The Horned Man

CHAPTER 5

By the time our committee met on Monday, I had made up my mind what to do about Elaine.

I went up to the meeting room, Room 243, a few minutes early, in the hope of finding a moment with her alone.

She was there, but not alone. Zena Sayeed, a Palestinian mathematician, was with her. Elaine looked at me and turned away without a word. I was prepared for something like this, and had in fact made a point of wearing the same shirt – the blue one with black buttons – as a signal, should we not have an opportunity to talk until later. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for the past few nights. Her eyes were red-rimmed; her face looked bloated and shapeless. Steeling myself, I went and sat next to her. She continued to ignore me. A moment later Roger arrived in the room with the fifth member of the committee.

Room 243 was a plain, drab seminar room with a chalkboard, globe lamps full of scorched moths, and a long, oak-veneer table, one side of which the five of us now occupied in a row.

As usual I took the minutes, while Roger, seated in the center, explained to us the nature of the complaint that had been brought against Bruno Jackson.

A Junior, Kenji Makota, had been grumbling about a low grade that Bruno had given him on a paper. He had told his adviser that it might have been higher if he had been ‘cute, with breasts’. The adviser had pressed the student to explain exactly what he meant. He had then persuaded him to put his perception of Bruno’s grading practices into writing.

‘The point is,’ Roger continued, ‘is that if a student thinks she or he is being unfairly treated because of an instructor’s involvement with another student, then we’re obligated to start harassment proceedings, even if that other student hasn’t complained. Now, under the circumstances, and Elaine will correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think we’re looking at a mandatory termination of contract here, which we would be if the other student had complained. But we ought to at least give the guy something to think about by bringing him here in front of us. My guess is the threat of a permanent stain on his academic record ought to be enough to stop him from continuing in this pattern of behavior. That way even if he denies any involvement with his students, which he probably will given our presumption-of-guilt policy, we’ll have done our job of protecting the kids, without subjecting everyone to the upheaval of a full-blown investigation. Agreed?’

We all nodded, though as I did so I cleared my throat, realising that I had come to a decision about something that had been on my mind for several days.

‘Roger,’ I said, ‘would you mind explaining the presumption-of-guilt policy?’

‘It’s very simple. If an instructor is discovered to be having a relationship with a student, and there’s a complaint, then the presumption is he’s – or she is – guilty of sexual harassment. The onus is entirely on the instructor to prove there’s no harassment involved.’

‘By “discovered” you mean…’

His blue eyes danced over my face for a moment. I felt the attention of my colleagues turn toward me, alert and curious.

‘Either there’s an accusation from the victim along with testimony from one or more witness, and the committee deems it sound, or else -’

‘- What about if the harassment is observed by a credible witness?’

‘You mean if the harasser’s caught in flagrante? Absolutely!’

‘This is a little difficult for me,’ I said.

Even Elaine turned to me at this point, her reddened eyes (tear-scoured, I thought, as well as sleep-deprived) wide open. I made a point of addressing my remarks as much to her as to Roger.

‘I happened to see Bruno with one of his students late the other night, down at the train station.’

‘A female student?’ Roger asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Was he harassing her?’

‘I would have to say that he was, yes.’

Zena Sayeed turned toward me.

‘What was he doing?’ She was a heavy-eyed, world-weary woman.

‘He was trying to persuade her to go back to New York with him. He was kissing her.’

‘And she did not want to go with him?’ Zena asked, with what I felt was an edge of private, ironic amusement.

‘I heard her say that she didn’t. And I had a definite sense that she wasn’t comfortable being kissed. I saw her pull away from him at one point.’

‘What was the outcome of all this?’ Roger asked.

‘I don’t know. My train came.’

‘Ah.’

‘How did you come to be observing them?’ Zena said, ‘if I can ask.’

I explained how I had been in the waiting room, and had had no choice but to witness the scene.

‘Obviously I felt very awkward about the whole thing,’ I added, ‘and to be honest, I’d made up my mind not to speak about it. One doesn’t like being in the position of a tattle-tale. But I think that on balance not to say anything would have been the cowardly thing to do. Either we take our responsibility here seriously, or else we might as well pack up and go home.’

Roger nodded vigorously. ‘I agree with you a hundred per cent. This is courageous of you, Lawrence. The question is, what happens now? Elaine, suggestion?’

