Читать книгу Tilly Bagshawe 3-book Bundle: Scandalous, Fame, Friends and Rivals - Тилли Бэгшоу, Tilly Bagshawe - Страница 27
ОглавлениеTheo Dexter looked straight at camera, raising one eyebrow like Roger Moore’s Bond and smouldering as only he knew how.
‘Driven,’ he whispered huskily, holding up a bottle of cheap-looking cologne. ‘The smell of success.’ He stood for five more seconds, his face frozen mid-smoulder, till the energetic Japanese director yelled, ‘Cut!’ Instantly Theo’s features relaxed into their more familiar, petulant scowl.
‘Very good, very good.’ The director clapped his hands enthusiastically, and the Japanese crew did the same. ‘All finish. Very good take, all finish.’
Thank Christ for that. Theo loathed Japan. A few years ago, Asia had excited him with its otherworldliness, its air of adventure. But by this point in his career, the novelty had well and truly worn off. If he closed his eyes and said the word Asia, four things sprang to mind. Humidity, cockroaches, stinking traffic and carbohydrates. (How the Japanese stayed so thin was a mystery to Theo. They seemed to eat rice or noodles with everything. He’d even come across a chicken noodle toothpaste, although that might have been intended as a joke item. You could never tell in Japan.) Despite staying at the uber-luxurious Park Hyatt, the hotel featured in the movie Lost in Translation, in a penthouse suite with spectacular views across the city all the way to Mount Fuji, he felt distinctly hard done by. Not least because Dita and the children were with him.
‘Just think of the money,’ Ed Gilliam told him cheerfully. Now in his late sixties and richer than ever thanks to his star client, Theo’s agent still had the hunger for the next big deal. ‘This commercial’s earning you more than your entire last season’s paycheck on Dexter’s Universe, and three times what you made on Space Suits.’
Mentioning the name of Theo’s last, ill-fated, straight-to-DVD feature film put him in an even worse mood. That was another thing he had to blame Dita for, pushing him into movies like some goddamn dancing monkey.
‘I don’t care. It’s embarrassing. I feel like a used-car salesman.’
‘Yes, well, get over it,’ said Ed. ‘All the big stars endorse over here. Clooney, Pitt, Cruise.’
‘Maybe. But they don’t have to live with Dita while they’re doing it.’
After seven years with Dita, six of them married, the novelty of her celebrity had well and truly worn off. Not that Theo didn’t still revel in the attention, the ubiquitous paparazzi who followed them everywhere, the throngs of screaming fans. But he resented the fact that his fame and Dita’s had become so inextricably linked in the public imagination. Being one half of Hollywood’s golden couple was wearing, particularly when the reality of Theo and Dita’s domestic life was, at best, strained.
Sexually Dita could still do it for him. Unlike most exceptionally beautiful women, Dita was good in bed, a skilled and exciting lover. But although she remained a huge box office draw, physically she was past her prime. The tabloids and gossip magazines ruthlessly scrutinized her every, tiny flaw, photographing her at point-blank range and then printing the shots with red circles drawn around every incipient laughter line or prominent vein. Already deeply insecure, such criticism sent Dita into a frenzy of panicked exercising, Botox injecting and sarong buying. It also made her more than usually demanding of Theo’s attention, a sure-fire way for her to lose it.
Theo couldn’t remember exactly when he’d started cheating on Dita. Probably while she was pregnant with Milo, their eldest, now five. A sweet, sensitive but sickly child, Milo Dexter was allergic to everything and seemed mysteriously to have been born with the lung capacity of a gnat, necessitating frequent, stressful late-night trips to the Emergency Room, often followed by lengthy hospital stays. Dita doted on the boy, transferring all the attention she had previously lavished on Theo to their son. Of course, she still employed nannies, legions of them, which grew into full-scale battalions when their second child, Francesca, arrived two years later. It wasn’t so much the time Dita spent with Milo, reasoned Theo. It was more the way she looked at him, the way they looked at each other, an exclusive little club of two from which he, Theo, would forever be excluded.
