She clasps her doughy hands over one knee and waits.
‘It was such a ridiculous thing …’ I start.
And it really was. Allow me to catch you up, as the Americans say. I’ve been at the University of South Anglia for two years as an art history lecturer and it’s the first time anything like this has happened. I was teaching my regular module on Manet and the Post-Impressionists, clicking through the PowerPoint presentation as I had done dozens of times before. The students were the usual bunch of unimpressed freshers: meaty-faced gym boys and girls sporting velour tracksuits without irony. There were a couple of pale-faced, nervous-looking teenagers who wore their diligence like albatrosses around their necks. These were the ones who read the right books but never proffered an original thought.
The University of South Anglia – USA as it’s known colloquially(the founders presumably not having thought it through) – is one of those institutions bequeathed by New Labour’s insistence on giving almost everyone a higher education. We accepted BTECs and bad grades as long as the students were willing to pay, and as a result, we tended to attract the stupid rich. It was an awful place, really, with a grey brutalist campus built in the 1970s that was now starting to warp and buckle at the girders. Great chunks of concrete would fall off exterior walls with startling regularity but there was never any money for renovations.
Still, one had to make a living. The University of South Anglia was the only place that would accept me when I started applying for jobs. I had no teaching qualifications. I had been a newspaper art critic and pushed out two books because an agent asked me to. The first was a bestseller; the second didn’t sell at all but had gravitas (so often the way). I was desperate for money and my options were limited. Taking this job meant I could stay in Cambridge, which in turn meant I didn’t have to move out of my cottage, bought in an era when I had considerably more disposable income (thanks to regular installments of hush money from the Fitzmaurice family, I had built up a nice little nest egg). Back then, interest-only mortgages were being handed out like Jehovah’s Witnesses magazines. The cottage was wonky with sloping floors and persistent rising damp, but I was fond of it.
I was fond, too, of Cambridge, despite the memories it held for me. I haven’t told Joanne Buster what I’m about to confide in you, but that’s because we – you and I – don’t have to hold anything back from each other, do we? And some of you will already know that when I was an undergraduate at the real Cambridge University, my best friend Ben drunkenly got behind the wheel of a car and killed a girl called Vicky Dillane. I witnessed it all from the back seat. And I took the blame. Said I’d seen a fox and swerved to miss it. The breathalyser registered my sobriety and so it was case closed. The Fitzmaurices did a comprehensive job of sweeping the incident under the carpet, which included paying me off to keep me sweet.
For a few comparatively happy years, life had carried on in this manner. The family counted on my discretion and I foolishly believed my loyalty was being rewarded with something like love. But at Ben’s fortieth birthday party, my wife and I were unceremoniously dumped: cast overboard like sacks of grain from a sinking boat. Our faithful retainership was no longer required, we were told. Ben would be standing for political office and needed to tidy up inconvenient loose ends, of which I was one. When my wife (dear, loyal Lucy) defended me, it all became rather dramatic. Serena said something unforgivable about Lucy’s inability to have children and my wife lashed out. It was, admittedly, unfortunate that the lashing-out involved a champagne bottle making contact with Serena’s skull, but Lucy was extremely drunk and she went to rehab shortly thereafter to repent of her sins. After the briefest period of unconsciousness and a stint at a private hospital, Serena survived with merely the hint of a scar on her forehead.
The police questioned me about the unpleasantness and because I thought I had nothing left to lose, I told them about Vicky Dillane. I showed them what Ben Fitzmaurice was capable of. I had wanted love and proximity and the Fitzmaurices had offered only manipulation and toxicity in return. Any feelings they’d once had for me (or I for them) had dissolved like aspirin. It was over. I wanted nothing more than to destroy them. Or maybe I simply wanted to get their attention.
In any case, my plan didn’t work. Stupid of me to have thought the truth stood a chance. The Fitzmaurices did their usual thing. They pulled invisible strings and pressed the secret levers of power and scratched various backs and then chummily asked their friends the police to make it all go away in exchange for some generous financial assistance. That was that.
I haven’t spoken to Ben since.
A boring little story, if you think about it. The rich getting away with literal murder. A disposable oik ground into the dust by the Fitzmaurice heel. And so the world turns.
For a while, I nurtured my grudge like a pet, determined on seeking revenge. These days, although the knowledge of what they did to me is always present – the canvas upon which my every action is painted – I also try not to think about how much I wanted to be like them; of my own callow desperation. As I approach my fifties, I have discovered a talent for extreme compartmentalisation. If I keep the perimeter of my life small and rigorously guarded, I can almost convince myself I am normal. That my oddness – for I recognise it, now, as oddness – is imperceptible.
At USA, I am seen as a loner. The other members of staff are respectful from a distance and the students, for the most part, are manageable. As a lecturer, I’m a safe pair of hands: neither dull nor inspiring. I get the necessary information across. I do not draw attention to myself. I hide behind a certain remoteness of manner. I wear glasses and knitted ties and jackets with elbow patches and I deliberately cultivate the professorial stereotype. I can make myself disappear behind the two-dimensional imagery of a Renaissance fresco or Cubist portrait.
Art history allows you to do that.
On the day of The Incident, the lecture hall was stuffy and somnolent. It was a hot, late-spring day outside and the students were more apathetic than usual. I pressed the clicker. Manet’s portrait of his friend, the author Émile Zola, came up on screen. I gave my normal preamble.
‘… and you can see here, in Manet’s flatness of colour and static style, the influence of a certain orientalism on his art. You’ll note, I’m sure, in the background, a Japanese print of a wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II, and this is just one of the ways in which—’
A hand rose from the far end of the room. It belonged to a young man whose face was shielded by the peak of a Yankees baseball cap he had not bothered to remove for class. I paused, irritated by the interruption.
‘Yes?’
‘You can’t say that,’ Yankee-man said.
The student was sitting next to a window, sunlight hitting the glass with such force it was difficult to make out his face. I squinted. Slowly his features defined themselves: dark eyes, large nose, a beard so feeble it was an insult to the noun. The neck of his grey T-shirt was frayed and gaped to reveal a pearl necklace. A recent crop of male first years had started wearing jewellery – crucifix earrings and skull rings and silver bangles. The trend made me uncomfortable. It was tricky enough to know what gender anyone was these days without the added confusion.
‘I’m sorry, Mr … er …’ I scanned the roll call on my desk to try and identify his surname.
‘Jacob Malik-Edwards,’ he replied. ‘And yes, I do identify as male so it’s fine to call me “Mr”.’
Fuck’s sake, I thought, here we go.
‘Thank you so much for the clarification,’ I said, with exaggerated politeness. ‘Please, do continue. I’m in a state of high anticipation.’
‘You can’t say …’ He struggled for a few seconds. ‘Well … the word you used. It’s offensive.’
‘Which word?’
I wasn’t trying to be obtuse. I genuinely wondered what he meant.
‘The … O-word.’
The other students had fallen into alert silence. No shuffling of paper or stifled yawning or lacklustre tapping of laptop keys now. In the front row, a blonde girl had taken out her phone and was filming the exchange.
‘Could you put your phone away please?’ I said, pointing at her.
