‘I hear a rumour,’ Tom Bowen said, as he pushed back from his desk and returned the thick file to me, ‘that you’re a very fine cook.’
This was scarcely the response I’d been expecting from my new tutor to the detailed outline of my dissertation proposal. But then, a great deal about the University of the West Midlands had been surprising. The location, for a start. True, I hadn’t been hoping for the architectural merit and charming location of an Oxbridge college. But my memories of Leeds, where I’d taken my first degree some fifteen years ago, hadn’t quite prepared me for this university. The department in which I was based was housed in what looked like a converted factory – no, not a chic eighties warehouse conversion involving recycled bricks, but a sixties job, with fading coloured panels, uniformly ill-fitting windows and stained concrete. It nestled between an architecturally preferable factory pumping out phenol into the atmosphere as if there were no such thing as pollution control, and a first-division soccer stadium. Such academic peace as the bare corridors allowed was shattered every time West Bromwich Albion scored a goal. I knew from bitter experience that further education – as exemplified by William Murdock College – was underfunded to the point of desperation. But I’d heard that higher education was better off. Even if this were true, it didn’t apply to UWM. Not this part of the university, anyway. This was clearly a Cinderella, horribly similar to poor William Murdock in its design, tatty equipment, overlarge classes and underfunded library. But as at William Murdock, there were bonuses. I’d expected the staff to be like the remote gods of my undergraduate days, preferring on the whole not to have too much to do with students. These turned out to be hard-working career teachers. True, some had fancy titles. Like Bowen, for example. Assistant Dean of this faculty, and my tutor. On whom my future – or, more specifically, the future of my M.Ed. dissertation – depended.
‘Is it OK? The dissertation?’ I asked. ‘Really? You see, I did all that work with the city-wide computer-based education project a couple of years ago, but the conclusions other people have come to are different from mine … And there’s a problem with my research methods—’
‘That’s what a review of literature should show up. Didn’t Anna Whatshername tell you that?’
Anna Wade had been my original tutor, until she’d started on her maternity leave. Bowen had inherited me, with, I presume, ill grace. And I suppose it was quite late in the course for him to have to take on someone else.
‘Yes. And I’d already outlined some of my problems in the research proposal. There are some ethical problems too—’
‘Don’t worry about that. Work your way through them, then. So you’ll have a proper basis for your dissertation. You’ve got plenty of time, after all. You don’t have to submit for another year at least. And then you can get an extension if you need it. I’ll see you for your next session – let’s see – in February.’
February! And this was November! ‘But I need to see you before that! I told you I had to submit the dissertation in July.’
‘Oh, come off it! No one submits in July. Oh, I know it says you do in the regulations, but no one takes any notice of them. Everyone asks for an extension. Everyone.’
‘But I don’t want an extension. I want to do the course in a single year. I know once I’m back on the William Murdock treadmill, I won’t have time for anything extra.’
‘To hear you teachers talk you’d think no one else ever did any work.’
Had I sounded as if I was whinging? I hadn’t meant to. But I did want to drive home to him the urgency of the situation. ‘Dr Bowen—’
‘Come on, Sophie, you clearly know more about the subject than I do. And I’d say you can do joined up writing. I’m sure you can do joined up brainwork too. Just get on with it: you’ll be OK. I’ll see you in February.’
I shook my head. What sort of tutor was this, who couldn’t make time to see his tutee? Who couldn’t even remember a colleague’s name? ‘I need to see you before then. As soon as the new term starts.’ To my fury, my chest started to tighten: the last thing I wanted was to wheeze all over the man, so I grabbed my asthma spray and had a quick, single burst. Ideally it should be two, but I didn’t want to invite him to get all sympathetic – and forgetful.
‘OK. When the new term starts.’ He scribbled a note on a scrap of paper.
I had a nasty suspicion he was the sort of man who’d promise something just to shut one up. I’d have to keep on at him until we had a firm date.
‘Now, about your cooking – you did the catering for a party I went to the other day. Right?’
‘They were friends of mine. I helped them out.’ I’d not socialised at the party, so I hadn’t seen him there. Not that I wouldn’t have been welcome. Instead I’d retired – with the hosts’ permission – to listen to the Radio Four cricket commentators bringing Mike’s century to life in their spare room. Where my presence had, incidentally, embarrassed a pair of would-be bonkers for whom the terms maiden over and Test Match might have had another meaning.
