coffee in her hands. The place was almost empty. I bought myself a latte at the counter and joined her. She looked even paler than usual, and her blonde hair was lank and lifeless. Perhaps it was her period, but more likely it was the stress of the dangerous game she was playing. I came straight to the point, and summarised what Butterworth had told me about their relationship, without going into the sexual details. She listened impassively, and then said: ‘I didn’t know you and Colin were buddies.’
‘We’re not,’ I said.
‘But men stick together in these situations, don’t they?’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t like Colin Butterworth, never have. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if he were publicly reprimanded, or had to resign. I think he behaved quite improperly towards you, even if you initiated the affair.’ I noted that she didn’t deny this. ‘But if you make an official complaint, he won’t be the only one to suffer. His wife and children will too. He has two teenage daughters. You could break up a family - and for what? It won’t get you the job. The job will be given to somebody else.’
‘How do you know that?’ she said sharply.
‘Butterworth told me.’
Alex swivelled her head and addressed the wall. ‘Asshole,’ she hissed.
‘Believe me, there was no way he could have got you appointed, even if he tried. So you see there’s no point in your shopping him. You would come in for some very unpleasant questioning - he’d have a lawyer, provided by the UCU - and he will accuse you of trying to blackmail him. Which you did. You would be disgraced too, and expelled from the University.’
‘There’s nothing in writing,’ she said, turning her head to face me again across the table. ‘I could deny it. It would be his word against mine.’
‘But your word isn’t very reliable, is it, Alex?’ I said.
‘What do you mean by that?’ she said.
‘You told Fred that your father sent you an air ticket to go home at Christmas.You told Butterworth that your father committed suicide when you were thirteen. Which is the truth?’
Alex looked down and stirred her coffee, though it was cold and the cup half-empty, and murmured something through a limp curtain of hair.
I leaned forward across the table. ‘What did you say?’
‘My daddy did kill himself,’ she said.
I said I was sorry to hear it, but didn’t understand why she had made up the story about the air ticket. She said she had been sitting around with some of the English Language postgrads after a seminar and people had been talking about going home for Christmas and when somebody asked her what she was doing she instantly made up a story about going back to the States to spend Christmas with her folks, because she didn’t want to admit that she would be spending it alone in her flat. ‘I do that sometimes,’ she said. ‘I make up a story, or I tell a lie, or I play a trick, on the spur of the moment. I can’t help myself. It’s not as if I cared about being alone for Christmas. I have no folks. My mother died of cancer five years ago, my grandparents are dead, apart from one who has Alzheimer’s . . . I’m estranged from my sister. I have no home to go to in the States. But I didn’t want to be pitied or patronised, so I made up this idyll about going back to my family for Christmas, it was like an old Saturday Evening Post cover. I figured nobody would know I was holed up in my apartment with a stack of TV dinners.’ When she received Fred’s invitation to our party she desperately wished she could accept, but she had to keep up the pretence that she was going back to America for the holiday. ‘I thought it would be nice if my daddy sent me the money for the flight,’ she said. ‘Since I was inventing an idyll, I thought I might as well make the most of it. So I put that in my letter to Winifred. It seemed to make it more believable. Then when Christmas came, and I saw all these people fogged in at Heathrow, I thought I had the perfect excuse to go to your party after all.’
‘You mean you made up all those stories about the hell of Heathrow from watching the TV news?’
‘It wasn’t difficult,’ she said. ‘I read