He got the email alleging the misconduct at midday and had been prepared to drop everything. Her name didn’t stand out to him, Arianne, although she said they had met earlier that year during a forgettable boat trip on the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge. A drinks event after a conference, it sank into the pile of outings with sweet beer and vinegary pinot grigio that attempted to be memorable but were always awkward and full of people squinting at each other’s twirling lanyards. He remembered the evening only because he had gone on holiday the following morning, and in order to survive his eight a.m. flight, he had made plans to leave the drinks function early.
I don’t know if you remember me, Arianne said. We met on the wharf and joked about how similar our names are. I attended your panel on women in higher education. I’ve kept this to myself but I can’t help but feel like I need to say something.
Adrian was no stranger to stories like Arianne’s. He recognised the tone and probable subject matter immediately, and they always sparked a cocktail of purposeful dread and thrill in his gut as he prepared to take on a new case, a new righteous offensive. Through a decade of his early career, he had climbed the ranks of Human Resources at one of the country’s largest engineering firms and he had become incensed by HR’s reputation for complicity in covering up bad behaviour. Case after case of harassment and abuse, both inside his employer’s company and in the industry at large reduced him to depression when it wasn’t making him scorchingly angry. He became indignant. He wouldn’t stand for jokes that skirted even the outermost borders of being off-colour. In everyone who wasn’t embroiled in an internal battle with their own anxiety, he saw people about to take advantage of those who were. His wife suggested a move away from HR as a profession given how much of a toll it was taking on him, and he’d agreed, moving back into academia and now onto his own venture. From his early years, he still prided himself on being an advocate for women and minorities.
He remembered the event, albeit vaguely. The boat trip from Hammersmith was meant to showcase the city but the evening had been misty and damp, despite it being late May. Most people crowded on the indoor lower deck, the air becoming as wet as it was outside and even smellier, ten hours of dress shirts and black coffee marinating in room-temperature lager.
Arianne said, I joined a group conversation but I was way out of my league. I thought they were talking about partnerships between universities, which was why I stuck around because that’s what I do. But they were talking about investing in businesses and engineering PhDs. I didn’t want to look silly by bowing out of a conversation I’d sort of snuck into so I stayed. One of the people was Lewis––
Adrian stopped reading. In the beginning, he’d taken full-chested satisfaction in crashing down on the blackmailers, the threateners and the creeps. He would go into bat, happy to put an offender on trial and find him guilty after reading one tweet, one text, one report. The offenders in question were faceless and nameless after he’d dealt with them, relegated to a scrap-heap of subhumanity. The old-fashioned days of science and academia’s pasts were clashing with modern professionalism and he was happy to facilitate the former’s demise.
Arianne. Who is Arianne. He flicked to the bottom of her email and clicked on the link to her Twitter account, noting that she worked as an engineer and was based in Sydney. He didn’t recognise the long brown hair, grey blazer and scooped off-white blouse. She looked older than he’d expected and he was about to search for her on LinkedIn before he was overcome by the dreadful, nauseous need to keep reading. He didn’t want to know. He never wanted to read another word Arianne had written ever again. But he had to know. She had said the name: Lewis. He wanted to delete her email. Never got it. Caught in spam. Sorry, love.
––was Lewis Bowden. He talked about his investment with you. We had been in a group of six or seven but most people got off at Tower Bridge because on the way back, we were alone.
Adrian had remembered more by then, mainly because he too had disembarked near Tower Bridge. He remembered the boat as well, a small river cruiser. The upper deck was outdoors with a wheelhouse and decorative funnel. It could have used several upgrades, notably replacement of the drab carpet, wood panelling and faded outdoor seating that had seen too many blustery Thames rainstorms.
I didn’t realise, she said, that everyone had gone.
Adrian had met Lewis at an automation conference near Frankfurt five years earlier. There had been a speakers’ dinner where Lewis waxed lyrical about his wife and twin daughters until midnight, when Adrian went back to the hotel and Lewis disappeared, seen next at lunch with a grey sheen and an ethanol-tinged odour. He was the personification of a hearty back-slap: likeable, too easily forgivable, troublesome.
She said, I didn’t realise what was happening until we were down at the front of the boat. There was a funnel in front of the driver (helmsman, Adrian thought) and my back was against it. He pressed himself into me and put his hand behind me. I said I had to go and he kept talking about helping me, saying he could get me jobs and asking where I was staying. I told him I was staying with friends and he said I should come back to his.
Adrian had never met Lewis’s wife. It was unfortunate too, because he liked knowing the family members of people with whom he was going into business. She existed in the same ghostly fashion as many spouses: they were almost never seen in the flesh and if they were, it was awkward. He didn’t know how old the twin girls were: Lewis had gone on about music or swimming or whatever, but they could have been five or fifteen. He found he was frantically chewing the inside of his bottom lip, creating a bloody ulcer that would be a weeping mess for days to come.
I pushed him. It was noisy on the water and I didn’t think it would make a difference to scream but I tried and he put his hand over my mouth. He grabbed my bum and shoved me against the wall and kissed me and I threw my drink at him. I ran. I nearly fell down the stairs. I hid in the toilets until we got back to Hammersmith.
There weren’t any paragraph breaks until that point. Adrian found poor writing grating, unintentionally infantilising. Irritating. He glared, suddenly overcome by intense anger at the paragraph. Writing well was a poor skill to lack. He was angry at her for it. Made you look weak. Made her look weak. Maybe she was weak. Maybe he was. The anger smarted behind his eyes as the lip gave way and his teeth met in a tightly locked underbite, tasting of tart and salty flesh.
I’m telling you this because I saw the press release about your upcoming launch and I couldn’t stop thinking about what he did. I know I should have said something sooner and I apologise. I know that nothing ended up happening. But I don’t want it to happen to another woman.
