by Alison May
Alex shook his head. ‘You were going to put adventurous. You need my help.’
He got no argument. Helen needed all the help she could get.
‘I might sign up myself.’
That was surprising. ‘I didn’t think you were looking for anything serious.’
Her housemate had his gaze fixed to the floor. ‘Not serious necessarily, just something to take my mind off ...’
‘Take your mind off what?’
Alex shrugged. ‘Nothing. Forget it.’
Helen turned her attention back to the screen.
‘Do you think Emily was ok?’
The change of subject was unexpected. ‘How do you mean?’
‘In the car.’
Helen shrugged. ‘She said it was just car sickness.’
Alex didn’t reply.
‘Why?’
‘No reason.’ He shook his head. ‘Come on. Let’s find you a love life.’
Helen wondered if there was something else on his mind, but before she could ask Alex was pulling the mouse out of her fingers and clicking through the screens, confidently selecting a range of virtues for her dating profile. She might not be doing very well at being her own cheerleader, but at least she had someone to do it for her.
Dominic
Dominic preferred working with his office door propped open. It was an old habit. Absolute quiet had never suited him, and he loved the noise of campus. It was the summer term, and the warmer days and lighter nights seemed to lift the mood, so the atmosphere was a mixture of pressing deadlines, summer barbecue and building hangover. It suited Dominic. It made him feel nineteen again.
Dominic scanned the document on the screen in front of him. It was his final draft of a journal paper based on his research into sixteenth century crime and punishment in the Welsh borders. He’d got lots of interesting material on the treatment of sex workers and the rates of sexual crime in the period, but his journal paper focused on witchcraft. Dominic rolled his eyes. He’d written his undergraduate dissertation on witchcraft more than fifteen years ago, but it never fell out of academic fashion.
His email pinged. He kept meaning to turn the notifications off and close his email while he was working. He kept meaning to; he never did.
He clicked on the notification window. Dr Hart. Subject: Urgent meeting.
He smiled and picked up his phone, dialling the extension for the Sessional Lecturers office. Helen answered on the second ring.
‘You didn’t answer my question.’
‘What question?’
‘From the staff meeting.’
‘That was two weeks ago.’ He was stalling.
‘You still never answered.’ She paused. ‘So you and Emily, wedding bells?
He sighed. ‘We’re not engaged.’
‘Really?’
He shrugged, which wasn’t much help over the phone. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well have you proposed to her?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re not engaged.’
Dominic rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t engaged, but marriage had been mentioned. That crossed a boundary. It wasn’t a conversation you could take back. You couldn’t sit down with your girlfriend and tell her that the discussion had been purely theoretical. He wasn’t sure he would want to anyway. Marriage. Children. Career. Those were the things he was meant to have, and Emily had been sweet lately. She’d been kind to his mum, and he knew how scared she was of being alone. He had the ability to take some of that anxiety away. You could measure a man, Dominic’s father had always said, by how he treated the women around him. Dominic didn’t want to be the sort of man who strung his girlfriends along. ‘What do you care anyway?’
There was a pause on the line. ‘I don’t. I hate to be behind on the gossip.’
‘You detest gossip.’ It was one of Helen’s most admirable qualities. Most people claimed to dislike gossip, but only as a social nicety before embarking on a full-bloodied character assassination. Helen genuinely meant it.
‘I actually wanted to talk to you about work.’
‘What about it?’
Three hours later, Dominic settled into the usual table in their usual pub. It was where all the staff from the university came. Close enough to stagger back to offices after overlong lunches, but not so close – and slightly too pricey – to be a student hangout. He sipped his pint of something with a stupid name. Vicar’s Vice or Curate’s Curiosity or something similar. He was early and Helen was late. Dominic could remember when he was always the one who was late for drinks after work, always trying to squeeze in one last thing before he left the office. These days he was out of there as early as possible.
He flicked through his phone while he waited. One text. From Emily, in reply to a message he’d sent her earlier after discovering that Theo and Tania’s Midsummer Ball was going to be fancy dress. He skimmed the message. Don’t worry about it. We can sort costumes nearer the time if we have to. If we have to? That didn’t sound like Emily had seen the folly of interfering with her father’s affair.
‘So how was your day?’
He jumped as Helen plonked a glass of plonk on the table and sat down next to him. ‘You know. Same old, same old.’
‘Well that’s being a historian. There’s a lot of old to get through.’
‘How about you?’
Helen shrugged.
‘You said you wanted to talk about work?’
She nodded. ‘It’s about the vacancy.’
He raised an eyebrow in question.
‘Since Professor Samson ...’ her voice drifted off. ‘... you know with the orange ...’
He nodded. ‘And the duct tape.’
‘Yeah. I just ...’
‘You just wondered about applying for his job?’
‘Yeah. Sorry. Is that bad?’
Dominic shook his head. ‘Not at all. I’ve never understood why you insist on hanging about around here. You could have got a post somewhere else years ago.’
Helen didn’t answer. ‘Maybe.’
