The Professor

by Charlotte Stein

  ‘I don’t think I can do that, Professor.’

  ‘Of course you can. A woman of your talent.’

  ‘No, but my talent takes a lot of work. I sometimes spend days on one sentence.’

  ‘Then let’s see what happens when you relax a little. Come, indulge me.’

  I wish he hadn’t said ‘come’ there.

  Or said it the way he does – so brusque, and insistent.

  ‘At least give me a prompt then.’

  ‘You really need one? Your mind seems to seethe with ideas.’

  ‘You’ve only read one story of mine. Well, one and a bit of bread.’

  ‘I hardly need a story when you talk the way you do.’

  ‘And how do I talk, exactly?’

  ‘Like someone who can hardly contain their wildly inventive thoughts.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call the things I say inventive.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not constantly trying to keep up with everything you say. Believe me, it is the most mental exercise I’ve had in years. I scarcely know what you might confess next – a feat made all the more memorable by your dull, forgettable behaviour prior to our first meeting.’

  I go to say something in response, then stop. It seems best to. All his compliments are rushing to my head – God knows what giddy thing might come out. You inspire me to greater heights is one possibility. You provoke me into this insanity is another.

  ‘Now, put pen to paper and see what you can come up with. You have ten minutes,’ he says, and he means it. He takes out his pocket watch and sets it on the desk at his side, eyes on that instead of on me. Not that it helps that his attention is elsewhere – if anything it only makes it harder. It gives me even more freedom, and freedom is the thing that scares me here. I don’t want to be able to write whatever I like. I don’t want to turn my mind loose and see where it goes.

  It’s already gone too far.

  How far will it go when I have to do this?

  ‘Pen to paper, Miss Hayridge.’

  His tone brooks no refusal, yet for a second I still try to resist. I waste time rolling up these enormous sleeves, and writing my name at the top of the paper. Then when he starts tapping his finger on the desk – close to me, far too close to me – I craft a first sentence. A bland one, that somehow takes ten times the effort anything interesting might have done. I have to force it out, while filthy and profane things batter at the bars inside me. Write that you want to suck his cock, my mind yells.

  But I turn it into something about the weather.

  ‘The rain was particularly heavy that evening,’ I put, as that tapping gets more insistent. He only looks like he’s not watching what I write, you see. Really he’s studying every word – and he proves it a second later.

  ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’

  ‘What? What do you –’

  ‘That is what you have written, Miss Hayridge, and quite frankly I am appalled. Not to mention extremely dubious that this was the first thing that popped into your head.’

  ‘Well, we were both just soaked to the skin.’

  ‘Indeed we were. Yet you think the most interesting thing about that was the weather pattern that began it all? If your main character was inserting a sandwich into their bottom would your first instinct be to discuss which bakery they bought it from?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that what we’ve done since is the equivalent of inserting a sandwich into your bottom? Because I have to tell you, Professor –’

  ‘You’re stalling, Miss Hayridge.’

  ‘I absolutely was not.’

  ‘You just did it again. Now begin. From the top.’

  ‘You want me to –’

  ‘From the top.’

  I do as he tells me to, then. The tone of his voice makes me. I hear that last word like knuckles rapping on wood and my pen just skitters over the page, words stumbling out of me in what feels like a rush. It feels like this is the product of my mind, set free. But I barely get to the bottom of the first paragraph before he pulls me up, as sharp as an electric shock.

  ‘Still not letting go. Again.’

  ‘But I –’

  ‘Again.’

  I go to protest a second time – to tell him that he really doesn’t want to see how far I can go. But his expression stops me. He looks so sure of himself, so certain that I will never be equal to his task. It makes me grind my teeth together. I’m gripping the pen too tightly, and I grip it even tighter when he leans forward and whispers to me. ‘What are you, afraid?’ he asks, so close I feel his breath on my cheek. I see that faint scar that splits his upper lip, beautiful and brightly tempting.

  And then I write.

  I write without looking, gaze locked with his. Heart beating so hard I feel it in my temples, only half-knowing what words are coming out of the end of the pen. They emerge too quick for me to properly keep track of them, hot with arousal and attraction and something else, something that rages in me to get out. He wants more, I will give it to him. He wants to test me, I will be equal to it.

  I don’t even flinch when he tells me to read it to him.

  I just let it blaze out of me, tongue curling around every ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’, so eager to emphasise the sheer filthiness of it that I barely worry about the tiny telling details. ‘She spread herself over the great solid curve of his back,’ I tell him, without wondering how closely the description matches him. It only matters that I make her cunt kiss the firm line of his thick thigh, so slick it leaves a stripe. Or that he comes in her mouth, heavy and copious – rather than the fact that her hand makes a fist in the tweedy material of his trousers.

  I don’t hear that part until I’m almost done, the sudden shame of it strong and stinging. My face burns as I say the last words, sure that when I look up that amusement will be all over his face. Really, he will say. Did you have to be so obvious Esther? I expected something far less crude from you. And he will be right. I should be better than this.