I hadn’t known whether I would come out with all this until I actually began speaking, but I had certainly formed the opinion that it was the right thing to do. Despite the superficial associations with spying and informing, it seemed to me that to tell what I knew would be consistent with the straightforward, ‘plaindealing’ approach to life I aspired to. And in fact I had found it pleasantly liberating to speak so openly. It gave me a feeling of robustness and courage – so much so that I felt bold enough to begin implementing, right there and then, my other big decision of the day; the one concerning Elaine.

As she paused for thought before answering Roger, I placed my hand on her thigh, under the table. This had an electrifying effect. She sat up with a jolt as if she’d been bitten, but then immediately disguised the action as a violent coughing spasm.

‘Excuse me,’ she managed after a moment, patting her chest.

‘Can I get you a drink of water?’ Roger asked.

‘No, no, I’m fine. Sorry.’

Far from trying to remove my hand, Elaine placed her own hand surreptitiously over it as soon as she had recovered herself sufficiently to do so.

‘To answer your question, Roger,’ she said, ‘I think it would be appropriate to add what Lawrence has told us to the documentation concerning Bruno. As far as termination of contract, it probably would need to be supported by a complaint from the student in question. But in the meantime it adds to the pressure on this instructor to leave these kids alone.’

‘You think we should tell him we know about this involvement?’

Elaine looked at me. She spoke neutrally, but her tired eyes were shining again.

‘That would be up to Lawrence I guess.’

I squeezed her thigh tenderly. Her lip gave a discreet quiver.

‘He knows I saw him,’ I said.

‘So then he may as well know you’ve told us,’ Roger put in, ‘unless you strongly object, Lawrence?’

‘It’s not something I relish. But if there’s no other way around it…’

Roger looked pensive for a moment.

‘Perhaps on second thoughts we’ll keep this to ourselves’, he said, ‘until the student herself complains. You don’t happen to know who she was?’

‘Candida something?’

Zena Sayeed raised a dark eyebrow at this: ‘Candy Johanssen? Skinny girl? Sort of a Pre-Raphaelite starveling?’

‘That sounds like her.’

‘She’s my advisee.’

Roger turned to her. ‘Then perhaps you might want to have a word with her, Zena.’

Zena made a non-committal sound.

‘Do you have a problem with that?’ Roger asked; not aggressively, but with a surprising forcefulness that impressed me again with the strength of his passion in this cause. Apparently he was prepared to ruffle a few feathers to get the results he wanted.

Zena eyed him a moment – debating, I sensed, whether it was worth getting into a discussion.

‘Not at all,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I’ll speak to her.’

Roger pressed his advantage: ‘It sounds to me as though there may be a psychological endangerment issue here. You say she’s thin?’

‘As a rail.’

‘I think you should speak to her, Zena.’

‘I said I would, and I will.’

A few minutes later Bruno was brought into the room by the Dean’s assistant.

One would have thought that, with the threat of the ultimate stigma of his profession hanging over his head, he might have appeared nervous, but it was evident at once that he had decided to adopt a posture of casual indifference toward the proceedings.

He gave us an affable sort of a grin and sat sideways in his chair, sprawling an arm over the back.

He looked at me. ‘Hello Lawrence,’ he said quietly.

I felt again the pressure of his peculiar and unrequited urge to make an accomplice of me. I nodded at him, glad that I had made my feelings about him clear to my colleagues, though uncomfortable at the appearance of duplicitousness that his friendly attitude seemed calculated to promote.

‘So. What atrocity have I committed?’

Refusing to rise to the bait of Bruno’s scorn, Roger proceeded to explain the charge of unfair grading, and how, under the circumstances, this had opened Bruno to the graver charge of sexual harassment.

‘I’ve never harassed anyone in my life,’ Bruno interrupted in his rasping voice. ‘Personally, I’ve never needed to.’

‘And we’re anxious’, Roger put in gently, ‘that you don’t find yourself accused of it. Which is why we asked you to come and meet with us.’

‘Who’s threatening to accuse me of it?’

‘Bruno, if I may, two things…’ Roger spoke in his calm, dispassionate way. ‘Number one, since we don’t, unlike some other colleges, have a rule saying you absolutely can’t get involved with students, the onus is on us to keep the barrier of protection especially high. You can make the choice to have an affair with a student, but at your own risk. The first whisper of a complaint from the student, you’re presumed guilty of harassment and you’re out of here, period.’

‘Has there been a whisper?

‘No. Not yet. Not from a student. But my second point, Bruno, is that you have a rich and rewarding career ahead of you. You’re on tenure track here, you’re clearly a gifted teacher, why blow it?’