‘So why do you need to talk to me about it?’
‘Well, Professor Midsomer likes you. I wondered if maybe ...’
‘You want me to put a word in?’
She nodded.
‘Course. Don’t see why the old boy network shouldn’t work for girls.’
‘Women.’ She corrected him automatically.
‘No. Then it’d have to be old man network. That would be to help you make sure you got into the nicest retirement village.’
‘You’re reckoning without the centuries old linguistic belittling of women through the normalisation of infantilising language.’
Dominic didn’t respond. It was an argument they’d rehearsed many times before. ‘Whatever. I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you.’
They sipped their drinks in silence for a minute.
Dominic broke the quiet. ‘What made you ask me about wedding bells?’
‘Just a rumour.’
‘Nothing Emily’s said?’
‘Would it bother you if she had?’
The question was asked casually, without making eye contact. Dominic stared at his pint. ‘No. I just prefer my private life to be private.’
Dominic took another sip from his drink. He glanced at Helen. Her head was still bent over her drink, but he could see the shock of untamed curls, and the shape of her button nose, and the slightest hint of the beginning of freckles across her cheek. He’d known her since she was twenty years old, and he would swear she hadn’t changed the slightest bit. She was still every bit as preoccupied with work and study as she’d ever been. Never one to be reckless. Never one to waste time on whims and romantic ideas. If she had been, might things be different now. He looked away. Maybe he should learn from Helen. He cared for Emily a great deal. Romance faded. Compatibility, shared plans – those were thing things that lasted. Something else niggled at the back of his mind. ‘It’s funny.’
; Helen looked up. ‘What is?’
‘You going for promotion. A couple of months ago I was actually thinking of packing it in.’
‘What?’
‘I was going to resign.’ It was the first time he’d actually said it out loud. The decision had been made. He’d been all set to tell his friends, and family, and then his father had died and something had changed. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on what, but somehow letting the man down to his face had seemed easier than letting down a ghost. He shook his head. ‘It was a whim.’
‘Are you sure?’ Helen looked concerned. ‘I mean if you want to talk about it?’
Dominic shook his head. ‘It was a silly idea. I’m fine.’ He glanced at his watch, and then drained his pint. ‘I’d better get going. I’ve got assignments to mark.’
He paused. ‘Are you going to this stupid archaeology thing at the end of the month?’
Helen pulled a face. ‘I’ve been trying not to think about that.’
‘It’s a chance to make a good impression if you’re serious about the job.’
Helen grimaced. ‘That’s what Alex says.’
‘Right. Alex. Yes.’ Why shouldn’t Helen be getting advice from Alex? She could be friends with whoever she chose. She could have a relationship with whoever she chose. He smiled as broadly as he could manage.. ‘Guess I’ll see you there, if not before, then.’
Helen
You have four new messages.
Helen opened her email and scanned the subjects. One special offer on carpets and three messages from potential internet dating suitors. This was good. Getting messages from single men was what internet dating was all about. This, she supposed, was what she’d signed up for. She clicked on the first message. It seemed innocuous. The sender was called Carl, and was a naturalist, living in Gloucestershire. He was thirty-two. He owned his own home. So far, so good. He’d also attached a picture. Helen clicked on the image and waited for it to open on her ages-old computer. The photo was, presumably, of Carl, standing in a garden holding a football. He had dirty blond hair and big hazel eyes, neither of which distracted from the fact that he was stark bollock naked. Helen closed the picture and re-read the email. Not naturalist, naturist. To each their own, that was not Helen’s bag. That would teach her to read more carefully in future.
She opened the second message. This one purported to come from a Mikey B, and was shorter with no picture. She identified two spelling errors and an incorrect apostrophe in the first sentence. The second sentence was a question. Helen could tell that because it started with the word ‘Wot.’ Another no, Helen decided.
Message three was the longest. It started with a paragraph praising Helen’s great beauty and announcing that the sender, Juan, had felt a great connection with her from the moment he clicked on her profile. By the fourth paragraph Juan was explaining that he would be very keen to come to England to explore this connection further, if Helen could first see her way clear to lending him £500 for the flight which he would, of course, pay back as soon as he landed in the UK.
Helen shook her head. Maybe she had been right all along. Maybe her infatuation with Dominic wasn’t a symptom of her hopeless lack of get up and go. Maybe all the men in possession of good fortune had already snagged themselves a wife, not that Helen was looking to embrace the outmoded institution of marriage, or expected to be financially supported by a partner. The point was that she was rapidly moving towards the conclusion that there simply were no other acceptable single men out there. Although Dominic wasn’t actually a single man, she reminded herself.
The memory of a time when he had been single sat at the front of her mind. That one forbidden moment between a student and her teacher. She could still recall the scent of his aftershave, the crisp blue of his shirt, the look in his eye. Or could she? It’s was a ten year old memory of a man not actually kissing her. Maybe she’d crossed the boundary between memory and fantasy a long time ago. It didn’t matter. Then he’d been her teacher. Now he was her friend’s boyfriend. Always off limits.
