The Englishman (34 page)

He is a big man in a brown blazer and a white-and-orange tie who made sure to position me in such a way that he has the sun in his back and I have to squint up at him; the oldest trick in the book.

“Well, sir, intimidating is a very subjective term, isn’t it? Some people might experience your behavior right now as intimidating.”

There is no way I can stand up to this man. He is literally standing on his own turf, in front of the Harrison laboratory of biochemistry. His family has probably been coming to Ardrossan since it was founded, rising in the world as the university rose in it. I don’t believe for a second that Madeline, who has linked arms with her mother and her older sister like girl football players in cashmere, has felt intimidated by me. I will believe, however, that she has felt pissed off and bored.

“Sir, I’m sure you are aware that since Madeline is of age, I am not allowed to discuss her academic concerns with anyone but herself. If she feels unable to appreciate my class, she may say so at the end of the semester in her evaluation of the course. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I wish you an enjoyable weekend.”

All the seats in the book store are already taken when I squeeze in. Tessa waves at me from the second row and shrugs; I signal that I perfectly understand that she was powerless against the two middle-aged women sitting next to her. The bar tables holding cheese, crackers and white wine in coolers are as popular as the chairs, and one back of a curly head looks very familiar.

“‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker,’” I whisper into his ear.

“Jesus, Anna!” Tim gasps. “Hey—glad you could make it. Will you stand at the back with me and be bitchy?”

“I came here with no other object in mind. Actually, that’s not true. Can you reach one of those clean glasses? I need a drink.”

“Wassup, lady?”

“I’ll tell you later. Who’s on first?”

I get a very straight look from the baby blues over the rim of a wine glass.

“No, I mean—” I have to giggle “—is Giles on first?”

“Naturally,” Tim says. “Oh, no—assholes incoming.”

Dolph Bergstrom and Steve Howell, both in orange football jerseys, are edging their way into the store. They seem to be scanning the small crowd, whispering to each other, and I look away a second too late. Steve sees me, nudges Dolph, and both quietly start sniffing. Scrunch up their noses. Sniff again. Inflate their nostrils. Steve gets out a hanky, fluffs it up in a theatrical manner, and pretends to blow his nose.

“What the fuck are they doing?” Tim frowns.

I turn my back to them, because I am actually close to tears for a moment.

“Adding insult to injury. God, they really are assholes!”

“Why, what—”

“Shh. I’ll tell you later.”

The manager of the book store comes on and introduces Giles, whose legs are very long and awkward as he steps onto the stage, and who looks so English in his light gray suit, blue shirt, and burgundy-and-blue-striped tie that the cold hand crushing my heart now digs its fingernails into it.

Tim bends closer to my ear, and I can hear his glee through the whisper.

“The tie…”

Everyone is wearing white and orange and sporting little plovers everywhere, and Giles-sodding-Cleveland comes in his Cambridge college insignia?

Gotta love the man or hate him.

The audience loves him. He keeps his talk about the book short and humorous, belittles the prize he won for it by pointing out that it is awarded by a small group of Scottish academics who otherwise occupy themselves eating unspeakably horrible food, being insufferably arrogant about the English education system, and doing unmentionable things to their sheep. He stresses the good account to which professors put their sabbaticals but advises university provosts to conduct themselves more in the manner of Renaissance monarchs.

“King James I got the first volume of a
History of the World
; several treatises on politics, warfare, trade and economics; and piles of poetry out of Raleigh by the simple expedient of locking him into the Tower of London for a dozen years. And with that thought…”

Amid the laughter, a second chair is placed on stage for Loren Bonner, host of the ABC Shaftsboro morning show, and the cameraman crouches next to the stage to get a better view.

“Can’t she see that she’s making him cringe?” I speak through clenched teeth, unable to avert my gaze from the spectacle of Giles crossing his arms and legs into knots of discomfiture as Loren sets to work on him.

“She’s enjoying it,” Tim murmurs back. “He has brought out the praying mantis in many a female. My grasp of heterosexual coupling behavior is tenuous, but I think they sense something in him that needs a strong woman.”

“Not all strong women are dominating bitches.”

“Granted, but he attracts the bitches. And they snap at his soft tissue till he yelps.”

With a tiny jerk of his chin he points at Loren, who is leaning in and has wrapped the ringed fingers of one hand around Giles’s wrist. Her long fingers disappear in the gap between his naked wrist and the cotton of the shirt; the claws of her rings must be pressing into the skin of his chest.

If this were a scene in
Ally McBeal
, I would be Lucy Liu, spewing fire. I am the dragon, Giles is the virgin, and I’m saving him from the clutches of the Wicked Witch.

Giles has rid himself of the transgressing fingers by gesturing with one hand while keeping the other wrapped firmly around his waist, hugging himself. Because he is so articulate, speaking in beautiful, well-turned sentences, and because he holds his long limbs in that blue cotton and gray wool so very still, apart from that expressive hand, he does not come across as uneasy. Reserved, yes, that goes with the accent, introverted, intellectual, but also amusingly self-deprecating, which Loren doesn’t get at all. I think it is perceptive of Tim to have picked up on the vulnerability in Giles that alerts the praying mantises and the dominant bitches.

So where is the reason he has not told me he and his wife split up? Is she here?
Who is she?
I daren’t look around to see whether I can identify a woman in the audience who is watching him with that look of tender amusement that I am trying so hard to keep from my own face.

Jenna, the fan from the graduate seminar, has a question.

“I read on the IMDB website that the book is going to be turned into a film? That is so awesome!”