‘No whisper of harassment from a student, but a whisper from someone else?’

‘That – that’s not something you have to trouble yourself with for the moment.’

‘Then what are you driving at, Roger?’

‘At this point I think if you would give us an undertaking not to go any further along this road than you may have already gone, that ought to be sufficient. Yes?’ Roger looked at each of us. We nodded, and he turned back to Bruno.

Bruno merely gave a disdainful grin. ‘I’ll take my chances with the whisperers,’ he replied swaggeringly. I felt that his eyes were upon me, though I had my own firmly down on the page of minutes before me.

‘Am I free to go now?’ he asked.

Roger sighed. ‘Yes. But please keep in mind that we’re charged with certain responsibilities here, and that we do take them seriously.’

Bruno stood up. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

There was a silence after the door closed.

‘So much for that,’ Roger said quietly. ‘Zena, you’ll have a word with your student?’

‘I’ll do what I can, Roger,’ Zena replied wearily. Even she seemed to have been disturbed by Bruno’s attitude.

A few minutes later I was walking across campus with Elaine by my side. The afternoon had turned soft and sunny. Over the distant roar of traffic, you could hear the trickle of melted snow running into the storm drains. For a while we moved together in silence – a silence that I sensed was highly charged for her.

‘I’d almost given up on you,’ she said at last, her voice thick.

‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t attempt to explain why I hadn’t been in touch.

‘Oh no, I’m sorry. I was just so – excited, I guess.’

‘That’s good. I want you to feel excited.’

‘Oh… Thank you for saying that.’

‘What would you like to do?’ I asked.

‘I’d like to cook you a meal. That’s what I’d like to do.’

‘I was hoping you might say that.’

‘I’m famous for my cauliflower quiche.’

‘My mouth’s watering already.’

‘Oh, you!’ she said, laughing. She scribbled the directions to her house on a scrap of paper, and we parted with a fond, liquid look into each other’s eyes.

Since she lived near the next train station up along the line, it wasn’t worth my while going back into Manhattan before dinner. I had two hours to kill. I went to my office, picking up a yellow interdepartmental envelope from my mailbox on the way. Inside was the piece Amber had asked me to look at. Reluctantly, I laid it on my desk and began to read, but I found myself completely unable to concentrate on it. I was thinking of its author – the way she seemed to suspend herself so vividly in the inner proscenium of my consciousness whenever I was in her presence, and the apprehension this always aroused.

At once I caught a trace of something from the distant past: a faint resonance, like the last, almost inaudible reverberation of a gong.

It sometimes seems to me that the mind – my own at least – far from being the infinitely capacious organ one likes to think it is, is in fact rather rudimentary, possessing only a very limited number of categories for the things it experiences, and lumping all kinds of diverse phenomena together on the basis of the most accidental resemblance. That would account for the way you realise from time to time that you have never made a real distinction between, say, the dog-owning neighbor in the town you were born in, and the cat-owning neighbor in the town you moved to later on. Both have simply been categorised as ‘pet-owning neighbors.’ It’s always a bit of a shock when you realise that the people or things you’ve fused together have nothing to do with each other at all.

In the case of Amber, what I realised was that I had combined her image with that of a figure from my adolescence: Emily Lloyd, my stepfather’s daughter.

It wasn’t that they looked like each other. Emily had thick chestnut ringlets; she was petite, with a watchful, smoothly angular face, while Amber was long-limbed, willowy, even a little gawky; a bit like a giraffe foal in fact, with her freckles and red-gold hair.

But the feeling each aroused in me was the same: a desire so sharp (I had had to acknowledge that Amber’s effect on me amounted to this) it seemed more to do with recovering something vital and precious that had been taken from me, than with gaining possession of something new. That, and a feeling of confronting something capable of destroying me.

Not wishing to think about either of them, I scanned the bookshelves for something to distract me.

A small collected Shakespeare caught my eye. I took it down and opened the front cover. In faded green ink, the handwriting as neat as a row of pines on a mountain ridge, was the following inscription:

To our beloved Barbara,

A gift to remind you how much we treasure you as you go off to college and embark on your life’s great dream.

Your ever-loving Mom and Dad

8 September 1985

The late Barbara Hellermann, I presumed: Trumilcik’s successor in this room, and my own immediate predecessor; brewer of coffee for her students, recipient of thankyou notes, collector of uplifting quotations… And quite a bit younger, judging from the date she went off to college, than I had imagined. Not more than her mid-thirties, it would seem, when she died: a painful thought, especially in the context of the parents’ loving inscription. With a small internal rustle – a little inner scene-shifting – the kind-old-lady image I had formed of her was replaced by that of a young woman in the tragic flush of some rare illness. Poignant, though since I had no personal connection, only superficially distressing.

