‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused any trouble.’
‘If. Damn right this is trouble, and unless we play our cards right there could be a heap more. Look, Ronald –’
‘Robert.’
‘– we’re all human. Those girls sit there in the front of the lecture theatre with their big eyes and their short skirts and they think you’re a god because you can quote Shakespeare, and they hang back after class or come to your office to ask if there’s any extra reading you can suggest, because they really want to do well on the course and your lectures are so inspiring, and so forth, there they are with pouts and their eyes and their low-cut tops. We’ve all been there. But when they come on like that it’s our duty to resist.’
‘Corinne is thirty. She has a daughter. She’s had a life. She isn’t naïve.’
‘She’s a student in the department where you teach. As far as the college is concerned, that’s all there is to it and you’re way out of line. With any luck, we can keep the lid on this. The Harding girl will get her B and not make any more trouble. God knows, you’re not the first. Still, if you’ve any sense you’ll break it off with this student at once. So long as there’s nothing ongoing, it’ll stop the gossip; the college authorities won’t get to hear and we’ll avoid having to instigate disciplinary proceedings against you. Sound fair? Hope so. I’d better get on. Damn timetable to draw up for next year. Don’t ever be a head of department, Ricky, it’s a nightmare.’
Rob came away shaken. He’d classes to teach, but even they couldn’t distract him. The business about changing the grade was undermining and he hated the idea of Lisa gloating over her victory. But the bigger issue was Corinne: to break it off seemed unthinkable; this was love between two adults, not a squalid teacher–student affair. On the other hand … no, there was no other hand, he mustn’t weaken; to compromise over the grade was one thing (in effect, he’d had no choice), but to give in to blackmail, inapplicable codes of conduct and outdated Christian morality was another. Only … was it true that Corinne had ‘boasted to friends’ about him giving her extra lessons and upping her grades? It didn’t sound like her. But how well did he know her? Intimately, he’d thought, mind and body. Now he wasn’t sure.
He hadn’t learned to drive (never did learn), but cycled across town that night, in the luminous dark, with his head buried under a hood, paranoid about everyone he passed. ‘It’s Rob, can I come up?’ he buzzed from below, and left his bike in the stairwell while he climbed to the third. From the brevity of his kiss if nothing else, Corinne could tell how agitated he was. ‘Bud?’ she said and opened two beers. As he’d hoped, Maya was in bed asleep. They sat on opposite sides of her kitchen table (just as they used to at his desk), she in pyjamas, PJs as she called them, an abbreviation he hated for its tweeness, but, given how young she looked in them – like a child, the pale blue sleeves with little red kites on them riding up her arms – PJs seemed right. He came straight to the point: Lisa’s grade, Lisa’s boyfriend, the gossip, the meeting with Prof Cutler, the ultimatum.
‘I never boast,’ she said. ‘I’ve nothing to boast about.’
‘But you told people you were having extra lessons with me.’
‘Not at the time. Later, afterwards. And not people – only my friend Julie.’
‘Julie?’
‘You’d probably recognise her. She’s in my poetry group.’
‘I didn’t know you were in a poetry group.’
‘Informally, just a few of us. From my year. We get together now and then to discuss our poems.’
‘You’ve never shown them to me.’
‘They’re terrible. I’d be ashamed to. But hey, we try.’
‘So that’s where the rumours started. With Julie.’
‘She’s not the sort to talk. And I didn’t say you upped my grades, only that I’d done better than I thought. You know me. It’s what I always say. I’ve no confidence.’
‘Confidence. That’s the thing. You took Julie into your confidence and word got out about us.’
‘I never said we were –’
‘She inferred it.’
‘And now you’re going to dump me.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘But you are. Just like that. Because a bunch of kids are gossiping.’
‘Maybe you don’t mind the gossip,’ Rob said.
