The Englishman (44 page)

In the morning there is little time to brood, partly because—improbably—I oversleep. I scold myself out of bed and into the shower, where the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question presents itself. To shave, or not to shave? I do my armpits and shins, carefully, can’t be doing with any cuts today. Trimming is allowed. I always trim. Nothing to do with the prospect of sex tonight.

Did I say “prospect?”

Tomorrow evening I will be sitting in my parents’ living room. It seems surreal, and yet it will happen, and it will feel completely normal. There is just time to send a text to Gloria:
Wd love to go to Edelstein’s. Will u book?
When I am in the middle of brushing my teeth, the phone rings.

“Anna, this is Mom. If I can still book a table for Saturday evening, I will, but they may be full. In that case I’ll go for Sunday lunch—or do you have plans?”

“No, that’s fine. Irene and I will work around that.”

“Only you needn’t think Nat and Jessica will join us.”

Orange alert. Gloria is peevish.

“I hadn’t thought of Nat and Jessy. Why?”

“Jessica announced to me yesterday that she and Nathan have decided not to go on their winter holiday together.”

“What does that mean?”

“You may believe that those were my very words to her!”

“Mom—I’m sorry, but I’m about to leave for the airport, literally this minute. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? Don’t worry too much!”

It is still dark, and cold enough for gloves. Karen and the girls are letting the dogs out as I wheel my suitcase past.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” she shouts over. “Going home for the holidays?”

“Yeah, ain’t it great? Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Have fun! Is that your taxi?”

As I approach the car Giles gets out, and I am relieved to see that he has the same kind of idiotic half-smile on his face as I feel on mine. Karen will never believe that he is a taxi driver.

“I do know, of course, that clothes are more of a challenge for women than they are for men, but—” He takes the suitcase and lifts it onto the back seat with an exaggerated expression of effort. The trunk is fenced off and lined with old rugs, for the dogs.

“I’m flying home afterward. To New York.” Since “good morning” has apparently gone out of fashion. He checks my face when he hears this, but he doesn’t comment.

“In.”

Slightly disgruntled, I climb into the passenger seat, and he slams the door behind me. As I watch him walk round the front, I see Karen and the girls lurking by the chestnut tree. Well, that’ll give them food for talk.

Giles accelerates down the lane toward the main road, and I cannot help feeling that he is not quite his usual sweet self.

“Are we late?”

“There’ll be traffic on the road and queues at the airport.”

Maybe he is not at his best in the mornings. I decide that I have too much on my plate today to start fretting about Giles Cleveland’s mood, especially since this whole thing was his own idea. So I keep quiet and settle into enjoying the view. His Barbour is on the backseat, and he is wearing a dress shirt underneath a rust-colored pullover. I would say he looks particularly handsome in it, but I suspect he would look handsome to me in polka dots and purple flares. There is a slight scent of soap in the air, and I indulge myself with a fantasy of Giles stepping out of the shower this morning. As far as I am concerned we could drive to Indiana in this car. I would watch his hands on the wheel, and his long thighs, and dream the journey away.

Last time we sat together in his car, he kissed me. And then I kissed him.

“Are you nervous?” he suddenly asks.

“Huh? Oh, about the conference. No, not really. Well, a little. Yeah, you know what? I am. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?”

He glances across, and for the first time today smiles at me. Thank God—I thought he didn’t like me anymore. But he does. He still likes me.

“Giles?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re not going to make me pretend I won’t mind if you come in, right?”

“Come in where? Ah.” I can see that he knew this subject would rear its anxious head sooner or later. “But I’ve been delegated to assess how well you carry yourself as an Ardrossan representative.”

I must have looked absolutely appalled, because he searches my face longer than the speed at which he is driving allows.

“I’m kidding. Anna—hey! Joke!”

“Oh, you horrible man! If I weren’t afraid you’d land us in a ditch, I’d hit you!
Horrible
man!”

“Yes, I know.” He grins.

I exhale noisily, still in shock. “Why
are
you coming, anyway?”

I would never have had the courage to ask if he had not wrong-footed me like this. But now the question hangs between us like a piece of lacy underwear pulled out from under the sofa cushions.

“To take you out to dinner tonight.”

Again he looks over, and I can see in the tension of the muscles around his mouth that some of his nonchalance is fake.

“All right,” I say quietly.

He looks straight ahead, and I really think that is all he will say on the subject.

“So your flight to New York is tomorrow.” This comes a full minute later.

“Yes, of course. Tomorrow afternoon.”

That
has been eating him. I don’t believe it. He has been sulking.

“To be honest, there’s another reason I’m going,” he says, and I hold my breath. “A friend of mine—we go way back, he was my tutor at Cambridge—recently got a job at Notre Dame. I haven’t seen him for ten years.”

“At the English department?” I ask. “Who is it?”

“Paul French. He was at UCL before. I don’t suppose you know him?”

“We were never introduced, no, but I remember seeing him at various Shakespeare-related events. Ginger-haired, roly-poly. Exuberant.”

“That’s Paul. Anyway, how do you think your paper will go over?”

The butterflies in my stomach rise and flutter hectically, like a flock of pigeons flushed from the side of a building.

“I hope I’ve made it watertight enough to stand up under scrutiny, but there’ll be a number of historians there, you know, proper historians, not lame-ass cultural historians like me. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a go at it. Or at me.”

