The Englishman

chapter 9

TO CELEBRATE THE COMPLETION OF MY FIRST WEEK of teaching at Ardrossan, Tim takes me bicycle-shopping. He claims to “know a little” about bikes, and unlikely as it seems, he is well known to the bearded, tattooed guy who runs the store.

“Hey, professor. If you came to get spares for your Colnago, gotta disappoint you, man.”

“No, I’m not here for myself today. Anna, this is Chuck—Chuck, Anna, a new colleague of mine. She’s looking for a bike to commute to work.”

Chuck assesses my biking credibility which, since I’m wearing a skirt and ankle-strap sandals with heels, can’t be impressive. “What you been riding before?”

“Uh—nothing.”

Now Tim, too, is staring at me in disbelief.

“But you can ride a bike—or are we talking training wheels?”

“Look, I used to ride a bike to school all through high school, and I had a bike in Cambridge, and I shared one when I lived in London. Yes, that means it’s been three years since I sat on one, but—well, is it true or isn’t it? That you never forget?”

My words echo in silence. Chuck gives himself a mental shake and turns to Tim.

“Gonna do her for a Jamis, a 700C—over here.” The men converse in low voices about my options and present me with a choice of three bikes, which I try out on the parking lot behind the store.

“This one, I think.”

“Good girl. Helmet.”

“Awww…do I have to, Mommy?” I wail, but pipe down when Chuck gives me a stern look.

“Sure don’t look purdy, does it? Well, neither does brain matter on asphalt!”

When Tim lifts my new acquisition into the trunk of the Subaru (mental note: send photo of bike in car to derisive Liebermans in Queens), I can’t help grinning from ear to ear.

“This is so cool! Thank you very much!”

“You look cool on it, too. Now, will you be all right setting it up, or are you going to thank Uncle Timothy by inviting him to the tomato farm for pizza?” The round blue eyes are all innocence.

“Tim, I appreciate your help, and you’re welcome to come round to the farm any time you want. But if you were straight, I’d be thinking you’re coming on to me—big time. So what’s with the attention?”

He groans and contemplates the traffic rushing past for a few moments. “Martin’s parents are visiting.”

“Martin?”

“My…partner.”

“But being nice to the in-laws is part of being married, so—”

“I am not married!” he snaps. “I only moved in with Martin because my building was sold and the lease expired, and I didn’t want to commit myself to anything, property-wise, before my promotion is through. This is a temporary arrangement, completely unofficial, and I see no reason to become all lovely-dovey with his mom and dad!”

Lots of strong feelings, and none of my business.

“Well—” I shrug “—if you’re really up for the drive, and you know a good take-out pizza place between here and there—because the farm ain’t got no delivery service, dude—I got beer, and I got soda, and I got a porch to sit on and trees to look at. All yours for fixing the handle bar and adjusting the saddle.”





Judging by the cars clogging up the parking space on the farm, the Walshes are having friends round. Tim and I park as best we can; I carry the pizza, the pump, and the helmet; Tim pushes the bike.

“You. Are. So. Weird,” Tim breathes as I open the farmyard gate. Dolly and Jenny are playing with a girl their age and a toddler on the swing hanging from the chestnut tree, and Pop, Howie, and two other men are getting the barbeque going. Pop sees me, sees Tim, and I make sure to nod a greeting. First time the new tenant is bringing home a man—that will be food for gossip.

“Weird for wanting to live here? Living in Ameeerica…suits me down to the ground. Along here.” I direct him past the main house and the steel barn. The cottage comes into view, blue as the sky on this warm evening, and my heart glows with proprietary pride.

“Mind you, Cleve lives in the sticks, too.” Tim shakes his head. “More remote than this, even. Without the farmers.”

“Why do you call him Cleve?”

“Oh, from when we were at school. I don’t see the appeal, myself, of this rural living.”

“You were at school together?”

He grins. “I bet that gives you all sorts of salacious fantasies, doesn’t it? Foreigners invariably think English boarding schools are hotbeds of adolescent sexual depravity.”

