Edith Crawley scowled across the desk. Her head ached with the urge to shake, her eyes wanted to roll.
He was actually wearing Doc Martens, and what looked like a velvet jacket. The sides of his hair had been shaved and he was obviously trying to grow a beard. It emerged in fits and starts. Presumably, he thought the glasses with the thick black rims made him look cool, adding to his carefully crafted persona: Michael Gregson, Hipster Professor.
In reality they made him look desperate. A man grappling with his fading youth, an ungainly arm-wrestle, which he was losing, and without any grace. That's what she'd been as well, she could admit it to herself now. An ornament in the battle against old age; the young girlfriend.
He peered over the plastic rims and stretched backwards in his chair, bringing his feet onto the corner of the desk, crossing his ankles.
"Edie, Edie, Edie."
She wanted to scream at him, "Stop calling me Edie!" For good measure she'd throw in, "Your glasses look ridiculous!" and "Your beard is patchy and always will be!" But, of course, she held her tongue and stretched her lips into a brittle smile instead.
"What am I going to do with you?" His eyes raked over her face, dropped to the gap in her blouse and the slight swell of breast that must be visible there. She pulled the white cotton closed and wondered if he'd always been this lecherous and it had simply escaped her notice.
She hated that this man had seen her naked. Hated. She'd give almost anything on earth to take it back. A wholly unsatisfying nine months, the entirety of her MA studies. She was so flabbergasted to find an older, handsome, intelligent man who showed an interest in her beyond the odd benevolent smile that she'd practically fallen over herself to jump into bed with him. Time showed her the truth. Gregson didn't understand her, he didn't really want to, she'd been an idea in his head, one she couldn't hope to match. She wasn't vivacious or flirty or simpering or any of those things men imagined about younger women.
She was twenty-three going on sixty-three and perfectly content with it, thank you very much.
For as little as he understood her, she realised she'd misjudged him just as badly. He was older in years, but that was it, age really was just a number. He was immature and insecure and not that intelligent after all. Once she'd realised all those things the last element in his favour fell away too: he ceased to be handsome. Nonetheless, they'd rumbled along for nine long months until he'd finally ended it and she was overwhelmed with relief.
The relief lasted over two years, until six months ago when her wonderful PhD supervisor had announced she was pregnant and that she'd found the perfect replacement to see out the remainder of Edith's studies: Professor Michael Gregson.
It would've been funny, if it weren't so terrible. Edith hadn't gone out with a great many men in her life and yet one of them had been sent to control her entire future. As if it wasn't mortifying enough simply presenting her work to be criticized.
He held her latest chapters over the desk and dropped them without ceremony.
"These just won't do I'm afraid." He spoke plainly, tone flat, as if sending back an overcooked salmon. She knew the tone because he was forever sending back food and wine and on one occasion, a complimentary breadbasket which didn't quite come up to snuff. He was such an ass.
This wasn't an overcooked fillet of fish. This was her life.
Months and months of work and stress and sleepless nights. She woke up sometimes, mentally cutting swathes of chapter four or reordering chapter nine. This thesis was her entire being and the best he could manage was 'these just won't do.' And that feedback came after countless submissions by email, most of which went unanswered. The few perfunctory replies that had arrived in return didn't suggest it wasn't good enough. They didn't say much of anything at all.
"If you could be a little more specific?"
"Perhaps if you wrote more like a man?"
"I'm sorry?" Her eyebrows were in her hairline, practically across the top of her skull and off down her back.
"More like a man, you know?" He waved his hand as if to indicate the obviousness of his point.
She bit back a sarcastic remark. Flushing pink and feeling his eyes on the travelling red wave rolling across her cheeks, "I'm afraid I don't."
"Have a point of view." He explained.
Aside from the ridiculous notion that all men had a point of view, it was hard to argue with him there. It wasn't that she didn't have a point of view, she had one, she had several, in fact. It was in expressing them where she got into difficulty. Finding the space to set down her own thoughts, as though they were something that mattered in and of themselves, that had been her problem since her very first supervision at Cambridge.
"I-I thought that – perhaps – I mean in chapter eight there is a section –"
He interrupted, "No. It's not enough."
She looked down at her hands, squeezed them together, and fought off the rising lump in her throat.
"Edie, look -."
Oh, she hated the way he said it, as though she was some beloved pet: Eeeedie.
"It's fine, but I can put it no higher than that. Will you get your PhD? Yes. But further funding, a teaching position, permanent residence with a University?" He counted off her hopes and dreams on his fingers, "On this basis of this –" He lifted the chapters and dropped them down again, "I think not."
