Scandalous

by Tilly Bagshawe

  Theo couldn’t remember exactly when he’d started cheating on Dita. Probably while she was pregnant with Milo, their eldest, now five. A sweet, sensitive, but sickly child, Milo Dexter was allergic to everything and seemed mysteriously to have been born with the lung capacity of a gnat, necessitating frequent, stressful late-night trips to the emergency room, often followed by lengthy hospital stays. Dita doted on the boy, transferring all the attention she had previously lavished on Theo to their son. Of course, she still employed nannies, legions of them, which grew into full-scale battalions when their second child, Francesca, arrived two years later. It wasn’t so much the time Dita spent with Milo, reasoned Theo. It was more the way she looked at him, the way they looked at each other, an exclusive little club of two from which he, Theo, would forever be excluded.

  Francesca, known as Fran, was much more the sort of child that Theo could identify with. Confident, sensible, and utterly self-reliant, she neither needed his love, nor asked for it, but rather accepted his affection as and when he chose to bestow it. If he’d known kids could turn out like this, he’d have adopted with Theresa years ago. Back then Theo would never have believed a three-year-old could be so politely distant, but that’s how Fran was with Dita. Pleasant, unassuming, but fundamentally a little bored by her mother. It drove Dita crazy. “Even my own daughter doesn’t love me!” she would sob melodramatically to Theo, who was trying to download Match of the Day on his PC and wished to God Dita would find somebody else to emote to. Bringing the whole family to Tokyo had been Dita’s idea, part of her drive to “deepen my bond” with Fran.

  “You can spend some time with Milo-pooks too. He’s hardly seen you all year.”

  “Come on, Deets. It’s not my fault the boy’s been in and out of hospital like an asthmatic boomerang. It’s not me he wants when he’s sick, it’s you.” He didn’t add, and all the rest of the bloody time too, but he felt like it. He knew it was ridiculous to be jealous of a five-year-old, but he couldn’t help himself. “Japan will be a nightmare. The jet lag, the paps, the kids going stir-crazy in the hotel room. I’ll be back in a few weeks.”

  It was no good. Dita had insisted. Theo had had no choice but to call Cassie, his latest twenty-one-year-old bit on the side, and tell her their romantic trip was off. “I’ll make it up to you, angel, I promise. We’ll sneak off to the Post Ranch as soon as I’m back.” Fuming, he’d climbed the stairs into the private jet with Dita and the kids feeling like he was walking up to the guillotine. This is going to be a nightmare.

  Then they got to Tokyo.

  And it was much, much worse.

  First, Milo picked up some bug on the plane and had to be rushed to the Hachioji children’s hospital. Then Dita was photographed looking haggard and exhausted the day they discharged him, and the picture ran in Star magazine back in the States, alongside an airbrushed photo of Theo looking preposterously handsome, taken from his aftershave campaign. That evening Dita had screamed and screamed in their suite at the Hyatt until Theo had had to call a doctor to sedate her. She was so bad, the nannies had moved with the children to a different floor, as Milo particularly was getting very distressed. The next morning, Dita had refused to let Theo go to work until he’d made love to her, then afterward sobbed in his arms for an hour. Despite his having come twice, Dita insisted he was “faking it” and didn’t really want her anymore. It was midafternoon before Theo got to the set. As ever, the Japanese crew was unwaveringly polite. But Ed Gilliam had ripped him a new asshole.

  “For fuck’s sake, Theo! You’re under contract. You can’t just turn up when you feel like it. You realize there’ll be a penalty, a big one. That fuck with Dita probably cost you two million dollars. I hope it was bloody worth it.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Theo grimly. On days like today, his mind sometimes wandered back to his first marriage. Theresa had been weak, and of course she did let herself go dreadfully toward the end. But she was also funny, and supportive, and never in the least part a drama queen. Even when the scandal with Sasha Miller had been all over the papers, when any rational wife would have had a good excuse to throw her toys out of the pram, Theresa had been so cool, calm, and collected, it was almost regal.