“Aren’t they?”

“No more than other establishments that lock up several hundred males with each other. I had a good time.”

“You can’t have been there together long,” I try with an objective handle. “He’s quite a few years older than you are.”

“Swee’pea, I’m not as young as I look. Although I obviously prefer being older than I look to looking older than I am.”

“Well, three or four years older than me. Right?”

“I’ll be thirty-eight before the year is out.” Tim is actually blushing. “This is what Shakespeare and I have in common: there are six lost years in our biographies. I doubt, though, that Shakespeare spent them on tenure track at a reputable American university and failed his five-year review.”

“You didn’t!”

“Let’s just say there is a reason why I prefer to keep my closet door carefully closed. Hey, this is neat!”

“Eat your words, city boy, and get comfy. Bathroom, if you need it, is here, but there’s a pile of girl’s laundry in there, so be warned.”

While the pizza is in the oven for quick warm-up, Tim sets up my bike and I exchange my skirt and heels for jeans and Birkenstocks and get rid of my contacts.

“Try this for height,” he says when I come down the porch. “And tell that kid to stop staring at the whoopsie.”

I look up to where he is pointedly not looking and see Jules sitting on one of the tractors, watching us.

“Hey, Jules!” I shout assertively, because I’m not going to be stalked by the Calderbrook Cinderella. “What’s up?”

She jumps off the seat, but instead of making herself scarce, she comes over.

“Is something the matter, Jules? Not to be rude, but you see I have a visitor. So why don’t we each look after our own, hm?”

Something clearly is the matter. Embarrassment and the desire to make mischief are fighting it out on her face.

“The men are wondering whether he is the man who raped the girl!”

“What?”

The shockwave of Tim’s reaction makes even Jules flinch.

“Don’t shout at me!” she says defensively. “I’m just saying what they’re saying!”

“No is the answer to that one, kiddo!” Tim seems even more upset than I am.

“Jules,” I intervene, “what do you mean, the man who raped the girl?”

She glowers at Tim, who seems absolved from the original accusation but is now in disgrace for having shouted at her.

“Lorna O’Neal—” she cocks her head into the direction of the main house “—works as a secretary at the Folly, and she said that there is a student who was raped by a professor.”

“But—when?”

“How should I know? Yesterday, last week?”

“Yes, but recently?”

“Yeah, like—she—or her boss, dunno—found out only this morning!”

Tim shrugs his exasperation. “But that could be anywhere in the college. If it’s true, that is!”

“It is true!” she flings at him. “And it was an English professor! I’m not stupid, you know!”

I am so stunned I have to sit down on one of the steps leading up to the porch. Tim leans on the bike saddle as if he was going to be sick.

“Jesus F.—”

“Hey, pas devant les Chrétiens!” I turn back to Jules. “Jules, this kind of information would be top secret, absolutely and totally confidential. Your parents’ friend wouldn’t be allowed to share this.”

“It’s all confidential,” Jules says petulantly. “She told my mother. I overheard them. And Bill O’Neal told Grandpa and Howie.”

“And you told us.” Tim and Jules are no dream team. She glares at him, her cheeks dark with resentment.

“Okay, I’ll go back and say it is you! I’m a rat, after all, so what do you expect!” She stalks off toward the group of men who have been watching us.

“Honestly, Tim…”

“The little punk. How come she’s black? Is she adopted?”

“Sort of. The daughter-in-law was married before, so Jules is the, uh, black sheep of the family. Be nice.”

“She isn’t really going to tell them I’m a rapist, is she?”

“I doubt it. And even if she did, they wouldn’t believe her.”

“Because that would be really ironic, if I was lynched by a mob of rednecks who think that I raped a woman!”

“The Walshes are no rednecks, Tim!”

He looks at me like a very troubled baby, his convex forehead deeply lined. “Let me get my phone.”

In the shade of my living room, the news seems even more ominous than in the bright sunlight outside.

