Clifford
The day before the
new faculty interviews, Sophia fell off her horse and took a resounding blow to
the head. Her brain reverberated within her skull as if it had been clouted
with a frying pan. At the hospital, she was pronounced sound and went about her
business as normal, but inside her body an atavistic sense had been awakened
from its divine slumber.
Graham
I sometimes feel
that Clifford is in another world and certainly not knuckling down to the job
in hand. We have barely a week in which to sort out the new hires. Ahmed in HR
always drags his heels on this, so we can’t afford to waste time at our end.
We’ve got our short list. Surely it can’t be too much to ask Clifford to show a
bit of leadership and hurry up with the interviews? As for Sophia, what was she
doing anyway riding a horse in the desert?
Eve
The hospital bit
was just attention-seeking on Sophia’s part. I would have thought that anyone
falling in sand would have had a soft landing. She always has to be one up on
everyone. I’m not impressed with people who injure themselves. Clifford put her
on candidate-lunch duty. Clearly that was all she was fit for.
Clifford
Sophia is meeting the
job candidates for lunch. I had to lean on her rather heavily to do that much. Everyone
else was either tied up, or simply didn’t want to be bothered. However, one
could say that Sophia went the extra mile, or so I soon discovered. As in the
days when she first learned and dabbled in Tarot, that old instinct, that sniffing
out of feelings and impressions and inner thoughts, started to take her over.
At
least that’s my take on it.
Graham
Our most promising
candidate … that chap Peter. She didn’t like him. Can you believe it? After the
lunch, she followed me to my room and she said, ‘Graham! Are you listening to
me, Graham? Make sure Clifford doesn’t hire him.’
Eve
asked me what the problem was. I said it was nothing. Just Sophia having a bit
of a rant. What Sophia had actually said was that this chap Peter was going to
cause an awful lot of trouble. Honestly, I’m at a loss.
Eve
Sophia gave me one
of her looks. Graham said I was being paranoid. No, I wasn’t. Sophia has never liked me. I think she’s just mean
and embittered because I have a husband and she doesn’t. Well, who would have
her? She’s just plain weird. Her latest thing is that she doesn’t want us to
hire Peter. He seems fine to me. Maybe a bit earthy, a bit too up-close and
personal? I don’t know. But, what do you need from a teacher? We’re not hiring
a president or something. He’d be fine.
Clifford
I rather liked
Peter. I thought him intelligent and cultured. Just the kind of teacher we need
for our Institute. We need to up the standard. This is the way to go. As I was
saying to Caroline last night at dinner, ‘For goodness sake, we’re not a summer
school. We need a touch of gravitas.’
Graham
So I said to
Sophia, ‘What’s your problem, Sophia?’
And
she said, ‘Mark my words, Graham, you’re going to be so sorry if we hire
Peter.’
I
said to her, ‘And what gives you that idea?’
‘His
handshake,’ she said. ‘Maybe you didn’t pick it up, but I did.’
I
said, ‘Pick what up, Sophia?’
‘It
was speaking to me,’ she said.
‘The
handshake?’
‘Yes,’
it said, “I am short-tempered and irritable. You are inferior to me, but I will
put up with you for now because of the interview situation.”
‘And
what was all that then,’ I said, ‘intuition?’
‘Insight,’
she said. ‘It was insight. And I’ll tell you something else,’ she said. ‘That
Peter has a roving eye.’
There’s
no two ways about it. I’m going to have to talk to Clifford about Sophia. We
can’t have a loose cannon like that in the department.
Clifford
Graham is
complaining about Sophia. I tried to explain to him that as one of the
longest-serving faculty members, her opinion counts for something. I told
Caroline about it. She’s never been a fan of Graham.
‘He’s
terribly ordinary,’ she said. ‘He’s probably worried that if you hire Peter,
he’ll lose his foothold in the department.’
She
could have a point. I told Graham to be patient with Sophia.
Graham
It’s pointless
speaking to Clifford. He’s like Sophia. As I said before, he’s in another
world.
He
said, ‘Oh do be patient, Graham. Sophia is not herself at the moment.’
Is
she ever herself? The woman’s deranged. Clifford sees Peter as intelligent and
cultured and she’s going around saying, ‘We don’t need troublemakers like that
working alongside us.’
Eve
If you ask me, Sophia
was always a bit strange even before the horse-in-the-desert incident.
Clifford
I don’t ask for
Graham’s opinion, but he gives it to me anyway. Caroline told me – and I think
she is absolutely right – that the sooner I take this whole matter into my own
hands, the better. I need to make haste and take some decisions.
Eve
Why do we have to
interview so many people anyway, asking the same questions over and over,
looking out for the tell-tale body language and listening for slips of the
tongue? There’s nothing wrong with Peter. Maybe Sophia fancied him and he
didn’t respond to her cues. That’s why she doesn’t want us to hire him.
Graham
Bad news. Sophia’s
sabotaged another candidate. Ernest. She held his notebook for him as he
repacked his briefcase. According to her it spoke to her … again, and it told
her he wanted security for his wife and two children, but that his drinking
flawed him and sentenced them. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. She told Clifford.
I’m guessing we won’t be hiring Ernest.
Clifford
One more candidate
to go. Brenda. I think I’m ready to take a decision about Peter. Ernest is off
the list.
Graham
Here we go again.
Brenda, it seems, ‘had hidden something deep in her heart.’ This is the inside
story from Sophia. We’ll have to stop her going to these lunches with the
candidates. But it’s like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.
I suppose Sophia knows something about bolting horses. It seems that Brenda’s
husband lived ninety percent of his time in the capital. He told Brenda he was
tired of the commute, but what he hadn’t
told her was that he had a mistress in the city. She knew anyway.
‘Her calm exterior belied the
tormented soul within.’ Sophia’s words, not mine. According to Sophia, Brenda ‘coveted
all she saw in the present and all she would take in the future.’
What
on earth does that mean?
Clifford
Sophia has left. That’s
it. She’s gone to China. I drove her to the airport. I said to her, ‘So you
want to eat, pray and love.’
She
looked at me coldly and she said, ‘No, only pray, and you should too.’
I
told her, ‘You just couldn’t forgive me for hiring Peter and Brenda.’
She
said, ‘You’re the director. It’s your decision.’
Graham
Well, that all
ended rather badly.
Clifford
Yes, I know. I
should have listened. Who would have thought so much could happen in six
months? Peter has moved to Qatar
Graham
What is his problem? All I said was, ‘Clifford,
this CV you’ve given me … it looks good but, you know what, I’ve got this funny
feeling about it.
___
Janet Olearski is an Anglo-Polish author, born in London, based in Abu Dhabi, but of no fixed abode ... effectively, an urban nomad. Her short fiction and poems have appeared in various publications including Jotters United, Far Off Places, Bare Fiction, Beautiful Scruffiness, and Pen Pusher. She is the founder of the Abu Dhabi Writers’ Workshop. Website: http://www.janetolearski.com
