The Englishman

chapter 37

I AM NO LONGER ANGRY WITH GILES for withholding this little piece of information from me. However closely the sword of Damocles is hanging over the precious few days we have together, at least it was not accompanied by a pornographic photograph.

“And he isn’t bluffing? Have you seen this picture?” I rally in a last-ditch defense later that evening when we’re snuggled up in front of the fire.

“Good thinking, Sherlock, but I’ve seen it.”

I’m tempted to ask for details, but Giles shakes his head.

“Why didn’t he tell us there and then?”

“He said you’re such a hothead, you’d have told him where to stick it. He thought I’d be more reasonable on my own.”

“So the deal is, you hold onto the file and he’ll hold onto the photo?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“God, I hate that.”





The scene has clouded over, and on the morning of my fourth day I decide that I must go home today, if only to get a change of clothes.

“You’ve had fresh undies each morning,” Giles points out with the face of an Angel in the House, and it’s true. Because we are going through so many bed sheets, he has been doing a load of laundry every day.

“Squidgy, slimy, oozy, gooey, sticky—oww!” he protests as I fling myself on him in the bed and wrestle him down. “I meant me! Did you think I was talking about you? Never!”

What with one thing and another, it is past four o’clock and getting dark again by the time we set off. I am grateful that Giles has offered to drive me and my bike back to the farm, because it’s no longer white and clear but wet and windy-cold. But I am also grateful that he doesn’t ask to come in or when he will see me again. I don’t even know whether he wants to see me again.

“Thank you, Giles.” More I cannot manage. I feel myself welling up, and I don’t want to cry in front of him.

“It was my pleasure, Miss Lieberman.” He bends down to give me a quick kiss on the lips, and then he’s off.

I’m glad there’s no Walsh about as I slowly push my bike up to the garage. I lock it in and trudge across to my porch.

I miss him already.

I’m also pretty certain that I didn’t close my shutters before I set out in the small hours of Saturday morning. Maybe Pop Walsh went round the house to do that, thinking his Yankee greenhorn tenant had left for four weeks without battening down the hatches.

The moment I open the front door, I know that something is wrong. It’s too warm, for one thing. I left the heat on low, assuming that I would be back in the morning; now even the little hall is warmer than I usually keep it. What I didn’t leave on is the radio, and I certainly didn’t leave it on in the bedroom, quietly playing country music.

Perhaps it is this detail that reassures me I won’t be clobbered to death by housebreakers. It may still not be wise to venture any further, but fear is only one of my instinctive reactions. The bedroom door is open a crack, and when I cautiously push it open, I wonder what I expected to see. What I did not expect to see is three naked young people having sex on my bed. I recognize the blond girl, Logan’s f*ck buddy, and I can only assume that the two boys, one tall and lean, one darker and stockier, are Pop Walsh’s farm helpers. They have the girl between them on all fours, one leisurely humping her from behind, one holding her bobbing head around his cock. It is a very peaceful, relaxed scene, and shocked as I am, I don’t think I will start shouting quite yet.

I take a few steps further and peep into the living-room. They have candles burning in here, and there is a fragrance of orange in the air. On several blankets, draped over the sofa cushions that have been pushed together on the floor, Jules Walsh lies naked on her stomach, being massaged by Logan Williams. He is wearing boxers and a t-shirt, and as I watch, struggling to take in this invasion of my private space, I try to decide whether he is also masturbating her. Not yet, or not now, seems to be the answer to this one.

“Okay, people, end of party.” I switch on the ceiling light, and Jules screams before bursting into tears.

“Get dressed, Jules, and stop blubbering!”

I walk back to the bedroom and throw out the Polish trio; the girl giggles, but the two boys seem to be stoned out of their heads. Without resistance or great hurry they pull on their clothes and disappear into the darkness.

“The first thing you’ll do is strip my bed and put the sheets into the washing machine.”

“Hey, man, don’t—”

“Don’t what, Logan?” I snap at him, showing him how very little amused I am. “Don’t ‘Hey, man’ me, for a start! You call me ‘Dr. Lieberman, ma’am,’ or I’ll call the police. Get on it!”

He shrugs and does as he is told. Meanwhile I lean in the doorframe and watch Jules, still sobbing, blow out the candles and rearrange the sofa cushions.

