The Englishman (4 page)

Katie promises to ask Mrs. Forster to call me back, which she does forty minutes later.

“Your office is full of paper, dear? But that can’t be—oh. You’re in four twenty-nine? That’s—wait a moment—” She covers the mouthpiece with her hand and goes on speaking; then she is back, a little rushed. “Actually, Dr. Lieberman, Professor Mayfield was wondering whether you could spare her a few minutes.”

“Now? I’m in the middle of cleaning out my office, only I don’t know what to do with—”

“Anna.” Professor Mayfield takes over the phone. “I saw you drive in earlier. I don’t mean to inconvenience you, but if you have a moment, this would be a good time to meet Giles.”

Oy gevalt!

“Gosh! Thanks, Elizabeth.” I was given to understand that I might address Professor Mayfield by her first name but to play it by ear with the other senior professors. “That’s very kind of you, but I just came in to bring some books and clean the place. I’m not—dressed.”

But Elizabeth has no time for time-wasters. When I arrive at her office two minutes later, a short, sharp double-take indicates that I have committed my first
faux pas
. I bite on an impulse to protest—after all, she told me to scrub my office, and now she slaps me for not doing it in silk and cashmere? Vowing never again to assume that I am off-duty when I am on campus, I slink along the hall in Elizabeth’s wake.

Giles Cleveland, of all people. I had planned to be introduced to Giles Cleveland when I was at my most professionally professorial, cool and well-groomed. I would have my contacts in and
not
have my hair in an untidy ponytail and most probably dirt under my fingernails, wearing jeans, a little t-shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. But unless I want to risk alienating Elizabeth Mayfield, I cannot dive into an unlocked office or the ladies’ restroom and pretend I was swept up by Martians. It takes us about three minutes to reach the garden end of the hallway where Cleveland has his office.

God give I don’t have sweat marks under my armpits.

“Giles would have been on your search committee, of course, but he’s just back from a sabbatical.”

Oh, great. The man is probably peeved as hell that he didn’t get to select the newbie in his subfield!

“Actually, Elizabeth, before we go in—I have a question about my off—”

“You know he’s English, don’t you?” she says before she knocks once on the half-open door and pushes me in.

Now what the hell is
that
supposed to mean?

I wonder whether in a decade or two my sparsely-furnished little office will also look more like a living room than a workplace. Cleveland has a shabby but comfortable-looking leather sofa in his, a big rug on the floor and lots of picture frames on the walls. I am too nervous to take them in properly, but there is a beautiful set of medieval illuminations. And nature—water, mountains, trees. Perhaps Scotland, or Canada.

“Giles, I’ve brought our new assistant professor to meet you. Anna Lieberman.”

“Professor Cleveland…”

In a split second I debate with myself whether to extend my hand or not, and decide on a gut feeling that I will not. Reserve seems a better strategy here than familiarity. He sits at his desk—not a particularly tidy desk—and looks reluctant even to rise from his chair, let alone to shake my hand. Eventually he does get up, and my heart beats faster, nervousness becoming tinged with alarm. Tall I knew him to be, but up close his six-foot-something towers above my five-foot-four like Gandalf over a Hobbit. A Celt, with light eyes and dark hair gone prematurely gray. There is nothing remarkable about his appearance, except that a tall man, halfway between gangly and gaunt, will always look good in light brown cotton pants and a blue shirt, open at the neck and rolled up at the sleeves. Next to him I look like a complete klutz. I am furious that I have allowed Elizabeth Mayfield to put me at such a disadvantage.

I nerve myself to smile up into his face. His features are lean and regular but not wildly handsome, and there is nothing charming about him at all when he looks down at me—
on
me, too—with that particularly English brand of polite dislike and says, “Dr. Lieberman. How do you do. I was…told of your appointment.”

The sound of that well-educated, faintly nasal English voice hits me in the middle of my body and contracts the muscles of my womb in a spasm of response.

I feel a spate of explanations and justifications rushing to my tongue. I want him to know that although I have been foisted on him I am sure that we will get along well, that I will do my best to honor the confidence the college has shown in me. But I say none of these things. Could not, because my tongue is in knots, and do not want to, either, suddenly, because he is so pompous and unwelcoming to a junior colleague who really cannot help the situation at all.

“How do you do, sir.”

He blinks, as if taken aback. “I assume you’ve been well looked after?”

“Yes, sir, thank you.”

“Right. Well, then…”
Get the hell outta here, bitch
. He does not say it out loud, but I can see the words forming behind his forehead. Evidently Cleveland hasn’t been told yet that he is to play Mother Goose to this gosling.

“Can you spare a few minutes, Giles? The least we can do is make sure Anna has a smooth start, and I was hoping you’d show her the ropes.” There is an edge in Elizabeth’s voice now, a note of admonishment, which he hears and, to my surprise, heeds. He comes down from his high horse and suddenly looks very much younger. He looks at a loss, almost vulnerable, with his soft gray hair curling in wisps behind his ears, and his broad, lean, boyish shoulders.

“By all means. Dr. Lieberman, won’t you sit down?”

It is all I can do not to clutch Elizabeth’s skirt to beg her not to leave me alone with him, but she closes the door behind herself and we are alone. In very non-companionable silence. He points toward the sofa, which has clearly been chosen to make people feel small. Its seat is very deep, so I can either perch on the edge, looking nervous, or sit back, in which case my feet will hardly touch the floor and I will look like a five-year-old. I choose a mid-position, put my bunch of keys on the low table in front of me and hope Cleveland will not see my hairy little Hobbit-feet.

He stands over me, reluctant, a very remote fortress, like Isengard.

