I hold up his words as proof, when my own words start to fail me.
Though he snatches them from me before I can get anywhere.
And he says things. Oh, God, the things he says.
‘Never speak to me about what you think I have written. No, indeed, let me correct myself. Never speak to me again, at all. There is nothing that we might now say to one another. No words that can possibly repair the damage you have done. If I were to never see your face again it would be too soon. Now go. Get out, before I decide that is not enough and have you suspended from Pembroke.’
Of course I go to protest as soon as he’s finished. Of course I do. But when I open my mouth to do it no sound comes out. All the air I would usually use to tell someone how terrible they are being deserts me. It falls down inside all the cracks he just opened through my body – some of them small and slight and labelled something like two years’ work down the drain. And some of them so enormous I can scarcely contemplate them. There is a giant black hole in the middle of my body, called you mean nothing to him.
And it gets bigger and bigger until everything I could possibly do here is sucked inside it. I can barely work up the will to leave under my own steam, but that’s OK. That’s fine, because just as I am wondering if I might have to stay here for ever, rooted to this one spot in his office, he flings open his door. He flings it open, then steps aside for me to go through it. No welcoming arm archway for me this time. No sense that I could change things, if only I knew how.
The only option is to do what I do then:
I run.
Chapter Seven
I feel sure that I head towards my flat. But after half an hour of near-running in the pouring rain I have to face facts: I am nowhere close. In truth I have no idea where I am. My head is so full of the conversation I just had and the words I read that there is no room for things like directions. There is only a tiny little space labelled aimless walking to nowhere, and so that is what I do. I cross stretches of grass I don’t find familiar and pass buildings I don’t know, until finally I come to a narrow stretch of dark road that could be just about anywhere. It could be some nightmare created by my own diseased mind.
Not that it really matters.
How can it matter, in light of what happened? He wrote all of those staggering things about me, and in return I violated his trust. I stole his most private thoughts from him, and can never now return them. He will remember for ever, just as I will. I suspect nothing on earth could make me forget. It will be on my gravestone: she did a humiliating thing when she was twenty-two.
And I’m still doing it now.
When I see a car slicing through the sleet-thick streets, I let myself imagine for a moment that it is him. As though somehow he was in the wrong, and could ever think he has to make amends. For what, I sneer at myself, for what? In fact I’m still sneering when the car slows to a crawl beside me. When I hear his voice, as unmistakeable to me as the sound of my own breathing.
‘Esther,’ he says, and I know as soon as he does.
I know that he would have preferred to use ‘Hetty’. The realisation steals over me like a blanket drawn to my shoulder while I sleep. It weathers any doubts I have and spits in the face of every harsh word he said to me in his office. He meant what he said in that book. He meant that I am his friend, even though he is scarcely capable of having them. That we have some sort of connection, bruised and forbidden but still stronger than anything I’ve ever known.
So strong it makes me stop and turn even though I think I shouldn’t.
So strong that his tone is imploring when he speaks again.
Imploring, for God’s sake.
‘If you must insist on going around without a jacket on, at the very least let me drive you home. You have to let me drive you home, please.’
I think the ‘please’ is the thing that hurts my heart.
Well, that, and the look on his face.
I see myself in his eyes, shivering wet, lost and adrift.
‘I never meant to do it. I never meant to do any of it.’
‘We can talk about that once you are safe and warm.’
‘I think we should talk about it now, before I get in.’
‘Will it really matter if we do? Will it change anything?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know what there is to change, Professor.’
‘It sounds to me like you think I do. But I know my way through whatever maze we find ourselves in with no more clarity than you, and even fewer tools to navigate it.’
‘It never seems that way, Professor. You seem well equipped to me,’ I say, and know as soon as I do that he is going to respond with something shocking or stunning or not what I’m used to from someone like him. I feel it coming, like a storm hanging tense in the air long before it arrives.
And then the thunder rolls and the lightning flashes, and still I am not prepared.
He looks away at nothing for a second, then turns to me and tells me this:
‘Because you only see the walls around the city, and not the burning ruins within.’
After which I completely fail to say anything in answer. I think I’m breathing too hard to. All I can manage is climbing into his car, then very little after that. Mostly I just sit in silence and let him do more things that plough a furrow through my feelings. He puts the heater on in the car, and touches each vent so they are all aimed at me – without having to be asked or prompted. He goes beyond anything I would have asked or prompted. My hair is wetter than it was after the last rainstorm I got caught in, and he hands me a clean white handkerchief to dry it with. I see the monogrammed initials and feel my eyes sting again.
But bite it back when I think of how silly that is. To be tearful, because someone did the smallest kindness for me. Other people probably have friends handing handkerchiefs to them all the time. They might not be monogrammed, but I don’t know what being monogrammed matters.
I only know that it does.
That when he says, ‘Forgive me,’ the space where my heart is supposed to be fills up. Maybe not with love or affection or anything like that, but certainly with something. A sense that maybe, just once, something can turn out wonderful. That better world we spoke of is just a hair’s breadth away, and I can get to it if I hold my nerve. If I can just say the right thing in response.
