The Englishman (25 page)

Great. Logan Williams and Jules Walsh exchanging gossip about his new professor and her family’s new tenant. This you do not get if you teach on a large urban campus.

“How come Logan hangs out with the pickers?”

“He has a job here! He’s a regular, been picking for, dunno, four or five years?”

With a dysfunctional family and the transition from a community college to Ardrossan University to digest, Calderbrook farm may well be a comforting factor of continuity in Logan’s life. He’s welcome to it, too, as long as he keeps his mitts off my landlord’s underage step-granddaughter.

Chapter 15

K
AY
C
HANG
W
AS
R
IGHT
to suspect that the students know far more about the
affaire
Hornberger than we do after the evasive briefing by our Dean and our new chair. There appears to be no other topic these days on the fourth floor of the Observatory than Greco vs. Hornberger, and the hub for all information is Natalie’s and Selena’s office. Natalie keeps coming to school with an air of wounded but stubborn pride that I secretly admire—no matter whether it is real or a show.

Unfortunately, as a junior professor I must not be seen to allow or encourage familiarity with students. All I can say after a few days of walking purposefully (and noisily!
In-yer-face!
) past their open door on my way toward the stairs is that there is word of at least half a dozen other students who have, over the years, enjoyed Hornberger’s attentions, that he got a kick out of seducing them in all sorts of places on campus including his office, the library, and the elevator at Rossan House (this I assign to the realm of the fantastic), and that nobody seems to be openly contesting Natalie’s version of events.

They—she and Nick—went to a conference together in Los Angeles shortly before the semester started; he lured her into his room, plied her with drink, and forced himself on her. This is more or less the story that I expected, and I’m ashamed to say that my first thought is that Natalie will find it difficult to explain away her friendliness toward Hornberger since then. It is easy to imagine how the same events are being related by Hornberger himself, probably with as much claim to subjective truth. This affair will occupy our thoughts and time for months to come, money and administrative resources will be wasted, and in the end nothing will emerge but the two irreconcilable narratives that we already know today. Just because an aging male professor can’t resist the opportunities that offer themselves to him in the nubile shapes of young women eager for approbation.

The sleazy talk is momentarily interrupted the following Wednesday when I turn up early on the fourth floor of the Observatory to prepare for my hard-won appointment with Dean Ortega.

The air at the top of the marble stairwell is unusually crisp, and I mentally congratulate the cleaning staff who must have left some windows open. But what Martha Borlind, Steve Howell, and a couple of students are examining seems to be the result of vandalism. Three window panes, each in a different dormer window, have been smashed.

“Could it have been birds?” Martha wonders.

“Then you’d have the shards
inside
, on the floor here!” Steve brushes her off. “But most of the glass is—” He cautiously opens one of the broken windows to peer down onto the inner yard. “Well, I can’t see anything; it’s bushes down there. But either the pieces were swept up already, or these were smashed from inside!”

I slowly walk along the corridor checking each hole, the last one in the window closest to the Dumpster that is still sitting under the stairs. Now and again people add some waste paper or some cookie wrappings to the pile of junk, and the other day I fished half a sandwich out of it—don’t want to encourage the rats, on top of everything else. What I find in there today is a blood-drenched ball of tissue paper. I nudge a pile of plastic folders over it and saunter back to the others.

“Has anyone called maintenance?”

Larry the janitor is, if possible, even more appalled than we are at this evidence of wanton violence. He calls his young man, and together they are taping plastic sheets over the holes in the window panes as I leave to make my way across campus to the Dean’s office at Rossan House.

“That’s funny,” Larry observes cryptically.

“What is?”

“All happens in front of your office, ma’am.”

“What does?”

“Mess. Junk. Now this—” He nods at the windows.

“But that has nothing to do with my office!”

He looks past me at the cart and scratches his grizzled head. I’m waiting for him to explain himself, but after staring and scratching for a while, he turns back to his work.

“Anyway, you promised two weeks ago that you’d have this…thing removed,” I add sharply. “You know better than I do that it’s a fire hazard!”

“Central maintenance’s job, ma’am.”

“Yes, but it’s your job to see to it that central maintenance do theirs! And I believe I’ve asked you not to call me ma’am, Larry!”

He glances over at me, and I could project any kind of disdain into his expression, but I don’t have time for this.

Holly Ortega is apparently starting what is going to be a very busy day—during the ten minutes that I am in her office, her secretary comes in to hand her a sheaf of faxes, but she is very focused and friendly as she listens to my plight. I was right to come and see her, she tells me, but unfortunately she can’t do more than make a phone call for me.

“Morning, Liz. Holly Ortega here. Listen, I have a young colleague here with some discrepancies in her paycheck. It’s one of the contracts Newburgh signed…that’s right. Can Amanda see her next week? Tuesday?” She looks at me. “Tuesday at ten thirty any good? Great, Liz, the name is Lieberman, Anna. Thanks very much. Bye!” She puts the phone down and smiles at me, her thoughts clearly already on her next task. “There you are, Anna—Amanda Cleveland will sort you out.”