“Do you want me to put the red dress in with the sheets?” Logan calls from the bathroom. He sticks his head out through the door. “Only because there’s also a lot of cunt juice on that. Dr. Lieberman, ma’am.”

And this is where the absurdity of the situation reaches the critical degree and I can’t keep my face straight any more.

“You really are a little shit, Logan Williams!”

At first he is not sure how he is to take this apparent change of atmosphere, then he steps out of the bathroom into the hall.

“Actually, no, ma’am, I’m not. If I was, I’d have allowed Pavel, Karol, and Elka to clean out the place long before now. I’d also have deflowered that young lady there—” He nods his head to indicate Jules in the living-room.

“You mean to tell me you haven’t?” I ask with awful irony.

“Jules?” he calls. “Have I f*cked you?”

“No!” She appears from the kitchen, too upset now for tears. “He hasn’t!”

“Yeah, because you’re saving yourself for Mr. Right. Anyway, I thought you told me you wanted out of this place. Juvenile delinquents don’t go anywhere except jail.”

“She’s fifteen!” Logan says, disparagingly. “She’s a black girl on a white man’s farm! She has no idea who or what she is or wants to be!”

“I’m sixteen!”

“Well, I’ll tell you what she is: no match for persuasive, personable scum like you!”

He gives a sardonic laugh and shakes his head about my ignorance.

“True. Had I wanted to f*ck her. But guess what: I didn’t! And you know why not? Two reasons! One, I have no mind to be sent down for statutory rape! She’s fifteen! Sorry, sixteen—whatever. I can do sums! And two, my kid sister went down that road. She’s eighteen now, and she’s already chalked up one abortion, one gang rape, and one bout of STD. You may think I’m scum, but I’m scum with principles!”

I look around me. “Yeah, you make Mahatma Gandhi look like a pimp!”

He scratches his cheek, grins, and shrugs.

“Jules, is he telling the truth?” I demand of her.

“About what?” she asks cautiously.

“What do you think? Did you have sex with him?”

“No! Not…really.”

I groan, more impatient with her cageyness than with his chuzpah.

Logan comes clean. “Somewhere between second and third base. Dr. Lieberman, ma’am.”

“I’m still waiting to hear that from you, Jules.”

She stares at me, in equal parts frightened and appalled.

“The thing is this, Jules, if I have any reason to suspect that Logan’s—or any other boy’s—penis or finger beyond the first knuckle has been inside you, I’m going to drag your sly, secretive little butt to the gynecologist before you can say contraception! Have I made myself clear?”

“Jesus, you are a ballbuster,” Logan says, half grinning, half annoyed. “Leave the kid alone!”

Jules has started crying again, and I give up.

“So whose idea was it to break into my house? You did that before, a few times, didn’t you?”

He shrugs again.

“Logan, how can I take you seriously if you behave like a fifteen-year-old, too?”

“I have a key! It was my idea!” Jules speaks up. “And I was sixteen last Sunday!”

“Well, at last you’re standing by your man! Simple rule, Jules: you don’t make out, let alone have sex, with a boy you don’t really, really like! And if you really, really like someone, you help them when they’re in trouble!”

This shames her, and I’m not sorry.

“Did you or the others take anything? Apart from my eggs and my wine?”

“We replaced the eggs! We were cold and hungry!”

I remember Giles in his kitchen, in t-shirt and jogging pants, making vegetable frittata for me.

“No, we didn’t,” Logan says earnestly. “Unless the others took something when I wasn’t looking, but I don’t think so. I told them I’d beat the shit out if them if they did. Are you missing any valuables?”

“I’ll let you know. Now go away. Oh, and, Jules…” I hold out my hand, and she stares at it.

“Give her the key,” Logan orders her, and she digs her hand into her coat pocket and extracts a single key on a length of brown string.

“What will you tell my mom?” She wells up again, and I can’t decide whether I prefer her tearful or petulant.

“I don’t know yet, Jules. You’ll just have to wait and see. That goes for you, too, Logan. I guess I should be all pedagogical about this and make a deal with you, like, I won’t tell anyone if you write me nothing but A essays for the rest of your time at Ardrossan. But I really don’t know whether I want to be so magnanimous.”

“And I don’t know whether I’d take the deal.”

“Then we both have something to think about, don’t we?”





“It’s me.”

