The Englishman (24 page)

“He’s a cardiologist.”

“See? Logan’s father is in and out of prison. Forgery, embezzlement, stuff like that, nothing heavier. But I didn’t tell you this.”

“Oh, man.” I rest my elbows on my desk and rub my forehead with the balls of my hands. “Now I can’t even dislike him?”

Cleveland grins. “Yes, you can. Although I don’t know about you, but I am usually more lenient with kids whose lives have been so much less privileged than mine. That’s when my middle-class guilt sets in. It’s the snooty, entitled ones who set my back up.”

“But I
had
to wallop Logan today! He was asking for it!”

“As far as I can see, you did all the right things, only you shouldn’t let him provoke you. But that’s the high art of teaching, and for you it’s early days yet. Now, in time—” He pauses, then continues with a twitch of the muscles around his mouth. “‘When in eternal lines to time thou growest,’ these incidents will become less frequent. Even if you were plain, you’d still be young. So be patient. Grow middle-aged. Don’t dye your hair when it begins to go gray. Gain a couple of stone in weight. None of them messes with Elizabeth Mayfield, I can tell you that.”

“That is preposterous!”

“It may be preposterous, but it’s the best advice I have for you. Take it or leave it. The rest is an occupational hazard.” Again he sighs, but he doesn’t seem impatient with me anymore, lounging on his rickety little chair. “We are pissing into the wind. All of us who uphold the fiction—or maybe it’s a dream, or worse, a hubristic fantasy—that by acquainting young people with, well, as Matthew Arnold has it, ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world,’ with
art
, which is always the fruit of intellectual subtlety and wit and compassion and tenderness, something that is bigger and better than us ordinary folk, so we have to expand our minds in order to grasp its brilliance and beauty—now I’ve lost the beginning of my sentence.”

The seawater eyes release me from their deadlock; he looks round my office, bewildered. So passionate, when he lets his guard down, and so vulnerable.

I’m so in love with him I can hardly breathe.

“I was pissing into the wind,” I remind him quietly. The eyebrows shoot up, but he doesn’t smile.

“So you were.” He seems to conclude our conversation by getting up from his chair. “There is nothing you can do to stop these young men from checking you out. And if they are the kind of male that bristles at women in authority, particularly in authority over
them
, they will seek relief from their discomfort by turning you into a sex object—a pretty little co-ed. If they become disrespectful, keep note of these incidents, mobilize witnesses, and report the offenders, but there’s never any point in throwing a temper tantrum. Send Elizabeth an email about Logan, and then drop it.”

All my tender feelings for him drown in the wave of blood that rushes to my head.

“Temper tantrum? That is so—patronizing! And where the hell do you get off calling me a
co-ed?”

“I’m merely stating the obvious. You’re—what, five-three? Five-four? A half pint.” He appraises me dispassionately. “There are substantial benefits to be reaped by pretty, petite young women, as you no doubt know full well. But claiming authority over a gang of twenty-year-old males is harder for you than for some other types of woman. Boo-hoo and all that, but there it is.”

“Will you stop calling me pretty!” I mutter through clenched teeth.

Cleveland’s eyes glisten. He is hell-bent on provoking me, and I couldn’t bring myself to back off if my life depended on it. We are both standing now, on either side of my desk, and the space between us is filled with crackling ice, or crackling flames, I can’t tell the difference any more.

“When we’re alone…I’ll call you anything I like, and you’ll stick it.” He pauses for effect, and into the silence crowds a cornucopia of terms and phrases. “Not because I’m a male and more powerful than you—I’m not, by the way, more powerful than you—but because I’ll not call you anything that I don’t believe to be true. In company, rest assured it’ll be ‘Doctor Lieberman, my esteemed colleague.’”

I open my mouth to rake him down, but he cuts me off.

“And while we are having a heart-to-heart, I’ll just enrage you a little bit further and give you some entirely uninvited and no doubt undesired feedback on your, er, garb. You tend to look like lamb dressed as mutton.”

He pauses, as if he were waiting for me to lunge forward and slap his face. Since physical violence and stunned silence are my only options, I opt for silence.

“Of course I see that you dress conservatively to compensate for your youth,” he goes on. “But in my opinion that’s an error in judgment. It’s quite easy to impress these youngsters, and your Noo Yoak toak and your Columbia degree do impress them, even if they don’t admit it. Many of them are—well, maybe not
scared
of you, but a little in awe. The cool girl from the Big City. Make the stereotype work for you! You gotta slap them right if they don’t act right…bitch.”

His gaze holds me, and the word—its vulgarity, his low, gravelly voice—is as transgressive as his hand on my body would be. I can only gaze back, torn between fascination and fury, until I eventually manage to rally in my defense.

“Listen, don’t…don’t bitch me, buster. And maybe you can tell me why guys always think that women can be
goaded
out of the dumps? Because I got news for you: it’s a
crap
method of cheering us up! It
never
works, and it
pisses
me off!”

His face lights up in that way that fools a girl into thinking she is his only joy and delight, but his shoulders do not relax, and our eyes do not unlock; in a moment of panic I lose my bearings and almost my balance, because what I see in his eyes is that he is
this
close to striding over to kiss me.

My clash with Logan Williams in front of the whole class has me panicking about my end-of-term evaluations, about my prospects at Ardrossan, and about my aptitude as a lecturer. If Giles Cleveland were to come round that desk, grab me, and kiss me, every cell of my body would hurl itself toward him with all the kamikaze force of which I am capable. I would forget all the Logans and all the Madelines in the world. I would even forget about my paycheck.

