From the introduction to Between the Sheets:
“Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.” So wrote Sylvia Plath on February 26, 1956. It was the night after she first met Ted Hughes at a college party. He had kissed her “bang smash on the mouth” and “ripped off ” her red hairband. She responded by
biting him on the cheek, drawing blood. Writing years later about Rebecca West, Fay Weldon endorsed Plath’s view of women, willingly lying down for, not with, male artists, when she described West’s acquiescence to her lover, H. G. Wells: “If young women lie down in the
path of this energy, what do they expect? They will be steamrollered!”
Not only are these women victims of “energy” and “violence,”but they have chosen to be. No one is forcing them to “lie down.” They are chasing their own victimhood when they chase after their male literary partners, for isn’t it true that Plath “chased” after Hughes (“whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room”)? They put up with their male partners’ refusal to recognise them publicly, as West did with Wells, even after she bore him his son. They put up with the worst kinds of infidelity: Elizabeth Smart’s partner,
George Barker, betrayed her with other women, refused to help support their four children, took money from her, and pushed her into alcoholic dependency. Hughes abandoned Plath for another woman, Assia Wevill, an act many have since viewed as contributing to her
suicide seven months later.
These victims endure lies and deceit and more: Martha Gellhorn was physically and mentally abused by Ernest Hemingway toward the end of their marriage; Jean Rhys was cast aside by Ford Madox Ford after their affair and succumbed to alcoholism; Anaïs Nin was financially bled dry by Henry Miller; H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was betrayed by her fiancé, Ezra Pound. Katherine Mansfield allied herself to a weaker partner, John Middleton Murry, out of illness and fear of death, while Simone de Beauvoir pimped her female lovers out to
Jean-Paul Sartre, who not only deceived her, but also left his papers in the care of another woman after he died. Such things are done to women who are victims, and that’s what makes them victims.
When these women are as much artists as their male partners, the problem only appears to be compounded. Then, they feel compelled to act out the role of literary handmaiden as well as victim. They spend laborious hours typing up the words of their writing partners, as Plath did for Hughes, or they manufacture special books of their beloved’s words, as Smart did for Barker. Sublimating their own literary desires in order to support the writing career of their male partners, they make victims of their art—and of themselves—in the process.
Or, at least, that’s what we’ve been told, over and over again. No one has ever been able to work out exactly why these women of genius, literary pioneers all of them, were attracted to men who only seemed to do them harm, or why, once the harm was proved, they
stayed with them. The only answer has been: they were victims. They lay down. They were steamrollered. It was their own fault.
The aim of this book is to show that the opposite of this story is true. It sets out to demonstrate that none of the women artists mentioned here were victims at all, but that they chose their own fates knowingly and without the taint of victimization; that they chose
such relationships in order to benefit their art and poetic consciousness. These women artists may have made a Faustian pact when they fell in love with their writing partners, but it was a pact freely chosen and only occasionally regretted in the dark watches of the night
many years later, when they were alone and momentarily doubting themselves.
The women featured here were all writers before they met their literary partners, and most of them had great ambitions for their writing from the very beginning. What is hard for us to understand now—in a time when women have the vote, can own property in
their own right, be heads of corporations, and the like—is that so many of them believed they needed a writing partner. These women didn’t believe they could do it alone—they really believed that they needed a partner in order to achieve their literary goals. “I must marry
a poet, it’s the only thing,” wrote a young Elizabeth Smart, long before she met Barker. “One would dance with him for what he might say,” wrote H.D. of Ezra Pound. And Pound was a terrible dancer. What we must try to understand is why they believed that such humiliation was worth it, that what they gained far outweighed what they lost—or surrendered.
