The Englishman (30 page)

“Well, not for nothing, guys, but I’m assuming there is more to come, apart from, ‘Will you really fast all day?’ and ‘How does atonement work?’ Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate this. I was getting a little lachrymose at the cottage, to tell you the truth. But there’s more, right? Has something happened?”

Giles glances over at Tim; Tim inhales and slumps against the wall behind him.

“They’ve drafted me onto the Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel!”

Apparently three of the six members of the current committee have resigned over the investigation of Nick Hornberger’s misdemeanor, and procedure in the case of resignation is to immediately replace the former members.

Now I see why Tim is deliberately getting legless tonight.

“But—you’re in such a vulnerable position, with your tenure review pending! You shouldn’t be made to involve yourself in this kind of thing!”

“You’d think, but their logic works the other way around. I’m vulnerable, so I can’t refuse. And we’ve been taught all the legal stuff, and there’s no time to train new members. Besides, imagine the noise when it becomes public that a new hearing panel had to be appointed because half of the current members wanted nothing to do with it! Worse and worse. No, it’s all hush-hush, business as usual, normality at all times.”

“But why do people volunteer for these committees in the first place if they’re going to cave in the moment a really distasteful case has to be heard?”

“Oh, Anna! Such innocence!” Tim mocks me. “They’re afraid the evidence will mean they’ll have to fire Hornberger, and they want nothing to do with that!”

Innocence, indeed.

“In that case, shouldn’t they stay on the panel and see if they can bail him out? By hook or by crook?” The two men look at me blankly until I have caught up with them. “Oh, you mean, they know he’s a lost cause?
Oy!”

“
Oy
is right. I don’t know how else to interpret this mass resignation. Presumably they know more than we do. He must be in it up to his neck.”

“But,” I say for the third time, “I just don’t see it! It’s evident and plainly obvious that he and Natalie were having an affair—who knows for how long? Maybe since her undergraduate days! But she was friendly with him in the Astrolabe, after the first faculty meeting. I saw them! I sussed them
because
they were so natural and familiar with each other!”

Tim stares at me and blinks.

“It totally kills me when you use British slang in that Noo Yoak voice of yours. I would so do you, Anna, if.” He looks at Giles for corroboration.

“And I will so gag you, Timmy-my-man, if you don’t watch your mouth,” Giles says.

Tim, three-quarters drunk at this point, seems offended at this unambiguous announcement, but Giles smiles at him in a way that shows how little amused he is.

And I am sick at heart.

Because the
first
thing that hit me when I walked up to the two men huddled around the small table underneath a poster of The Pogues was the lamentable but undisputable truth that I have fallen in love with a married man who is also a tenured colleague.

For the sin which we have committed before You by improper thoughts.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart.
For all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us.

Chapter 18

S
INCE
M
ONDAY
I
S
N
OT
A T
EACHING
D
AY
for me and I have no set appointments, I could stay at home, slip into a white sweater, white sweatpants, and woolly socks, abstain from food, drink, and sex (ha!), and have an informal, private Yom Kippur. Obeying the letter of the law would be easy this year. I’m too dejected to have appetites of any sort, and in a sullen way I would even enjoy the ordeal of enduring thirst. But in view of the past days’ events, it seems hypocritical to do
teshuvah
—pray to return to God and to a stricter observance of His laws—when I know that tomorrow I will still be sadly and stupidly infatuated with Giles Cleveland.

So I drive in. It is pouring down rain, and my butt is still a bit sore from my bike ride on Saturday. My plan is to sort out the mystery of the lock on my office door. I start with the department secretary.

“Lorraine, hello. Listen, you wouldn’t happen to have a key to my office? E-four twenty-nine.”

“Oh, sure, dear—forgot yours at home, did you?” She unlocks a cupboard in which there is a locked chest in which are stored all the keys of the department.

“No, I mean, a key to the new lock on my door. There’s a new lock on my office door, but I never got a key for it.”

“But that’s…not yet,” says Kathy, her assistant. “Remember Central Maintenance wrote an email saying some of the older locks will be changed?” She clicks open some emails, finds the one, and says triumphantly, “Yes, November, and it will affect offices with the numbers E-four-oh-six, E—well, anyway. But that’s next month.”

“Well, the lock on my office door was changed last Friday. Any idea how I might get hold of a key? Preferably today?”

“This is funny,” says Lorraine, rummaging in the key chest. “E-four-twenty-nine, you said? There’s no spare key here for E-four-twenty-nine.”

“I know, right?” Kathy pulls the metal box toward her. “It’s a mess in here. Professor Dancey was looking for a couple of keys last week, and they were missing, too.”

Dancey was looking for other people’s office keys?

Lorraine tells me that Dancey teaches on Monday afternoons but usually comes in just before his class starts, so it would be better if I spoke to him afterward. But my patience has run out.

“Professor Dancey? I know you’re teaching now, sir, but I spent the better part of the morning trying to get into my office. A new lock was fitted on Friday afternoon, but I never received notice of this, nor a key. So I’d be extremely grateful if—”

“Oh, then this must be it!” Dancey, who had been hanging up his coat and cleaning his black woolen sweater with an adhesive roll, reaches across his desk to where a padded envelope is sitting on top of a pile of books. He picks it up and rattles it. “This arrived on Friday afternoon when Lorraine had already gone.”