  Sasha Miller had been on Theo’s mind too lately, for the first time in years. Bizarrely, his former student and paramour seemed to have reinvented herself as some sort of business mogul. Her property company, Ceres, had gone public a month ago, its shares floated at some astronomically inflated price, and suddenly Sasha’s face was all over the business pages. Physically, she’d changed surprisingly little over the years. She still had that youthful, moonlight-white complexion, and of course those incredible pale-green eyes that had once gazed into his with such trust and passion. In her early thirties now, she wore her hair shorter than she had as a student, but it still gleamed the same lustrous tar-black. Her body, if anything, looked better than it had back then, or at least more to Theo’s taste, leaner, with less baby fat. But if Sasha looked unchanged, appearances were obviously deceptive. You didn’t get to that sort of position in business or in life without being a tough cookie. When Theo had known Sasha, she’d been as soft and malleable as dough, but the intervening years must have baked her hard.

  Theo’s first reaction to Sasha’s success was nervousness. The last thing he wanted was for some overenthusiastic journalist to start digging into Sasha’s past and unearthing the stolen theory scandal all over again. He raised his concerns with Ed Gilliam, but Ed was reassuringly sanguine.

  “It’s very unlikely. That was eons ago. More importantly, it happened in England. Americans don’t care about scandals in other countries.”

  “Hmmm.” Theo wasn’t convinced.

  “Look, there’s nothing you can do about it so you may as well stop worrying. What’s the worst that can happen? Someone leaks the story, you and Sasha both make statements about bygones being bygones. If anyone’s reputation’s in danger here it’s hers, not yours, right?”

  “Right,” said Theo uneasily.

  In the years since the scandal, Dexter’s Universe and the theory that launched it had become so much a part of Theo’s self-image, he’d almost forgotten its murky origins. Seeing Sasha Miller’s face again stirred emotions buried deep in his subconscious—an uneasy concoction of guilt and fear that had begun to further sour Theo’s mood. Combined with the increasing strain of dealing with Dita’s meltdowns, and now this horrendous trip to Japan, he was feeling more restless and dissatisfied than he had in years. Ed Gilliam inadvertently made things worse by filling Theo in on the latest gossip among the Cambridge physics faculty. Apparently one of Theo’s former students, Mike Green (now Emeritus Professor Michael Green) was sending shock waves across the scientific world with his groundbreaking research into optical quantum computer chips.

  “He’s quite the new big thing,” Ed told Theo. “I’ve got four publishers in a bidding war for his book. Of course Oxford, Harvard, and MIT are all desperate to lure him.”

  Theo consoled himself that Mike Green would never have a career like his. For one thing he was so shy he bordered on autistic, and for another he looked like a three-hundred-pound version of Daniel Radcliffe. No one wanted to switch on their television and be mumbled at by a morbidly obese nerd. Even so, Mike’s success rankled. The public might never love him, but his fellow physicists clearly did. Much as he hated to admit it, there was a part of Theo Dexter that still craved approval from his peers. Grinning inanely at the camera today for three hours straight with a giant bottle of aftershave in his hands, Theo felt more nostalgic for Cambridge than he had in years.

  One day I’ll go back. I’ll get back to my research, prove to all those envious bastards that I’ve still got what it takes. He turned on his phone. Six missed calls, all of them from Dita.

  One day.

  Horatio Hollander looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.

  Not bad. Not George Clooney, perhaps. Not Theo Dexter, either. But not bad.

  At twe
nty-two years of age, Horatio had finally (thank God) grown out of the acne that had plagued him as a teenager. Tall and skinny, with a shock of thick hair that had never been able to decide if it was red or blond, merry blue eyes, and wide nose smattered with freckles, girls generally referred to Horatio as “sweet.” In his first year at Cambridge, one of the prettier freshman girls had described him as looking a bit like a baby giraffe, and the phrase had stuck. A talented rower with a regular place in Jesus College’s First Eight, Horatio’s crewmates knew him only as “Giraffe.” Horatio rolled his eyes, but secretly he rather liked the nickname. After six years of being called “pizza face” and getting the shit kicked out of him at school (what sort of sadists named their son “Horatio” then sent him to the toughest public school in Leeds?), Giraffe was a refreshing change.