Francesca, known as Fran, was much more the sort of child that Theo could identify with. Confident, sensible and utterly self-reliant, she neither needed his love, nor asked for it, but rather accepted his affection as and when he chose to bestow it. If he’d known kids could turn out like this, he’d have adopted with Theresa years ago. Back then Theo would never have believed a three-year-old could be so politely distant, but that’s how Fran was with Dita. Pleasant, unassuming, but fundamentally a little bored by her mother. It drove Dita crazy. ‘Even my own daughter doesn’t love me!’ she would sob melodramatically to Theo, who was trying to download Match of the Day on his PC and wished to God Dita would find somebody else to emote to. Bringing the whole family to Tokyo had been Dita’s idea, part of her drive to ‘deepen my bond’ with Fran.
‘You can spend some time with Milo-pooks too. He’s hardly seen you all year.’
‘Come on, Deets. It’s not my fault the boy’s been in and out of hospital like an asthmatic boomerang. It’s not me he wants when he’s sick, it’s you.’ He didn’t add, and all the rest of the bloody time too, but he felt like it. He knew it was ridiculous to be jealous of a five-year-old, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Japan will be a nightmare. The jet lag, the paps, the kids going stir crazy in the hotel room. I’ll be back in a few weeks.’
It was no good. Dita had insisted. Theo had had no choice but to call Cassie, his latest twenty-one-year-old bit on the side, and tell her their romantic trip was off. ‘I’ll make it up to you, angel, I promise. We’ll sneak off to the Post Ranch as soon as I’m back.’ Fuming, he’d climbed the stairs into the private jet with Dita and the kids feeling as if he was walking up to the guillotine. This is going to be a nightmare.
Then they got to Tokyo.
And it was much, much worse.
First, Milo picked up some bug on the plane and had to be rushed to the Hachioji children’s hospital. Then Dita was photographed looking haggard and exhausted the day they discharged him, and the picture ran in Star magazine back in the States, alongside an airbrushed photo of Theo looking preposterously handsome, taken from his aftershave campaign. That evening Dita had screamed and screamed in their suite at the Hyatt until Theo had had to call a doctor to sedate her. She was so bad, the nannies had moved with the children to a different floor, as Milo particularly was getting very distressed. The next morning, Dita had refused to let Theo go to work until he’d made love to her, then afterwards sobbed in his arms for an hour. Despite his having come twice, Dita insisted he was ‘faking it’ and didn’t really want her any more. It was mid afternoon before Theo got to the set. As ever, the Japanese crew were unwaveringly polite. But Ed Gilliam had ripped him a new arsehole.
‘For fuck’s sake, Theo! You’re under contract. You can’t just turn up when you feel like it. You realize there’ll be a penalty, a big one. That fuck with Dita probably cost you two million dollars. I hope it was bloody worth it.’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Theo grimly. On days like today, his mind sometimes wandered back to his first marriage. Theresa had been weak, and of course she did let herself go dreadfully towards the end. But she was also funny, and supportive, and never in the least part a drama queen. Even when the scandal with Sasha Miller had been all over the papers, when any rational wife would have had a good excuse to throw her toys out of the pram, Theresa had been so cool, calm and collected, it was almost regal.
Sasha Miller had been on Theo’s mind too lately, for the first time in years. Bizarrely, his former student and paramour seemed to have reinvented herself as some sort of business mogul. Her property company, Ceres, had gone public a month ago, its shares floated at some astronomically inflated price, and suddenly Sasha’s face was all over the business pages. Physically, she’d changed surprisingly little over the years. She still had that youthful, moonlight-white complexion, and of course those incredible pale green eyes that had once gazed into his with such trust and passion. In her early thirties now, she wore her hair shorter than she had as a student, but it still gleamed the same lustrous tar black. Her body, if anything, looked better than it had back then, or at least more to Theo’s taste, leaner, with less puppy fat. But if Sasha looked unchanged, appearances were obviously deceptive. You didn’t get to that sort of position in business or in life without being a tough cookie. When Theo knew Sasha she’d been as soft and malleable as dough, but the intervening years must have baked her hard.
