At the beginning of February Tonie’s boss glances up from his desk and says,
‘The honeymoon period’s over now.’
It is a grey lightless afternoon and the darker grey interior of the building is a grid of monochrome squares and rectangles that form strange block-like avenues of perspective leading nowhere. The whole place is a maze of corridors and staircases, of anonymous rooms jigsawed with desks and metal filing cabinets and identical black-upholstered chairs. This cluttered rectilinear gloom signifies thought, intellect, impersonal endeavour. Tonie has noticed how the human form is elided by its geometry: here she seems only to see people in parts, a pair of legs in a stairwell, a back disappearing through a doorway, a profile glimpsed through a shatter-proof glass panel, bent over a desk.
‘The honeymoon period’s over now,’ Christopher says, silhouetted by the grey light of the institutional window. ‘At this point we need you to be functioning independently.’
‘All right,’ Tonie says, after a long pause.
Christopher’s office is more home-like than the others. As Head of School he has a slightly larger version of the cubes the rest of them occupy. He has lamps on low tables, cushions, a rug on the floor. Since September she has come here several times each week, assuming herself to be entering the territory of an ally and friend. She likes to sit on Christopher’s dove-grey sofa and consider the view, his orderly bookshelves, his framed Dutch prints. Now she wonders whether it is Christopher’s house that is neutral, impersonal, or whether it exists at all; whether this office in fact is all he is, a man in a room which despite its atmosphere of comfort is still only ten feet wide.
‘All right,’ she says.
‘I’m always available to answer questions,’ he says, ‘but my time is apportioned to favour the bottom end of the structure. I need to consider those younger, less experienced colleagues who have genuine reasons for requiring my help.’
Tonie is used to Christopher, used to his voice and appearance, to the reedy sound he makes, to the precision of his bachelor tastes, to the sight of his long, narrow form among other forms she knows. For years she has watched him go off to his lunchtime organ recitals at St John’s, his medieval recorder evenings, his private views. Yet she has never, until now, put all those things together. She has never added him up.
‘Fair enough,’ she says.
‘There simply isn’t the infrastructure here for members of the department to be carried. We don’t have the resources.’
‘I get it,’ she says.
Tonie has been associated with the English department for eight years. In that time she has seen people argue, flounce out of meetings, cry openly in corridors. She knows that emotion is a possibility here, as it is not elsewhere in the university or, indeed, the world. As a result the departmental discourse relies heavily on its bureaucratic origins. The grey walls pulse with rampant sensibility: only the rules stand in the way of a general outbreak of unconstrainable feeling. Now that Christopher has invoked this discourse, it would be perfectly acceptable for Tonie to shout at him, to weep, to storm back to her own cheerless office with its view of the car park; it is, perhaps, what Christopher expects and requires her to do.
She looks at his pleated silk lampshades, at his mohair cushion covers.
‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Thanks for the honeymoon. I enjoyed it.’
She laughs quietly, turns to go.
He stiffens in his chair, offended. ‘As I say, I’m always reasonably available. And obviously, if any question is urgent I’ll answer it.’
She laughs again. Once, she was Christopher’s senior in the department, when he was a junior research fellow with a neck so slender his collars gaped around it. And he fawned on Tonie in those days, hungry for scraps of approval. It is this version of himself, she sees, that haunts him. He wants to exorcise it, to gouge it out of her recollection. He doesn’t realise how many things have happened to her in the intervening years, how little she has considered him. He doesn’t know how sad she suddenly finds it, that he should have spent his prime struggling to ascend through the ranks of a second-rate university, with only distracted mothers to impede him.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she says.
Outside, in the corridor, she realises that her arms are full of files. She looks down at them. They are hard, blank-faced, with metallic spines. She is holding them against her chest. For a moment she can’t think what on earth they are.