It didn’t look like jumping into the dating scene was going to be enough to cure her infatuation. She couldn’t have Dominic. She didn’t want anyone else. She needed to fill her head with things she could control. Her research. Her career. Perhaps she should take up a hobby. Helen sighed. She was turning into a cliché. The blue-stocking spinster. The only thing missing was the houseful of cats.
Emily
The Big Community Dig is the centrepiece of the Faculty for Humanties and Social Sciences’ claim to be engaging with the local community. Basically, it’s an archaeological dig on a former car park in the city centre which is apparently destined to become a block of luxury apartments, but because we’re ‘engaging with the community’ we have special activities for kids and displays of finds from other nearby digs, and pretty much everybody who works for the faculty has been forced to don their wellies and come and stand in what is essentially a massive muddy puddle.
I look around the site. Even Helen is here. Helen is not a digging-in-mud sort of person. She’s a libraries and theatres and museums sort of person. She’s standing at one edge of a group who are waiting to get their instructions for the day from one of the archaeology professors. Looking more closely, I notice that all the hourly-paid lecturers are here, apart from Dr Sandys who’s about eighty. Aside from Alex, they’ve all applied for the permanent job as well. Such a coincidence that that would coincide with a sudden upsurge in team spirit.
Fortunately I’m saved from actually having to get my hands dirty, by dint of having brought a clipboard with me to hold. It’s a brilliant trick. Stand anywhere, looking vaguely purposeful and holding a clipboard and people will assume that you’re incredibly busy. At the moment I’m standing with my dad, who is far too important to be expected to go near actual mud, and Dom who’s managed to wangle himself onto ‘showing round local dignitaries’ duty, and is also saved from having to wield a trowel.
I try to pay attention to the introductory speech the archaeology professor is making. I almost feel sorry for him. He’s probably had a team working here for weeks and now he’s got all these amateurs clomping across his beautiful site. Eventually, he splits the ‘volunteers’ into smaller teams and dispatches them to different trenches, each one with an archaeology grad student to keep an eye on them.
I whip round the side of the group and grab hold of Helen before she ends up knee-deep in mud. ‘You must really want this job.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘This wasn’t my idea. Alex made me come.’
Alex. I find my eyes scanning the crowd looking for him. He’s at the other side of the site. His hair’s all sticking up, and the waterproof he’s put over his uniform skinny jeans looks like he rescued it from a charity shop reject pile. ‘Why’s Alex bothered about what you do?’
‘He’s obsessed with helping me get this job. He thinks turning up here will make a good impression.’ She leans towards me. ‘To be honest it’s knackering. He’s got formal interview practise scheduled for most of next week, and I haven’t even definitely got an interview yet.’
‘Right.’ I smile. ‘He must really care about you.’
She shrugs. ‘Guess so. Anyway I’m going to need a break at some point. I wondered if you wanted to go costume shopping together?’
Costume shopping? ‘What for?’
‘Er, for your dad’s party. The fancy dress ball.’
Oh. That. ‘I guess.’
She slips her arm through mine and walks me a few metres away from the general rabble. ‘I thought you’d be excited about the wedding by now Em.’
I shake my head.
‘What’s wrong? Tell me.’
‘She’s not right for him. I keep trying to say something, but he doesn’t want to hear it, and Dom thinks it’s none of my business but it is my business. I know him better than anyone, and she won’t make him happy.’ I can feel my fists clenching. ‘She won’t.’
I wait for her to tell me I’m ma
king a fuss. That’s what everyone thinks. I tell myself that’s why I haven’t actually followed Dom’s advice and gone to the history centre yet. It’s because I want to believe that the whole Tania-wedding thing will blow over, but that’s not the reason. Actually going there and finding out the truth is the point of no return, isn’t it? Whatever I find out, I’ll have crossed a line.
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Everything. You haven’t met her. She’s like something from a different planet to him. He’s nice pullovers and good whisky. She’s all spray tans and yoga and she knows about colour blocking. My dad shouldn’t be with someone who reads fashion magazines. He should be with someone who bakes and sews and knows how to look after him.’
I see her start to laugh, but she swallows it fast. ‘And if he managed to find this perfect 1950s housewife, would you be happy for him then?’
‘Of course I would, if she made him happy.’
‘You can’t really do anything about it though, can you?’ Helen rubs my arm. ‘And it’s been four months now. If it was a holiday fling I think it’d have flung by now.’
I shrug.
‘So costumes?’
I suggest a day and time.
Helen pulls a face. ‘That’s the day before the party.’
‘It’ll be fine. The wedding planner’s got a deal with the costume place. They’re getting extra costumes in the week before specifically for us.’ I walk away before she can suggest we go at the start of the week. If things go to plan there won’t be a party and we can forget the whole costume thing anyway.
Helen excuses herself to go back to the dig. I hold my clipboard in front of me like a shield and make my way back to the little marquee they’ve set up to keep the rain off the important people.
Alex
Soil. Mud. Trowel. Don’t break the history.