“Thank you—yes, since the hype of all things Tudor seems to continue, the BBC is thinking of jumping on the bandwagon and doing something similar. A mini-series, something along those lines. I say
may
.” Giles gives his answer in as neutral as voice as possible; not arrogant or condescending, just as if he were genuinely uncomfortable with it. Tim whistles under his breath.

“The sneaky fucker,” he murmurs. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Tessa, too, turns round to us and makes the face of an astonished cartoon character. I roll my eyes and shrug back.

“That sounds wonderful,” Loren says, picking up her cue. “Is that something you will be involved in? Will you be writing the screenplay yourself?”

“Lead actors?” one of the ladies next to Tessa butts in. “Perhaps you might convey the preferences of the reading public to the casting officer!”

Giles smiles at her. “Well, what are the preferences of the reading public?”

This leads to cheerful palaver among the audience as they debate the question. The bookstore manager and her assistant appear next to Tim and me.

“I thought this one would be a dull Brit,” the manager says. “If I’d known he’d charm rings around them, I’d have put him last!”

I have to hide the delighted smile on my face from the store manager on my left, from Tim on my right, and from Dolph and Steve across the room, so I check my phone.

Know that bust of Abigail Adams?

“Oh, my God! Tim, I have to go. I think my friend is here, my friend from New York!”

I jostle my way out of the store, as eager and excited as if I were a freshman and my parents had come on a surprise visit. The campus is very crowded now; the smell of tailgate barbeques is wafting through the air (I fight down the memory of rotten fish), in the distance the band is playing the Ardrossan song; someone seems to have brought a banjo. I run across Library Square, and the tall figure with the glowing red hair sticks out a mile.

“Reenie!
Irene!”

She sees me, and I could cry, I am so relieved to have her here, a familiar face, someone who knows me.

“But, Professor Lieberman! This is so sudden!” She grins and catches me as if I were her little sister. I know I am overreacting, but I can’t help myself.

“Oh, Ashley, take me away! I’m sick of it! I’m tired of it! Oh, Ashley!”

This makes us both laugh, and although she is playing it cool, I can see how pleased she is that her surprise was a success.

“That bad, huh?”

“No, no, it isn’t. Well, today is—wait, what are you doing here, anyway? You should have told me, I could have—”

“Didn’t know till Wednesday. Listen, I don’t want to rain on your parade, though. What were you doing when I burst onto the scene?”

“Never mind—you’re here! You’re here!”

We get one or two odd looks, Red Irene in her dark teal skirt suit, strutting at five foot ten inches in her heels, Anna-Banana in her white Ardrossan U t-shirt. We are both used to it. I can persuade her not to go back to the book store—I wouldn’t mind her meeting Tim, but there are other dangers—but to stroll along the river promenade toward the stone arch bridge instead.

“
Gee, Anna, you were right. This place is beautiful!”
I cue her.

“Well, it ain’t too bad.” She nods graciously.

“Thanks, that’s all I wanted to hear. So how
are
you? How is everyone? What are you doing here?”

She is accompanying Jacques on a business trip to Washington. He flew in on Thursday and has meetings all day today; she took the first flight to Shaftsboro this morning and will join him there. I guess it would be ungrateful of me to be disappointed that she has not come down merely to see me.

“But tell me how
you
are!” she exclaims. I am always a little suspicious when Irene starts exclaiming, because it is often a cover for something that is troubling her. But I know she isn’t ready to tell me, and there is too much to see and too much else to talk about.

We amble up the hill toward the Observatory, and I decide not to tell her of the fishy events of this morning. I am still too upset and confused to talk about it to an outsider, and to one who I know will tell me she told me so. I don’t need that. I show her round the Observatory, including—with bated breath—the fourth floor; and she does not comment on the fresh paint and the bouquet of solvent intermixed with Eau d’Herring. The garbage cart is gone, too, so there is nothing that needs to be explained away.

“What’s up there?” she asks, pointing at the stairs to the dome.

“The old observatory, but it’s not—actually, why not. It’s pretty cool. Come on.”

Making light of the fact that the key to the dome is kept in a box of tissues in front of it, I unlock the door for her. The dome is flooded with sunlight, beams of dust are dancing in the air, and the old glass panes distort the light so that the air itself seems to be whirling.

“Wow…” She turns on the spot, her head tilted back.

“I know. I wonder why the college hasn’t spruced it up, as a museum or something. These things—” I run my hand along one of the telescope stands “—must be a hundred years old, maybe more.”

“This is a place for secrets.”

“Well, Reenie, funny you should say that…”

Of course she relishes the story about Selena and her night-time lover.

“He’s bound to be an absolute assclown,” she says definitely. “And she’s writing her thesis about the devil? Bound to be the guy. Anyone devilish among your male grad students? Unless she’s making it with a professor, too.”

“Oh, come on. They can’t all be having affairs with professors! Anyway, Selena isn’t—”

I had been wandering aimlessly around the room, curious to see what it was too dark to see when I first came up here. There are two folded rugs on the old sofa; they look new and smell new, too. And on the little washbasin there is a small wash bag with a toothbrush sticking out of it. A bar of soap, and a disposable razor blade.

“Someone sleeps here?” Irene asks, looking over my shoulder.

“Possibly, although this doesn’t look like—eew!” I drop the razor into the washbasin.

“What?”

“This was not used to trim a beard,” I say through clenched teeth. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Blood?”

“Naaah…don’t ask.”

At the bottom of the stairs, as if to illustrate my story, Selena O’Neal is staring up at us, white as a sheet.

“Dr. Lieberman! I thought—”