Only I don’t need to. By the time I think of it, the car has come to a stop – and not outside my flat.
He has brought me to his home.
He leads me up a thin and winding path to the only place for miles and miles around, dark and tiny and so oddly built I can only imagine it served some other purpose once. It was a lighthouse, surrounded by oceans made of grass. When people rode out across them it lit the way, to stop them falling off the edges of the earth.
It certainly seems like you could, when you look out over it all. The only thing I see in the distance is an ancient tree from a horror movie, complete with branches that almost make an unearthly face. I look away as soon as it starts to appear, but doing so barely matters. I still have the house itself to cope with – and it does take some coping. The door is so little he has to bend almost double to get through it. Both of us have to turn sideways to make it through the hall and into the main living-room space. And even after we have, everything seems very closed in and near suffocating.
Quite possibly because of the seething heaps of books spreading outwards from every orifice the house has, or the furniture that barely belongs in such a narrow place, or the fact that he is so enormous he would make anything look small. But more probably because of the silence that then stretches between us. He just stands there looking at me, as though he expects me to speak first. He wants me to somehow address all of this, even though I already have. I told him why I read his work. It was obvious what made me go out into the rain. There is no mystery on my end and a great sprawling world of it on his. At the very least I expect him to say what made him bring me here, yet he seems either unwilling or un
able.
Both of which make me wonder if it was anything innocent at all.
Right now, with him staring at me like that, it almost looks like the dark and secret other option. The one I won’t think about, or entertain, or imagine as true unless he specifically says in the most explicit terms possible. I need graphic language and diagrams; a map to the middle of his desire. Without it I can only stand there and stare back, in the most stifling silence of my short life. After a while I start to flounder in it.
When he finally speaks it feels like being saved from drowning.
‘I expect you would like me to explain.’
‘Where did you want to start?’
‘With the words I wrote, of course.’
‘Not the fact that you brought me here.’
‘You think that is in need of explanation?’
All it takes is an eyebrow lift for me to see what I should have done before:
He didn’t realise what it meant to do this.
He even backs it up with the most reasonable words.
‘I can assure my motives were beyond reproach. You saw the roads – I could barely see my way. It seemed prudent to stop and take shelter before I ran us off the road or worse.’
Yet somehow they don’t quite seem reasonable at all.
‘And that’s all there was to it, then.’
‘I struggle to understand how you could ever think otherwise.’
‘There are a lot of reasons why I might think otherwise.’
‘Name them, then. Say them aloud and let me dispel your concerns.’
‘I said reasons, not concerns. But I can see why you would use that word.’
‘And what would that reason be, exactly?’
‘Because you often turn something innocuous into something wicked.’
‘Oh? You know my mind so distinctly, do you?’
‘Of course I do. You are me ten years from now.’
I don’t think he means to pause then. I can see his next words on the tip of his tongue and in his eyes, oh, those eyes. How could I ever have thought they were a featureless lake? They are the opposite. You can read almost every thought he has on the glossy surface of his gaze, from the shock when I say what I just did, to the softening light in them after he accepts it.
Almost like it pains him, I think.
Though he tries to cover it over.
‘I scarcely know what to say to something so absurd. You will never be me.’
‘Because I’m common as muck and simple as anything?’
‘No, because you have twice the talent I ever had.’
Those eyes flash even brighter now, even fiercer.
He even takes a step towards me, and when he does I have to fight not to step back.
I have to fight to answer him with just as much conviction.
‘I don’t know. That writing seemed beautiful to me.’
‘The only reason it seemed beautiful was because you believed it was about you.’
‘So you want to claim it wasn’t. That is how you are going to play this.’
‘There is no playing of anything. The whole thing is simply a coincidence – I knew another Esther once, and took to calling her Hetty. That’s really all there is to it.’
‘I see. Well, that does clear a few things up.’
‘I was hoping it would.’
‘I mean, obviously I feel foolish now.’
‘No, no, you really shouldn’t,’ he says.
He even has the audacity to wave his hand, magnanimously.
‘I really should, if you honestly think I would just believe such a bald-faced lie. In fact, that lie is so bald-faced I feel no fear whatsoever in poking fun at it. Honestly, I’ve never heard anything like it in all my days, and my father once stole my shoes to sell for booze money then told me fairies did it. Could you not at least have gone with “your name suited a completely random character”?’
He tries to smother it, but I see his reaction to that plain enough:
Panic, that I know his game. More than panic, really.
It looks more like I stabbed him in the stomach, and now he has to worm his way out of dying.
‘Right now I wish I had. Perhaps then you would not persist in thinking I have formed some sort of attachment to you. I mean, really, The very idea is absurd beyond belief.’
‘That story didn’t seem to suggest it was absurd.’
‘That story was a mistake. An accident. Something I should never have written. I should never have done any of this at all – I could see where it was headed yet told myself you were not so silly as to think it could ever come to anything.’