"But surely some parts of it are good enough?" Desperation tinged the words.
He shrugged and fired off the worst of it, "It's all hopelessly derivative. It needs more."
The damning words echoed in a whisper around the office, "hopelessly derivative." It took her moment to realise it wasn't an echo, it was her own voice parroting them back. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be shot.
"I'm afraid so."
Her stomach threatened a revolt. She took a deep breath but it made it worse. She had to get out of this office. She stood, looked around aimlessly. Put her hand to her head, bit her lip.
"Edith?" He cocked a brow, still leaning back in his big leather chair, with his ugly brown boots up on the desk. It was nothing to him to treat her this way.
She grabbed her handbag, lunging for her hopeless chapters and stuffing them inside, hoping to enact a reverse rabbit in a hat - they might disappear. She tossed the bag over her shoulder, "I just wish you'd told me a bit sooner."
"Don't be like that."
"Like what?"
"Petulant."
She'd never hit anyone, she'd never wanted to, but now she imagined clenching her fingers into a fist – thumb on the outside, just like Matthew had taught her – and slamming it into the side of his face. Petulant? Petulant! As if she was some moaning child and not a graduate student, asking that her thesis supervisor actually supervise, rather than waiting until the eleventh hour to tell her she'd written something useless.
Instead of hitting him squarely in the jaw, she apologised with a shrug.
He came around the desk and she instinctively took a few steps back. He didn't take the hint. He came right into her personal space. His hands were on her shoulders, "let's go and get a drink. I can talk you through it - show you how it's done."
God, had he actually winked?
She pulled away, "No!" His eyes narrowed, "No, thank you, Michael. But no. I-I'm just going to go to the library and work a little more. Perhaps another time."
The rain outside the faculty carved through the air in violent sheets. Edith knew exactly where she'd left her umbrella, lying useless and damp by the leg of her kitchen table. Ordinarily, she'd have waited it out, gone to the library - fulfilled her lie to Gregson - but agitation propelled her outside. The flabby chapters weighed down her handbag, caused pains to shoot up her arm, spiraling into her shoulders.
London was noise and smells, blaring and assaulting until her sinuses were so full of the City she could barely breath. She stumbled her way to a waiting taxi and clambered in. The cabbie chuckled, perhaps made a joke about drowned rats. She barked her address in Bloomsbury and silenced his attempt at comradery.
Her hand went to the button controlling the window, she lowered it slightly, the rain stinging her face. She rolled up the pages of the manuscript in her hand, prepared to pitch them out into the elements where they could become detritus on the mess of Kingsway's crowded carriages. But she couldn't do it.
The window closed, she rested her forehead on the cool glass.
Idly she pushed the sheets of the latest chapter between thumb and forefinger, counting the pages of her uselessness. It flopped open in her hand at the start of chapter seven. It started, like all the other chapters, with a quote:
'I will continue to fight for all womankind because I must. Hang the consequences that fall on my shoulders!'
What consequences? Edith traced the lines of the text with her index finger.
Probably the usual ones faced by all women who continued to fight for women's rights. Ostracised by society, belittled by husbands and fathers, brothers and sons. Often faced with an artificial choice between femininity and their cause. Myriad reasons.
The rain lashed against the window. The taxi indicator blinked insistently across the puddles in the road.
Edith's eyes drifted back to the stark black typeface. It was such a personal declaration. The consequences weren't a possibility; they were inevitable, expected even. Destined to weigh on the author's very being, her own burden to carry.
A little number one hovered just outside the close of the quotation marks, her eyes dropped to the corresponding footnote. She hadn't referenced the primary source, only the secondary.
It caused her to flinch. A small, enormous oversight, particularly now that the quote was crying out for an explanation. It just wouldn't do. She thumped on the perspex divide and directed the driver to the British Library.
Once inside the building she ordered the book. She couldn't even remember it now. It wasn't a famous text. A small history of northern towns and cities. It dated back to the early 1970s and gender history was barely a concept back then. She'd probably just skimmed it; the quote was probably the only bit which had caught her eye. Now it hummed about her mind, crowding out Gregson's criticisms.
What consequences?
Finally the book was up from storage and she raced through its pages, desperate to find the familiar words.
And there it was. She squeaked with delight, received a scowl from the old lady at the next desk and a smile from the young woman at the one in front.
