7

BOSTON, UNITED STATES

He scheduled his meetings with Simone so she could be the last appointment of his day. Today, he had missed looking at her as she spoke, seeing how expressive she was when she was confident about what she was saying, loosening the nervousness she seemed cloaked in at the beginning of every meeting. Even with just her voice to go by he could, through the nuances, imagine her face, how she looked upwards when she was thinking and frowned when she was listening.

His meetings with doctoral students had always been structured the same way. He would start by asking them about their project: ‘What is your central argument?’ This required them to think more deeply and assisted them in understanding their arguments more thoroughly than by just writing them down. But he also had the habit at the end of their meetings of asking his students about what they were reading, knowing the question forced them to read something other than the materials they needed for their research.

It gave him a chance to talk with these bright, young students about matters beyond their studies - about life, love, ethics, duty, values and politics. John had always been a prolific reader, an only child who wasn’t naturally drawn to sport - more of a loner than a team player - and he prided himself that it was rare that his students would talk about a book that he had not read. He had even introduced a ‘Law and Literature’ course over the summer semester, much to the amusement of his colleagues but to the delight of the students. It always filled quickly with a long waiting list.

He liked his discussions about literature with Simone best of all. He understood her better by her reaction to what she had been reading. He could see her interest in recognising right from wrong, in social justice.

It was just like Simone to pick Remains of the Day, he smiled to himself, a book that raised questions of sacrifice for work, of exploitation of the lowest classes and too much deference to the upper ones. But at its heart it is a love story, albeit a doomed one. Not of a love unrequited but one which failed due to time, circumstance and emotional limitation. Stevens’s role as butler, as a servant, made it impossible for him to have a fulfilling emotional life. Inevitably, he could not act upon how he felt about Miss Kenton.

But, John pondered, what if you do get the person you want? What if you do have love in your life and then you lose it? Had Stevens been able to woo Miss Kenton, it would have been no guarantee of happiness.

Charmaine had fascinated him when they met at a dinner for Noel Phillips, an old friend who had become a local political figure. Like most fateful meetings, it almost didn’t take place. The tragedy of losing Lucy had left him wrecked. Louise was visiting her parents and had taken Jessica with her. He felt uneasy about his ability to function socially, had lost his confidence among people, but his loyalty to Noel and the kind intent of his friend’s personal invitation made John feel obliged to attend. He had planned to go only to see Noel, eat something and leave as quickly and as quietly as he could.

John had been seated next to an empty chair and was calculating how long it would be before he could escape when Charmaine Edgeworth walked in and sat down beside him. It is the worst of cliches to say that his heart skipped a beat. It didn’t really skip a beat, so much as beat harder, reminding him that he had one. Her face, the softness of her skin, her bright, bright smile, her sweet, chocolate dark eyes, the tantalising curves under her red dress, they all drew him in. She melted into his heart that first night.

But he realised now that he had seen what he had wanted to see. He had been so low, so paralysed with his grief, so engulfed with thoughts of falling asleep and never, never waking. No wonder he had created something to believe in, someone to save him. And why wouldn’t he have hoped to find it in Charmaine? He could not have known then that beauty could mask such coldness. She was so much more sophisticated than Louise but Charmaine brought with her vanity, materialism and deceit.

When he had discovered the birth control tablets while he had been innocently searching her bedside drawer for pain killers he felt like a fool. Their conversations about her wish to give him a child, and the disappointment he felt with each failure over the previous years were a farce.

Charmaine, unaware of what he had discovered, continued for a while - ‘We really should go to Aspen this winter. It might be the last that it is just the two of us’, ‘Let’s look at baby clothes; they are so adorable’, ‘Madelaine, what a lovely name for a little girl’ - and he could not say anything to her, did not accuse her but just looked at her, disgusted, as she continued the charade.

Eventually his stoniness seeped into her. She understood that he had unmasked her and they never mentioned children again. Without the promise of such a future, one of hope, and with what he knew of her deception, he began to fall out of love. Since then he had been falling back into the abyss that she had pulled him from.

John put on his coat and tied his scarf tightly around his neck. His in-tray was overflowing with letters, tasks, requests that he needed to attend to but it all seemed overwhelming.