‘There,’ she said. ‘Great. I love beer but I want to stay awake for the movie. I’d like a coffee, though.’
He placed the order, and they settled down opposite each other.
‘You wanted to ask me more stuff about Professor Summers?’ she invited. ‘I was upset yesterday, but I’m all right now.’
‘Yes.’ Salter nodded. Her hair which had seemed messy at the funeral now seemed just right. Was it ‘carefully tousled’ as they used to say? She had a pleasant face which was made more appealing by a slightly affected use of gesture—her eyes went wide with wonder, the corners of her mouth turned down in despair or disappointment, and joy switched on the sun in her face. And she was wearing no brassiere. Salter smiled at her, ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘As I told you yesterday, I am trying to learn as much about Summers as I can. What kind of man he was. Whatever you can tell me about him.’
‘So go ahead. Ask.’ She smiled encouragingly.
‘Was he a good teacher?’ Salter asked, again. Who cared? All he wanted was an excuse to keep this girl with him.
‘You asked that. I told you. But I’ve thought about it since then. I still don’t know. On the plus side, he knew his stuff, he liked it, and he got excited about it. On the minus side he didn’t lay it out in a way that was easy to take down, if you like a lot of notes. So some of the students, especially the girls, got a bit uptight when the exams came around.’
‘They didn’t all fall in love with him?’ Why was he feeling jealous?
She roared with laughter. ‘You’re a bit out of date, Charlie. Nobody sits swooning in class these days.’
‘What do they do these days? Lie down in the professor’s office between classes?’
She sat back in her chair. ‘No. Usually we just grab the ones we like by the balls when we meet them in the hall. What kind of question is that?’
Salter felt as if he had just pinched her, spitefully. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what goes on in colleges these days with your generation.’
‘What do you think goes on?’
‘I don’t know.’ Salter was miserable. ‘You hear about swinging professors, you know.’
‘Summers didn’t swing. I told you, he taught poetry.’ She was still sitting back watching him. ‘What was it like in your day? Did you go to university?’
‘For a while. Listen: “A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears.” ’
She sat forward, smiling. ‘That’s Wordsworth. It was one of Summers’s favourites.’
‘Was it?’ Salter clawed his way back into her favour. ‘Here’s another bit: “While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.” That’s Keats,’ he said.
‘ “To Autumn”,’ she said. ‘Right. He liked that one, too. ‘Are all you guys romantics?’
‘No, just me. That was my favourite course,’ he lied. ‘I dropped out of university after second year.’ They were nearly together again, and slightly excited by the exchange.
The ‘Reuben, Reuben’ arrived and she began to eat while he sipped another beer. Nothing was said until she had made some progress with the sandwich.
Then, ‘Good sandwich?’ he asked.
‘Here,’ she said, offering him a bite. He leaned forward to take the corner of the sandwich between his teeth. If anyone is watching this, he thought, they will think we are doing a Tom Jones.
‘Nice,’ he said, chewing, and taking a sip of beer. ‘So. I’ve learned about English professors, and I know a little bit more about Professor Summers. Tell me some more.’
She considered. ‘He was enthusiastic—have I said that? Sometimes he went pretty far and got worked up about what he was saying.’
‘Very emotional?’
‘I thought he kind of looked for highs in class.’
‘How?’
‘He liked the room to turn on to what was happening. If we just sat there, he wasn’t much good. He didn’t seem to have many notes to fall back on. If he didn’t get much response you had the feeling he would just wrap up what he was saying and go on to something else. On a bad day he could do Paradise Lost in twenty-five minutes.’
‘All twelve books?’ Salter asked smugly. In his university course only the first two books were assigned, but it was well known that there were ten more.
‘Yes. It didn’t always work, though.’
‘What about outside the class?’
‘What do you mean?’
Salter took a deep breath. Most of all he wanted to avoid sounding like a dirty old man, but one part of him continued to conduct a police investigation. ‘Students sometimes know what is going on outside the room,’ he said. ‘Was there any gossip about Summers?’
‘Here we go again.’
But Salter had considered his question. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I would like to know if you thought he had any close friends or enemies in the college.’
‘Or lovers.’
‘Or lovers.’
‘We wondered about one of his colleagues. This isn’t any fun, Charlie.’
‘Nor for me. Which one?’
‘Marika Tils. They kissed each other hello and goodbye a lot.’
‘Everybody does that now. It’s called the Elizabethan kiss of greeting,’ said Salter, who had read about it in Saturday’s paper.
‘Yes, well. That’s it. She was an Elizabethan friend, then.’
‘But no students.’
‘I don’t think so. He probably had someone like me in every class. But, as I said, it was all poetry.’
‘No enemies?’
‘Not that I could see.’ She finished her sandwich and picked up the check. ‘Movie starts in twenty minutes, Charlie. Want to come?’
He took the check from her. ‘No, But I’d like to see you again.’
She looked bewildered, and then she laughed. ‘Do you think we ought to go on meeting like this?’
Grateful, he said, ‘Sometimes new questions crop up and you like to be able to come back.’
‘Any time, Charlie,’ she said. She looked at the clock. ‘My turn?’
‘What?’
‘My turn. One. Why did you become a policeman?’
Tell her the truth. So he did, just as if he were talking to a stranger in a foreign country, someone he would never see again.
‘I was fed up,’ he said. ‘I’d dropped out of university . . .’
‘Why?’
‘I found myself counting the number of bricks in the classroom wall while the lecturer was explaining why some poem I hadn’t read was so witty. It wasn’t his fault. I hadn’t tried to read the poem, because it seemed to be in code. To understand the jokes you had to know the Bible. But I was doing the same thing in History, Economics, and Sociology, especially Sociology. I was about to fail the lot, so I quit.’
‘Then what?’
‘I