Theo’s first reaction to Sasha’s success was nervousness. The last thing he wanted was for some overenthusiastic journalist to start digging into Sasha’s past and unearthing the stolen-theory scandal all over again. He raised his concerns with Ed Gilliam, but Ed was reassuringly sanguine.
‘It’s very unlikely. That was aeons ago. More importantly, it happened in England. Americans don’t care about scandals in other countries.’
‘Hmmm.’ Theo wasn’t convinced.
‘Look, there’s nothing you can do about it so you may as well stop worrying. What’s the worst that can happen? Someone leaks the story, you and Sasha both make statements about bygones being bygones. If anyone’s reputation’s in danger here it’s hers, not yours, right?’
‘Right,’ said Theo uneasily.
In the years since the scandal, Dexter’s Universe and the theory that launched it had become so much a part of Theo’s self-image, he’d almost forgotten its murky origins. Seeing Sasha Miller’s face again stirred emotions buried deep in his subconscious – an uneasy concoction of guilt and fear that had begun to further sour Theo’s mood. Combined with the increasing strain of dealing with Dita’s meltdowns, and now this horrendous trip to Japan, he was feeling more restless and dissatisfied than he had in years. Ed Gilliam inadvertently made things worse by filling Theo in on the latest gossip amongst the Cambridge physics faculty. Apparently one of Theo’s former students, Mike Green (now Emeritus Professor Michael Green) was sending shockwaves across the scientific world with his ground-breaking research into optical quantum computer chips.
‘He’s quite the new big thing,’ Ed told Theo. ‘I’ve got four publishers in a bidding war for his book. Of course Oxford, Harvard and MIT are all desperate to lure him.’
Theo consoled himself that Mike Green would never have a career like his. For one thing he was so shy he bordered on autistic, and for another he looked like a three-hundred-pound version of Daniel Radcliffe. No one wanted to switch on their television and be mumbled at by a morbidly obese nerd. Even so, Mike’s success rankled. The public might never love him, but his fellow physicists clearly did. Much as he hated to admit it, there was a part of Theo Dexter that still craved approval from his peers. Grinning inanely at the camera today for three hours straight with a giant bottle of aftershave in his hands, Theo felt more nostalgic for Cambridge than he had in years.
One day I’ll go back. I’ll get back to my research, prove to all those envious bastards that I’ve still got what it takes. He turned on his phone. Six missed calls, all of them from Dita.
One day.
Horatio Hollander looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
Not bad. Not George Clooney, perhaps. Not Theo Dexter, either. But not bad.
At twenty-two years of age, Horatio had finally (thank God) grown out of the acne that had plagued him as a teenager. Tall and skinny, with a shock of thick hair that had never been able to decide if it was red or blond, merry blue eyes and wide nose smattered with freckles, Horatio was generally referred to by girls as ‘sweet’. In his first year at Cambridge, one of the prettier fresher girls had described him as looking a bit like a baby giraffe, and the phrase had stuck. A talented rower with a regular place in Jesus College’s First Eight, Horatio’s crewmates knew him only as ‘Giraffe’. Horatio rolled his eyes, but secretly he rather liked the nickname. After six years of being called ‘pizza face’ and getting the shit kicked out of him at school (what sort of sadists named their son ‘Horatio’ then sent him to the toughest comprehensive in Leeds?), Giraffe was a refreshing change.
This morning, unusually for him, Horatio had made a titanic effort with his appearance. He wore his best tweed jacket, which only had a couple of tiny moth holes, a clean, ironed blue shirt and a pair of French Connection jeans that his friend Mary had assured him made his bum look great. ‘More beefcake, less beanpole,’ had been her exact words. That’s good enough for me.
