The Englishman (56 page)

The more crowded and festive the occasion becomes, the lonelier I feel. I want to ask Tim whether Giles isn’t attending tonight, but I don’t dare. I’m worried he would see the state I am in. How can one absence be so conspicuous? Among hundreds of faces and voices, the bells, the torches, the crackling fires, the music, the speeches, the sketches, the singing—

And then I see Selena. In a severe dark gown with a hooped skirt and lace at the throat, she looks more striking than I have ever seen her. Jane Eyre, pregnant with Rochester’s child. Instead of fleeing the place when she found out that he was seducing her into sin, she stayed and became his whore. It occurs to me that the graffiti may not have been directed at Natalie at all, or maybe it meant both herself and Natalie. She is holding a mug of something, and she is there with a group of other graduate students, but like me, she seems to be isolated by her thoughts, and like me she is staring up at the dome.

“I don’t believe that man!”

Erin’s choked exclamation comes at precisely the same moment as Selena’s face, rigid and expressionless before, registers emotion. I only have to follow her horror-struck gaze to detect Hornberger among the crowd. We are not the only ones to have seen him; a murmur of surprise, perhaps of disapproval or outrage, runs through the air.

“You gotta hand it to him,” Tim says. “He’s not floored by adversity.”

Erin fumes. “How
dare
he?”

“Look, look at Demers!”

Graham Demers, our President, at one point in his life worked for a high-ranking management consulting group, so he is wise in the ways of the world and not easily fazed, but it doesn’t need a reader of micro-expressions to see how dismayed he is at Hornberger’s—evidently unscheduled—entrance. But the
pièce de résistance
is, no disrespect to her, the piece of ass accompanying him.

“Wow. Just wow,” Vernon Russell mutters, only to choke a cry of pain when his wife elbows him in the ribs.

“At least she’s more than half his age,” Yvonne says caustically.

The ravishing brunette on Hornberger’s arm is thirty-five, if she is a day. She looks as if she had been sown into the black gown that she is wearing, her shoulders and décolletage are immaculate, and her make-up and jewelry are just this side of expensively sluttish.

“She must be costing him a pretty penny,” states an English voice behind me.

“Giles!” Erin exclaims. “There you are! Gosh, you look—Ginny, doesn’t he look—”

“Wow,” Eugenia says, still annoyed at her husband. “Just wow!”

The women’s voluble response masks my own amazement. Giles Cleveland—who wore his college tie on Family Weekend, just to wave the flag—has come dressed up as a gentleman of the Old South. I am so stunned I can hardly look at him to take in the details, let alone look at his face. Buff-colored pantaloons, knee-high riding boots, and a dark green frock coat with brown-and-yellow-patterned vest, his hair brushed back from his forehead.

This is so unfair of him.

One hand disappears into the pocket of his pants; I can just see a strip of white shirt held together by golden cufflinks. It is a movement at the same time poignantly at odds with the formality of his suit and curiously expressive of what I perceive, after all, as a hint of self-consciousness.

“Where’s your Scarlett?” Erin asks, a little acidly. She looks very stylish in her Bloomsbury Group outfit, but now she seems to regret the sexually neurotic touch that comes with looking like Virginia Woolf or Ottoline Morrell.

“Mm, you know, I’ve gone off Scarlett,” Giles says. “I’m getting a bit old for those high-maintenance teenagers.”

“Would that were true of all our professors,” Eugenia mutters.

Partly to appear unimpressed, partly because I am suddenly anxious, I turn to check how Selena has reacted to Hornberger’s latest stunt. But Selena has disappeared.

“A good evening to you all!” Elizabeth slowly edges her bulk through the crowd. She is one of the few women who can carry off the layered look, and that is what she sticks to, probably wisely. “Now may not be the best moment, but when the outcry has died down, I want to take you, Tim, and you, Yvonne and Anna, to see the President. You’re here to mingle. Network, my dears, network. Let me have a drink first, then I’ll introduce you.”

“Do you think they’ll let Hornberger stay?” Tim asks. “Or will he be marched off campus by a posse of security guards?”

