The Professor (6 page)

‘Do you know how rare it is for me to find anyone who wants to talk to me for more than five minutes? Who actually cares enough to come after me when I am distressed? Who would break rules for me and cross boundaries? There are people practically forced by law to like me who can barely hide their contempt and confusion over everything I am. And not in a cool way, either. Not in a good way, that secretly makes me awesome or superior. In a terrible, soul-crushing way that every day makes me feel that I somehow came here from another place altogether and just can’t remember where it is or who my people were. And until I met you, I would have done anything – I would have ripped off my own skin and walked a thousand miles in a river of acid – to get back to wherever that is. But now I don’t have to, because you did all of that for me. You seared yourself raw to get here to me, and if you think I’ll ever let you go back on it you’re sorely mistaken.’

‘How can you think that? How can you say it? I spoke of the rudest possible things with a student I have inappropriate feelings for. It is abominable. I should be jailed for it.’

‘For liking an adult woman of sound mind and body.’

‘I never disputed that you are an adult, Hetty, or of anything less than an exemplary intellect. Do not play these games with me – you shall lose.’

‘It doesn’t feel like I’m losing.’

‘Then let me make it plain: this ends now.’

‘I see. So you will never see me again.’

‘I should sooner cut off my own arm with a rusted spoon.’

‘You will leave Pembroke and never return.’

‘If I could arrange it this very second I would.’

‘Just throw away your career over a crush on a person as smart as you, as reasonable, as capable of making their own decisions and knowing their own mind.’

‘Yes, yes, a thousand times yes and more.’

‘Go on then. Go. Go and leave me alone in this
hell
. Because God knows it will be now that I know I could have loved and been loved by a man like you, by my own likeness, by my own self, and instead have to watch it torn away over a fucking
technicality
.’

I honestly don’t mean to swear. Or to let that much rage and frustration into my voice. I all but spit the words, and I know the last ones come out broken in two. 

But oh, I’m glad they do.

The very second they leave my lips his expression changes. His eyelids grow heavy, his eyes shot through with sudden desperation. And then he takes three steps to me, so abrupt and aggressive I barely have a chance to register what he’s doing. I somehow think he’s about to toss me out into the street – that would be normal in a mediocre life like mine. I even brace myself for it. I think of things I can say to protest it, only to have him take my face in his two big hands and God, oh, God, oh, Lord in heaven.

He
kisses
me.

No, no, more than that, more than anything I’ve ever known as a kiss. His lips are not dry and mealy; he does not press then wait for me to press back. He draws me up to him, to the point where my feet actually start to leave the ground. Then, when that’s not enough, he does something even more stunning. He sweeps me into his arms. I feel his fingers splayed over my back, and suddenly there is air between me and the ground.

He is able to lift me.

And even more fantastically: he can do it one-handed.

It takes him almost no effort at all, as though I were made of feathers and air. But if I am, God only knows what he is. When I grasp his shoulder – more out of shock than hunger – it feels as solid as the side of a great beast. He doesn’t yield beneath my touch, no matter how much pressure I put on.

Because I do put pressure on, after a second. I need something to steady myself, to hold on to – or so I tell myself. Certainly I think it starts out that way, with me simply clinging to whatever seems sturdiest. But then he keeps on with this, he keeps on with it and somehow I seem to be bunching his jacket into my fists. My mouth is crushed against his, but it isn’t him doing the crushing. It’s me, pressing and pressing as if I could somehow get beneath his skin if I only did it hard enough.

At the very least I could burn the memory of this into me. I want to always know every inch of it, from the warm whiskey taste of him to the sense of being so completely surrounded by someone. The insides of his arms, the push of his chest, his great height curling over me…all of it, I need all of it. But only when he finally pulls away do I get why it was so important. I feel how he wrenches himself from me, and see his horrified expression, and I utterly understand what made me so desperate to feel all of this to the utmost.

He is never, ever going to do it again.