Of course the real question was whether they’d be good enough for Professor O’Connor. He’d waited long enough. It was time to screw his courage to the sticking place and ask her out before … before what? What am I so scared of?
Horatio had lost count of the nights he’d lain awake, his body racked with longing and his heart crippled with fear, imagining his Shakespeare tutor, Professor O’Connor – Theresa – locked in passionate embrace with another man. In his fevered imaginings, the other man always looked preternaturally handsome, and usually bore a strong resemblance to Professor O’Connor’s ex-husband, the ghastly, white-toothed, perma-tanned Theo Dexter. Theresa had reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, largely to stop people making the connection between her and her world-famous ex. But of course, everyone at Cambridge knew.
This must be what Chris Martin felt, asking Gwyneth Paltrow out after she’d been engaged to Brad Pitt. But look at Chris, eh? He got the girl! Then again, he was a multi-millionaire rock star with legions of screaming fans. Whereas I’m a scruffy student from Leeds with an overdraft and holes in my jacket.
The thing was that Theresa had given him just enough hope – a smile here, a shy glance there – to make Horatio think that perhaps, just perhaps, by some miracle, his affections might be returned. Yes, she was his teacher. And yes, she was twenty years older than him – not to mention twenty times more beautiful and brilliant and funny and kind and …
‘Get a move on, mate!’ Jack, Horatio’s roommate, was banging on the bathroom door. ‘You can’t polish a turd, you know. She’ll either see past your ugly mug or she won’t, so hurry the fuck up, would you? I need a slash.’
Jack was an engineer. Lovely bloke, but no soul whatsoever.
Horatio opened the door. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you’ve got no chance,’ said Jack robustly. ‘She’s old enough to be your mother, she’s sworn off men, which is probably code for she’s a lesbo …’
‘She is not a lesbo!’ said Horatio crossly.
‘And, she supervises you, which makes you even more off-limits.’
‘Maybe that’ll be part of my appeal?’ Horatio smiled hopefully. ‘I’m a forbidden fruit.’
‘You’re a forbidden fruit-loop more like it,’ said Jack. ‘Nice jeans though. You don’t look like as much of a scrawnster as you usually do.’ And with that he shut the bathroom door, abandoning his friend to his fate.
Theresa unlocked the outer, heavy wooden door of her college rooms with the same, heavy, palm-sized metal key that its occupants had been using for over two centuries. The romantic in her loved the giant key. Like the rest of her rooms, the rest of Cambridge in fact, it felt magical, like something out of a fairy tale. The key to Rapunzel’s tower perhaps, or to some lost city of gold. Once inside she turned on the lights and the fan heater. It was April, spring according to the newspapers, but Cambridge was still bitterly cold and the college authorities were notoriously parsimonious about luxuries such as central heating. Soon, however, the noisy little fan had expelled the chill sufficiently for Theresa to take off her duffel coat, turn on the kettle, and start leafing through her notes for this morning’s session on Macbeth.
She had a one-on-one supervision this morning with her star pupil, Horatio Hollander, and she was looking forward to it immensely. Horatio’s last essay, on Macbeth’s classic ‘Tomorrow’ soliloquy, was so good it had moved her almost to tears. Then again, that wasn’t hard. Yesterday evening she’d sobbed like a child watching Jenny’s cat, a fat old tabby inappropriately named ‘Ninja,’ give birth to six healthy kittens.
‘What’ll you do with them?’
‘Sell them, I suppose. Or more likely give them away. I doubt people pay for kittens any more. We might keep one, I suppose.’
‘Oh, you can’t do that!’ protested Theresa. ‘Look at them. They’re a little team. They have to stay together.’
‘I’m not housing seven cats, T,’ said Jenny reasonably. ‘JP would divorce me and I wouldn’t blame him.’
