The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story (3 page)

Afterward, the department chair, Michael Fitch, took her to lunch at the faculty club. It gave her a chance to calm down, to ask, “Is Brendan Thorne teaching here? I met him once, years ago. I thought I recognized him at the back of the room.” Yes, he was a tenured professor in the department. It seemed impossible.

Finally, Michael shook her hand. “Well, you know how this goes,” he said. “Through the department, up to the dean, and so on. You should be hearing from us in a couple weeks. But as far as I’m concerned you’re a very strong candidate.”

So that was good, wasn’t it?
she thought as she walked back to her car. Where Brendan Thorne was waiting.

“Evelyn Morgan,” he said. “You know you’re going to get this position, don’t you? Not because of your qualifications, although they’re quite adequate, but because the department is desperate to have someone in place by September.”

She didn’t know what to say.
I’m sorry that, when you kissed me years ago, I ran away screaming. I have a tendency to do things like that. Just ask my shrink
.

“I know, it’s been a long time. More than ten years since I met
you in Clews, I’m thinking. Shall we start over?” He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Morgan. I’m Brendan Thorne.”

She laughed with relief and shook his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Dr. Thorne.” Thank goodness. No apology would be necessary.

“I didn’t tell you, did I? That week, when we met. I was at Oxford, too, studying toward my doctorate.”

“Oxford!” she said, astonished. “You knew I was at Oxford. Why didn’t you tell me?”

He laughed. “Oh, I was enjoying playing the local boy. You know, when I was a kid, I used to go out with the fishermen. I thought I wanted to be one myself someday. I was never interested in running the bookstore. My father was disappointed, but I couldn’t stay in Clews. Too much of the world I wanted to see. Although I never thought I’d end up at Bartlett College, in the crown colony of Virginia.”

“Why did you?” He seemed incongruous here, with his accent, although it was less pronounced than she remembered. The brown hair was still thick, although there were a few gray strands running through it, and the green eyes still crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

He was smiling now. “Fate, perhaps? Allowing us to meet again? Listen, assuming you get this position, which you will, can I take you out to dinner to celebrate?”

“Um, sure.” She smiled back. That was one thing they’d never done together in Clews: go out on an actual date.

“Terrific. I’ll see you in September.” As she drove back to the Richmond airport, she felt a sort of warm glow.
Why does the thought of having dinner with Brendan Thorne make me so happy?
she wondered. And yet it did.

E
velyn rented a house in Coleville, where Bartlett College was located. Slowly, she settled into her new routine. It was completely different from teaching at Columbia. In the mornings, she woke to the sound of birdsong and drank her coffee on the front porch. Then she drove to the college. No subway, no picking up a quick breakfast at the diner. At Columbia, her students had come from New York, California, Singapore. Here they came from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee. Many were the first in their families to go to college. She liked their accents, their earnestness.

Her office, in a building that had stood there for a hundred years, looked out onto a courtyard with an ancient oak tree and a lawn where undergraduates made out. She looked at them wistfully. It had been so long since she’d been romantically involved with anyone. There hadn’t been anyone in her life, not in a serious way, since David. She’d been so focused on writing her dissertation, on being a good teacher, that she had entirely neglected that part of herself. Perhaps she shouldn’t have? She thought of brown hair and green eyes that crinkled at the corners. She’d been at Bartlett for a week but had heard nothing from Brendan Thorne.

“Dr. Morgan, I presume?” And there he was, standing in her doorway, dressed in corduroys and a Fair Isle sweater, looking not much older than he had in Clews. “I believe I invited you to dinner.”

“You did. And where in Coleville are you planning to take me?” She had learned on the first day to pronounce it
Covil
, although it still confused her that Talliafero Hall, where the English department was located, was pronounced
Tolliver
.

“Surely you jest, my lady. I’m planning on driving you to Richmond, so we can have dinner at a proper restaurant, not the Pancake House. And, by the way, would you do me the honor of
signing my copy of
Green Thoughts
?” He held out her book. “I had no idea you’d written this, E. R. Morgan. Every third poet is named Morgan in Cornwall. I bought it when it was first published. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for years.”

