The Englishman

chapter 40

GILES MUST HAVE CARRIED ME over into the bedroom. At least that is where I wake up, and I doubt I would have been able to walk there. My wrist watch on the bedside table says half past seven, but it takes me an age to figure out whether it is morning or evening and whether I’m on Greenwich Mean Time or Eastern Standard Time.

I am alone in my bed, but like a lover in a movie, he has left a note.


Gone to pick up the dogs. Thank you for last night. G.


It takes me another six hours to get up, partly because I feel as if I had swum across the Atlantic instead of flown across, partly because I don’t want to wake up and think about the biggest mess I have ever got myself into. So much do I not want to think about being Giles’s farewell fling before he leaves for University College, London, that all other chores seem attractive.

Karen answers the phone, and I ask her to come over as soon as is convenient. My voice must have sounded ominous, because ten minutes later she knocks on the door.

“Sorry to make you trudge through the slush, Karen, but I suspect you may not want witnesses.”

I prepared myself for a confrontation, but she denies nothing and grows very quiet.

“I’m sorry, Anna.” She plays with the handle of her teacup, and I notice how tired she looks. Christmas is never a relaxing time for mothers.

“Is there more?” I say after a pause. “I had hoped you’d be sorry, but—is that all?”

“You took the key off her? That’s good. Hold onto it, hide it somewhere in the shack, but hide it well.”

“Karen!”

She sighs and hides her eyes behind her hand for a moment.

“Why do you think the previous tenants left?” She waits for me to catch on. “When they found out, they went straight to Howard. I don’t blame them! You will, too, and I don’t blame you, either! But I can’t stop her. I have no control over her.” Karen’s lips tremble, but she won’t cry in front of me. “You can’t imagine the row we had over it. But she can’t resist the pickers. They make her feel important and…grown up, I guess.”

“But, Karen, at this rate she’ll end up pregnant before she’s finished school! You don’t want her to end up—”

“Like me?” she says bitterly. “It seems inevitable. I’ll get her on the pill, now that she’s sixteen. I don’t know what else to do.”

Her defeatist attitude makes me angry, but I have no solution ready, and the longer I reflect on her situation, the more I see how complicated it is.

“There must be something you can do!” I finally say, lamely.

“Take her and move out?” Karen’s smile is twisted with suppressed tears.

A day later and twelve weeks early, Howard Walsh III is delivered by emergency caesarean section. Grandma Shirley, whom I meet on my way to the car, is unable to give me any details beyond the fact that he is expected to live and that he weighed eight hundred sixty-five grams at birth. Karen is also being kept in for observation, and she—Shirley—feels it would probably be too much for Karen if they all went to visit her all the time.

“She’ll want some peace and quiet now. We’ll see her when she gets back home.”





The only silver lining on all these black clouds is that my course evaluations were not as disastrous as I had feared. The graduate students were very sweet and generous, and the remaining undergraduates in my Comedy class also liked me. Ma Mayfield informs me in an email that the complaints about me have been shelved for the time being, but I should prepare myself for spot checks of my teaching next semester. Fair enough. English Lit doesn’t get more hardcore than Paradise Lost, and whatever groans and grumbles it will provoke, they won’t be about sex. Maybe I have had enough of sex for the time being.

On Saturday afternoon the phone rings, but I surprise myself by not answering. I’m busy. I’m prepping my semester, sorting out clothes, cleaning the cottage. Leave me be. I’m in a mood. Resentful. Irritable. Isn’t it downright childish, this desire to give yourself up to another, to relinquish all agency and responsibility and just let your body take over? Honestly, I think that is what this whole sex thing is all about. Hormones. Like a computer with data overload, my body has shut down. Too much stimulation, too much sex. Silly. We all have jobs to do, don’t we?

I only realize how angry I am when I arrive at the Observatory on the first Monday of the spring semester and the whole place is in an uproar because Nick Hornberger has been arrested for sexually assaulting a fellow student thirty years ago.

“Do you know what really pisses me off?” I snap at Steve Howell, whose morning seems to be spent loitering on the fourth-floor corridor to greet every new arrival with the news. “That this guy is absorbing so much of our time and attention! I’m here to teach literature, not to gossip about dirty old men!”

