The Englishman (32 page)

The last thing I need right now is another clash with Dolph Bergstrom. He overruns his sessions most weeks, but usually he just runs into the transition time, not into my class period. Today my class is once more still loitering in the hallway when I turn up. The light of a beamer is flickering in the darkened classroom; I recognize Peter Fonda in his psychedelic shirt pressing his face against the stone statue in the cemetery. I mentally re-run the film and calculate it is at least another five minutes until Wyatt’s bike is blown up. Five more minutes of film, wrapping up, packing up—what the heck does Dolph think he is doing?

Whatever I do, I must do it with conviction.

“All right, people—we can’t barge in on the ending of
Easy Rider
. Wouldn’t be cool. I’ll start the session in ten minutes sharp. See you back here in seven.”

Seven minutes to hide in the toilets, my fists pressed into my eyes. When I return, I can tell by their silence and their faces that my apparent sangfroid has created a certain sense of expectation, gleeful in some cases, apprehensive in others. For a moment I feel like the narrator in George Orwell’s story about a police officer in Burma who is goaded by a crowd of natives into shooting an elephant. But my job is to teach them Ben Jonson’s
The Devil is an Ass
, not to mud-fight a colleague.

A “colleague” who, five-and-a half-minutes into my class period, is still holding forth about the contradictions of avant-garde film-making in late nineteen-sixties Hollywood.

“Excuse me, Dr. Bergstrom—so sorry to interrupt. You’ll have noticed it’s way past the end of your class period.”

Without waiting for his reply, I usher my lot in but almost lose my cool when he says that he has been showing a film and needs another couple of minutes. My students, with the deference to authority that doesn’t cease to amaze me, stop in their tracks and look at me for their cue.

There is never any point in throwing a temper tantrum.

“But a couple more minutes won’t do justice to
Easy Rider
, now, will they? Maybe leave it till Thursday and discuss it properly?”

Dolph is in my face as if I had interrupted him at a particularly tricky bit of brain surgery.

“Now you’re telling me how to teach? Listen, if I want your advice, I’ll ask you!”

My instinct is to go for him, but my bad angel has been doused so effectively by the icy water of eavesdropping that it lacks the élan to egg me on to a foolhardy confrontation.

“I wouldn’t dare. But this isn’t your time and place to teach, I’m afraid, Dolph, but mine, and I’d be glad if you gave me the chance to do so.”

A good speech, if I say so myself. It makes Dolph close his laptop with an angry
klop
and his class sigh with relief. My New York students would by now have formed a ring around us, chanting for their champions—well, metaphorically speaking, anyway. Ardrossan students are made uncomfortable by clashes between their authority figures. Ignoring me completely, Dolph packs up the projector and turns around to wipe the board as if he was alone in the room and had all the time in the world. Then he picks up the board markers, one by one, and sticks them into his back pocket. It doesn’t help that bubbling up through my stupor I feel the urge to laugh about his absurdly territorial behavior.

“Wait.” I hold him back very affably when he finally collects his papers and books and shoves them into his bag. “You forgot to pee on the desk. Go on. You know you want to.”

This provokes a double-take as he stares at me, thunderstruck. Then he grabs his belongings, storms out and—get this!—slams the door behind himself. His last remaining students rush out meekly, and Logan, of all people, gives me a cheer of triumph that makes me bite on a smile.

Asshole.

I drive home at a snail’s pace. My brain has slowed down, my whole body has slowed down in the attempt to come to grips with what I learned today. Not that I have fallen in love with Giles Cleveland—I knew that already. But that there is no limit to how wrong I can still be about a man, at the great old age of twenty-nine years and three hundred and forty days. How selectively blind to his signals. This is a man enjoying his new-won liberty! Yes, he made that little joke to the barman about me being his wife. Yes, he enjoyed, for a moment or two, the idea of picking up a young woman in front of his cabin at the lake. But that whole conversation at the lake, which made me feel so warm and happy—which for the first time made me feel as if he actually liked me—is now overshadowed by the glaring absence of one simple sentence.

My wife and I are getting a divorce.

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting in my car in front of the farm’s gate when my phone bleeps.

Call me! Great news! Deb.

Oh, God, no. Not another pregnant woman! Debbie has been joking that if editing the pregnancy essays isn’t going to make her conceive, she will go for IVF. I would be very happy for her if she could save herself that whole ordeal, but this is not the best moment for me to rejoice with her. But I owe Debbie. So I go inside, get a glass of wine, and call England.

“Queen Mary College is going to advertise a full-time position for someone who does Ren. Lit. as well as something modern to do with Anglophone literature! I spoke to Ewan Buchanan; he says Anglo-Jewish definitely qualifies, and he says hi, and you would be a fool if you didn’t apply!”

Debbie is a little breathless after this outpouring. As am I.

“Woah, hold your horses, Crocker. Did you tell Ewan that I have a tenure-track position at Ardrossan?”