Leafing through the silky pages of the volume, I came to Measure for Measure. I hadn’t looked at the play since my teens, but the lines were as familiar to me as if I had written them myself. There was the sexual miscreant Claudio, that ‘warpèd slip of wilderness’, on death row for his sins. There was his judge, Angelo, ‘this ungenitured agent’, as the dissolute scoffer Lucio calls him, battling (with underappreciated sincerity, I felt) his own ungovernable urges. And there was Claudio’s sister, chaste Isabella, about to enter the cloisters when she encounters Angelo, triggering his explosive lust. I took her part once in our all-boys O-level class, and I recalled now the queazy excitement it had given me to announce that I would rather die than accept Angelo’s offer to spare my brother’s life if I would sleep with him. Were I under terms of death, I remembered declaiming passionately, th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies…

I took the volume over to my desk, meaning to reread the play. I hadn’t got far, though, when Emily Lloyd started drifting back into my thoughts. It occurred to me that I must have come into contact with her right around the time we were studying this play. I was fifteen, home from school, where my stepfather was now paying the fees. I remember him tousling my hair as I arrived at the little station near the weekend cottage he’d bought my mother in Kent. I put down my bags and we shared a look of helplessness. We were less than nothing to each other – a void; the shape of an absence. In his case his own children; in mine, my father, who’d died of a brain tumor when I was five.

The house was tiny; all that Robert – my stepfather – had been able to afford now that his ex-wife had his finances tied up. It was a former ploughman’s cottage, with minute windows. My mother filled the little rooms with rustic bric-à-brac, but it remained obstinately gloomy, and every time the three of us spent any time there together, the effort of not getting on each other’s nerves would distill itself into a fine, potent melancholy that tended to engulf us in silence after a few hours.

‘You look a bit peaky, dear,’ my mother said to me that evening.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re not bored are you?’

‘No.’

‘I think it’s a dreadful shame you didn’t want to bring one of your friends to stay.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘There’s lots to do. Bike rides, sailing on the reservoir… I should have thought they’d jump at the opportunity to come and stay.’

‘I’m supposed to be revising.’

I couldn’t tell her it was out of the question that I should ever bring a friend here. There was an absolute veto on the subject in my mind. The form it took was a sense that everything that occurred in our household was blighted with a deep wrongness of spirit. I didn’t know where this sense had originated, but I knew it was so. Under our roof, the simplest observation on the weather was liable to sound insincere, or manipulative; the social functions my mother liked to arrange had a fraught, overelaborate quality that made everyone long for them to be over. With the resignation one learns at the kind of schools I went to, I accepted all this as my lot in life, but I had no wish to share it with anyone else.

Even so, my mother was right: I was bored, and I was lonely.

‘It’s a pity the Bestridges don’t seem to want to know us,’ she pressed on. ‘They have a boy Lawrence’s age don’t they, Robert?’

‘Do they?’

My stepfather was ensconced behind his newspaper with a glass of white port, his long legs in their well-cut pinstripes sprawling with an incongruous languor toward the diminutive fireplace.

‘Why don’t you invite them over for cocktails?’

He lowered his newspaper, glancing at her through the tops of his bifocals.

‘We’ve been through that, dear.’

‘Have we? Well I think it’s very silly that we can’t invite them for cocktails just because they haven’t had time to invite us back for dinner yet. I think it’s very stuffy and conventional, if you must know.’

‘If they’d wanted to socialise with us, they’d have found time to invite us over in the year and a half since we had them to dinner, don’t you think?’

‘How would I know? I’m not them. Anyway, why wouldn’t they want to socialise with us?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘It isn’t as if they have any right to be high and mighty with us. You’re a company director. Lawrence goes to a perfectly good school. I may be a bit of a nobody, but at least I’m not a frump, which can’t exactly be said of Jill Bestridge. I should have thought they’d want to bend over backwards to be friends with us. Perhaps they’re shy, perhaps that’s all it is, Robert. Perhaps they need more encouragement. Robert?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Oh, you’re no help!’

‘You can’t force people to like you, Geraldine dear. It’s against the laws of physics.’

He turned the page of his newspaper and shook it straight with a single practiced snap.

