Tim Connor Hits Trouble (32 page)

‘In the days of the Wild West, cowboys used to sleep with one eye open. You know, keeping an eye open for trouble.’

Erica saw this folksy reference as an opportunity to bump him out of his serious frame of mind.

‘Tim, that’s ridiculous. It’s not possible to keep one eye open all night. At the least, they’d have to rotate eyes. Anyway, in all the Westerns I’ve seen, sleeping cowboys cover their eyes with their hats.’

Aware that he was on the wrong end of a leg-pull Tim decided to conclude his homily. ‘Alright, then but just take care of yourself.’

‘Tim, I will. How about going out for a walk now? I promise not to dive into the sea or even dance along the beach, if you promise not to give me another good behaviour lecture.’

‘You’ve got yourself a deal,’ he replied with a wry smile.

Rachel was quietly pleased that Annette was unable to make it to the modest mid-summer social get-together she had arranged for the department's women. She was getting tired of listening to Annette's endless complaints about her husband, her delight at his downfall and then her chagrin at his apparent revival. She winced at Annette's fierce cruelty: ‘Let's hope the fucker cracks up properly and gets himself institutionalised, finally out of my way. He never could cope with himself, pathetic.' She had some sympathy for Annette but to her Henry was no longer relevant. Her conflict with him had been essentially professional. Henry had to go and now he had gone: job done. He was no longer around campus and didn't even live in Wash. From time to time she did wonder whether he really was as demented as Annette believed and she herself sometimes suspected. Mad genius? She thought not, but she recognised, with a tinge of professional regret, that he had squandered a decent talent, depriving the department of a much-needed boost to its profile. She even allowed herself to wonder whether
Annette's brittle, niggling behaviour had tipped Henry over the edge. She dismissed the train of thought. It didn't matter now.

Annette's absence meant that her only guests were Erica and Aisha. And she could hardly think of Erica as a guest as she had a house key, came and went as she wished and occasionally slipped into Rachel's bed. Rachel could not help noticing though, that lately Erica's comings and goings had been less frequent and that her bedroom visits had almost dried up. She knew why, of course. It was her involvement with Tim Connor. To be fair Erica had been frank about the matter. In any case, her relationship with Erica was an open one and given Erica's youth, it was hardly surprising that it was occasionally tested. Rachel was confident in its resilience. She herself had affairs with men when she was younger before deciding that on balance they were not worth the hassle. Still, she recognised that she felt happier and more secure when there was no third party attracting or, as she saw it, distracting Erica's attention. She recalled how upset she had felt at the recent London conference when Erica had seemed to prefer Connor's company to her own. It had made her physically sick, forcing her to realise that her hard won confidence and assertiveness was not quite as secure as she liked to believe.

Erica was always guarded in her remarks about Connor but from what she did say Rachel guessed that the relationship was mainly sexual and would in due course probably smack into the buffers or just fizzle out. When that happened she intended to ensure that any of their subsequent personal problems did not spill over into work. She knew from experience that it was in the bitter break-up of a relationship that the serious trouble could kick off. She could see the appeal of Connor. He had the edgy, brooding demeanour of an outsider combined with a raw sensitivity, transparent to everyone but himself, that might attract the female romantic. In other words he was a recipe for disaster as she suspected Erica would discover. Either way Rachel
would remain on stand-by. The fact was she loved Erica. This was the one aspect of her life that she recognised as being beyond the dictates of logic. She was quite willing to play a waiting game.

In any case, on this occasion her focus was Aisha rather than Erica. She had, of course, no wish to develop anything other than a positive working relationship with Aisha, to bring her fully into the departmental ethos. She was puzzled that this was taking longer than she had expected. Not that she was dissatisfied with Aisha's work or had clashed with her in any way. Her teaching was going very well, effectively engaging the ever-widening ability range of students, and her contributions to the women's research group were impressive. In fact, Aisha was a perfect professional.

