His smile widened. “I just wondered,” he said, “is it very lonely, being so clever?”
She had sounded neither proud nor coy, as though she didn’t consider it a notable accomplishment that she had taught herself a complex language that was completely different from her native tongue. It was just something she had done. She looked at him wide-eyed now; his comment seemed to have startled her.
“That was a joke,” he clarified.
Her fingers plucked at a fold in her skirt. “I reckon I sound terribly formal when I speak it.”
“You do. Like a newspaper article. Do you understand my dialect well?”
“I do. It’s lovely. Your pronunciation, too.”
“Is it?” he asked idly.
The blush on her throat was instant. “I mean the echoes of the Aramaic substratum. What I mean is, from a linguist’s point of view, it’s interesting.” She lifted a hand to her cheek. “I also noticed some French underlying your English.”
He would have preferred to hear more about how lovely she found his dialect.
“I learned French long before I studied English,” he confirmed. “I attended a Jesuit school in Paris when I was a boy.”
An unexpected discomfort constricted his chest the moment the words left his mouth: a bewilderment that he had shared private, superfluous details about his person with her. Her eye contact was shaky, but she had still listened to him with a gravity that had simply drawn the words from him. The compassionate tilt of her lips said she sensed that Paris had not made for a happy time in his life. For a moment, their gazes clung and probed deeper. It was the sort of connection that left a piece of insight behind in each other, a deepening of mutual understanding that couldn’t be undone. He glanced away. He had come to Britain to take things away, not to give something of himself.
Someone loudly cleared their throat behind them. The queue had moved on, and they had allowed for a gap to form.
When it was his turn at the clerk desk, he sent a telegram to Nassim:
Dearest cousin
Plans have changed. Inshallah I am in Oxford tonight already.
Your affectionate cousin
Eli
* * *
—
Their train soon rumbled south. Elias had found a place in a coach just behind Catriona’s coach, and his fellow passengers kept to themselves, so he looked out the window where the gentle landscape of the lowlands slipped past. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose over industrial structures. He was preoccupied; his prolonged absence would impact the business operations in Beirut and his uncle wouldn’t be pleased, though this was Uncle’s status quo in any case. In obtrusive intervals, he thought about sex. Usually, the fantasizing was diffuse, smooth bodies of women he had never met, faces he couldn’t properly see, but today, he thought of the nymph by the lake. Her skin had the luster of pressed silk in the sunlight. In his imagination, she was pleasantly surprised to see him. She leaned slightly back against the boulder and smiled at him, and he went to her. He ran his palms over her softness, from her throat to the enticing curve of her bottom, thoroughly, leisurely, until he felt her body loosen and her breasts were heavy in his hands. He tasted her rosy lips, still wet with lake water. He wrapped her long black hair around his fist and took his place between her thighs. He steered his mind away then, because a rude feeling heated his cock, and these tight Western trousers hid nothing.
He opened his satchel, where he kept his chessboard, carefully wrapped in cloth, and A Comprehensive Work about the History, Nature, and Culture of Scotland. He found his last page in the book and sank himself into passages about the fertile soils of Fifeshire, about Scottish inheritance laws and political treaties. He studied the chapters about sheep pastoralism with great intensity, as if there were clues to a treasure hidden between the lines.
Under a pale blue sky, the train rolled into Oxford’s railway station shortly before six o’clock in the evening. At half past six, Elias had settled in his new lodgings at St. John’s College and was unpacking his suitcases. He washed and shaved. At seven o’clock on the dot, Lady Catriona knocked on his door. She stood at a distance when he opened, as though she had just taken a step back. The ugly tartan shawl still hung around her shoulders, though she had changed into a blue dinner dress. She held an envelope in her hand. Behind her, the chaperone hovered, a little droopy after the long day.
“How do you find your accommodation,” the lady asked politely. She had snuck a decidedly less formal glance at his sharply tailored black-tie attire and now her face was a little pink. Interesting. He stepped aside to reveal the bright, spacious reception room.