My mother stood up and wandered about the room, fussing with her ornaments and flowers. She wasn’t done with this topic, I could tell. Her restless, aggrieved spirit never settled easily, once aroused.

I sensed also that she hadn’t yet come to her point, her real point; that to get to it she had to conjure a more vexed and petulant atmosphere than currently prevailed.

‘I don’t see how you ever get what you want in life if you aren’t prepared to push a little. You have to push! I’ve had to push people all my life.’

‘And you wonder why people find you pushy.’

‘Do they?’ my mother asked, her violet-blue eyes suddenly wide and vulnerable.

I could see that my stepfather regretted his riposte.

‘No dear, I’m just saying they would -’

‘Is that why the Bestridges don’t -’

‘Don’t let’s start, Geraldine -’

‘I suppose you think I pushed you. Is that what you think?’

‘Geraldine -’

‘All those afternoon drinkies at the Portingham Cellars – was that me pushing you? Those romantic tête-à-teêtes down in the storage room at Findley Street, did I push you down there? Did I? Pushy Geraldine shoving poor weak Mr Robert Julius Lloyd down the basement stairs in the middle of the morning when she couldn’t wait another second for a bit of what you fancy, is that how you remember it darling?’

My stepfather sighed, folding away his newspaper. He disliked confrontations, and would agree to almost any demand in order to avoid them. His own dissatisfactions he worked out silently and in private, in stratagems that didn’t emerge until their fruit was already fully ripened. For all I know, as he sat there gazing mildly at my mother, he was already plotting how to start siphoning off funds to set up the flat (or ‘love nest’ as the newspapers later called it) for his new mistress, a private casino waitress by the name of Brandy Colquhoun, whose existence burst on us a year or so later.

‘What is it you want, my love?’

‘Want? I don’t want anything. I’d like to think I had a husband who took some interest in the well-being of my child -’

‘Geraldine, I’m simply saying I don’t think the Bestridges -’

‘Oh who cares about the Bestridges? Do you think I care tuppence about those snobs?’

‘Well what is it you want me to do?’

‘What’s the point of even discussing what I want you to do since you refuse to do anything I suggest anyway?’

‘What have I ever refused?’

My mother looked away from him; adjusted a dried rose.

In a quiet voice, she said:

‘The Royal Aldersbury, for one thing.’

There.

‘Ah, now Geraldine…’

‘What? Just because your daughter’s a member does that mean it’s too good for Lawrence? I find that a little bit insulting, if you must know.’

The Royal Aldersbury was a sports club for well-to-do county families. Robert’s daughter Emily was a member and, from what I could gather, spent all her free time there, in a gilded haze of tennis tournaments, dinghy regattas, and country dances.

It was near the Lloyd house, twelve miles from us, on the banks of a wide stretch of the Medway. Robert met his daughter and two young sons there for tea every Sunday, an event from which he would return in a state of dejection that my mother had come to feel offended by, so that they had had to institute a counter-ritual of dining out at an expensive restaurant – the White Castle or the Gay Hussar – every Sunday night when they arrived back in London.

Several times she had raised the subject of Robert getting me into the Royal Aldersbury, ostensibly so that I would have something to do when I came to the cottage, though the more Robert had resisted the idea, the more firmly it had acquired the higher significance of a measure of his current regard for her. Robert was too much of the English school of obtuseness to say right out that he was afraid it might upset his daughter to have to mix with the son of the woman he’d left his family for, but that was evidently what he felt, and my mother found this mortifying. She had taken the position that once she and Robert had married, the entire situation regarding both families had become irrevocably normalised and stable, almost to the point of retroactively annulling the fact of his previous marriage. She often tried to get Robert to bring his children to our home, and even hinted that it was about time he took us over to visit his former wife. Perhaps she had visions of joining Selena Lloyd and her set for ladies’ luncheons in Tunbridge Wells.

Even so, she was probably as surprised as I was when Robert suddenly stood up and telephoned the Royal Aldersbury, asking to speak to the Club Secretary.

A few minutes later I was a probationary member.

‘Satisfied?’ he asked my mother, sitting back down to his newspaper. He was affecting nonchalance, but he must have been aware of the magnitude of what he had done; its fundamental destructiveness. I suspect he was the type of man who even took a certain fastidious pleasure in setting off small avalanches of this nature: proving to himself and the world just how much of a source of disorder he was.

My mother was pleased: deeply, physically pleased. She flushed, and her eyes shone. She brought the bottle of white port over to Robert and filled his glass. They were guarded about showing physical affection in front of me, but they had evolved numerous small acts of attention that by now were as obvious an indication of the flow of feeling between them as the deepest of French kisses would have been.

