The Professor (5 page)

I know it is.

I know it the way I know myself.

I know it no matter how hard he tries to hide it.

‘Better,’ he says, so tightly I hear the Ts squeak.

‘You think so, Professor?’

‘Yes, indeed I do, you know I do.’

‘What part did you like the best?’

‘You wish me to tell you. To tell you in detail.’

He sounds hoarse when he says it.

He won’t look at me.

‘As much detail as you can stand to give me.’

‘That implies there is a point where I could not.’

‘We all have our limits. You said it yourself, about your boundaries.’

‘They are not the same thing, as I believe you are aware.’

‘It might seem so, Professor, but I promise you, right now I am barely aware of anything at all.’

‘You have no thoughts, then. About any of this. No concerns of the smallest kind.’

‘What could I possibly be concerned about? All of this is above board, isn’t it?’

‘Absolutely and in every way.’

‘Your conduct is unimpeachable.’

‘It will never be otherwise,’ he says, and in the moment I even believe him.

‘Then tell me what you think,’ I say, expecting nothing.

And instead getting the most telling words of all.

‘That these sessions are over. Goodnight, Esther.’

My first thought is to go to him after class and talk about it. I even imagine it will be easy. He won’t object to a conversation. He loves conversations. And I know him well enough by now to have some idea how to frame it. I will point out that never meeting again suggests there was something wrong with us doing so. He will never in a million years admit that there was something wrong with us doing so.

Nothing could be easier, I think.

Until I actually try to do it. I pick my moment carefully, waiting for everyone to leave before I even stand. Then, when he begins to wind his watch, I get up. I start down the steps in the middle of the hall, quick and sure at first but then gradually less so. By the time I get to the bottom my feet are lead. My heart is hammering, and after a second I understand why.

He is deliberately ignoring me.

The opening I thought would be there is closed. The shades are drawn and everything is locked up tight – and it stays that way long past the point I can bear to stand here. A minute is too much for me, but I try to make it. Two minutes is agonising, yet I keep hoping that he’ll turn his head. At the very least I expect him to answer me when I say ‘Professor’, but that only makes his continuing silence more humiliating. Suddenly I see everything in a new light: me the gauche student clamouring for his attention.

Him indulging me patiently, calmly.

He probably knew about the bathroom, I think.

And then I have to leave immediately, before the thought takes hold. I can already feel it trying to wear a groove in my mind. If I stay another second I will forever be falling into it, and I just can’t afford to let that happen. I already struggle to speak to people. I worry that a simple hello is unwelcome. Anything more and I will dwindle down to nothing, and I so badly want to have some part of myself left for the years ahead. How will I ever have a best friend if I don’t? How will I take a lover?

These were all things I had planned, for some distant but bright future. And they can stay that way, if I just pretend all of this never happened. He didn’t read my work. He never said I was better than I ever believed I could be. All is as it was before:

Quiet, and calm, and blank.

My real life can still begin.

Or at least it can, just as soon as I take my story back.

I decide to do it on Wednesday, when he attends the monthly staff meeting. That way, there is absolutely no chance of him stumbling across me. No chance of him catching me in his office. And though he will know I went in there and took my story back, I think I can live with that. He’s never going to talk to me again anyway, so he won’t be able to mention it. He can’t possibly call me a thief, because those words are mine. They should be returned to me. He has no right to keep them when it was all just nonsense.

So this seems like a pretty reasonable plan.

It just doesn’t feel reasonable, while I’m busy doing it. 

Every shadow makes me jump, as though I somehow stumbled into a horror story without knowing it. Any moment the ghost of Professor Halstrom is going to drag me down to hell, for daring to trespass on the house he haunts. Either that, or I’m about to be arrested. Why does it feel so much like I’m about to be arrested? His door isn’t even locked. I go in without a problem and find the story within seconds. Now all I have to do is turn around and go back the way I came.

God, I wish I had gone back the way I came. If I had it would have been fine. But for some reason I linger. I run my gaze over all the things I will probably never see again: his desk, the window with the curtains made of books, the labyrinth I never got the chance to get lost in. Everything so still and quiet without his presence – as if no one has been in here for years. I expect a cloud of dust to go up when I touch one of the books he must have been reading, and instead get a flurry of pages sliding to the floor.

