The Realms Thereunder

3

At a quarter past two, Freya started off for her tutorial. She left the coffee shop and made her way to her tutor’s room using the most populated streets. She ran into Julie, the other student she was to take her tutorial with, just outside the college. Freya was angry with herself for arriving on time; if she were just a little earlier, she would have been able to enter and reenter the doors and arches. The arches especially upset her.

Fighting anxiety, Freya mounted the stairs ahead of Julie. Reaching the door of the tutor’s room, she knocked and reached into her bag for her tutorial gown. She pulled it out, deliberately bringing some papers with it. She bent down to collect them as they heard, “Come in, please,” from inside the room.

“You go ahead,” Freya said to Julie, deliberately picking her bag up the wrong way around to spill some of her books onto the floor.

“I’ll help,” Julie said, bending down.

“No! That’s fine, I’ve got it,” Freya said, harsher than she had meant.

Julie nodded, stood, and entered.

Freya stuffed the books in her bag and then took a bottle of pills out of an inner pocket. She dry-swallowed a couple and then went to a window in the hallway. Where was the sun? The sky had become overcast, but it wouldn’t set until around five thirty this time of year. Surely the tutorial wouldn’t drag on that long . . . but it might.

She took a deep breath. One crisis at a time. She opened the door and went in and out of it as fast and as silently as she could, seven times. That did absolutely nothing to calm her-she had gone through too many arches already. The only thing that could help was if she went back to the street and started again fresh. She closed her eyes and started to massage her forehead.

The door clicked shut behind her, making her jump.

“I’m sorry, did I startle you?”

“A little . . .” Freya saw Professor Stowe, her tutor, standing just inside the doorway.

His face was concerned. “It’s okay. I’m a little anxious because I thought I would be late.”

“No, dead on time, as usual. Shall we start?” He gestured to the sitting room where Julie was already settling herself.

Freya bustled into the next room and sat on a small, uncomfortable wooden chair next to Julie, facing Professor Stowe’s leather wing-backed chair.

The next fifty minutes were dedicated to the discussion of Freya’s and Julie’s essays on determinism. Julie got high praise for hers, while Freya had all the flaws and bad reasoning pointed out in hers. She stopped taking notes when he started critiquing her sentence structure. Eventually, Stowe got down to the end of the paper and paused long enough for her to assume that he’d finished.

“Alright,” she said, her voice quavering just slightly, feeling very much under attack. “You’ve told me all the things I shouldn’t do, what are the things that I should do?”

The professor smiled at her. “Address the essay title,” he said, tossing her back her essay. It was creased and glossed over completely in red ink. “Stay focused, be relevant. Do better.”

Freya was fuming. She ostentatiously checked her watch.

“Yes, you’re right,” Stowe said. “We’re finished now.” He set the reading and essay titles for next week and rose from his chair as Julie and Freya packed up.

“Freya, if I could have a word in private with you.”

The two students made eye contact.

“I’ll wait for you outside,” Julie said and left.

“I just wanted to say,” Professor Stowe said, standing behind his wing-backed chair and leaning forward on it, “that you are, without a doubt, one of the smartest students in your current year-perhaps the smartest-and that is why I was so tough on you.”

“I don’t understand.”

Professor Stowe turned his head rather theatrically to gaze out of the window and said, “The problem with your essays is that you are trying to advance the reasoning of the field, trying to arrive at some conclusion, whereas your only goal is to display an evidence of having read the material and, to some degree, retained it and understood it. We’re not looking for a breakthrough. We don’t want to revolutionise the field”-he slid his eyes away from the window and back to her-“just yet.”

Freya considered this. “So . . . ?”

“So for now, you need to toe the line. I never want to discourage original thought, but the truth is that this is the wrong forum for that. You’ll want to save all that for your doctoral thesis. But in order to get there, you need to finish your graduate degree, and for that you’ll need to, barbaric as it sounds, simply follow the herd- or lead it, if you can. This isn’t the time for individual thought-it is the place for it, but not the time, yet. Do you follow?”

“That’s an ironic comment to come out of an essay on determinism.”

Professor Stowe laughed, his eyes creasing merrily. “See, you’re obviously brilliant. All things in their places, that’s all I’m saying.”

Professor Stowe straightened and went to stand by the window. “I believe you’ve got a shining career ahead of you-you’ve an excellent academic mind, but you have to maintain distance. We’re scholars of philosophy and theology, not practitioners, after all.

You must maintain the perspective of the outsider.”

Freya didn’t agree with this at all and opened her mouth to protest, but Professor Stowe held up a hand and turned his face to the window.

“Now, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about-come over here for a second, please. Look down there.”

Freya cautiously crossed the room to the window that looked down on the street.

“See that man opposite us, sitting on the pavement?”

Freya craned her neck. There was a form huddled against the wall of the house across from them that looked to be . . . Daniel.

“Do you know him?”

Freya nodded. “Yes, that’s . . . an old friend of mine I was at school with.”

“His name is Daniel, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know he was following you?”

“No.”

“I first noticed him sitting outside here three weeks ago. He’s quite a notorious figure in Oxford. I used to volunteer at the night shelter a few years ago. He was banned for violent behavior. A couple weeks ago I saw him walking down the street with blood on his face. Has he approached you?”

“Yes. Like I said, we were at school together.”

“I would never advise a student on their personal life, but I would ask you to consider your involvement with him very carefully and treat him with great trepidation. There is little doubt in my mind that he will want to exploit your past friendship. It won’t seem like that initially-he’ll want to earn your confidence at first-but gradually he’ll make more and more demands of you, which you’ll find increasingly difficult to refuse.”

Freya felt anxious. She thought about her agreement to meet Daniel later on that day.

“If you like, I can ring the police and have them caution him.”

“No,” Freya said. “That’s fine. I’ll-keep an eye on him.”

“Have you planned to meet him again?”

Freya was going to deny that she had but then felt childish. She nodded her head. “We arranged to meet in a church . . . St. Michael’s in Summertown.”

“I don’t think that’s wrong but if I might advise you-miss the appointment. Just this once, to let him know that you have your own schedule.”

“Okay, I’ll consider that.”

“Good. I just want you to be safe, that’s all.”

“I know, thanks.” Freya shouldered her bag and moved to the door. She waved good-bye and then joined Julie outside in the hallway.

“What was that about?” she asked.

“Nothing, he just wanted to give me a little more feedback.”

“More? He was pretty harsh in there.”

“No, he’s okay, really.”

They walked off into the Oxford gloom.