• • • •
The idea for this book has its roots in two sources: one, appropriately enough, in personal experience. At the beginning of 2005, I began a relationship with a male writer. I had just had my first short story accepted for publication, after being short-listed in a national
short story competition. I had written a poor historical novel that I couldn’t get published, and I was wondering whether to start another book or try to make this one better. I didn’t chase my writer boyfriend: I had no plan, as Smart or Plath or Nin all had, from an early age, to marry a poet. We met at a publisher’s dinner; he took my number. Then, a few days later, no
longer able to wait, I called him and we arranged a date. On that first date, I learned that he had separated from his wife some months before and had two small children, and that both he and they lived very close to me. He was also dating about “five to six” other women. I made up my mind on that date not to see him again: too much emotional baggage, too little interest in committing himself to one person after the end of his marriage, too many other women in the picture.
And it would have stayed that way, had we not, halfway through the
date, begun to talk about writing. What made me stay in a relationship with a man who dismissed monogamy, was seeing other women, had a soon-to-be ex-wife and
very young children, and was emotionally shaky, relying on antidepressants and drinking heavily every day? What made me want to be with someone who didn’t want anyone to know that we were seeing each other, as it would upset his ex? What made me put up with
being denied in public, with being dropped at the last minute, then picked up again? What made me run round to his flat every time he called, with bags of wine and food, an extra expense that, on my freelancer’s salary, I could barely afford?
A female friend told me at the time that it was simple: I loved him. Yes, I did love him. But it wasn’t enough. What I was getting from this relationship was something I had never had before: a constant dialogue about writing, both his and mine. Someone who knew
about writing, whose first book was about to be published, was talking to me about my work, reading it, encouraging me, making me take it more seriously than I had taken it before. Someone who knew about writing thought I was a good writer—no, he thought I was a
really good writer. My self-esteem and my self-confidence—which should have been compromised and damaged by the secrecy of our relationship, by his refusal to be faithful, by the emotional demands from people in his life far more important to him than I was—were
in fact being reinforced and enhanced by this remarkable exchange. I had met male writers before, and I had male writer friends. We talked about writing, sometimes. But it was a far inferior kind of dialogue to the one I was having with my writer boyfriend.
Our relationship came to an end in the summer of 2006, after he’d been abroad for a month. I found his sudden coldness and refusal to talk on his return the last straw, so I ended it. A week later, calling him from holiday in Italy to find out what had really happened
between us, I found out he had met someone else while he was away. That was the reason for his coldness.
About a month after our relationship ended, I read a review by Andrew O’Hagan of Christopher Barker’s remarkable memoir of his parents, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, in the London Review of Books. His portrait of his father struck more than a few chords
with me: charming, intellectual, a highly promising writer, dandyish, and mercurial, Barker was also an alcoholic, depressive, sexually flexible, and incapable of fidelity to any woman, or any man. He took what he needed when he needed it and didn’t care what carnage he
wreaked in the process. It seemed like a portrait of the man I’d just left, in every respect. But Elizabeth Smart didn’t leave George Barker. I could understand, after my own experience, why she’d found him attractive in the first place (although without my own experience I
doubt I would have understood that at all). But why did she stay with him? Why did she go on to have four children with a man who abandoned her just before the birth of their first child to go driving across America with a male friend (and with whom he also had sex)? What made her forgive him, time after time after time? That was something I couldn’t understand. Yes, initially it smacked of victimhood. But if I didn’t see myself as a victim, and I certainly didn’t, why then should I see Elizabeth Smart as one?
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London, 1823
I couldn’t have known what it was. Not the first time. I wasn’t to blame though later I believed I was and for a long time after that, too. But it was the wood smashed him down onto stone. It was the chair that tipped and the basin that clattered out of my arms, like they had lives of their own. I didn’t make the blood bubble blackly from his burst tongue and his irises roll, or the dough splatter yellow and thick on the stone slabs.