  This morning, unusually for him, Horatio had made a titanic effort with his appearance. He wore his best tweed jacket, which only had a couple of tiny moth holes, a clean, ironed blue shirt, and a pair of French Connection jeans that his friend Mary had assured him made his bum look great. “More beefcake, less beanpole,” had been her exact words. That’s good enough for me.

  Of course the real question was whether they’d be good enough for Professor O’Connor. He’d waited long enough. It was time to screw his courage to the sticking place and ask her out before…before what? What am I so scared of?

  Horatio had lost count of the nights he’d lain awake, his body racked with longing and his heart crippled with fear, imagining his Shakespeare tutor, Professor O’Connor—Theresa—locked in passionate embrace with another man. In his fevered imaginings, the other man always looked preternaturally handsome, and usually bore a strong resemblance to Professor O’Connor’s ex-husband, the ghastly, white-toothed, permatanned Theo Dexter. Theresa had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, largely to stop people making the connection between her and her world-famous ex. But of course, everyone at Cambridge knew.

  This must be what Chris Martin felt, asking Gwyneth Paltrow out after she’d been engaged to Brad Pitt. But look at Chris, eh? He got the girl! Then again, he was a multimillionaire rock star with legions of screaming fans. Whereas I’m a scruffy student from Leeds with debt and holes in my jacket.

  The thing was that Theresa had given him just enough hope—a smile here, a shy glance there—to make Horatio think that perhaps, just perhaps, by some miracle, his affections might be returned. Yes, she was his teacher. And yes, she was twenty years older than him—not to mention twenty times more beautiful and brilliant and funny and kind and…

  “Get a move on, mate!” Jack, Horatio’s roommate, was banging on the bathroom door. “You can’t polish a turd, you know. She’ll either see past your ugly mug or she won’t, so hurry the fuck up, would you? I need to piss.”

  Jack was an engineer. Lovely bloke, but no soul whatsoever.

  Horatio opened the door. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’ve got no chance,” said Jack robustly. “She’s old enough to be your mother, she’s sworn off men, which is probably code for she’s a lesbo…”

  “She is not a lesbo!” said Horatio crossly.

  “And, she supervises you, which makes you even more off-limits.”

  “Maybe that’ll be part of my appeal?” Horatio smiled hopefully. “I’m a forbidden fruit.”

  “You’re a forbidden Fruit Loop more like it,” said Jack. “Nice jeans, though. You don’t look like as much of a scrawnster as you usually do.” And with that he shut the bathroom door, abandoning his friend to his fate.

  Theresa unlocked the outer, heavy wooden door of her college rooms with the same heavy, palm-sized metal key that its occupants had been using for over two centuries. The romantic in her loved the giant key. Like the rest of her rooms, the rest of Cambridge, in fact, it felt magical, like something out of a fairy tale. The key to Rapunzel’s tower perhaps, or to some lost city of gold. Once inside she turned on the lights and the fan heater. It was April, spring according to the newspapers, but Cambridge was still bitterly cold and the college authorities were notoriously parsimonious about luxuries such as central heating. Soon, however, the noisy little fan had expelled the chill sufficiently for Theresa to take off her duffel coat, turn on the kettle, and start leafing through her notes for this morning’s session on Macbeth.

  She had a one-on-one supervision this morning with her star pupil, Horatio Hollander, and she was looking forward to it immensely. Horatio’s last essay, on Macbeth’s classic “Tomorrow” soliloquy, was so good it had moved her almost to tears. Then again, that wasn’t hard. Yesterday evening she’d sobbed like a child watching Jenny’s cat, a fat old tabby inappropriately named Ninja, give birth to six healthy kittens.

  “What’ll you do with them?”

  “Sell them, I suppose. Or more likely give them away. I doubt people pay for kittens anymore. We might keep one, I suppose.”

  “Oh, you can’t do that!” protested Theresa. “Look at them. They’re a little team. They have to stay together.”

  “I’m not housing seven cats, T,” said Jenny reasonably. “JP would divorce me, and I wouldn’t blame him.”