  Or at least I think so, until I see his face.

  I dare to glance up, and there is only a ruin where his features used to be. His eyes are haunted – though God knows by what – and if his eyebrows met any more steeply in the middle they’d kiss his hairline. Worse still: he isn’t breathing. If this goes on for much longer I feel like I might have to thump him on the back, get him sucking in air, get his lungs working.

  And I know why, too.

  This wasn’t a test of me at all.

  It was a test of him.

  Oh, good God, it was a test of him. Everything, all of this, was a test of his resolve, not mine. He wanted to see if he could do it. If he could sit here with me half-dressed and hear me speak and still be as impervious as ever – I can tell he did. It’s in the way he makes a fist suddenly, hard enough to turn the knuckles white. The way he glances away, as though he can’t stand to look at me a second longer.

  I know it is.

  I know it the way I know myself.

  I know it no matter how hard he tries to hide it.

  ‘Better,’ he says, so tightly I hear the Ts squeak.

  ‘You think so, Professor?’

  ‘Yes, indeed I do, you know I do.’

  ‘What part did you like the best?’

  ‘You wish me to tell you. To tell you in detail.’

  He sounds hoarse when he says it.

  He won’t look at me.

  ‘As much detail as you can stand to give me.’

  ‘That implies there is a point where I could not.’

  ‘We all have our limits. You said it yourself, about your boundaries.’

  ‘They are not the same thing, as I believe you are aware.’

  ‘It might seem so, Professor, but I promise you, right now I am barely aware of anything at all.’

  ‘You have no thoughts, then. About any of this. No concerns of the smallest kind.’

  ‘What could I possibly be concerned about? All of this is above board, isn’t it?’

  �
�Absolutely and in every way.’

  ‘Your conduct is unimpeachable.’

  ‘It will never be otherwise,’ he says, and in the moment I even believe him.

  ‘Then tell me what you think,’ I say, expecting nothing.

  And instead getting the most telling words of all.

  ‘That these sessions are over. Goodnight, Esther.’

  Chapter Six

  My first thought is to go to him after class and talk about it. I even imagine it will be easy. He won’t object to a conversation. He loves conversations. And I know him well enough by now to have some idea how to frame it. I will point out that never meeting again suggests there was something wrong with us doing so. He will never in a million years admit that there was something wrong with us doing so.

  Nothing could be easier, I think.

  Until I actually try to do it. I pick my moment carefully, waiting for everyone to leave before I even stand. Then, when he begins to wind his watch, I get up. I start down the steps in the middle of the hall, quick and sure at first but then gradually less so. By the time I get to the bottom my feet are lead. My heart is hammering, and after a second I understand why.

  He is deliberately ignoring me.

  The opening I thought would be there is closed. The shades are drawn and everything is locked up tight – and it stays that way long past the point I can bear to stand here. A minute is too much for me, but I try to make it. Two minutes is agonising, yet I keep hoping that he’ll turn his head. At the very least I expect him to answer me when I say ‘Professor’, but that only makes his continuing silence more humiliating. Suddenly I see everything in a new light: me the gauche student clamouring for his attention.

  Him indulging me patiently, calmly.

  He probably knew about the bathroom, I think.

  And then I have to leave immediately, before the thought takes hold. I can already feel it trying to wear a groove in my mind. If I stay another second I will forever be falling into it, and I just can’t afford to let that happen. I already struggle to speak to people. I worry that a simple hello is unwelcome. Anything more and I will dwindle down to nothing, and I so badly want to have some part of myself left for the years ahead. How will I ever have a best friend if I don’t? How will I take a lover?

  These were all things I had planned, for some distant but bright future. And they can stay that way, if I just pretend all of this never happened. He didn’t read my work. He never said I was better than I ever believed I could be. All is as it was before:

  Quiet, and calm, and blank.

  My real life can still begin.

  Or at least it can, just as soon as I take my story back.

  I decide to do it on Wednesday, when he attends the monthly staff meeting. That way, there is absolutely no chance of him stumbling across me. No chance of him catching me in his office. And though he will know I went in there and took my story back, I think I can live with that. He’s never going to talk to me again anyway, so he won’t be able to mention it. He can’t possibly call me a thief, because those words are mine. They should be returned to me. He has no right to keep them when it was all just nonsense.

  So this seems like a pretty reasonable plan.

  It just doesn’t feel reasonable, while I’m busy doing it.

  Every shadow makes me jump, as though I somehow stumbled into a horror story without knowing it. Any moment the ghost of Professor Halstrom is going to drag me down to hell, for daring to trespass on the house he haunts. Either that, or I’m about to be arrested. Why does it feel so much like I’m about to be arrested? His door isn’t even locked. I go in without a problem and find the story within seconds. Now all I have to do is turn around and go back the way I came.