The envelope, baggy and dog-eared like all recycled office material, has
Central Maintenance
and
Urgent
written on it. Not urgent enough to inform me, apparently.

These are my plans for getting my ass fired from my tenure-track position at a national research university. Plan A: alienate the big-donor, conservative Christian clientele. Working on that. Plan B: start an affair with a married and tenured colleague who is also my academic mentor. Unlikely to be realized, as said colleague does not progress beyond very mild flirtation and comes to Sunday night drinking spree in his dog-walking gear. Plan C: drive into town, find a locksmith, and have the ancient key to the old observatory copied behind admin’s back. Check. I don’t even know why I want a duplicate of the key to the dome. Ineffectual spite, I guess. Why am I so determined to piss off my employer? Well, Your Honor,
they started it!
Armed, at last, with the key I fingered out of the (sealed and re-sealed?) envelope on Dancey’s desk, I enter my office with as much suspicion as the weakest link in the tenure chain may allow herself. What does it matter if anyone’s been in my office while I was locked out? It isn’t my private home, and if I keep anything private in my workplace, it is at my own risk.

Except that someone
has
been in my office. As far as I can tell, nothing has been taken, but why would someone lift up and turn over the library books on my desk? Someone picked up all the items on my desk and did not realize that my system of working through library books is that I put the ones I’m done with face down. I know for a fact that there was a face-down pile of four; the pile is still there, but it is facing up. Knowing that Crazy Corvin had a key to my office made me uncomfortable, but this is a brand-new lock. It wasn’t Corvin who snooped around in here.

Wonderful. So now I have a choice of at least four stomach-churning scenarios to worry over: my paycheck disaster, the intrusions into my office, the fact that I have not added a single sentence to my Notre Dame paper since Rosh Hashanah, and my imminent encounter with the woman I envy more than anyone else in the whole wide world.

“Ms. Cleveland is upstairs, but she knows she’s seeing you at half past.”

Liz, her administrative assistant, opens a door from the landing area into a waiting room with a suite of slim beige armchairs and a sofa. The office itself can be partitioned off by a sliding door, which is already half open. There is another sliding door, currently shut, on the opposite wall—evidently the other legal counselor’s office. It’s like being at an expensive dentist’s, including the Picasso prints on the walls and the potted ficus by the window. Actually, some root-canal work doesn’t sound so bad. I hear the door open and close in the adjoining room, and my stomach turns.

“Look, you can’t simply walk in here and assume that I’m going to make time for you! I’d like to see your face if I barged in on one of your lectures!”

“Would you prefer me to ring up your secretary and make an appointment? I can do that, if that’s what you want!”

Oh, please, God
—don’t make me witness a fight between Giles Cleveland and his wife!

“Anyway,” he says, “this is urgent. Holly Ortega and the department want me to take over the chair from Nick.”

I should leave. I should wait for Liz to return and inform her that Ms. Cleveland is seeing someone else first, and discretion dictates that I wait out of earshot.

Do it. Get up. Leave the room.

“But you haven’t made full professor,” Amanda Cleveland says. She sounds defensive now, less exasperated than she did at first.

“Well, I sort of have, as both Holly and Elizabeth hastened to point out. I got the salary boost before I went to England. They’re promising me the full package now, if I hand in my stuff by Christmas.”

“Why can’t someone else do it?”

“Any suggestions?” he asks sardonically. “The only one who wants to do it is Matthew Dancey, which would be a disaster, particularly for MedRen Studies. I think he’s planning a putsch of some sort.”

“Then do it.” I don’t have to see her face to know that there is no conviction in this counsel.

“To clean up after yet another one of Nick’s messes? Like hell I will. And no, I do not relish the idea of revenge, gratifying as it was for about fifteen seconds.”

Revenge?

“I do not see why revenge needs to come into it.”

“Oh, it’s just a thought. Many a man would feel tempted to kick his wife’s lover in the balls if he gets the chance.”

Jumping cats!

Right, that’s it. If they find out I’ve been sitting next door and soaking up every word like a shamefaced sponge, Cleveland will get me fired before I can say “tenure review.” He will get me fired, and my body will be found years from now in the river, a bloated, water-logged corpse with a couple of volumes of the
Oxford English Dictionary
tied to its feet. Folio edition.

“So don’t take the chair. Giles, I am really busy. I’m supposed to be seeing someone right now. She’s probably—”

“I’m going to explain to Holly Ortega why I won’t do it.”

Another pause. I can only guess that Amanda is speechless with horror. I certainly am. Speechless and rooted to the spot.

“You can’t do that,” she says flatly.

“Yes, I can. To Holly, and to as many of my colleagues as necessary, because they are all convinced I’m merely shirking a tedious job.”

“You know as well as I do that Nick didn’t force himself on that girl! She’s just a hysterical little attention-seeker!”

“On the contrary, it would amaze me to hear that Nick has evolved enough to adhere to something as sophisticated as a sexual code of honor. But of course you have more insight into the matter than I have.”