paper, in London, last year? So when the search committee shortlisted me, and when we first met and I was so insecure because I thought he hadn’t been involved in my appointment, and when he was a condescending jerk about my work—he knew all along who I was?
“We weren’t introduced at the time,” he says to Irene. “Better late than never, eh? I’m Giles Cleveland.”
They shake hands, and before she can make things worse, I butt in.
“Giles, this is a yuchna from the planet Klutz, who is impersonating my friend Irene from New York.”
“Is that so?” He smiles blandly, but I can tell he is mustering his defensive troops. “And from that far away it is you’ve come to see Anna at Ardrossan?”
“Was he…making fun of me?” Ten minutes later Irene still has not recovered from being stumped.
“Yeah, well. A biseleh.” I could not suppress the beam of delight on my face if my life depended on it.
“He’s like…an eel! A gray eel with a stick up his ass!”
“No, he’s English, that’s all. It’s partly an act. The upper-class English schoolboy. They grow into six-footers, hone their bodies with all that rugby and rowing, and then play on our maternal instincts with their awkward charm. On British women it doesn’t work half as well as on us. You either can’t stand them because you think they’re effeminate and moody and emotionally constipated, or you fall for them.”
“I must be more British than I thought,” she grumbles. “Have you fallen for him? But why am I asking? I can see that you have!”
“I don’t remember the falling. Where do you want to go for dinner, Reenie?” I pointedly change the subject. “Bernie recommends a Mexican place to which I haven’t been, or we could try Cajun, then you’d have something to tell Jacques about, or—”
“I can’t.” Irene doesn’t often look embarrassed, but now she does. “I gotta be back at the airport by four thirty.”
“You’re not flying back today!”
“Yup. Sorry, Banana. Jacques wants me at this working dinner he has tonight.”
“Well, call him and say you’ve found me in a madhouse and you have to stay the night at the tomato farm to set me to rights again. You haven’t even seen the tomato farm yet!”
“I would so much love to, really I would!” She’s not lying, either. “But these people tonight are really important for Jacques, and things have not been going so great between us, so…this is our quality time. Our quality time together is a business dinner he has in Washington with two guys from San Francisco. Care to guess what our problem might be?”
This is where the exclaiming earlier came from, and the brittle gaiety that she’s had all day. I would have wormed it out of her earlier, if—well, if I hadn’t spent the day in a madhouse.
I am very sorry to let her go so soon, but I can’t pretend that it is Irene that I brood over when I cycle back home. Or the herring, or the graffiti.
Giles knew me?
Chapter 20
MATTHEW DANCEY HAS A LOT OF QUESTIONS. Is the difference between my New York students and my Ardrossan students very considerable? Am I finding the transition hard to make? Do I feel that Ardrossan students and I, in modern parlance, have “clicked”? Is it perhaps my experience with the British university system that made me neglect the crucial mainstay of private education, that is, the cultivation of good relations between parents and faculty?
“These are largely rhetorical questions, sir. I take it you do not mean me to answer them.”
“And I take it you don’t have any answers! After Friday’s events you must be aware of the fact that your settling-in period at Ardrossan is rather more problematic than we had hoped!”
“It is more problematic than I had hoped, too, sir, and I’m sorry for it.”
Contrary to my expectation that Dancey would try to file Friday’s vandalism under the heading of Wear & Tear (Misc.), he phoned me in my office half an hour ago and summoned me to a meeting. He had cleared this with my mentor, with Maxine Emerson from Employee Relations, and with Jerry Poplar, an officer with the campus police. He caught me unprepared. I am still in the phase of fermentation, strangely unable to stay away from the scene of the weekend’s bizarre events and revelations. After my first impulse to pour out to Giles what I had found out about Selena O’Neal, I stalled. Or maybe I stalled because