“Just because someone was accused doesn’t mean someone else was really raped,” I think aloud, somewhat incoherently. “I hate to say this, but—it might be a trumped-up harassment charge, filed by some snowflake to be revenged on a professor who gave her a ‘C’ for her essay.”

Tim looks up, and I have not yet seen him so grim. He actually looks his age for once.

“I wouldn’t have said it if you hadn’t,” he admits. “But ten to one it’ll turn out to be something like that. Boning student totty is one thing, but actual rape? I don’t believe it.”

“Oh, snap! You know what we’re doing, don’t you?”

“We’re blaming the victim.”

“Exactly. For shame! Who are you calling?”

He sits on my sofa with his phone in his hands. “Who’d know?”

“Ma Mayfield knows, for sure, as Dean of Studies, but—”

We stare at each other, overawed at the thought of phoning Elizabeth Mayfield on the little matter of a scandal involving a student, a professor and a count of sexual assault. Then we collapse in a fit of hysterical laughter.

“You call her Ma Mayfield?” Tim asks. “That’s perfect! Why does it ring a bell, though? Ma Mayfield…”

“Brideshead Revisited. The nightcl—”

“The nightclub Charles and Sebastian go to in London, where they get sloshed and pick up those two prostitutes! Ma Mayfield is the proprietress! Oh, that is perfect!” Tim cackles. “Wait till I tell Giles!”

“Oh, no! No, Tim, please!”

“Well, whoever he is, and whatever he did, Ma Mayfield is going to have his balls for this!” he says gleefully. “And God have mercy on his degenerate soul!”

“Actually, whatever he did or didn’t do, God is his best bet, because his career is finished.” As the implications sink in, I’m beginning to feel nauseous, with the shock, with hunger. “Heck, I forgot the pizza!”

I bolt into the kitchen, which is already thick with the smell of burnt dough, though not yet with smoke. I save what can be saved, put it on a tray with two bottles of beer, and find Tim on the sofa, still immobile.

“And?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t know. First things first. Cheers!” He takes a long pull. “The thing is, we don’t want to be hasty here. This may still turn out to be a misunderstanding. I never heard of a sec called O’Neal, so she isn’t one of ours. If she works at the Observatory, I’m sure I’d know her name.”

“Hang on—why is the name familiar to me but you say you don’t know her?”

“O’Neal? Selena O’Neal is one of our students. She’s one of—” He stops dead.

“—one of the new grad assistants recommended by Nick Hornberger,” I complete his sentence.

“Holy shit!”

“Yes, but—no, Tim, that—no, come on! Would the whole family be visiting friends and having beer and barbeque, if the daughter had just come home with the news that her professor had molested her? That isn’t likely. In fact, whoever it is, it’s not the O’Neal girl.”

“You’re right. Anyway, she’s hardly Nick’s type.” Absentmindedly he reaches for a piece of pie and starts chewing.

“Does Nick sleep with students?” I despise myself for using this opportunity to find out the dirt about my colleagues, but not enough to shut up.

“Does the sun rise in the east?”

“With Natalie? America’s Next Top Model?”

Tim grins through his pizza.

“You’re quick. Yes, Natalie’s the current flavor of the month.”

“Current?”

“Nick and I don’t share our weekend score over a beer on Monday nights. But to the best of my knowledge he’s had one on the go most times since I came here. Everyone knows, everyone looks the other way, even Elizabeth, Dancey, and Ruffin, because he has never been reported and because he’s an Ardrossan alumnus and knows all the important people, both on and off campus. Plays golf with the dads and then goes and does their daughters. You gotta admire the guy. In a way.”

“Yeah, right.”

“As long as they’re of age—”

“I keep having this conversation with people! I don’t care who Hornberger sleeps with, as long as it’s consensual and he remains able to do his job efficiently and impartially! But is he? And if he isn’t, is that because he has sex with the daughters or because he plays golf with the fathers?”

“Have you ever…” Tim peters out discreetly.

“Played golf?”

