The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [57]
‘A student?’
‘Yes.’
‘One of yours?’
‘Yes.’
A containerload of emotions hit me hard, like a goods wagon skidding off the rails, everything spilled out chaotically on the tracks. Not a barmaid. One of his students. Bright. Clever. An Oxford undergraduate, the kind of liaison he'd always, always frowned on, had no time for amongst his colleagues. It did happen – of course it happened – but not to Ant, not to my husband.
‘How old?’ I croaked.
‘Eighteen.’
Eighteen. A first year. And he'd have been thirty. Questions crowded my mind. Fought to be heard, elbowing each other out of the way, like so many hands shooting up. How? Why?
‘She was in my English poetry group, so I saw her – obviously in lectures – but on a one-to-one basis too, in tutorials. And that was her special interest, nineteenth-century poetry. The Romantic Poets. Byron in particular.’
Byron. His speciality. A shared interest.
‘Very bright?’ I whispered.
‘Yes. Very clever.’
That hurt. Oh, that hurt. And there I'd been, pedalling around Oxford on a bicycle pretending to be clever. Romantic fiction of a different nature in my basket; less Troilus and Criseyde, more doctors and nurses.
‘Pretty?’
He looked at his feet. Silly question. Gorgeous. Your worst nightmare, Evie. Ten years younger, razor sharp, drop-dead gorgeous. Big tits too, no doubt.
‘Don't answer that,’ I snarled. I fought for breath. Then composure.
‘What happened? How did it…?’
He made a helpless gesture, his arms rising then flopping to his sides. His shoulders sagged. ‘How do these things happen? Slowly. Imperceptibly. It was all… so unspoken. So… pure.’
I nearly vomited; put my hand to my mouth.
‘I noticed her quite soon, obviously. It would take a very unobservant teacher not to. She stood out. But not in an obvious, Hedda Gabler sort of way…’
I pressed my nails into my palms. Always the literary allusions. He knew I didn't know who the sodding hell Hedda Gabler was.
‘More in a Jade Goody sort of way?’ I snapped.
He frowned. ‘Who?’
‘Forget it,’ I muttered. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, as I say, nothing happened. Nothing tangible. It was just…’ he struggled to explain, ‘well, I realized I looked forward to seeing her, to our tutorials. Began counting the days. I found myself poring over her essays when she handed them in, marvelling that her interpretation, her conceptual analysis, was so like mine…’
I stared at the cream carpet. This was the thing about Ant. He would be honest. I'd get it warts and all now. Except, obviously, there wouldn't be a wart in sight. About how he'd gazed at her hair – Titian, no doubt – in a dusty shaft of sunlight as he sat behind his desk, as she read haltingly from ‘Tintern Abbey’. I imagined the scene: the young don, his even younger student, Ant listening as she spoke of her love for Wordsworth, nodding, smiling encouragingly as she described how she felt she was with him as he wandered the valleys of his native Lake District, how his romance with nature was her romance too. Oh shit.
‘And sometimes, in lectures, I'd find myself just looking at her, directing the lecture at her, embarrassingly. As if she was the only one in the room. And in tutorials, I found I had to sit a long way away from her, over by the window, looking out at the quad to concentrate; couldn't sit too close. And then when we walked to lunch, her to halls and me to the Buttery, well, sometimes our arms would brush together and I'd feel—’
‘Yes, I get the picture Ant!’ I shrieked. ‘You fucking fancied her!’ For an intelligent man he was remarkably stupid. ‘You don't have to walk me through the lightning bolt!’
‘Sorry. I thought you wanted—’
‘I do, but I can do without the glimpses you got of her bra as you strolled through the quad together. I can paint my own nightmarish scenes!’
‘It wasn't like that. I mean, I didn't just feel a sexual desire – that's what I'm trying to explain. Well, of course I did. I did feel that, but what I felt more, was