The Englishman (35 page)

“Hmm? You thought I was someone else?”

“I thought there was no key to the observatory!”

“Oh, but everyone knows where the key is kept!” I say airily. “Even I do! Sorry, Selena, could we just get past?”

The hallway is empty, except for Natalie Greco, a couple of girls I don’t know, and Mrs. O’Neal. They are viewing what is left of the evidence, and one of her friends sees me and whispers something to Natalie. She casts me a quick glance, undecided whether to address me or not.

Mrs. O’Neal has no such qualms.

“And what do you make of all this, Dr. Lieberman?” she demands of me.

“I’m sure my guess is worse than yours, Mrs. O’Neal,” I reply smoothly, glad that Irene has disappeared into the ladies’ room.

“Someone hates this poor girl! As if she hadn’t been through enough!” She bends down to me and lowers her voice. “Father’s dead, you know, he was much older than Natalie’s mother. She—the mother—has taken up with a new man. He’s a bank manager in Shaftsboro. Plenty of money, but—well, you can imagine.”

“Was her father a clergyman?” I ask on a hunch.

“Yes, why?” Lorna appears not to have been told about the quote from Leviticus on the wall. “Yes, he was a church minister, a highly respected man, and a very charismatic preacher. Lung cancer, bless him.”

Natalie has made up her mind to step in front of me. All these towering females, I’m getting tired of having to look up at everyone.

“What do
you
have to do with this?” she blurts out.

“Nothing at all, I would have thought. What do you think?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what to think!” She flicks back her long mane with a sound that is close to a “Humph!” Natalie, I am beginning to suspect, is a little annoyed with me for stealing her limelight.

“It must be two different…things.” Selena has followed us and offers her opinion, possibly to erase my impression of how flustered she was just now. “Unconnected. It’s possible.”

“I don’t see how they
could
be connected,” I point out.

“You think it’s a coincidence?” Mrs. O’Neal asks, still belligerent.

“That seems equally unlikely, I agree.” My non-committal friendliness frustrates them, but I will not be drawn out.

“What was all that about?” Irene murmurs when we are walking down the stairs.

“Hate graffiti on Natalie’s office door this morning.”

“Which one was Natalie? She’s the one who says she was raped, right?”

“The one in the sexy dress. Selena’s the one in the attic.”

“Odd. I would have said the other way round.”

It strikes me for the first time how odd it actually is. Ninety-nine out of a hundred uninvolved bystanders would guess that Selena was raped and Natalie is having clandestine sex in unconventional surroundings.

“That dowdy girl, the one who has sex in the observatory, has fallen for a very bad man.” Irene clicks her tongue. “She would never have given in to the nice boy in her poetry class. She hates herself for what she’s doing. She’s has self-hatred steaming out of every pore.”

“You can tell that at a glance? You’re quick.”

“I’m a family lawyer. I have to be able to tell that sort of thing.”

“She does hate herself. Harms herself, too, she scraped her knuckles—wait. Oh,
wait a minute!”

I run back up the stairs, four flights, and arrive panting on the fourth floor. Selena is standing alone in the corridor looking down toward my office.

“Selena, would you mind—” I hold out my hand, and because I am so rattled and out of breath, she obeys automatically and gives me hers. I clasp her wrist tightly so she can’t pull back when I push up the long sleeve of her tunic, all the way up over her elbow. When she sees what I’m doing, she struggles and her wrist slips from my grasp. But I have seen what I thought I would see.

“Dr. Lieberman! What are you doing?” Mrs. O’Neal hovers in the door of her daughter’s office.

“Nothing,” I say, still heaving. “Selena?”

Selena’s face is like cast iron. “It’s nothing, Mom.”

“I worry about you, Banana,” Irene remarks when I pick her up on the second-floor landing.

I’m too upset to trust myself to speak. In the great hall a tour of the campus is just about to start, and a crowd of people is milling about, waiting, looking at the paintings by students from the art department that are shown here because of the light. A tall, blue-shirted figure stands out, and every fiber in my body rushes toward him.

“Wait a sec, Reenie.”

“What, again? Okay, I’ll get myself a coffee over there.”

“Giles—”

His face lights up when he sees me, and through all my shock and anger I am desperately sad that this smile doesn’t mean what I thought it meant.

“I know this isn’t the right moment, Giles, but could we—sorry. I should first say—you were really good, earlier, in the…in the bookstore. Very funny.”

“Thanks. Sometimes Americans like me.”

Last time I looked into his eyes, it was to offer him sex. I think he remembers that.

“A BBC series, huh?” I have to say something, or we’ll stand here forever, gazing into one another’s eyes.

“It may all come to nothing.”

“Tim was a bit miffed he didn’t know about it.”

“He called me a sneaky fucker. To my face.”

“Yes, to my face, too. But I wasn’t going to repeat that.”

“Not to hurt my feelings?”

God, I wish he’d stop smiling at me like this!

“Actually, not to get Tim into trouble.”

“Speaking of trouble,” he says, turning serious.

“Giles—could we talk about Selena again? You know the other day some windows were smashed up on the fourth floor?”