“Anna, I don’t think—”

“For heaven’s sake, Steve, would you scan the supermarket tabloids for stories like this? No, you wouldn’t! I bet you feel superior to the housewives who buy them, don’t you? Well, be superior, then!”

He stares at me, a twisted smile on his face, half incredulous that I said what he heard me say. Poor Steve. But I really can’t stand him.

So Louise Randall, née Mary-Lou Tandy, decided after all that vengeance may be the Lord’s, but justice can at least try to kick Nicholas Hornberger, née Eagleson, in the balls. My first instinct is to phone Giles to talk this development of events over with him, but—no. I’m here to work.

The noises coming from Andrew Corvin’s office convince me, if there was any doubt, that he must have been away for most of the winter semester, because the walls are so thin that I hear him clomping around, pushing furniture from one corner of the cramped room to the other, and occasionally even talking to himself. The noise is less eerie than the silence that I interpreted as evidence of vigilante malignancy, but after a while it becomes very distracting. Might as well have the next word.

When I knock, all activity in the room comes to a halt.

“Sir? Professor Corvin? It’s Anna Lieberman. Your next door neighbor? May I have a quick word with you, sir?”

There is more silence, and then a cough, which I decide to interpret as a permission to open the door and peek in.

“Get out! You have no right! No one has the right to—”

Quickly I beat my retreat, more stumped than ever by the choleric fossil ensconced next door. Literally. I couldn’t see much, but he seems to have built himself a small fortress out of boxes and piles of books, with a corner of an air mattress and a sleeping bag visible behind it. A kettle, mugs and plate on a stack of old journals, and a row of instant soups.

“Hi, Tessa! All set for the next semester?” I stick my head into Tessa’s office, where she and her colleague Mel are quietly chatting. “Listen, I just tried to speak to Corvin, but…nothin’ doin’. Does he sleep in his office now?”

They look at each other and shrug. “Like, overnight, you mean?”

“Yes, he seems to have a sleeping bag in there and a kettle and cup noodles.”

Mel whistles and makes a circling movement with her finger next to her temple. “Not that I haven’t pulled the odd all-nighter in here,” she admits. “But I’m not Methuselah.”

“Hmm. And Selena? Have you seen her today?”

This is a far more loaded question, and I get a sense that this had been the subject of their conversation.

“Why?” Mel asks.

“Why? As in, ‘Sooner or later I may or may not answer your question’?”

Tessa hastily jumps in. “No, we haven’t. But we both enrolled in your class on Paradise Lost, so she should be there tomorrow, if you want to speak to her.”

“I do want to speak to her. If you see her, please ask her to come and see me. It’s urgent.”





The little impromptu birthday celebration for Ma Mayfield is embedded in the semester opening finger-food-and-wine-with-classical-music, and I gather from Yvonne that the idea is simply to claim everyone’s attention at some point, sing “Happy Birthday” and hand over our present. Dean Ortega was informed of this plan and indicated that she would also say a few words, but on the whole the occasion is to be kept low-key and informal.

“No one will want to make a song and dance about anything today, what with…the news,” Yvonne says, a little piqued, on our way across to Rossan House.

“Did Louise speak to you?”

“She did.”

“About the file?”

“She didn’t catch your name, but she had Giles Cleveland’s card, and—well, you’re not all that difficult to describe, Anna.”

“Giles found the file among the jumble in my office. He had heard of the incident, but he didn’t know the file was in the folder till I told him that Nick was called Eagleson before he married. I couldn’t tell you, Yvonne, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. All for the best, probably. You felt you had to be loyal to Giles.”

“Of course, and I am, but why…what’s your point, Yvonne?” I stutter.

Now I get a long, significant stare over the blue rim of her eyeglasses.

“Well, if there’s no point to be gotten, maybe there’s no point to be made,” she says with a shrug. “After all, it’s none of my business what you and he were doing driving round Shaftsboro together at Christmas, when you told you me you were flying home.”

“Look, I can—” But I can’t explain.

Yvonne, seeing my mortification, relents and quickly touches my arm.

