Now it’s Alexandra’s turn to go pink. ‘I haven’t, no. But everyone knows that Dostoevsky said that. It’s, like, his most famous quote.’
Lucy puts her chin up. ‘He didn’t say it. Look.’ She picks up her phone and scrolls through, eventually lighting on the article she’s saved about the misattributed quote. ‘Look.’ She hands her phone to Alexandra, who flicks at it crossly before pushing it back towards Lucy.
‘Well, he could have said it. That’s more important.’
‘More important than quoting him correctly?’ Lucy says. She knows she’s being pedantic, but Alexandra has irritated her with the bumptious self-confidence the woman displays without any grounding in actual knowledge.
Alexandra subsides into her chair, her shoulders slumped. She’s muttering something to herself. Lucy can’t make out the words, but she doubts they’re complimentary. On the other hand, Edgar is still looking at her, a warmth to his expression as if he’s proud of her performance.
‘Lucy’s right. It’s a common misconception. Very good.’ She catches his eye and he nods at her, smiles. Lucy glows inside. ‘So, back to the original discussion,’ he continues. ‘Does prison work? What do you think?’
No one responds, no one puts up their hand. A roomful of confident law graduates reduced to silence by this man. Lucy can feel the charisma radiating from him. She needs to show more of herself. She’d been too focused on imagining how she would seduce him, undressing herself for him at some private tutorial, but now she sees how foolish she’s been. That’s not the nakedness he needs from her – what she must give him is deeper inside.
‘When I think of prison, I think of my mother,’ she says, not bothering to raise her hand.
He turns to her. ‘In what way?’ he says.
‘It was where she died,’ Lucy says. Their eyes meet, and this time it’s not a spark that’s lit. It’s a flame.
22
It’s been over a fortnight since that class. She thought then that the professor might have asked her to stay behind and explain to him what she meant. But he watched her walk out of the seminar room without any attempt to hold her back.
Ben hasn’t talked to her either, not since she walked straight past him at the end of the class. It’s as if she’s surrounded by a forcefield, or something at her core that repels all the other students, although Lucy sees them watching her when she turns her head suddenly and catches them staring.
She doesn’t care about the other students. She’s isolated, not lonely. The workload is steep, no time for dwelling on things. At least forty hours a week, and that’s with only selective reading from the list. Lucy is reading everything, not just the books on the list, but the books referred to in the footnotes, too, and all the articles.
Perhaps she should be worried that the professor hasn’t tried to engage further with her, but she’s not. She knows that he’s hooked, that he wants to know what she meant, what she was talking about. It’s only a matter of time.
Sure enough, as the year edges into early spring, her moment comes. At the end of the seminar, he asks for volunteers for a research assignment, a paper he needs to prepare unexpectedly for a conference at the weekend.
‘A keynote speaker is ill,’ he says. ‘So they’ve asked me to step in. I’m going to need some help, though. It’s nearly my area, but not quite, so there’s some work to do. I need someone to provide a synopsis of all the main points of any relevant research. Could be a couple of all-nighters, but you’ll learn a lot.’
Lucy shoots her hand up before looking round the room to see that nearly everyone else has, too. Not like school, when volunteers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to read aloud, or even answer a simple question. Every student is as keen as she is. Though not quite.
She sits still, an image of what’s going to happen clear in her mind. He’s going to look round the room, and after a show of hesitation, he’s going to lean over and—
‘Lucy, you said something in your application about the Nordic model of incarceration, if I’m not mistaken.’
She nods, unable to speak. It’s exactly as she’d hoped it would be.
‘I think this will be right up your alley. Stay after class and we’ll discuss.’
Daggers from round the room, but they bounce straight off her, the forcefield around her now glowing gold.
‘Come over to my office,’ he says at the end of the session. She’s the last student left at the table.
‘Now?’
‘I’ll show you what I need you to do,’ he says.
They walk through the quad together, their shoulders nearly touching as they approach the narrow arch that leads to the building where his personal office is situated. Lucy jumps back at the proximity, stumbling as he gestures for her to go through. She might be twenty-two, not some squeaky undergraduate, but now that the moment’s come and she’s in his presence, she’s all thumbs, her feet stuck on the wrong way.
As he unlocks his office door, Lucy’s cheeks start to warm. He gestures her through but she steps back –no, after you.She wants to get her blushing back under control. It really is like it was at school when she had such a crush on Alan Mackenzie, who was in her history class. They snogged once after a disco one Friday night and every time she saw him after that, she turned red as a tomato, much to her friends’ glee. Shouldn’t she have grown out of it by now? She could kick herself for the stupidity of it. It’s time to stop undermining herself.
He’s noticed her. He knows she could be the other half to his whole, the partner in his already illustrious career that he doesn’t know he needed. The work they’ll do together, the advances in prison reform . . .
‘Come on through,’ he says, and she lands back down on earth, shaking her head free of the nonsense of it all. She follows him.
