“What will you live on?”
“Gil has something in trust from his mother and some money from his novels . . .”
“So you’re going to live on the money given to you by a man?”
“. . . and there’s his teaching.”
“His teaching!” She spat out the words. “He won’t be in that job for long when they find out.”
“They won’t be bothered. They’ve seen it all before.” I pulled away from her and stood up.
“It’s an abuse of power,” she said. “You’re his student. It’s disgusting.”
“I love him,” I said again, angrily this time.
“And you think he loves you? You think he hasn’t done this before?”
“We’re getting married. I know he wants this—a family.”
I sat again and we were both silent for several minutes. After a while I said, “I think I can smell the beans burning.”
I wore the yellow crocheted dress to our wedding. Louise, however, arrived at Caxton Hall registry office on the 5th of October 1976 in a long white dress, high-necked, with lace sleeves. “Secondhand,” she said. “What do you think?” She twirled on the pavement. She wore it to annoy you and had no idea how much it hurt me.
Inside, waiting in the lobby, Jonathan tried to defuse the atmosphere. “Diana Dors and Orson Welles got married here,” he said. You and Louise looked in opposite directions and I sat on the only chair. “Not to each other, of course.”
“Actually,” Louise said to no one in particular, “this is where the suffragettes held their first meetings.”
The registrar appeared, picking food out of her teeth and wiping her hand across her mouth. And it was you and Louise, in her mock wedding dress, that the woman greeted and ushered forwards to be married.
In the end, of course, Louise was right: the university did find out and they did care. I never discovered who told them—perhaps it was Mrs. Carter, who’d seen that first kiss; perhaps it was Louise, so angry with me for deserting her that she didn’t think about the consequences. Whoever it was, on the 29th of April 1977, when the baby was nearly due, you received an invitation for a chat with the dean the next day.
“It’ll be fine,” you said. “A slap on the wrist. ‘Just don’t do it again, Coleman,’ with a nudge and a wink. Really, nothing to worry about.”
Neither of us wore our wedding rings on campus, and when I attended your classes we carried on as if we were still only lecturer and student. At the beginning of the autumn term, when I still wasn’t showing, Guy had invited me to his lodgings for a “bedroom shuffle” (as he called it), and I delighted in telling him that I was seeing someone else and watching his face fall.
“Who is it?” he asked, and when I wouldn’t tell he pressed me further. “It’s someone I know, isn’t it? He’s married, isn’t he?”
I knew there was gossip. Sometimes rumours went round like Chinese whispers: you were having an affair with the vice chancellor’s wife or his secretary; you were a homosexual; you’d been discovered with your pants down in your office. Up until Christmas the latter was nearly true; we just hadn’t been caught. The number of private tutorials I had that first term grew until I was being requested by you almost daily, but we never discussed my work. Instead, you asked me again and again to tell you what I wanted you to do, until I had to come up with something.
“I want us to make love in your writing room,” I said, although I was perfectly happy with your office, the Swimming Pavilion’s bed, or the dunes. “I want to lie back on that velvet cover. It’s night and the window’s open.” I was beginning to enjoy myself. “We can hear the sea lapping at the sand. I want you to kneel between my legs and push my thighs apart.”
“Only Professor Coleman is allowed in, miss,” the porter said, blocking my entry to the administration building with his suited bulk. He was more like a bouncer than a porter, and I reckoned if I couldn’t match him pound for pound, our waist measurements would be similar.
“Mrs.,” I said.
The man would look me only in the eye.
You, Gil, placed your hand against my neck. “I’ll be fine,” you said. “What’s the worst that can happen?” You smiled a brave smile.
Louise was standing behind me, and I knew she would have that concerned expression on her face—the one where her eyebrows met below her wrinkled forehead. That morning during a “chat,” she’d pulled the same face and said, “Someone has to be there for you. This isn’t all about Gil.” I’d told her I was perfectly capable of looking after myself, but she’d insisted.
You pushed through the glass swing door into the university while Louise and I waited, leaning against the wall like schoolgirls skiving school. In front of us was that famous metal sculpture: tubes and beams crisscrossing each other and a circular plate resting at the end of a pole.
“What do you think it’s meant to be?” Louise said, tilting her head.
“The skeleton of an arthritic elephant,” I said.
“A line drawing by a left-handed octopus.”