The next morning my stepfather took me to the Royal Aldersbury. It was a fine spring day: the May was flowering in the hedges and the apple orchards were in bloom. We drove in silence: by tacit agreement we never spoke to each other when my mother wasn’t around.

The main building of the club was a grand, gabled, chimneyed pile covered in Virginia creeper. Around it were tennis courts, squash courts, croquet lawns, a badminton lawn with stout-legged ladies leaping around in pleated skirts, and at the back, gliding blackly in its flower-filled banks, the river.

Robert took me uptairs to meet the Treasurer and Secretary. He was politely aloof with these functionaries, who appeared to regard him as a mighty personage. An enigmatic smile played across his features as they made conversation with him, supplying their own answers when none was forthcoming from him. Though I had no idea what he was thinking, I felt that he was privately amusing himself at everyone else’s expense. I didn’t mind.

A woman came to the door and signaled to the Treasurer. He tiptoed over to her, murmuring an apology. They stood in the next room talking in hushed voices, then the Treasurer tiptoed back. He cleared his throat:

‘It would appear that Mrs Lloyd is taking tea in the main lobby with Miss Lloyd. Would you – would you like us to take you out through the side door Mr Lloyd… ah… discreet…’

‘No. I was hoping she’d be here. I want to introduce Lawrence.’

The Treasurer and Secretary looked nervously at him. Though they probably didn’t expect anything so vulgar as a ‘scene’ to occur, they were the kind of creatures to whom a situation with even the potential for a scene, even where that potential is sure to remain firmly suppressed, is a source of anxiety.

After I had filled out my forms and signed the membership book – an ancient volume with a column in it for your title as well as your name and address – I followed Robert back down to the main lobby, which was now alive with the particular muted but purposeful buzz of the upper classes going about their leisure.

Mrs Lloyd and her daughter were seated in an alcove half-screened by potted palms. As we approached them, I saw at once that the daughter was beautiful, and moreover beautiful in a way that so intimately corresponded to my ideal conception of female beauty at the time, that it was hard to resist the feeling that she had been created and placed there expressly for my personal delectation. My interest in the place, till then not nearly as strong as my mother’s, abruptly sharpened.

Mrs Lloyd, a smaller, sallower, skinnier woman than I had imagined, gave a brief start as she saw us, but quickly recovered her composure. Emily looked gravely at her father, her bee-stung little mouth firmly closed.

‘I want you to meet Lawrence,’ Robert said. The same aloof, secretive smile played on his face. Perhaps it was just his way of showing embarrassment, though its effect was to suggest he wasn’t actually present in the situation at all, other than in the most banally literal way.

‘Geraldine’s son,’ he added.

Mother and daughter looked at me blank-faced.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, immediately noticing a look flash between all three Lloyds.

‘Emily, I was hoping you might show Lawrence around. Introduce him to your friends. He doesn’t know anyone here. Would you do that?’

The girl seemed stunned, almost benumbed, by the situation. But she said ‘yes’ with an obedient simplicity as though it would never have crossed her mind to oppose her father’s will.

‘Good. Well then. I’ll see you on Sunday dear. Lawrence, I’ll pick you up at six.’

To his ex-wife he merely nodded, receiving the faintest of nods in return.

Emily was true to her word. After her mother left, which she did as soon as was civilly possible, she gave me a tour of the building and grounds, introducing me to various teenage acquaintances on the way. She made no attempt to converse with me, and was largely unresponsive to my remarks. Even so, I felt that I was making a favorable impression on her. I was intensely smitten by her. The thick, reddish-brown spill of her ringlets, her agate eyes, her sharply chiseled nose and pointed, elfin chin, were altogether too close to my image of that longed-for but hitherto entirely elusive entity, a girlfriend, for me to be capable of separating her from my fantasy. Her prolonged presence by my side as we strolled through the club began to acquire a meaning of its own in my imagination; something more than just duty and circumstance could account for. In some ineffable way we were ‘together’ – a fact that seemed further cemented every time she introduced me to someone new. Her voice was soft and clear, with a faint, nascent edge of imperiousness. She wore a perfume that rapidly insinuated itself into the deepest cortical centers of my brain: even today, when I catch it in a store or lobby, I am instantly back in her sweetly enchanting aura.

By the time we finished our tour, I was feeling distinctly proprietorial about her. Doubtless she expected me to wander off by myself now, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind, and she was too well brought up to say anything.