She signed off: Arianne, surname, Twitter links, foreign phone numbers. Kind regards. His lip wept.
Nothing happened. Happen again. She apologises. Another woman. I’m telling you this because it happened.
He’d heard so many stories before and he knew those stories were often widely shared under a cover of near-silence, near blackout secrecy that sought to protect the injured but in fact did the opposite. They called it the whisper network. Many of the whispers were outwardly unremarkable, detailing folks who couldn’t be trusted with early morning speaking slots on account of their notorious hangovers, or who philandered but at least had the consent of the third party. But there were other stories too. Ones that were often never committed to text. Stories that mattered. Sweat blanched cold across his palms and forehead. He laid the question out, stretching it from one side of the office window to the other: had he ever heard anything about Lewis? Had there ever been an imperceptible nudge, a raised eyebrow, someone’s else’s bitten lip, a nod in Lewis’s direction that said wait, just a second, and listen for a whisper. Years raced behind his field of vision; drinks, sighs, falters, stifled coughs, women politely exiting stage left before the evening’s end. I’ve got to go now, with a sliver of hurry. Had he? And he decided, far too quickly and with far too much undue conviction, that he had not.
He had not. You haven’t, Adrian. Promise me that you haven’t.
Help.
Beyond the window, the bland skyline of Hackney wilted under August clouds. A lot had happened over the summer. There were six weeks left until the launch of his new company: a scientific research network in which interest from the academic sector couldn’t have been hotter. Adrian had secured investment from four colleagues, three of them women. Three women, and Lewis. Before receiving Arianne’s email he had been looking over the plans for the launch party. They were to rent the ground floor of the Hoxton Hotel and woo Silicon Roundabout for all its good fortunes.
He decided to talk to his wife, conducting the conversation in his imagination. In his head, his wife was appalled. She said, Adrian, this is really bad. Did you know he was like this?
Promise me that you didn’t.
Lewis had gone through a number of jobs since he and Adrian had met, always managing to maximise either golden handcuffs or golden handshakes. He was leading research and development at a manufacturing conglomerate now; something in aerospace but with a consumer bent. He was always exceptionally busy and this was exemplified by lower-case, typo-ridden tweets that garnered positive responses and a lot of shares nonetheless. The need to write professionally somehow didn’t apply to Lewis.
Adrian clicked on Arianne’s company website and found a photograph of her with shorter hair and wearing those NHS-chic glasses that were making a bizarre comeback. His wife’s face faded from his mind’s eye and was replaced with Lewis’s. He began the next imaginary conversation: clear the throat, steady the temper, light grimace.
Lewis, Adrian said to himself. Mate.
Backslap-chat. It was a dialect they spoke to each other: a middle class slang that combined plenty of mates with clipped Home Counties accents.
Mate I’ve got an uncomfortable issue mate. Do you remember that seminar we spoke at a few months ago in Hammersmith? There was a boat trip?
He stumbled in his script. Lewis would process the correct response before Adrian had got out the second mate. Lewis would know. Lewis always knew. But I didn’t, Adrian thought. Surely I didn’t.
Oh, Lewis would exclaim. Yeah mate, I remember. Rain! Everyone sloshed!
There was a girl there, Australian?
Aaaahm? Lewis’s eyebrows met at a peak. Thoughtful, pious, home by dinnertime. Wouldn’t have the faintest, to be honest. Why, what’s up?
She said you trapped her against the funnel and assaulted her.
It wouldn’t happen like that. In fact, Lewis wouldn’t deny the memory.
Oh… mate! Yeah I remember. She got hammered! I had to help her down the stairs. She spent the rest of the night puking but we got her a taxi in the end. She could barely remember where she was staying.
Adrian could gently suggest that the undoubtedly extremely drunk Australian girl, whose version of events he clearly didn’t buy, had implied Lewis had been too friendly; had made her uncomfortable. Lewis would look concerned, appalled even, that he may have been responsible for a moment of disquiet. He’d say, honestly mate I barely remember her. Extremely sorry if I caused offence?
The investment would be safe but there would always be that cloud; that time Adrian mentioned that girl, Adrienne or something, who got drunk on that boat and made a scene. There would always be that exposed nerve between both of them, where Adrian saw Lewis and Lewis saw Adrian and the bar they leant against or the table across which they sat prickled and chilled. There would be that twitch of hesitation that Adrian, in every sense of the word, could not afford.
In future, he said to himself, he’d keep a closer eye on Lewis. It wouldn’t happen again, not on his watch. Not to another woman. In fact, this was the best idea (he decided, alone in his head): it was vital to keep Lewis around. He was doing this to further the cause. He could help. He could build bridges, encourage change, keep watch, find a platitude that meant he didn’t have to let go, not yet, a couple more years and a second round of funding… Party plans back on the monitor, Adrian’s gaze met Lewis’s in the photo from the press release. With ten percent more ownership of the new company than the other shareholders, Lewis stood in the middle of the group, hands around his co-investors’ waists. On one tightly curled finger, his wedding ring glinted in the camera’s flash, outshone only by his eyes.
Don’t you ever mention this, Adrian, especially not to me.
If he dared to ask, the relationship was as good as dead. If he returned the money and fired him, Lewis would be free to roam. If he kept him close, Adrian could keep watch... I’m doing this for her, really. Adrian’s mind strained at the equation of appeasing those glinting eyes, of deciding to do nothing. I never got this email. He closed the party plans. Even if Arianne’s message was archived, and after his lip healed, never thought of again, he was still a saviour. Arianne who? Nothing happened really. Bit of a dust-up after too many beers. A misunderstanding most likely. She’ll live. He silently wished her well. That was him; he was whole. A problem solved. A job well done.