I didn’t make my girls scream out. Yet I don’t blame him, I say that honestly: it’s not why I still want to leave him. Their fright wasn’t his fault: something else was pinning him down that day. Something we couldn’t see made him monstrous, thrashed his arms against my newly-scrubbed kitchen floor and bucked his legs out at the toppled chair. I might have moved with the heaviness of a woman three times my age but it wasn’t from fear, or reluctance to help. I had to consider, slowly, that was all: then a rush, sliding on the dough, and I sent a footstool flying that just missed Izzy who was at the back door, rattling at the doorknob and crying out to leave. But I wouldn’t let her go. A demon had my husband: it might take hold of all of us. Still I couldn’t let her go.
I used to think about demons a great deal. In Broughty Ferry, when I was growing up, we thought about them every Sunday. Kail-kirk to fill our bellies and cold church walls, on those bright, fierce days, to protect us from the sea outside. The sea lured men from the town: some never came back. Drink called to them, too, on a Saturday night, when the taverns bulged. The sea and the drink were demons both and only prayer and abstinence could save us. When I was young, I thought they were enough.
But demons are everywhere and prayer and abstinence are useless. It was natural a demon should have been here inside my husband that morning: a punishment for unwifely thoughts. Six years late, maybe, but here at last. Relief made me clumsy: I pushed Izzy too hard at her sister, and she fell, crying out as I tried to clear the way, still his head. I got my reward when he flattened my fingers twisting this way and that. If I could have made a fist out of my crushed hands I’d have struck him but Izzy’s wails called me back. The demon is no match for my girls.
My sister’s silver tea-urn crashing down; her copper pans, her wedding china, the mortar and pestle she brought back proudly from Pisa. I didn’t try to save them. Tiny, bloody darts splintered in his cheeks and my fingers flickered at his face because I didn’t know what to do. I know now, though, how much time I wasted. Telling my girls to stay, to run and fetch help, to stay after all. I waited for it to show me the way out, my instinct for escape, but it let me down for the second time. I sat beside him instead, as still as he was restless, as though by my stillness I could force him to be quiet.
When at last he was, it was little thanks to any action of mine. The demon left him as it had entered him, of its own accord, and the shaking stopped. I took a deep breath, then, and laid my palm on his chest, to feel for the heartbeat I knew I wouldn’t find.
*
The second time I’d found the courage to think about leaving; the second time I’d failed. Just as before, he persuaded me to stay: perhaps it’s as well. I’ve not thought about it until today. There have been many more fits these past four years, though, so maybe my wickedness is not to blame after all. Just the same, it’s nipping at my neck, the need to decide. Wanting it isn’t enough.
Because I am the expert in his disease, that is the problem. No-one knows the warning signs better. The torpor in his eyes just before the eyelids begin to flutter; the lolling of his head; the grey pallor of his skin. The bite-marks on the smooth little bar of wood I always carry in my pocket are an eager pupil’s good grades, but I didn’t earn my marks today. How often it comes on him in the mornings! I’ve never understood why, and no-one can tell me, not medical pamphlets or chapters in David’s books, or articles in journals that make a kind of sense, before slipping away. Watching for it is all I know to do.
When I first complained, my father sighed as though he’d anticipated this all along. It was only to be expected. ‘An older man’s jealousy of his young wife, that’s all. There’s thirty years between you, Bella,’ he said.
I’d already considered that. ‘He has ways that are not....he gets angry, for no reason....’ The fits hadn’t yet begun. My father was working at his ledger in our windowless little box-room: in a few days he’d be gone to London, although I didn’t know then that we were bound to follow him so soon after. It wasn’t the best time to speak to him, when he was working out his accounts, especially after all that he had lost. But it was rare for us to be alone now I had Kathy. I seemed always to have her in my arms and when I did, I wasn’t looking to speak to anyone else.
My father had the kindly tone of a fair man. ‘We’re all angry occasionally, Bella. He’s bound to get impatient with a growing family to keep and times being what they are...’ But I wanted escape, not fairness.
‘You’ve heard nothing, seen nothing, while you’ve been here? You think he is...as he should be?’ The tally of excuses just beginning.
‘David’s a good man, Bella. There’s no man I have known longer, or better.’
David was a good man. ‘He’s different from what he was; he has moods, I don’t understand them.’
