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CHARLOTTE STEIN
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Copyright
Mischief
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.mischiefbooks.com
An eBook Original 2015
Copyright © Charlotte Stein 2015
Cover design: Head Design 2017, cover images: Shutterstock.com
Charlotte Stein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007579501
Version: 2017-08-22
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
About the Publisher
Chapter One
I know immediately that I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. I can tell before I search through my folder for the essay I should have handed in, and instead find it still in there like a protruding tongue. Though once I see it and know for sure, I still pretend I did something else. I probably dropped a different piece of work on his desk. I gave him the one I did on Romanticism for Professor Pacheco, I tell myself.
But that essay is still in the folder too.
The only thing that’s missing is the story.
The filthy, appalling story that no one should ever see, never mind Professor Halstrom. Why did it have to be Professor Halstrom? Everything would have been fine if I’d just given it to squat, flustered little Garwood, or the guy who teaches linguistics and looks like Rory McGrath. They might never have mentioned it at all.
But I know he will.
He never lets anything go. He once made the captain of the football team cry for failing to hand an essay in on time – or so the legend goes. And I believe the legend, because that is exactly how terrifying Halstrom seems. His gaze is as flat and still as the surface of an undiscovered lake, yet oddly penetrating with it. I always get the impression that he sees absolutely everything about you in one stroke, yet finds you so dull and disappointing he can’t quite muster any emotion in his eyes.
He just takes you in, then spits you out.
And that’s not even the most intimidating thing about him.
No, the most intimidating thing is his enormity.
Every other lecturer at Pembroke is normal sized. They all look like academics, from their hunched, narrow shoulders to their neat little shoes. Occasionally you’ll come across one with a pot belly or maybe an unnervingly large head. But none get anywhere close to Halstrom. He must be somewhere north of six foot five, despite how ridiculous that number sounds to me.
Every time I leave his lecture hall I think, No, he can’t be.
And then I return and see him towering over the tallest guy in the class. He’s talking to Ricky Callahan when I next slink in, and the disparity between them is shocking. It gives me a little jolt to realise that even a champion rower with a bull neck and a fondness for tight shirts looks small beside Halstrom.
But it remains true – and not just in terms of his height. His shoulders are so broad they nearly eclipse Ricky completely. When he turns to pick something up off his desk they strain the seams of his suit, and his chest does the same to his waistcoat. One day he will bend down too quickly and rip right out of all of that tweed.
Like a werewolf, I think, tearing off his human skin to reveal the man beneath.
Then quickly force myself to think about something else. Melissa Gorlinski is applying sticky red nail polish to her squat little nails, and I try to train all my attention on that. I watch the brush swishing back and forth – the strokes slow and steady at first but then with more impatience – and will myself to be hypnotised.
It doesn’t work, however. No matter how hard I try I keep imagining what he looked like when he opened what he thought was my essay. Did he blanch at the first ‘cock’? Or did he just raise one of those too thick and too dark eyebrows? I think it might be the latter, but doing so doesn’t help me in the slightest.
If anything it makes it worse. His brow is curiously mobile, for someone with a face like a slab of stone. In fact it often seems to say things that his eyes and mouth won’t. If someone answers him back in class, his eyebrows register the fury or the shock. They almost kiss in the middle of his forehead, in this oddly querulous way, while the rest of him maintains complete control.
I expect it was the same when he read that part about her wet and aching cunt. The one that makes the blood surge in my face whenever I remember it. Why did I have to be so graphic? It seemed a good idea at the time, in the fever I often get into while writing. But now it feels like the height of bad manners. He will say I did it deliberately, to try and get some sort of reaction from him.
Even though I’m not that kind of person at all. I never raise my hand in class, in case it turns out that I’m wrong. I rarely argue a contentious point in my essays, for fear that I’ll get an F instead of my usual B. Sometimes I see other students outside my bedroom window, glittering in gaudy costumes for some fancy-dress party that seems to be always going on, and I wonder how they dare. Don’t they care about being laughed at? Don’t they mind that they might fuck everything up?
I guess they don’t.
But I do. It’s why my body floods with relief when he tells us we may pick up our essays at the end of class. Somehow I’ve been spared, even though he never spares anyone. It was only a couple of weeks ago that he filleted Thomas Brubaker’s essay ‘Why Feminism Is Dumb’ for the edification of the entire class. He read out excerpts and licked his finger with a flourish before turning pages, teeth almost snapping around the most deliriously poisonous comments.