I tell myself that things will not turn out so badly. I mean, it isn’t as though he’s really going to leave Pembroke for ever because of a conversation and a kiss. That would be the height of absurdity. It would be so cruel even he could never contemplate it. And if by some chance he did, surely he would tell me first. I even imagine it: him standing beneath the arch between the buildings, waiting for me. His face closed and folded away, his big hand stopping halfway to the reassuring touch he wants to put on my shoulder.

I have decided to take up a post in Scotland, he tells me, in my head. Then I can call him a fool and he can get angry and two steps later his mouth will be on mine again. Simple, I think, and I suppose it would have been. It could have been, if it were not for one slight problem: when I return to campus on Monday
he has already gone
. I have to hear it from a girl three rows down in his lecture hall, who whispers too loudly to the boy next to her that she heard he had to do a moonlight flit, that he was in trouble with the law, that he stole something valuable.

And I think,
Yes, my heart
.

Then wince, and want to take it back. He doesn’t have my heart. I’m stronger than that, and more sensible, and less silly. A softer sort might have fallen that hard for him, but not me. Though perhaps that would ring more true if I didn’t leave the lecture hall with my heart pounding in my teeth. If I went calmly home, instead of walking faster and faster in the direction of the Haverforth building. By the time I get to the bottom of the hill I’m almost running. I shove myself up it in great strides that I’m not really capable of, and have to stop at the top to take in great lungfuls of air.

And to make myself presentable, because right now I think I might not be. My hands are shaking, despite my best efforts to keep them steady. Every bit of me feels in disarray, as though I slipped and fell into a hole without knowing it. A part of me got trapped somewhere inside, and now no matter how hard I claw I can never get back out again. I’m stuck, and I know it. Anything I do will only make it worse – like going up to his office. Oh, I should never have gone up to his office.

Seeing it stripped back to the bone is just too much to take. 

I open the door expecting the book labyrinth at least, and instead find blank white walls. Not even the shelves everything sat on; not even his big-backed chair and the kettle with the dent in the side. There is nothing, no sign of him, not even a hint he was ever here. He could have died and had a greedy relative come in and clear him out – that is how stark it looks in his office. And he did it, I think,
in one weekend
.

Whatever happened between us was so terrible he scorched the earth under his life in three days, and all without telling me. The last thing he said was that we would talk soon, and I like a fool believed him. I thought he was a man of his word, a man of integrity, but I can see now that I was mistaken. He wouldn’t know integrity if it sacrificed its life for his. He has no word, no honour. He is just a pompous stupid popinjay stuck in the past, a ludicrous relic of some bygone era where everyone forced their feelings into the tiniest of spaces. Well, let him suffer his whole life from it, I say to myself.

And after I have I feel a little calmer.

I manage to uncurl my clenched fists, at the very least.

The nails have barely even punctured the palms.

When I get the letter it means nothing to me. I leave it under a pile of junk in my pigeonhole, and never think about it again. Not even when I check my mail the next day, and see it poking out from underneath a Chinese takeaway menu like a little white tongue. Not even the day after that, when the tongue has gotten mysteriously bigger. Instead I bury it beneath more fliers, and go about my day.

I just wish sometimes that my days were more engrossing.

Professor Wingard has taken over certain classes, and he is as dull as a grey December day. His face is so blandly handsome he could model jumpers in the kind of catalogue you get through the mail. He wears
cool
clothes, and has
hip
theories about authors that were last edgy in 1979. In his lecture on Philip Roth I fall asleep, and have to be woken by the girl who runs all the committees. The one I was almost friends with, until she realised I was a weird, daydreaming clot who kept forgetting her name.

It was nothing personal, though. I always forget names. Like right now, I can barely remember what Halstrom’s was. Lewis, was it? Luton, maybe? For all I know it could have been Harold – that would have suited him, at least. All that tweed he covered himself in, and those shoes like something your grandfather would wear. Mahogany-coloured and worn with a hundred years of use, most likely worked on a million times by the only cobbler still open for business in Yorkshire.

