The Englishman (20 page)

“This does look like a rather blatant case of cherry-picking, Giles.”

I don’t know how Cleveland is able to withstand the combined glares of Elizabeth Mayfield and Holly Ortega, but he remains silent. Shrugs his shoulders.

“You have to count me out. I’m sorry, Elizabeth.”

Never in my life have I more keenly craved inclusion among a group of knowledgeable insiders than after Ortega and Dancey send us on our way with the strict reminder not to encourage rumor, and we disperse toward our various floors and offices. As if accidentally, I trail Tim, Eugenia, and Erin, and halfway through the great hall Yvonne and Joe Banks catch up with me.

“Anna, I’m taking bets on how long before the full story appears in the papers,” Joe says. “I give it twenty-four hours.”

We laugh, and Erin turns round.

“Nervous tension releasing itself in laughter?” she guesses.

“I need to release my tension into a beer or three,” says Tim. “You coming?”

The following two hours in the Astrolabe are far and away the most informative I have yet spent at Ardrossan, even if afterward I feel I need to take a shower to rinse all the sleaze out of my hair and off my skin.

“In a way it doesn’t matter what happened and whether it was a rape,” Tim says. “If there’s a stink and the media smell it, the damage is done. It’s very clever of Hornberger’s bit of stuff to go to the police as well as to the campus authorities.”

“
Clever?”
Erin lashes out at him. “Honestly, Tim, could you possibly be more biased in this matter? We’re talking about a
rape
allegation!”

“Or a rape
allegation
,” he points out.

I throw myself between them. “It is certain, though, is it? That it’s Natalie Greco?”

Apparently so, and Joe and Erin not only confirm that she is by no means Hornberger’s first fling with a student, but that his reputation preceded him when he came to Ardrossan twelve years ago.

“Nick may not be able to keep his hands to himself, but I cannot believe he’s capable of violence.” Joe lifts his glass to his mouth, sighs, and sets it down again without having drunk. “What do you think?”

It is no fun, gossiping about rape.

“I cannot believe even Nick is stupid enough to use violence,” Tim says.

“In other words, you believe Natalie is stupid enough to ruin her own reputation by pulling this preposterous allegation out of thin air?” Erin is a forthright woman, but I have not yet seen her so vehement.

“Why should he force one into bed if three others will hurl themselves under him? It makes no sense!”

“You only say that because you refuse to understand, Tim! Rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power and humiliation!”

“Who knows what kinds of power games Nick and Natalie had been playing,” Eugenia agrees. “If he really raped her, it was to degrade her, and to satisfy some perverse impulse that has little to do with…ordinary sexual desire. Whatever that is.”

“Well, I’ll be sorry if she turns out to be the victim in this—” Tim shrugs “—but Natalie Greco is a spoilt, manipulative little bee-yatch who brought the chair and the Dean of Studies down on me in her very first semester here because I wouldn’t accept her essays after the deadline.”

“But that doesn’t mean she would fabricate a
rape
allegation!” Erin is exasperated. “Did you never see
The Accused
?”

Was it predictable that the men would doubt the truth of Natalie’s charge against Nick Hornberger, while the women tend to believe it? Like television detectives we argue all sides of the case, and—for all its fruitlessness—cannot bring ourselves to stop speculating.

I make an ingenuous bid to steer the debate into another direction.

“So, will Dancey get the chair, do you think?”

“What
is
it with Giles?” Erin promptly fires up. “Someone needs to shake some sense of responsibility into that man! Elizabeth is right, he’s been picking the cherries out of this job, and now he won’t pull his weight!”

I catch Yvonne watching me, and I’m almost sure that she is covering up for me when she asks, “How do you mean, picking cherries?”

Now everyone is looking at Tim, but Tim—and I must say, I love him for this—shrugs and purses his mouth.

“It isn’t a secret,” Erin takes over, clearly annoyed at Tim’s misplaced loyalty. “A year ago they gave him leave to teach at Stanford for a semester to see whether he liked it well enough to stay there—this is extremely unusual and set a few tongues wagging! And last semester they allowed him to bring his sabbatical forward, and he spent that in England.”

“Well, he can spend his sabbatical anywhere he wants, can’t he?”

“Yes, of course he can! It’s just a little galling to see how some people get break after break, while others—I mean, I used my sabbatical to prolong my maternity leave by a semester!”

“Each to his—or her—own, Erin,” Eugenia says gently. “That was your decision, and Giles did a lot of admin before he left, you know he did. Sure, the Stanford fellowship was a favor, but I know for a fact that he only got half his salary during the semester in England, although theoretically he might have had a full one.”

“Big deal—for those with private funds!”

“Maybe it’s just as well,” Joe says. “You say you’d prefer him to Dancey, but Giles has a pretty idiosyncratic way of doing things, and if he took the chair and decided to go all English on us—that wouldn’t exactly be helpful either.”

“How do you mean, go all English?” I ask.

He was away for a whole year? What about his wife?
But this I cannot ask.

“Well, as long as it’s just his own research and teaching, it doesn’t matter—after all, Diversity with a big D, right? But I’m not so sure his style is really suited to leading this department. Just my two cents, guys.”

“You might not notice it so much, Anna,” Eugenia adds, “coming from British universities yourself—Tim, are you not eating those nachos?”