I even remember one of them now: ‘It seems Mr Brubaker labours under the misapprehension that women are put on this earth to wipe his arse for him. Would that he had done so himself with this essay, and spared us all the horror of having to hear a single ghastly word of it.’
Yet he lets me go without any punishment? It seems incredible, considering how much more appalling my story was. I never said feminism was dumb, but I did describe a penis in extensive detail. That to me seems ripe for his brand of brutal criticism, but when I pass his desk and pick up my essay he doesn’t even raise his head. He just keeps scratching out words in the leather-bound book he always carries around with him, as I file out with the rest of the class to my freedom.
Or at least, I think it’s my freedom.
I get as far as three quarters out of the door when I hear him say:
‘My office at five, Esther. Do not be late.’
His office is at the very top of the Haverforth building, which is a problem all by itself. I see it looming in the distance and almost turn back right then and there. On a good day it looks like the ruins of some haunted house, from a film where everyone dies at the end. But in the middle of this dark November day it seems at least ten times worse.
The whole front of it seems blacker, and more wasted, as though someone set it on fire not long ago and now only a husk remains. And though I could have sworn it had windows before, I cannot make a single one out. There is only blank, sooty stone and then more stone than that, until finally it gets to the crazily jagged roof that most resembles a set of demonic broken teeth.
And it gets no better inside.
His office is at the very top of a rickety, winding staircase – so rickety in fact that I worry that I might go through the wood every time I stand on one of the steps. I find myself watching my feet, but watching my feet hardly helps me at all. Now I can see the strange dusty darkness that is revealed whenever my weight parts one section of wood from the other, and none of that seems comforting.
I practically cling to the banisters for support, only the wrought iron is just as warped and unstable as everything else in here. At one point I could swear something bends, like toffee left out too long in the sun. Paint flakes off on my hands, as fine and papery as spider webs and just as disturbing. All of this is disturbing. I actually let out a sigh of relief when I get to the hallway at the top.
Even though it is barely a hallway at all.
It’s really more of a box, with a ceiling that slants so violently I have to wonder how Halstrom ever gets to his door. He must have to oil himself then squeeze through on his hands and knees – a ridiculous image I try to shake as soon as it enters my head. It makes me think weird things like I bet he’s really hairy under his clothes, and I just don’t want those thoughts to be there when he comes out.
I want to be cool, and calm, and proper. And I manage it, too. I sit on the single crumbling chair beneath the one window, hands folded neatly in my lap, expression completely neutral. Every inch of me perfectly tidy and carefully covered, so as to not give the wrong impression. And then the door abruptly opens, and all my efforts are reduced to dust. I might as well have worn stockings and suspenders. I should have painted my mouth red – after all, red is how it feels when I take him all in. I see his flat, still gaze and his broad shoulders and his enormous hands, and I finally understand.
He is handsome.
How did I not realise before that he was handsome? I suppose it hid behind the lugubrious features and the excessive tweed, but it announces itself now. It accosts me, viciously. I have to glance away because I can feel the colour rising to my cheeks – and not just because I enjoyed the look of him.
Because of what I’ve done.
I didn’t just hand in a filthy story to my Professor.
I handed it in to my deeply and unnervingly attractive Professor.
And now I have to speak to him about this somehow. I have to go into that tiny office and discuss penises at length and in great and varied detail, even though I can barely answer when he asks a simple question.
‘Was it your intention to sit out here all evening?’ he asks, and I just about manage to shake my head. How I stand I have no idea, and especially when I see what he intends. He doesn’t disappear inside to let me in. He stands there and holds the door, so that I have to almost go under his arm. My hip brushes some oddly electric part of him, the contact static-y and squirm-inducing.
And the scent of him…
It gets me right in the face, rich with what must be tobacco yet is sweet and oddly familiar at the same time. Like a place I used to go to or a person I used to know, I think – until I see his office. Then I understand why it means something to me. I get it completely.
It’s the smell of ink and paper. It’s all over him, like an animal who recently rolled in books. Though how could it be otherwise, when his office looks the way it does? Every available surface is covered in paperbacks and hardbacks and leather-bound classics. They flow like papery waterfalls off straining shelves and touch the ceiling in teetering stacks. Barely any light penetrates the tiny room, because what does get through has to squeeze between the spines of several dozen novels.
