What She Left: Enhanced Edition (36 page)

Dear Larry,

Alice slung the contents of the glass into my face and screamed: ‘You pervert.’

I dabbed at my eyes with my handkerchief; the place was so busy no one gave us a second glance. In the din we stood stiffly, but one of us had to speak, so ridiculously I enquired: ‘How’s your reunion going?’

‘Shit, that’s how, the worst day of my life. Any more stupid questions?’

‘Gosh.’

‘Actually, it’s the second worst day of my life. You’ll remember the first, you were there – you made it the worst, you
creep
!’

You’ll never guess what she did next, Larry? By golly, she slapped my face.

‘There. That’s for what you did when I was eighteen.’

The last person to have hit me was my father, five-plus decades ago, and her contact had the same blunt, mechanical quality. Bizarrely, in the commotion, no one noticed. ‘I deserved that,’ I said. ‘If it’s any consolation, I regret what I did with every fibre of my being.’

‘Very poetic, but no it’s not.’

‘I haven’t come to hurt you. I’m here to explain.’

Her look reminded me of a near dead weasel I’d once encountered in a snare.

‘There’s no need to be frightened.’

‘Not. Not frightened of any man.’

‘Should I get you some water?’

‘Water?’ she replied, as if I’d suggested we booked a restaurant. ‘It’s alcohol I need.’

I scuttled across to the bar and bought her a drink – opted for a gin and tonic, because that was her mother’s tipple, a double – and when I returned she was struggling to breathe, puffing as if fresh from a bout of exercise.

‘Just go,’ she said. ‘If you go now, I can tell myself this is a coincidence.’

‘But it isn’t. I knew you were here from Twitter.’

‘You followed me?’

‘The over-sixties
can
use the Internet.’

‘Yes clearly – to email my mum! What the fuck –’

‘About 2004,’ I interrupted. ‘You need to hear.’

‘No, you need to get out of my face.’

But it was bravado. Not dissimilar to how I’d repeat the mantra: I’m not scared of dying. A sense of exigency pressed in on me. ‘I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. For your discretion. My life could have panned out very differently.’

‘I didn’t do it for you. Is that what you think? You stupid old fuck! I kept quiet because I didn’t have a clue what went on. I wasn’t confident enough to do anything else. If it was now, I’d have you strung up.’

No lies, Larry, we said no lies, and I’m aware I’ve never told you exactly what did occur that night. It was 2004: the anthropology community had been ablaze with chatter about the discovery of fossilized hominid remains in Indonesia, Homo floresiensis. It dominated conversation at our little bash: how this hobbitesque species could have existed as recently as 12,000 years ago, their skeletons like Homo erectus, but their bodies and brains tiny. I’ve never told you how afterwards, safely ensconced in my office, Alice had virtually collapsed into me.

‘You could barely walk,’ I said.

She shivered, a look of horror passing across her face.

Yes, I may have locked the door, but not for any malign reason, but because she’d made a spectacle of herself at the function and I was anxious to prevent anyone else witnessing her in that state. The inalienable fact remains, however, that no student – regardless of gender – should have been alone with a member of the faculty while that intoxicated. Certainly not for an entire night. Even disregarding the Liz component, it was a gargantuan transgression.

‘I put you to bed,’ I said, but she didn’t hear, so I repeated it more loudly, and my declaration had the same bizarre ring as it might were I to have proclaimed: I live on the moon.

She went to turn away, but clearly couldn’t. ‘How?’

‘There was an element of manhandling.’

‘When I woke up I was … I didn’t have all my clothes on.’

‘Your top was covered in wine, Alice; it was drenched. You wouldn’t have been able to sleep in it.’

‘So you took it off?’

‘I helped
you
remove it.’

She shuddered and peered over my shoulder at the throng of Saturday-night revellers.
That’s where you want to be, isn’t it, sweetheart?
I thought.
Out there in the middle of all that untarnished and optimistic life.

‘I made sure you were comfy,’ I said. ‘I tended to you.’

‘You could have got a female colleague to do that.’

‘Indeed, and with hindsight, that’s what I should have done. The student–staff relationship is predicated on trust and I violated that.’

But, Larry, I didn’t engineer events to unfold as they did. I didn’t choose to see her slim, pale body or the shaded pinch of her navel or the startling bright purple of her underwear.

I should have left the pub then, but it would be the last opportunity I ever had to speak with her; I wasn’t intending to leave her with questions. ‘It was the same with your skirt,’ I said. ‘You were snatching at it, complaining you wouldn’t be able to sleep in it. I assisted you out of it.’

‘You slimeball, you should have been fired.’

I’d come to make amends, but it was running away from me, my carefully crafted lines swept aside by her momentum. ‘We have a code and I breached it. I acted unethically.’

‘I should have gone to the authorities. I could have had you prosecuted.’

‘For what exactly? I acted irresponsibly, immorally, but legally my conduct was unimpeachable. I transgressed one boundary, but there are others I would never cross.’

Larry, I didn’t elect to smell her sugary breath or feel her limp limbs concertina against me or have to stand back and stare detached and abstractedly at the unadulterated Liz-like gorgeousness of the woman prostrate in my office.

‘You’re disgusting, you’re virtually a paedo.’

‘No, that’s not on, I won’t have that.’ My right eye twitched; a vein in my right temple pulsed. I rarely lose my temper, Larry – three or four times in the last two decades, but when I blow, I really blow. Once, after a hospital visit, we’d gone to the park – to ‘decompress’, as Fliss had put it, because the news hadn’t been good – and I’d banged a bench until my hands had bled. What’s weird is how I recall so little of that day now. Exorcized from my mind. One’s memory – one’s brain – works in astounding ways; it’s an artful, self-regulating self-defence mechanism, bolting out the bad. ‘I looked after you,’ I said. ‘I took care of you.’

