Summer Night Dreams

by Alison May

  The student pointed at the door. ‘I’m here to see Dominic. Professor Collins.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s here.’ Alex remembered. The funeral. ‘Actually he’s not in at all today. I think he’s back tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay.’ The guy leaned back against the wall for a second before sliding down to sit on the floor.

  ‘I don’t think you can wait here.’ Alex grinned. ‘Maybe come back in the morning.’

  ‘Right. Only I can’t get into my room.’

  Alex didn’t want to know, but curiosity got the better of him. ‘Why not?’

  ‘No key.’

  ‘Right. Is it a room in halls?’

  The boy looked at Alex as if he’d performed a small feat of genius. ‘Yeah man.’

  ‘So have you asked the porters to let you in?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘Gotta have ID. No ID. ‘S’all like in my room.’ He looked back at the door. ‘Professor Collins usually sorts this sort of stuff out for me.’

  Did he now? Alex shrugged. ‘I think you’re going to have to try to persuade the porters this time.’

  ‘Or the girl!’ The student jumped up off the floor.

  Alex was confused. ‘What girl?’

  ‘The girl in my room.’ The boy’s brow furrowed. ‘She wouldn’t let me in.’ He stared down at his own feet for a second. Alex followed his gaze. Greying socks. No shoes. ‘Do you think the girl in my room might have my shoes?’

  Alex found himself shrugging again. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Right.’ The boy set off, apparently in pursuit of his lost footwear and the mysterious girl.

  ‘Hold on. What’s your name? Do you want me to tell Professor Collins you were looking for him?’

  The boy nodded. ‘Yeah. Nice one. I’m Nick. Nick Bottomley. Dominic’s my pastoral thingy.’

  ‘Pastoral supervisor?’

  ‘Yeah. Can you tell him “thank you” as well?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘He got me one of those grant things for when you’ve spent all your money.’

  ‘A hardship grant?’

  ‘Yeah, but you can tell him I won’t need another. I’ve got a job.’

  Alex nodded. ‘Great.’ He watched the boy shamble off down the corridor. Pastoral supervision was one of the many and various obligations of the departmental staff. It usually amounted to a cursory meeting with the student twice a year. It looked like Dominic had got himself landed with a rather more high maintenance charge. Heaven help whoever had had the misfortune to employ him.

  Alex was still grinning to himself as he finally arrived at the shared office. It was deserted, apart from Helen, sitting at one of the four computers. She looked up as he came in. ‘What you smiling at?’

  ‘I just met one of Dominic’s students.’

  ‘And why’s that funny?’

  ‘Nick something. I think he was stoned.’

  Helen laughed. ‘Nick Bottomley probably. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s stoned. I taught him for a whole term last year and he’s basically like that all the time. Once he turned up to a seminar with no trousers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was already sat down when I got there, so I didn’t notice til the end. He walked out, cool as anything, in T-shirt and boxer shorts. Dominic swears he has hidden depths.’

  Alex shook his head, and looked around the room. It appeared to have been furnished by the method of chucking in all the decrepit and mismatched furniture that nobody else wanted, and suffered from the lack of care common to communal spaces where nobody felt personally responsible for keeping things nice. ‘So this is our office then?’

  Helen followed his gaze. ‘It is. Shared by eight people, and we have four desks, three computers, and three functioning chairs. It’s not exactly palatial.’

  ‘Four computers,’ Alex corrected her.

  ‘Nope.’ Helen pointed towards the desk in the farthest corner of the room. ‘That one’s only a monitor. And you should be thanking me for telling you that. Normally we just let newbies waste ten minutes working it out for themselves.’

  Alex sat down on a wobbly office chair. ‘Isn’t it easier to work from home?’

  ‘But then you miss out on the gossip and everything.’

  ‘Everything being the chance that you might run into Dominic?’

  Helen turned back to her computer, studiously not answering his question. ‘They’ve sent an all-staff email around about Samson dying.’

  ‘Does it mention the orange and the asphyxiation?’