“Yes, Tessa said—”

“That was Selena. With her naked elbow, like this.” I punch the air with a sharp, horizontal jab.

“She did
what?”

“And there’s more. She—sorry, I don’t want to pour this out here and now, just to ask, can we talk about this? Soon? And there’s more, still—not about Selena, but—well, I’m—”

“Flapping.”

“Yeah, I’m flapping.”

And I’m so in love with you, and I want to tell you my worries and hear what you have to say, and I want to share my life with you!

“Talk now. I have time till the concert.”

“No, I can’t. I—have a friend waiting.” I will not introduce him to Irene.

“Right, then, let me know when it suits you.” Withdrawing almost imperceptibly.

“I will, thanks. I appreciate it, Giles!”

“Who is that?” Irene, a cup of coffee in hand, is staring past me across the crowded room as if she had seen a ghost.

“Who is who—oh. The gray-haired guy?” But she knows me too well. If anything, my harmless reply makes her more suspicious.

“Yes, the gray-haired guy! Are you sleeping with him?”

I know my face is flushed with the wine and the rush and the mayhem, but at this, my temples start throbbing.

“No! And will you
please
keep your voice down!”

Irene sets her jaw, but goes on staring.

“Who is he?”

Flustered, I turn my back to Giles, who is doing the agreeable with a group of parents.

“Giles Cleveland. Stop interrogating me, Reenie. And stop staring at him.”

“And who is Giles Cleveland that I have heard so little about him? Nothing, to be precise. Zilch. Zip. Nada.”

“A colleague.”

“I met him before.” I can hear the bombshell in her voice.

“Don’t be absurd. You can’t have.”

“Excuse me, but I have. Here, I can produce evidence: he has a thin scar that runs from the corner of his eye to his ear, like a crow’s foot, only longer. Sort of like a professor of literature who was in a bar fight. Sexy.”

“Yeah, I know.” My own voice sounds hollow to me. “Okay, tell me—where?”

“At that conference about whatever-it-was in London. When we were supposed to be on a girls’ trip around Europe and you schlepped me to school because you had to give a paper.”

“Anglo-American Writing Between the Wars?”

“That’s the one. I’d been sitting next to this cute guy—chap, don’t you know, something of a dish,” she says, imitating a posh English accent, “who was really impressed with your paper. Don’t you remember? I tried to point him out to you afterward, but he was gone, like Cinderella, and didn’t even leave a slipper.”

“That was Giles?” My stomach churns as if I had eaten rotten herring for lunch. “What was it he said? Something—wasn’t it something about young academics giving better papers than the big names?”

“Yeah, I outed myself as a totally clueless tourist, and he laughed at me for wasting my time at stupid conferences instead of going shopping or sight-seeing. Wise guy. Sexy smile, though.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Well, he said that your paper was the only worthwhile one he’d heard that conference, and that one could tell that you loved what you were talking about, unlike the old codgers who just do it because they have to and bore everyone stiff.”

My fingers are trembling so badly I have to set down my cup for fear of spilling the coffee.

“He said that?”

“Yes, I definitely remember he said ‘bore everyone stiff,’ because that made me wonder whether he’s the type who goes—what do you call that? Conference hopping. Mind you, he wasn’t hitting on me or anything. I sort of expected him to hit on you afterward, but apparently his pumpkin was waiting. Speaking of which,
is
he married?”

“Divorced. But—”

“And is he hitting on you now? Come on, I could totally see that he is!”

“Irene, he doesn’t even—I’m not even sure he—where are you going?
Don’t!”

She storms past me, and before I can wrestle her to the ground and kick her under a table, Giles—who is momentarily between parents—has seen us. I think it is fear that I see flickering in his eyes for a few moments, and I don’t blame him.

“Hey, there!” Irene charges at him, hand outstretched. “Remember me? I guess not, why should you? London, the July before last? A conference on—what was it again?” She turns to me, pulling me closer by my sleeve.

“Queen Mary, Lockkeeper’s Cottage. I do remember,” Giles says, and I can tell that he does. A line from
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
comes into my head. Sir Clifford, her husband, says something—can’t remember which scene this is from—
with the suavest English stiffness, for the two things often go together
. I doubt Irene can tell, but Giles feels extremely uncomfortable, either because she is doing her loud-mouthed New Yorker, or because she caught him being complimentary about me. I can’t even process that yet, on top of all the other events of the day.
Giles knew me?
Well, not
knew
, but Giles heard me give a paper, in London, last year? So when the search committee shortlisted me, and when we first met and I was so insecure because I thought he hadn’t been involved in my appointment, and when he was a condescending jerk about my work—he knew all along who I was?

“We weren’t introduced at the time,” he says to Irene. “Better late than never, eh? I’m Giles Cleveland.”

They shake hands, and before she can make things worse, I butt in.

“Giles, this is a
yuchna
from the planet Klutz, who is impersonating my friend Irene from New York.”

“Is that so?” He smiles blandly, but I can tell he is mustering his defensive troops. “And from that far away it is you’ve come to see Anna at Ardrossan?”