She’d been out for the count so I’d draped my sweater over her and she’d emitted little animal noises: my snuffling blind kitten, my harvest mouse. I’d flicked the wireless on
and leant in and got the close, uninterrupted look, the examination, I’d so long coveted: black whorls of hair on her neck, a tiny mole on the side of her head, the faintest dusting of hair on her face, like down.

‘I watched over you while you slept,’ I said.

I’d sat beside her all night – her tiny body, my tiny brain – and held her hand and outside a dark breeze had brushed the branches of the elm tree against the window. I did think about sex, I very much did – but it was how ultimately inadequate it was. Not much to wreck a marriage over, is it? A stranger putting one part of their body against yours and moving it a bit. Wet against wet, that’s all.

‘You could have done anything,’ she said.

‘But, Alice, it would have been an abomination.’

‘Are you lying?’

‘No,’ I said.

She glanced around for her friends, a shot of loneliness connecting us. ‘You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve
nearly
confronted you about that night,’ she said. ‘Always chickened out.’

‘I’ve always had a soft spot for you. Even when you were a fresher, I felt protective towards you because of your mother. You’re so like her.’

‘I saw your email – earlier today, I read it. Is
Jem
what she called you? The pair of you are gross!’

‘Bless you, Alice. We weren’t born old.’

‘My dad’s more of a man than you’ll ever be.’

‘That I don’t doubt.’ She was driving us off on a tangent, but I had to make my peace, so blundered on. ‘Thing is, thing was, the concern I had for
you
manifested itself speciously. There is the night to which we’ve been referring, plus you may recollect receiving an anonymous note during freshers’ week. I’m rather afraid that was from me.’

‘You bastard.’

Larry, I’d damped my handkerchief and periodically wiped her brow and held water to her mouth and pulled back her hair when she flopped sideways to be sick. I’d fought sleep – I had to ensure she didn’t choke on her own vomit – and a monotonic presenter had chatted to a procession of callers about the city’s recycling policy and the menace of urban foxes, and daylight had filtered between the drawn blinds and I’d seen her faded brown skirt on the floor, twisted and rumpled like a rope, and I’d thought:
Is this all it is to be a man? All those millions – billions – of years of evolution and this is all it’s made us?

‘I’m here to say sorry.’

‘Sorry’s not good enough.’

‘It’s a start,’ I said. ‘And it’s all I’ve got. I am profoundly sorry.’

She stared down at the pub table, traced the lines of the wood with her finger. Always amazed me as a boy, how you could age a tree by the rings in the wood, one of the first occasions upon which I appreciated the power of science to yield answers. Other revelations circled in my head: Liz’s drinking, the attempt she made on her own life, but they weren’t mine to share.

‘The truth can never be an entirely bad thing,’ I said.

‘Why did you email her today?’

‘Alice, learning you were in the city brought back lots of emotions. They say the death of an old man can never be a complete tragedy but, damn it, I’m not quite old. I don’t feel it at any rate.’ Fear slithered in at me. ‘Prostate cancer, I have prostate cancer.’

‘That supposed to make me feel sorry for you?’

‘It’s not supposed to make you feel anything. It is what it is. One of your mother’s favourite expressions used to be
“look at your monsters”. You’ve done that tonight. I’m proud of you.’

We were barely three feet apart but it could have been a mile; it was as if she was regarding me through a body of water. I felt a curious release: letting go.

‘I left my mum a message after I read your email – not a nice one.’

‘Why don’t you call her, put her mind at rest? One should never let the sun go down on an argument.’

‘Can’t, too late, it’ll come out wrong. I’ll ring her in the morning. Not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Promise me one thing,’ I implored her. ‘Don’t do anything tonight you’ll regret forever.’

‘Fuck forever.’

She sniffled a bit then, on the verge of tears, and I felt an ache in my gut, my balls, a twinge, muscle memory. Time, Larry, I was running out of the wretched stuff. I’d had sixty-five years to be a better person; how could I have wasted that opportunity? The police have been on to me, too, can you believe it?
Me
. Apparently Liz burst into the station – drunk, from what I could infer – and levelled a melange of allegations against me. It wasn’t onerous to run rings round that bunch of incompetent buffoons, though. I intend to release information on my terms, at a time of my choosing.

‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?’

‘That’s rich coming from you.’

She had a point. I was debating whether to get behind the wheel of my car loaded up on Scotch. I felt myself in a new, altered space: a zen-like calm bordering on the existential. It was done. ‘That quote you’ve got on your Facebook page, I’m rather taken with that – how the truth hurts for a little while but lies hurt forever.’

In the morning, Larry, I’d stood to leave, but she’d looked so defenceless I’d bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. ‘Goodbye, Alice,’ I whispered. ‘Goodbye, my darling.’ She’d woken in a panic, flustered and mystified, then fled from my office and never once spoke of that night during her three-year tenure at the university. Fate largely conspired to keep us apart, allowing us only a handful of on-her-part painful chance encounters.

‘This isn’t the end of this,’ she said.

A song that I wasn’t familiar with stopped, and another one started.

‘Bet you got a right buzz out of manhandling me like that, didn’t you?’

I could feel ire and antagonism burgeoning inside me. Of course I wasn’t expecting gratitude or thanks, but what would she have preferred – that I throw her to the wolves? I decided to take a stroll to clear my head. The river would be nice: quiet, bracing, invigorating. As I departed, she seized my arm, spun me round.

‘Asked you a question, Professor Pervert. How did it feel when you were touching me?’

‘Heaven, Alice. It felt like heaven.’