The Englishman (64 page)

“Are you worried she’ll start leaving gunge on your office door, too?”

“Oh! I haven’t told you!” I reach across the table to touch his hand, which makes him smile, catch it, and link his fingers with mine. “It wasn’t Corvin! It can’t have been, because he’s back and almost had a heart attack when he tried to get into his office and couldn’t because the lock had been changed. He says he spent the last two months with his daughter in Vermont.”

Giles seems suitably impressed with this news and more interested than in Selena O’Neal’s plight. “So Dancey was right? It was that spoiled little rich girl?”

“Madeline Harrison? I don’t know. Yes, it must have been. That college of yours is full of psychologically unstable, violent young women—why is that, Giles?”

He grins. “Your guess is as good as mine. Well, that’s a lot of words you’re going to have with quite a lot of people, isn’t it?”

I drop my head between my hands and groan. “I want the holidays to go on forever.”

On his shelf I find a large picture book about British landscape and literature, and we spend a happy two hours leafing through it, comparing favorites and telling each other anecdotes about the places we visited.

“…and there’s a pub in the village that sells the most fantastic homemade pasties, just heaven after a long hike. Remember that for when you’re next there.”

I look at his profile, so close to mine on the sofa.

“Giles.”

“Hmm?”

“Tell me again why we wouldn’t work.”

“Because I’m twelve years older than you.” He sighs, leans back and continues to enumerate his mental list. “Because I can’t father any children. Because your situation in the department is vulnerable and will remain so for years to come. Because I’m sure that your parents would have fifty fits if you spent your fertile thirties with a goy—an infertile one at that! Shall I go on?”

“When did you last have your…baubles…tested?”

“My baubles?” He laughs, but it’s partly to cover his embarrassment. “Never as such. I was told at the time that given the extent of the inflammation, it was very likely that my fertility had been, uh, adversely affected. At some point Mandy and I stopped using contraception to see whether she would get pregnant, but she didn’t. So I have to assume that my…baubles…are empty.”

“Well, that’s a bit lame! You should get tested! I’d be willing to assist you with the necessary, um, preparations.”

He stares at me, defensive and outraged at the same time.

“Listen, stop deluding yourself! All my little swimmers are dead! If there
are
any little swimmers; I’ve never really made it my business to enquire into the—”

“Oh, I’m not much bothered, myself,” I say nonchalantly. “I’m just thinking of the next woman you have sex with. Unlike me, she may actually know that she does want children, so it would be useful to know the exact facts, wouldn’t it?”

My ingenuous little monologue upsets him so much that he jumps up, stalks over into the kitchen, and starts sorting the dirty dishes into the washer.

“End of conversation,” he mutters when I follow him. “You’re doing neither me nor yourself a favor by pretending that you do not want children! You’re in your first year on tenure track. You’re thirty years old!”

“Fair point. The sense I have at the moment that I don’t necessarily need a child to be happy may change. Or it may not.”

He stares at me, a dirty plate in one hand, a chopping knife in the other.

“Don’t start, Anna! It’s no good! Even if you weren’t on tenure track, it would be grossly selfish of me to—”

“You
married
, knowing yourself infertile!” I protest, by now seriously hurt. “I hear what you’re saying, but don’t pretend you’re being all noble and unselfish!”

“Yes, and look at what a resounding success my marriage was!”

“What if a woman wants you more than she wants a child?” I shout, pushed over the edge.

“She may think that for a while, maybe, if the sex is good enough.”

“Cleveland—you’re a bastard!”

It hurts to be reminded of the limits of our little affair, but the hurt disperses the haze of vague hopes and fantasies in my mind. That evening we don’t make love again, but there is no question of either of us sleeping on the sofa. I’m sad, but after all, I knew that this would make me sad, so I have no one to blame but myself. I wake in the middle of the night, in the pitch-black bedroom, and I miss him. I feel for his thigh, for the waistband of his pajama pants, for the warm, fragrant skin of his groin. His warm, half-erect cock. More tenderly than ever I cradle his soft, heavy balls in my hand and kiss them softly, so gently.

His fingers close around my naked arm.

“Anna…” His voice his faint and gravelly, but I don’t know what he means, so I go on caressing his flesh because that is all I
can
do to show him what I feel for him.

“
You led them…in the night by a pillar of fire…to give them light in the way wherein they should go
.” I smile and clasp his pillar of fire in my hand.

His fingers are kneading my arm, and I can hear him breathe in ragged, uneven gasps. I hunch up my knees and pull off my panties, then his shirt that I’ve been wearing as a pajama top. My face fits snugly into the hollow of his throat as I stretch out on top of him.

“
You multiplied their children as the stars of heaven
,” I whisper,
“and you brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess
.”