There is a short pause in the line. “So it is.”

“Giles, do you think I could come back tonight, with my essays, a change of clothes, and my PJs?”

He gives one of his spurts of laughter. “You won’t need PJs.”

While I’m waiting for the washing to be done, I wander around the cottage, checking it for theft or damage. It is a relief, in a way, to know that I wasn’t imagining the subtle changes I noticed around the house recently, and I lived in shared housing for too long to be very deeply upset about the idea of people using my stuff in the kitchen, or even sleeping in my bed. Still, all that is very different from a group of young people effectively breaking into my home to have sex parties there.

I am worried that I am foisting myself on Giles and he is too polite to say so, and when I knock on his door, a rucksack on my back and a sack of groceries in my hand, I fully expect a lukewarm welcome. His eyes are very bright and very alert, and he is very polite indeed, taking the groceries off me and assuring me that I shouldn’t have.

“Are you all right?” he asks when I’ve peeled myself out of my coat and boots.

“Yes, I am, but you won’t bel—”

The rest is stifled by a big, thorough kiss, after which he literally flings me over his shoulder and carries me off into the bedroom. I didn’t think I would be in the mood for sex, after that little intermezzo at my cottage, but the moment I see his face and feel his body against mine, I decide I am not going to allow a anyone to spoil him for me.

“I missed you,” he whispers into my hair.

“Oh, my sweet.” I hug him more tightly and raise my hips against his. “Then you’d better take better aim, hadn’t you?”

This makes him laugh so hard that he can’t take aim at all for a few minutes. It is almost ten o’clock by the time the quiche is in the oven and Giles has drawn the cork of a bottle of Chardonnay.

“You seem very sporting about it,” he remarks, eyebrows raised, when I have described my domestic situation. “Are you taking this too lightly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But they’re young, and after all…it’s just sex.”

“I have to say I have little sympathy left for Logan Williams,” he says.

I sip my wine. “Hmm.”

“You’re going to let him off, aren’t you?”

I gaze at him across his little kitchen table. “It’s so lovely to touch someone you like. I guess I’ll have to talk to Karen. She was odd when I tried to broach the subject before. Evasive. I imagine she’s tired of hearing complaints about her daughter.”

“If you shield the girl, she’ll only get into more trouble.”

“What would you do? Lock her up?”

“She’ll be knocked up by next Christmas.”

“Yeah, maybe. Talking of which, what are we going to do about Selena?”

He pulls a face at me over the rim of his wineglass.

“You mean, what are you going to do about Selena?”

“Oh, Giles! She needs help!”

“‘If she’s caught the Nicholas, it’ll cost her a thousand pound ere she be cured,’” he quips.

“You don’t like her because she has fallen for Hornberger! I don’t much like her either, but I’m not just frightened for her but also of her. I think she’s a liability, Giles. And she won’t confide in anyone unless she is confronted.”

“Are you worried she’ll start leaving gunge on your office door, too?”

“Oh! I haven’t told you!” I reach across the table to touch his hand, which makes him smile, catch it, and link his fingers with mine. “It wasn’t Corvin! It can’t have been, because he’s back and almost had a heart attack when he tried to get into his office and couldn’t because the lock had been changed. He says he spent the last two months with his daughter in Vermont.”

Giles seems suitably impressed with this news and more interested than in Selena O’Neal’s plight. “So Dancey was right? It was that spoiled little rich girl?”

“Madeline Harrison? I don’t know. Yes, it must have been. That college of yours is full of psychologically unstable, violent young women—why is that, Giles?”

He grins. “Your guess is as good as mine. Well, that’s a lot of words you’re going to have with quite a lot of people, isn’t it?”

I drop my head between my hands and groan. “I want the holidays to go on forever.”

On his shelf I find a large picture book about British landscape and literature, and we spend a happy two hours leafing through it, comparing favorites and telling each other anecdotes about the places we visited.

“…and there’s a pub in the village that sells the most fantastic homemade pasties, just heaven after a long hike. Remember that for when you’re next there.”

I look at his profile, so close to mine on the sofa.

“Giles.”

“Hmm?”

“Tell me again why we wouldn’t work.”

“Because I’m twelve years older than you.” He sighs, leans back and continues to enumerate his mental list. “Because I can’t father any children. Because your situation in the department is vulnerable and will remain so for years to come. Because I’m sure that your parents would have fifty fits if you spent your fertile thirties with a goy—an infertile one at that! Shall I go on?”

