right too: it was.’
‘So when you are denied something, you force it.’
‘No. No, never. I don’t think I’ve ever dared do anything like this.’
‘Yet here you are, not only forcing but prying. Intruding on my most private and personal thoughts.’
‘That was never my intention. How could I have ever known? How could I have known that you thought this way and felt like this? I believed you were an immovable block.’
‘I am, Miss Hayridge, and would thank you not to insinuate otherwise.’
‘But you just said that – and you write that –’
I hold up his words as proof, when my own words start to fail me.
Though he snatches them from me before I can get anywhere.
And he says things. Oh, God, the things he says.
‘Never speak to me about what you think I have written. No, indeed, let me correct myself. Never speak to me again, at all. There is nothing that we might now say to one another. No words that can possibly repair the damage you have done. If I were to never see your face again it would be too soon. Now go. Get out, before I decide that is not enough and have you suspended from Pembroke.’
Of course I go to protest as soon as he’s finished. Of course I do. But when I open my mouth to do it no sound comes out. All the air I would usually use to tell someone how terrible they are being deserts me. It falls down inside all the cracks he just opened through my body – some of them small and slight and labelled something like
two years’ work down the drain.
And some of them so enormous I can scarcely contemplate them. There is a giant black hole in the middle of my body, called
you mean nothing to him
.
And it gets bigger and bigger until everything I could possibly do here is sucked inside it. I can barely work up the will to leave under my own steam, but that’s OK. That’s fine, because just as I am wondering if I might have to stay here for ever, rooted to this one spot in his office, he flings open his door. He flings it open, then steps aside for me to go through it. No welcoming arm archway for me this time. No sense that I could change things, if only I knew how.
The only option is to do what I do then:
I run.
Chapter Seven
I feel sure that I head towards my flat. But after half an hour of near-running in the pouring rain I have to face facts: I am nowhere close. In truth I have no idea where I am. My head is so full of the conversation I just had and the words I read that there is no room for things like
directions.
There is only a tiny little space labelled
aimless walking to nowhere
, and so that is what I do. I cross stretches of grass I don’t find familiar and pass buildings I don’t know, until finally I come to a narrow stretch of dark road that could be just about anywhere. It could be some nightmare created by my own diseased mind.
Not that it really matters.
How can it matter, in light of what happened? He wrote all of those staggering things about me, and in return I violated his trust. I stole his most private thoughts from him, and can never now return them. He will remember for ever, just as I will. I suspect nothing on earth could make me forget. It will be on my gravestone:
she did a humiliating thing when she was twenty-two.
And I’m still doing it now.
When I see a car slicing through the sleet-thick streets, I let myself imagine for a moment that it is him. As though somehow he was in the wrong, and could ever think he has to make amends. For what, I sneer at myself, for what? In fact I’m still sneering when the car slows to a crawl beside me. When I hear his voice, as unmistakeable to me as the sound of my own breathing.
‘Esther,’ he says, and I know as soon as he does.
I know that he would have preferred to use ‘Hetty’. The realisation steals over me like a blanket drawn to my shoulder while I sleep. It weathers any doubts I have and spits in the face of every harsh word he said to me in his office. He meant what he said in that
‘So when you are denied something, you force it.’
‘No. No, never. I don’t think I’ve ever dared do anything like this.’
‘Yet here you are, not only forcing but prying. Intruding on my most private and personal thoughts.’
‘That was never my intention. How could I have ever known? How could I have known that you thought this way and felt like this? I believed you were an immovable block.’
‘I am, Miss Hayridge, and would thank you not to insinuate otherwise.’
‘But you just said that – and you write that –’
I hold up his words as proof, when my own words start to fail me.
Though he snatches them from me before I can get anywhere.
And he says things. Oh, God, the things he says.
‘Never speak to me about what you think I have written. No, indeed, let me correct myself. Never speak to me again, at all. There is nothing that we might now say to one another. No words that can possibly repair the damage you have done. If I were to never see your face again it would be too soon. Now go. Get out, before I decide that is not enough and have you suspended from Pembroke.’
Of course I go to protest as soon as he’s finished. Of course I do. But when I open my mouth to do it no sound comes out. All the air I would usually use to tell someone how terrible they are being deserts me. It falls down inside all the cracks he just opened through my body – some of them small and slight and labelled something like
two years’ work down the drain.
And some of them so enormous I can scarcely contemplate them. There is a giant black hole in the middle of my body, called
you mean nothing to him
.
And it gets bigger and bigger until everything I could possibly do here is sucked inside it. I can barely work up the will to leave under my own steam, but that’s OK. That’s fine, because just as I am wondering if I might have to stay here for ever, rooted to this one spot in his office, he flings open his door. He flings it open, then steps aside for me to go through it. No welcoming arm archway for me this time. No sense that I could change things, if only I knew how.
The only option is to do what I do then:
I run.
Chapter Seven
I feel sure that I head towards my flat. But after half an hour of near-running in the pouring rain I have to face facts: I am nowhere close. In truth I have no idea where I am. My head is so full of the conversation I just had and the words I read that there is no room for things like
directions.
There is only a tiny little space labelled
aimless walking to nowhere
, and so that is what I do. I cross stretches of grass I don’t find familiar and pass buildings I don’t know, until finally I come to a narrow stretch of dark road that could be just about anywhere. It could be some nightmare created by my own diseased mind.
Not that it really matters.
How can it matter, in light of what happened? He wrote all of those staggering things about me, and in return I violated his trust. I stole his most private thoughts from him, and can never now return them. He will remember for ever, just as I will. I suspect nothing on earth could make me forget. It will be on my gravestone:
she did a humiliating thing when she was twenty-two.
And I’m still doing it now.
When I see a car slicing through the sleet-thick streets, I let myself imagine for a moment that it is him. As though somehow he was in the wrong, and could ever think he has to make amends. For what, I sneer at myself, for what? In fact I’m still sneering when the car slows to a crawl beside me. When I hear his voice, as unmistakeable to me as the sound of my own breathing.
‘Esther,’ he says, and I know as soon as he does.
I know that he would have preferred to use ‘Hetty’. The realisation steals over me like a blanket drawn to my shoulder while I sleep. It weathers any doubts I have and spits in the face of every harsh word he said to me in his office. He meant what he said in that
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