And his
hair
.

That rich caramel hair, as fine as down to the touch. I can still feel the way it feathered against my fingertips when I grasped his collar at the nape of his neck, then slowly rougher as I moved around to his face. Where his sideburns are, I think, though I was sure I hadn’t touched him that intimately. It was just the jacket, his shoulders, his arms. I would never have dared to hold him the way he held me. I would never have dared to clasp his face in my two hands, or run my thumbs over his jaw, or looked at him the way he looked at me.

He did look at me like that, didn’t he?

Sometimes it seems the whole thing was a dream. The way I spoke to him, all the things that happened before, all those conversations…it could never have been real. In reality, I barely know how to socialise with ordinary people my own age. I go to the cafeteria and stand there with my tray, desperately searching for a place I can sit down without it seeming too much like I crave human contact. And even after I see a likely spot I still refuse to go to it. What if they all get up when I sit down?

What if they laugh at efforts I swear I never intended to make?

People usually laugh when I fumble my way into situations. Or they look at me with oddly curious eyes, as though wondering what this thing in a human suit is doing trying to pass itself off as one of them. A guy by the cake case is looking at me like that now, in fact – so intently I end up putting my tray back. I stuff my sandwich into my bag, and when I do I see someone else with that same stare. I see a dozen people with that same stare, as though everyone in the world is so keenly aware of how impossible I am.

Everyone, that is, except for Lukas.

Oh, God, why did it have to be everyone except for Lukas? That seems supremely unfair to me. If anything he should be worse than all of these people. He is ten years older than me and two hundred times more knowledgeable. He could discuss Sartre at garden parties with other elegant faculty members. People who are even further above me – who wear floaty scarves and eat nibbles and drink wine that they know how to pronounce. And then as the sun sets over their elegant soirée they do adult things.

They have affairs with each other.

They pass out on little Jimmy’s bed and have to have a taxi called.

They go to Belgium, and teach in French, and lead the sort of life I will never be permitted into. Not if I can’t even eat lunch in a third-rate university cafeteria. Not if I walk away with my eyes stinging just because someone registered how ungainly I am. I need to understand that, to forever understand that and never hope for anything more. That letter probably spells it out for me in no uncertain terms. It must do, it has to do, I should just read it and end all of this. As soon as I do I will be able to rebuild the force field around myself, free from any hopes of something better. 

There is nothing better, I tell myself, as I rip open the envelope that somehow found its way into my bag, and read the first line.

I read it:

Forgive me for leaving you, my fellow visitor from some place else altogether.

And then I stand in the stairwell next to the cafeteria, and let out one sob of relief.

I wait until I get home to read the rest of it. I have to, if I want to avoid making a scene in public. One line was enough to reduce me to tears – I dread to think what the rest of it will do. There are three pages in all, and they are crammed with his handwriting. At some points there are almost words on top of words, letters running and tumbling over other letters, and that does not bode well for my emotional state. If he could not control himself on paper, with time to deliberate and plan, I am never going to be able to do it when I read.

And I am right to think so.

In fact I think I underestimate. I see the first word and forget to close my front door behind me. I just stand there in the entranceway, reading ‘dearest’ over and over again. ‘Dearest’,
he has put, and then to follow it he decided not to bother with Esther or Miss Hayridge. No, no, he went with Hetty.

The name that is his, that he gave me, and that I gladly take.

How could I not, when this is what he writes:

By the time I finish there is a necklace of wet around my throat. I can barely read the last words; I see them through a veil of tears. That he would be so generous, when I thought him so cowardly. I called him a popinjay in my head. I imagined he cared nothing for me and for my faithlessness I get this as a reward. It seems incredible – like proof of life on some distant world. It seems unjust of me to doubt it did.

But not to worry.

I know how to set it right.