“Innocent until proven guilty.” Elizabeth shrugs. “It may well be his last Christmas at Ardrossan.”

“Anna!” Yvonne whispers to me when Elizabeth turns to talk to Erin, Eugenia, and Vernon. “If
she
is as outspoken as this about the matter, it must mean Hornberger is finished!”

After curtseying and listening prettily to all the anecdotes and jokes of the college worthies Elizabeth introduces me to, I join the procession of light around the campus, with a speech and a song at each significant spot. Later, and frozen through, I am recovering by the fire of one of the gingerbread stands with Tim and Martin, a wiry, shaven-headed sociologist who is very clearly the calm anchor in this relationship.

“I’m so bad at that,” I gripe. “Small talk with the VIPs! It’s going to break my precious little assistant-professorial neck that I’m crap at networking!”

“You’re not bad at it,” Tim points out. “You just think you are, because you hate it.”

“They weren’t listening to what you said. I can guarantee that,” Martin remarks, looking me up and down with an exaggerated leer. “Very sexy dress. Even on a woman.”

“Stop that!” Tim protests. “We can’t both flirt with Anna, and I saw her first!”

“Ah, but what neither of you boys has seen…” The punch must be working its dangerous effect on me, because I step behind a big trash can and quickly hitch up my skirt to display the lace top of my stocking.

“Oh, you brazen hussy.” Tim grins. “Anyway, don’t show us, show Giles.”

The name rushes into my blood vessels like a triple gin and tonic. My face must have registered my reaction, because Martin, more sensitive to embarrassment than Tim, clicks his tongue and tries to change the subject.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing my ass off out here. Will you come in and—”

“Hey, honey! Tim, hi! Lurking in the shadows?” Bernie emerges from the crowd, a glass in one hand and a woman’s purse in the other. “Not for nothing, guys, but this girl is wasted on you this evening.”

“Says the man who looks like Billy the Kid,” Tim shoots back, a little pissy.

Bernie takes this jibe at his expensive-looking cowboy outfit in good humor, admitting that Elvira had expressed doubts, too.

“You should have listened to her.”

“Why, you don’t like the rugged look?” He grins. “Anyway, Anna-Banana, before Elvira comes back, for old times’ sake—” He puts one arm around my taffeta shoulders and kisses me on the mouth before he struts off.

“You’re kissing the wrong man.” Tim glares at me through narrowed eyes.

“I didn’t kiss him at all!” I snap, indignantly.

“Never mind,” he relents. “Where
is
Giles? We need to get Elizabeth’s card signed.”

The spring semester starts on January fifteenth, Ma Mayfield’s fifty-fifth birthday, and some strategic thinker realized that we would never get a present sorted out and a card signed if we left it till then. He also bought a pint-sized crystal-and-sterling bottle, which he produces from a dark leather box in his office.

“And this is genuinely eighteenth-century?” Erin examines the sparkling piece in its velvet case.

“No, I got it from Sears for nineteen ninety-nine,” Giles says.

“Seriously, where did you get it? The Internet?” Eugenia straightens up from signing the card.

“London. I know a guy who sells that sort of thing. And no, it isn’t fenced goods!”

“‘Last week, mysteriously disappeared from the Duke of God-I’m-Posh’s billiard room, antique crystal to the value of—argh!’”

Giles grabs Tim by the neck and shakes him.

“Listen, son, don’t get fresh just because you’ve passed the first round of your tenure review!”

“My tutor in Cambridge collected this sort of stuff,” I tell them. “He wasn’t supposed to keep it in his office at all, because of insurance, but he did it anyway.”

“Tristan Millard was your tutor?” Giles asks, mildly interested. With the air of one humoring a precocious child, he picks a yellowing, slightly tattered booklet out from beneath the velvet bed and hands it to me to read. Despite ourselves, nerds that we are, we get involved in the topic and I only realize that the others left the room when Erin sticks her head through the half-open door.

