The Lecturer

I saw them leave the building together. I had just left it myself, and was about to cross the road, when I happened to glance back. She was leading the way as usual, with her confident, slightly arrogant stride, her handsomely angular form decorated in suitably serious pinstripe grey. He brought up the rear, catching the backswing of the door, grappling with stacks of paperwork with a martyred devotion.

The unlikely affair had begun at the start of the year, or so I believe. She had made a typically forceful entrance in to our first seminar and introduced herself as if taking part in University Challenge and expecting us to do the same. Our lack of enthusiasm did not deter her in the slightest. She had an admirable zeal in her subject which all too few academics are able to communicate – despite, or perhaps because of, being only mid-way through her thesis and drafted in to babysit the freshers for a few hours a week.

We must have appeared a motley group – five in total, and a sixth who shuffled in silently in week three without explanation and made sporadic appearances thereafter. There was a more mature German student who tended to hold up the flow of the lecture by feeling it necessary to contest each and every point our tutor made, spouting the names of historians with very little relevance. Then there was an elegant blonde who spent the time she was forced to sit at a desk in writing thank you letters for the previous weekend’s shooting party. Irritatingly, when a question was fired at her she always managed to raise her head quite calmly and respond with an assurance that brooked no argument, adding just a hint of contempt to her tone if the German felt obliged to contradict her. In contrast to her, on the opposite side of the room, a budding goth with scraped-back greasy black hair and unhealthy skin listened intently and responded aggressively as if someone were questioning her integrity rather than her historical knowledge. And then there was him. Fairly unremarkable in appearance, it was not for several weeks that anybody commented, and then in jest, on his fixation with our tutor.

As I watched she turned left along the pavement, too sure of herself to turn her head, or throw a smile at her faithful companion. About to turn away, I stopped, struck with curiosity, as against all expectations, he turned not left but right and marched on without a backward glance. I was transfixed, eyes flitting from one, talking condescendingly and unaware there not a soul in tow, to the other whose purpose it seemed ever more clear was revenge…