She laughed. “Well, thanks. I’m glad you like it.”

“What does the
R
stand for?”

“Rose, actually. It was my grandmother’s name. Terribly sentimental, isn’t it?”

“It’s rather nice,” he said. “Evelyn Rose. It suits you.” She blushed and opened her book. On the flyleaf she wrote,
To Brendan, with love. Evelyn
. And then wondered what in the world had possessed her to write something so personal. But it was too late now. She’d written it in pen and couldn’t simply cross it out.

“How are classes going?” he asked.

“All right. I like the students. They’re quieter than the ones at Columbia, less willing to raise their hands. I feel as though they’re afraid they’ll give the wrong answers.”

“Yes, as if in literature there were any right answers.” He sat on a corner of her desk. “You know, I worried that you’d find it boring here, Evelyn from Boston by way of New York. But Bartlett seems to suit you.”

“It’s … comfortable. And I’m not just teaching literature this semester. They’ve given me an advanced poetry workshop.”

“
Advanced
being a euphemism for ‘slightly less terrible than what you would get in introduction to poetry.’ ”

She laughed. “Well, I did get a poem on plumbing yesterday. It rhymed, too. But what I wanted to say is, I’m going to try writing poetry again, myself.” She felt almost uncomfortable telling him. No one, not her parents, not Professor Lambert at Oxford, not her
adviser in the doctoral program at Columbia, had ever encouraged her poetry.
Fanciful nonsense
, she still heard in the back of her mind whenever she tried to pick up a pen and write a poem.
Why don’t you focus on the real world?
Those were the words she’d heard all her life.

“That’s terrific!” said Brendan. “You know, you have a rare and genuine talent. I wish I had your ear for rhythm. It would have helped me with my translation of
The Tale of the Green Knight
.”

“Your translation?”

“The one nobody heard about. You know what Oxford University Press told me? There wasn’t enough scholarly interest in such an obscure Cornish poem. Three years later, they published the translation by Thomas Holbrook.” He grimaced. “Well, at least my translation got me out of graduate school. And to Bartlett.”

“Why Bartlett?” she asked.

“The same reason you’re here, I imagine,” he said. “Where are you going to find a tenure-track position for a medievalist nowadays? You were offered this position because old Randolph died, and I’m not joking. Literally keeled over in the lecture hall while his students were taking their final exams.”

She couldn’t help laughing. “I know, that’s not funny, is it?”

“Not if you’re an undergraduate who needed to do well on the exam. Are you teaching today?”

“Not today,” she said. She’d come in to grade the first papers of the semester, which she usually enjoyed doing. They would tell her whether the students were really paying attention and what she could expect from them in terms of run-on sentences and dangling modifiers. But suddenly she felt like getting outside, seeing something other than the four walls of her office. It was a warm fall day. She could see students playing Frisbee on the lawn.

“Come on, then! Play a little, Associate Professor Morgan!”

She straightened the papers on her desk, hovered indecisively for a moment, and then followed him out.

W
hat she realized, as the semester progressed, was that she had never been in love before. Not really.

On most days, she and Brendan ate lunch together, either in the faculty dining room or, when the weather was fine, outside in the courtyard, watching the undergraduates make out. They laughed, but the sight hurt her, like a tightness in her chest that kept her from breathing freely. How long had it been since she’d kissed anyone?

Brendan took her to Richmond, to what was supposed to resemble a genuine English pub but served spareribs and key lime pie. On the tables were candles in mason jars. In their glow, he looked more tired than she remembered. “How is your father?” she asked.

He smiled wryly. “Dad died years ago. Keeled over right in the bookstore while cataloging a new shipment of nineteenth-century medical textbooks. Not a bad way to go, all in all. But I sold the store. I couldn’t stand to go back there after that. And what was I going to do with it, anyway? I had just graduated and I’d already been offered the position at Bartlett.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, remembering how he had looked there, that first day in Clews. Standing among the shelves. “That must have been difficult. You know, I tried to send you a letter there once. I guess it never reached you. Maybe it was after your father died.”

