Girl Unknown(20)

As I free-wheeled past the water tower, and the sports centre, I saw the stirrings of a student demonstration. I cycled past it, locked my bike, walked up the steps to the Arts building and went to my office. I turned on my computer and scanned my inbox. A slew of emails confronted me, including a number of questions from Administration, Admissions and the student council. After I had responded as efficiently as possible, but before I had tackled my teaching preparation, I went to the common room for coffee. I needed the jolt. Alan was there with another colleague of ours, John McCormack, the two of them sitting in the corner, sipping tea and chatting.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Setting the world to rights?’

‘What else?’ McCormack said.

He was four or five years younger than me: prolific, brilliant, with an international profile to envy. In history circles his books on the belle époque and the poets of the Russian Revolution were considered sexy, if anything in history can be considered such. Rather than academic publishers, he had commercial publishing deals. He had an agent, and his books were shortlisted for prizes where they competed with other non-historical titles. As a historian, he was a rising star, as another colleague put it.

‘Join us,’ Alan said, and I sat. ‘John was just telling me about the conference at Birkbeck later this month.’

‘Will you make it?’ McCormack asked.

I told them I hadn’t planned on it this year. McCormack mentioned some of the presenters at the conference and how it was going to be a very full, but fulfilling weekend. In many ways, McCormack was everything I was not – we were both ambitious, but in different ways: he blazed trails where I dug ditches. I liked the dirty work, so to speak, and my pedagogic focus was, to the best of my abilities, student-focused; I don’t know how important McCormack considered the students in his overall plan – teaching, to him, was a necessary evil, something he was obliged to do so that he could do what he really wanted, which was to write those critically acclaimed books. I had been asked the previous year to take on some of his teaching so that he had more time to focus on his research. I didn’t mind. Neither did I begrudge McCormack his success – but I will admit to wondering about his professional integrity.

Those were the kind of things I worried about at the time.

We talked more about the conference before Alan stood up. ‘I’m afraid I have a meeting. Duty calls,’ he said, and bade us farewell.

McCormack brought up the dean’s suggestion for a week-long festival of teaching and learning. ‘For whose benefit?’ he wanted to know.

‘Our students could get a lot out of it,’ I said, but McCormack detailed how he thought it could end up only as more work for us, thereby swamping us in greater administrative duties.

‘By the way,’ he said, in a confidential whisper, ‘I thought you might prefer it to come from someone you know rather than anyone else, but a colleague told me she saw you having a drink with one of the students. She did say it looked like a compromisingly intimate encounter.’

‘Who saw me?’

‘It’s not important who saw you, David, it’s that you were seen.’

I lowered my voice. ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’

‘She only wanted some advice.’

He smiled as if to say: That’s what your office is for, not the pub. ‘I suppose one needs to be careful these days,’ he said.

I felt my temper simmering.

‘It’s best I told you. You know these things can spread if allowed to … escalate.’ He stood up and tapped his newspaper on the table. ‘I’d better go.’

I tried not to let what McCormack had said bother me, but as I got up and left the common room without the coffee I had come in for, I wondered which colleague had seen me and Zo?. Did people have to worry about this kind of thing in other jobs? The thought made me ponder my life in academia: how might I have fared in what people call the real world? I used to balk at the description of the university as an ivory tower. The older I got, though, the more I wondered. I once heard a visiting poet say hello to Alan as we met in one of the warren-like corridors in the Arts building. ‘You’re still here?’ the poet said to Alan warmly.

‘Me? I’m a lifer,’ he replied, with a broad smile directed at me as if to say, And so are you.

The thought of being institutionalized, even by a university, genuinely frightened me. It seemed to me that I spent more and more time in meetings rather than researching my own books or, God forbid, teaching the students.

When I got to my postbox, I was glad to see it was there – a discreet letter, unassuming, aside from ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL’ printed on the envelope, which was nestled next to the UCD magazine and other anonymous-looking material. I swept up the lot, lodging the letter in my jacket pocket, and walked back towards my office, a shot of panic pulsing through my veins. I hurried along, imagining the possible content of the letter, playing a variety of scenarios in my head. As I pushed through the swinging doors and around the corner on the second floor, there she was, waiting for me, leaning against the wall, the cords of her pink earphones trailing over her shoulders and into the phone she was holding, one foot tapping to whatever she was listening to.

‘Hello,’ she said too loudly, struggling to remove the earphones. ‘I wanted to ask you about the essay.’