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tracking the acidic reception of Forty-Nine Parallels and decided to see if there were any antecedents to David’s novel. Lo and behold, he discovered that one of the benchmark works of the French nouveau roman , Michel Butor’s La Modification , was a stream-of-consciousness account of a writer traveling between Paris and Rome on some trans-Europe express and musing at length about his wife and his mistress.
    ‘ Yes, Professor Henry does make a passing reference to La Modification in his exceedingly obscurantist tome ,’ wrote the uncredited New York journalist, ‘ as his narrator does talk about writing a book that “would out-Butor Butor”. But this one buried reference does not really exempt Henry from the charge of essentially transposing the entire structural and thematic idea of someone else’s novel on to his own. Or perhaps the good Professor has a deconstructionist theory about this case of High Modernist Reappropriation . . . also known in plainer English as Plagiarism .’
    As soon as I read this, I rushed out to the Harvard Coop to buy an English translation of Butor’s novel. Like Forty-Nine Parallels , it was dense, elliptical and very much an ‘in-his-head’ form of narration. But beyond the basic premise, the two books couldn’t have been more disparate. So what if they had obvious similarities in terms of the man-on-a-journey-caught-between-two-women set-up. Every piece of literature is, in some form or another, a reinvention of someone else’s previous work. Only a vindictive hack journalist – out to debase and wound a talented man – would equate an evident homage with plagiarism.
    I tried ringing David again at his office. I even called the department secretary, Mrs Cathcart. Again using very neutral language I said that, if she was speaking to Professor Henry, would she please tell him that I felt the plagiarism charge was completely preposterous.
    Mrs Cathcart – who was around sixty and had been the department’s secretary since the early 1970s – cut me off.
    ‘I’m afraid the university doesn’t think it preposterous, as Professor Henry was suspended today while a faculty committee examines the charges against—’
    ‘But that’s ridiculous. I’ve read the other novel and there is no plagiarism charge to answer.’
    ‘That is your interpretation, Miss Howard,’ Mrs Cathcart said. ‘The Faculty Affairs Committee will—’
    ‘Crucify him, because he has so many enemies on that—’
    Again she cut me off. ‘If you want to help Professor Henry, I wouldn’t make such statements public. It might cause people to speculate.’
    ‘Speculate what?’ I asked.
    But she didn’t answer that, except to say: ‘I gather Professor Henry has gone to ground and left Cambridge. You could call his wife, if you so wish.’
    Was there an undercurrent of malice to that comment? Was she letting me know, ‘I’m on to you’ ? But we had been so damn careful, so completely circumspect. Surely she was just being her usual devious self – as she was notorious in the department for always making others feel uncomfortable.
    ‘Do you have his home number?’ Mrs Cathcart asked.
    ‘No.’
    ‘I’m surprised you don’t know it, having worked so closely with the Professor for the past four years.’
    ‘I never call him at home.’
    ‘I see,’ she said with a hint of ice. And I ended the call.
    I immediately rang David’s home number. There was no reply and the answerphone wasn’t on. Had Polly gone with him to Maine? He had a little cottage there outside of Bath in which we never stayed, as it was in a very small village with ‘all-seeing, all-knowing neighbors’. If Polly had gone there with him and if I showed up . . .
    But if he was alone in Maine . . .
    Part of me wanted to rent a car and drive straight up there. But the cautious side of me counseled against such rash action – not just because Polly might be up there with him, but also because I sensed (or, at least,