disrespect to her, the piece of ass accompanying him.
“Wow. Just wow,” Vernon Russell mutters, only to choke a cry of pain when his wife elbows him in the ribs.
“At least she’s more than half his age,” Yvonne says caustically.
The ravishing brunette on Hornberger’s arm is thirty-five, if she is a day. She looks as if she had been sown into the black gown that she is wearing, her shoulders and décolletage are immaculate, and her make-up and jewelry are just this side of expensively sluttish.
“She must be costing him a pretty penny,” states an English voice behind me.
“Giles!” Erin exclaims. “There you are! Gosh, you look—Ginny, doesn’t he look—”
“Wow,” Eugenia says, still annoyed at her husband. “Just wow!”
The women’s voluble response masks my own amazement. Giles Cleveland—who wore his college tie on Family Weekend, just to wave the flag—has come dressed up as a gentleman of the Old South. I am so stunned I can hardly look at him to take in the details, let alone look at his face. Buff-colored pantaloons, knee-high riding boots, and a dark green frock coat with brown-and-yellow-patterned vest, his hair brushed back from his forehead.
This is so unfair of him.
One hand disappears into the pocket of his pants; I can just see a strip of white shirt held together by golden cufflinks. It is a movement at the same time poignantly at odds with the formality of his suit and curiously expressive of what I perceive, after all, as a hint of self-consciousness.
“Where’s your Scarlett?” Erin asks, a little acidly. She looks very stylish in her Bloomsbury Group outfit, but now she seems to regret the sexually neurotic touch that comes with looking like Virginia Woolf or Ottoline Morrell.
“Mm, you know, I’ve gone off Scarlett,” Giles says. “I’m getting a bit old for those high-maintenance teenagers.”
“Would that were true of all our professors,” Eugenia mutters.
Partly to appear unimpressed, partly because I am suddenly anxious, I turn to check how Selena has reacted to Hornberger’s latest stunt. But Selena has disappeared.
“A good evening to you all!” Elizabeth slowly edges her bulk through the crowd. She is one of the few women who can carry off the layered look, and that is what she sticks to, probably wisely. “Now may not be the best moment, but when the outcry has died down, I want to take you, Tim, and you, Yvonne and Anna, to see the President. You’re here to mingle. Network, my dears, network. Let me have a drink first, then I’ll introduce you.”
“Do you think they’ll let Hornberger stay?” Tim asks. “Or will he be marched off campus by a posse of security guards?”
“Innocent until proven guilty.” Elizabeth shrugs. “It may well be his last Christmas at Ardrossan.”
“Anna!” Yvonne whispers to me when Elizabeth turns to talk to Erin, Eugenia, and Vernon. “If she is as outspoken as this about the matter, it must mean Hornberger is finished!”
After curtseying and listening prettily to all the anecdotes and jokes of the college worthies Elizabeth introduces me to, I join the procession of light around the campus, with a speech and a song at each significant spot. Later, and frozen through, I am recovering by the fire of one of the gingerbread stands with Tim and Martin, a wiry, shaven-headed sociologist who is very clearly the calm anchor in this relationship.
“I’m so bad at that,” I gripe. “Small talk with the VIPs! It’s going to break my precious little assistant-professorial neck that I’m crap at networking!”
“You’re not bad at it,” Tim points out. “You just think you are, because you hate it.”
“They weren’t listening to what you said. I can guarantee that,” Martin remarks, looking me up and down with an exaggerated leer. “Very sexy dress. Even on a woman.”
“Stop that!” Tim protests. “We can’t both flirt with Anna, and I saw her first!”
“Ah, but what neither of you boys has seen…” The punch must be working its dangerous effect on me, because I step behind a big trash can and quickly hitch up my skirt to display the lace top of my stocking.
“Oh, you brazen hussy.” Tim grins. “Anyway, don’t show us, show Giles.”
The name rushes into my blood vessels like a triple gin and tonic. My face must have registered my reaction, because Martin, more sensitive to embarrassment than Tim, clicks his tongue and tries to change the subject.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing my ass off out here. Will you come in and—”
“Hey, honey! Tim, hi! Lurking in the shadows?”