banner banner banner
The Professor
The Professor
Оценить:
Рейтинг: 0

Полная версия:

The Professor

скачать книгу бесплатно


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.

The most I ever did was come here and stay.

But the thing is, with Professor Halstrom…

Why would I not say?

‘Not even one tiny thing.’

Chapter Two (#ua302d615-4fcb-5e50-92a8-226f88b0a3b1)

He tells me to bring him something new the next time I come.‘If you have the time,’ he says, but I think he already knows I do. He knew everything else, after all. He knew things I had no idea about myself. I thought I was absolutely fine going on as I did before. Pretending to smile when people told jokes I didn’t find funny. Holding my tongue when I wanted to say something weird. Always sensible of my clothes that are just a bit wrong and my hair that never quite looks like everyone else’s, full of stories I tell myself I don’t want to share, even as they press against the seams of my skin.

But he exposed it for what it is:

A ridiculous sham, created by a coward.

Even after all of that I still try to pull the wool over his eyes. I take him the tamest story I have, full of hints instead of flesh-and-blood descriptions and characters hiding behind high collars. There is nothing graphic or full-bodied about this one – though I somehow convince myself that he will like it anyway. That this one is better, tighter, cleaner.

It’s almost a shock when he lashes me with a sharp look, two minutes into reading. He hasn’t even gotten to page three. There are twenty more to go, but he stops, one eyebrow quirking up at the very outer edges, a certain sort of feigned confusion all over his face.

‘Would you mind explaining what this is?’

‘You said to bring you a story. So I brought you one.’

‘I think you will find that what you have brought me here is a slice of white bread. And saying that, quite frankly, is an insult to bread.’

‘I thought you’d like it more than the other one.’

‘Now you’re just intentionally lying to me.’

‘I’m honestly not. This one just seemed less inappropriate.’

‘I see. And what did you think was inappropriate about the first one?’

‘You know what was inappropriate about the first one.’

‘I am afraid I don’t. Please feel free to elaborate for me.’

The worst part about him saying that is not the words themselves. It’s the gestures that accompany it. The way he sits back in his chair, as though settling in for this imaginary show. One hand poised on the arm as though holding a non-existent marking pen, the other spreading and splaying in a sort of flourish that almost seems familiar now.

I’ve seen him do it before, at least. He does it when he wants a student to make an utter arse of themselves – which I am absolutely not going to do. I take a deep breath and grit my teeth, then just lay it all out for him in as clear and practical terms as possible. No obfuscation. No fluttering. Straightforward and firm, as though I am a different person who understands the word ‘poise’ and the word ‘practical’.

‘All right. All right. I would just really rather not hear you say “penis”. I feel mortified that I even said “penis” in front of you. I can barely call you anything but Professor and you refer to me as Miss Hayridge. Every time we talk it feels like we’re meeting for the first time at the Netherfield ball, which just makes penises seem really, really not OK to discuss.’

I sit back, satisfied that I’ve made my point.

Only he has this other one to raise, that I didn’t even think of.

‘Did you just reference Pride and Prejudice in a conversation about penises?’

‘What? What do you –’

‘Netherfield, from Pride and Prejudice.’

‘It was just the first olde-timey event that came to mind.’ I pause then, suddenly very aware that I have to make this seem like the height of reason, instead of what it is already becoming in my head. We made a pass at him, somehow, my mind whispers frantically, and I am not sure I can call my mind wrong. I can only cover it all over, with another rushed and probably ill-advised comment. ‘I could have used something less romantic like the one from The Way We Live Now, but I think Felix Carbury snogs Marie Melmotte there so that probably seems just as bad.’

‘You believe Carbury’s false overtures to Marie are as bad. That somehow his opportunistic greed and lazy attempts at winning her are on the same romantic level as the greatest love story in the English language.’

I don’t know what flummoxes me more. His astonishingly perfect deadpan or the fact that he admitted something was a great love story. Before today I wouldn’t have thought he knew what love was. I definitely would not have believed he would see it in Austen’s work. He’s supposed to call it ironic. He should talk about it like he did Remains of the Day – though then again those thoughts were just lies.

Who knows what else he makes up on a daily basis?

‘I like the way he woos her, even though it’s all just pretend.’