“Noooo…”

“No, Tim, I haven’t! And yes, I’m almost as cynical about it as you are. But this—apparently—wasn’t consensual! And I’m not even sure that I know what consensual means, if it’s a case of a professor sleeping with a student!”

“Nick isn’t the raping sort.” He dismisses my objection and my heat.

“And who, in your opinion, is the raping sort?”

“All right. It’s impossible to tell. Joe Banks had a fling with a grad student, but she left a while ago, and she was good people. And it can’t be any of my brothers in the closet, unless it’s a really, really devious double bluff.”

“Is Dolph Bergstrom in your closet?” I ask, curious.

“Ha! No. But doesn’t Dancey wish he were! Mind you, I have sometimes wondered how far Doofus would go, brown-nosing the alpha male. But that would be self-prostitution, not rape.”

“Hm. I think I’ll decide you don’t mean that. Could it be one of the male teaching assistants, or one of the adjuncts? I know Jules said professor, but that may be a misunderstanding. A drunken party at a frat house—wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That—yes!” Tim sits up, obviously relieved at the thought. “That’s perfectly plausible. Bad enough, very bad, but—hell, yeah! It’s one of the frat boys! C’mon, let’s hang out on your porch. Maybe they’ll come over and tell us.”

I get him another beer—he assures me he can have another one, for the shock, and still drive home—and offer him the rocking chair, which triggers an extremely funny shtick in the character of Laura Ingalls on how she went a-studying in the big city and fell for her handsome professor.

“So, tell me about Martin,” I challenge him, innocently.

“What Martin?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I’m not an ass, I’m an arse,” he quips but fortunately decides, upon reflection, not to elaborate. “Martin’s my man.”

“So the moving-in is a temporary arrangement, but Martin isn’t.”

“No, he isn’t temporary. I think.”

“And you’re really not…out…to the department?”

“I’d say I’m neither out nor in.” He shrugs after a baleful pause. “He—or she—who has eyes to see, will see, but I’m a professor on tenure track, not a gay-rights activist.”

“Was that the problem the first time round?”

He dismisses the episode like he would swat a wasp away from his face. “With hindsight I’d say that homophobia played into it but that it was only one factor—the most actionable factor, though, which of course made the lawyers focus on it in a way that—ah, well. The whole thing was a nightmare. I don’t want to ever be involved in anything like that again.”

“And the Winchester connection?”

“You mean, did Cleve get me in here because we were at school together? No, I got this job fair and square!”

Cleveland must have been on Tim’s search committee, and among the things I learned about private schools like Eton, Rugby, and Winchester when I was in England is that “old boys” smell each other out like stoats. But I understand that Tim and Cleveland have to pretend to each other, themselves, and the world that this played no part in Tim’s appointment.

“So, do tell. Tim Blundell’s Schooldays. Director’s cut.”

“Forget it, you salacious little fag hag!”

“Hey! If I wanna know about that time Cleveland rogered you behind the Fives’ Court, I’ll ask, okay? Geez!”

“You don’t even know what Fives is, you colonial.”

“Whatever. Something posh and brutal to do with a ball!”

He laughs. “Sorry, then. I know Giles had his chances at school. Don’t know whether he ever took anyone up on an offer. Of course I had a bit of a crush on him; lots of us did. He was academically top-notch and a member of Lords—the cricket team—and something of a dish, as you can imagine.”

I say nothing.

“Well, maybe you can’t, but he was. Is, I would have thought, although I know he doesn’t necessarily appeal to American women.”

“He doesn’t?” asks Puts-Her-Foot-In-It.

“Well, no—too reserved. The understated charm of the English upper middle-class male is lost on your sisters. There is nothing understated about the sides of hung beef favored by American women.”

“Speak for yourself, dear.”

“Tell me, Lieberman—” Tim chuckles “—what’s the type you go for? By the way, I like you in your glasses. The sexy librarian. Have you started looking for some light diversion yet? Nice Jewish Boys are few and far between around here, I’m afraid. There’s Freddy Katz, but he’s orthodox with half a dozen children. His wife’s an assistant professor in the music department. Then there’s—oh, incoming, eleven o’clock!”