It would be the end of life as I know it.

Chapter 14

I
’M
R
UNNING
, S
TUMBLING
O
VER
S
TONES
and the roots of trees, trying not to twist my ankle, trying not to fall. Trying to run off the adrenaline that sears all the nerve endings in my body, threatening to tip me into a vat of panic. What am I doing wrong?
Everything
is going wrong!

Not everything, not quite everything.

Dancey must not have been informed about Madeline Harrison’s complaint about me, or he would surely have slapped me with that, too, the same way he feels it necessary to inform me that one among my colleagues considers the noise of my heels an attack on his personal freedom. Corvin. Or Dolph Bergstrom. Who else would complain to the department chair about a new colleague’s shoes?
Shoes
, for Chrissakes, half-boots, not Louboutins! I’ll be damned if I’ll be bullied like this! They can underpay me, and they can fire me for treating students like liberal-minded adults, but they can’t make me take off my heels! This battle I will fight.

And upon reflection I doubt that Logan Williams will report me to the chair, or worse, the Dean of Studies. Does he really want to tell Ma Mayfield about “semen” and “phallus”? Not freakin’ likely. So I’m safe, for the time being.

As long as I don’t fling myself at Giles Cleveland.

I must keep my distance, or I will fall for him like an egg from a tall chicken. Like an egg shot from a sling. Destruction upon impact. That was a crazy moment, earlier today.
Crazy
. At the time I could have sworn that he was about to come for me, but now, in hindsight—impossible. Maybe what I saw in his face was his consternation at what
he
saw in
mine!
I can only hope and trust that in hindsight he, too, has decided that he was wrong.

The adrenaline ebbs out of my body, leaving behind a sense of nausea. Like a virus that crawls up my spine from the pit of my stomach. I would be fine, here, in my little cottage, with my new job and my new bike and my new colleagues. I would be fine, if it wasn’t for Giles Cleveland.

Smoke.

I’m jogging along, deep in thought, and I couldn’t say for how long I have been smelling burning wood, but it is very distinct now, and it’s getting stronger. Feeling like Davy Crockett, I sniff and listen and peer through the dusky trees, and soon I can hear the sound of a guitar and of voices. The pickers’ camp. I hadn’t noticed it before when I walked past the clearing, but there is a knee-high stone circle designed to hold a fire. Several figures are sprawled round it, and on the wind comes a familiar whiff as of Catholic churches. I wonder whether the Walshes know of the depraved activities that go on here, the sex and drugs. But at least it isn’t sex and drugs among illegal Mexican laborers; maybe that is all that counts.

One figure disengages from the group around the fire and walks toward me, or rather toward the path that leads back to the farm, and it is now so dusky that we only recognize each other when we’re just a few yards apart.

“Hey, Jules,” I greet her serenely.

She isn’t as composed, but she manages to fake it, and she has no choice but to walk back together with me.

“Not for nothing, Jules, but you do know that if I ever happen to see you smoking dope, I’d have to tell your parents, right?”

“I wasn’t smoking anything!”

“I’m not the Drug Squad. I don’t need to know what you did or didn’t do, and by the way, I could tell if you were stoned, and you’re clearly not. I’m just saying. If.”

“Have you ever—”

“Nice try, girlfriend, but hardly the issue.”

“That means yes,” she says quickly, and we both have to laugh.

“I confess nothing, Jules! I hope you heard me!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“More importantly, how’s Karen?”

“How do you know about that?”

And why did I think I would get a straight answer out of a teenager?

“I had to get something from my car last night, and I saw them driving off. Is Karen at home again? Is she all right?”

“They’re keeping her at the hospital for a day or two. To find out where the blood came from.”

“That’s okay, no need to tell me the gory details.” A fifteen-year-old shouldn’t have to talk about the vaginal bleeding endangering her mother’s pregnancy.

“This would be the third miscarriage since the twins,” she offers as if she were talking about the weather. That, of course, explains the hushed excitement when Karen told us the good news. “But she’s only thirty-five; she can try a little longer.” I have the uncanny feeling that she is giving me a sound bite from home.

There is a lot of bitterness here, and again I wonder whether it wouldn’t improve Jules’ lot if there was a little tomato princeling to shoulder his elders’ expectations. But it wouldn’t be appropriate to share this with her, particularly since there may well not
be
a princeling. Instead, I give her what I hope is an encouraging smile and let her jump first across the brook and onto the grass verge of the dirt track leading past the farm. In a cloud of dust a car approaches, a pick-up about ten years more beat-up than Pop Walsh’s. Jules seems to recognize it; she gives a little yelp and starts waving. The pick-up slows down, and out the window leans my favorite student.

“Hey, ladies—going home already? The party’s just starting!”

Jules giggles and says something about a curfew. I wonder whether her admiration is as obvious to him as it is to me, and my heart sinks.

“Who’s your friend?” Logan asks Jules and hesitates only for the tiniest moment before he looks over at me, bold as brass. Looks me straight in the eye, daring me.

“Oh, this is Anna!” Jules responds eagerly. “Lieberman, Dr. Lieberman. She is an English professor at the Folly, too—don’t you know each other?”

“Yeah, the name rings a bell.”

Against my will I am a little tickled by this display of
chuzpah
, but if he thinks he can play me, he better think again.

“Logan is in one of my classes this semester, Jules.”

“He is? That’s so neat!” she exclaims. “That’s so weird, though! Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“I do.” My tone is dry enough to register with Logan, but not with Jules, whose attention is focused on the boy.

“Stranger things happen at sea,” he says breezily and drives off.