“What do you have to do with this?” she blurts out.
“Nothing at all, I would have thought. What do you think?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what to think!” She flicks back her long mane with a sound that is close to a “Humph!” Natalie, I am beginning to suspect, is a little annoyed with me for stealing her limelight.
“It must be two different…things.” Selena has followed us and offers her opinion, possibly to erase my impression of how flustered she was just now. “Unconnected. It’s possible.”
“I don’t see how they could be connected,” I point out.
“You think it’s a coincidence?” Mrs. O’Neal asks, still belligerent.
“That seems equally unlikely, I agree.” My non-committal friendliness frustrates them, but I will not be drawn out.
“What was all that about?” Irene murmurs when we are walking down the stairs.
“Hate graffiti on Natalie’s office door this morning.”
“Which one was Natalie? She’s the one who says she was raped, right?”
“The one in the sexy dress. Selena’s the one in the attic.”
“Odd. I would have said the other way round.”
It strikes me for the first time how odd it actually is. Ninety-nine out of a hundred uninvolved bystanders would guess that Selena was raped and Natalie is having clandestine sex in unconventional surroundings.
“That dowdy girl, the one who has sex in the observatory, has fallen for a very bad man.” Irene clicks her tongue. “She would never have given in to the nice boy in her poetry class. She hates herself for what she’s doing. She’s has self-hatred steaming out of every pore.”
“You can tell that at a glance? You’re quick.”
“I’m a family lawyer. I have to be able to tell that sort of thing.”
“She does hate herself. Harms herself, too, she scraped her knuckles—wait. Oh, wait a minute!”
I run back up the stairs, four flights, and arrive panting on the fourth floor. Selena is standing alone in the corridor looking down toward my office.
“Selena, would you mind—” I hold out my hand, and because I am so rattled and out of breath, she obeys automatically and gives me hers. I clasp her wrist tightly so she can’t pull back when I push up the long sleeve of her tunic, all the way up over her elbow. When she sees what I’m doing, she struggles and her wrist slips from my grasp. But I have seen what I thought I would see.
“Dr. Lieberman! What are you doing?” Mrs. O’Neal hovers in the door of her daughter’s office.
“Nothing,” I say, still heaving. “Selena?”
Selena’s face is like cast iron. “It’s nothing, Mom.”
“I worry about you, Banana,” Irene remarks when I pick her up on the second-floor landing.
I’m too upset to trust myself to speak. In the great hall a tour of the campus is just about to start, and a crowd of people is milling about, waiting, looking at the paintings by students from the art department that are shown here because of the light. A tall, blue-shirted figure stands out, and every fiber in my body rushes toward him.
“Wait a sec, Reenie.”
“What, again? Okay, I’ll get myself a coffee over there.”
“Giles—”
His face lights up when he sees me, and through all my shock and anger I am desperately sad that this smile doesn’t mean what I thought it meant.
“I know this isn’t the right moment, Giles, but could we—sorry. I should first say—you were really good, earlier, in the…in the bookstore. Very funny.”
“Thanks. Sometimes Americans like me.”
Last time I looked into his eyes, it was to offer him sex. I think he remembers that.
“A BBC series, huh?” I have to say something, or we’ll stand here forever, gazing into one another’s eyes.
“It may all come to nothing.”
“Tim was a bit miffed he didn’t know about it.”
“He called me a sneaky fucker. To my face.”
“Yes, to my face, too. But I wasn’t going to repeat that.”
“Not to hurt my feelings?”
God, I wish he’d stop smiling at me like this!
“Actually, not to get Tim into trouble.”
“Speaking of trouble,” he says, turning serious.
“Giles—could we talk about Selena again? You know the other day some windows were smashed up on the fourth floor?”
“Yes, Tessa said—”
“That was Selena. With her naked elbow, like this.” I punch the air with a sharp, horizontal jab.
“She did what?”
“And there’s more. She—sorry, I don’t want to pour this out here and now, just to ask, can we talk about this? Soon? And there’s more, still—not about Selena, but—well, I’m—”
“Flapping.”
“Yeah, I’m flapping.”
And I’m so in love with you, and I want to tell you my worries and hear