  Helen frowned at him. ‘No.’

  ‘Does it mention recruiting his replacement?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. It’s the usual stuff. Sad news, deepest condolences to his family. You know the sort of thing.’

  Alex looked around the office. The mishmash of rejected furniture and second-hand computers was depressing. He sighed. ‘Lunchtime?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Emily

  I need to do something about Tania. I’ve tried to be nice to her. I’ve tried to talk to Dad about the whole insanity. They’ve had nearly a fortnight for the whole thing to fizzle out. It’s time to take action.

  I leave work early, so I’ll be home before Dad comes in. I shout ‘hello’ as loudly and cheerily as I can manage as I come through the door, and wait for a response. Nothing. Tania’s not here. I run upstairs and into Dad’s room. I haven’t been in here since She arrived. It hasn’t changed much, but there are touches here and there, traces of Her. I fling open a couple of drawers. His clothes. His clothes. Her clothes. I pull a few things out and look underneath. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for. Whatever it is it’s not in the first drawer. I try the others, but there’s nothing incriminating. Clothes, a few bits of cheap jewellery, some toiletries. Something doesn’t feel right about that. I can’t put my finger on what. I survey the room, trying to commit it to memory, waiting for the moment to strike when the thing that’s out of place pops to the front of my attention. That’s how it always works on TV. The detective character has a little niggling feeling that something’s not quite right, and then five minutes from the end he has a revelation and the whole mystery becomes clear. I wait a minute, but no revelations are forthcoming.

  ‘Anyone home?’

  Tania’s voice travels up the stairs. Shit. I scan the room to make sure I haven’t left anything out of place and dive into the hallway, just as she comes into view. She glances at the swinging door behind me. ‘Were you in our room?’

  I shake my head, and push past her to go back downstairs. Not that there’s any reason that I shouldn’t go in there. It’s my house. I’ve lived here since I was a baby. She’s the interloper, not me.

  I hear the click as she pulls the bedroom door shut before she follows me. ‘Where have you been?’ She doesn’t have a job and, so far as I know, she doesn’t have any friends around here.

  She smirks. ‘I’ll tell you when Theo gets in.’

  I let her go off into the kitchen, no doubt to prepare another of her deadly dull meals for Dad. I flick my phone on. Nothing from Dom. I texted him this morning before the funeral and got a two line reply. Nothing since. My stomach contracts. Dad is, apparently set on marrying Her, and Dom doesn’t like having me around enough to introduce me to his mother. I can feel the blackness closing in. Breathe. Slow deep breaths. I tell myself everything is going to be okay. Dom is dealing with his dad dying. He’s bound to be preoccupied. Everything will get back to normal soon. And there’s no way my dad’s actually going to go through with marrying Tania. It was a holiday romance. One way or another he’ll realise that. They can’t be serious about getting married. They’d be talking about wedding plans if they were.

  I tell myself that again and again in my head, but I can’t stop thinking about what it will be like if they do go through with the wedding. Tania won’t want me living here. What if Dom carries on going off me as well? What if, in the end, everyone does leave me and it’s just me and t
he darkness and nothing else? The feeling of being alone competes with my hostility towards Tania. I almost go into the kitchen and make chit-chat. At least she’s somebody. At least she’s here. I put the telly on instead and turn the volume up high to drown out my thinking.

  Dad comes in just after six. I stay firmly seated in the lounge so I don’t have to watch them getting all teenage up against the kitchen worktop. It’s disgusting, and it’s not like him at all.

  ‘I’ve poured you a drink Emily.’ Tania bears down on me clutching two champagne flutes.

  I take one from her. What’s she up to? ‘What are we celebrating?’

  She waits for my dad to sit down, and perches herself on the arm of his chair. ‘We are celebrating the fact that I think I’ve found the perfect wedding venue.’

  Dad sits up straight. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. It’s called Arden Manor. It’s about half an hour out of town – beautiful old manor house, with grounds. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and it’s just about within the budget we talked about.’

