graduate seminar, or better still, given it to me to read.” He casts me a quick glance but looks away when I look back.
“You’re very busy.”
“I would have read it, if you’d asked me. I’m supposed to, as your mentor!”
“Thanks,” I mutter, not very graciously. “Of course I discussed it with various people. I’m not that much of a frosh!” He raises his eyebrows to express skepticism, and out rushes the truth. “If I must be panned, I’d rather be panned by a bunch of strangers than by you!”
“But that’s silly. Just silly.” He deliberates for a moment. “Did Tim say I’ve been thrown off his tenure committee?”
“No! Why? And what does that mean?”
“I’m too close, personally and professionally. To be fair, I probably am. It’s just that Elizabeth would not have objected, and Dancey has.”
“But Tim’ll be all right, won’t he?”
Again he considers his reply carefully.
“I think so. His portfolio is too solid to deny him tenure, even if some people wouldn’t claim that he’s…their favorite person.”
“Nobody can be everybody’s favorite person.”
He grins. “That’s a wise thing to say. But everybody can and should make sure that their mentor approves their conference papers!”
I get the distinct feeling that I have just been officially reprimanded.
“Well, if they thrash me, you’ll tell me that you would have told me so if I’d given you the chance!”
“At great length, and with plenty of footnotes!”
“Keep your eyes on the road.” I nod toward the windshield, biting on a laugh. “We’ll never find out if you wrap us round a tree.”
“I just—” he starts, then stops. Relaxes his hold on the steering wheel as if he had been clasping it too hard. “I just don’t want any of those arseholes—and there are bound to be some, there always are—I just think that you should have taken all possible precautions to shield yourself against boorish attacks, that’s all.”
“The more enemies, the more honor.”
He casts me another exasperated glance. “You’re very cool.”
“I won’t be cool if you come in to listen.”
“Think of me as a claque,” he says. “It’s nice to have a friend in the audience, isn’t it?”
Yes. It’s nice to have a friend.
I disentangle myself from our dispute and force myself to watch the forest by the highway flying past. There was a road sign to the airport; shouldn’t be longer than ten minutes till we’re there.
“You don’t care what people think,” I say slowly. A harmless remark, like a pebble into the pond of our…friendship.
He glances over, with a snort and a lopsided smile. “It’s hard for a young lion not to care what the alpha males say about him.”
Giles doesn’t care. That is so not true.
“My father was a soldier,” he goes on. “An officer, during the war. He was fifty-one years old when I was born, and although he had an artistic side and was, I think, more naturally warm-hearted than my mother, he never quite reconciled himself to the fact that his younger son was a…a wuss.”
“Wuss he?” I ask, and he laughs. I love that. I love that I can make him laugh.
“I felt like one, anyway. With a father who fought in Italy and Germany and was present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and an older brother who had made his first million on the stock market by the time he was twenty-six, a First in English literature doesn’t really cut it.”
He would never be telling me this if he didn’t have to concentrate on the road and couldn’t pretend that we are only chatting.
“Are you sorry you didn’t go into the City?”
“Lord, no.” He scowls. “I would have made a complete hash of it.”
“A nice house in Buckinghamshire, a cottage in Sussex, a sailing boat, tickets to all the fancy London premieres…sorry, premieres.”
“No, that’s your fantasy,” he says, a little riled. “I emigrated to another continent to get away from all that.”
“Well, if I had wanted all that so very badly, I could have stuck with the Etonian.”
“Maybe you should have.”
We are almost fighting.
“Do you know what is so depressing?” I ask when we have parked the car and are walking toward the terminal. I need to say this out loud, because I need to see how he will react. “That sooner or later a girl realizes that her good opinion means very little to a man. A woman can’t boost a man’s ego, not if he feels inferior to the big boys out there. Women don’t count. They can undermine a man, sure, and he might