Some friends of hers came up, and as I persisted in lingering by her, she introduced me to them. These, it turned out, were her particular set, and over the next three days I got to know them well. The mere fact of Emily’s introducing me appeared to be enough to gain their acceptance. No doubt she found a way of quietly explaining who I was, but she must not have conveyed any particular antipathy on that score, because they included me in all their activities as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Like her, they were extremely polite and superbly confident. The boys were constantly standing up and offering their seats to older women. The girls – Fiona, Rosamond, Sophia, Lucy – were miracles of deportment and elocution, their adolescent bodies always under perfect control. Their facial expressions had the sophistication of seasoned matrons – little nuances of irony, moues of mock petulance, casting a wonderful allure over the most neutral of remarks. But nothing off-color or spiteful was ever intimated. They seemed almost conscious of a responsibility to set an example of gracious conduct, whether they were lobbing an easy ball to a weaker player over the tennis net, or complimenting the dinner ladies on the rhubarb pie in the dining room.

Among the boys was one I immediately identified as a rival. His name was Justin Brady. He was good-looking – tall, with a supple athletic build, wavy black hair and a cheerful, animated face. There was some kind of understanding between him and Emily. At first I thought he might actually be her boyfriend, but they never held hands or kissed, as some of the others did, so I ruled that out. But when we first played doubles he seemed to take it for granted that he would partner Emily, and later, when she mentioned that she wouldn’t mind going out on the river for a sail, he seemed to assume this meant she wanted him to go with her.

In both instances I managed to ward him off by sheer force of will. I simply stuck by her at her end of the court, creating a standoff, until, with a pleasant grin, Justin retreated to the other end. And when it was decided that we should all go sailing, I preempted him by asking Emily outright if she would come in my dinghy. She did hesitate a moment, looking at Justin, but he merely gave his pleasant warm smile again, and told her to go ahead.

Out on the river a mild breeze, scented with the flowers that grew on the banks, puffed out our sails and sent us rippling across the water. Emily said nothing, barely looked at me, but I felt that I was in paradise. To the extent that I even noticed her unresponsiveness, I put it down to shyness and her generally subdued manner. This was almost enough; almost all I wanted of love at that moment, to be gliding silently across the river with this bewitching girl. My own sails were filled! There had been talk of the upcoming Easter Dance, some preliminary discussion of partners and costumes. It seemed to me an inevitability that Emily would come as my partner, that we would dance all evening, and seal our budding romance with a long, tender kiss out on a balcony.

By the second day I had half-intoxicated myself with the imagined taste of her kisses, the sensation of plying my hands through her wondrous mass of ringlets. I spent the day waiting for opportunities to gaze into her eyes. On the rare occasions when she looked back at me, it was with a curious, dazed expression, as though we were meeting in a dream.

The next day her mother had to pick her up earlier than usual. On the spur of the moment, a general invitation to tea was issued. It didn’t cross my mind that I might not be welcome at Robert’s former home, and I ran to get my things along with the rest of them. When I turned up at her Land-Rover, Mrs Lloyd frowned slightly. Wasn’t Robert expecting to pick me up at the club later that afternoon? she asked. Gently, with the effusive politeness I had learned from my new friends, I assured her she needn’t worry – I would ring him from her house and he could pick me up there instead. Since she appeared to operate at a fairly cool temperature at the best of times, I didn’t think anything of the frostiness with which she received this, and I piled into the car next to Emily.

The home was a dilapidated Elizabethan manor. Dwarf apple trees stood blossoming through lichenous old limbs in a garden enclosed by a crumbling brick wall. Inside, fragrances such as only the action of long centuries can distill out of worn stone, polished elm, dust, silver and old glass, hung in the tall rooms. I wandered through with a sense of having gained admittance to some inner precinct of existence, where every sensation was rarefied to an almost melancholy sweetness and purity. My spirit seemed to open here. I felt that I was converging with some design deeply inscribed in my own destiny; one that had been guiding me toward this place for many years without my knowing it, and that intended to connect me to it with the strongest, most intimate bonds.

We had tea in the drawing room. Emily’s younger brothers joined us. They stared at me, not saying a word. I didn’t mind: there was all the time in the world, I felt, to befriend them. Mrs Lloyd kept coming in with cakes and sandwiches. We boys stood up for her every time she entered, pressing her to sit down and join us, but she wouldn’t.