  I feel myself tense. Wedding venues? Budgets? When have they been discussing all this?

  My dad’s eyebrows rise. ‘How “just about” within the budget?’

  Tania drops her head and looks through her lashes at him. ‘Very nearly just about. I promise. And I’ve had another idea too.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, they’ve still got the midsummer weekend free at the end of June, and so I thought, what if, instead of having hen and stag parties, we had a big midsummer’s eve party on the Friday night for everyone, and then the wedding on the Saturday?’

  The end of June. That’s only five months away. ‘I thought it took years to plan a wedding.’

  Tania waves her hand. ‘It doesn’t have too. Six months is plenty of time, and I love midsummer’s eve. All the folklore about the solstice, and the long light evening. When I was a little girl in Penzance, my grandmother used to tell me stories about old Cornish midsummer traditions. They call it Gollowan, and there were fireworks and parades. And you’re called Midsomer as well! It’ll be the Midsomer Midsummer wedding.’

  Penzance. She had a grandmother in Penzance. I file the fact away in my memory for later. It sounds like it’ll take more than hope to stop this happening, and knowledge is power. She stops talking, keeping her eyes fixed on my dad. ‘So what do you think?’

  Eventually he nods. ‘I think it sounds perfect.’ He raises his glass. ‘To the Midsomer Midsummer wedding!’

  PART 2

  SPRING

  Dominic

  April

  ‘Hush. Hush. You’re okay.’ Dominic stroked his girlfriend’s hair on the pillow beside him.

  Emily opened her eyes sleepily. ‘What happened?’

  Dominic smiled. ‘You were kicking the duvet off. I think you were having a bad dream.’

  She peered around the room for a second, and shook her head. ‘I’m fine. Sorry. Did I wake you up?’

  Dominic shook his head. ‘I’ve been up ages.’ He held the clock up for her inspection. ‘If you want a lift to work you need to get dressed.’

  ‘I’m gonna go in later.’

  Dominic raised an eyebrow. It was the first proper day back after the Easter break, and they had a full departmental meeting at nine. ‘I thought you were doing the minutes.’

  Emily shrugged. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’

  Emily had had ‘stuff’ to do a lot recently. Dominic wondered if he ought to ask. It was two and a half months now since his father passed away, and since Emily had been lumbered with a new wannabe stepmother. He wondered if they ought to be talking more to one another about how they were feeling. There were only two problems he could see with that idea. He hadn’t been raised to wear his heart on his sleeve, and he didn’t have a clue what he was feeling anyway, about his father, about his future, about his career. Everything had crystalized to one moment in Helen’s hallway when he’d answered the phone and been told his father was dead. He gave Emily a squeeze which he hoped communicated more than he was able to put into words, and kissed the top of her head. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  How did he mean? He wasn’t quite sure. ‘Just generally.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good. I guess I’ll catch up with you later then.’

  The meeting, when he arrived, was an unusually long and boring one, in a life that seemed, to Dominic, to be increasingly filled with long, boring meetings. Professor Midsomer had already talked at length about the challenges facing the department, and the whole university, in the new funding model and the need to attract more students with higher A-level results. The Vice Chancellor was talking a good game on that point right now, with Theo nodding vigorously at his side. Dominic didn’t fancy their chances. Kids with As at A-Level didn’t pick the University of the South Midlands, unless they were taking a peculiarly subtle approach to teen rebellion against an Oxbridge educated parent.

  A piece of paper drifted into his peripheral vision. It was blank apart from a series of dashes and a question mark at the top of the page.

  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ?