“Help yourself.”

“I’m shameless, I know,” she sighs, pulling Tim’s plate toward herself. “He comes across as not caring very much. Giles, I mean.”

“It’s the traditional British policy of non-interference.” Tim can’t, after all, stay out of the fray. “What you call caring, he calls mollycoddling.”

“Non-interference by a nastier name is appeasement!” Erin snaps.

“Laissez-faire,” I correct her, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Disastrous in world politics, maybe, but in education there’s a lot to be said for it. I don’t know whether Cleveland is like this, but I know a number of lecturers in England who don’t believe in…well, in teaching.”

“
I
don’t particularly like teaching, either.” Joe shrugs. “Necessary evil.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that.” I fumble for an explanation. “I mean that they don’t believe in teaching as organized, explicit instruction. In fact, they believe that good students shouldn’t need teaching. They expect their students to get on with it, and they only interfere if you go off the rails or find yourself in a hole. They’re catchers in the rye. Sort of.”

“Sounds like a well-reasoned excuse for laziness, if you ask me.” Erin frowns. “And it’s exactly the sort of bull Giles comes up with.”

Joe leans his elbows on the table and puts his fingertips together in a gesture I find irritatingly complacent. “It’s two fundamentally different systems and cultures. And if he doesn’t want to adapt to those differences, he can’t teach at an American university—simple!”

“Well, they are wooing him to stay.” Erin drains her glass and reaches for her purse. “I understand why, he’s tipped for the top, yadayada. I like Giles—don’t get me wrong. But he’s totally biting the hand that feeds him, by being so stubborn about this. If Bob Morgan doesn’t come back, Dancey will make sure that Medieval Literature is taken out of the curriculum and the next professorship goes to modern American Lit. But why should I care about that if Giles doesn’t?”

“He got another break at the beginning of the semester, remember?” Joe reminds us. “Not having to be here for the first week of term?”

“Yeah, but—” I look at Tim, and again he shrugs. “He was in Scotland, Joe. He won a prize for his book on Sir Walter Raleigh. A quite prestigious prize, actually.”

“Then why didn’t he say so?”

“Because there’s something devious about Giles.”

“
Erin!”
Tim explodes.

“All right, not…
devious
.” She lifts her hands in a gesture of capitulation. “But he’s not
straight!”

“Yes, he is,” Tim mutters.

“No, I mean—infuriating boy!” She cuffs Tim on the shoulder. “Up-front! You can never tell whether he says what he means, or whether he means what he says. And all he cares about is his own research! His crop of graduates is consistently smaller than that of any other subfield because he can’t be bothered to waste time advising. Well,
he
would feel it’s time wasted!”

Tim shakes his head in exasperation but decides to let it go.

“And Dancey, what does he—”

Erin interrupts me. “Now
he
is all bad.”

I look at the others for a rebuttal of this blunt assessment.

“He thinks he’s God,” Joe says. “He wants to shape the department in his own image. Don’t they all? And wouldn’t you?”

“He keeps dropping these ominous hints about Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Erin, you said this is about Bob Morgan’s job, but is there more to it?”

I can tell just by the expression on Tim’s face that there is more to it.

“Listen, guys,” I add a little severely, “one of the reasons I applied for this job is the excellence of Ardrossan’s Early Modern Studies program. If Dancey is scheming to pull the plug on the English Lit side of that, where will that leave me?”

“It’s a game of dominoes.” Tim at last seems ready to give me a comprehensible answer. “For twenty years and more, Rich Westley and Bob Morgan were a fixture in this department—Bob with his Medieval English Language and Literature, Rich with his Native American Culture and Dialects. Cultural Studies was big. These days—who cares? The pendulum is swinging back to hard science. The worst-case scenario—from your point of view, Anna—is that the professorship of Medieval English Literature will be re-designated as something like Aesthetics and Cognitive Science, to operate as a docking station for the new Center for—whatsit?”

“Institute for Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Psychology,” Joe says.

“Hornberger’s baby.” I nod. “Dancey told me about that. He suggested Dolph and I convene a conference there, about Renaissance art and neuroesthetics.”

“He did?”

“Yeah, but I mean…like hell.”

“Don’t be stupid, Anna!” Erin reaches over and grabs my wrist for emphasis. “This was Dancey’s offer to join his camp! With Dancey, it’s very simple. You’re either for him or you’re against him. And you can’t afford to be against him.” She turns to her colleagues. “Don’t you agree that was an offer Anna can’t refuse?”

They agree. Reluctantly, but unanimously.

“I don’t think it was an offer,” I say, drowning. “It felt more like a taunt. And the whole idea behind it is to pull the rug out from under my own discipline!”

“If we want to remain at the cutting edge, we need to reinvent ourselves!”

“Wait, so are you telling me that Dancey and Hornberger will trade in Medieval Literature and the Piedmont Center for Area Studies for a share in this new Institute for Cognitive Science? Is that the deal?”

“Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” Joe shrugs, and the others avoid my eyes.

“If any of this can still be stopped, it’s by a department chair who will take on Dancey and make sure that Medieval and Renaissance Studies isn’t bled dry.” Erin counts some money onto the table and slips on her jacket. “It would have been in Giles’s own interest to take the chair. See what I mean when I say he doesn’t care?”