It’s like stepping into a book labyrinth.
One wrong turn and I’ll be lost for ever in literature.
A fate that sounds markedly better than the one I can expect here. He asks me to sit, but doing so is impossible. The only chair in here is the creaking, broad-backed old thing he takes, beneath the window. My options are the desk that runs all along the wall beside us, or a stack of books. At a pinch I could go out and get the chair from the hall, but doing so would pose another problem.
The only available space for it is about an inch from him. Our knees would probably touch if I managed to wedge it in there. Every time he moved I would feel him, and I can’t let that happen. I’m already sweating and red-faced. My limbs are watery and nothing is working right, and it gets worse every time I notice something new about him. Like his sideburns, too thick and too heavy and all amazing. And the scars that feather up from underneath his starched collar.
As though he really did burst out of his suit-skin once.
He rampaged across some malevolent, ink-black moors.
The ones that only exist inside me.
‘Maybe I should just stand,’ I say, finally.
But he dismisses the idea with a wave of his hand.
‘Oh, I should think you will be here long enough to need one. There is a stool behind the stack of Dickens novels to your right. Draw it up, and we can begin.’
Begin what? I think, over and over, yet none of the words reach my mouth.
I just do as he suggests, primed for an exasperated noise from him every time I make a mistake. I send books sprawling to the floor and bang the leg of the narrow stool against some solid part of him, wincing all the while. It doesn’t even occur to me that he hasn’t made a sound until I sit down. Then I dare to look at him, and find no irritation or amusement.
On the contrary – his gaze is as flatly assessing as ever.
Like an anthropologist, cataloguing me for later.
‘Now, to the matter at hand. Or should I say the problem?’
‘If there is one you have to know I didn’t mean to cause it.’
‘So then you handing in this piece of work was unintentional.’
‘Completely unintentional. It was just an accident.’
‘You accidentally handed in an erotic story.’
He doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow, but I hear the amusement in his voice. It’s dark and deep and way down at the back of his throat, but it’s definitely there.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous, Professor –’
‘Utterly absurd, but really whether you deliberately did this deed or not is rather beside the point, don’t you think?’
‘I have no idea. I don’t know what the point is. I spent all night trying to guess.’
‘And what was your very best attempt?’
I hesitate. Partly because this conversation is strangling me.
Mostly because telling the truth might make this happen:
‘That you wanted to give me a real roasting.’
‘I see. And by roasting you mean insults, that sort of thing.’
‘Pretty much, yes. In fact no, exactly that.’
‘You thought I was going to tear a strip off you.’
‘It had occurred to me that you might.’
‘Well, to be honest I have half a mind to.’
He glances away as he says it, as if I’m not worth the full weight of his contempt. I only get half-measures. Other, more important students are permitted full explanations and disappointed looks. He doesn’t make them twist in the wind as he builds up to whatever this is going to be – though maybe they would never twist in the wind anyway. They probably don’t find it hard to breathe, or make bloody semi-circles in the palms of their hands. They don’t have to brace themselves, the way I do.
By the time he finishes his thought I’m wincing away from him.
I practically flinch at the first word – but I’m a fool to do it.
‘Do you have any idea how irritating it is to spend three terms assessing your mediocre nonsense, when you were capable of producing work of this calibre? Endless interminable essays written in the most pedestrian style possible…I ought to put a piece in the newspaper. “Student Deliberately Bores Lecturer To Death. Motivation as yet undetermined.”’
I mean, did he say ‘calibre’ there? Is ‘calibre’ good?
I think so, but it’s awfully hard to tell when your mind has just slid sideways. It takes almost everything I have to respond to him, and when I do I know how I sound. Stuttery and flustered and focusing on completely the wrong thing.
‘That isn’t…I didn’t deliberately bore you to death.’
‘Ah, so that was accidental too.’
‘No. What? No, no. I just –’
‘You slipped and fell into twenty pages of codswallop about Remains of the Day. Or did you come up with that load of old bollocks about duty being more important than passion in your sleep?’
I think my mouth drops open. The ‘calibre’ comment was bad enough.
But to have the boldfaced nerve to claim that.
‘But you said that was what it meant. You said duty was a passion of its own, and underlined it seventeen times on the board in permanent marker. Professor Tate complained!’
‘Professor Tate is an insufferable ignoramus.’