  He grinned, and wrote the letter E at the foot of the page. That filled in two blanks. He remembered exactly when he and Helen had started passing notes during meetings. It had been a graduate seminar with a visiting professor. About fifteen minutes into the professor’s presentation Dominic had noticed that the man’s fly was undone. Approximately eight seconds later a piece of paper ripped off Helen’s pad had appeared in front of him. The message simply read: I can see his pants. As a comment on the argument in front of them it was neither big nor clever. It was, however, accurate. Since then Helen’s hastily scribbled comments had tended toward the more academic, but that first one stuck in his memory. The note passing had quickly progressed into puzzle setting, especially when Helen was as bored as him. It kept them both awake if nothing else. He looked at the game in progress, and followed the E with an S. One more blank completed. T and A got him the upright and the crossbar of a gallows, but a lucky guess at I, followed obviously by N and G got him back on track.

  _ E _ _ I N G _ E _ _ S?

  It still didn’t make sense. He raised an eyebrow at the puzzle setter sitting next to him.

  The door crashed open at the back of the room. ‘Sorry!’

  It was Emily. He glanced at his watch. In an odd sort of way he had to admire her brazenness. She’d been awake when he left for work, and still managed to roll in a clear two hours late. That, he supposed, was the benefit of working for your dad.

  She bowled across the room, and plonked herself into a seat next to her father who smiled indulgently. The Vice Chancellor’s lips pursed slightly, and the poor doctoral researcher who’d been stuck taking minutes slid their pad and paper across the table to Emily. She waved at Dominic across the table. He nodded trying to hit a balance between professional and affectionate. Dating at work was a minefield. Dating the boss’s daughter was worse. Part of him wished Theo disapproved terribly. Then they could keep the whole thing secret. It would be easier.

  Dominic looked back at the pad in front of him. R, T, O and U took him further down the road to the hangman’s noose, before L and D filled in enough gaps for him to finish the puzzle. He wrote the W and B straight in.

  WEDDING BELLS?

  He paused for a moment, wondering what she was driving at. Theo was getting married soon, but everybody knew about that. Most of the department were going. It was old news. He glanced at Helen, who shifted slightly in her seat and pointed her biro towards Emily.

  He pulled the sheet of paper back towards him.

  WHO SAID THAT? He scribbled.

  IT’S TRUE?

  He paused, wondering if his brain would present a clear answer to the question if he allowed a sufficient period of silence. Nothing came. Dating for fourteen months. She had a drawer in his bedroom and a spare toothbrush and selection of potions in his bathroom. He wasn’t twenty-one any mo
re. It was getting to the point where he was expected to put a ring on it. And why not? He liked Emily. She was exactly the right sort of wife for the life he had. But he hadn’t actually popped the question yet. Something was holding him back. What was the phrase they used for relationship statuses online?

  IT’S COMPLICATED.

  ‘Professor Collins?’

  Theo was looking directly at him.

  Dominic smiled broadly. ‘Yes?’

  Next to him, he could hear Helen stifling a giggle. It must be obvious that he had no idea what was happening in the meeting. His only hope was that nobody else was following things closely enough to notice.

  ‘You were going to share some thoughts on the issues with the second year elective timetabling?’

  ‘Right.’ Dominic looked around the room at his colleagues. Not an attentive face amongst them. He’d be better off putting the whole timetabling plan in an email for them to ignore at their leisure, rather than forcing them to come together and ignore him en masse. Nonetheless, they were here, and like it or not, he was a full professor now. ‘Committee rooms and drinks parties’ – that’s where his doctoral supervisor had told him academic careers were made. Dominic wondered if he needed to start paying more attention at both.

  He rambled valiantly for a few minutes about second year timetables, before inviting opinions from the floor. Given the fact that nobody appeared to have been paying the slightest attention, a surprising number of opinions were forthcoming, and the first two or three were actually relevant to the subject. As the debate degraded into the traditional moaning about the quality of the coffee in the senior common room and the arcane rules about photocopying allowances Dominic zoned out again.

  ‘There was one thing before we finish.’ Theo was calling the discussion to halt. Dominic dragged his attention back into the room. ‘As you all know, Professor Samson passed away recently...’ Theo paused to allow the customary murmurings about the whys and wherefores. ‘That does mean that we have an academic vacancy in the department. Just to confirm that we will be advertising that vacancy during the coming term with a view to having someone in post for the new academic year.’