She had not been his student in eleven years. The corridor outside the office still smelled the same — paper, radiator dust, the faint clove of someone's tea — and that was the first thing that undid her, before he had even opened the door.
She had been twenty when she sat in his seminar on the long nineteenth-century novel, and he had been forty-one, and the gap had been an ocean. She had written him an email at the end of that term thanking him for a single sentence he had said about Middlemarch, and he had written back two paragraphs that she had printed and kept in a folder for years and then, eventually, lost in a move. She had not spoken to him in person since the day of her viva, where he had sat at the back of the room and said nothing and shaken her hand afterwards and called her by her surname for the first time, as though to release her into the world as a peer.
Now she was thirty-one. She had a book out, a small one, with a press he respected. She had written to him three months ago to ask if she could buy him a drink when she was in the city, and he had written back to suggest his office at six, after his last meeting, and a walk to a bar he liked, and she had said yes.
The door opened. He was greyer. The grey suited him; she had expected it to and was annoyed at having been right. He was thinner too, in a way that suggested either illness or a recent and successful negotiation with himself, and she did not yet know which.
"Come in," he said. "I'm just packing up."
The office was the same office. The desk, the lamp, the shelves with the same broken order. A new framed photograph she did not look at. He moved papers and she stood, because she had not been invited to sit, and because sitting in that chair, the chair she had sat in at twenty, would have been a thing she could not yet bring herself to do.
"It's good to see you," he said, without looking at her. "I read the book."
"Oh."
"It's very good."
"You're being kind."
"I'm not, actually. I don't, anymore. There isn't time."
She smiled at the floor. He looked up at the smile, and she saw him register it, and saw him decide to register it openly. The decision was new. The man she had known at twenty would not have let her see him notice anything.
They walked to the bar. The walk was long enough for the city to do its evening work on them. The bar was the kind of place he would choose — old wood, a stained ceiling, a long mirror behind the bottles in which she could see, when she looked up, the two of them sitting side by side at the counter, looking like what they were not.
He ordered for both of them without asking. She let him, because she was curious what he remembered, and he remembered. The drink was the one she had not had in years, the one she had picked up from him in the first place, at a department gathering she had no business attending. She had been twenty-one then, in a borrowed dress. He had been very correct. He had been very correct for the entire eight terms she had known him.
"How long are you in town," he said.
"Two more days."
"Where are you staying."
She told him. He nodded. He did not say anything else for a minute. She watched, in the long mirror, his fingers on the stem of his glass — the same fingers that had marked up her essays once, a careful, almost calligraphic hand in soft pencil. She remembered every comment. She had read each of them in her room with the door closed and her face hot, not because the comments were intimate — they had been the opposite of intimate, they had been clean — but because the cleanness itself, the attention, had been more than anyone had ever paid her.
"You're allowed to ask me anything now," he said.
"Now meaning."
"Now meaning you don't owe me anything and I don't owe you anything, and you're not twenty."
She took a sip of her drink. "Were you ever — " She did not finish.
"Yes," he said. "Of course. I was very careful not to be, but yes."
The bar around them did not stop. Two men were arguing about a film at the far end of the counter. The bartender was cutting a lime. Outside, a tram passed and rang its bell. She set her glass down because her hand had gone, suddenly, a little unreliable.