‘So are you going to tell me precisely what the problem you have with me is?’
No knock. No warning. No – do you have a moment. Just Anna standing in his office, face fuming.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I was wondering, professor, if you were going to have the decency to tell me to my face precisely what I have done wrong?’
Max was temporarily struck dumb.
‘No?’ She had widened her eyes – a ripple of lines on her forehead as her brows stayed high. Furious.
Oh right. The email.
‘Look, Anna. If you’re unhappy about the email, I can talk to you later about that. It’s just I’m running late…’
‘And funny how you are always running late. Every time, every single Wednesday for as long as I can remember when I have been trying my very best to make a fresh start and a good impression here. Putting in God knows how many extra hours to try to make a real go of this. Looking to you – my supposed mentor – for some support. Some feedback. Some small encouragement. And not only do I get none of those things but I get in this morning to a one sentence email bumping me to another mentor. To Frederick fecking Montague. And we both know precisely what that means.’
‘Frederick is a fine professor. And a respected colleague...’
‘And two years off retirement. With no influence, no ambition, no interests in the politics of this place, which we all know is everything these days – and absolutely no interest in my future. Which is clearly something you have in common.’
‘I think that’s enough, Anna.’
‘Well for your information, I have only just begun. I’m taking this straight to HR, Professor Dance. You are not going to get away with this.’
And now Max felt the blood drain from his face. H fucking R.
‘Look Anna. I transferred you to Professor Montague’s team precisely because I have a real interest in your future here. I just felt I was not the best person to take forward the enormous effort and enthusiasm you have shown already for this new role. My other responsibilities make it difficult, at this time, to give you the time you clearly want and need. I’m not the right person. The right mentor. Professor Montague has more time.’
‘And why couldn’t you have at least discussed it with me?’
Max took a deep breath. He looked at Anna and for a split second considered saying it out loud.
‘Anna. Can I ask you to just give me some time on this? Before you take it to HR. To allow me to properly explain myself.’
She looked at him intently – no sign of calming down at all.
‘Can we meet back here, Anna? One o’clock?’
She looked away towards the window and then back at him – eyes still fuming.
‘I will not be fobbed off. I may have come from what you all sneer at as a former poly but I am a good lecturer.’
Shit. So that was what she thought.
‘I will not have my efforts and ambitions here compromised just because of sexist, cliquey, old-school—’
‘I think that’s quite enough, Anna.’
And only now did she finally flush just a little bit.
‘One o’clock, Anna? I am running late for a lecture,’ he stood up, reaching for his jacket from the stand alongside his bookcase, deliberately keeping his eyes turned away from her. ‘Back here at one o’clock.’
And then she was gone, slamming the door behind her.
Max went on to deliver what was quite possibly the worst lecture of his life. A comparison of anti-trust laws. Different approaches by different countries to trade and monopolies. A lecture so badly focused that even his favourite students looked bemused. At one point, Max lost his way so very obviously that he had to feign the symptoms of a cold to excuse the fuddle.
Never mind, he was thinking whether legislation should or should not be controlling the growth of Google – what the hell am I going to say to explain myself to HR?
Sorry Mrs Bramble but I had a crush on her. I kept getting distracted by her bra strap so I decided it would be unwise for me to continue as her line manager and mentor.
Holy shit, Max!
Eleven thirty and he retreated to his office. He checked back through his emails to find no fewer than ten recent, detailed and yes – impressive emails from Anna outlining her suggested changes to improve the course, which had prompted very short and one might even say, dismissive replies.
He hadn’t even realised that he had been doing it. Blanking her.
He pictured Giselle Bramble going through these same emails and wondered if there was no other option than to come clean with Anna. No. Shit. That would only make things very, very much worse.
One o’clock arrived very much too quickly and as the knock came at the door, Max was mortified to realise that he still had no intelligent strategy in place. And then to his surprise she was in the room looking quite different. Not just calmer but actually cowed. Head down. Flushed.
‘About earlier?’ She sat down on the chair opposite. Max held his breath. Maybe she had already been to HR? Maybe she looked cowed because he was about to be suspended. His prospects and his pension – all gone already.
‘I may have been a little more direct than I intended.’
And now Max was winded. This was good. Completely unexpected but good. Also disorientating. He took a deep breath and opted for silence – repeating inwardly only one mantra. Don’t dig, Max. Do. Not. Dig.
‘I realise that it is wholly unprofessional of me to bring my personal life to work. Unforgiveable. Unlike me. I really would not want you to think—’
‘Your personal life?’
‘I had a very bad weekend and your email, which felt to me as if it was shutting down all the plans I had in place for the course. Well – it was the straw and the camel. Which doesn’t mean that I am not disappointed. Hugely disappointed and you need to understand that I am not prepared to let it go. Give up on all my ideas, I mean. But I realise that the way I spoke to you earlier. It’s not the way I normally like to deal with things. The reputation that I want here. The hysterical woman.’
‘I see.’ Max did not see at all.