“When did you last have your…baubles…tested?”

“My baubles?” He laughs, but it’s partly to cover his embarrassment. “Never as such. I was told at the time that given the extent of the inflammation, it was very likely that my fertility had been, uh, adversely affected. At some point Mandy and I stopped using contraception to see whether she would get pregnant, but she didn’t. So I have to assume that my…baubles…are empty.”

“Well, that’s a bit lame! You should get tested! I’d be willing to assist you with the necessary, um, preparations.”

He stares at me, defensive and outraged at the same time.

“Listen, stop deluding yourself! All my little swimmers are dead! If there are any little swimmers; I’ve never really made it my business to enquire into the—”

“Oh, I’m not much bothered, myself,” I say nonchalantly. “I’m just thinking of the next woman you have sex with. Unlike me, she may actually know that she does want children, so it would be useful to know the exact facts, wouldn’t it?”

My ingenuous little monologue upsets him so much that he jumps up, stalks over into the kitchen, and starts sorting the dirty dishes into the washer.

“End of conversation,” he mutters when I follow him. “You’re doing neither me nor yourself a favor by pretending that you do not want children! You’re in your first year on tenure track. You’re thirty years old!”

“Fair point. The sense I have at the moment that I don’t necessarily need a child to be happy may change. Or it may not.”

He stares at me, a dirty plate in one hand, a chopping knife in the other.

“Don’t start, Anna! It’s no good! Even if you weren’t on tenure track, it would be grossly selfish of me to—”

“You married, knowing yourself infertile!” I protest, by now seriously hurt. “I hear what you’re saying, but don’t pretend you’re being all noble and unselfish!”

“Yes, and look at what a resounding success my marriage was!”

“What if a woman wants you more than she wants a child?” I shout, pushed over the edge.

“She may think that for a while, maybe, if the sex is good enough.”

“Cleveland—you’re a bastard!”

It hurts to be reminded of the limits of our little affair, but the hurt disperses the haze of vague hopes and fantasies in my mind. That evening we don’t make love again, but there is no question of either of us sleeping on the sofa. I’m sad, but after all, I knew that this would make me sad, so I have no one to blame but myself. I wake in the middle of the night, in the pitch-black bedroom, and I miss him. I feel for his thigh, for the waistband of his pajama pants, for the warm, fragrant skin of his groin. His warm, half-erect cock. More tenderly than ever I cradle his soft, heavy balls in my hand and kiss them softly, so gently.

His fingers close around my naked arm.

“Anna…” His voice his faint and gravelly, but I don’t know what he means, so I go on caressing his flesh because that is all I can do to show him what I feel for him.

“You led them…in the night by a pillar of fire…to give them light in the way wherein they should go.” I smile and clasp his pillar of fire in my hand.

His fingers are kneading my arm, and I can hear him breathe in ragged, uneven gasps. I hunch up my knees and pull off my panties, then his shirt that I’ve been wearing as a pajama top. My face fits snugly into the hollow of his throat as I stretch out on top of him.

“You multiplied their children as the stars of heaven,” I whisper, “and you brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess.”

With my knees I spread his legs so that my thighs are cradled between his. When I slide him into me, he moans like a man in a dream. I clasp his hands in mine and crook his arms so that his palms face up, like a sleeping child’s.

“So the children went in and —” I ride him slowly, my elbows on either side of him, keeping him immobile “— and possessed the land, and…thou subduedst before them the inhabitants of the land and gavest them…into their hands…that they…”

My mouth finds his throat, finds it stretched to a long, smooth column of skin and muscle as he arches himself against me, gasping for breath in long, deep gulps.

“…that they might do with them…as they would…”

He thrusts himself into me, shuddering, his lean, solid male body underneath me, and I feel his strength and my power over it.

“My sweet,” I murmur against his throat, my cheek pressed against his heaving chest. “My poor, sweet, lovely boy.”





In the morning, the noise of the shower wakes me. Without even going into the kitchen to switch on the kettle, I boot up the PC and search the online phone directory.

“Hey.” He comes to look over my shoulder, toweling his head.

“Hey.”