The problem, if it was fair to call it a problem, was that she seemed to be holding back from full commitment to the group. It was her apparent lack of that extra element of identification with the team that concerned Rachel. She knew that she could not demand this but it was something she always looked for and usually found in women colleagues. It mattered because Rachel wanted to create a working environment built on a spirit of collective commitment to shared projects. She believed that this was the foundation of authentic performance, of ‘excellence', rather than merely observing the proliferating regulatory rules. She could play the top-down institutional game well enough – you had to if you wanted to survive and get anything done – but it was her feminist values and purpose that made her tick.

At first she worried that Aisha's reticence was a response to her ethnic minority status: that as a British-Asian member of an otherwise white group of staff she felt inhibited, perhaps without even being aware of it. However, she had to concede that Aisha's poise in ethnically mixed social gatherings and her easy relations with a diverse body of students seemed to belie this explanation. Rachel was well aware that contrary to one stereotype of Asian women as
rather muted and subdued, many could be quite the opposite. Only the unobservant would mistake Aisha's demeanour as withdrawn or lacking in confidence. She carried herself with an unaffected dignity and sense of self-worth that commanded the attention as well as the respect of others. True she seldom showed the remarkable sparkle she had at interview but that was a one-off, winner-takes-all situation when she had to distil and dramatise what she had to offer.

Another possibility was more troubling for Rachel. Despite Aisha's commitment to the women's writing group and to feminism more widely she seemed less of a feminist in her everyday life than Rachel had assumed. It was almost as though Aisha suspended her criticisms of patriarchy outside of an academic framework. For Rachel, men's tendency to selfishness and lack of reliability were realities that women needed to be aware of as a matter of course, in a lived way. Of course, there were individual exceptions to the predictable patterns of male behaviour, mostly among gay men, but men had created a society in which they routinely practised their unpleasant and destructive behaviours.

Yet, if anything, Aisha seemed to prefer the company of men to women. She certainly spent as much time with them as with women colleagues. This was particularly unwise given the men immediately around her. It was understandable that she might seek informal advice and support from Howard, although even his track record was hardly pristine. In her early days at Wash he had even tried it on with her. More worryingly Rachel had also noticed that Aisha quite often socialised with Tim Connor and, when he was still around, even Henry. From time to time she had seen Aisha and Henry in quite animated conversation. Again it was tricky to bring this up with Aisha, but it puzzled her. As a black feminist Aisha was a potential star in the kind of department Rachel wanted to develop. It was important that she was ‘one of us': Rachel could have kicked herself as the tainted cliché came to mind.

Aisha's own thoughts could hardly have been more
different from Rachel's as she turned into the pleasantly secluded mews where Rachel's house was situated. She had just got the news from her doctor. She was pregnant and healthily so, as far as could be assessed at this stage. She had immediately called Waqar. His great, laughing roar of delight almost blasted her ear off. Unlike the day she was appointed to Wash, he had honoured his promise to return early from London to celebrate the news. He stopped only to buy her and ‘both juniors' something ‘special.' Aisha had pretended to dissuade him from ‘making a fuss' but was secretly pleased. She knew her husband's priorities and children were top of the list – along with her, of course, but in his mind the two were inseparable. She wasn't too happy with this fusion but she was sure that a second child would strengthen their marriage. Not that she had any intention of reducing her work and career commitments. On the contrary having delivered for Waqar in his terms, she was well positioned to insist on her own. She might even persuade him to take a part-time course in Social Science. His views had always been quite progressive for a self-made businessman and recently he had begun to take a greater interest in Aisha's work. Their partnership was renewing itself, more mature, more equal and more genuinely shared than when they had first got married. She was glad that she had kept her faith in Waqar, not that it had ever really wavered.

High on cloud nine, she found that she had breezed past Rachel's place. It was easily done. The house was a mid-terrace bijou property, beautifully presented, but petite enough for a daydreaming mother-to-be to miss altogether. Aisha backtracked a few yards and pushed open the wrought iron gate to Rachel's garden. The flowers were in colourful early summer bloom almost bursting out of the neat beds Rachel had planted. Their abundance reassured her that she had chosen well to buy Rachel a small gift of dark chocolates of the high cocoa content Rachel loved rather than yet more flowers. Pulling the chocolates out of her bag it occurred to her that if she held them conspicuously in front
of her Rachel might be deterred from delivering her usual crunching hug. It didn't work. As soon as she answered the doorbell Rachel was squeezing the breath out of her much slighter colleague.

