He was horrible at mornings, which I related to him being a very big person, 6'5 and extremely wide, a farmer’s build. I’ve had this idea in my head since I was young that a person’s body is a factory, a big Edwardian job, and that you need every worker comfortably sitting at their station before the day’s work can begin. The bigger the person, the further the workers have to travel: trudging up stairs, turning down corridors. This was my own explanation for being bad at mornings and I was happy to extend the kindness to Fred Byrne.
“Right,” he began. “The Victorians.”
He nudged his brow with the heel of his hand, trying to stop a bead of sweat before it fell on the lectern.
“Who knows Sherlock Holmes?”
He knew that most of us would drop out by the end of our first year. That’s how it is with Arts. People love it for the variety but can’t handle the droopy uselessness of it, and when the hangovers and the depressions kick in around February, it’s hard to justify dragging yourself out of bed for Cronus eating his babies. Dr. Byrne was passionate about his subject but he also did not like to waste energy, so he spent those first few classes giving us just enough information about the Victorians so that it might one day be handy in a pub quiz.
He repeated his question, after it was met with silence. This was pre–Benedict Cumberbatch’s reign over the BBC, so it was a dry time culturally for Mr. Holmes, and we didn’t know a lot.
“Detective,” someone said.
“London,” another.
A long silence.
“Drugs,” one boy said, finally, and there was a titter because we were eighteen and imagined ourselves to be the inventors of drugs. “Wasn’t he on drugs?”
A few people in Dr. Byrne’s factory sat down at their machines just then, and he suddenly erupted in talk, talk so fevered that it was at first hard to tell whether he was mad at the boy for saying “drugs” or very happy. He talked about opium, laudanum, morphine and cocaine, which were legal in Victorian England at the time. He noted that non-white writers don’t tend to put out exploratory Drug Books with quite the same tenacity, and was that because they had bigger things to say about drugs, such as how they destroyed their communities. He talked about spending five years in America as a younger man, about how the war on drugs there was merely a feeding tube for the private prison system. He argued with himself, representing both the pro-and the anti-drugs side, his face reddening as he did so. He was thirty-eight in 2009, which I suppose makes him fifty now.
“Right,” he said, at the end of his spiel. He always ended his classes the way he started them: with the word “right.”
We loved it, of course. We thought of him as the Drugs Guy. We would later learn that Dr. Byrne didn’t really care about drugs so much as he liked having a subject that was old and could be argued from a lot of directions. Incest, sodomy, abortion, prostitution: anything that had been around for two thousand years and had always been controversial. I suppose he liked the Victorians because they tried to put rules on things, and he loved debating whether or not those rules should exist. He was everyone’s favourite lecturer, which I sometimes think was not down to his brilliance but to the fact that the English faculty was mostly women. We already know that I was something of a misogynist. So was everyone else, I suspect. I also think there’s something in the fact that most English teachers at most secondary schools are women. Having a large man teach you about a book felt exciting, like Dead Poets Society.
I had been in several of Dr. Byrne’s classes by the time I met James, at the end of 2009. At this stage in Dr. Byrne’s career he was so popular that he was allowed to have any stipulations he wanted for his seminar group, and everyone who signed up was asked to write an essay about any aspect of the Victorian sensibility that was still present in culture today. The group would run from January to April, my final term of university. There were only fifteen places, and something like 150 of us had tried to sign up. I would be surprised if even twenty people wrote the essay.
I received an email to meet him at his office, which was situated in a department-owned house on the college road. This sounds seedy. Are all colleges like this? Faculty members being outsourced to tiny little houses that smelled of old radiators? Anyway, he wanted to discuss the essay I had written. It was very exciting for me. Sitting in his pokey little office, I thought what I always do when I’m in a small room with a man I’m not related to, which is: Are we gonna fuck?
I don’t know why I think this. It’s never happened. I’ve had one-night stands, of course, but they were always an extension of a date or a night out. But I’ve never been in a lift, or a stockroom, or in library stacks with a random man and then suddenly found myself wrapped in his arms. Despite this, I am always poised for it to happen. I could be standing next to a seventy-year-old man in a lift and think: I hope he doesn’t want to have sex; I’m still on my period.
Dr. Byrne was obviously different: I really did want to have sex with him. It wasn’t just that he was a random man in a small room. I had been nursing a quiet crush on him since my first year, a crush I only kept private because of how annoyingly obvious it seemed. I didn’t really talk to the girls in my year but I was pretty sure we were all hoping to fuck Dr. Byrne. He was huge, and passionate, and he was the only man under fifty in the English department.
Most tantalisingly of all—oh my God—he had a wife. But not just that.
That wife had been a student.
Despite being so uninvolved with college, I was very aware of the situation with Dr. Byrne’s wife. Crushes are like that. No matter how checked-out you are, there’s always one microphone left switched on, and it only records information about your desire. He and the wife had been married four years, had met six years ago. When she was an undergrad? We counted on our fingers. No, came the answer. She had been a master’s student. She had been well into her twenties. This was less good, but still exciting. It proved it could happen.
So I sat in the little room and looked at his face. He had what James would later call “baby dinosaur features.” The broad brow, wide nose, heavy-lidded eyes all came together and made you think of a brachiosaurus lazily eating leaves out of a tree.
“Right,” he said. “Rachel Murray.”
He was reading my name off my essay paper, then looked up and smiled, as if he were glad to finally be putting a name to a face. I had been in four of his modules by that point.
“Hello,” I said, motioning to close the door behind me.
“No, no, leave it open,” he said. “Have a seat.”
I must have looked agitated. I have a thing about sitting in rooms with the door open. It makes me fidget. Were you born in a barn? etc.
“We have to keep it open,” he said absently. “In case I try to pounce on you.”
I looked at him, shocked. He did not bother to meet my gaze.
“It’s unfortunately rather common at third-level education,” he said gravely, and I thought, Don’t kid a kidder; I know how you met your wife. “Anyway. Pyjamas. Explain your notion.”
“I’ve written it in the essay,” I said.
“I know you have, but I want to hear you explain it. I want good chatters in my group. Go on.”