‘Fuck you. Why would being associated with some assistant lecturer who all the students think is a dork make me look special? The guy who wears leather shoes and woollen shirts even when the temperature’s in the nineties? Who crosses the word gotten out every time some kid writes it in an essay, even though gotten is normal usage here.’
‘Do all the students think I’m a dork?’
‘I’m just saying: you’re not some fucking Adonis.’
Their beers were empty, but if she’d more in the fridge she wasn’t offering. He hadn’t meant it to go like this. He’d come to reassure himself that she’d not been flaunting their relationship, and, having established that, to discuss what to do next, how to ‘put a lid on’ and ‘draw a line under’ their relationship, but only in appearance, to satisfy the authorities and quash the malice, not to end things or sacrifice what they felt for each other, the passion and desire he felt even now, in the middle of the worst argument they’d ever had, as she sat there opposite him, the lovely V between her breasts showing above the top button of her PJs, the sun-bleached hairs faint on her arms, the Virago-book-jacket-green eyes. He reached for her hand. She snatched it away.
‘I didn’t come here to dump you,’ he said.
‘What, then?’
‘It’ll be difficult still seeing each other, but –’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘I’ll be risking my job, but –’
‘It’s not just about you. Do you think I’ll be graded fairly, now the whole department knows? You’ve no idea what this place is like. They’ll want to penalise me, to make an example; they pretend to want older students like me, but they don’t; we unsettle the younger ones; we’re needy and we over-think things and we don’t know how to behave. I’m proof of that. I went and seduced the nice young Englishman. That’s how they’ll see it. If I’d been twenty it would have been his fault, but I’m thirty, a divorcee, from the wrong side of town, so it’ll be mine, and for that I won’t get my As, even if I do finally deserve them.’
‘Getting As isn’t everything.’
‘Easy for you to say. Your education was paid for, you just waltzed through. For me it’s been a fight. I might train as a teacher next and I need the grades for that. Or I might stay on and do a master’s and get to be a prof one day. Don’t look at me like that.’
‘I wasn’t looking like anything,’ he said, but to imagine her as a literature professor was a stretch, and the stretch must have shown in his face.
‘The world’s changing, not all profs are like you.’
‘I agree.’
‘Well, that’s why the As matter. Or did. I’m fucked now, whatever.’
‘Of course you’re not,’ he said, reaching for her hand again, which this time she let him take. They sat there for an hour, pulling back from the brink, making up, pretending certain bitter words hadn’t been spoken or hadn’t been meant. They were, they agreed, in shock – best get some sleep and by morning things might not look so bleak. There must be a way they could see each other without his job being risked and her grades being affected and the two of them being the subject of gossip. They held each other by the door, before he left. There was no question of them making love, but the hug was a promise to each other: We’ll find a way, this will go on.
Cycling back, though, he felt upset again, and upset in different ways: the interview with Prof Cutler had been bad enough, but Corinne’s reaction had made it worse. Did his students really see him as a dork? Not the bright ones, surely, the kind that Corinne mixed with in her poetry group. Why had she never mentioned the group before? Shyness probably, but the fact of her being in a group and o
f her having friends – one of whom, Julie, she felt close enough to confide in about the so-called extra coaching – that had shocked him, still shocked him, because it didn’t fit with the image he had of a woman who felt isolated, adrift, uncertain, for whom college was an alien place, her real life, her established life, lying elsewhere, in a flat with her daughter, on the other side of town. And her ambition! That obsession with As. He’d come expecting her to sympathise with his dilemma as a young lecturer in his first job who now risked falling foul of the university authorities, and even of losing his job, and all because of her – not that he’d uttered a single word of blame, it wasn’t her fault he’d fallen in love with her, but still he hoped she’d understand and comfort him. Instead of which, her response had been all about her and the risk she now ran of being ostracised by the department, penalised in her grades and thwarted in the career she’d set her heart on. He didn’t believe for a moment that she would be penalised. But even allowing for her shock and panic – hysteria even – it was striking that what she most feared wasn’t the loss of their relationship but missing out on a good degree.