Karen and a woman about ten years older than her are walking toward us from the direction of the main house, their heads bent toward each other in rapid exchange, and I can sense their discomfort from here. As so often in my dealings with the Walshes, I am unsure of protocol. It seems impolite to remain seated till they have come up to us; on the other hand, getting up and walking toward them might be misunderstood to mean that I don’t want them on my porch. I take my cue from Tim, who rises from his chair, and together we walk down the steps and wait there.

“Anna, I’m—I’m so sorry!”

“You mean because of Jules? Don’t worry, Karen!”

“I’m so tore up about it, sir, I hope you weren’t—well, of course you were offended, how could you not be!”

“Don’t give her the satisfaction of having riled you,” Tim intervenes, and I nod my agreement, but they stare at him as much for the authoritative way he has inserted himself into the exchange as for what he said. Hastily I launch into the introductions, and of course Karen’s friend is Lorna O’Neal.

“Your Selena is in one of my classes, isn’t she? I’m only just getting to know everyone.”

“Well, she mentioned you,” Lorna says sternly, and I don’t know whether this is good or bad. She is a big, tall woman—what fashion magazines nowadays call “full-figured”—with blond highlights and a little too much color around the eyes—but striking, and clearly a very pretty woman when she was younger. I wonder how she gets on with her studious, mousy daughter, and then I wonder how mousy Selena would look if she straightened her shoulders and put on some age-appropriate clothes.

“Selena’s a marvel,” Lorna continues, “so hard-working and ambitious! I know you wouldn’t think it on account of her being so quiet. She has to show more personality, I keep telling her, because she has every right to be confident. I don’t mind telling you that she is the first in our family to go to graduate school! That’s why the girls talk about you, Dr. Lieberman. You’re an example to them.”

A Jewish agnostic who talks to first-years about masturbation? I think not.

“Thank you, Mrs. O’Neal, you’re very kind,” I murmur mechanically. “But about this…rumor.”

“Bless you, I’m sure I needn’t to stress how very confidential this information is!” She is a self-assured woman, not easily shaken, but she knows perfectly well that she has committed a serious professional blunder that might even be cause for dismissal.

“So, who is it?” Tim asks bluntly. “If it’s a secret that can be shared with the general populace, I don’t see why you should be cagey about telling us.”

“I suspect Mrs. O’Neal feels she oughtn’t to tell us,” I supply helpfully.

“Can’t!” she insists. “And that’s the truth! I know no more than that, Dr. Blundell. No names, no details. But, as right is right, this is too shameful a crime to be swept under the carpet by the college—dearly as they’d like to, I have no doubt!”

“Neither have I,” Tim agrees.

I jump in before Tim can go on. “We’d best leave the matter to the authorities and interfere as little as possible. We appreciate the difficulty of your position, Mrs. O’Neal. Please give our best regards to Selena. Is she here, too?”

“No, she—” Lorna can’t quite get herself to release Tim from her glare of mistrust. “She decided to stay behind to study.”

Tim leaves shortly after the two women, promising to let me know if he finds out anything over the weekend. Through the shock and confusion I feel the pull of the woods. I could take out my new bike, but cycling would distract me from thinking, so I walk. Once through the poplars and across the creek, I cut left, away from the path that will take me past the pickers’ camp and round to Calderwood Lane. No more people!

When Tim demanded to know whether I ever had an affair with a professor, I could truthfully answer in the negative. Alex Gresham was no professor. He was a rabbi.

Now there’s a secret.

About half a mile along a path I never took before, the trees are thinning out and a grassland hill comes into view. Hare Hill, as I learned from the map of the surrounding area that I bought at the gas station. Today I will walk up Hare Hill, although it feels oddly uncomfortable to leave the cover of the forest and to venture out into the open grassland. Why do hares do that?

Alex and I weren’t exposed. Not that we did anything wrong, or morally turpid. It is just that a recently widowed rabbi, on a curative exchange from Manchester, England, will always prefer for his affair with a twenty-one-year-old volunteer tutor at the temple to remain undiscussed by the yentas. I preferred it, too.

