The Englishman

chapter 31

I’M NOT DONE HIDING. But on Tuesday morning I have to give an exam, so I crawl out of my quilted cave, breakfast on ice-cream, and switch on my PC. Plenty of emails, but none from the sender I hope-and-dread to see. What if it was him, on the phone? And what could he possibly want to say? Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.

When I arrive on E-4—weak-kneed and sweaty from the mild exertion of driving here and getting to the elevator—Andrew Corvin’s office door is open. Like the door to a cage in the zoo.

Tessa, Martha Borlind, and a couple of grad assistants are hovering in front of my office, conferring in low voices. Now and then one of them advances a step or two so she can peek into the hoarder’s den, carrying back information like a bee carries honey to the hive. I hear Corvin’s voice before I hear theirs.

“…damned insolence! Fifty years I’ve worked here…kicked like a dog…I won’t have it! I will not have it!”

“Good grief, what’s with him?”

“Rage,” says Tessa. “I was walking back from the Modern Languages restroom when I saw him trying to get into his office. Is there another lock on the door, or something? Because he couldn’t get in, and he was really crazy. Not just annoyed. Panicking.”

“He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and started banging it against the door,” Martha says. “That’s when I called security. I don’t know what’s taking them so long!”

The door handle is now dangling uselessly on some splinters of wood. Corvin seems to be frantically moving around the piles of paper and junk, cussing like a trooper. I take a deep breath, brace myself, and step into the room.

“You! Get out of here!” He glances around, and with the strength and speed of rage, he picks up the fire extinguisher and hurls it at me. I step back out of sight and it crashes against the wall.

“Sir! Calm down! Listen to me!”

“It’s all your fault, you—you interloper!”

“It is not my fault!” Cautiously I poke my head round the door. “My lock was changed, too, and no one told me about it! They did the same thing to me, Andrew!” This does stop him in his tracks for a second as he tries to process this information. “Think! What did you have that they wanted? The file! Hornberger needed to find the file, so he—he and Dancey, I suppose—had the locks changed so they could search your office. And mine!”

He is breathing hard, swaying, and now I’m worried he really is going to have a stroke.

“Come, sir, you are not well. Will you not sit down?” I hold out my hand as to a wild animal. He doesn’t take it, but he doesn’t resist as I reach around his elbow and lead him to the only chair in the room.

“Nothing was taken, I promise you that! Hornberger was only looking for the file!”

“I couldn’t get in,” he tells me, in the astonished voice of an old man. “I couldn’t get into my office!”

“I know, sir, and I understand how very upsetting this is for you.”

“Dr. Lieberman.”

A bearded man I’ve never seen before appears in the doorway. With an abrupt movement of his head he tells me to come out into the hallway and moves in.

“Campus Security,” Martha whispers to me, eyeing the hunky guard standing by. The bearded man coaxes Corvin out of his jacket and takes his pulse, making sure he’s okay. All the while he keeps up a chatty, inconsequential conversation with him, in the course of which Corvin says that he has been staying with his daughter in Vermont for two months.

This information, and the fact that Corvin has evidently not tried to get into his office since before Yom Kippur, finally gel in my head. It can’t have been Corvin. Hurling the junk in the Dumpster back into my office, probably. Complaining about my heels, possibly. But not the fish. If what he says is true and he was in Vermont for the past eight weeks, someone else must have attacked my door with rotten herring.

“Anna, what did you mean, Dancey and Hornberger had the lock on your door changed?” Martha seems to feel that this accusation is outrageous enough to justify her asking me about it, and it doesn’t help that Tessa is also watching me with a mixture of compassion and alarm.

“All the locks on the fourth floor are due to be changed,” I say blithely. “Ours were first, that’s all.”

Martha, perfectly aware of having been fobbed off, disappears back into her office in a huff, but Tessa waits till I have unlocked my office and follows me in.

“Is that the file I found? When we came to straighten up your office?”

“Yes. But Giles won’t want you to know about it, so try, if you can, to erase the memory from your mind.”

“Is it about Professor Hornberger’s—”

“Ssshh! Ssshh.” I silence her with my finger in front of my mouth.

Later that afternoon I receive an email from someone whose name I do not recognize, but the address ends in qmul.ac.uk. My skin heats up and my heart rate doubles.

What do I want?





“Deb, Queen Mary College has invited me for an interview.”

“Oh, well done, Anna! You will come, won’t you? I know they can’t reimburse you for the full cost of—”

“I bought a ticket in October, as a pledge of good faith.”

“God, this is exciting! You’re in with a real chance there, Ewan Buchanan said.”

“I am? No internal candidates? No political considerations, like having an ethnic minority on the shortlist?”

“Don’t be silly. When is it?”

“January eighth.”

“Do you want me to come up?”

“No, you needn’t. But if I could come and see you for a few days beforehand?”

“We’d love to have you. Always. Any time.” There is a short silence between Bristol, England, and Ardrossan, Virginia. “And how are you—otherwise?” she asks discreetly.

“Well, I’ll say it like they say in the movies: ‘I gotta get outta here!’”

“I’m sorry, Anna. Unrequited love is really the last thing you need during your first year on a new job. Or, at all, really.”

Have I not spoken to Debbie since I overheard Giles and Amanda in her office?

“That’s not quite the state of, um, affairs any more. Giles and his wife are divorced. He would have an affair with me, if I wanted to, or perhaps it would be more truthful to say that I —” My voice catches in my throat. “Anyway, I’ll end it. I will, Debbie.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how much do you like him? Anna?”

“Eleven. Twelve. A hundred.” My laugh doesn’t sound like a laugh at all.

“Then maybe you should risk it. If you love him, you should risk it.”

“I won’t.”

“Anna, what if he is your beshert?”

My heart misses a beat, and I have to grab the edge of the desk for support.

“I don’t believe in beshert.”

Giles Cleveland is not the man cut out for me by Fate to be my partner in life. That is what the Yiddish word beshert literally means. Cut out to be someone’s soul mate. I just hope that Giles isn’t cut out to be my Nemesis.