You have to admire her ambition, he thought, leaving his bike in the garage and creeping up the stairs (it was past midnight and the physics professor and his wife would be asleep), but she doesn’t understand how universities work; she has a weird take on things; you could even say that for all her As she’s actually a little bit stupid.
He didn’t see her for two weeks. Before that intense we-still-have-a-future hug, they’d agreed a pause would be best. He phoned her one night, but the conversation was perfunctory: she’d an essay to get in the next morning and hadn’t been sleeping well; Maya was being bullied at school again. He phoned another night and asked if she could get a babysitter the following Saturday so they could meet at The Day’s Inn: it was on the edge of town, he’d cycle there and get a room, and she arrive separately. She took some persuading, but agreed. The room was grim but their lovemaking made up for it: so much need had built up. Afterwards, lying there – he with a Bud, she with a cigarette (post-coitally was the only time she smoked) – he tried to soothe her worries. It was nonsense to think she’d be penalised, he said. His colleagues were above such pettiness. Their duty was to be objective.
‘You’re not the only prof to give me extra time,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘You gave me the most, sure. But I couldn’t expect you to know everything about the whole of literature.’
‘Who else did you see?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘But male?’
‘What else? The whole fucking department’s male. Nothing went on, if that’s what you’re thinking. Though I kind of sensed an interest from one guy. And when he and the others I saw hear about us, they’ll sure as hell punish me. You think I’m being paranoid. But I’ve had this kind of thing in my jobs. With my ex, too. It’s human nature – with men especially.’
Of course she’d consulted other profs. She was that kind of student. It was odd that he’d never thought of it. But even odder that she’d never mentioned it. Had she guessed he’d be jealous? He was now, at the thought of the interest she’d sensed from a nameless colleague. What form did it take? If she’d not been involved with him, Rob, might she have responded? Lying there in the half-light of the room, two dead bulbs in the matching wall lights and a Gideon’s Bible in the drawer, he no longer felt exclusive. Till then he’d seen her as an ingénue, more of one than students ten years younger. But she’d surely been sly not to mention the sessions with his colleagues.
Their lovemaking was usually tender. When they made love again that Saturday, ten minutes before she was due to leave, he was rougher. The roughness included a bite on her neck. He was angry and wanted to leave his mark on her.
He spotted her in the campus café a few days later. She was with a group of female students, laughing together, one of the crowd. She stopped laughing the moment she saw him. He’d never seen her in a polo-neck sweater before. The love bite must be underneath, dark purple, hidden out of discretion or shame. He bought a latte-to-go from the counter and nodded as he passed, a general nod, to the group, avoiding eye contact with her.
For the next three weeks they avoided any contact.
He’d booked a flight to spend Christmas at home. A ten-day trip only, but in his mind it was a watershed, a crisis point, do-or-die: he couldn’t not see her before he went.
‘Maya’s out with her dad,’ she said, when he phoned. ‘You could come round now.’
Out, she said, not away: was he back in town, then?
‘Sure is,’ she said, when he arrived. ‘He’s got a job with the electric company.’
‘I thought you were divorced.’
‘Separated. Same thing. He’s not living here. I won’t have him fucking up my life again. Bud? Don’t worry, they won’t be back for a while and he won’t come in when he drops her off.’
They drank their beers at the table – the last time, just a few weeks back, seemed a century ago. He told her he was going home for Christmas, omitting to mention that he’d once had thoughts (at the high point of their summer) of spending it here, with her, the lights blinking on the tree, and the presents under it, including his to her, a necklace he’d seen in town, curled up on the purple velvet slope of the jewellery-shop window, still there probably – he could go tomorrow to buy it and bring it to her as a token of his love. But love seemed out of the question now. Or in question. Hers for him, that was. He knew about his for her.