“Don’t worry about me. But take care, honey.”

To begin my second semester at Ardrossan with a clean(ish) slate, I follow Elizabeth Mayfield to her office after the lunchtime gathering and ask her for ten minutes of her time. She was more touched by the crystal bottle than she cared to show, and I apologize for what I am about to tell her.

“It can’t be worse than having a colleague arrested for rape, can it? Go on.”

So once again I relate my version of Selena’s story, omitting only the razor blade with pubic hair in it and the scene involving Giles, Hornberger, myself, and awkwardly placed pantyhose.

“There is a great deal of hearsay and surmise in all this, Anna.”

“I know. That is why I didn’t come to see you sooner. And I want to make clear that I am not reporting anyone. Technically, she has committed acts of vandalism, but—”

“Technically?”

“No, I know, but—well, honestly, I’m not in the least interested in a few walls and windows. She did worse damage to herself, and she almost succeeded in hiding it. I’m not surprised that her…misery, distress, whatever you want to call it, manifested itself as anorexia. Anorexia is not for wimps! She is headstrong and calculating, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t in need of help. Most particularly if it turns out that she really is pregnant with Hornberger’s child and he is going to prison!”

Elizabeth sits behind her desk, her hands folded on the desktop, not visibly impressed by my vehemence.

“On days like these, I hate my job,” she says.

This was a word I should have had earlier. As I hurry across Library Square in a cold, gray drizzle, I feel as if a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders. Strange. I should be in a panic, shouldn’t I? Nick Hornberger now definitely knows that Giles didn’t stick to his part of the bargain, which was to conceal the file. But I don’t believe for a minute that he is going to expose Giles and me.

Expose. For what? F*cking in the old observatory. Small fry.





When the phone rings that evening, I pick up. It’s Tim.

“Hey, Professor Blundell. Have you come out of your closet yet? You’ve been tenured for over a week!”

Tim is not amused. “Look in your inbox.”

“What? Tim, I—”

“Put the phone down and look at your emails. And don’t panic. Call me, or better still, call him. I’m trying to get hold of Gill Miller.”

“Who is Gill Miller?”

“The college’s computing officer.” He slams the phone down and I run upstairs, my heart beating high in my throat. What? What?

Damn dial-up! Who has dial-up Internet access these days?

An email from Nick Hornberger to the English department mailing list, subject: “An Englishman in New York.” The picture loads painfully slowly, but I know what it is before I’ve seen more than half an inch.

You couldn’t tell, really, who it is, if there was more than one female on the Observatory faculty who wears Mountie boots.

After staring at it for what seems like hours, I switch off the modem, go downstairs again, pull out the Shaftsboro phone book from under a pile of books on the living room table, and pick up the phone.

How can Hornberger send emails if he is in custody?

Funny, how your mind, when you stumble and fall, fastens on one tiny detail.

And what if I’m wrong? Doesn’t matter, now.

“Mr. O’Neal? This is Anna Lieberman. I am one of Selena’s professors, and I was—yes, that’s right, I’m the one who lives in Howard Walsh’s cabin. Mr. O’Neal, I was wondering whether Selena is at home. It’s rather important.”

But Selena is still at the college.

Ah, well. Nothing else to do, have I?

It is still raining in a thin, cold spray, cold enough to see one’s breath. Several windows are lit on the fourth floor; one of them may be Selena’s, or it could be Tessa’s. The great hall is still well-lit, but there is hardly anyone around. I nod a greeting at the security guard playing with his phone.

Steve Howell’s office door is closed, but dim light and soft jazz music are trickling into the hallway through the cracks where the door doesn’t shut properly. Light, too, under Selena’s door.

I don’t even knock. She jumps in her chair and gives a little yelp, but I quickly close the door behind me. A hard-working graduate student at her desk past eight o’clock on the first day of the semester. Some library books on her desk. I pick one up.

“The Devil in Renaissance Drama. Do you know, I think if Satan was really an aging university professor who gets off on deflowering Christian virgins, the world wouldn’t be in the state that it’s in.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What do you want?” she manages to say, and the steely defensiveness is never far from her surface.

“No, Selena. What do you want?” I sit down in Natalie’s chair.

