**Tuesday's Pleasure**
*She wore no knickers under sheer tights during his lecture.*
---
Cambridge in Michaelmas term. Rain lashing ancient stone. Light fading by four.
Every Tuesday, Emma du Plessis leaves her marketing job and four-year-old daughter to attend Dr James Harrow's "Transgression in Victorian Literature" seminar. Perfectly composed in her All Saints top and sheer black tights that hide nothing underneath.
James can hardly manage his marking some days, his ADHD making relationships fleeting at best. But on Tuesdays, his focus narrows. On Emma. On her lingering questions about power and submission in Jane Eyre that go well beyond Charlotte Brontë.
Two souls recognising something hidden. Until the afternoon Emma shares her password-protected files, and propriety dissolves like chalk in the Cambridge rain.
---
I was living in a grotty shared house on Mill Road when I met Emma. The Victorian terrace backed right onto the railway line, so close I could hear the commuter trains rumbling past my window at all hours, ferrying the suited masses to and from London Liverpool Street. The 5:15 AM service was particularly grating, filled with bleary eyed Cambridge folk beginning their daily exodus to the capital. My housemates were all postgrads, perpetually skint but clever, the lot of them cycling off to their respective departments regardless of the absolute washout weather that seemed to plague Cambridge for eight months of the year.
I was teaching English literature at Anglia Ruskin to pay the rent and my growing stack of bills. I was in my early forties now, with a string of failed relationships behind me. Never could settle down, me. Not that it was entirely my fault. Been struggling with me ADHD since forever, though I'd only got the official diagnosis last year. Always jumping from one obsession to the next, forgetting important dates, losing me keys, missing deadlines. The university had been decent about it, to be fair, but I still couldn't quite get on top of the marking. The pills helped, but I often forgot to take the bloody things. The mounting interest on my credit cards suddenly seemed like someone else's problem when I got hyper focused on writing through the night.
It was the Michaelmas term when I met her, that damp stretch from October to December when the rain seemed relentless and everyone retreated behind scarves and umbrellas. She was a mature student in her late twenties, sitting in the front row of my "Transgression in Victorian Literature" seminar. Emma had dropped out of uni years before, had done whatever she'd dropped out for for a few years, changed her mind, and now worked as a marketing executive for some tech firm in the Cambridge Science Park. The university had a special programme for mature students like her, day release, they called it, where she only needed to attend lectures on Tuesdays, stretching her degree over a longer period to accommodate her work and family commitments. She was one of those determined types, juggling motherhood, a proper career, and education all at once.
She wasn't like the others. She seemed a bit too polished, a bit too self assured to be there among the usual lot. Emma was tiny, barely 5ft if that, but she carried herself with the confidence of someone much taller. She had a lush and sumptuous woman's body, long brown hair and deep brown eyes, and she always dressed well in denim short skirts with sheer black tights that accentuated her surprisingly long legs for someone so petite. Proper posh, she was, with that unmistakable Home Counties accent that spoke of private schools and family money. But there was something in her eyes when we discussed the more provocative elements of Victorian Gothic literature, a hunger, a curiosity that went beyond academic interest, the kind of intensity you'd expect from someone pushing thirty rather than the fresh faced undergrads who typically filled my classes.
By the third week, she was staying after class, asking questions about power dynamics in Jane Eyre, about the nature of control and submission, about the thin line between fear and desire. Her essays explored the shadowy territories of Victorian sexuality with an insight that both impressed and unnerved me. When she wrote about the red room in Jane Eyre, about confinement and punishment, her analysis wasn't merely academic. There was something personal in it, something lived, something that spoke of deeper psychological needs.
I learned bits about her past in fragments. She'd mentioned growing up in Saffron Walden, her parents the sort who sent their children to boarding schools and drove Range Rovers they never took off road. That quaint market town with its medieval buildings and grammar school had produced in her a peculiar mix of rural practicality and upper middle class refinement. Her father had been largely absent, some high flying executive who'd missed most of her childhood, and her mother had been the cold, perfectionist type. That explained a lot. Then came the failed marriage to a South African cricketer, some rising star who'd come over to play county cricket and swept her off her feet. She still used his surname, du Plessis, as the divorce wasn't finalised yet, another complication in her already tangled life. She had a four year old daughter who lived with her in a small flat in Cherry Hinton. The marriage had collapsed spectacularly, with him returning to Johannesburg and leaving her to sort her life out. Now she was finishing the degree she'd abandoned for him, determined to build something for herself and her child.
"Do you write?" she asked me one evening as we walked across the rain slicked campus, the lights reflecting in puddles around us. Despite her small stature, she kept pace with me easily, her sheer black tights disappearing into her denim short skirt, and I found myself watching the rhythm of her legs as we navigated around pools of water. My Loake Chelsea boots splashed through a puddle as my mind wandered to thoughts I shouldn't have been having about a student.
"Yeah, I do," I admitted, my northern accent a stark contrast to her refined speech. "But not academic stuff, like."
"What then?"
