Before I could properly organise my words, Professor Chen, who was skinny and blonde and had the louder voice, broke in. “Ron, don’t be so nosy. I’ve got a Chinese name and I’ve never lived in China.” To me, she explained, “Something my ex-husband left me with.”
“Husbands can do that,” I agreed, though I’ve never had one.
In any case, this agreeableness on my part seems to have settled my generally discreet colleagues on the idea that I am the divorced wife of a Portuguese man whom I have left behind somewhere, probably England, and about whom I prefer not to talk. There’s a residual caution left in me that insists there is advantage in others not knowing too much truth. It was prudent in scheming Zanzibar, was coaxed into an art form in London under Benji’s influence, and turned out to be a useful survival skill during my tenure at Cookham College, also known as Cookham Wood, Her Majesty’s Prison for Women. Yet I would love to be open and free, able to know the truth and tell it.
Ron insisted I needed a ride back to my house, which sits at the end of its own unpaved road half a mile from the village. I would have been happy to walk. The roads were white with a new snowfall and the brightness of a snowy landscape at night is still amazing to me. It’s so safe here that even the darkness seems friendly. I said I’d enjoy thinking while I walked home, but he insisted that I did not yet appreciate the deadliness of Vermont’s cold.
In his Jeep Ron could talk without facing me, which seemed to make him bolder. “I thought you should know,” he said, “there’s a silly story going around that you were deported from England before you came here. That’s the trouble with a small college. There’s not much for people to do but gossip about each other. You might want to put the story straight before it gets out of hand. Nip it in the bud.” He was driving very slowly, making the half mile last.
“And do they say why I was deported?”
“I haven’t heard that.”
I ran through the possibilities of being tripped up by the truth. I knew no one in America. My old world and the new world of Moore College were about as likely to collide as for an asteroid to bang into the earth and smash it to smithereens. What Ron had told me was as much as the college president knew or had wanted to know. And that was supposed to remain secret. I reminded myself that the policy of keeping my distance was a good one.
“Yes, it’s true. I’m an international criminal. Terrorism, arms deals, drugs, that sort of thing. Maybe you’d prefer me to walk after all?”
“No, please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean to pry. I just thought you should know.”
“Well, thank you, Ron.”
I let the silence grow until we stopped in the snow- banked clearing the college plough had made in front of my porch. I opened the car door an inch and looked across at him. His lips moved twice with things he was bursting to say but could not. I laughed and showed mercy, patted him on the shoulder as I stepped down. “Don’t worry, Ron. It’s nothing serious. A little trouble with the London police. I was protesting against racism.” That was good enough for him.
“I thought it must be something like that.”
“I thought you didn’t believe it at all.”
“Well, there’s usually something in rumours, isn’t there? Some innocent seed. Rumours are an interesting phenomenon.”
“Very interesting. Goodnight, professor.”
As I slammed the door and waved goodbye, I saw he was still speaking, but the Jeep was soundproof and I pretended not to notice.
An assertion from the dinner party caught up with me as I clumped my feet free of snow on the doormat of my house, and it nags at me still. After the false story of my marriage to a Portuguese had been essayed and abandoned, the talk had turned away from the subject of me to the story of an absent colleague who had been belatedly accused by a grown-up daughter of having sex with her during her childhood. I found I could add nothing to this conversation: the thirty-year delay in accusation, the hanging on to injury as if it were a jewel, the intimate presence of a father during youth, the sexy excitement they all seemed to find in their subject, the exposure of the subject itself; these were all odd and foreign to me. Finally, after more wine, Dean Goodrich, the oldest man present and the one with the deepest voice, brought the discussion to a conclusion. “I don’t care whether he’s innocent or guilty,” he declared. “We’ve known him twenty years as a friend and colleague and we’ve come to love him. If he turns out to be an incestuous rapist, well, he’s our incestuous rapist!”
The assertion nags at me, though I have never met the man in question. I think it’s just the last sentence, with its suggestion of blanks to fill: She may be a .... but she’s our.... I keep hearing it. I cannot think of the words for my offence, and cannot think who in the world might claim me and forgive me anything for the sake of my belonging.
In Zanzibar, in nineteen eighty-three, Mrs F claimed me and I resented her for it then. Always decisive, she decided one day that it was time to deal with the problem of me and barged into my room, declaring, “Marcella, it’s time you showed yourself. You must walk down to Jamituri Gardens with us. People are wondering what is wrong with you.” Her view was, I think, that I might be an idle, flirty, disrespectful, irreligious and foolish Goan, but I was her Goan.
I was bored enough and lonely enough and dispirited enough to be incapable of effective resistance. And Mrs