“It must have been. I would certainly have written back to you, Evelyn.”

“Then, you weren’t angry?” she asked. It was the first time they
had referred to the incident, and she wasn’t quite sure what to say about it. Should she explain about the hallucinations?

“I could never be angry with you.” He reached across the table and took her hand. It was all right. She wouldn’t have to say anything. After all, it had been more than ten years. Dr. Birnbaum had assured her that, as she grew older, the hallucinations would go away. And they finally had. She didn’t want Brendan to think he was getting involved with a woman who had mental problems. If he even was getting involved; she still wasn’t sure. Although, he was holding her hand. If she decided that she should tell him, eventually … well, then she would. But it didn’t have to be tonight, did it? There was plenty of time.

After dinner, they drove to the Museum of Fine Arts. They wandered through the galleries, looking at the Tiffany lamps and second-rate Sargents. They stopped in the gift shop, and he bought her a notebook with a picture of John Waterhouse’s
The Lady of Shalott
reproduced on the cover. “For your poetry,” he said. She smiled and squeezed his hand, then thought,
What am I, fifteen?
But that’s how he made her feel.

They drove back to Coleville in silence. He walked her to the front porch and said, “Evelyn, is it safe to kiss you? I’ve been holding off, you know. Worried you would run away again.”

It was the first reference he’d made to what had happened in Clews so long ago.

“I’m not going to run away,” she said. “I promise.” He looked particularly handsome under the porch light, with his hands in his jacket pockets. It was October, already starting to get cold.

“All right.” He smiled, put his hand on her cheek—how well she remembered that gesture—and leaned down. His kiss was soft,
tentative and then, when he realized that this time she wasn’t going to run away, passionate, insistent.

“Do you want to come in?” she said, breathless.

“Yes, I want to come in. Most definitely.” He followed her up the stairs, and she realized what she had never seen before, that her bedroom looked exactly like the one at the Giant’s Head. Why had she bought those white pillowcases, that white coverlet overfilled with goose feathers? That small table and the painting of a fishing boat?

“Evelyn,” he murmured, his lips in her hair. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.” She felt his mouth on her neck and then moving down to her shoulders, his fingers unbuttoning and then pulling off the blouse she had so carefully chosen as attractive but not too sexy, because she hadn’t wanted to seem
too
eager. Although she wasn’t thinking about that now, didn’t care what he thought, just wanted it to continue. So this was what it felt like to be made love to. She had never experienced this—not with college boyfriends, not with David, not with the few dates since David that had ended back at her apartment in New York. Brendan touched her with a combination of passion and expertise that she had never imagined existed. It was as though his fingers knew exactly where to go, where to find the secret places of her body, how to tease and caress her so that she cried out in surprised pleasure, wondering at the revelation. Afterward she slept, deeply and without dreams, curled up against his back. For the first time that she remembered, the world felt right, as it should be. As though everything were in its place.

A
fter that night, they were a couple, although not as far as the college was concerned.

They never sat together at faculty meetings, never touched while they were on campus. It wasn’t something they had agreed to, but Evelyn had no desire to become the object of gossip, particularly among her students. She was starting to get to know them, especially the ones in her poetry workshop. She was starting to get a sense for who would go on to graduate school, who might actually become a poet.

The most promising was a girl named Anne Harringon, who was applying for a semester at Oxford, as Evelyn had long ago. “Just avoid Gregory Lambert!” she said while they were discussing the recommendation Anne had asked her to write. “ ‘Fanciful nonsense,’ that’s what he called my poetry, back then.”

“What a jerk!” said Anne. “I’ll definitely avoid him. Professor Thorne told me to take Hilary Margrave for Victorian literature and Emmet Dowson for poetry. They sure have weird names at Oxford, don’t they?”

“I’m glad you talked to Professor Thorne,” she said. “He knows more about Oxford than I do.”

“Yeah, he was really helpful. My sister told me to take his Chaucer class. She was here when his wife died.”