  “Well at least take two,” pleaded Theresa, watching the blindly crawling fur balls through a haze of tears. “They can be company for each other. I’ll have the rest.”

  Jenny laughed. “All four of them? You’re not serious?”

  “Why not? I like cats. They’re good company.”

  “But you’ve already got Lysander. You’ll be like the classic old cat lady, T! Blokes’ll be too scared to come near you.”

  “Perfect,” said Theresa, reaching down to stroke one of the fur balls. “I don’t want blokes coming near me. They can be pets, companions, and bodyguards all in one.”

  This summer it would be five years exactly since Theresa had last been on a date. Looking out over Cloister Court, with its medieval arches and cobbled paths worn smooth with age, the thought gave Theresa a warm glow of contentment. I don’t need a man. I don’t even want a man, and that’s the God’s honest truth. In the first few years after her divorce, she’d accepted occasional dinner dates, largely as a way to keep Jenny and Aisling and her other friends off her back. But as time went by and she settled once more into the rhythm of academic life, cocooned in beauty both at work and at home, Theresa began to take a stand.

  “I’m not denying myself,” she would say, truthfully. “I’m happy as I am.” Coming home to Willow Tree Cottage still made every night feel like Christmas Eve. Last year she had finally published her book on Shakespeare in Hollywood, the first really serious academic analysis of the modern media interpretations of the plays, to high critical acclaim. The book was never going to make her rich, but Theresa was inordinately proud of it. As a result, she’d been approached to edit and write an introduction to the new Cambridge University Press Shakespeare anthology, a huge honor and without doubt the crowning professional achievement of her life so far. I have my work, my friends, Lysander, my perfect chocolate-box home. What more could anyone ask for?

  If there were one thing she might have wished for, had someone presented her with a magic wand, it would probably have been a baby, although even that desire had softened over the years. It would not, under any circumstances, have been a boyfriend, still less a husband. Theresa had loved once, deeply, and she had lost. As far as she was concerned, that was that. Her feelings for Theo had also faded—when she saw his face on the television now it was like looking at a stranger—but the memory of the pain remained. Someone had once told her that that was the definition of a lunatic: someone who repeats the same mistakes over and over and over again. Well, Theresa O’Connor was not a lunatic. She was simply a single woman who happened to share her home with five cats.

  A knock on the door disturbed her musings.

  “Come in,” she trilled cheerfully. “It’s open.”

  Horatio hovered in the doorway. Not for the first time, Theresa thought what a kind, intelligent fa
ce he had. If I had a son, she thought, I’d like him to look like that.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hollander. Can I offer you some tea?”

  Horatio cleared his throat. “Er, no. No thank you. I’m fine. Thanks.”

  Theresa smiled. “You look nervous. If it’s about your essay I can assure you you have no reason to be. As usual you were insightful and to the point. I did want to debate a couple of your conclusions with you, however, especially your position in the final stanzas, where—”

  “It’s not about the essay.”

  Pouring herself a cup of Earl Grey, Theresa noticed the boy’s complexion had faded from its usual white to something closer to see-through. “My goodness, Horatio. Are you all right?”

  “Not really.” He walked over to where she was standing and gently took the mug of tea from her hands. Unfortunately his own hands were shaking so much, he instantly scalded himself, yelping with pain. Theresa shifted at once into motherly mode.

  “Come on, come with me. I’ve some frozen peas in the kitchenette, I think. I don’t cook much in my rooms, but I think they’re still there. Stick it under the cold tap while I have a look.”

  Horatio stood at the sink, oblivious to the burn on his hand, watching her. In a pair of slouchy jeans that looked in permanent danger of slipping off her slim hips, and a black polo-neck sweater that accentuated her fragile arms, she looked (to Horatio’s eyes) almost childlike. In the stressful wake of her divorce Theresa had shed all the weight she’d gained in America, and her students at Jesus had only ever known her as skinny. It was a joke among them that half Professor O’Connor’s body weight had to be made up of hair, that trademark wild explosion of titian curls that today she wore piled up on top of her head in a messy bun.