Offcomer Read Online Free PDF

harshly, deliberately.
    “Ah. What’s it like these days?” She smiled at him.
    “Depends where you live.” He frowned, gave her a troubled look. “I had to get away. Nothing for me there.” He paused a moment, then added, his accent shifting towards the authoritative tone he would soon, he thought, assume with his students: “You know, in German, the verb ‘to be’ is very similar to the verb ‘to dwell.’ It comes from the same root. So, ‘to be’ is literally ‘to be in a place.’ Heidegger called it ‘being-in-the-world.’ To be a human being is to be a human being somewhere. So it really matters, the place where you choose to be. It makes you what you are. That’s why I left.”
    She looked up from her coffee, looked at him, eyes wide with interest. In her eyes Alan saw himself, magnified, and fell in love.
    The other students were stubbing out cigarettes, scraping back chairs, standing up and making their way back to class.
    “I guess we’d better go,” Alan said. She drained her plasticcoffee cup. He twisted the biscuit wrapper into a knot, then followed her up the stairs.
    For the next half hour the young woman stared at Mrs. Peters. She didn’t once lean down to dip her pen into the ink, didn’t make a single mark on her paper. Whenever Alan glanced up from his own murky sheet, he saw her sitting, pen on lips, lips folded in against her teeth.
    Mrs. Blundell pulled a stool up next to her, sat down, began talking. The young woman listened carefully, mutely, pen on lips. Once or twice she lifted the pen to reply to the teacher’s comments. Then she folded her lips in again, put the pen back. She sat like that until the class ended.
    While the other students were shuffling on their coats, Mrs. Blundell went to talk to her again, a cigarette dangling from her hand. Alan slowly coiled his scarf round his neck, listening.
    “I hope I haven’t put you off …”
    “No, no, no …” The young woman was dragging on her heavy overcoat. “It’s just it’s hard …” Mrs. Blundell nodded eagerly, agreeing.
    “Oh, I know …”
    Alan dropped his stubby bit of charcoal into its box, rubbed his hands together. He clamped his drawing board underneath his arm and waited, proprietorially, for their conversation to finish. Mrs. Blundell began gathering her things, setting the room to rights. The young woman pulled on a pair of grey gloves and picked up her board.
    “Goodnight,” she said.
    “See you next week.”
    Alan fell in beside her as she trudged down the stairs.
    “You should try a different medium,” he said generously. “You should try charcoal.”
    “I’m useless with charcoal. I just make a mess.”
    They reached the bottom of the stairs. Alan regarded himself a moment in the glass-panelled door before opening it. He stepped out into the carpark. She followed and the door slammed shut behind them. Their breath disappeared in the mist. She held her drawing board between her feet as she buttoned up her overcoat. He wondered briefly what her breasts were like. They walked across the carpark together, and Alan became aware of a strange warmth spreading out through his chest, like when he drank his tea too hot. He found himself blinking away tears, sniffing in the cold. This little frail being walking along beside him had listened to him. For the first time since he had come to Oxford, he had met a woman who looked at him while he was speaking, who didn’t stare over his shoulder, glaze over, or just wander off to talk to someone else. And she was even quite good-looking. If he could just persuade her to get some decent clothes, make her realise how unattractive it was when she folded in her lips, he was flying.
    “Are you coming back next week?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Well, we should meet up sometime.”
    “I’m at Somerville. You could drop me a note. Claire Thomas.”
    She shifted the board under her arm, settling it as comfortably as possible for the walk back to