absolutely confidential report about the first sitting of the Sexual Misconduct Hearing Panel, I leap at his offer before I remember that I had resolved to limit my contact with Giles to the Observatory-based minimum. And because this secret intelligence meeting can’t take place in public, and because the mysterious Martin, too, is sitting at home grading essays and can’t be disturbed, Tim decides that it is time Giles was invited to the tomato farm.
I panic. Then I run over to Karen to ask whether I can scrounge a few apples. I need to bake a cake. Apple and almond.
“I should say straightaway that I disapprove of this,” Giles says when he has got off his bike and is ascending my porch. Unlike Tim, who comes in bright professional cycling gear, he is wearing jeans and his Navy sweater. I am glad—even Giles would look silly dressed as a canary. I wouldn’t mind, though, if he was a little chirpier.
“You do?” I ask, crestfallen, and look around me.
“Not of the farm, or—this! This is very cozy. Very nice, indeed.”
I am learning to hear what Giles doesn’t say, and what he doesn’t say about my gamekeeper’s cottage makes me blush under my cake-baking flush. It is very nice to have him here. Very nice, indeed.
“No, I disapprove of this habit Tim has developed of feeding you classified information!”
“Giles believes that I’m corrupting you.” Tim shrugs and disappears into my bathroom. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“No, I don’t mind.” I peek up at Giles with my most helpless bicycliste-in-distress mien. “Please corrupt me!”
This hits him like a blow to the body, and his reaction is anger.
“You!” He points again, like Uncle Sam. “You shouldn’t even be making jokes about that sort of thing, in your position and what with…with what’s been happening at the Observatory lately!”
Now I’m stumped, because I suddenly can’t remember whether—
“Did I tell you about Selena? I thought I hadn’t…”
“Selena?”
“That Selena is having sex in the dome? In the old observatory? I didn’t. Damn, I didn’t mean to.”
Giles checks Tim’s whereabouts—he’s still in the bathroom—then gazes down at me. This is why I didn’t want him in my cottage. Now that he’s here, I don’t want to let him go again.
“Who with?” he asks.
“Don’t know. Some guy. Strictly speaking, I don’t even know for sure that she’s having sex. Well. Yeah, I do. I think. She must be.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me last Friday?”
“Last Friday. What was last Friday? Oh God, was that only last Friday? No.”
“There’re all sorts of things you’re not telling me, aren’t there?”
I nod, so nervous I have to swallow before answering. “But so are you. Not telling me things.”
“That’s true. Too dangerous.”
This is why Giles so rarely looks into my eyes. When he does, the earth moves.
The men are perfectly happy to be plied with coffee and cake and are very complimentary about both. Since each of them has three slices in the course of the afternoon, even as neurotic a housewife as I will believe that they enjoyed it.
“They postponed my tenure review,” Tim explains his cold-blooded violation of confidentiality. “The committee was all set and supposed to meet next week, Monday, but it has been deferred for the time being.”
“‘Organizational problems,’” Giles adds. “That’s all I was told, at any rate.”
“Just to keep the sword dangling over my head! They are so screwing me—I don’t see why I shouldn’t squeal!”
“Who’s on the sexual misconduct panel now, anyway?” I ask. “Elizabeth—”
“No, Ma Mayfield is only sitting in. The Provost decided since she’s biased, being English Lit and all that, the Assistant Dean of Studies should chair the panel. Young guy, more hair than sense.”
“It would have been better for Natalie if it had been some old, cynical bastard with nothing to lose,” Giles remarks. “He might have stirred things up a bit.”
“Nobody is interested in stirring things up, Giles!” Tim snaps. “It’s not as if Hornberger is a pedophile or anything! He is one of the college’s best cash machines, with lots of extramural connections. The girls he has sex with are grad students, which makes the dependence and power play worse, but it seems he’s wise enough to stick to the older ones.”
“Older?” I jeer.
“Twenty-one or older! Look at what the athletes get away with, and the frat boys!”
“That is no excuse.”
“Well, there is no excuse for forcing untenured assistant professors onto a committee that could potentially blow up the college! All three faculty members on the panel are