The question throws her, and she falters.

“Hmm? What did you hope to achieve, for instance, by sending round that photo of Giles Cleveland and me? What do you hope to achieve,” I say, raising my voice above her protest, “by making yourself the tool of such a man? He isn’t even fascinatingly evil! He’s just…middle-aged and panicking!”

“You and Cleveland dumped him in the shit!” she flings at me, goaded into a reaction. “Cleveland said he’d keep the file!”

“No, Selena, Nick dumped himself in the shit when he forced himself on that student! The only wrong in this case is the one that he committed! The only injustice is that he wasn’t called to account for it at the time!”

“I don’t want to talk to you.” Her chin trembles, and I remind myself that this screwed-up young woman will be a mother in a few months’ time.

“I can well believe that. I tried to help you, and you tried to shame me in front of all my colleagues.” I lean forward on my elbows, chin in hand. “Luckily I am not ashamed of loving Giles Cleveland, and although I’d much rather make love to him in private, I am fair enough to admit that if I make love to him in public places, I risk public attention.”

Now she is staring at me with a mixture of disbelief and fascination.

“I’m not ashamed of loving Nick, either!” she announces, like a creed.

“Selena, your bad luck was to be seduced by a man with a lot of experience and no scruples. He broke through your defenses, which was necessary and liberating, but it’s still only sex. You want to love a better man, don’t you?”

“I do love him!” She jumps up, and I sense that this is the one thing that makes her feel on firm ground.

“I know you do. Big feelings, big words. God’s words.”

Her rigid posture relaxes a little. “You—you know about the—” She bites her lip.

“The graffiti? Yes. I’m sorry, Selena.”

“And will you tell?”

“That’s hardly your most pressing problem!”

“What?”

“Your belly is beginning to show,” I inform her matter-of-factly.

Now she is scared. She takes a step back and bumps against the wall, her arms crossed protectively in front of her.

“It isn’t! How do you know about that? How do you know that?” Her cheeks are bright red.

“I talked to Karen Walsh about you. You stole her pregnancy tests.”

“Did she tell my mother?”

“Don’t you think that if she had, you’d know?”

“Anyway, it’s too late for an abortion!”

“Selena, for heaven’s sake!” I explode. “How old are you? If you want to have this child, have this child! Move out of your parents’ house. Break up with them, if need be. Bring the child up on welfare. But stop kidding yourself that you love a man who has f*cked and ditched more students than you or I have teeth in our mouths!”

Now she is just staring at me, apparently speechless with emotion, her hands still shielding her belly.

“Tell me, Selena, does Natalie know about you and Nick? Does she know about the baby? Is that—God, I’m so slow! Is that why she reported Nick? To get revenge?”

Selena nods, her cheeks flaming. I think she is going to burst into tears, and I almost hope she will, to release her pent-up feelings.

“But that means that Nick knows about the baby, too. What does he—”

“He doesn’t!” she insists hotly. “At least…I don’t know. I didn’t tell him.”

“You didn’t—oh, Selena. Why do you torture yourself like this? Are you worried he’ll ditch you if he finds out you’re having his baby? Selena! How will you get out of this mess? You need help.”

“I don’t need help!”

“That’s right. You’re managing brilliantly on your own.”

“I hate you! I hate you!”

For a crazy moment I think she is going to attack me, but she grabs the bunch of keys on her desk and runs out of the room, slamming the door. I run after her, and I can just see her disappear up the spiral staircase into the dome. Steve opens his door.

“What’s all the—oh. Hey.”

We look at each other, and I can tell by his twisted grin that he has seen the photo.

“Embarrassed?” I ask as I walk past him toward the staircase. “Join the club.”

“I’m not the one with cum on my skirt,” he mutters. “Or with pickled herring on my office door.”

His provocation would be like water off a duck’s back, but something in his manner makes me stop and turn back.

“What do you know about the herring, Steve?”

“What don’t I know about the herring?”

“You? You did that?” I know I look stupid, but I am beyond caring about looking stupid.

“No, I didn’t.” He hesitates. “I didn’t. But then you didn’t tell me that I behave like a territorial tomcat.”