“Would you care for a cup of tea? Hot tea, I should say.”

Actually, I want to get this over with as quickly as possible. But you only have one chance to make a first impression, and when a senior colleague offers you a drink, you accept. Besides, I have to acknowledge the gesture of an Englishman making an effort.

The water in the kettle on the sideboard apparently just boiled, so he is busy about the cups and teabags for no more than half a minute. Half a minute during which I can surreptitiously observe him. His hands and feet—his feet naked in leather boat shoes—are a fraction too large for his body. He must have been one of those loosely-knit youths who are a little embarrassed about shooting up to their full height. Middle age has tightened his frame, but I can still see the awkward boy in his hands and shoulders.

“Do you take sugar? I don’t have any artificial sweetener, I’m afraid.” He still has his back turned to me, but I am sure that this is a jab.

“No, just milk, thank you. I suppose you’ve got milk?”

At this, he casts me a quick, suspicious glance, and I can’t suppress a smile and a shrug. Can’t live in England for years without picking up some habits.

“Sure, I’ve got milk,” he says and surprises me by answering my smile. It is a smile of extraordinary attractiveness—bright, young and full of humor.

Just as well, perhaps, that it doesn’t last.

He sets down our two mugs—I get a fine bone china one, with a William Morris motif and a chipped rim—and swivels his chair by a hundred and eighty degrees so that he faces away from his desk and toward the sofa.

“Are they making you go to those torturous New Faculty Orientation events?”

One ankle on the opposite thigh, he balances his mug somewhat precariously on the inside of his knee.

“Yes, that’s next week, spread over two days.” “Torturous” is probably the correct word, but it wouldn’t do for me to agree with him on this.

“Well, if there’s anything of that nature—where to find things and how to work things—ask the other people on tenure track, or the TAs.”

And don’t come bothering me!

“I hear ya.”

“Do come to me,” he goes on, glaring at me with those light eyes, “if you ever run into trouble with senior colleagues or admin.”

“Well, sir, funny you should mention th—”

“You have settled your teaching, haven’t you? Be an unfortunate omission if not, seeing as term starts in a week’s time.”

“I was asked to teach the first-year course on English Comedy this semester, and—”

“Have you made any changes to the syllabus?”

No idea whether yes or no would be the right answer, so I answer truthfully.

“Just a few.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I prefer
The Rivals
to
The School for Scandal
, but—”

“What about
She Stoops to Conquer
?”

“I’d rather not.” Too late I notice my blunder.

“Oh, I think stooping is all right,” he says dryly. “As long as you don’t bend over backward.”

The shock of hearing him play on my inadvertent reply sends a hot flash through my body; it might have been a joke, even an inept attempt at flirting. But his voice is cold with hostility, and the image so violent; he isn’t inviting me to laugh with him at all. In one fell swoop he has put his sharp pencil right on the sore spot of every young, tolerably attractive female academic—in fact, every young, tolerably attractive female professional: the implication that we achieve success by way of the casting couch. And the really devious thing about it is that it is usually no more than an insinuation, which you can’t defend yourself against without coming across like a defensive, neurotic cow.

So I keep my mouth shut and try to weather the insult like a flower weathers a storm: hunch up and wait till it’s over. And then a really strange thing happens: While I am pretending that I am merely an uninvolved bystander, my eyes stray over the objects cluttering the table in front of me: a pile of unopened letters, a pile of new books (probably review copies sent to him by hapless postdocs), my bunch of keys with its Royal Shakespeare Company dangly, my half-empty mug, his mug, with his hand…with his fingers…with his long, hard fingers wrapped round it. He grips it more tightly and the bones ripple across the back of his hand, the muscles in it flex, and so do the muscles deep in my belly, the muscles that sooner or later atrophy in any academic environment. I stare at his hand, and my body seems to anticipate its touch, and to anticipate it with keen impatience. Like a bolt of lightning that hits me in the solar plexus, I suddenly feel those hands on my skin, clasping my waist much more tightly than the tea mug, bending me over backward on this shabby leather sofa…

I am reeling under the sudden conviction that all this talk—all these words between Professor Cleveland and myself, cagey and aloof on both sides—is completely beside the point, because what we really should be doing is—unthinkable. Except I
am
thinking it.

I look up quietly, my mind in a whirl, and I say nothing. I don’t know what to say, and Cleveland almost apologizes. His eyes flicker and the groove between his eyes deepens—the pained look of a man about to apologize.

Of course he doesn’t.

“What’s—” He clears his throat. “What’s your take on Renaissance drama, Dr. Lieberman? I suppose you are a feminist new historicist?”

“Of course I am. Isn’t everybody, these days?” I can be blasé, too, if sufficiently provoked.

He is still staring at me, and I could swear that there is a grin lurking in the light eyes, and my chest expands in anticipation. But then he hides his face behind his mug, and I feel as if he had pushed me away.

“Only I’d like to coordinate my course requirements with my colleagues, particularly with Tim Blundell, who will be teaching English Comedy II next semester. I’ve no mind to become the Nasty Newbie by making them read or write more than they have to in other first-year classes, or—”

“Didn’t Hornberger take it upon himself to instruct you in this matter?”

“No, why—”
I am saying the wrong thing here, aren’t I?
“—why should he?”

“Well, you would naturally turn to him, seeing as he’s our new chair.”

“No, sir, I didn’t.”

“Christ, woman, will you stop calling me sir!”

Driven by my particular demon, I grin manically and do my Marcie-and-Peppermint-Patty impersonation.

“Yes, sir.”

He stares at me, still caught up in his irritation, and inwardly I quail at my audacity.
Play with me!
I’m nice! Come out of there and play with me!