Pages that I think are courtesy of a broken spine, until I see the edges of them all jagged and obviously torn. And then of course there is the writing on them, so fine and neat you could almost believe it was printed. 

Almost, almost, but not quite.

Not when there are so many crossings out. I pick the stack up and see dozens of thick black lines through perfectly reasonable sounding opening paragraphs. More than reasonable sounding in fact. Most of them are technically excellent in every possible way. Each one is carefully crafted and painstakingly developed. There seems to be no reason why he would abandon so many before getting anywhere with any of them. Or at least, that
would
be true.

If they were not quite so unspeakably dull.

Oh, the sheer
lifelessness
in most of them. The lack of passion or feeling or even wit. That deadly tongue of his is in none of them. That spark I saw in him when he raged about the life I was settling for is completely absent. Every passage is perfectly done.

But dead as a party in a nunnery.

So dead I can hardly stand to read them. I put them down after a moment – though putting them down doesn’t feel like enough. I have to hide that I ever saw them, so he never has to know I did. I need him to never know I did. Not when they’re like this. Not when he behaves as though he barely cares about anything, then cares so much that he would try a thousand times and fail a thousand more. All these attempts at something, I think, and then feel this ache start in the centre of my chest.

It eats me up inside, until I ease the pages back into the book they were ripped from.

The book that has one page still attached. Everything else has been torn out, but this last one remains. It held on through whatever storm made him discard all the rest. And, even more jolting, it has writing on it. Words that haven’t been crossed out – and I see immediately why not. This piece is different. It succeeds where all the others fail, a gut punch where they barely make contact. It burns, this passage; it could have been written by another person altogether.

Even the handwriting looks different.

Still recognisably his, but
different.

As though he wrote it in a terrible gush. Nothing could check it. No power of his could stop it. He tried to hold back, I bet, but couldn’t. I even know why he would want to hold back from this, the one success amongst a life of failures: it begins with a girl who has
my name
. Esther, it says, Esther, and what follows is so torturously lovely that I cannot take it.

He never thought of her by those two sharp syllables. Instead she was Hetty, always Hetty, as though she had become his most beloved and familiar friend without her being aware of it. They had spent summers doing delightful things and long evenings as intimates, sharing anecdotes and stories and hopes and dreams in a way he had always suspected true friends did. Of course he could not know for certain; he had never possessed the happy talent of drawing anyone close enough to find out what happened beyond casual acquaintance. And now here was she: sharp and sly and strange, so full of her own secret worlds that they spilled out in the most mortifying of ways.

He should have hated her beyond all reason.

Instead he thought of her with a constancy that unmanned him. Her great dark eyes were his companion, her words always lingering at the edges of his thoughts. He heard her in the night as he laid his head down: is that what happened to you, Lukas?

And in his head he answered as he had not in life:

Yes, God, yes, oh, I can hardly believe what I have become.

I stop there. I have to stop there. The stinging in my eyes is so bad I can barely stand it. Something is trying to burst out of me, through doors I thought I had sealed shut. I want to scream, but when I try to, no sound comes out. Instead it just jams itself up against the bars of my teeth. It shoves against the hand I put over my mouth.

And that is how he finds me.

‘Miss Hayridge,’ he says, only when he does it means something else than it did before. He calls me something that is three times removed from where he would most like to be. All this time he said those two words, and inside he was saying my real name. Because it is – my real one, I mean. Hetty is clearer and truer to me than anything else I’ve ever known.

As though we
did
live a lifetime as friends, without either of us knowing it.

Or having the pleasure of it.

‘This is not what it looks like.’

‘Such a cliché is beneath you.’

‘I don’t think it’s a cliché if it’s the truth.’

‘And I suppose now you will tell me how it should be so. You fell into my desk and the book flew into your hands. You only came here to retrieve a missing shoe. The devil made you do it; you did it on a dare. Come, tell me, am I close yet? Close enough?’

I draw myself up before I answer.

I have to. He seems even more enormous than he did before. He swells to fill the doorway, all shoulders and arms and an expression I can only call
dark
. Like a thunder-filled sky, I think, that I have to somehow batten against.

‘Nowhere near. I wanted to know your company one last time, and reading your words seemed like the fastest way. I was right too: it was.’

‘So when you are denied something, you force it.’

‘No. No, never. I don’t think I’ve ever dared do anything like this.’