Of course. How could I have been so slow? I always knew it wasn’t Madeline Harrison.

“Well, you can tell Dolph that he is the least of my problems. And congratulations for showing so unambiguously that he didn’t deserve the job he didn’t get.”

The security guard in the great hall is now on the phone. I indicate that I want to talk to him, and he covers the mouthpiece with his fingers and looks up.

“There’s a student on the fourth floor, Selena O’Neal, who has locked herself into the dome. She has shown self-harming behavior before and,” I add maliciously, although I don’t believe this for a second, “she may be suicidal. If I were you, I’d hurry up and get her out of there.”

He stares at me as I walk off. “Hey! Hey, you can’t just—”

“You rather than me, baby!”

Outside in the dark parking lot, the cool drizzle on my face feels wonderful, and I stand with my eyes closed for a long minute before I get into my car.

Now what?

Talk to Giles, I guess.

Poor Giles.

I’m about to turn the ignition key when the passenger door opens and a man flops into the seat.

“For f*ck’s sake!” I yell at him.

“Yeah, I know.”

My heart is pounding in my chest, but I am so ridiculously relieved to have him near me, and evidently in a state of wry composure, that I start giggling. And then I’m crying again.

“Sweetheart,” he says, drawing me against himself across the barrier of the emergency brake. “You really have to stop this, or I’ll begin to take it personally, this crying.”

“It is personal!” I sniffle onto the waterproof shoulder of his Barbour. “I d-don’t want him to humiliate you again! In f-front of everybody! I’m so sorry, Giles! I’m sorry I-I’m so s-sorry I didn’t stop you!”

“Didn’t stop me doing what?”

“F-F*cking m-me!” I cried so much during the past few weeks, but it was nowhere near enough.

“I didn’t f*ck you, Anna. I made love to you.”

“Oh!” I wail. “Don’t be sorry you did, Giles!”

He pulls me closer, laughing quietly.

“Why would I be sorry? And why would I be humiliated? Because now they all know that the sexiest, most beautiful woman in the whole college likes me to make love to her? That’s not how humiliation works among men, Anna! It’s you I’m worried about.”

“You don’t m-mean that!”

“Which bit?” He pushes me away a little and scans my face. “Well, Kay Chang is a very beautiful woman, too, perhaps I was too quick with the superlative. And there’s an assistant professor over in the art history department, she’s a right little stunner, and—”

“Don’t be like that,” I whisper and pull his head down for a kiss.

“Do you remember?” He cups my face in his hands and kisses the corner of my mouth.

“Oh, yes…so silly of you not to come in when I invited you. We lost weeks, because of that, Giles, and we have so little time anyway!”

He hears me well up again and draws me into a bear hug. “I know, love. But I’m not sorry that we started this, and I would hate to think that you are. Are you?”

I don’t trust myself to speak, so I shake my head.

“Do you regret giving Louise Randall the file?”

“No! I hate you for leaving me!”

“Anna—”

“Shut up!” I don’t know where this comes from, but now that I have blurted it out, I can’t stop. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why do you never tell me things?”

“Anna, I’m in love with you.”

“That makes it worse!”

He grins, ruefully. “Probably.”

“So why leave me?”

“Don’t I have to?” he says, looking into my eyes. “How can I start an affair with a colleague on tenure track unless I know I’ll be gone before any damage is done?”

“Oh, ha-bloody-ha!” I jeer. “Damage? Like what? A compromising photo? Like my broken heart?”

“It won’t break your heart.” He is sitting back in his seat, staring out the windshield.

“Not it! You! Of course you’re breaking my heart! You’ve been breaking my heart ever since I first saw you, you arrogant English git!”

“Don’t say that, Anna.”

“So you want I should f*ck you but not love you?”

He smiles at my syntax.

“I don’t expect you to love me.”

“You mean you don’t want me to love you! Because that would be so inconvenient, wouldn’t it? It would complicate our nice, easy, fluffy little affair!”

Giles shakes his head. “No. You’re saying things you know are not true.”

“And to think that I have been so ashamed of chickening out and hurting you. And all the while you were just having a farewell f*ck. Wow, Giles. That’s…pretty shitty behavior.”