“Tim, c’mon—the taxi’s here! Sorry, Giles, but I had to bribe the driver with the promise of an extra-large tip, so—Tim, now, please!”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”

Tim grabs his coat and makes for the door before I can decently get up from that damned leather sofa. I was all right in Giles’s office on that sofa in my burgundy taffeta dress as long we were a crowd of six. I’m definitely not staying for a company of two, and since he has also gotten up from his chair, I’m assuming that we see eye to eye on this one.

“Bye, Giles! Bye-bye, love!” And Tim is out the door.

And I’m suddenly so shy with this man I’ve hardly been able to look at all evening because I don’t want to let him see the adoration glowing in my eyes.

“Yes, well, it’s a good thing we’ve got that sorted out. One item off the holiday list, I guess.” I glance round for my coat. “I think I’ll try my luck with the cabs, too, now.”

Then everything happens very fast. I’m reaching for the doorknob, and he is suddenly right behind me. One hand, left of me, slams against the door, the other, by my right shoulder, slams against the light switch and turns the key in the lock. Suddenly the pale glimmer from the electric bulbs in the garlands outside the windows is the only source of light, and it isn’t much. I wince at his unexpected physical violence, but not for a nanosecond am I afraid. His hand is on my waist, his fingers dig into my flesh; he spins me round, my shoulders and the back of my head bump against the door.

And then he kisses me. Giles Cleveland bends down from his great height to kiss me, and it is a big, wet, angry kiss, full of pent-up emotion. The fingers of his other hand slip round my neck, and I couldn’t avoid his mouth even if I wanted to.

“This is for letting that guy kiss you!” he growls above me in the dark.

“Bernie? But he isn’t—”

“And this one is for wearing lace stockings in my office!”

“How do you—” I gasp for breath when he finally releases my mouth.

“Well, you didn’t put them on for Tim and Martin.” The gaze from those light eyes exposes my most unacknowledged motives. “Did you, Anna?”

“N-No, but I—” His first fury spent, his kisses become, if anything, even more thorough, but now they are less of an assault. His objective is to turn me on, not to punish me, and now he is allowing me—daring me—to respond. I realize only hazily that he has clasped my thigh, pulled it up to his hip and pushed back the hem of my dress till his fingers reach the lace top of my stocking. He draws me against himself, not roughly now, but in a way that leaves no doubt that resistance would be futile.

I don’t resist him at all. With his fingers crooked around my knee he pulls me onto the smooth, hard slope of his thigh between my legs and rocks me gently back and forth, his other hand in the small of my back.

Although I could hate myself for it, it is the most deliciously sensual feeling, being in the hands of this angry, beautiful man who has set his mind on arousing me. His fingertips are on my naked flesh, high up on my thigh. He feels for me blindly, and my body is responding just as blindly to any touch, any movement of his. My good angel, a bedraggled little figure squatting on my right shoulder, warns me that we’ll be copulating on the floor in a couple of minutes if his fingers inch any higher. His other hand glides down to my ass, one of my ass cheeks fits comfortably into his hand, and there is a worrying inevitability in the way he yanks me against his rock-hard thigh. Oh, God—does he really mean to fuck me now, here, in his office?

“Please, no, don’t—”

He cuts me short huskily. “Hold still.”

In delicious obedience I slip my arms round his neck as he hauls me up and against the length of his body. It’s like an electric shock running through me when it becomes very clear that his thigh is not the only part of his nether regions that is as hard as a rock. One of my legs is still wrapped around his hip; his probing fingers reach the edge of my panties and then, through the thin lace of my panties, his fingertips feel my soft, swollen flesh. And I want to die with desire and shame, I’m so wet for him. Now he knows how wet I am for him. This is so embarrassing—oh, God, this feels so good! My arms tighten around his neck and I press my face against his shoulder. He smells of expensive cloth, a little of rum punch and shaving cream, but the predominant fragrance is that of Giles himself, which I can’t define at all except that there is a hint of licorice in it and that it’s the loveliest smell I can imagine.

Still there is nothing frantic in our movements. We are dancing on a tightrope, in more senses than one, a supreme rush of adrenaline balanced by a supreme effort at control.