He had been expecting to be introduced to a stoop-shouldered, concave-chested, pasty-skinned fading wild-flower of a girl, someone who sat miserably on the edge of a threadbare ottoman with her legs tucked back and clinging to its sides. She’d be wearing an old dress printed with rosebuds. She’d be wearing ankle socks and scruffy-looking brogues. And for Dr. Weaver’s sake, he’d do his duty with an appealing blend of gravity and graciousness.
He’d even carry a small notebook in the pocket of his jacket to make sure that they could communicate in writing at all times.
He’d held on to this fictional Elena all the way into the sitting room of Anthony Weaver’s house, even going so far as to scan the guests who were there for the history faculty’s Michaelmas drinks party. He’d had to give up the idea of the threadbare ottoman quickly enough when he saw the nature of the house’s furnishings-he doubted that anything threadbare or frayed would be allowed to remain for longer than five minutes in this elegant environment of leather and glass-but he did maintain his mental image of the cringing, retiring, handicapped girl alone in a corner and afraid of everyone.
And then she came swinging towards him, wearing a clingy black dress and dangling onyx earrings, her hair catching her movement and subtly duplicating the sway of her hips. She smiled and said what he took for “Hi. You’re Adam, aren’t you?” because her pronunciation wasn’t clear. He noted the fact that she smelled like ripe fruit, that she didn’t wear a bra, that her legs were bare. And that every man in the room followed her movement with his eyes, no matter the conversation in which he was engaged.
She had a way of making a man feel special. He’d learned that soon enough. Astutely, he realised that this feeling of being the sole interest in Elena’s life came from the fact that she had to look directly at people in order to read their lips whenever they spoke to her. And for a time he convinced himself that that was the entirety of his attraction to her. But even on the first evening of their acquaintance, he found his eyes continually dropping to the nubs of her nipples-they were erect, they pressed against the material of her dress, they asked to be sucked and moulded and licked- and he found his hands sore with the need to slide round her waist, cup her buttocks, and pull her against him.
He’d done none of that. Ever. Not once in the dozen or more times they’d been together. He’d not even kissed her. And the single time she’d reached out impulsively and ran her fi ngers the length of his inner thigh, he had automatically knocked her hand away. She laughed at him, amused and unoffended. And he wanted to strike her every bit as much as he wanted to fuck her. He felt the desire like a blaze of fire burning right behind his eyes, needing both at once: the violence of abuse and the sexual act itself; the sound of her pain and the satisfying knowledge of her unwilling submission.
It was always that way whenever he saw too much of a woman. He felt caught within a raging argument of desire and disgust. And perennially playing in the back of his mind was the memory of his father beating his mother and the sound of their frantic coupling afterwards.
Knowing Elena, seeing Elena, dutifully squiring her here and there had all been part of the political process of academic advancement and scholastic success. But like any act of egocentric machination, what posed as selfless cooperation was not without its attendant price.
He had seen as much in Dr. Weaver’s face whenever the professor asked him about time spent with Elena, just as he had seen it on the very first night when Weaver’s eyes followed his daughter round the room, shining with satisfaction when she paused to talk to Adam and not to someone else. It wasn’t long before Adam had realised that the price for success in a milieu in which Anthony Weaver played a major role was likely to be bound up intimately in how things developed in Elena’s life.
“She’s a wonderful girl,” Weaver would say. “She has a lot to offer a man.”
Adam wondered what twists and turns and rough roads lay in his future now that Weaver’s daughter was dead. For while he’d chosen Dr. Weaver as his advisor strictly for the potential benefits that might accrue from such a choice, he had come to know that Dr. Weaver had accepted him with his own set of benefi ts in mind. He harboured them in secret, no doubt calling them his dream. But Adam knew exactly what they were.
The study door opened as he was staring at his references to the fourteenth-century riots in Kent and Essex. He looked up, then pushed back his chair in some confusion as Anthony Weaver came into the room. He hadn’t expected to see him for at least another several days, so he hadn’t done much about straightening up the litter of teacups and plates and essays across the table and on the fl oor. Even had he done so, the appearance of his advisor directly upon the heels of his having been thinking about him caused the heat to seep up Adam’s neck and spread across his cheeks.
“Dr. Weaver,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting…” His voice drifted off. Weaver was wearing neither jacket nor overcoat, and his dark hair was curled and chaotic from the wind. He carried neither briefcase nor textbooks. Whyever he had come, it was not to work.
“She was pregnant,” he said.
Adam’s throat went dry. He thought about taking a sip of the tea which he’d poured but forgotten about an hour previously. But although he slowly got to his feet, he couldn’t manage any other movement, let alone getting his arm to reach out towards the cup.
Weaver shut the door and remained standing next to it. “I don’t blame you for it, Adam. Obviously, you were in love with each other.”
“Dr. Weaver-”
“I simply wished you’d used some precautions. It’s not the best way to start a life together, is it?”
Adam couldn’t formulate an answer. It seemed that his entire future depended upon the next few minutes and how he handled them. He danced between the truth and a lie, wondering which would better serve his interests.
“When Justine told me, I left the house in a rage. I felt like some eighteenth-century father storming out to demand satisfaction. But I know how these things happen between people. I just want you to tell me if you’d talked about marriage. Before, I mean. Before you made love to her.”
Adam wanted to say that they’d talked about it often, in the late of night typing back and forth furiously on the Ceephone, making plans, sharing dreams, and committing themselves to a life together. But from the roots of such a lie had to grow a convincing performance of grief over the next few months. And while he regretted Elena’s death, he did not actually mourn her passing, so he knew that a show of abject sorrow would prove itself more than he could manage.
“She was special,” Anthony Weaver was saying. “Her baby-your baby, Adam-would have been special as well. She was fragile and working hard to find herself, it’s true, but you were helping her grow. Remember that. Hold onto that. You were tremendously good for her. I would have been proud to see you together as man and wife.”
He found he couldn’t do it. “Dr. Weaver, I wasn’t the one.” He dropped his eyes to the table. He concentrated on the open texts, his notes, the essays. “What I mean is I never made love with Elena, sir.” He felt more colour burn its way into his flesh. “I never even kissed her. I hardly ever touched her.”