depends on one particular person. Jane Austen knew it was wrong, dangerous, to think that! We all know it! And yet…”
“Why don’t you come home?” Irene asks gently.
“Failure.”
“No one would think that!”
“I would. Although that place, Ardrossan, is a madhouse.”
Irene waves her hand in a gesture that says, I told you so, but I’m not going to rub it in. “You could even sleep with the Englishman, for a while, and then come home.”
I should be annoyed with her for advocating an affair with Giles because the inevitable fallout will set me free to move up north again. But I feel guilty for not telling her about the letter I kissed in the Ardrossan post office, so I leave it at that. There is no point in discussing an affair with Giles, because there will not be one. It may even have been necessary to hurt him. I’m not at all sure that he agreed that we were having a one-night stand, and I’m pretty sure that I would not have been able to resist him if he had continued to…um, woo me. Now I needn’t worry he’ll woo me. He won’t even speak to me.
“I haven’t seen you cry since your bubbe died,” Irene says after a couple of minutes.
“I know. And she had lived her life. I…not so much.”
“Now you’re being melodramatic! You have a life, you have a career!”
“I think I have a career so that I don’t have to have a life. I know this sounds melodramatic and adolescent, but—” I shrug, too dejected to try further explanations.
“You’re exhausted, that’s all. You should have rested and gone hiking for three weeks before you started that job down there, not squeezed every drop of energy out of yourself to finish your book!”
I look up at her impassioned face and smile.
“That’s what Giles said.”
Chapter 28
I FEEL TENSE AND FORLORN in New York, but I dread coming back to Ardrossan. I dread it so much that the night before my flight I can’t sleep, and on the day itself I can’t eat.
Even my cottage is no safe haven.
There are traces of cigarette ash on my porch, and I sweep up a crunched-up cigarette rolling paper. Perhaps Jules was sheltering here again and tried her hand at rolling her own. Whatever, I’m not having it. Events at the Observatory—Hornberger’s intrusions into my office, Corvin’s senile guerilla attacks—have affected me more than I had thought, and my nerves are still raw. This is what paranoia must feel like. How does this ash get onto my porch? Was this towel not clean when I left, and now it’s limp and grubby? Did Karen not give me four brown eggs before I left, and now there are two brown and two white ones? There’s nothing for it; I must talk to Karen about Jules.
“So I guess you’ve seen it. I’m sorry, Anna.” Karen is crouching by the chicken pen with a pair of pliers. Sheltering criminals seems to have become second nature to me, because for a weird moment I think she is talking about the bobcat that got the chicken, and my impulse is to deny all knowledge of it.
“Well, have you spoken to her about it?” I ask.
“Lorna? No, I haven’t seen her for weeks. But I know that she is terrible tore up about it all. She does have very strong feelings about…well, everything, really, but especially moral issues.”
“Lorna? What are you talking about?” Never mind Jules rolling cigarettes on my porch.
Karen stands up and pushes her hands into her back as if it hurt her. Like this, standing straight and pushing her belly out, her pregnancy is beginning to show.
“The report in the newspapers?” Now she is as confused as I am. “I’m surprised the university managed to keep it quiet for so long; a professor accused of raping a student, and what’s more, the stepdaughter of an important man in the city—that’s a big story.”
“Was it in the papers? No, I didn’t know that! In the Shaftsboro Times?”
“Yes, Saturday. Everyone talked about it at church on Sunday—well, you can imagine.” She pulls a face. “People around here are very happy to suspect the Folly of all sorts of moral misconduct and liberal laxity. Oh, that sounded poetic, didn’t it? Liberal laxity. Anyway, I thought you meant Lorna. What did you mean?”
I can’t bring myself to mention the grimy towel and the brown eggs, but the evidence of loiterers on my porch is no paranoid fantasy, nor was the