“What the hell did you expect? You knew this…we…have no future! You knew this would hurt in the end!”

“Yes, I knew it would hurt, but I didn’t know how it would end, or when! But you did! Why didn’t you tell me? ‘By the way, Anna, I’m quitting, I have a new job in London. If we’re discreet, we can get away with a little affair.’ What’s so difficult about saying that?”

His jaw locks, but he has nothing to say for himself.

“You accused Amanda—sorry, but this seems relevant! You accuse Amanda of refusing to talk about how your marriage was going down the drain. Seems to me that it takes two to be in denial!”

He looks down at his knees and shrugs. There is an insecure sixteen-year-old in Giles Cleveland, and I know he will not stand up to me. A praying mantis would now go for his jugular.

“When were you going to tell me?” I ask, more calmly.

“When I could bear it.”

“When you could bear it. Well, thanks, Giles. Thanks very much for your kind concern for my feelings!”

“I wasn’t even sure whether I would go,” he says, asserting himself. “You make it sound very straightforward, but it wasn’t. They wanted me to sign the contract in October, but I said I needed to talk to Paul French first. But after that…after Notre Dame—” He glances over at me and shrugs again.

“So you’ve known for two months!”

“No, no. I held off. I couldn’t believe you’d come to me…like that, and then pretend nothing had happened.” An ironic snort is comment enough, and I’m glad he is leaving it at that. “I signed after Nick caught us together in the observatory.”

I need a minute to digest this, and to control the tears pricking behind my eyelids.

“You thought about staying here?” There are tears in my voice, too.

“I was about to risk the withdrawal of the offer, yes. Caught between a rock and a hard place.” He grins but thinks better of spelling out the innuendo.

“If you’d asked me to come home with you, after Nick caught us, I would have. You pushed me away, Giles.”

“I know.”

I look over at him in the half-dark of the car. “Why?”

“Because, Anna, implausible though it may seem to you, I am actually doing what I can to protect you.”

“Don’t protect me from what I want!”

He opens his mouth to counter this, but I interrupt him.

“The only other man I’ve ever—” I catch myself in mid-sentence and glance at him quickly, embarrassed. “When I was in my early twenties I loved someone very much, someone who just wanted to have sex with me. He was fond of me, fond enough to want my love, but he didn’t want to…he didn’t want to be with me, either. He came to London to spend a weekend in bed with me, and at the end he told me he was engaged to be married to someone else.”

And it took me years to get over it.

Giles reaches over, clasps my hand and draws it to his lips.

“Anna, I don’t just want to have sex with you. You know it’s more…it’s a lot more than that. But I can’t ask you to be with me. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be…honorable.”

And suddenly this discussion ends the same way it began.

“Oh, for f*ck’s sake, Giles!”

I yank the key out the ignition and jump out of the car, slamming the door as hard as I can. The Subaru is hardly perturbed by my little anger. The drops of rainwater on the roof twinkle in the light of the street lamps like the stars in a clear, cold night.

Halfway up the entrance portal, he catches up with me.

“Go away and be an immature, screwed-up English schoolboy somewhere else!” I am not shouting. But I am about to knee him in the groin, and he is well aware of it.

“Anna, don’t. Don’t fight with me. Please.”

“But that’s what happens, Giles! You lie to people to keep them sweet, they find out about it, they feel jerked around, they shout at you! Which part is it that’s coming as a surprise to you?”

“You are very self-righteous for someone who has applied for a job across the pond herself.”

This comes so completely out of left field that all I can do is stare at him, slack-jawed. “How do you—”

“People keep asking me whether I know you and what I think of you.” He shrugs. “I always tell them the same thing, although I’m not sure any more that I’m doing you a—” A blood-curdling noise drowns out the rest of his words. “That’s the fire alarm!”

Oh, my God.

“Giles, Selena ran up to the dome! What if—”

It is raining more heavily now, and we run toward the huge dark building and up the monumental entrance steps. The great hall is empty, except for the ear-splitting wail of the siren.

“It’s probably just someone having a smoke in their office!” he shouts.

I shrug, too worried to reply.