And then something completely appalling happened – something which Max had never known how to handle. With Eleanor. And Melissa also.
Anna began to cry.
Oh no. Please, no.
She struggled hard against it and was clearly mortified – raising her arm and turning away as if to head to the door.
‘Don’t go. Please – Anna. Sit a moment, at least. Please.’
She now chose very oddly to sit on a chair in the corner of the room by the door, turning away from him and fumbling in her bag for tissues while Max wondered what the hell he was supposed to do now. Were he to make any attempt whatsoever to comfort her, he was in danger of giving himself away. Worse – he would be marched off to HR for the inappropriate laying on of hands. Fail to comfort her and he was the cold, callous and disinterested bigot she believed him to be.
‘I’m sorry about this, Professor Dance. Very unprofessional of me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We all have our moments.’
Moments. What a bloody ridiculous word, Max. Think of something.
She blew her nose and then twisted her mouth to the side as if weighing something up.
‘It’s just…’
Max was now thinking bad thoughts about Anna having a tiff with her husband or partner or whatever he was. This man whose ring she did not wear.
She plunged on. ‘My son. The half marathon?’
‘Oh yes. You mentioned it.’
‘He’s pulled out.’
Max was still not following.
‘Oh I see.’
‘He’s going to stay with his father instead. Abroad.’
And now something in Max’s stomach physically moved as if a muscle had contracted involuntarily while Anna stood up, shaking her head.
‘Which is clearly of no issue here. To my work, I mean. And I should not have l
et it affect things – or even mentioned it. But there it is. It upset me and I allowed myself to be unprofessional and to overreact. For which I feel I should now apologise.’
16
ELEANOR
Eleanor was born an only child late in the marriage of teachers Michael and Susan. That she would become a teacher herself was no great surprise. For starters, she wondered why anyone would want to work in a job which did not accommodate the whole summer in France. Slowly she became aware of the snide putdowns – those who can do, blah blah – but Eleanor watched both her parents take pride in their careers. She watched the huge range of expression from tutting to beaming as they pored over great piles of books lined up for marking on the dining room table – and she listened to them bicker about the meddling politicians; the education secretaries who knew nothing about education.
Michael taught Biology in a respected comprehensive. Susan taught French in a girls’ grammar. Eleanor decided on English Literature on the grounds that permission to read full-time seemed like some kind of joke. Right through university she wondered when someone was going to find her out.
Her first job was every bit the trial her parents had warned of – a large and underperforming comp where getting the girls to exam year without a baby in tow was considered an achievement.
There were many lows. Once when four students stunned her by disappearing through a ground-floor window during one of her classes she stunned the rest of the class back by hopping out the window to sprint right after them. Not too bad on her feet, she caught them easily, marching all four back to the head, on pain of suspension. To be frank, she had rather expected them to tell her to piss off and keep running, but they seemed more shocked at her agility and speed to do anything other than throw in the towel.
After that, Eleanor determined to be stricter, alongside which she introduced the effective cliché of song lyrics and popular TV drama to hook in her students to poetry and story shapes before gently guiding them towards the classics on the syllabus. Some were never going to be won over, however hard she tried. But she managed to keep them all in the room, and results improved sufficiently on her watch to earn her a transfer after three years to a smaller secondary with an impressive exam record.
It was in western Oxfordshire – an area she would grow to love. Flat in the south but just a few miles from the glory that was the undulating hills of the Cotswolds. And it was there, during the second term, that she was tasked with babysitting the Economics Professor from a local university (‘not Oxford – but don’t be sniffy’) during a careers night when the Head of Maths suddenly went down with explosive diarrhoea.
‘Explosive diarrhoea?’ Max had said, laughing out loud at her candour and shaking her hand that first meeting.
‘Yes. Paints quite a picture, don’t you think? I wondered if his wife could have been a little less graphic on the phone with the excuses, but he needed this favour of me. I should warn you I have not the foggiest on economics so my introduction may not do you justice.’
And that was when she noticed that he was not blinking. Professor Maximillian Dance, senior lecturer of Economics – who cared that it wasn’t Oxford uni – was looking right at her, without blinking. Which later, as she watched him on stage surprising all the parents with a very polished and yet relaxed presentation on the crucial place for Economics in the understanding of the world around us, she was thanking the lord for explosive diarrhoea. So that when on parting later Max wondered ‘if she fancied dinner sometime’ something in her own stomach changed forever.
Eleanor determined to play it cool. And then laughed at herself as she moved her belongings into his flat within a month. There wasn’t anything not to love.
Max had an energy and enthusiasm for life which was infectious and exhilarating. Nothing seemed to get him down. He loved sport. He loved cooking. He loved walking. He loved Economics. And he loved Eleanor.
He had enjoyed a very happy childhood, which on reflection was probably at the root of it all, and he was one of those rare men who actually wanted very much to get married and have a family. Forget all the commitment-phobic bollocks that had broken her heart in the past. Max was full on from the start.