“You should have presented it in the graduate seminar, or better still, given it to me to read.” He casts me a quick glance but looks away when I look back.

“You’re very busy.”

“I would have read it, if you’d asked me. I’m supposed to, as your mentor!”

“Thanks,” I mutter, not very graciously. “Of course I discussed it with various people. I’m not that much of a frosh!” He raises his eyebrows to express skepticism, and out rushes the truth. “If I must be panned, I’d rather be panned by a bunch of strangers than by you!”

“But that’s silly. Just silly.” He deliberates for a moment. “Did Tim say I’ve been thrown off his tenure committee?”

“No! Why? And what does that mean?”

“I’m too close, personally and professionally. To be fair, I probably am. It’s just that Elizabeth would not have objected, and Dancey has.”

“But Tim’ll be all right, won’t he?”

Again he considers his reply carefully.

“I think so. His portfolio is too solid to deny him tenure, even if some people wouldn’t claim that he’s…their favorite person.”

“Nobody can be everybody’s favorite person.”

He grins. “That’s a wise thing to say. But everybody can and should make sure that their mentor approves their conference papers!”

I get the distinct feeling that I have just been officially reprimanded.

“Well, if they thrash me, you’ll tell me that you would have told me so if I’d given you the chance!”

“At great length, and with plenty of footnotes!”

“Keep your eyes on the road.” I nod toward the windshield, biting on a laugh. “We’ll never find out if you wrap us round a tree.”

“I just—” he starts, then stops. Relaxes his hold on the steering wheel as if he had been clasping it too hard. “I just don’t want any of those arseholes—and there are bound to be some, there always are—I just think that you should have taken all possible precautions to shield yourself against boorish attacks, that’s all.”

“The more enemies, the more honor.”

He casts me another exasperated glance. “You’re very cool.”

“I won’t be cool if you come in to listen.”

“Think of me as a claque,” he says. “It’s nice to have a friend in the audience, isn’t it?”

Yes. It’s nice to have a friend.

I disentangle myself from our dispute and force myself to watch the forest by the highway flying past. There was a road sign to the airport; shouldn’t be longer than ten minutes till we’re there.

“
You
don’t care what people think,” I say slowly. A harmless remark, like a pebble into the pond of our…friendship.

He glances over, with a snort and a lopsided smile. “It’s hard for a young lion not to care what the alpha males say about him.”

Giles doesn’t care.
That is
so
not true.

“My father was a soldier,” he goes on. “An officer, during the war. He was fifty-one years old when I was born, and although he had an artistic side and was, I think, more naturally warm-hearted than my mother, he never quite reconciled himself to the fact that his younger son was a…a wuss.”

“Wuss he?” I ask, and he laughs. I love that. I love that I can make him laugh.

“I felt like one, anyway. With a father who fought in Italy and Germany and was present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and an older brother who had made his first million on the stock market by the time he was twenty-six, a First in English literature doesn’t really cut it.”

He would never be telling me this if he didn’t have to concentrate on the road and couldn’t pretend that we are only chatting.

“Are you sorry you didn’t go into the City?”

“Lord, no.” He scowls. “I would have made a complete hash of it.”

“A nice house in Buckinghamshire, a cottage in Sussex, a sailing boat, tickets to all the fancy London premieres…sorry,
prem
ieres.”

“No, that’s your fantasy,” he says, a little riled. “I emigrated to another continent to get away from all that.”

“Well, if I had wanted
all that
so very badly, I could have stuck with the Etonian.”

“Maybe you should have.”

We are almost fighting.

“Do you know what is so depressing?” I ask when we have parked the car and are walking toward the terminal. I need to say this out loud, because I need to see how he will react. “That sooner or later a girl realizes that her good opinion means very little to a man. A woman can’t boost a man’s ego, not if he feels inferior to the big boys out there. Women don’t count. They can undermine a man, sure, and he might take it out on her if he had a bad day at the office, but it’s the boys’ admiration that he craves, not hers.”

“If you believe that, you’re crazy!”

Whatever this is, it is not the notorious English reticence.

Our fellow travelers are all on their way south or northeast, so the departure lounge in which we wait for our flight is only half-f and quiet. Giles, ambling along the window front, both hands dug deep into his pockets, bag slung over his shoulder, seems to contemplate the airfield bathed in the pinkish-gray light of the rising sun. Seeing him there, out of his natural habitat, my face softens, my whole body softens.

I know in my head that making love with him tonight would be a really stupid idea, but my heart and my belly know not from reason.

His seat is on the other side of the plane, a few rows behind mine, but when I look up after extracting gum, pen, and manuscript from my bag and stowing it under the seat in front of me, he is standing above me, elbows propped against the overhead locker.

“I hope you wouldn’t have preferred sitting next to that nice lady who changed seats with me.”

I raise myself to look across the rows of seats and see a middle-aged woman in colored knitwear wave at me. I wave back and mouth a thank you.

“What did you tell her?”

His grin deepens and he slumps into his seat, suddenly no more than a few inches away from me, closer even than in the car. So much for the nap I had hoped to take during the flight.

“Oh, never mind.” He pretends to be interested in my manuscript. “I can be very persuasive if I want to be.”

I decide to let that one pass and go for small talk. “Have you ever been to Notre Dame?”

“‘South Bend! That sounds like dancing, doesn’t it?’” he says in a falsetto voice.

“Katherine Hepburn. In
The Philadelphia Story
.”