• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Isabel chose her words carefully. “Men have treated women badly in the past, Professor Lettuce. In many parts of the world, they continue to do so. They put women down. They try to stop them being educated, being given any opportunities.”

Lettuce listened impatiently. Now he interrupted her. “Not in this country, Miss Dalhousie. Not in this country.”

“Oh? Are you sure about that?”

Professor Lettuce’s head shook slightly with irritation. “Such treatment is illegal. And nobody is stopping women being educated here. Look at university admissions. When I look out over my classes of undergraduates these days, all I see is women’s faces. The occasional man. But mostly women.”

“Girls are doing better in the school-leaving examinations,” said Isabel mildly. “They appear to have better qualifications.”

Lettuce’s irritation increased. “That is because boys are now at a disadvantage,” he said. “They are the ones who are being made to feel inferior.”

The waiter appeared at the table. Isabel was relieved; she did not want to argue with Professor Lettuce, much as she disliked him. I must try to like him, she told herself; I must try to like this man, even if only a little.

“I’m sure you’re right about boys,” she said. “We must do something for them. No, you’re quite right.”

Her remarks seemed to assuage Lettuce’s tetchiness. “Yes, I really believe that we must. Not that this should in any way diminish our efforts on behalf of girls. But we must do something for the boys.”

With this common ground identified, they ordered lunch. “I shall have this salad,” said Lettuce, pointing at an item on the menu. “What’s in it?”

The waiter leaned forward to see which salad had been chosen. “Lettuce,” he said. “Tomatoes, olives and avocado.”

“Perfect,” said Lettuce.

Isabel made her choice and the waiter moved off. For a few moments there was silence. Then Isabel spoke. “You said that there was something you wanted to discuss with me.”

Lettuce looked out of the window. Isabel could tell that he was avoiding meeting her gaze.

“It’s a somewhat unfortunate matter,” said Lettuce. “Not something which I would have wished to become involved in.”

Isabel waited for him to continue. He was still looking out of the window. Now he cleared his throat. “Christopher Dove has drawn my attention to a most unfortunate matter,” he said. “I had not been aware of it myself, but he, quite rightly, I must say, brought it up.”

Isabel sat quite still. She knew exactly what it was. So Dove had involved Lettuce; she should have guessed that from the start.

“You’re referring to an apparent case of plagiarism,” she said.

Lettuce transferred his gaze back into the restaurant. Now he looked directly at her and she was able to see his eyes with their small folds of flesh above and below.

“Precisely.”

“I received a letter from Christopher Dove about that,” she said. “I have been attending to it.”

“Attending to it?”

Isabel took a deep breath. She could feel the tension within her rising. This was a fight.

“Yes. As is appropriate in such a case, I wrote to the author and asked for an explanation as to why the passage in question appeared to be lifted from somebody else’s article.”

“So you wrote to this … what was his name?”

“Dr. Jones.”

“You wrote to Dr. Jones.”

Isabel felt her resentment mounting. What business was it of Lettuce’s how she handled this issue? There were established ways of dealing with accusations of plagiarism, or accusations of anything, for that matter, and Lettuce knew this full well. He had been chairman of the editorial board for years, and during that time they had been obliged to deal with more than one allegation of plagiarism.

“I followed the usual procedures,” she said testily. “You’ll remember yourself how things work. I wrote and asked the author to comment.”

“And?”

Isabel bit her lip; this was not a courtroom and she was not a witness. “He wrote back to me and explained that it was entirely accidental. He admitted that he had read the other person