“Yes, I did. He said,
Where?”

“God, you Brits are so arrogant.”

Debbie chortles into the phone but says nothing.

“’Kay.”

“What?”

“I’ll apply.”

“Seriously?”

“No, I’m kidding. Yeah, seriously!”

“Anna, is something wrong?”

“Yeah.” I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to sit on the couch in Debbie’s and Dave’s living room with a mug of milky tea and a biscuit, or stand and
shuckel
with the half-asleep Jonah against my shoulder. “D’you think I’m pretty?”

“Oh, Anna,” she sighs. Then we both burst into laughter.

I give her a sixty-second version of events, and Debbie points out that Cleveland has evidently turned out to be the jerk I took him for at our first meeting.

“No, see—he isn’t. Me refusing to read the message he was sending doesn’t make him a jerk. Not fancying me doesn’t make him a jerk.”

“Yes, it does!”

“Bless you, but no, it doesn’t. He’s probably seeing someone else, that’s all. Spoiled for choice, that one, for sure.”

“So what was your plan before you found out he didn’t tell you he is divorced but seeing someone else? Start sleeping with a senior colleague? If that was the idea, I suggest you find yourself a Southern pothead and do a repeat performance of Ciaran, because—”

“Please, don’t. Look, I’ll apply for that job at Queen Mary and meanwhile I’ll lust after my mentor a little, okay? No harm done, either way. End of debate.”

Chapter 19

T
RUE
T
O
T
HE
R
ESOLUTION
I M
ADE
on my bike ride, I try my hand at sorting out Selena O’Neal.
Muscle in on grad advisement
, Giles said. Okay.

“Hey, Natalie. Hey, Selena.”

The two young women are sitting and working at their desks, facing each other, framed by the window and the blue sky behind them. An academic idyll.

“Be great if we had weather like this at the weekend, huh?” I’m about to ask whether both girls’ families will come to Ardrossan for Family Weekend when it occurs to me that this would hardly be tactful. Natalie is showing great strength of character (or a great deal of
chutzpah
, depending on who you listen to) by showing up in college like this, but Family Weekend is a very different ballgame.

“All weather stations say it’ll be sunny,” Natalie informs us archly. “So it’ll probably be pouring with rain!”

“Mmhmm. Selena, I was wondering whether you had a moment?”

Selena jumps up onto her feet. “Of course, ma’am. Dr. Lieberman.”

“Anna.”

She bobs her head and twists her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a cross between Princess Diana and Rapunzel. This will be much harder than I thought.

“I tell you what, if you have half an hour or so, we could get ourselves a coffee and walk a little?”

Natalie’s beautiful face clouds over. I doubt that coffee with Dr. Lieberman counts as a special treat in Natalie’s eyes, but she is peeved that Selena is getting it. Not that Selena is keen. If she could think of an excuse, she would wriggle out. But I smile at her in the manner of a kind but firm professor, and she has no choice. Ten minutes later we are walking between the box hedges, each nursing a paper cup between her hands.

“Selena, I felt bad about—hey, what happened to your hand?” When she took a sip of the coffee, her sleeve, pulled down to her fingers, shifted a little, and I caught a glimpse of raw flesh.

“No, it’s nothing.”

“Yes, it is, let me see that!” Doubly alarmed, I become vehement. “Have you been in a fight, or what?” The knuckles on the backs of both hands are red and glistening with lymphatic fluid; these wounds are fresh. Four round red marks on each hand.

“I…fell,” she improvises. “I was carrying something and scraped against the…wall of the garage, at home. It’s nothing.” She hitches her sleeves over her hands like oven gloves and nurses her coffee.

“Selena, I’m not stupid. How you deal with stress is none of my business, so I won’t probe. But I feel all the more urgently that I ought to say this, about last week’s grad seminar. Things got a little out of hand, and you may have walked away from it feeling that your topic doesn’t make sense or that your approach doesn’t work. But all you need to—”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t bothered by that,” she interrupts me. She may be shuffling alongside me in her sensible skirt and sensible shoes, ducking her head so as not to have to look down at me, but she is perfectly capable of interrupting a professor.

“Weren’t you? Well, that’s good. What’s your…what did you take away from it, upon reflection?”

Not much, it seems. She tries to convince me that like a good little grad student she listens to all criticism and tries to use it constructively, so appreciative of all the help she gets, such an opportunity, graduate study at a place like Ardrossan—

“Yes, but. Selena.” Aha, there it is, the mulish set to her mouth and jaw. I’ve seen it a few times, but I keep forgetting it because the impression of her dowdy diffidence is so overwhelming. “I spoke to Giles Cleveland about your paper, and it seems to me that you and he do not exactly see eye to eye on the question of whether you should go on to do a Ph.D.”

“You fought with him about me. Natalie heard you.”

If I had a wall to bang my head against, I would.

“We didn’t
fight
, we had a—never mind that! We are discussing your—”