I glance up, check whether the night’s interlude had any lasting effects. Giles still looks like a boy, young and disheveled, with a quiet, slightly bashful smile on his face. I hold out my hand for his and draw it to my lips.

“Sweetie, I’m afraid I’m going to pick a fight with you.”

He laughs, then sees that I am in earnest. “What about?”

“About your reputation.”





“So, where to?” he asks when he has steered the Volvo onto the main road.

“Southside, Oakland Park.”

I am holding the file on my knees, but I am not tempted to look at it again.

Bartholomew Road is a residential area bordering on a business park; the houses are garishly decorated with lights and stars and reindeer, and there are several Santa Clauses scaling the rooftops.

“Number twelve sixty-seven. Here.” I unclick my seat belt and open the door.

“Wait!” He grabs my elbow. “You will regret this!”

“I hope I will never regret having done the right thing. Will you regret it?”

He looks at me, looks me over. Sighs.

“Not for myself, no, but I may well regret not having stood up to you!”

For half a minute or so I think there is nobody home, or the people who are home won’t open the door for us. Then there is the sound of a chain being latched, and the door opens a crack.

“Mrs. Randall? Louise Randall?”

She is a tall woman, quite big now, with a mass of silvery-dark hair done up into a loose chignon.

“What do you want? Are you collecting for something?”

“No, no, I’m…I’m Anna Lieberman, and this is Giles Cleveland. We are English professors at Ardrossan University.”

This produces the reaction I had feared. The door is slammed shut, and her voice, though muffled, is angry.

“Go away! Are you reporters? I have nothing to say to you!”

“Mrs. Randall!” I put my mouth close to the door. “Louise! I promise you we are not reporters! I just want to give you something, and you can decide what to do with it!”

Silence.

“Listen, Louise, I’m not going to stand out here shouting for all your neighbors to hear. Am I right in assuming that when you were young you went by Mary-Lou? And that your maiden name is Tandy? Just tell me whether I’m right!”

Silence.

The door opens again, but the chain is still in place.

“Keep your voice down,” she says, much calmer now. “I’m not going to ask you in. I have guests, and they’re asleep. As for that fine gentleman, I don’t want to talk about him. There’s no point!”

“I don’t know about that, but it isn’t for me to decide, or for anyone, except you. This—” I hand her the file “—is yours. I—we—came by it by accident, and we feel that you should have it. Take it to the police, or burn it—it’s up to you.”

She stares at the plastic folder in her hand, dumb with emotion.

“This comes thirty years too late.”

“I know. But if we keep it, we’re protecting him, and if we hand it over to the police, we are interfering in your life in a way that I don’t want to be responsible for.”

She nods, mechanically, and undoes the chain.

“The past is never just that, is it?” she says.

“Past, you mean? No, I guess it isn’t. Or just.”

At this she smiles wanly.

“No, it isn’t. Well, they do say that choice is a burden.” She weighs the slim folder in her hand. “Not very heavy, is it?”

I smile back, relieved that she is recovering her sense of humor. Even if it is of the gallows variety.

“If you wanted to get in touch with us at all, don’t hesitate, via email or the phone.” Giles digs up his wallet out of his back pocket and pulls out his card. “Anna will shout at me for having said this, but I think you should go to the police and make sure that his ass ends up in jail.”

“Giles!”

“That’s all right,” Louise assures me. “I won’t rush into anything, and I sure won’t be guided by another white male professor’s opinion. No offense, sir.”

Giles smiles at her, and I can see that even on Louise Randall in her present plight it has the usual effect.

“All the best, Louise. I don’t know whether I can say Merry Christmas, but—Merry Christmas!”





A week after I should have flown home, Giles takes me to the airport and kisses me goodbye at the gate. We both know it is reckless to be seen like this in public, but as far as I’m concerned, the public can go boil its head.

“Be good,” he murmurs into my ear, and I can only nod. “When will you be back?”

“On the twelfth.” I did not tell him that I’ll be flying in from Heathrow. I have not told him about London, neither the job nor the interview. I don’t know why not, maybe because we didn’t talk about the time after the holidays at all. Or maybe because I don’t know what I think myself. Giles will be flying to London the day after tomorrow to spend Christmas with friends and be back two days before me. We might bump into each other on Trafalgar Square, theoretically. It will be very strange to know that he’s in London when I am, but—no. I haven’t told him.