‘Yet here you are, not only forcing but prying. Intruding on my most private and personal thoughts.’

‘That was never my intention. How could I have ever known? How could I have known that you thought this way and felt like this? I believed you were an immovable block.’

‘I am, Miss Hayridge, and would thank you not to insinuate otherwise.’

‘But you just said that – and you write that –’

I hold up his words as proof, when my own words start to fail me.

Though he snatches them from me before I can get anywhere.

And he says things. Oh, God, the things he says.

‘Never speak to me about what you think I have written. No, indeed, let me correct myself. Never speak to me again, at all. There is nothing that we might now say to one another. No words that can possibly repair the damage you have done. If I were to never see your face again it would be too soon. Now go. Get out, before I decide that is not enough and have you suspended from Pembroke.’

Of course I go to protest as soon as he’s finished. Of course I do. But when I open my mouth to do it no sound comes out. All the air I would usually use to tell someone how terrible they are being deserts me. It falls down inside all the cracks he just opened through my body – some of them small and slight and labelled something like
two years’ work down the drain.
And some of them so enormous I can scarcely contemplate them. There is a giant black hole in the middle of my body, called
you mean nothing to him
.

And it gets bigger and bigger until everything I could possibly do here is sucked inside it. I can barely work up the will to leave under my own steam, but that’s OK. That’s fine, because just as I am wondering if I might have to stay here for ever, rooted to this one spot in his office, he flings open his door. He flings it open, then steps aside for me to go through it. No welcoming arm archway for me this time. No sense that I could change things, if only I knew how.

The only option is to do what I do then:

I run.

I feel sure that I head towards my flat. But after half an hour of near-running in the pouring rain I have to face facts: I am nowhere close. In truth I have no idea where I am. My head is so full of the conversation I just had and the words I read that there is no room for things like
directions.
There is only a tiny little space labelled
aimless walking to nowhere
, and so that is what I do. I cross stretches of grass I don’t find familiar and pass buildings I don’t know, until finally I come to a narrow stretch of dark road that could be just about anywhere. It could be some nightmare created by my own diseased mind.

Not that it really matters.

How can it matter, in light of what happened? He wrote all of those staggering things about me, and in return I violated his trust. I stole his most private thoughts from him, and can never now return them. He will remember for ever, just as I will. I suspect nothing on earth could make me forget. It will be on my gravestone:
she did a humiliating thing when she was twenty-two. 

And I’m still doing it now.

When I see a car slicing through the sleet-thick streets, I let myself imagine for a moment that it is him. As though somehow he was in the wrong, and could ever think he has to make amends. For what, I sneer at myself, for what? In fact I’m still sneering when the car slows to a crawl beside me. When I hear his voice, as unmistakeable to me as the sound of my own breathing.

‘Esther,’ he says, and I know as soon as he does.

I know that he would have preferred to use ‘Hetty’. The realisation steals over me like a blanket drawn to my shoulder while I sleep. It weathers any doubts I have and spits in the face of every harsh word he said to me in his office. He meant what he said in that book. He meant that I am his friend, even though he is scarcely capable of having them. That we have some sort of connection, bruised and forbidden but still stronger than anything I’ve ever known.

So strong it makes me stop and turn even though I think I shouldn’t.

So strong that his tone is
imploring
when he speaks again.

Imploring, for God’s sake.

‘If you must insist on going around without a jacket on, at the very least let me drive you home. You have to let me drive you home, please.’

I think the ‘please’ is the thing that hurts my heart.

Well, that, and the look on his face.

I see myself in his eyes, shivering wet, lost and adrift.

‘I never meant to do it. I never meant to do any of it.’

‘We can talk about that once you are safe and warm.’

‘I think we should talk about it now, before I get in.’

‘Will it really matter if we do? Will it change anything?’

‘No. Yes. I don’t know what there is to change, Professor.’

‘It sounds to me like you think I do. But I know my way through whatever maze we find ourselves in with no more clarity than you, and even fewer tools to navigate it.’

‘It never seems that way, Professor. You seem well equipped to me,’ I say, and know as soon as I do that he is going to respond with something shocking or stunning or not what I’m used to from someone like him. I feel it coming, like a storm hanging tense in the air long before it arrives.

And then the thunder rolls and the lightning flashes, and still I am not prepared.

