everyone talked about it at church on Sunday—well, you can imagine.” She pulls a face. “People around here are very happy to suspect the Folly of all sorts of moral misconduct and liberal laxity. Oh, that sounded poetic, didn’t it? Liberal laxity. Anyway, I thought you meant Lorna. What did you mean?”

I can’t bring myself to mention the grimy towel and the brown eggs, but the evidence of loiterers on my porch is no paranoid fantasy, nor was the condom dangling from the tree in my backyard like tinsel from a Christmas tree.

“I’m just putting that out there, Karen. No interference; none of my business. But Logan Williams is not the best company a fifteen-year-old malcontent could keep. I wouldn’t trust him, to be honest.”

But to my surprise, Karen brushes away my concern and vaguely promises to have a word with Jules about not sitting on my porch when I am away.

“If she really does that. Why would she, really? She has her friends in the pickers’ camp, and they sit in their vans, or round the fire. She is allowed to walk past the cabin, you know.” Karen pushes her little finger between the jaws of the pliers and pinches it.

“Of course she is. But what I have observed is much more than walking past. She seems to regard the cottage as part of the farm, while I regard it as my home. I would like to be able to decide who I invite into my home, and when—even if it’s just the porch or the garden. I’m sorry, Karen, but her disregard of the fact that the cottage is my private space is not acceptable.”

“Yes, well, I’ll, um…I’ll mention it to her, and I thank you for your understanding.”

Maybe Karen’s hormones are messing her up. Or maybe I am overreacting.





“It was in the Washington Post!” Tim splutters into the phone when I ring him later. “That woman has totally blown the whistle on us all! Where were you the past few days?”

“Busy. That woman. Lorna O’Neal? Do you mean to say that Lorna O’Neal spoke to journalists from the Post?”

“Our very own Deepthroat! ‘According to anonymous sources,’ the article said. Anonymous, not so much. Unauthorized, you betcha.”

“No, wait—then how do they know it was Lorna?”

“We were all summoned to appear before the Prez and the Prov, individually, you understand, and she admitted it! Felt she couldn’t, in all conscience, stand by while the university was doing its damnedest—my word, not hers—to sweep Hornberger’s misconduct under the rug. Of course they are, and it is sickening. Do you know that they approached Nancy, Terry, Martha, and Warren for character assessments?”

“Of Natalie, or—”

“Of Nick! No, Natalie they want to have psychologically assessed. Martha came to my office the other day and told me that the Assistant Dean of Studies had phoned her at home and suggested that she volunteer to give Nick a character reference. He assured her that the whole thing would be handled most discreetly, anonymously, of course, and she would not regret having cooperated with the college in this delicate matter.”

“And she felt she couldn’t refuse.”

“Right. Except he then read them out. Aloud. With the authors’ names and everything. Martha thinks Hornberger is a mediocre scholar who has buttressed his position at the department by his extramural connections and his bullying techniques. How can she be stupid enough to be honest! After a phone call! If this doesn’t scream, You’re being f*cked here, baby, and there’ll be no paper trail for you to prove it, then what does?”

“Oh, man…”

“The other three followed their cues and produced wonderfully creative pieces of fiction. So with these glowing character references in the balance—”

“Tim, if…just supposing there was a similar case from way back, years ago. Would that make a difference to the way the hearing is going?”

“Do you mean the incident back in seventy-six? How do you know about that?”

Careful now.

“There was a woman from Hornberger’s year at the Homecoming reception. She told us. How do you know?”

If Greco vs. Hornberger is all over the papers now, Mary-Lou Tandy may hear of it and come forward to testify. If she wants to go back to that traumatic time, if it is her own decision to get involved, I will make Giles throw the file into the ring. He cannot go on protecting Hornberger.

“Natalie said. She’s full of lewd and lurid stories about Hornberger’s past, including this one, but she can’t prove any of them. Mark my words, Hornberger will end up looking like the innocent victim of a smear campaign!”

“I feel sick.”

“You feel sick! What do you think I feel! I already had my fingertips on terra firma, Tenurica, the Land of Safety, when I was pulled back into the maelstrom of university politics by an over-excited snowflake and an aging, over-sexed macho! We don’t know what our cue is, from one meeting to the next! Bernie says we should simply carve our signatures into potato halves and tell them to do whatever they liked with them.”

“I’m seeing Bernie the Sunday after next at their house-warming party. I suppose I know nothing of this, right?”

“Nothing is already too much. Don’t throw me under the bus now, okay? My tenure committee sits in two weeks’ time. I want that to go as smoothly as a lubed cock into—”

“Eeek! Yes, you’ve made your point, Blundell! I won’t say a dicky bird.”





On Tuesday morning I finally get a reply to my emailed apology to Vicky Benedetto and Pete Kirkpatrick, the organizers of the Notre Dame conference. Pete, who sends the reply, does not bother to pretend that they were not offended by my sneaking out of the conference like that. Nonetheless, they are offering to include me among the selected papers that they plan to publish as a collection of essays. I see this as a confirmation of my paper’s quality, but I also see how close I came to compromising myself professionally. It is like a near miss in the car—you’re grateful worse was prevented and resolve to keep your eyes very firmly on the road in future.