‘Lovely to see you. You look so well, positively blooming. Oh!' as she released her, Rachel noticed the now severely dented box of chocolates, ‘Are those for me? Oh dear. I'm sorry I…'

‘Don't worry, they'll still taste the same,' smiled Aisha.

‘Absolutely, we'll eat them this afternoon.'

As they were speaking Erica appeared at the garden gate.

Rachel prepared to launch herself again.

Unlike Aisha, Erica usually welcomed Rachel's hugs but she quickly intercepted this one.

‘Rachel, just a kiss on the cheek please. I'm feeling slightly nauseous.'

Rachel settled for kisses all round and then led the way into her living room. She gestured Aisha towards one of the armchairs of a dark-leather suite, expecting Erica to join her on the sofa. Erica went purposefully to the other armchair.

‘I see you're rejecting me, then. What have …'

‘Not at all, I really am feeling nauseous,' Erica interrupted her.

‘I'll get you a glass of water, then.' Rachel had now twigged that Erica was genuinely a bit off colour.

Sipping the glass of water, Erica soon announced that she felt much better. As the three women settled down their conversation turned, as is often the way in single-sex groups, to the other sex. Henry was the prime candidate, his recent adventures, still the hot topic. They each rehearsed their views on his dismissal: Rachel reiterated her opinion that his sacking was necessary but insisted that she had no wish ‘to dance on his grave.' Erica also took the view that Henry had to go, but felt it would have been better to wait until the end of the academic year to fire him – granted that it had now become difficult to know if the academic year ever did end. Aisha agreed with Erica, adding that the possibility
of keeping him on next year could also have been left open should he become more settled. Rachel's response was to insist that it would be much better to start next year with a clean slate. In any case, that was Howard and Geoffrey's view: ‘the patriarchs have spoken,' she quipped.

‘That's rather disingenuous of you, given your part in his downfall,' commented Erica.

‘We really don't want to be wasting time and energy on the Jones problem next year,' Rachel repeated, ‘and with him out of the way we're in an excellent position to motor on, especially if we get a new appointment, perhaps in the gender area. From now on we should look forward.'

Keen to avoid further discussion of Henry, Rachel suggested that it was time for tea and cakes. The whole idea of this get-together was to cement relationships, not to argue over dead meat. She had a gourmet selection of teas and had made a chocolate cake for the occasion that she was eager to sample herself. Having sorted out the tea preferences she rotated off to the kitchen.

The two younger women looked at each other and grinned.

‘She loves doing the maternal bit,' said Erica leaning forward towards Aisha. ‘Aisha, it's so good to see you away from work. Somehow we never seem to get the chance to spend any time together.'

‘I know, I've had the busiest year of my life. I think we mostly teach at the same times and when I'm finished I'm usually off to the library or to pick up Ali.'

‘We must make more time for each other next year. Things should be a little easier for you.'

They continued to chat for a few minutes until Rachel reappeared, barely coping with the huge tray she was carrying.

Erica and Aisha quickly rose to assist her, Erica taking the enormous cake from the tray and Aisha removing a jug of hot water. Her load suddenly lightened Rachel wobbled backwards. As the crockery cascaded around the tray,
she managed to stabilise herself by plumping down on the couch. The moment of near disaster passed and the three women swiftly set things out for tea.

Rachel was soon in charge again. Having offered her guests a choice of tea-bags, she began to cut the cake.

‘I'll cut up the whole thing, knowing you, Erica, you'll want a second piece. I don't know how you manage to keep that figure of yours, the amount you eat. Aisha I think you might be back for more as well.'

‘Rachel, no, actually I don't think I can eat any cake at all. I seem to be feeling slightly sick again,' said Erica looking awkward.

Rachel put the cake knife down and, hands on hips, stared almost belligerently at Erica. ‘No cake! That's not like you. What's wrong with you? I don't think I've ever seen you even slightly off-colour. If I didn't know you better I'd think you might be pregnant.'

There was a moment of silence for which the word ‘pregnant' is the best description.

‘I am,' said Erica.