My father scratched at his ledger. His room was cold with no June sun to warm it and petulance doesn’t keep the cold out. ‘Different from what you think he was, maybe.’ He chuckled at that, his head still not raised. ‘That’s what marriage is for. To find out. You are so young, you have a lot to learn.’ My father is a compassionate man, a good father. But he believes too many in the world are like him, when they are not, and he should know this better.
‘You know they called him Devil, in Broughty Ferry. They were scared of him.’
My father looked up at that: his clear brow and even features, tricked into a shocking,
rare frown and meant for me. My guilt and apology only muddied more the mess I was making. ‘Don’t whisper like that, Bella,’ he said, sounding worse than he looked, his impatience coulnd;t be surprising. ‘You of all people can’t be cowed. You! My Bella - the best of them all? No wonder he’s suspicious if you don’t speak up. You know better than to be scared of him.’
My father and my husband. Praise that jabs the way condemnation might. They’re not
alike but they are in cahoots, I think, sometimes. ‘I try, every day. I try to talk to him but it’s impossible. Sometimes I think...’
‘What? Come now, my girl. You’re a Baxter. We don’t hide away. Tell him what’s on your mind.’
I am not a coward.
‘I’ve tried, but it’s more than his work that keeps him from me...how can I make him hear me?’
‘I told you: it’s what marriage is about. Talk to him again.’
‘You make it sound so simple...I think he forgets who I am.’
‘How can he forget? Only if you don’t speak to him as a wife and an equal should. You weren’t brought up to think otherwise, Bella. I didn’t raise my girls to think they were lesser beings.’
‘I don’t mean he thinks I am lesser...he thinks I am not there. He doesn’t see me.’
He turned back to his ledger. A spoilt little girl: touch the grey curls, tug on the tweed
coat draped across his shoulders, confirm it. ‘Don’t let things fester between you,’ he carried on. ‘It’s bad for your marriage, Bella, and bad for you.’
Was I mad to marry him?
But I only whispered those last words to myself as I slid out of his study. Diabolical is a
word from the Greek, ‘diabolos’, meaning Devil. My father wouldn’t recognise the diabolical in anyone. I am different: I know the diabolical when I see it.
And I should have seen it this morning. I missed the signs.
Recrimination lures like those wicked sirens of the sea, makes me welcome the chance to punish myself for my carelessness. How best to effect it? What method to use this time? It’s good to feel guilty, but sinful, too. I was good this morning at breakfast. The moment he fell I swooped down onto the carpet behind him like a voluptuous grey swan, bolstered his head and shoulders and gripped his back with my hips and thighs as tea spattered patches on my skirt. I fixed on them while he shook and shuddered against me.
I concentrate now on my guilt even though it’s wrong and pour David some water once he’s calm again. I smile as I reach round his chest and I smile as I clasp my hands and wrench him up from the floor. Now, as I fix my shoulder under his arm and we shuffle out of the dining-room together, I am smiling still.
He’d warned that the cottage was ugly on the outside and too small on the inside, but I didn’t believe him until I saw it and prayed we’d walk on by and it wouldn’t be ours. But he stopped at our new beginning, with its poky front parlour and mean little dining-room at the back. The kitchen is the best part: its awkwardly shaped S makes it difficult for more than one adult person to be in it at a time. It’s hard to live so close by others: there was room for us growing up, more than we needed. And more possessions, never mind our vows of poverty. How we would complain about practice on my mother’s old harpsichord: to hear my girls making such a complaint one day! But that’s long gone, with our old house, and dreaming of new paper hangings and velvet chairs won’t help.
