The Englishman (49 page)

“Here?” he whispers. “You want me here?”

His hand slips into the hot, slick cavity high up between my thighs, almost but not quite reaching my center. Still I am hoping he will nudge my legs apart to give him more scope, but he does not. I must do it, offer myself to him in the silvery darkness, hiding against the mattress. I moan when he slides into me, when he bites into my neck, plays with my ear. His loins feel so smooth and strong against my naked butt. The bed sags. He has taken the weight off his elbows.

This time I come against his hand.

When I wake again, my mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow. I was dreaming I was in an exam situation—fully clothed, at least—and I had to pick one from a table covered with hundreds of cards in wild disorder. I knew that the card held the question I would then have to answer, and I was terrified because I had not prepared myself well for the exam. Hoping against hope to pick a question I could handle, I turned one over, and instead of letters it showed an anatomy illustration: like one of Charles Estienne’s or Giulio Casserio’s naked women, this figure looked vaguely Grecian, and she was holding up the folds of her abdominal wall with both hands as if it were a frilly petticoat.

I knew without having been told that it was my task to comment on what she displayed within her abdominal cavity, but hard as I strained my eyes, I could not seem to focus on any details. People were passing in and out of the room, and I grew ever more frantic because one of them would stop by my table and demand an answer. Finally someone did stop, and I, playing for time, began to describe the scene in the drawing. But the examiner reached for the card and began to pull it out of my hand. I tried to hold on to it, but he laughed. As he laughed, I looked up, and it was Ciaran Dyce. With an overwhelming sense of defeat, I let go of the card and woke up.

I cannot do this.

I have not lost myself in him, or in
this
. But if we do it again, I will crack. He will crack me open to the core.

Chapter 27

“S
O
T
ELL
M
E
A
LREADY
,” Irene says, not wanting to know.

“What?”

“Well, so you fucked him. Now what?”

My heart begins to race, and it’s not with pleasure at the memory. We’re sitting in my former life, at Antonio’s on Amsterdam Avenue, and are each having a panini and salad.

“I did not…
fuck
him.”

She inflates her cheeks and exhales like an impatient balloon.

“Right, you had the most romantic night of your life with him. Now what?”

I don’t want to fight with Irene. I want to slap her, yes, but then we would fight, and I am too dejected to fight.

“I wanted him, that’s all. The truth is, I want him, and the truth is—”

But I’m not sure I will lay myself open to more jibes than absolutely necessary. Irene waits for me to go on, but I shake my head again.

“The truth is it was the best sex of your life. Cue violins!” There is no escaping the jibes.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“What, then? Talk
tachlis
. Why are you bent on ruining your career? I thought I’d—”

“Don’t, Reenie!” I interrupt her, almost with my hands over my ears. “Look, there won’t be any more sex, okay? I left him.”

“How do you mean—
left him?”

“Left while he was sleeping. Left for the airport first thing and bought a ridiculously overpriced ticket that someone else hadn’t picked up.”

“Wait—you did
what?”
Irene is genuinely shocked, and my throat is getting so tight it hurts.

“I panicked. When I went to his room, it was almost completely dark, but later the moon came round to that side of the building, and—”

“You had sex in the dark?”

“I made him switch off the light. I couldn’t have—I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it, with the light on.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know. But I can’t even begin to tell you how beautiful he is to me.”

“Hence the light. All the better to see him by.”

“No, because—” I’m staring at my hands shredding the napkin in my lap, and suddenly tears are dripping down like from a leaky faucet.

“Anna, for heavens’ sake!”

I swallow and swallow again, gulp down the tears, although I feel that there are many more, a torrent of salt water.

“All I could manage was sex,” I manage to say, feebly but mercifully without sobbing, “and he…I think he wanted to make love to me!”

The first time I almost called him was in the departure lounge at South Bend Airport. Since then, I have been on the brink of calling him a dozen times. But what would I say?

You are a wonderful lover, and you’re so beautiful it stops my heart. But don’t touch me again.

I knew all this before I went to his hotel room.

“You’ll never be able to stay away from him,” Irene predicts after she has ordered two shots of limoncello and made me down mine in one.

“Oh, you can rely on Giles to stay away from me. I h-have—I have h-hurt him, and now he’ll hate me!” My chin wobbles, and she pushes her own glass of limoncello toward me. “It’s like a disease!” I rally against my tears. “Foolish infatuation! You remember what Elinor says, in
Sense and Sensibility
? That it is foolish—no, I think she says ‘bewitching’—that it is a bewitching idea to think that all our happiness depends on one particular person. Jane Austen knew it was wrong, dangerous, to think that! We all know it! And yet…”

“Why don’t you come home?” Irene asks gently.

“Failure.”

“No one would think that!”

“I would. Although that place, Ardrossan, is a madhouse.”

Irene waves her hand in a gesture that says,
I told you so, but I’m not going to rub it in.
“You could even sleep with the Englishman, for a while, and then come home.”