‘But money changed hands. Heavens, woman, I’m not about to shop you to the tax man. I want you to cook a meal for me!’
Bowen looked like a man who cared for his food. Possibly rather too much, given his reddening complexion and the way his stomach overflowed his trousers. Though that could have been too much beer, too little exercise. Whatever it was, he must have been carrying at least two stone he didn’t need, risky for a man in his late-ish forties.
‘I don’t want to mess up my work schedules,’ I said. Even to my ears, I sounded horribly prissy.
‘Haven’t I just told you you’re well ahead of the game!’ He produced a Father Christmas smile. ‘And I know you post grads are always looking for ways of augmenting your income – that’s why I put that teaching your way. I mean, the course fees don’t come cheap, and I presume the mortgage and other bills don’t just go away. Come on, Sophie: if you can produce food for a hundred of that quality, I’d like to see what you can do for an intimate dinner. For twenty, say.’
Intimate! And presumably he had a dining table big enough to seat them, and a room big enough for the said table. He was on something bigger than a further education lecturer’s salary, then.
‘I can see you’re the sort of woman who likes a challenge,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’d say you were busy working out a menu right now.’
A hit. A palpable hit. I pushed away projects for individual portions of poached salmon and fished out my diary. ‘When were you planning this feast?’ I almost hoped for a date I couldn’t manage. Goodness knows why. Provided he didn’t want fiddly canapés to welcome his guests, a dinner party wasn’t a major problem and I could certainly do with the money. I’d have preferred twelve to twenty, especially as I hadn’t seen his kitchen, and I didn’t know how far I’d have to ferry stuff from my house in Harborne.
He named a Friday a couple of weeks away. My diary was singularly blank on the day on question, and the one before. It should be a doddle. A profitable doddle.
‘I’d better let you have some sample menus and a scale of charges,’ I said.
He looked briefly taken aback. He didn’t assume I was doing this for love, did he? And I wasn’t happy with his smile. ‘I guess there’ll be a discount, won’t there? I mean, we’re both teachers.’
If not quite the same kind of teacher. Oh, of course he’d get a discount – when I’d jacked up the prices first. I smiled duplicitously back.
The walk back to the post-graduate work-room – yes, despite the obvious financial pressures on the university, they’d set aside a room for us furnished with filing drawers and computers – was marred by all sorts of unpleasant suspicions. Surely the man wasn’t suggesting that my grade could be affected by what I’d thought of as a business deal? And wasn’t it rather dodgy of him to have asked a student of his anyway? I’d never have approached any of my students in that way, even in the remote event that one had been in a position to do anything for me. But perhaps, I told myself, in the adult world of HE things were different. After all, none of us was a minor, in need of protection from predatory grown-ups. And if things like that hadn’t happened at Leeds, well, maybe it was because there was a whole new university climate these days – and I wasn’t thinking of the phenol which was especially pungent today. In a few moments I was due at a seminar – and it wouldn’t be the intimate eight or ten of my undergraduate days. Twenty-five, more like, crammed into a room with inadequate ventilation for so many, broken blinds, and an overhead projector with a cracked lens. Home from home for ex-William Murdock students, then, one or two of whom I bumped into from time to time. They were clearly bemused that such an elderly person as me should be creeping round. But there were plenty of other people whom they probably saw as wrinklies here – people topping up their teaching qualifications, or students who’d done access courses in their thirties and forties and were now doing their first degrees. Not that I was a wrinkly. Thirty-seven was no age, I told myself as I slogged up the stairs. Not if I eschewed the lifts, got out my bike, and reminded myself about jogging again. Somehow, without Mike to urge me on, I’d lost motivation. I’d better find it again, pretty fast. When at last we were reunited, he’d be in peak condition and nicely sun-tanned: I might have to turn up pale – there was no way I’d use a tanning bed – but at least I should be sleek too. And maybe the profits from Bowen’s dinner party would fund some of that expensive wrinkle-prevention cream I’d seen the other day … Imagine my coming to this!
I dumped my stuff in my lockable drawer – we’d all been given one though most people left stuff lying around on a wide shelf which was supposed to constitute our work stations. I’d put too much effort into the work to want to mislay it. And I always feared losing what I didn’t use. Like my leg muscles, come to think of it.