“It could be anywhere,” he tries again. “You don’t know that it is on your floor!”

A few people trickle into the hall, some with their fingers in their ears, none of them particularly concerned, among them a security guard.

“Hey!” I tap his shoulder to get his attention. “Contact your colleague! He’s up in the dome, the fire may be there!” He tries his walkie-talkie and shrugs; it’s too loud. Giles taps my shoulder and points at Steve, Nancy Benning and a handful of other, vaguely familiar people, who come running down the stairs of the east wing.

“It’s somewhere along the hallway on E-four!” Steve yells, but he hardly stops on his way out.

Even plugged by my fingers, my ears are beginning to hurt. I see Giles chewing on a piece of tissue, which he rolls into balls and pushes into his ears.

“Give me your keys!” he mouths, and before I can process the intention behind his request, I have handed them over.

“No! Giles! No!” But he’s off, and much faster than I can follow him. The staircase is deserted, and I can’t smell anything, until I reach the third floor. Someone comes down the stairs, but it is only the security guard, and he is coughing violently and shaking his head.

“The girl! Where’s the girl?”

“Don’t know! Locked in, doesn’t answer—there’s smoke up there! Come!”

“No, I must—”

“Are you all crazy?”

He clamps my upper arm and drags me downstairs, and struggle as I might, I have no chance against him. We reach the great hall just as the fire trucks arrive and the alarm is switched off. Like on the morning after a long night in a club, every sound is now muted, except the hammering of my own heart. I can’t hear what the security guard tells the fire fighters, but they run up the staircase with their gas masks and huge rucksack-like contraptions on their backs.

A megaphone sounds across the hall. “Keep calm and vacate the premises now! Please vacate the premises now!”

A few more people are trickling into the hall from all directions, and it is only the sight of the firefighters and the flashing engine outside that jolts them out of their irritation at being interrupted at their work.

Now I know what it feels like to be on the brink of madness. I’m so scared, I can only manage one second at a time.

Don’t panic.

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

“Please, ma’am, you have to leave the building.” The crew leader comes up to me, and I realize what a nuisance I am to him for skulking behind a pillar.

“I will, in a minute. Look, it’s not dangerous down here. I have to—”

His face becomes even more impatient as something behind me catches his attention.

“No, sir, you can’t get in here! No—stop!”

“What’s going on?”

The voice stabs into me like a knife. Nick Hornberger, as big and broad-shouldered as any of the firefighters, stands in the middle of the entrance portal, staring. Without thinking twice, I rush up to him and slap him across the face, as hard as I can. My hand stings like hell, his cheek must feel worse, and he is not amused.

“Are you mad? What do you—will you restrain this woman?” He turns to the firefighter, who is staring at me, stunned.

“I had hoped you were stuck in a holding cell, being buggered by some Crips with schlongs like baseball bats!”

This makes him blench. “You f*cking little do-gooder! Did you egg Giles on to hand the file to the police? I told him this would happen if he told you!”

“The police? No, we gave it to Louise Randall. Mary-Lou,” I add. “She reported you. And good for her!”

“There’s a fire in this building!” the crew leader asserts himself. “You can’t stay here!”

As if to confirm this, a loud groan rises from the crowd outside. I run out onto the landing; everyone is staring up at the dome.

“The dome’s on fire!” someone shouts.

Oh, God.

“Selena’s up there. And Giles has gone to fetch her. Did you know you knocked her up?” I am beyond shouting, but Nick’s eyes widen with sudden comprehension. It seems he didn’t.

And then I hear them, the firefighters’ heavy boots on the marble steps. The awful, intense nausea of fear rises in me again, and I tear away from the man holding me by the arm to run back inside to see Giles, wracked with coughs behind a gas mask, uncertain on his feet but upright, supported by one fireman, Selena carried by another. They are led straight past us into the cool, wet night air and down the steps to the medical response truck.

I don’t want to be in the way, but I need to see him, so I lurk at a short distance, just making sure. His ribcage seems too tight, he stretches out one arm while the other rests against the gleaming white metal.

“Anna…” he wheezes. I wasn’t even sure he had seen me, but he wants me to hold his hand. “I lost your keys upstairs.”

