The Professor (14 page)

I consider just asking him outright. Maybe in the morning, when the light is soft and forgiving and he is as content as he ever gets. You wouldn’t think he was a morning person, but he is. It’s the only time he ever allows his hair to be mussed, or his appetites to be known. He won’t drink his scotch in front of me, and he tries to limit the cigarettes, and in cafés he catches himself before he licks the crumbs from his fingertips.

But in the mornings, oh, the mornings.

He will sprawl on the bed in his pyjamas and a robe, feet bare in a way that struck me before I even knew why it did. And he will gorge himself on crumpets and
pain au chocolat
, until I can actually see it around his mouth. ‘Come look at this,’ he will say, intending to show me something in the paper.

And then I will sneak a taste of his gleaming lips.

Now I just have to sneak a taste of something else. Be stealthy about it, be cautious, just phrase it as though I mean something else. I even have practice words on the tip of my tongue when I wake the next morning, and turn to him with the intention of saying them. I go to tell him, ‘You know, you should really stop falling asleep in your suit,’ or maybe ‘Those pyjamas seem awfully thick and stuffy
.
’

But then I see he is already up, and I know I have no need.

He’s already guessed what I have been thinking. He must have done, because he’s sitting by the open window so he can smoke inside. Plus when I sit up he doesn’t glance my way. He hears me, I can tell. But he just keeps on gazing out at the street below, as though he can see something down there that spells everything out. Certainly, he is never going to really do it.

His tone, when he speaks, is flat and airy at the same time. As though there could never possibly be a problem he doesn’t want to talk to me about.

‘There is no great mystery to it, you know.’

‘No great mystery to what?’

He shakes his head, half-amused.

And offers the words to match.

‘You are far too clever to play it so foolish.’

‘All right, I will play it as it is: why do you never take off your clothes?’

‘I suppose you think it must be something very disturbing. A wild aversion to revealing myself in any way, that runs so bone-deep I have to stay dressed at all times. Before I told you I loved you I had to don an extra scarf, and when we sleep together I wear a wetsuit beneath my flimsy pyjamas.’

‘Now who is playing it foolishly?’

‘I am. But, in my defence, you started it.’

‘I never said anything as bad as that scarf thing.’

‘You implied something as bad as that scarf thing. I simply ran with the idea.’

‘I don’t think it’s a wild leap to imagine your jacket stays on because you want your emotions to stay in.’

He laughs then, but there is no joy in it.

‘So that is what you really think? That I am some cliché from a novel about manly men who fail to express their true feelings? And here I thought I was doing so well – writing you romantic letters, asking you for romantic walks, trying to persuade you to let our affection deepen, before our sexual connection bursts the banks of our relationship and consumes everything in its path…’

He lets his words trail away, just waiting for me to pick up the thread. But the thing is, I don’t know how to. None of this is playing out the way I thought it would, when I first decided to say something. I thought he might get angry, or maybe even storm out.

I didn’t think he would cut my suspicions off at the knees.

‘We are the wrong way around for this theory. You realise that, don’t you?’ he asks, and I know what he means. I hate that I know what he means, but I do all the same.

‘It
is
starting to dawn on me a little.’

‘
You
are the one who chooses sex over love.’

‘I don’t…I don’t choose sex over love.’

‘
You
put desire at a premium and affection far below.’

‘I have never once put affection far below I just…I just…’

‘You just…you just…’ he says, and I know, I absolutely know that he doesn’t mean to be cruel when he does. The pressure I can suddenly feel is coming from me, not from him. I’m the one who lets it build and build, until the answer suddenly bursts out of me.

Loudly, far too loudly and punctuated with a punch to the mattress beneath me.

‘I told you, I just don’t see the difference between the two. They go together, sex and love. They both mean as much to me, in a way I feel like you might never understand. At the very least I don’t think you’re ever going to fully give yourself over to it, and that worries me, Lukas. It worries me that you still hold something back. Is that so wrong?’