‘Well, at least take two,’ pleaded Theresa, watching the blindly crawling fur balls through a haze of tears. ‘They can be company for each other. I’ll have the rest.’
Jenny laughed. ‘All four of them? You’re not serious?’
‘Why not? I like cats. They’re good company.’
‘But you’ve already got Lysander. You’ll be like the classic old cat lady, T! Blokes’ll be too scared to come near you.’
‘Perfect,’ said Theresa, reaching down to stroke one of the fur balls. ‘I don’t want blokes coming near me. They can be pets, companions and bodyguards all in one.’
This summer it would be five years exactly since Theresa had last been on a date. Looking out over Cloister Court, with its medieval arches and cobbled paths worn smooth with age, the thought gave Theresa a warm glow of contentment. I don’t need a man. I don’t even want a man, and that’s the God’s honest truth. In the first couple of years after her divorce, she’d accepted occasional dinner dates, largely as a way to keep Jenny and Aisling and her other friends off her back. But as time went by and she settled once more into the rhythm of academic life, cocooned in beauty both at work and at home, Theresa began to take a stand.
‘I’m not denying myself,’ she would say, truthfully. ‘I’m happy as I am.’ Coming home to Willow Tree Cottage still made every night feel like Christmas Eve. After she had finally published her book on Shakespeare in Hollywood, the first really serious academic analysis of the modern media interpretations of the plays, to high critical acclaim. The book was never going to make her rich, but Theresa was inordinately proud of it. As a result, she’d been approached to edit and write an introduction to the new Cambridge University Press Shakespeare anthology, a huge honour and without doubt the crowning professional achievement of her life so far. I have my work, my friends, Lysander, my perfect, chocolate-box home. What more could anyone ask for?
If there were one thing she might have wished for, had someone presented her with a magic wand, it would probably have been a baby, although even that desire had softened over the years. It would not, under any circumstances, have been a boyfriend, still less a husband. Theresa had loved once, deeply, and she had lost. As far as she was concerned, that was that. Her feelings for Theo had also faded – when she saw his face on the television now it was like looking at a stranger – but the memory of the pain remained. Someone had once told her that that was the definition of a lunatic: someone who repeats the same mistakes over and over and over again. Well, Theresa O’Connor was not a lunatic. She was simply a single woman who happened to share her home with five cats.
A knock on the door disturbed her musings.
‘Come in,’ she trilled cheerfully. ‘It’s open.’
Horatio hovered in the doorway. Not for the first time, Theresa thought what a kind, intelligent face he had. If I had a son, she thought, I’d like him to look like that.
‘Good morning, Mr Hollander. Can I offer you some tea?’
Horatio cleared his throat. ‘Er, no. No thank you. I’m fine. Thanks.’
Theresa smiled. ‘You look nervous. If it’s about your essay I can assure you you have no reason to be. As usual you were insightful and to the point. I did want to debate a couple of your conclusions with you, however, especially your position in the final stanzas, where …’
‘It’s not about the essay.’
Pouring herself a cup of Earl Grey, Theresa noticed the boy’s complexion had faded from its usual white to something closer to see-through. ‘My goodness, Horatio. Are you all right?’
‘Not really.’ He walked over to where she was standing and gently took the mug of tea from her hands. Unfortunately his own hands were shaking so much, he instantly scalded himself, yelping with pain. Theresa shifted at once into motherly mode.
‘Come on, come with me. I’ve some frozen peas in the kitchenette, I think. I don’t cook much in my rooms but I think they’re still there. Stick it under the cold tap while I have a look.’
Horatio stood at the sink, oblivious to the burn on his hand, watching her. In a pair of slouchy jeans that looked in permanent danger of slipping off her slim hips, and a black polo neck sweater that accentuated her fragile arms, she looked (to Horatio’s eyes) almost childlike. In the stressful wake of her divorce Theresa had shed all the weight she’d gained in America, and her students at Christ’s had only ever known her as skinny. It was a joke amongst them that half Professor O’Connor’s body weight had to be made up of hair, that trademark wild explosion of titian curls that today she wore piled up on top of her head in a messy bun.