This cottage is deceptive, though: for all it’s so small, it must hold more paper than the great library of Alexandria ever did. Parchments, manuscripts, letters, leather-bound companions to this or that exhausted-looking volume are scattered on the floor of his bedroom, or balance on the mantle. Some piles reach the tip of the fireplace, others almost touch the ceiling. There’s no space for the man himself: even the bed is spread with his own papers, spidery black letters scored across white. He told me long ago to sleep with the girls in their room so they don’t come in here. Except last week, when Izzy cut some roses for him. Jammed into an old jug and balanced on a book on the window-sill, they’re turning brown and pulpy. They still make me smile though, and for her sake, I enjoy taking a kick at Hume and Locke before settling David carefully on the bed. But then Thomas Reid catches the edge of my toe and I squeal like a cat with its tail caught. I don’t cry: when my husband first cried in front of me it shocked me and I cried with him. It takes more than an old philosopher lying in wait to bring tears to my eyes now, though.
‘Be careful,’ he snaps, as I stumble and catch my cuff on his collar.
‘Oh - there’s a bruise here.’
‘Where?’ he panics.
‘At your temple, close to your eye.’ His long fingers quiver at the sore spot and he winces, so I bat them away as gently as possible and dab around the sooty edges, smears from the dining-room floor where he fell. He sulks like the boy he must have been once. ‘It’s only a little bump,’ he mutters.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I tell him, briskly. ‘These can do more harm sometimes, you know that. Worse than a broken bone.’ But I’m not paying proper attention: the slightest change in tone can upset him, and it does now. ‘Don’t speak to me like that. I’m not some cretin!’ He’s up on his elbows, now; I make a feeble attempt to restrain him. ‘David, I wasn’t – you need to lie still....’ Thirty years older he may be, but he’s still strong.
‘Leave me alone!’ he spits out the words. ‘Abandon me forever like I always knew you would. Whore! Slut! Where’s my wife? What have you done with her? I want my Bella! Give me back my wife!’ Spittle hangs from his lips as his eyes bulge and his eyes search for something to strike me with, as he’s done before. I step away but he grips me hard around the waist, stabs his thumb at my back. ‘You know what I can do!’
My friend, Mary, has written about monsters. About a yellow-skinned, yellow-eyed creature galvanised by an unseen power into mimicking the movements of a human being. What makes a monster? Mary’s never witnessed what I have. The monster a man becomes when reason deserts him and he thrashes about, insensible, on a stone floor. When nothing his wife says or does brings him back to himself. What mother might tell her daughter this on her wedding night - if I had had a mother to warn me on my wedding night? I would have listened to her. Wouldn’t I?
At last he leans back and closes his eyes: pale lashes and heavy, withered lids. Resentment can take a material form, like a piece of coal that warms and glows inside the body. It burns inside me when he is this way. The fit won’t kill him when it happens now and I wonder if that knowledge makes the glow burn brighter, makes me the wicked woman he tells me I am.
I try not to frown because that annoys him, too. He once said he loved my frown: not what I was expecting. To love my frown and not my smile? ‘Looking like you’re always right about everything,Bella,’ he’d said, then. Was that another sign? How many of them I must have ignored, misread. ‘I’m not a man,’ he sighs suddenly and sinks down against his pillows. ‘I’m no husband to you. You don’t want me. I can see it, I know.’ He wheezes a little and I pat his shoulder gently.
‘No more, now, David. Excitement makes you worse. Please lie still. I can’t get the rest of these clothes off you if you won’t be still.’
A faint smile shimmers on his lips. ‘You’re a good wife, I know you are.’
But he won’t charm me so easily. He finds me clumsy and uncaring more often, and says so. His tone this time, though, becomes melancholy, self-pitying as he continues, ‘I don’t earn enough to keep us all. I’ve failed in every way. Nothing I do is good enough. Nothing works.’
‘That’s not true. Don’t get upset, you only make it harder for yourself.’
‘I’m sorry, Bella. Forgive me. You should leave me; take the girls. You’d do better without me.’
How do I leave you now?
These stilting whispers come always after a fit. His vulnerability snakes round, squeezes the treachery out of me to leave nothing behind except how can you leave him now? His hands are stretched out, the veins standing up thick and black and I wonder, suddenly, about the colour of his blood.