He looks away at nothing for a second, then turns to me and tells me this:

‘Because you only see the walls around the city, and not the burning ruins within.’

After which I completely fail to say anything in answer. I think I’m breathing too hard to. All I can manage is climbing into his car, then very little after that. Mostly I just sit in silence and let him do more things that plough a furrow through my feelings. He puts the heater on in the car, and touches each vent so they are all aimed at me – without having to be asked or prompted. He goes beyond anything I would have asked or prompted. My hair is wetter than it was after the last rainstorm I got caught in, and he hands me a clean white handkerchief to dry it with. I see the monogrammed initials and feel my eyes sting again.

But bite it back when I think of how silly that is. To be tearful, because someone did the smallest kindness for me. Other people probably have friends handing handkerchiefs to them all the time. They might not be monogrammed, but I don’t know what being monogrammed matters.

I only know that it does.

That when he says, ‘Forgive me,’ the space where my heart is supposed to be fills up. Maybe not with love or affection or anything like that, but certainly with something. A sense that maybe, just once, something can turn out wonderful. That better world we spoke of is just a hair’s breadth away, and I can get to it if I hold my nerve. If I can just say the right thing in response.

Only I don’t need to. By the time I think of it, the car has come to a stop – and not outside my flat.

He has brought me to his home.

He leads me up a thin and winding path to the only place for miles and miles around, dark and tiny and so oddly built I can only imagine it served some other purpose once. It was a lighthouse, surrounded by oceans made of grass. When people rode out across them it lit the way, to stop them falling off the edges of the earth.

It certainly seems like you could, when you look out over it all. The only thing I see in the distance is an ancient tree from a horror movie, complete with branches that almost make an unearthly face. I look away as soon as it starts to appear, but doing so barely matters. I still have the house itself to cope with – and it does take some coping. The door is so little he has to bend almost double to get through it. Both of us have to turn sideways to make it through the hall and into the main living-room space. And even after we have, everything seems very closed in and near suffocating.

Quite possibly because of the seething heaps of books spreading outwards from every orifice the house has, or the furniture that barely belongs in such a narrow place, or the fact that he is so enormous he would make anything look small. But more probably because of the silence that then stretches between us. He just stands there looking at me, as though he expects me to speak first. He wants me to somehow address all of this, even though I already have. I told him why I read his work. It was obvious what made me go out into the rain. There is no mystery on my end and a great sprawling world of it on his. At the very least I expect him to say what made him bring me here, yet he seems either unwilling or unable.

Both of which make me wonder if it was anything innocent at all.

Right now, with him staring at me like that, it almost looks like the dark and secret other option. The one I won’t think about, or entertain, or imagine as true unless he specifically says in the most explicit terms possible. I need graphic language and diagrams; a map to the middle of his desire. Without it I can only stand there and stare back, in the most stifling silence of my short life. After a while I start to flounder in it.

When he finally speaks it feels like being saved from drowning.

‘I expect you would like me to explain.’

‘Where did you want to start?’

‘With the words I wrote, of course.’

‘Not the fact that you brought me here.’

‘You think that is in need of explanation?’

All it takes is an eyebrow lift for me to see what I should have done before:

He didn’t realise what it meant to do this.

He even backs it up with the most reasonable words.

‘I can assure my motives were beyond reproach. You saw the roads – I could barely see my way. It seemed prudent to stop and take shelter before I ran us off the road or worse.’

Yet somehow they don’t quite seem reasonable at all.

‘And that’s all there was to it, then.’

‘I struggle to understand how you could ever think otherwise.’

‘There are a lot of reasons why I might think otherwise.’

‘Name them, then. Say them aloud and let me dispel your concerns.’

‘I said reasons, not concerns. But I can see why you would use that word.’

‘And what would that reason be, exactly?’

‘Because you often turn something innocuous into something wicked.’

‘Oh? You know my mind so distinctly, do you?’

‘Of course I do. You are me ten years from now.’

I don’t think he means to pause then. I can see his next words on the tip of his tongue and in his eyes, oh, those eyes. How could I ever have thought they were a featureless lake? They are the opposite. You can read almost every thought he has on the glossy surface of his gaze, from the shock when I say what I just did, to the softening light in them after he accepts it.

Almost like it pains him, I think.

Though he tries to cover it over.

‘I scarcely know what to say to something so absurd. You will never be me.’