‘Not wrong, exactly. But not right either.’

‘So you are going to deny that you do.’

‘I would not say that exactly.’

‘Then what would you say?’

‘That you have the wrong idea.’

‘If I have the wrong idea then take off your clothes. Take everything off right now and stand before me naked. Let me see every inch of you, as though it barely matters at all,’ I say, and when he remains exactly where he is, fully clothed, I go one further. I offer him myself first, as a sort of gesture of solidarity. I stand and lift my nightie over my head, baring my body more completely than I have ever done before.

Oh, he’s seen almost all of me, true enough.

But he’s seen it in fits and starts and bits and pieces. He’s peeled single items of clothing off or watched me do the same – a cardigan here or a pair of panties there. Nothing like this. Nothing like me standing in the middle of the room, as unselfconscious about it as I could never previously imagine being.

Yet still he cannot.

He will not join me.

‘I thought at one point that you held back because I was your student. And then later it was all that stuff about “other things”, and affection. But now I know that none of that was really the case. I know that there is more, no matter what you say or how you try to deflect.’

‘Now my asking about you is a deflection?’

‘It is when you still haven’t really answered me.’

‘I told you, there is no great mystery,’ he says, and then as though to underline that fact he carries on talking. He keeps his voice measured and his face impassive, and tells me his secret in a manner more befitting a weatherman explaining about a coming cold front:

‘I was burned very badly as a young man.’

Then afterwards he seems to think he can simply leave it at that. He turns his face away from me, half-disguising it as a need to take a drag of his cigarette – only when he brings it to his lips he seems to reconsider, and flicks it away to the street below. This is why the habit seems to pain him, I think, swiftly followed by a whole jumble of other equally gut-wrenching thoughts.

The feathery scars, that were always really flames licking up over his jaw.

The way he winces sometimes when he moves his right shoulder too quickly.

And the clothes. It must be terrible, if it keeps his clothes on.

So terrible I can hardly stand to hear it, but I have to.

I have to.

‘How…how burned? Where?’

‘They…the scars are mostly confined to my right side.’

‘All of your right side is covered in scars.’

‘I would probably not put it like that.’

‘How then? How would you put it?’

I wish I didn’t sound so strained when I ask. It makes all of this seem so much more terrible than it has to be – and it was pretty awful to begin with. The more he talks the flatter his voice gets, until finally it feels like hearing someone speak from beyond the grave.

‘That I was very fortunate to escape with my life. Our home was very old, and the fire almost to the rooftops by the time I awoke to it. I had to climb from a third-storey window – though I remember very little about doing it. My only true recollection is lying in the grass afterwards, and wondering where I was. I had walked a mile to the river that bisected the village where we lived, without even realising I was walking. In truth I don’t even think I knew I was burned, until later when it hurt,’ he says, so lost in the story for a moment that I don’t think he even understands what he’s revealed.

But I do. I hear it above everything – even the fact that he walked a mile without feeling anything. As though he was numbed somehow, I think. My Lukas, probably skinny and just starting to edge towards tall. Most likely in the type of pyjamas he wears now, striped and so formal, hair still tousled from sleep in a way that makes my heart ache
before
I circle that one word in my head.

The one he should have focused on, but instead covered over in irrelevant details.

‘
Our
home.’

‘What?’

His voice is sharp, suddenly.

So sharp I have to step carefully, to avoid being cut.

‘You said
our
home.’

‘Yes. Yes, of course. Where I lived with my family.’

‘And they all got out too. They all escaped with you,’ I ask.

Though of course I know the answer. He would have mentioned them sooner, if they all managed to go with him. He would have said, ‘My father did this’ and ‘My mother did that’ and ‘My sister…’ I know he had a sister. He mentioned her once when I said I wished I had siblings, but the thing is…

He did it as though she was still alive.

As though she lives in Surrey somewhere with a bank manager.