They fell in love quickly and completely. And they stayed in love with only one major hiccup along the way.
Money.
Max hit a sudden and inexplicable spell when he decided that education was no place to make sufficient money to raise a family. Eleanor, unmaterialistic and with modest expectations, completely disagreed. Over this they had one spectacular falling out. It was very, very painful and Eleanor preferred to blank it.
All that mattered was they eventually resolved it.
So that on a clear, spring day in the same church in which her parents had been married, Eleanor stood in the front of the church staring at this handsome and kind, kind man – never quite believing her luck.
Until one morning baking cookies with her daughter in a cottage in Cornwall and she was brushing down the flour from her jumper.
Eleanor knew deep down that it was pure craziness not to tell Max about the lump and not to see the doctor about the lump. It wasn’t a bright thing to do and she was a bright woman. But everything in her life had been so charmed until that point that she had this terrible feeling, deep inside, that all roads had been leading to this place and she needed somehow to postpone knowing. She did some research and tried for a time to reason that it was a fibroadenoma – both benign and quite common in women in their twenties and thirties. That could fit. But the lump, when she checked it more closely in the privacy of the bathroom seemed to go quite deep into her chest – right under the armpit. Also there was some discolouration of the breast which had been there for quite some time. A rash that she had just got used to and assumed was some kind of allergy or eczema. There was also the curious fact that she had been losing weight without trying.
Much later Eleanor would try to answer Max’s heartache and exasperation at why she had delayed investigating all these symptoms – even for a week, let alone the months she actually delayed – but she just couldn’t find the words or the rationale to explain that she didn’t actually want to know.
Chanting in the car on the way to get that first result about the statistics and how unlikely it was to be anything serious, she was in her head writing an entirely different script – knowing already how this was going to turn out. It was more than pessimism. She actually felt that she knew. Not some psychic experience but rather a physical awareness which probably had more to do with the cancer which had already spread inside her than she realised. She just didn’t want it confirmed.
And so, for Max, she put on an air of faux optimism through all the wretched tests, until they sat there and the doctor’s face told them before he had even opened his mouth.
It was stage four. It was already in her liver and her lungs. It was the reason she had been losing weight and felt so tired. They were terribly, terribly sorry but her circumstance was very rare. The treatment could not be curative though there was much they could do in terms of quality of life.
Max sat there making notes – his face white as he scrawled and scrawled, pressing so hard into the page that the paper tore. Eleanor did not listen to another word.
In her mind she had already journeyed back to the front of that church. She was back in that other ward when the midwife said it was a girl. She was lying on the floor, setting up skittles. She was playing cricket on the beach. And she was collecting together all the ingredients for Easter biscuits.
And now, writing the journal for Melissa she would get these moments of extreme panic when the details would begin to jumble and she would worry about how much she should share with her daughter. All of it? Part of it?
During one writing session, she described over three full pages how she felt on her wedding day. The scent of the orange blossom which drifted into the church every time someone opened a door. Also – the day that Melissa was born. The delicious smell of
the newborn that she just couldn’t find the words to describe. And the story of the orange zest and the cupcakes. How they had first come to use the zest. Would Melissa remember this? Should she have written it down for her? The story. And then, thinking of orange, she suddenly got herself in the most terrible tizz – spending two full hours trying to find a particular picture of her mother visiting her in hospital on the day that Melissa arrived.
She remembered the picture as her mother was wearing a bright orange jumper which seemed to reflect on all their faces, distorting the skin tones when the pictures were developed. ‘We look like oompa loompas, Mother.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. The baby looks beautiful. Completely beautiful.’
‘For an oompa loompa baby. Alongside your jumper.’
But Eleanor could not find the picture. She hunted high and low but it was nowhere to be found. She had mentioned it in the journal – the story of the orange jumper reflections – and so she couldn’t decide what to do. To rip out the page if she did not find the picture?
All the while Max distressed… to see her distress.
‘I don’t understand why you need the picture today, Eleanor? We can find it another time? It’s probably in a frame somewhere. Please don’t be like this. I hate to see you like this.’
17
MELISSA – 2011
‘Look – I know I said that I was fine. That we could close the whole marriage thing down but I find that I just can’t, Melissa.’ Sam had finally agreed to a trip. They were now on the way back from a disastrous visit to the Tomb of the Kings near Paphos.
Melissa, caffeine-deprived and distracted by confusion over the roller coaster of her mother’s words had insisted they set off early. A mistake. Both overtired. Plus two days by the pool seemed to have stirred Sam into an even worse mood, the sore leg now itching unbearably in the heat.
Melissa had banked on the visit itself lifting both of them. On the website the Tombs looked impressive – a World Heritage site. She had imagined an air-conditioned visitor centre where Sam could at least rest his leg if the tour proved too much. But no. There was no centre and no coffee, merely a scorching expanse of baked earth to be explored – with mosquitoes holed up in the tombs.
Recipes for Melissa Page 9