The quote was buried, mid-paragraph on page eighty-three. There was no context to speak of. It stood alone. It was referenced, the author and the source secreted somewhere in the endnotes. She found the relevant one:
J. Pearson, Diary, March 1920, Locksley Library Archive, Yorkshire.
A Miss or a Mrs, or possibly even a Ms if she'd been very progressive, J. Pearson was the woman facing the consequences of fighting for her fellow woman. But Edith still didn't know if they were personal ones or the same as all the other women she'd written about. What if it was something different entirely? Some new avenue to explore? A source untapped since 1972?
The information was vital. She was opening chapter seven with this woman's words. She needed to know what Miss Pearson was talking about, at the very least.
Locksley Library Archive, Yorkshire.
The diary was in Yorkshire.
There was only one thing to do.
Despite the fact that her bank account was in a sorry state, she took her second taxi of the day back to the flat. She grabbed a bag from the cupboard and took out her mobile phone whilst simultaneously retrieving her laptop from the kitchen table and stuffing some underwear from the clotheshorse into the open bag. It was quite the feat of multi-tasking until she stumbled into the dresser trying to stop herself from dropping the computer.
"Shit!"
An Irish voice interrupted the insistent ringing, "Branson residence."
Edith balanced the phone precariously between her chin and shoulder blade, trying to plug her computer into the power cable at her desk, "Tom? It's Edith."
"Edie? You're all muffled." He shouted, as if that might compensate for her poor diction.
She got the laptop plugged in and put the phone on he desk, hitting speakerphone, "Better?"
"Much. What's up?"
"I just wanted to tell you guys that I'm going away for a while."
"Oh? Where?"
She typed the destination into Google, "Locksley. It's a village in Yorkshire."
"What's in Locksley?"
"It might be nothing, or something. They have an archive up there and there's a diary I've seen a couple of quotes from which is supposedly stored there. It might be helpful for my thesis, if it's even there. Or it might not be useful, if it's there, which it might not be. I don't know." The uncertainty coursed through her, overpowered by the only certainty she'd felt in some time. The one that had come over her when she'd gone back to that book and seen where Pearson's diary was kept: she was going to Yorkshire.
"Ok." He dragged out the 'o' indicating he didn't follow, "I thought the thesis was basically done?"
"So did I." She rubbed her hand over her brow, opened the Trainline website, "It is." Typed 'Locksley' into the white box, "or, I thought it was. It needs something. I think it just - there's - it's not right, Tom. It's not quite right."
"Ede?"
She exhaled her frustration, "I have to go Tom. I need to."
The line was dead silent. She wondered if the connection had dropped, perhaps Tom had wandered into the dim recesses of his and Sybil's basement flat, "we'll grab drinks tonight then, bid you farewell?"
"I'm leaving today." She clicked the buy button on the website, silently mourning the low three figures flying from her meager bank account and that wouldn't even get her there. Locksley had no train station, so she'd have to battle with two local buses to make it the rest of the way.
"Well, I'll come over now, we can pop to the pub?"
She shouted across the room as she dumped clothes thoughtlessly into a bag, "Nope. My train leaves in 32 minutes."
"Ede. This isn't - this impulsiveness - this isn't like you." It was as though his face had found her through the phone, earnest in its Irish confusion and concern. She could see his slightly furrowed brow, the tilt of the head. The remnants of the Catholic schoolboy in her sister's agnostic husband.
"Yep. Well." She shrugged at her empty bedroom, "This is what's happening." She unplugged the laptop and pushed some books into her bag.
"How long will you be gone?"
"I don't know. If there's nothing there, I could be back in a matter of days." She sat back down at the desk and took the phone off speaker as her inkjet printer brushed the train tickets noisily into existence, "kiss the bump for me?"
"I will. You think you'll be back for the birth?"
Tom and Sybil's first child was due in early December, her first niece or nephew, she was excited, of course, but she hoped she'd miss the birth, she hoped there would be such a mass of material in Yorkshire she'd be bogged down in it for ages - weeks, months, years, eons. It was the only thought that stopped her crumpling into a heap on the floor.
"I don't know. But Sybil doesn't need me there. She's got you and Mom and Mary."
Tom snorted, "I don't think Mary will be there for the birth of her own children, let alone anyone else's. She'll be back in the waiting room."
"Smoking a cigar."
"With an old fashioned."
"On the rocks."
Tom chuckled, "Or maybe I'm underestimating her, maybe she'll get right in there and just scowl the kid right outta Syb. No muss, no fuss."
"Well then, you really don't need me. You've been to all the classes. Mum's had three of her own and if all else fails there's scary Aunt Mary."
He was silent for a moment, probably waging a war with himself over whether he should pry further into her rationale for going North so quickly. Edith held her breath.
"Call us when you get there?"
She smiled her relief, "Of course."