‘Don’t speak, there’s something...’
‘What are you doing? What’s this?’
‘Your hand is scratched, torn, it looks bad. I need to bandage it...’
‘It’s not a catastrophe, woman. It’s not a twisted thumb. I can still write! That’s all that matters.’
‘You need to rest it, trust me, please.’
He mutters more protests but lies back all the same. Uneven bones jut through his shirt. I wind calico round his wrist and wonder ifpain is a feeling or a sensation; which I will cause him, which he causes me. I tuck in the loose ends of the calico and place his wrist against his chest. ‘I have so much to do,’ he grumbles. ‘You’ll have to write the paper up for me...’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t have time to copy down everything you dictate for a week, David. The house needs me.’
He reaches for my waist with his good hand again but friendlier this time, and pleads, ‘Maybe I was lucky this time. Is it getting worse? Did it last longer than usual?’
I shrug off his questions and his grasp, turn away to put the calico back on the dresser. ‘No, not so long. But you know you shouldn’t talk.’ He persists, ‘Did I hurt you, Bella? I didn’t hurt you, did I?’
‘No, no, not at all. I’m fine.’
‘And did I say anything...’
‘Nothing, nothing at all. Shhh. You have to rest now.’
‘But I’ve got things to do. Important things...my paper...my lecture for the Society...’
‘Don’t worry about your work. You must sleep. I’ll look after everything.’
‘But don’t touch anything, not in here, I don’t want you in here. I’ve told you that before but you never listen to me, I know you come in here when my back is turned...’
He’s excited again: I pull up the blankets, reign him in.
‘Shhhh, please, David. Go to sleep.’
‘You never listen to me. You stay out of here...’
‘Stop it, now. Really, please. You need to rest.’
To my surprise, he gives in at this and shuts his eyes once more. For now, his shame and my own inability to offer anything more than a few soothing words and some liniment to rub his feet, nearly blue, prick something inside me at last. Not my heart. Not that. I lighten my pressure after a while and wait for him to smile, complain as usual that I tickle. But it’s only when I stop and cover those long, white toes that look artful enough to hold a brush or a pen that I realise he is asleep.
And that I am alone.
*
Our wedding day, drear and dreich: the consistency of shame. My sister’s cold fingers trembling at my neck, her white velvet ribbon knotted too tight, to be unpicked and redone once she’d gone. My mother’s amber thistle brooch glittered on my collar, flame-shaped and just as fiery, making me sucked the breath in between my teeth as I pinned it. I held my head high, though, and didn’t waver. Christy had never hit me before and I could still feel the justice of it spread hot and sharp on my cheek. The last night in my father’s house alone in my room, full of thoughts of what I’d done, was about to do, just as my sister intended.
Our father made the peace between us as always, wanting the world only to get along. The gift of ribbon was her apology: my gift was to wear it but I didn’t apologise. Father thought it best not to bring Robbie home for a ceremony without friends, and not held in our church. What need did I have, I thought, for family or friends or a faith that couldn’t accept me?
He was standing on the town hall steps, shorter for being round-shouldered, but clever and commanding in his black coat: how I like to remember him. People bowled away from him that day like loose beads from snapped thread, but he acknowledged neither their fear nor their lack of manners. From the carriage I watched, made happiest when the wind blew open his coat and revealed new trousers, tucked into new boots. He wasn’t a man whose thoughts ran to fashion: my distinguished husband-to-be, whom they all called ‘Devil’, had made a special effort. When I stepped down and his fingers gripped mine, I cleaved to what those little people feared.
Too warm in my wool coat and gloves: sweat trickled along my spine as we stood in front of the nervous, stumbling town clerk and spoke our vows. But before the heat could claim me, we were outside in the rain and back at my father’s for the toast, a party of four, half of us gleeful, half of us troubled. Christy, tearful and forgiving after too much sherry, hugged me on the doorstep for promises to see her soon.
