My stomach drops an inch.
For half a second, I read that sentence the way a different person would read it.They’re not working, said by a lecturer to a student behind a closed door, is the first sentence of a referral. A pastoral email. A quiet word with the programme director. A door that does not open for me again.
‘The space is too—’ He stops. Starts again. ‘It’s too private.’
My breath catches before I can stop it.
His eyes lift, then lower again. ‘I don’t mean?—’
No. He does not say that. He refuses the sentence before it can become dangerous.
‘It would be more appropriate to meet somewhere else,’ he says instead. ‘A café, perhaps. Somewhere with other people.Somewhere we can talk about the work without the room making everything worse.’
My stomach climbs back up. Not all the way. Enough.
He isn’t closing the door.
He’s opening one with witnesses.
Other people.
He stops. Stares at the gap where the words should be, like he can’t believe his own mouth has brought him here. He does not look at me. He is, I realise, editing in real time. Trying out the sentence in his head and then trying to make his mouth deliver a version of it that a panel could read as pastoral concern and not a man proposing to relocate the problem.
‘Perhaps we should meet for a coffee. Outside. To discuss your progress properly.’
He saysproperly, as people sayresponsibly, like the word itself is a leash, and he’s hoping it’ll hold.
A coffee. Outside. Other people. A venue he has chosen because he cannot trust the venue we are currently in. He has not chosen to end the meetings. He has chosen to move them. I watch him watch himself make that distinction, and I understand, for the first time in six weeks, that I am not the only person in this building keeping an account.
‘Sure.’ I keep my voice level. Flat, textbook-casual. ‘Good idea.’
He nods, once. Eyes on the screen. ‘Saturday. I’ll email you the details.’
‘Cool.’
I stand. Pick up my bag, walk to the door. My hand on the handle. The metal is cold, and my palm is not, and the air behind me shifts. He’s not looking. Definitely not looking.
‘See you, Dr Haldrey.’
I close the door. Gently.
The corridor is empty—fluorescent light, linoleum, and a fire extinguisher that’s been there since before I was born. I walk twelve steps before the smile hits—the private, stupid grin.
The absence of attack was the attack.
I’m half-hard in the corridor of the maths department, which is new, because usually it takes more than a coffee invitation.
I stop walking—the corridor hums, pipes somewhere. The postgrad is still typing.
The triumph should be clean. It’s not. There’s grit in it.
He looked at his palms on the desk. Away, not at me. Like they’d done something without his permission, and he was trying to decide whether to forgive them.
He’s not losing a game. He’s admitting he’s at war with himself.
I’ve pulled men almost twice my age before. There’s a specific face a man makes when he realises a younger lad has got him. The face is usually, in my experience, pleased—pleased in the dirty, relieved way—the admission that he’d already made the decision and was just waiting for someone to make it for him. That face is a face I know.
Haldrey’s face, now, in the office I just left, is not that face. Haldrey’s face is the face of someone who has spent his professional life refusing to be the man in the newspaper paragraph that beginsDrand endssuspended, and who has just scheduled a coffee that he does not know, yet, whether he is going to be able to keep himself in the professional shape of.