After tea we trooped up to Emily’s bedroom to listen to records on her new stereo. Her bed was an old four-poster with a carved wooden canopy. I felt a kindliness emanate from it; a sense that it and I were going to become old friends.

We sat around on cushions, chatting, laughing, listening to music. I couldn’t help feeling that it was for me in particular that this event had been orchestrated. I smiled indulgently at the others, interred so blissfully in my own folly that I half-expected them to start leaving one by one so that Emily and I could finally be alone.

Justin took charge of the stereo without being invited to. I tried not to let this interfere with my expansive mood, but after a while it started to bother me. I felt uncomfortable more on Emily’s behalf than my own. I stood up, and with what I thought was a friendly but firm decisiveness, changed the record he had just put on, and stationed myself by the controls. With his usual good grace, Justin backed off at once. I noticed a few looks being exchanged among the others, but I felt that all they signified was a growing acknowledgment of the intimacy developing between Emily and myself.

The beat of the music went through us, binding us together as we nodded our heads in time, or sang along with snatches of the melody. I felt the surging happiness you only ever experience at that age – the euphoria of being part of a group of friends traveling together into the future. Love overflows your heart; you feel an almost religious joy, as though some divine emissary had alighted right there in the midst of your little congregation.

Emily was quiet, but the rest of us were animated – talking about our lives, our schools, our families. The subject of mothers came up. Fiona’s mother was a Tory councillor. The mother of one of the boys raised some rare breed of sheep. ‘What about your mother, Lawrence,’ somebody asked me, ‘what does she do?’ I was just thinking how best to answer, when Emily spoke, her voice quiet but clear as a bell above the music:

‘She’s sort of a high-class prostitute, isn’t she?’

What I felt at first was simply a loss of bearings, as though some natural disaster had just occurred. The euphoria was still inside me, still surging on its own momentum, and in the hush that followed Emily’s remark, I heard myself blurt with what I thought was tremendous quick-wittedness, ‘Actually no, she’s a low-class prostitute,’ whereupon a strange ballooning light-ness seemed to raise me up to my feet and carry me involuntarily out of the room and downstairs, where Mrs Lloyd informed me that Robert was on his way to pick me up, and that I would be doing her a great kindness if I would leave immediately and wait for him at the end of the driveway so that he wouldn’t have to come to the house.

As I stumbled off, the magnitude and horror of what had just occurred – what had been occurring, I grasped dimly, throughout the past three days – broke on me in little astounding illuminations. It was more than I could absorb all at once. Little dazzling glimpses of it burst inside me. The effect was largely physical. I didn’t know whether I wanted to sob or throw up.

I’ve had my share of snubs and insults since then, but nothing has ever had such a decisive effect on me. My own part in it dismayed me more than anything else. For years afterwards I could make myself writhe in undiminished pain at the thought of my obnoxious behavior during those three days. How clearly I could see in hindsight the growing hatred I was arousing in Emily’s friends as I strutted about among them. Yet how sure I had been of their love at the time!

Was it really possible to be so catastrophically wrong in one’s reading of a situation? The discovery that it was disturbed me profoundly. I have distrusted myself ever since. Any time I begin to feel comfortable with people, I immediately conjecture a parallel version of myself arousing their secret loathing. Pretty soon it gets hard to tell which version reflects reality, and I find myself splitting the difference; withdrawing into an attitude of detached neutrality.

I sat there in Room 106 remembering these things. I hadn’t dredged them up for years, but every detail was as fresh and vivid in my memory as ever. A plausible hell, I have often thought, could be made out of such incidents, relived ad infinitum.

While going over them, I had swiveled my chair around and put my feet up on the shelf behind my desk, so that I was in a reclining position. Lying that way I was in the same relation to Trumilcik’s lair as I was to Dr Schrever’s chair when I lay in her office. Had I in some way been substituting Trumilcik for Dr Schrever as I relived these moments? Perhaps I thought that as a European he might understand better than she the structure of inhibitions and concealed hierarchies that made such an event possible. At any rate, by the time I was finished, I felt the pleasantly calm, spent sensation I sometimes felt at the end of my sessions with Dr Schrever.

With that in mind, I took a couple of twenty-dollar bills from my wallet and left them on the desk by Amber’s pages: an offering for Trumilcik, should he come tonight. I had formed the idea that he was living pretty much hand to mouth, and I felt I owed him something for co-opting his spirit as a stand-in for Dr Schrever. I also wanted to demonstrate to him my good will; my solidarity with him as an ex-pat from the old world trying to plant his feet in the new.

Then I set off for Elaine’s.