‘That doesn’t change the fact that you just criticised me and berated me for something you yourself actually believe.’
‘Ah, but that is the exact problem, Miss Hayridge. Just because I believe something does not mean that you are obliged to do the same. It seems to me that you spend a great deal of your time telling people exactly what you think they might want to hear, and doing things exactly as you think might best please them, instead of daring to be as brilliant as you quite possibly are.’
I go to say something when he’s done with this little speech. Something as hot-headed and outraged as my comments a moment ago. No, that isn’t the case at all, you don’t know anything about me, I think, but by the time the words get to the tip of my tongue I can’t let them emerge.
Shock wipes them out, and leaves only the weakest words behind.
‘I don’t believe passion is more important than duty.’
‘I see. So you think he was right to throw his single, tiny, glimmering chance of happiness away to be a butler for a Nazi.’
‘That’s a really uncharitable reading of the book, Professor. He had no idea he was the butler of a Nazi. He thought they were all wise and doing the right thing and besides – maybe he wouldn’t have been happy. Did you think about that? He might have hated being married to her. He might have come to despise her, once away from everything he knew.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. Never loving or being loved sounds like a marvellous way to live your life,’ he says, and now that amusement is back. Thicker though, this time. Harsher, somehow, and with a slight twist to his lips once he’s done speaking.
Not quite a bitter sneer, I think.
But almost.
‘He loved his work.’
‘Did his work love him? Did it keep him warm at night, do you think? Perhaps in those long hours he spent reading about other people enjoying the delight of a romance, he comforted himself with the thought that tomorrow he might polish the silver.’
‘This is the complete opposite of what you said in your lectures.’
‘But not the complete opposite of what you’ve expressed in this story, Miss Hayridge. This story is all but bursting at the seams with passion. It’s clear in both its themes, and in the way you chose to address them – not in the milky, meek tones of someone who wants to coast by unnoticed in a class they most probably find dull, but in a raging beast of a voice that refuses to be quiet, no matter what the consequences might be.’
I don’t know when he started leaning towards me. I only know that he is much closer by the time he gets to those last heart-pounding words. He must be, because I can see so many new details of that incredible face. Like the tiny tick of a scar right through the bow of his upper lip, so fine you could never see it from any distance away. And his eyelashes, far darker than the hair on his head and too long for someone so masculine. They look the way most people’s do when rain hits them, spiky and suddenly thick.
Beautiful, I think.
Then want to look away, before that one word shows on my face somehow.
It probably already has, when I think about it. My attraction to him is so visceral, he could grasp it with both hands and squeeze.
Downplaying it is of the utmost importance.
‘It’s just a silly smutty story.’
‘Do you really believe so?’
‘It has the word “cock” on page two.’
‘And that qualifies it as silly, does it?’
‘It qualifies it as smutty, at the very least.’
‘I could find you a dozen award-winning books right now that have that word in them. Though I suppose that is the issue, is it not? When men write about sex in boring books about recapturing their lost youth, they are invariably rewarded with praise. When women do it they are laughed at and ghettoised until a student who finally produces a piece of work worthy of my attention only gives it to me by accident.’
He says ‘accident’ the way most people say ‘appalling nightmare’. I can practically feel how offended he is that I really did just mess up – as though he can see how close I came to never being here and never doing this and shudders at the thought. It’s strangely the best thing anyone has ever said to me.
But also the most terrifying.
Probably because he then cracks his knuckles and rolls his shoulders, like someone about to fight me. And his brisk tone, when he speaks again, absolutely reflects that.
‘Now, to the business at hand.’
‘There is more business?’
‘Of course, Miss Hayridge. Surely you do not believe I brought you here to commend you for finally giving me work I might be satisfied with, but would then let you go on your merry way without another word? Dear me, no, that will never do. No no no, we have a great deal of work to do, Miss Hayridge – work we shall continue every day at five from now until I deem it done.’
He glances up at me when I don’t reply. Eyes suddenly lit in a way they’ve never been before, one brow just ever so slightly raised.
‘Unless you have something better to do?’ he asks, and for just a second I think about lying. Out of habit more than anything – when people say things like that to me I usually do. I have to, if I don’t want to seem small and pathetic. Everyone else has such exciting lives, filled with endless mixers and lock-ins and barbecues. The students who live across from my flat above a shop once played miniature golf on their roof terrace. A guy was arrested the other day for stealing a penguin from the local zoo.