‘Here you go.’ She pressed a packet of frozen peas onto his hand. It was an entirely maternal gesture, but Horatio seized the moment, and the physical contact, and clasped her hand in his.
‘Have dinner with me,’ he mumbled.
Theresa looked up at him, surprised, but said nothing. The tap was still running. Perhaps she hadn’t heard him?
‘I love you,’ he said, more loudly, just as Theresa turned off the tap. The words boomed around the small room like a public announcement in a railway station waiting room. Blushing, Horatio continued. ‘I’m in love with you, Profe … Theresa. I adore you. Have dinner with me.’
Now it was Theresa’s turn to blush. It had not escaped her notice that Horatio Hollander was one of the more attractive of her students. Not handsome in any classical sense, but tall and kind and intelligent, the sort of man she might have gone for had he been twenty years older, and had she been in the market for a man, which, quite plainly, she wasn’t.
‘May I have my hand back, Horatio?’ she said kindly.
Horatio thought about saying, ‘Not till you give me an answer!’ the way all the dominant, manly heroes did in romantic fiction novels. Mentally, he tried the words on for size, but from him they simply sounded ridiculous.
‘Of course.’ He released her hand. ‘I meant what I said, though.’
‘I can see that.’ He looked so earnest, Theresa couldn’t bear it. Part of her felt like kissing him right then and there, but it was a small part and she squashed it. ‘You do realize how old I am?’
‘I’ve no idea how old you are,’ he lied. ‘All I know is how beautiful you are.’
‘I’m forty-three,’ said Theresa. ‘How old is your mother?’
Horatio hesitated. ‘Older.’
‘How much older?’
‘Have dinner with me and I’ll tell you.’ He smiled, Theresa laughed, and mercifully the tension was broken. ‘How can I persuade you? There must be something I can do.’
‘There isn’t,’ she said, passing him back the peas and walking back to the sofa where she taught her supervisions. ‘I’m your supervisor. I like you very much, Horatio. I mean that sincerely.’ His face lit up. ‘But you have to forget about this, or I won’t be able to teach you any more.’
Morosely, he followed her into the sitting room and sank into his usual armchair. ‘You think I’m an idiot for asking you.’
‘Not at all,’ said Theresa. ‘I’m flattered. But you don’t need an old woman like me, for heaven’s sake. I’m sure you have a queue of drop-dead-gorgeous twenty-year-olds lined up outside your rooms as we speak.’
I wouldn’t bet on it, thought Horatio.
‘Now come on. Macbeth. Impress me!’
He watched her eyes light up, the way they always did when she spoke about Shakespeare, and felt himself fall a few feet deeper into the bottomless pit of unrequited love. One day, he vowed, she’ll look that way for me.
There was a key to Theresa O’Connor’s heart. There had to be.
All he had to do was find it.
At dinner that night with Jenny and JP, Theresa told them the whole story.
‘I think it’s adorable,’ said Jenny, knocking back a second glass of Bordeaux. They were at Henri’s, a new French bistro on Jesus Lane that JP had pronounced ‘acceptable’, his equivalent of at least two Michelin stars. ‘ “ From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross’d lovers! ” ’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Theresa. ‘Horatio Hollander and I are nothing like Romeo and Juliet. And please don’t use the word “ loins ” when we’re talking about my students. It’s enough to put me off my foie gras.’
‘Methinks thou art protesting too much,’ teased Jenny. ‘I’m sure you’ve mentioned this kid to me before. Admit it, you think he’s cute.’
‘He is cute. For a kid,’ said Theresa. ‘You aren’t seriously suggesting I accept a dinner invitation from one of my students? My top student, as it happens.’
‘But not your “ on-top ” student. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Jenny!’
