The Englishman Read Online Free

I’ll have to keep you a little with some administrative business. I’m handing over the chair at the end of the month, but because I chaired your search committee, I agreed to oversee your initiation at Ardrossan.”
    “No hot radiators or bottles of Jack Daniel’s, I hope.”
    “I beg your pardon?” She looks up from my file, as if she thought she had misheard me.
    “Nothing, sorry. Who will take over from you?”
    “Nick Hornberger.” She focuses her attention back on my file, and I wonder whether her terseness is significant. Hornberger was on my search committee, too, and he baffled me. With his close-cropped hair and the physique of an aging linebacker, he looks nothing like a paper-shuffling administrator, let alone the reconstructed male I had assumed him to be after surveying his list of publications. His most recent book is called Rakes, Rogues and Renegades , an unpardonable title for anything but a paperback with two pairs of nipples and swathes of red silk on the cover. In fact, it purports to be a study of masculinity—or, as the subtitle puts it more correctly, masculinities —in the Old South.
    Perhaps it is his understanding of antebellum gentlemanliness that made him touch my arm or my back every time we passed through a door on my campus tour. I don’t think there is any harm in Hornberger; he is just a middle-aged macho who needs to flirt with younger women. But I am thankful that it is Elizabeth Mayfield who seems to be taking me under her wing.
    “I think Giles Cleveland would be the right person to take you under his wing,” she says in her placid alto voice.
    “Oh—uh—that’s—great.”
    “Do you know Giles?”
    “N-No. Well, I know of him, of course, and I heard him at a conference once, but I haven’t met him.”
    Giles Cleveland, associate professor of Renaissance Literature and director of the Early Modern Studies program, has, in the last few years, turned into a force to be reckoned with among scholars of the English Renaissance. A good choice as a mentor, as regards his scholarship. But he is also a bit of an oddball. An Englishman born and raised, he came to Harvard as a postdoc and never went back home. I heard a rumor that he would go to Stanford, but apparently he is still here. Now in his early forties, he is reputed to be charming but difficult, an interesting and entertaining speaker at conferences, but I have heard people say about him that he is an embodiment of English arrogance, bringing civilization to the colonials. He is definitely not popular with everyone. Elizabeth seems to think she is doing me a favor. I jolly well hope she is right.
    “We had most of the little offices on the fourth floor painted during the vacations.” She looks up and smiles. “But your humble abode might benefit from a quick sweep and wipe. You could ask the cleaning staff to put you on their list, but frankly, I wouldn’t advise it. Everyone is coming back right now and finding that their offices need cleaning, and—well, you know what it’s like. They’d probably make it up there in December.”

    The next day I put my home improvement on hold, chuck rubber gloves, dustpan, liquid soap, and rags into a plastic bucket, put on jeans and t-shirt again, and go on another nesting mission. Appropriate to their insignificance in the larger scheme of things, assistant professors are located on the top floor, like a mixture between children and servants in the upper-class Victorian household. I am comfortable with that. I reckon it will be much cozier up here, with the other assistant profs, the adjuncts and the graduate assistants, than downstairs with the—um—grown-up folk.
    My office is small—a third the size of the study at the cottage—but it has a proper desk, a filing cabinet, and floor-to-ceiling shelves that need scrubbing, and—oh, glory!—leaded windows. The only flaw in the set-up is that the whole room is clogged up with dozens of plastic bags, boxes, folders,