He even manages a sneer at the end of that.
One good enough to make me answer more angrily than I intend.
‘So that’s what I am now, silly?’
‘No, not entirely not precisely –’
‘Just a little lovesick idiot.’
‘I would never do you the discourtesy.’
‘So weak I can barely –’
‘Hetty.’
He says the word in a fury, half-insensible of it. But then he seems to realise – he seems to hear it the way I just heard it – and his whole face changes. It sags right through the middle as if all the muscle behind suddenly dissolved. His lips part around the ghosts of words I’m sure he would have loved to say, if he hadn’t made that one mistake.
Only he did make it, and now can never take it back.
He called me the thing he claimed was for someone else, and with all the conviction of someone who has long wanted to. All the time he was calling me Miss Hayridge, and this was most likely in the back of his mind. This little name that you would call a friend, a beloved friend, a person you cared for deeply.
Good God, he cares for me deeply.
And looks as stunned as I feel to realise it. The idea might as well have socked him in the gut. He doesn’t speak for a full minute, and in the minute he can hardly seem to breathe. His gaze seems to plead with me, but I hardly understand what it pleads with me for. He has to know I can never let him out of this now. I am bound so tightly to it I could use a chainsaw and not get free. My heart is galloping in my chest, and all in anticipation of what he might say now. More lies, I think.
But I’m wrong, oh, I’m wrong.
‘I…I have no more idea than you do. If I did, if I had, if I suspected for one moment that I was failing so terribly in my duty I should never have let myself entertain it. I could not have borne it. I, a man ten years your senior? Not only so separate from you in age but in station – I am meant to be your guide, your mentor, and instead I take advantage of you in the most grievous way possible.’
‘Oh, yes, calling me your beloved friend is grievous indeed.’
‘You need not be so generous with me, Hetty. I know full well that you are sensible of everything this means. It puts into question every single thing I have done since I first sat down with you in my office. It says plainly that I should have stopped the moment I realised what you had written, yet I did not. I thought myself so above any feeling towards you that I could withstand anything, any temptation, any conversation about such things, but I was wrong. Do you not see that I was wrong? They had me all this while, you had me all this while, and I simply fooled myself into believing otherwise. I have fooled myself into crossing every boundary and breaking every rule, and the worst part is I would do it all again.’
I wait to answer him. I wait, until the effort it takes to say those words has slackened its hold on him. His chest stops heaving and his expression loosens a little, from a kind of fraught and strained thing to near relief. It has been weighing on him, all of this, and now he can relax a little. He can hear me calmly – or as calmly as he is capable of.
And even calmer than that, if I can just say it right.
‘Do you know how rare it is for me to find anyone who wants to talk to me for more than five minutes? Who actually cares enough to come after me when I am distressed? Who would break r
ules for me and cross boundaries? There are people practically forced by law to like me who can barely hide their contempt and confusion over everything I am. And not in a cool way, either. Not in a good way, that secretly makes me awesome or superior. In a terrible, soul-crushing way that every day makes me feel that I somehow came here from another place altogether and just can’t remember where it is or who my people were. And until I met you, I would have done anything – I would have ripped off my own skin and walked a thousand miles in a river of acid – to get back to wherever that is. But now I don’t have to, because you did all of that for me. You seared yourself raw to get here to me, and if you think I’ll ever let you go back on it you’re sorely mistaken.’
‘How can you think that? How can you say it? I spoke of the rudest possible things with a student I have inappropriate feelings for. It is abominable. I should be jailed for it.’
‘For liking an adult woman of sound mind and body.’
‘I never disputed that you are an adult, Hetty, or of anything less than an exemplary intellect. Do not play these games with me – you shall lose.’
‘It doesn’t feel like I’m losing.’
‘Then let me make it plain: this ends now.’
‘I see. So you will never see me again.’
‘I should sooner cut off my own arm with a rusted spoon.’
‘You will leave Pembroke and never return.’
‘If I could arrange it this very second I would.’
‘Just throw away your career over a crush on a person as smart as you, as reasonable, as capable of making their own decisions and knowing their own mind.’
‘Yes, yes, a thousand times yes and more.’
‘Go on then. Go. Go and leave me alone in this hell. Because God knows it will be now that I know I could have loved and been loved by a man like you, by my own likeness, by my own self, and instead have to watch it torn away over a fucking technicality.’
I honestly don’t mean to swear. Or to let that much rage and frustration into my voice. I all but spit the words, and I know the last ones come out broken in two.
But oh, I’m glad they do.
The very second they leave my lips his expression changes. His eyelids grow heavy, his eyes shot through with sudden desperation. And then he takes three steps to me, so abrupt and aggressive I barely have a chance to register what he’s doing. I somehow think he’s about to toss me out into the street – that would be normal in a mediocre life like mine. I even brace myself for it. I think of things I can say to protest it, only to have him take my face in his two big hands and God, oh, God, oh, Lord in heaven.
The Professor Page 6