‘Because I’m common as muck and simple as anything?’

‘No, because you have twice the talent I ever had.’

Those eyes flash even brighter now, even fiercer.

He even takes a step towards me, and when he does I have to fight not to step back.

I have to fight to answer him with just as much conviction.

‘I don’t know. That writing seemed beautiful to me.’

‘The only reason it seemed beautiful was because you believed it was about you.’

‘So you want to claim it wasn’t. That is how you are going to play this.’

‘There is no playing of anything. The whole thing is simply a coincidence – I knew another Esther once, and took to calling her Hetty. That’s really all there is to it.’

‘I see. Well, that does clear a few things up.’

‘I was hoping it would.’

‘I mean, obviously I feel foolish now.’

‘No, no, you really shouldn’t,’ he says.

He even has the audacity to wave his hand, magnanimously.

‘I really should, if you honestly think I would just believe such a bald-faced lie. In fact, that lie is so bald-faced I feel no fear whatsoever in poking fun at it. Honestly, I’ve never heard anything like it in all my days, and my father once stole my shoes to sell for booze money then told me fairies did it. Could you not at least have gone with “your name suited a completely random character”?’

He tries to smother it, but I see his reaction to that plain enough:

Panic, that I know his game. More than panic, really.

It looks more like I stabbed him in the stomach, and now he has to worm his way out of dying.

‘Right now I wish I had. Perhaps then you would not persist in thinking I have formed some sort of attachment to you. I mean, really, The very idea is absurd beyond belief.’

‘That story didn’t seem to suggest it was absurd.’

‘That story was a mistake. An accident. Something I should never have written. I should never have done any of this at all – I could see where it was headed yet told myself you were not so silly as to think it could ever come to anything.’

He even manages a sneer at the end of that.

One good enough to make me answer more angrily than I intend.

‘So that’s what I am now, silly?’

‘No, not entirely not precisely –’

‘Just a little lovesick idiot.’

‘I would never do you the discourtesy.’

‘So weak I can barely –’

‘
Hetty.
’

He says the word in a fury, half-insensible of it. But then he seems to realise – he seems to hear it the way I just heard it – and his whole face changes. It sags right through the middle as if all the muscle behind suddenly dissolved. His lips part around the ghosts of words I’m sure he would have loved to say, if he hadn’t made that one mistake.

Only he did make it, and now can never take it back.

He called me the thing he claimed was for someone else, and with all the conviction of someone who has long wanted to. All the time he was calling me Miss Hayridge, and this was most likely in the back of his mind. This little name that you would call a friend, a beloved friend, a person you cared for deeply.

Good God, he cares for me deeply.

And looks as stunned as I feel to realise it. The idea might as well have socked him in the gut. He doesn’t speak for a full minute, and in the minute he can hardly seem to breathe. His gaze seems to plead with me, but I hardly understand what it pleads with me for. He has to know I can never let him out of this now. I am bound so tightly to it I could use a chainsaw and not get free. My heart is galloping in my chest, and all in anticipation of what he might say now. More lies, I think.

But I’m wrong, oh, I’m wrong.

‘I…I have no more idea than you do. If I did, if I had, if I suspected for one moment that I was failing so terribly in my duty I should never have let myself entertain it. I could not have borne it. I, a man ten years your senior? Not only so separate from you in age but in station – I am meant to be your guide, your mentor, and instead I take advantage of you in the most grievous way possible.’

‘Oh, yes, calling me your beloved friend is grievous indeed.’

‘You need not be so generous with me, Hetty. I know full well that you are sensible of everything this means. It puts into question every single thing I have done since I first sat down with you in my office. It says plainly that I should have stopped the moment I realised what you had written, yet I did not. I thought myself so above any feeling towards you that I could withstand anything, any temptation, any conversation about such things, but I was wrong. Do you not see that I was wrong? They had me all this while,
you
had me all this while, and I simply fooled myself into believing otherwise. I have fooled myself into crossing every boundary and breaking every rule, and the worst part is I would do it all again.’

I wait to answer him. I wait, until the effort it takes to say those words has slackened its hold on him. His chest stops heaving and his expression loosens a little, from a kind of fraught and strained thing to near relief. It has been weighing on him, all of this, and now he can relax a little. He can hear me calmly – or as calmly as he is capable of.

And even calmer than that, if I can just say it right.