Page 22 of The Headmaster’s Binding

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Thursday, Elena fed me at her flat, because she has a standing theory that nobody with my haircut cooks vegetables, and over her table I performed a small anthology of deflections while she watched me the way a woman watches a kettle she has decided not to rescue.

"You've told me four lies since the salad," she said, eventually. "I counted. I always count."

"Which four?"

"'I'm sleeping fine.' 'The review's just admin.' 'I barely see him outside it.'" She refilled my glass. "And 'this is great,' about my chicken, which was dry, so that one I forgive."

"The chicken was⁠—"

"Thomas." She never uses my first name. It sat me back in the chair. "You came off that high table nine days ago looking like a man doing long division, and now you look like a man who got an answer he can't show his work for. I'm not asking what happened. I'm asking why you handle that man like a hot dish."

And I don't know if it was the wine, or the graph paper still printed on the inside of my eyelids, or just the fact of one person in this postcode counting things the way I count things, but I put my fork down and told her the whole account, straight through, no jokes, first time out loud in four years.

"His name was Richard. He was my department chair. He was married, which I knew, and it was over between them, which I believed, because he said it with his hand on my jaw and you can't notarize anything at that range. Two years. I thought I was a secret because I was precious." I turned the glass a quarter turn on her tablecloth, and noticed myself doing it, and put my hand in my lap. "I was a secret because I was deniable.

"It came apart over money, in the end. Not love, money. There were hotel bills, conference weekends, two years of them, and it turned out they'd been billed to a research grant I was named on. I didn't book those rooms and I never saw the invoices, but my name was on the grant, so my name was on the audit, and the audit is how his college and his wife found out on the same day.

"There was a hearing. He didn't look at me. He read a statement his lawyers wrote, and he was wearing a tie I'd given him, which I choose to believe he didn't notice that morning, because the other reading is worse. And his counsel used the word predatory, at the hearing, into the microphone." I heard Elena stop chewing. "About me. The twenty-eight-year-old untenured nobody had preyed on the fifty-five-year-old chair with the budget and the keys and the wife. That was the theory, and here's the thing about a hearing: it doesn't have to convict you. It just has to publish the word. He kept his chair. I got a finding of no formal misconduct and a professional obituary, and nobody ever wrote the word blacklist anywhere, and eleven colleges passed on me in eighteen months, and Ashgrave was the twelfth.

"So no. I don't do bosses." I got the glass again, because my hands wanted work. "Especially ones I actually like."

The radiator ticked. Elena sat very still, and then she reached over and moved the wine bottle out of my reach, which is her love language, and said:

"'Like.' Present tense."

"Grammar's a trap."

"Mm," she said. "So's the passive voice, and you just told me a four-minute story where everything got done to you, right up until the last sentence, which is the first one you built yourself." She stood and started stacking plates, unhurried. "'I don't do bosses.' Fine. It's a good wall, and you paid for it, and I'd have built it twice as high." At the kitchen door she stopped, plates balanced, and looked back at me with no punchline anywhere in her face. "But you should know it's the first wall of yours I've watched you check for a door."

I walked home the long way, past the east range, because the long way is protocol and the protocol is a joke I keep telling with a straight face. The seam of mortar between the second and third buttresses looked like every other seam of mortar, and I stood there anyway with my collar up, and then I went up my three flights and opened the notebook.

Item thirty-eight: the intervals are shortening. Whatever this college does on Thursdays, it's hungrier than it was two years ago, and nobody who keeps the real records knows I have the fake ones.

Item thirty-nine: Tuesday, four o'clock. I already know which shirt I'll wear. That's the whole problem, itemized.

Chapter 10

Adrian

There is a dose of any dangerous substance that a body can absorb without visible harm, provided the exposures are scheduled, the duration fixed, and the recovery period observed. The men who established those tables did it the only way such tables are established: somebody stood too close, for too long, and was measured as he sickened. I have an hour on Tuesdays. I have begun to understand how the tables were made.

The inspector built my exposure schedule herself, which is the detail I return to at night the way the tongue returns to a cracked tooth. She found our onboarding procedure thin; she recommended supervision of new senior members; the recommendation named no one and selected him with the precision of a document that names no one. I sat with her recommendation for a full day looking for the version of refusal that would not read as an answer to a question she had not asked, and there was no such version, and so every Tuesday at four o'clock the college's most careful man pours water for the college's least careful one and takes his dose.

I will describe the meetings honestly, since this page answers to no one. They are one hour. They have an agenda, which survives the first quarter hour and then gives way. He arrives at one minute past four, every week, which I first read as carelessness and now read correctly: it is policy, one minute of lateness held like a coin he refuses to spend on me. He sits where the chair is put, and then moves the chair two inches, and the two inches are also policy. He wore the blue shirt on the third Tuesday and again on the fourth, and I have begun keeping statistics for which the office prints no field.

And for one hour he thinks aloud, at speed, with his hands, about teaching, and his students, whom he watches the way I watch the fabric, and the week's small wars, and I return serve in the flattest voice I own, and by the end of the hour I show the symptoms the exposure tables predict. I leave those meetings and stand at my own window and observe the symptoms with a clinician's interest: an unwillingness to file; a tendency of the attention to reenter the empty room and stand where the argument was; the retention, at high fidelity and against orders, of the exact pitch of the laugh he gave his own joke on the third Tuesday, because I would not laugh at it, because I have spent one of those already and the budget is the budget.

Rationed wanting is still wanting. It simply keeps better books.

* * *

On the Friday between the third Tuesday and the fourth, the inspector attended my gallery walk, which she does now, at an interval of her own choosing, so that I can never once brace for it, and she spent the first length of the gallery on the college's finances, about which she has no questions, which is how I know the finances are not under review. At the turn, where the portraits give way to the long window, she stopped and looked out at the east range with her hands folded.

"Neave keeps the instruments," she said. "You have seen her level the case. She levels it because the case is sensitive to disturbance, and a disturbed reading is a wasted reading. You will appreciate the difficulty, then, of the night of the storm."

"The storm," I said, "disturbed a great many things. Slates, principally."