‘Theresa’s right,’ said JP, scraping the last scraps of perfectly cooked entrecote onto his fork. ‘This is a line it is best nevair to cross. Especially when one ‘as ambitions.’ He raised an eyebrow cryptically.
‘Eh?’ said Jenny
‘What ambitions?’ said Theresa. ‘You make it sound like I’m running for office.’
Jean Paul reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping from the latest Varsity. ‘Per’aps you should be. Take a look at this.’
Theresa read the clipping. ‘It’s about St Michael’s. Anthony Greville’s finally stepping down as Master next year. I can’t believe that old goat’s still going. He was about a hundred years old back in Theo’s day.’
‘The college is inviting applications for the Mastership.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘You should apply.’
Theresa laughed so hard she almost choked on her foie gras toast. ‘Me?’
‘Why not you?’ asked Jenny.
‘Why not me? Why not the dustman? Why not my mother? Why not Lysander, for God’s sake! I’m far too junior. I don’t have nearly enough experience.’
‘Sure you do,’ said JP. ‘Graham North’s put himself forward. He’s in my department, engineering. I wouldn’t hire Graham to unblock a drain, never mind run a college. The rest of the list are older but distinctly uninspiring: Andrew Gray. He’s been at St Michael’s so long they’re about to name a library after him. Hugh Mullaney-Stoop from Robinson, which isn’t even a real college.’
‘Old Mulligatawny Soup’s put his name in the hat, has he?’ laughed Jenny. ‘He’s the dullest man in Cambridge. You’d be miles better than him, Theresa.’
Theresa laughed too. Some PA to the gods had obviously sent a celestial memo round that today was her day to be flattered. ‘Thanks, guys. I appreciate the vote of confidence. But I am much too young, much too insignificant and, last but not least, much too female to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming Master of St Mike’s. Now, who’s for pudding? The hazelnut soufflé’s supposed to be out of this world.’
* * *
Later that night, in bed in Willow Tree Cottage with the wind rattling the ancient leaded windows, Theresa lay under a mountain of blankets, thinking about the day. She’d managed to get through the rest of the supervision with Horatio Hollander, largely by avoiding eye contact as much as possible, but the poor boy’s embarrassment was contagious. Afterwards she’d wondered guiltily if perhaps she’d somehow given him any encouragement – unconsciously, of course. The truth was she did enjoy his company. Theresa had come to look on her supervisions with Horatio as one of the highlights of her week, though in the past she’d always put that down to the thrill of working with an undergraduate capable of challenging her intellectually, of pushing the boundaries. Well, now the boundaries had been well and truly pushed. It was her job, her responsibility, to push them back. Even so, she couldn’t help but take a tiny sliver of pleasure from the fact that this kind, brilliant, golden boy had fallen for her of all people. At her age, it was quite a compliment.
Then there was the day’s other compliment, at the other end of the scale, Jean Paul’s suggestion that she apply for the St Michael’s Mastership. Theresa wasn’t sure which fantasy was the more impossible to picture. Herself as Mrs Horatio Hollander, skipping down the aisle in a white dress, or herself taking the Master’s seat at St Michael’s high table. Both thoughts – the white dress and St Michael’s – drew her mind back to Theo.
Theresa was no longer in love with him. Those days, mercifully, had passed. But occasionally, especially after a few glasses of Bordeaux, or when she saw pictures of his and Dita’s adorable little children, fragile, blond Milo and the chubby-cheeked little girl, Francesca, she felt a sort of wistful nostalgia. Those could have been my children, she would think, before realizing that of course they couldn’t, and that it was ridiculous and wrong to project her own frustrations or regrets onto two perfectly innocent little people whom she hadn’t even met, and likely never would.
Tonight, as sleep crept over her, she wondered about Theo. Where he was right now, this moment, as she lay in bed in Grantchester. What he was thinking. She thought of how amazed he’d be if he were to read that she, Theresa O’Connor, had become Master of his old college.
As pipe dreams went, it was a good one.
