asks me when we’re alone. “Oh, dear—as bad as that?”
I dash away the water from my eyes.
“Yeah…really bad.”
“Have you been, er, seeing him?”
“Mm-hmm.”
She nods. Then she shrugs. “Well…”
“What?”
“Well, if you get the job at Queen Mary, you could—”
“Go on sleeping with him for six months and then leave him?”
She shrugs again.
“I don’t think I could leave him,” I say.
“But if you get the job?”
“I know. I don’t know.”
“If he didn’t exist and you got the job?”
“Oh, in that case…” My chest expands with relief. “I don’t know. I feel I would come back to England. I feel I would want to. But I feel so many crazy things at the moment, how can I trust my judgment? Giles will have to ditch me. I can’t.”
“Wait till he breaks up with you? That’s miserable!”
“Yes, I know.”
On Monday morning Debbie and I take the fast train to London. Under the grubby glass dome of Paddington Station, we part company.
“Right,” she says resolutely. “Remember—it’s all about choice. That’s all. You want to have the choice, Ardrossan or London. That’s all.”
I make my way across London and amble along the busy Mile End Road toward a nondescript brown brick building. It looks like a cross between a big dental practice and a community center, and while the traffic is rushing past me, I wonder whether I am crazy to even consider leaving a place as beautiful as Ardrossan. But when Ewan Buchanan picks me up in the hall, I am strangely calm and, suddenly, wonderfully focused.
“And you would really move to the UK?” It is the oldest among my interviewers, a man with an almost-white beard and a red bowtie, who seems skeptical.
I was prepared for the question, but none of my prepared answers seem appropriate.
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
“Anna has flown in from the States.” Ewan Buchanan comes to my aid. “Surely that speaks for her motivation!”
“I’m sure her motives are most honorable,” Professor Simpson agrees. “I would like to have them explained to me, that’s all.”
I have a job. I don’t need to lie.
“Well, sir, I spent five of the past ten years in England, and by and large they were the better years, personally and professionally.”
He waits for more.
“The truth is, I think I would be more productive living in England. And happier.”
Back at Heathrow I have that bizarre feeling at the end of a holiday that I only just arrived two days ago. Bored with the trashy novels on the shelves of W. H. Smith, I select a volume about British country houses up for sale and in need of refurbishment. That will keep me dreaming on the flight.
“Anna?” a male voice addresses me. “Anna! What are the odds!”
So lost am I in thought that it takes me several seconds to recognize the burly, bouncy redhead. Paul French has been to see his children and his mother and is waiting for his flight back to Chicago. He suggests coffee, and I don’t see how I can refuse.
“It’s amazing how fast you can get from London to New York these days! You’ll be making the trip more often in future, won’t you?” he says significantly. “Maybe you should get yourself a job in the old country, too. Mind you, pay-wise, that’s bad advice, and so I told Giles. I earn heaps more at Notre Dame than I did in the UK.”
For a moment or two I’m too confused to answer.
“Have I put my foot in it?” he asks, pulling a face of contrition. “Forget that I—”
“What do you mean, Paul?”
“No, no, he obviously didn’t…well, I assumed Giles would have mentioned it.”
“Is Giles going back to England?” I sound calm, but Paul French is no fool.
“Look, I assumed—”
“Where?” As if that was the point. But I’m too frightened to ask when.
“They’ve offered him my old job at UCL. That’s why he came to see me at Notre Dame, to discuss the offer. God, Anna, I’m so sorry, I assumed he told you! Don’t tell him I—”
“I won’t tell him you told me,” I say slowly, thinking fast. “Don’t worry. I won’t say a word.”
Chapter 39
THE FIRST THING I DO WHEN I GET HOME—no, wait, let me rephrase that. The first thing I do when I return to the cottage on the farm is check each room for evidence of interference, but everything seems to be as I left it. The rocking chair sits in a corner of the study looking as if the previous tenants had forgotten it. Then I call the main