“Forget about the keys.” I clasp his hand between mine and press it against my cheek. He reeks of smoke, and his face is an odd shade of flushed pallor. “Are you all right?”

“Think so.” He breathes deeply, and more calmly.

We watch as Selena, sobbing, is laid on a stretcher and pushed up into the back of the truck.

“Sir, you had better put this on.” A young paramedic hands him an oxygen mask and adjusts the valve on the metal container. “Do you want to sit down? Do you feel dizzy, nauseous or confused?”

“I’m all right.”

“Please, sir, do you feel dizzy, nauseous or confused?” the paramedic repeats impatiently.

“No! I don’t need—”

“Giles, please! You’ve played the man enough!”

He groans, coughs, and slips the tube around his head and the openings into his nose.

“How is the girl? She’s pregnant,” he tells the paramedic. “Did she say that she’s pregnant?”

“Yes, sir, and she’s in hysterics. But as far as we could see, she’s not—um—hurt in that way.”

“Not bleeding?” Giles urges him.

“No, sir, she isn’t. Sorry, I must—” He dashes off.

“What’s Nick doing here? Why isn’t he with her?” Breathing heavily, Giles nods at the girl inside the truck.

“Don’t know. Returning to the scene of the crime, maybe. He didn’t know she is pregnant, though. Stupid male chauvinist heroism!”

Giles frowns. “Heroism? Nick?”

“No, you!” I laugh and cry and the same time. “You could have—what if you had—”

“No, no, don’t you see? I helped save his child. I’m free of him now. Of Nick and all that. Now I’m free of it.”

I try to digest this, and I dimly understand what he means, But if I’m honest, I don’t really care. He is safe. That’s all I care about.

“Anna…”

“Breathe, don’t speak!” I clasp his hand again, but he reaches underneath my coat and round my waist.

“Come close!”

I snuggle against him, push the plastic tube out of the way with my nose and gently kiss the soft, stubbly skin under his ear.

“That’s nice. Anna, the fire didn’t come from the dome.”

“Not? But Selena—”

He shakes his head. Breathes. Then speaks.

“Her key was stuck in the bloody…door. It…she couldn’t get out. I had to smash the door in…with the fire extinguisher.” He grins wanly at the irony.

“But then—”

“Corvin…Corvin’s office.”

“Oh, my God! Was he—was he in there?”

“Don’t know. It was all full of smoke. The firemen pulled me away before I could get to him.”

Another groan comes from the crowd, and shards of glass are sprinkling onto the asphalt. We step out from behind the truck and look up; smoke and flames are now pouring out the windows as well as the roof of the dome.

“Stand back!” the megaphone sounds again. “Stand back from the building!”

“What a mess,” I murmur, hiding against Giles’s body. “What a God-awful bloody mess.”

“Some of the mess is that you don’t know what you want.”

When I am angry, I flare up like a firecracker. Giles glimmers like a slow fuse. He doesn’t usually shout back when I shout at him, but when I have cooled down again, he goes on smoldering.

“I’m glad you weren’t burned to a crisp up there. That’s gotta be a good sign, right?” I doubt that flippancy will throw him off the scent, but the last thing I want tonight is to go on arguing with him.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I know that I want to come home with you tonight,” I offer.

At last, a sort of smile. He pulls me closer, and his hand inches lower. “That’s something to live for, isn’t it?”

Now I’m riled, too. “Well, do you know what you want?” Oddly enough, I have the feeling that I have been manipulated into asking him the question he wanted me to ask him.

“How did your interview at Queen Mary go?” he asks, as if he was merely making polite conversation.

I stare up at him, uncertain about his train of thoughts. He shrugs, as if he was bored, but I recognize the tell-tale tightening of the muscle next to his mouth.

“It’s just that if you didn’t make a complete hash of your interview, and if at Queen Mary they know a good thing when they see one, you could…” He hesitates.

“I could…?” I ask, leaning in.

Giles looks down at me, into my eyes, and my heart runs hot with anticipation.

“You could ‘come and live with me and be my love,’” he quotes. “‘And we would all the pleasures prove…’”