The light-blue lambswool sweater is a trusty friend, but I have not yet had the courage to wear my short tweed skirt, and at the beginning of the semester I would not even have considered combining it with what I consider to be among my coolest articles of clothing: a pair of brown nappa, knee-high, lace-up boots. My classes go like a dream. The remaining twenty-one students in the Comedy class eat out of the hollow of my hand, and Logan Williams—on time, for a change—sits in the last row and gazes at me with a mixture of resentment and fascination. Well, baby, I know that half of you—the lower half—wants to see me flat on my back across one of the classroom tables. But life’s a bitch and then you don’t f*ck your professor.

Mental note: You do not f*ck your professor.

On Wednesday afternoon Yvonne knocks on my office door.

“Anna. I need to tell you something. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure, come in.”

She closes the door behind herself very carefully and walks over to close the window. “I am violating someone’s confidence by telling you this, so please promise me that you won’t do the same? I know that sounds idiotic, but I simply have to talk to someone about it!”

“Is this about Hornbergergate? Actually, Tim calls it ‘Hornygate,’ but you know Tim.”

“When is his tenure review?” Yvonne frowns. “It’s not for me to say, but isn’t he very careless with the things he says in public?”

“Look, the boy’s under a lot of pressure in that damned hearing panel—cut him some slack. Anyway—”

“Yes, anyway.” She inhales deeply and holds her breath for a moment. “There’s this woman in the church I joined last year. She’s divorced, too, lives with her younger daughter not far from me; the daughter sometimes sits with Teddy and Ally in the evenings. Last Sunday—and remember the story about Hornberger was in the Shaftsboro Times on Saturday!—we had a clothes bazaar, and she and I happened to have kitchen duty at the same time. I saw at once that something was bothering her, and eventually I asked, and she—God, I find this so upsetting! She told me that she knew someone who was a student at Ardrossan in the seventies and that this woman was raped by Hornberger!”

“A ghost from the past! You wonder how many there are. Will this woman come forward?”

“No, no, you haven’t heard it all.” Yvonne catches my hands in hers. “Anna, I do believe she was talking about herself! I know her as Louise Randall—Louise may easily have been Mary-Lou as a girl! I know that her mother was white, and she is clearly an intelligent, educated woman, and she told me once that her first husband was the manager of the store where she worked. That all fits, doesn’t it?”

The skin on my arms puckers with goose bumps.

“Could it be a coincidence?”

“Yeah, because there were hundreds of women of color at private universities in the mid-seventies!”

“You’re right,” I agree. “Not a coincidence. Dear God—what now?”

“I was hoping you’d help me figure that out.”

“How did she seem to feel about the whole thing? The fact that she told you seems to indicate that she needed to talk about it, even if it was under cover of that old chestnut, ‘I have this friend who—’”

“I could repeat Elaine Shaw’s account to her and see how she reacts.”

“Hmm. What kind of a woman is she? Does she have friends to talk this over with? She may not, you know. She may have left Ardrossan and closed that chapter in her life. If she has come to terms with what happened and doesn’t want to go probing old wounds in public, I could understand that. It would be her word against his, and who needs all that dirt flung around?”

I feel a pang of guilt for not telling Yvonne about the file. I ought to tell her, and Giles ought to hand over the file to the police.

I do not tell her.

Then the inevitable happens. I am having a coffee with Tim in the Eatery, going over the members of his tenure committee and his likely external reviewers, when Giles turns up at our table.

“Did you get the email?” Yes, definitely still furious with me, and definitely still the most beautiful man I have ever seen. So much for the theory that one night with the ogre would break the spell.

“What email?”

“Semester review. Yours, not mine. Elizabeth wants to see both of us on Friday.”

“Oh, my giddy aunt…”

“No, don’t worry.” Tim waves away my concern as if it was a fruit fly. “That’s all part of the care the college lavishes on its rookies.”

“I don’t think so. I had seven drops and withdrawals from the Comedy class, and this week I got three emails whining for my permission to withdraw late. What’s the policy of late withdrawal?”

“You mean the official one or the actual one we practice?” Tim asks, rolling his eyes.

“I can’t save your tush every day of the week!” Giles has not sat down.

“You leave my tush out of it!”

His eyes narrow, and my heart beats faster because we both remember. The skin of his stomach sliding along the skin of my buttocks; me arching my back to offer him access to the hidden parts of my body and my soul. Two pillows under my belly to tilt me at the angle he wants me, his hard shaft sliding playfully, a little menacingly, down the cleft between my ass cheeks till it finds its slippery way home. His hand burrowing down till his fingers find me.

I guess now I know why you are not supposed to have sex with people you work with.

“You told me to pamper them. Giles told me to be a bitch. Why do I listen to you at all?” I pretend to be more upset than I am, to justify my tomato-colored face.

“Why do you listen to him?” Tim corrects me. “My advice was good! However you conduct your classes later on, in your first year you have to be uber-submissive!”

“We didn’t hire her to be submissive!” Giles fires up. He has flushed, too, with anger or with arousal, perhaps both.

“Of course she has to be submissive! If she values her skin? Yes, she does, and then some!”