  God, I wish I had gone back the way I came. If I had it would have been fine. But for some reason I linger. I run my gaze over all the things I will probably never see again: his desk, the window with the curtains made of books, the labyrinth I never got the chance to get lost in. Everything so still and quiet without his presence – as if no one has been in here for years. I expect a cloud of dust to go up when I touch one of the books he must have been reading, and instead get a flurry of pages sliding to the floor.

  Pages that I think are courtesy of a broken spine, until I see the edges of them all jagged and obviously torn. And then of course there is the writing on them, so fine and neat you could almost believe it was printed.

  Almost, almost, but not quite.

  Not when there are so many crossings out. I pick the stack up and see dozens of thick black lines through perfectly reasonable sounding opening paragraphs. More than reasonable sounding in fact. Most of them are technically excellent in every possible way. Each one is carefully crafted and painstakingly developed. There seems to be no reason why he would abandon so many before getting anywhere with any of them. Or at least, that would be true.

  If they were not quite so unspeakably dull.

  Oh, the sheer lifelessness in most of them. The lack of passion or feeling or even wit. That deadly tongue of his is in none of them. That spark I saw in him when he raged about the life I was settling for is completely absent. Every passage is perfectly done.

  But dead as a party in a nunnery.

  So dead I can hardly stand to read them. I put them down after a moment – though putting them down doesn’t feel like enough. I have to hide that I ever saw them, so he never has to know I did. I need him to never know I did. Not when they’re like this. Not when he behaves as though he barely cares about anything, then cares so much that he would try a thousand times and fail a thousand more. All these attempts at something, I think, and then feel this ache start in the centre of my chest.

  It eats me up inside, until I ease the pages back into the book they were ripped from.

  The book that has one page still attached. Everything else has been torn out, but this last one remains. It held on through whatever storm made him discard all the rest. And, even more jolting, it has writing on it. Words that haven’t been crossed out – and I see immediately why not. This piece is different. It succeeds where all the others fail, a gut punch where they barely make contact. It burns, this passage; it could have been written by another person altogether.

  Even the handwriting looks different.

  Still recognisably his, but different.

  As though he wrote it in a terrible gush. Nothing could check it. No power of his could stop it. He tried to hold back, I bet, but couldn’t. I even know why he would want to hold back from this, the one success amongst a life of failures: it begins with a girl who has my name. Esther, it says, Esther, and what follows is so torturously lovely that I cannot take it.

  He never thought of her by those two sharp syllables. Instead she was Hetty, always Hetty, as though she had become his most beloved and familiar friend without her being aware of it. They had spent summers doing delightful things and long evenings as intimates, sharing anecdotes and stories and hopes and dreams in a way he had always suspected true friends did. Of course he could not know for certain; he had never possessed the happy talent of drawing anyone close enough to find out what happened beyond casual acquaintance. And now here was she: sharp and sly and strange, so full of her own secret worlds that they spilled out in the most mortifying of ways.

  He should have hated her beyond all reason.

  Instead he thought of her with a constancy that unmanned him. Her great dark eyes were his companion, her words always lingering at the edges of his thoughts. He heard her in the night as he laid his head down: is that what happened to you, Lukas?

  And in his head he answered as he had not in life:

  Yes, God, yes, oh, I can hardly believe what I have become.

  I stop there. I have to stop there. The stinging in my eyes is so bad I can barely stand it. Something is trying to burst out of me, through doors I thought I had sealed shut. I want to scream, but when I try to, no sound comes out. Instead it just jams itself up against the bars of my teeth. It sh
oves against the hand I put over my mouth.

  And that is how he finds me.

  ‘Miss Hayridge,’ he says, only when he does it means something else than it did before. He calls me something that is three times removed from where he would most like to be. All this time he said those two words, and inside he was saying my real name. Because it is – my real one, I mean. Hetty is clearer and truer to me than anything else I’ve ever known.

  As though we did live a lifetime as friends, without either of us knowing it.

  Or having the pleasure of it.

  ‘This is not what it looks like.’

  ‘Such a cliché is beneath you.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a cliché if it’s the truth.’

  ‘And I suppose now you will tell me how it should be so. You fell into my desk and the book flew into your hands. You only came here to retrieve a missing shoe. The devil made you do it; you did it on a dare. Come, tell me, am I close yet? Close enough?’

  I draw myself up before I answer.

  I have to. He seems even more enormous than he did before. He swells to fill the doorway, all shoulders and arms and an expression I can only call dark. Like a thunder-filled sky, I think, that I have to somehow batten against.

  ‘Nowhere near. I wanted to know your company one last time, and reading your words seemed like the fastest way. I was right too: it was.’

  ‘So when you are denied something, you force it.’

  ‘No. No, never. I don’t think I’ve ever dared do anything like this.’

  ‘Yet here you are, not only forcing but prying. Intruding on my most private and personal thoughts.’

  ‘That was never my intention. How could I have ever known? How could I have known that you thought this way and felt like this? I believed you were an immovable block.’

  ‘I am, Miss Hayridge, and would thank you not to insinuate otherwise.’

  ‘But you just said that – and you write that –’