I should be annoyed with her for advocating an affair with Giles because the inevitable fallout will set me free to move up north again. But I feel guilty for not telling her about the letter I kissed in the Ardrossan post office, so I leave it at that. There is no point in discussing an affair with Giles, because there will not be one. It may even have been necessary to hurt him. I’m not at all sure that he agreed that we were having a one-night stand, and I’m pretty sure that I would not have been able to resist him if he had continued to…um, woo me. Now I needn’t worry he’ll woo me. He won’t even speak to me.

“I haven’t seen you cry since your
bubbe
died,” Irene says after a couple of minutes.

“I know. And she had lived her life. I…not so much.”

“Now you’re being melodramatic! You have a life, you have a career!”

“I think I have a career so that I don’t have to have a life. I know this sounds melodramatic and adolescent, but—” I shrug, too dejected to try further explanations.

“You’re exhausted, that’s all. You should have rested and gone hiking for three weeks before you started that job down there, not squeezed every drop of energy out of yourself to finish your book!”

I look up at her impassioned face and smile.

“That’s what Giles said.”

Chapter 28

I F
EEL
T
ENSE
A
ND
F
ORLORN
in New York, but I dread coming back to Ardrossan. I dread it so much that the night before my flight I can’t sleep, and on the day itself I can’t eat.

Even my cottage is no safe haven.

There are traces of cigarette ash on my porch, and I sweep up a crunched-up cigarette rolling paper. Perhaps Jules was sheltering here again and tried her hand at rolling her own. Whatever, I’m not having it. Events at the Observatory—Hornberger’s intrusions into my office, Corvin’s senile guerilla attacks—have affected me more than I had thought, and my nerves are still raw. This is what paranoia must feel like. How does this ash get onto my porch? Was this towel not clean when I left, and now it’s limp and grubby? Did Karen not give me four brown eggs before I left, and now there are two brown and two white ones? There’s nothing for it; I must talk to Karen about Jules.

“So I guess you’ve seen it. I’m sorry, Anna.” Karen is crouching by the chicken pen with a pair of pliers. Sheltering criminals seems to have become second nature to me, because for a weird moment I think she is talking about the bobcat that got the chicken, and my impulse is to deny all knowledge of it.

“Well, have you spoken to her about it?” I ask.

“Lorna? No, I haven’t seen her for weeks. But I know that she is terrible tore up about it all. She does have very strong feelings about…well, everything, really, but especially moral issues.”

“Lorna? What are you talking about?” Never mind Jules rolling cigarettes on my porch.

Karen stands up and pushes her hands into her back as if it hurt her. Like this, standing straight and pushing her belly out, her pregnancy is beginning to show.

“The report in the newspapers?” Now she is as confused as I am. “I’m surprised the university managed to keep it quiet for so long; a professor accused of raping a student, and what’s more, the stepdaughter of an important man in the city—that’s a big story.”

“Was it in the papers? No, I didn’t know that! In the
Shaftsboro Times
?”

“Yes, Saturday. Everyone talked about it at church on Sunday—well, you can imagine.” She pulls a face. “People around here are very happy to suspect the Folly of all sorts of moral misconduct and liberal laxity. Oh, that sounded poetic, didn’t it? Liberal laxity. Anyway, I thought you meant Lorna. What
did
you mean?”

I can’t bring myself to mention the grimy towel and the brown eggs, but the evidence of loiterers on my porch is no paranoid fantasy, nor was the condom dangling from the tree in my backyard like tinsel from a Christmas tree.

“I’m just putting that out there, Karen. No interference; none of my business. But Logan Williams is not the best company a fifteen-year-old malcontent could keep. I wouldn’t trust him, to be honest.”

But to my surprise, Karen brushes away my concern and vaguely promises to have a word with Jules about not sitting on my porch when I am away.

“
If
she really does that. Why would she, really? She has her friends in the pickers’ camp, and they sit in their vans, or round the fire. She is allowed to walk past the cabin, you know.” Karen pushes her little finger between the jaws of the pliers and pinches it.

“Of course she is. But what I have observed is much more than
walking past
. She seems to regard the cottage as part of the farm, while I regard it as my home. I would like to be able to decide who I invite into my home, and when—even if it’s just the porch or the garden. I’m sorry, Karen, but her disregard of the fact that the cottage is my private space is not acceptable.”

“Yes, well, I’ll, um…I’ll mention it to her, and I thank you for your understanding.”

Maybe Karen’s hormones are messing her up. Or maybe I am overreacting.

“It was in the
Washington Post
!” Tim splutters into the phone when I ring him later. “That woman has totally blown the whistle on us all! Where were
you
the past few days?”

“Busy. That woman. Lorna O’Neal? Do you mean to say that
Lorna O’Neal
spoke to journalists from the
Post
?”

“Our very own Deepthroat! ‘According to anonymous sources,’ the article said. Anonymous, not so much. Unauthorized, you betcha.”

“No, wait—then how do they know it was Lorna?”