Even the rain, pattering on the trunks and our hats, couldn’t cause regret. I had no presents but I had what I wanted. Across the Tay to Newburgh that evening we travelled lightly, with few words between us, our happiness felt rather than spoken. And yet, when we arrived, and I stepped across the threshold of my new home to see the portrait of Margaret still hanging in the hallway, I wondered for the first time if I’d done the right thing in marrying her husband.
From The Picnic:
Smell the salt in the air.
Sadie likes it because she’s not used to living by the sea. Every evening after she picks her way over wet cobbles and struggles against the East Coast wind, she smells it on her hair and her coat and it reminds her of some pleasurable thing that might be a memory or a dream of day trips to the seaside when she was little.
So she likes standing here, just like this, across the road from the old entrance walls of the University, which might have been a memory or a dream too, only she knew on the day she came for her interview what they would look like. She knew what was going to appear on the approach road with its fields high on one side and its sand slipping down to the sea on the other, because she had been on that road once before. A day trip many years ago that included a visit to a ruined castle and an anxious choice of two teashops, Pepita’s or Juanita’s, that her mother, Lily, was too distracted to decide upon. The tearooms are gone so it might have been a dream, but the ruined castle is still here and so it is a memory.
And as Sadie stands here, deliberating between memories and dreams which is partly because it’s still early in the morning and she’s feeling dozy, the wind picks up and pulls her briefcase, light with only a few essays and a notebook inside, right up behind her. Her thin grey coat, fine for a West Coast winter but no use here, she can’t afford to replace it, she’s at the bottom of the lecturer’s pay scale and she’s only had one month’s salary so far, isn’t keeping her warm. So she scowls at the morning in spite of the pleasure of the salty air.
Oh I wish I’d just gone to bed when I started to feel tired that stupid fucking essay drives me mad oh and thank you very much just splash me why don’t you why the hell students need bloody cars when there’s only about three streets
and at the cold wind that is making her shiver and bad-tempered even before the day has properly started that second tutorial haven’t enough have I enough
and she curses the cobbles that hamper her progress across the street and darken her mood even more just the same old thing just exactly what it was before think they can talk to you any way they bloody well like just because they’ve been here for ever bet he doesn’t even think he’s done anything wrong “Yes there will be a permanent post but you won’t get it this is more of a teaching post than a research post is why you got it” it was that Oxbridge arse wanted him couldn’t have taught a fucking cat to drink milk but then he was researching the English Channel in Victorian poetry and we all know how important that is don’t we?
The memory of yesterday morning will not go away. Sadie has been here, in her first proper academic post, for exactly a day over six weeks. Yesterday, a senior member of the department, a professor, had asked to meet with her, as the department’s latest appointee. He was anxious to tell her, in a polite tone of voice, that he had not selected her for the post. Others had done that. He had preferred someone else. And he wanted to tell her too that if she worked hard and made friends, she would get a good reference when she left.
I’ve been through all this before I’m not going through this again.
And now it moves suddenly, the anger from yesterday that she hasn’t quite got over yet, and lights instead upon something else, something that is much less important but that matters to her all the same. Sadie bends her head in towards the wind but it is no use. She will have to give up trying to keep her head down in the hope that the wind will not ruin her hair. It is a lately acquired thing, her vanity; she never paid much attention to her appearance, not until the end of her teens anyway. And although she cannot really recall what made it so important, all of a sudden, Sadie knows now, at twenty-six, that she has a fine but fragile sense of how she wants to appear in front of the world. So the wind wins easily and her defeat has a more serious impact than it should have; it angers her even more than the memory of ill-judged remarks by some obsolete professor the day before.
But she has no more time for thoughts like these, not now, not when she’s lifting the latch on the gate and letting herself in by the back door of the departmental building, creaking open that old, white wooden door. Sadie has a full day ahead of her; she needs time to prepare. And then, when she peers in, as gloomy as the basement corridor is, she can just make out the awkward, shifting shape of a student who is standing at the other end of it, right outside her office door.