He was the first man I ever made love with. I’d had sex with boys, two or three—but I had not made love with a man. His grief made him both needy and unavailable at the same time; the combination was irresistible to me. We both knew that come August I would leave for the marshy plains of East Anglia, and neither of us ever called that event into question. I was in love, but I was also ambitious.

I sit down on a grassy knoll on top of the hill—no hares to be seen—and rest my chin on my hunched-up knees. The surrounding tree tops, in differing shades of green, have begun to turn yellow and red. Soon it will be autumn.

Why do I have to think of Alex now?

I rang him up when I went to live in London four years later. His phone number was not difficult to find, and I could hear that his first reaction was one of pleasure. But when I suggested a meeting, he backed off. Said it wouldn’t be wise, what with my work and all. A week later he turned up, unannounced. We spent the weekend in bed, and I don’t believe I have it in me to be happier than during those few days, even though at the end of them he told me that he was getting married again.

That evening I wrote him a letter. What I needed to say was that I loved him and wanted him to marry me. For the first and only time in my life I laid claim to another person, a man. Nothing by return of post; nothing within the week. Then, a small parcel and inside it a small box and inside the box a gray pebble, the size of a child’s fist. No note, nothing. His answer to my question was engraved in the pebble: “&”.

I have never seen Alex again or spoken to him. There is nothing left to say. I understood what he tried to say, and the pebble is among my most treasured possessions. I broke my heart over him and went back to having sex instead of making love, this time with Ciaran, a man whose wife and child were not dead. For a while I smoked a lot of dope and got little writing done, then I had a sort of breakdown and got no writing done at all. Dark days.

So lost am I in memories that when I hear faint grunts and moans echoing between the trees, I at first think I am hallucinating. That, in turn, worries me enough to make me tread more carefully and to survey the gray-green stillness around me. I have only taken one more turning of the way when off to the left, behind a huge uprooted tree, there is movement. The rhythmic movement and sound of hips smacking against each other.

One of the many things my dope-hazy affair with Ciaran taught me is a certain sang-froid in relation to casual sex. If you start sleeping with the owner of the house in which you share the top-floor apartment with a fellow student, and in which he lives with his wife and new baby on the second floor and runs a second-hand record store on the first floor, and if his wife not only knows about your affair but even claims to condone it, and if you spend an increasing number of evenings in their sitting room, smoking weed, eating Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, and making out with your landlord, occasionally his friend and, on one best-forgotten occasion, even his younger brother, you do not flinch when you come across a copulating couple in the woods. I try not to step onto any dry twigs and make myself scarce.

“What the hell!”

Like birds flushed from a thicket, two bodies rush out of the undergrowth in front of me, limbs flailing, giggling, out of breath. They are as startled by my sudden appearance on the scene as I am by theirs, and it would be hard to tell which of us is more mortified when Logan Williams, the aggravating redhead from my Comedy class, and I recognize each other.

“Oh, shit!” He bites his lip, but the cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone in his blood spurs him on. “Dr. L.! What the f*ck are you doing here?”

His companion, a blond hippy in a corduroy mini skirt and a grass-stained t-shirt, giggles and pulls him along, but as in class, Logan wants to see how I react to his provocation. I give him a sour smile and nonchalantly lean against the tree to my left.

“Not what you’re doing here, f*cking. Run along now. I hope you’re using condoms!” I shout after them as they scurry off, giggling again.

What point is there in trying to teach this swaggering bundle of muscles and spermatic cords the subtleties of Renaissance poetry? He embodies the force of nature that comedy seeks to represent and tame, and while he is driven by the sexual energy of youth, he is not at all interested in its representation. And why should he be? Except that someone is forking out thirty thousand dollars a year to keep this kid in school.

I already wasn’t looking forward to next week; now I’m looking forward to it even less. I wish the males at Ardrossan were a little less…ardent in their attentions to the opposite sex.