Instead of the horrible truth he tells me next. He doesn’t want to, I can see. In fact I think he would give almost anything to pretend it never happened, or at least imagine that it has no effect on him. Yet when he speaks this time his voice is not quite as flat. It comes from somewhere far away and oh, so full of terrible obstacles. He can hardly get over them all.

Though he tries.

It is the trying, I think, that does me in.

‘I wish more than anything that I might say yes to that, but I think you would know it was a lie. I think you might even know why I
want
to lie, though mostly I tell myself otherwise. I imagine that it is all long forgotten or at least gotten over – and truly I believe it is, when it comes to my parents. We were not so close, they and I. Most of the time they found me strange, as though someone had replaced me at birth with an inhuman creature. A feeling that I am sure you understand all too well.’

‘I do. My mother once told me she found me in a hedgerow. I believed her.’

‘I would have believed mine. She was not a cruel woman, you understand. No, not cruel at all. But she was not kind, either.’

‘No, no. Just…somewhere in between. Some indifferent place in between.’

‘Precisely, yes. I could never quite tell if she loved me at all – though it scarcely mattered to me.’ He pauses there, though it provides no respite. It still knocks the wind out of me when he speaks again. It knocks the wind out of him, just to say it aloud: ‘Because I had Mathilda, my dear little Mathilda.’

Though there is more, so much more, too much more.

‘I only have the vaguest memories of her now. Her fair hair caught in the wild roses outside our home, like spiderwebs. The feel of her small hand in mine. Even at the age of seven she was still tiny compared to me – a little slip of a thing, as quick as lightning and as mischievous as I was not. I was never any of those things. Perhaps in time I might have learned from her, but there is the thing. We were not permitted it. I was not equal to the task of saving her, though sometimes I am sure I tried my hardest. I carried her all the way to the river, and would have carried her a thousand miles more if it would have made a difference.’

I am crying now, but I do my best to hide it from him. It isn’t hard – he hasn’t looked my way since he said her name. The only struggle is in keeping quiet, but, by God, I manage it.

I need to, if I want to hear the rest.

Oh, the rest.

‘But she was already gone. The smoke had already killed her by the time I got to her. I could not save her. I could not keep her with me, no matter how tightly I held on to her or what I did to escape. And I think of that every day of my life, even though I do everything within my power not to. I fight to keep it out of everything I do and everything I say.’

‘But it is in you, anyway.’

He does look at me, after that. Probably in part because my voice has completely gone. It flew away the moment he said he could not save her, and leaves behind this strange and wavering thing. Words come out thin and wavery when I speak with it, and I think that strikes him more than anything else.

Certainly I see pain in his eyes, when I say something else.

‘You honestly think it doesn’t affect you?’

‘Have I not been the model of restraint here, while talking about it?’ he asks, but I think he secretly knows he hasn’t. Not to someone who knows his expressions and his gestures and the way his brows go when he feels something deeply. They strain to meet each other, even as he tells me that.

What else does he think I can say?

‘If you made a joke about it, I would know what it had done to you. If you smiled and smiled and said you were glad, it would make no difference to me. I could still see where it ran a crack right through the middle of you, and will carry on seeing it no matter what walls you put up around yourself. You can talk in that voice and look on me with that flat gaze – it will never change you in my eyes.’

‘And I suppose now you are going to tell me why. Here is your grand theory, ready to strike right to the core of my being. To illuminate every part of my hidden self,’ he says, yet it still sounds strained when he does. I can never unhear how strained he sounds.

‘At the very least, it explains why you never tried to be a writer.’

‘Then I should be very interested to hear it. All this time I thought it was a lack of any real talent at all.’

‘Did you though? Did you really? You must know in some part of yourself that this could never be true. Your taste is exquisite; your mind as keen and sharp as a paring knife. You must know. I think you even knew all along that there was nothing wrong with us being together, and yet you fought it so hard anyway. Every step of the way you fought, and now I know the reason.’