Oh, he is waiting for her! He doesn’t know how busy her day is going to be, that she needs time by herself. He believes he can see her at any time and so he is waiting, expecting and wanting her attention before she’s even had time to remove her coat or sort out her hair. And Sadie will have to stifle that impulse to tell him to go away, as her feet carry her too soon, too soon to her office door. To tell him to go now, straightaway, that he can come back during office hours when she is ready and calmed and knows what to say. To make him disappear.
“Dr Mathieson – “
“Benedict, isn’t it?”
Sadie’s key is in the briefcase and she has to set it down on the floor to open it without everything tumbling out and the student doesn’t move out of her way but lets her bend down in front of him. Which riles her more and compromises her too, because if she were not Dr Sadie Mathieson but the Obsolete Professor of the day before, she knows the student would have stepped back in a deferential manner and given her room.
“Yeah, it’s about the essay – “
“I haven’t really got time to talk about it right now –“
The key is in the lock and the door is opened and she can escape the dark, stuffy hallway into a big, bright room with its high-up windows that look out to the sea. Sadie puts her briefcase on her desk with what she hopes is authority and turns away from him as she starts to unbutton her coat.
“I just wanted to ask about an extension, I’ve had some family stuff going on at home, you know? So I haven’t really had the time – “
She turns back and he scratches his head as he tells what is probably a lie
Scratching your head, not looking you straight in the eye, playing with your hair all signs of evasion or lying on tv somewhere one of those daytime programmes can it be that fucking obvious.
but Sadie doesn’t care. She just wants rid of him. She wants to have the room to herself so whatever it takes to get him to leave is what she will say.
“That’s fine, take an extra day. Any more than that and you lose 5 per cent, but I’ll let you have one more day.”
“Oh that’s great, Dr Mathieson, thanks, thanks a lot…”
It works and now he’s gone. To tell the others in the class that the way to a penalty-free essay extension from Dr Sadie Mathieson is to turn up first thing in the morning when she’s too tired to argue. And her need to be alone will be taken for weakness or inexperience or both and yes, she may regret it later. But, for now, she has the room to herself. And so she picks up the kettle and fills it at the sink in the corner of the room as she does every morning as soon as she arrives, and puts a teabag in the single mug and opens up a can of Marvel.
Oh, for a ‘do not disturb’ sign! For now that Sadie has been disturbed so early, she is tense, expecting the next knock at the door. And she has too much to do, there is a tutorial, then a booked appointment with a student, then another tutorial and another one. And she feels suddenly tired, the way she does just before she gives a lecture, that stage-struck feeling that should energise her with I’m too scared to but instead deadens her nerves with I haven’t the energy to.And Sadie thinks how preferable it would be to go to the library and read for a while where no-one can find her.
Why can’t they stick to fucking office hours, that’s what they’re for if they have to come in here with their bloody problems
But she knows she may be the only one who sees it this way. She can’t be too sure of that, though. She hasn’t been here long enough yet to find out how her colleagues what a word, what a fucking false word ‘colleagues’ who the hell am I kidding view it all, put up with it, sort it to suit themselves. There is so much she has yet to find out but she knows that she will have to find a way to keep her distance, preserve her space, if she is going to make a success of this post. She cannot leave it open for just anybody to walk right in, uninvited, unarranged, no, no, that would not do. That would not do.
And it is just then, as the kettle clicks off and Sadie sighs and pours the hot water over the tea bag, idly watching the brown deepen inside the cheap mug she purchased at the last minute in the supermarket the day after she arrived, that she is intruded upon for a second time. The phone on the desk rings and Sadie turns round to stare at it. She doesn’t want to answer it. She is still in a bad mood, she hasn’t even taken a sip of her tea yet and she wants to be alone but maybe she should answer it, just in case, and so she crosses the room, puts her mug on the desk and lifts the receiver. And as soon as she does, she hears that bright, sharp voice:
“Sadie!”