With my knees I spread his legs so that my thighs are cradled between his. When I slide him into me, he moans like a man in a dream. I clasp his hands in mine and crook his arms so that his palms face up, like a sleeping child’s.

“
So the children went in and —”
I ride him slowly, my elbows on either side of him, keeping him immobile “—
and possessed the land, and…thou subduedst before them the inhabitants of the land and gavest them…into their hands…that they…
”

My mouth finds his throat, finds it stretched to a long, smooth column of skin and muscle as he arches himself against me, gasping for breath in long, deep gulps.

“
…that they might do with them…as they would…
”

He thrusts himself into me, shuddering, his lean, solid male body underneath me, and I feel his strength and my power over it.

“My sweet,” I murmur against his throat, my cheek pressed against his heaving chest. “My poor, sweet, lovely boy.”

In the morning, the noise of the shower wakes me. Without even going into the kitchen to switch on the kettle, I boot up the PC and search the online phone directory.

“Hey.” He comes to look over my shoulder, toweling his head.

“Hey.”

I glance up, check whether the night’s interlude had any lasting effects. Giles still looks like a boy, young and disheveled, with a quiet, slightly bashful smile on his face. I hold out my hand for his and draw it to my lips.

“Sweetie, I’m afraid I’m going to pick a fight with you.”

He laughs, then sees that I am in earnest. “What about?”

“About your reputation.”

“So, where to?” he asks when he has steered the Volvo onto the main road.

“Southside, Oakland Park.”

I am holding the file on my knees, but I am not tempted to look at it again.

Bartholomew Road is a residential area bordering on a business park; the houses are garishly decorated with lights and stars and reindeer, and there are several Santa Clauses scaling the rooftops.

“Number twelve sixty-seven. Here.” I unclick my seat belt and open the door.

“Wait!” He grabs my elbow. “You will regret this!”

“I hope I will never regret having done the right thing. Will you regret it?”

He looks at me, looks me over. Sighs.

“Not for myself, no, but I may well regret not having stood up to you!”

For half a minute or so I think there is nobody home, or the people who are home won’t open the door for us. Then there is the sound of a chain being latched, and the door opens a crack.

“Mrs. Randall? Louise Randall?”

She is a tall woman, quite big now, with a mass of silvery-dark hair done up into a loose chignon.

“What do you want? Are you collecting for something?”

“No, no, I’m…I’m Anna Lieberman, and this is Giles Cleveland. We are English professors at Ardrossan University.”

This produces the reaction I had feared. The door is slammed shut, and her voice, though muffled, is angry.

“Go away! Are you reporters? I have nothing to say to you!”

“Mrs. Randall!” I put my mouth close to the door. “Louise! I promise you we are not reporters! I just want to give you something, and you can decide what to do with it!”

Silence.

“Listen, Louise, I’m not going to stand out here shouting for all your neighbors to hear. Am I right in assuming that when you were young you went by Mary-Lou? And that your maiden name is Tandy? Just tell me whether I’m right!”

Silence.

The door opens again, but the chain is still in place.

“Keep your voice down,” she says, much calmer now. “I’m not going to ask you in. I have guests, and they’re asleep. As for that fine
gentleman
, I don’t want to talk about him. There’s no point!”

“I don’t know about that, but it isn’t for me to decide, or for anyone, except you. This—” I hand her the file “—is yours. I—we—came by it by accident, and we feel that you should have it. Take it to the police, or burn it—it’s up to you.”

She stares at the plastic folder in her hand, dumb with emotion.

“This comes thirty years too late.”

“I know. But if we keep it, we’re protecting him, and if we hand it over to the police, we are interfering in your life in a way that I don’t want to be responsible for.”

She nods, mechanically, and undoes the chain.

“The past is never just that, is it?” she says.

“Past, you mean? No, I guess it isn’t. Or just.”

At this she smiles wanly.

“No, it isn’t. Well, they do say that choice is a burden.” She weighs the slim folder in her hand. “Not very heavy, is it?”

I smile back, relieved that she is recovering her sense of humor. Even if it is of the gallows variety.

“If you wanted to get in touch with us at all, don’t hesitate, via email or the phone.” Giles digs up his wallet out of his back pocket and pulls out his card. “Anna will shout at me for having said this, but I think you should go to the police and make sure that his ass ends up in jail.”

“Giles!”

“That’s all right,” Louise assures me. “I won’t rush into anything, and I sure won’t be guided by another white male professor’s opinion. No offense, sir.”

Giles smiles at her, and I can see that even on Louise Randall in her present plight it has the usual effect.

“All the best, Louise. I don’t know whether I can say Merry Christmas, but—Merry Christmas!”