As I left the seminar room after the class, I fell into step with Carla, the lecturer who’d been leading the group. She’d worked very hard with us. We were all experienced teachers but you would never have guessed from the level of participation. Perhaps they were all on something? Not speed, though.
As we split up to go our separate ways, she said, ‘Thanks for your contribution, er …’
‘Sophie,’ I said. ‘Sophie Rivers.’
‘Of course. I get more and more hopeless with names the older I get.’
She might have been in her early fifties. It was difficult to tell with her short-cropped red hair and skin to die for. But her bright, brown eyes twinkled over the half-moon glasses, a style that always signalled middle years.
My contributions had been less hostile than those of the other main participant. This was a tall, thin man, probably thirty-five or so, who thought that a beard that bristled with contempt made up for a follicly challenged cranium. He was actually quite good-looking, if you liked men with bones very near the surface of their faces and a blue intensity about the eyes. Pity his teeth hadn’t seen an orthodontist when he was younger. He was of the school of thought which considered that a question should be less concerned with eliciting an answer than with showing off the learning of the questioner. He’d given Carla a tedious time this morning.
Carla and I both seemed to be heading for the refectory. Although there was an area reserved for staff, this was closed more often than not, so we saw quite a lot of them slumming with us.
We both asked for decaf, and she reached for the biscuits and choc bars. She took a couple, looking at me.
‘No, thanks. They’re my favourite but—’ I hesitated. I was about to go into prig mode again. ‘They’ve been taken over by that firm involved in the Third World baby-milk scandal. I’m on this one-woman campaign to bankrupt them.’
She put them both back. ‘You’d better tell me about this,’ she said, paying for my coffee too and heading for a table.
It was a story she could have read in any of the quality broadsheets. A major Swiss company had broken World Health Organisation guidelines on exporting baby-milk to people who hadn’t the literacy or the clean water supplies or the sterilising facilities essential for bottle-feeding. Instead of home-grown mother’s milk, babies were getting expensive doses of bacteria. I’d seen the results first-hand, in a hospital funded by my cousin Andy in Africa. I’d done a stint or two out there in the past during some of the long summer holidays.
‘Andy Rivers?’ she repeated. ‘The pop star? But you seem to be such a decent woman! Oops!’
‘Andy’s decent too,’ I said. ‘Don’t believe everything you see in the red-topped tabloids. He’s become a roving ambassador for UNICEF. And he’s set up a trust fund for this hospital of his, which takes a huge amount of his income.’
‘Which is enormous,’ Carla reminded me. ‘Squandered millions on booze and drugs and—’
‘That was then. He hit success too young. OK, he did all the stupid things kids do when they’ve got too much money and too little self-discipline. But he’s reformed.’
‘That’s what they all say!’
‘That’s what I know. He lives a remarkably normal, indeed frugal, life and—’
‘“Frugal”?’ she persisted.
‘And–’ Oh dear, if I’d been priggish before, what was I now? ‘–he’s recently married a headmistress.’
And, oddly, that worked. I wonder how she’d have reacted if I’d announced something I’d yet to announce to Andy himself – that he was the father of my son. Andy was Stephan’s dad. He’d been out of his skull on a cocktail of drugs, and raped me when we were both teenagers. I’d kept my pregnancy secret – Leeds was a long way from my home – and had my son adopted. If he was still too scared to tell his parents about me, I was still too anxious to tell Andy about him.
Carla drained her cup, saying apologetically, ‘There, I spend all my life teaching students not to believe what the media say, and I’ve gone and believed something myself.’
‘A lot of people have.’ Including, in all probability, Steph. ‘Anyway, he’s truly Mr Squeaky-Clean, these days.’ Which might make him even less attractive to Steph, come to think of it. ‘Another coffee?’
‘No, thanks. They say that decaf’s worse for you than the real stuff – Alzheimer’s and all that. And the one thing I’m really scared of is losing it like that. I mean, aphasia’s bad enough. But imagine your mind packing up altogether. Ugh. Horrible. It’s not the dying frightens me, it’s the soggy brain before you go. Losing your identity, your knowledge of who you are.’
Which was unanswerable, particularly as it sounded a very personal fear. Had someone close to her gone that way? I gave her a look that was meant to tell her I’d listen if she wanted to talk, but she smiled slightly, shook her head as if to clear away dark thoughts and started to gather her things together. But she stopped, and leant towards me. ‘Now: how’s that assignment of yours going? Any problems so far …?’