Jay smiled tolerantly. "Close. I work with people who work with computers."
"Ah," I said intelligently. "So what's your role, then?"
I won't attempt to reproduce the answer—I couldn't do it justice. Essentially, his role seemed to have something to do with herding temperamental computer scientists into line and making them work harder and more efficiently. This was followed by a long explanation of something called "interfacing," which boiled down to being a middleman between clients and the computer scientists. The computer scientists apparently spoke Java, with a side of Klingon, and the businesspeople communicated in various dialects designed to maximize the number of syllables, while minimizing actual content.
"How interesting!" I exclaimed. It sounded deathly dull. "How did you get into that?"
It turned out that when he graduated from college, with a degree in econ, he knew a guy who knew another guy. Three guys later, we had made it past the first joyous euphoria of the Internet bubble, politely mourned the wreckage of his first two Internet start-up companies, and gone backpacking in the Himalayas. At least, I think he said the Himalayas. Wherever it was, they had mountain peaks and no hair-dryers.
"Birmingham must be pretty dull after that," I said.
"I'm not there most weekends. My mother said you're in school here?" Jay asked, politely turning the conversation to me. He added, "I have some friends at the LSE."
I'd been through this before. Independent researchers, not affiliated with an English university, tended to occupy a somewhat anomalous position, for all that there were a lot of us in London.
"I'm actually doing my doctorate at Harvard, but I'm here on my research year," I explained. "So I'm still affiliated with Harvard, even though I'm over here. Almost everyone in the history department goes abroad in their fourth or fifth year to do their dissertation research."
"And you're in…"
"My fifth year," I supplied.
He didn't say "And you're not done yet?" although I could tell he was thinking it. I gave him points for that. I'd never forget Grandma's reaction when I told her my degree would take an average of seven years, possibly more. Panic on the other end of the phone, followed by, "You can leave if you get married, can't you?"
"That's a lot of time," he said instead, which I supposed was a more neutral way of expressing the same sentiment.
"It's a long program," I agreed. "We used to have fourteenth-years floating around the department, but they just passed a ten-years-and-you're-out rule."
"Ten years?" Jay choked on foam. "My MBA was only two. And that was one year too long."
"Well, people get sucked into teaching," I explained. "You're only funded for your first two years, so after that, you have to teach to support yourself while you write the dissertation. But teaching tends to expand to fill all available time, so it just becomes a vicious cycle: You teach so you can write, but you're so busy teaching that you have no time to write. It just goes on and on, and suddenly people wake up, and they've been there for ten years. Like Rip Van Winkle," I added helpfully.
"What's your dissertation on?"
"Spies during the Napoleonic Wars. You know, like the Scarlet Pimpernel."
"The who?" Jay squinted at me over his beer.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel. There was a book about him, by Baroness Orczy. It's pretty well-known."
I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter that he didn't know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was; after all, most Americans have only a nodding acquaintance with English history and literature, and I'd already shown I know nothing at all about either computers or business. If he was willing to overlook that, I could overlook historical illiteracy.
Alex would be so proud of me.
Jay was clearly making an effort, too. "What was it called?" he asked.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel," I said apologetically.
"Oh," said Jay.
Since that was proving to be a conversation killer, I hurried on. "But he's only one of the spies I'm researching. Right now, I'm looking into the role of English spies in quashing the Irish rebellion of 1803."
It belatedly occurred to me that if Jay didn't know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, he certainly wasn't going to know about the Irish rebellion of 1803. Oh, well. The name was fairly self- explanatory—like the color of George Washington's white horse. The boy had gone to Stanford; he should be able to figure it out. At least, I hoped he could.
"An Irish rebellion." Jay mulled it over. Well, he'd gotten the salient bits right, even if he seemed to have forgotten the year already. "It doesn't upset you?"
Many things upset me. The computer in the Manuscript Room. Miss Gwen's handwriting. The fact that the BL cafeteria had been serving watery potato soup for lunch, and had been all out of croutons, to boot. But I couldn't say the Irish rebellion was on that list.
I took a sip of my wine. "Why should it?"
"Come on," said Jay, grinning at me. "Red hair. Kelly. You have to feel some loyalty to the Irish side."
I shrugged. "It was two hundred years ago. It's hard to maintain a grudge for that long."
"Lots of people do. Look at the Balkans."
"I'd rather not," I said honestly. Genocide depresses me.
"Don't you feel like you're betraying your ancestors?"
"I would hope my ancestors would have more sense than that."
Actually, I had my doubts about that. My ancestors may have been many things, but sensible wasn't high on the list. I switched tactics.
"The English behaved horribly in Ireland, but they had their reasons for what they were doing at the time, even if they weren't what we would consider good reasons. It's like reading Gone With the Wind," I tried to explain. "You know that slavery is morally wrong, but while you're reading it, you can't help empathizing with the South anyway."
It belatedly occurred to me that a man who hadn't read The Scarlet Pimpernel most likely hadn't read Gone With the Wind, either.
Jay leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. "So you're a moral relativist, then."
I hate people who act like they have you all figured out.
"I didn't say that," I said quickly.
Jay had clearly been a debater in college. His eyes gleamed with the thrill of argument—or maybe just the beer. Dammit, where was the waiter with our food?
"Then what would you call it?"
I planted my elbows on the table. "Look, you have to evaluate events in context. To the English, Ireland was a dangerous security threat. They were fighting a losing war against the French; their continental allies were entirely unreliable; and they were in constant danger of being invaded."
"And that justifies their behavior?"
"It's not a question of justification." I could hear my voice rising with annoyance, and quickly resorted to my wineglass. Adopting a gentler tone, I tried again. "My job as a historian isn't to justify or to judge. My job is to try to get inside their heads, to understand their world on their own terms."
"Sounds like a cop-out to me."
"It isn't a cop-out; it's responsible scholarship. Otherwise, what you have isn't a scholarly work. It's an op-ed piece."
"I like op-ed pieces," opined Jay.
"So do I," I gritted out. "In context. Oooh, look! There's our food."
It wasn't, actually. It was the next table's food. But it provided an excellent distraction. Jay immediately turned around to look. As he did, the door to the street burst open, and three guys barreled through in a blast of cold air and masculine banter, the steam from their breath adding to the haze on the glass door. One pointed to the bar, while another shoved out of his coat. And the third…
Those traitorous flutters, those flutters that hadn't so much as quivered when I saw Jay at the bar, woke up from their nap and started dancing a Highland fling, complete with tartan and bagpipes.