Oh. My. God.

Yes, I’m sure Amanda Cleveland will sort me out good ’n’ proper. Especially if I tell her that I am lusting after her husband.

Well, all right. I admit it. I’m curious about the woman who is allowed, by some cosmic coincidence of time and temperament, to run her hand across those broad, boyish shoulders. Slip her fingers into his and draw him close. Undress him. I am still wondering why he was so dead set against becoming department chair. There is more to it than “Giles only cares about his own research.” Amanda knows.
I
shouldn’t even
want
to know.

When I return to the fourth floor of the Observatory, business seems to be going on as usual. The office doors are all open—we received a memo from Dancey reminding us to leave our doors open as much as possible and without fail when we are in our offices with a student—and the makeshift plastic window panes are softly flapping in the wind. How much more pleasant it is, despite the frustration, to wonder about Giles and Amanda Cleveland, if the depressing reality is a blood-drenched hanky in my Dumpster and the janitor’s muttered suspicion that the recent mishaps on E-4 have one common denominator: the location of my office.

That’s got to be nonsense.

As usual, my bunch of keys is hiding at the very bottom of my purse, and when I’ve found it and grab the door handle, my hand slips off and I smash bodily against the door.

“
What the
—”

The handle—and now also the palm of my hand—is covered in a thick, oily substance. Viscous, oily, and evil, smelling of rotten fruit and airports. Engine oil? Lamp oil? Maybe Larry did something to the door hinges while he was up here, and a little got spilled? But there is no oil on any of the metal parts of my door.

Slowly it drips onto the floor in front of my Mary Poppins boots.

No. I will not lower myself into the bog of paranoia.

It must be Corvin. I would totally believe that Corvin has complained to Dancey about the noise my heels make. But would a seventy-five-year-old emeritus professor, no matter how aggressively senile, smear lamp oil onto the handle of colleague’s office door? And what’s with the broken window panes?

There are two rivaling theories about the windows, Martha Borlind informs me when I invite her, a little disingenuously, for a coffee in the Eatery. One, favored by Martha herself, is that this was the act of vandals, the same individuals who last semester smashed some glass cases with
libri rari
in the library and sprayed graffiti on the front façade of Rossan House. The second—and Larry vowed to make enquiries—is that a party at Modern Languages yesterday evening got out of hand.

I don’t tell Martha about the oil on my door handle, or about the bloody Kleenex. When I come back from the restroom along the corridor into Modern Languages, it is still sitting there, underneath the plastic folders, possibly the
corpus delicti
in this case. Without really bothering to examine my motives, I slip it into a clean plastic bag and lock it into the drawer of my desk.

Thursday after class I do what I consider to be the main part of my job: I spend an hour in the library and then work at my desk till my eyes cross with exhaustion. I may not be able to sleep eight hours at a stretch, but I can and do fall asleep anywhere. My three chairs pushed alongside each other make an adequate cot, and I’m dead to the world seconds after lying down. When I wake up, with a crick in my back and swollen eyes, it is almost eleven o’clock. The view from my window is a panorama lit by moonlight, sparsely dotted with the light from other offices, other night owls, and I can see the straight line of Victorian-style street lamps that illuminate the river promenade. I’ve never been in the Observatory so late in the evening. The hallway looks picturesquely dark except for the dim light from the windows, and it is exciting to feel that I have the building to myself. A little eerie, too. When mid-term grading is upon us, I’ll be surprised if by midnight this place is empty. We will be keeping ourselves awake with green tea and gymnastics in the corridor. Two essays, one jog up and down the staircase, another two essays; that would be a good routine, guaranteed to—

Oh, snap!
There is someone upstairs in the dome!

I’m as scared as I would be if I saw two thugs walking toward me in a deserted alleyway. This huge old building sitting on a hill, with its dome designed to look out into the night sky, empty except for some light and some voices at the very top, under the roof, one of the highest points on campus. The immediate associations from films we have seen are inevitable. A chair rocking gently, the creaky voice of an old woman talking to her son.

Every step I take will go
clackety-clack
on those stone tiles. I take my shoes off and creep up the first couple of steps of the spiral staircase, my shoes in one hand. A male voice and a female voice. It may simply be some students who’ve picked the lock and think it cool to have midnight sit-ins under the dome. Who else
could
it be, really?

The vandals!

In a flash I feel more protective of Ardrossan than ever before. My vigilante spirit awakes, and I have to hold on to the grubby metal handrail to stop myself from charging upstairs and demanding to know, like Malvolio in
Twelfth Night
, whether the intruders have no wit, manners nor honesty, to gabble like tinkers at this time of night. My compromise is another two steps, but as I creep up, my heart stops—the female voice grows loud enough for me to distinguish words.