‘Don’t expect a crowd,’ she says at the door. ‘They’re not very good at evenings. They go back to their burrows once darkness falls.’
He laughs politely. She sees that he is very smartly dressed. He is wearing a suit and tie, cufflinks, polished shoes.
‘Never mind,’ he says.
She opens the doors. If anything, there are fewer people inside than there were before. She introduces him — his name is Max Desch, from the University of York — and there is a faint sound of clapping as she leaves the podium. She sits a few rows back, alone. She watches him adjust the microphone, lay out his notes. For a long time he doesn’t speak. He gets various books out of his briefcase and lays them out too. Then he shakes his head, puts some of them back and gets out others. People start to turn around in their seats, looking back at her. They sense that something is wrong. They expect her to act, but what can she do? In a way, she admires him. She admires people who don’t do what they’re supposed to.
He is silent for so long that when he finally speaks into the microphone, everybody jumps.
‘Why don’t you all come up here?’ he says.
Everyone troops up on to the podium. They don’t even complain about it: they’re too unnerved. Tonie comes last. There are a few chairs up there and she sits on one. Other people sit on the floor. The professor sits on a chair.
‘The best thing about poetry’, he says, ‘is reading it. Don’t you think? I’ll just read one now.’
He reads a poem by Wilfred Owen. Everyone listens. He has an unusual style of reading. He declares each line flatly and leaves long pauses between the lines. He is not at all self-conscious, in his impeccable suit. One or two of the students laugh. But after a while everyone is quiet.
‘Who wants to go next?’ he says, when he is finished.
To Tonie’s surprise, a few hands go up. He points to a girl and passes her the book. It is Julie Bowes: Tonie often sees her on the bus, whispering into her phone and staring wanly out of the dirty window. She reads a poem by Rupert Brooke, the famous one. It is hard to think of something less associated with Julie Bowes than this poem. She reads it softly, falteringly, with her south London accent. Tonie’s neck and shoulders begin to ache. When Julie Bowes asks, ‘And is there honey still for tea?’ Tonie’s whole being cringes. She feels angry with the professor, with his suit and his cut-glass accent. She herself makes every exception for these students, who look so exhausted by life before they’ve even begun. She is angry that they should be made to read the patriotic words of public schoolboys. Yet they don’t seem particularly to mind.
The professor motions Julie to pass the book along. She gives it to Nile, a big silent boy in tracksuit and gold chains, trainers like showboats, his muscled legs uncomfortably crossed in front of him. He leafs slowly through the pages. Then he starts to read, Siegfried Sassoon. His voice is strong and beautiful, simple as a beam. It is as though he has never used it before; as though the poem has hewn it out of the substance of what he is. Slowly, Tonie gives in. She listens to the sound of them saying what they do not normally say. She sees how innocent they are, how unformed, how transitive. They pass easily into the vessel of the poem. For an instant, they become it. Her consternation and embarrassment fade. She is amused, impressed, and in the end she forgets to be anything at all. The hour passes easily. A feeling of comfort, almost of love envelops her. For the first time in a long time, she loves this place.
‘What about you?’ he says. ‘Will you read something?’
They are all looking at her. They want her to become human, like them. They want her to emerge from her authority, her fixed life, a small figure emerging from a large building. They want to see what she really is.
‘All right,’ she says.
Suddenly the book is in her hands. She reads where the page is open, Wilfred Owen again, ‘Insensibility’; a poem she remembers, though she hasn’t read it in years, hasn’t even thought about it. His voice speaking through hers surprises her. Like the others, she does not often say beautiful things. Yet the words seem to be her own — they feel like what she would have invented, if only she knew how to. They seem to delineate an unlived passion, a dark form, like a second, nameless body inside her own. When she reads the lines,
….. whatever moans in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars
her voice trembles. The book is old, with yellowed pages. It is older than her, and Wilfred Owen is dead. She feels sad, sorry, as though he represented a missed opportunity; as though he has left her to go on alone, full of stillborn passion. When she has finished, she returns the book to the professor. Their eyes meet. ‘Goodbye, then,’ he says to the students.
He starts putting his books and papers back in his briefcase. They stand, hover uncertainly, trail towards the doors. They don’t want to leave: they want to be looked after. He has made them feel secure, and now they want to surrender responsibility for themselves.
Tonie remains behind, to see him out.
‘Is there somewhere near here we can get a drink?’ he says.
They go to the pub that is the traditional refuge of the English department, where Tonie half-hopes she’ll meet someone she knows. She doesn’t know what she’ll find to say to him. She watches him while he gets the drinks. Now that it is over, she isn’t sure what his talk really amounted to.
‘It was nice, hearing them read,’ she says, when he returns.
He puts the drinks on the table. His is something clear, gin or vodka.
‘Was it?’ He drinks from his glass, apparently indifferent.
‘Generally they don’t talk all that much.’
‘Talk is a snare,’ he says.
She glances at him, surprised. He is looking at her steadily. He smiles, a smile that is much less polite than the rest of him.
‘I wanted to hear you read,’ he says.
She holds his eyes for a second. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you did.’
He says, ‘I hate to tell you, but your voice gives you away.’
She reminds herself of his name. Max Desch.
‘I thought talk was a snare,’ she says brightly.
He tilts his head, strums his fingers against his glass. ‘There are different kinds of snare,’ he says. ‘This is quite a pleasant one. It reeled me in firmly but gently.’
There is a silence. Tonie does not want silence. To be silent suggests that she is willing for him to take control of things.
‘You seem very young to be a professor,’ she says.
He looks surprised. ‘I’m thirty-three.’
Tonie laughs, relieved, and vaguely disappointed. He is even younger than she thought. She had imagined he was flirting with her. It is a bad sign, to believe that young men are flirting with you.
‘That’s young,’ she says. Yet she cannot quite believe that she is so much older, almost a different generation. She has clung to youth, she realises. She has no idea what she will do when it is entirely gone.
‘Is it?’ he says.
‘To me it is. I just turned forty.’
He waves this away with his hand. ‘What does that matter?’
‘I don’t know what it matters. It just does.’
He leans forward, rests his elbows on the table. She sees his cufflinks, little polished silver discs in the stiff cloth. She imagines him putting them in. His fingers are broad and pale and clean.
‘Why? You’re still young. And beautiful,’ he adds, lifting his glass to his lips.
Tonie laughs. ‘Stop it.’
‘I’d like to go to bed with you, that’s all,’ says Max Desch.
Tonie’s cheeks grow red. How strange, that when she was younger and more free, she reserved all her scorn for a remark such as that; and yet now it has all the mystery for her that the idea of love had for her then.