The last time he sat there he’d been quick to get to the point. This time he was slower, and the point a different one, but he got there eventually, fearful that putting the question would mean the end, but doing so anyway, because he couldn’t endure the sense of limbo. Did they have a future was what it came down to, but either he put it badly or she chose to misunderstand.
‘I sure hope I’ve a future,’ she said. ‘I’ve a kid to bring up and a degree to get. I’m not planning on pegging out just yet.’
‘Do we? Together?’
‘Now, honey,’ she said, an endearment she’d never used before, one which made him feel like a child being addressed by his grandmother, ‘we’ve been through this.’
‘Have we?’
‘You can’t see me and I can’t see you. OK, we’ve tried. But sneaking around’s not right. The last time, at the motel, was terrible. I came home and cried all night long, then missed school half the next week. I don’t know how I got through. But then Jim turned up and though he’s nothing to do with this I finally realised how wrong it is, how much damage it’s doing. You only see me when I’m OK. I’ve never let you see the other me, the emotional wreck I am the rest of the time. I’m barely holding myself together, and I have to, for Maya, and for my studies, I can’t afford to fail.’
‘But after next summer? When you’ve finished.’
‘It’ll never work. All the rumours, people spying on us, the warning you had from your prof – they’ve poisoned everything. Not for you maybe, but for me. I hate saying this. It breaks my heart. But we have to stop, sweetie. No more mess. No looking back. Scorched earth policy. That’s how I am. I’ve done my grieving already. Now you have to.’
Though he hated what she was saying, he loved her forthrightness. She seemed so worldly, so mature, so good at endings. Perhaps she’d had practice at them: the ex, the death of her mother (which she’d once described to him in grisly detail), the move from Oregon to Tennessee. What could he say? She had left him no room to argue. His whole body hurt, but that was good, authentic, necessary.
He finished the beer and left. In time, they agreed, it’d be fine to have a coffee together, after graduation maybe, for old times’ sake.
It didn’t happen. It would have been too painful. Back in Sussex over Christmas he hunted for jobs in the THES. There were none he fancied and without a PhD, despite that article he’d published on Keats, no reputable university would have him. Back at college, he spent as little time on campus as p
ossible. And when he marked essays did so quickly, perfunctorily, with a minimum of marginal comment and no exclamation marks. One day he overheard some students talking about a friend who’d ‘taken that jerk of a husband back, the one she had her kid by’. Could that have been Corinne? He didn’t want to think about it.
It was a bleak few months. But he began writing poetry again, seriously this time, having only played with it in the past. And when he wasn’t writing poems he was writing job applications. In April, after several shortlistings and failed interviews, he got the post in Brandon, to begin in the autumn. His elation lasted only till the phone call came a few days later, to say his father had died: suddenly, of a heart attack, at sixty-one. He was given compassionate leave to stay on in Sussex after the funeral, rather than returning to Tennessee; teaching had finished by then anyway, and he knew Prof Cutler, ‘Chuck’, would be glad to see the back of him. He made no attempt to say goodbye to Corinne and never found out how she fared in her exams. His books and clothes were sent on to Brandon in a trunk.
‘So that’s my story,’ he said, the near-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s between us on the porch of the lakeside cabin, moths fluffing against the lit window, a bridal train of moon across the water. ‘The only one I have. Not to be repeated.’
‘You can trust me.’
‘Not to be repeated by me, I mean. No more falling in love with students. No more falling in love, period. My first experience and my last. It cost too much. Took years off my life and left me with nothing. Love’s the ruin of people.’
‘Come on, you can’t –’
‘Survive without love? I did before and I will again.’
‘One day you’ll meet someone.’
‘And marry? Not from love. It’s too consuming. You lose all perspective. I went crazy for a while. Writing’s been the one consolation.’
‘Do you write about Corinne?’
‘What other subject is there? But no, I don’t. I might write to her one day. Who knows? Here, have some more.’ He aimed the bottle towards me.
‘I’m done,’ I said, covering my glass.
The Executor Page 7
