"Mmmmmm, he's a bit of a mystery still," Mrs Cooper said in her motherly voice, "Like you, he's new this term. All we know about him is that he's divorced and has been working in Africa for twenty years. He seems to be from another age; the tweed jacket, elbow patches, short back and sides, he looks like my lecturers did. He's very good, but he shares my grandfather's attitudes. And, in Africa there's no distance between the lecturers and students, it's like it was here in the 60s. We don't know what he's been getting up to.
The male lecturers were always having flings with the female students. Then, there's the corporal punishment thing, that's still standard practice in Africa. For all we know, he HAS acquired an unhealthy taste for spanking students, it's an occupational disease for male lecturers. In colonial days, many a missionary was sent home in disgrace after he succumbed. Is he showing an interest in Charlene? What was she saying about putting hands on her arse?"
"That was Devon, not Hunter," Bethany told her.
"Well good luck to Devon, he's aspirational, but not particularly realistic," said Mrs Cooper, "Charlene's much more likely to succumb to Hunter's art-deco attraction."
From that moment, Bethany's impression of Jack Hunter changed. No longer did he seem a fusty and curious refugee from a gentler age, a stereotype unworthy of attention. Garbed in this air of mystery, and tainted by suspicions of exotic sexuality, arising in truth more from her own desire for titillation than anything proved against him, she began to regard him through the immature eyes of the freshers she had rebuked. Solid bricks were built from insubstantial straw. In a world of soft cords and moleskin jackets, where lecturers sat casually amongst the students on their level to impart learning, Hunter's Harris Tweed jacket, cavalry twills, polished brogues, and ramrod straight back as he towered above his students at the front of the class set him apart.
Through the remainder of the day Bethany clothed these physical certainties with imaginative flesh. The frisson she first felt when Mrs Cooper speculated that his duties in Africa may have infected him with an unwholesome interest in his charges, delighted her, and in the tedious interludes inevitable in her work, she cultivated it.
She imagined him divorced, living alone in a bachelor apartment, but each day having to teach classes of nubile young students who posed and postured provocatively in response to their surging hormones, unconscious of their invitation to any interested male. These girls, who would excite him, would inevitably misbehave.
She considered also that because of the aids holocaust, Africa would not be a place where a sensible man would resort to prostitutes, or casual partners.
The only physical intercourse he could have had with womankind would be when he administered a just punishment in the course of his duties. She thought what temptation it must have been for him to lay these lovely miscreants across his lap, the torment of feeling their warm soft bodies pulse against his crotch, seeing their taut, bulging buttocks displayed before him yet able to touch them only briefly as his hand struck home in chastisement. Bethany could readily imagine that a man in his desperately deprived situation, no matter how pure his motive, would find himself aroused to involuntary ejaculation.
How long would it be before such a poor creature would seek out misconduct, telling himself that if peace of mind resulted from justly administered censure, no harm resulted. That he received a collateral benefit in no way diminished the benefit resulting to his students?
She understood that. Indeed, she could feel sympathy for him, even pity.
After all, he was upright and responsible, a good man who deserved the enjoyment of a woman, an enjoyment from which he was cruelly cut off for so long. She felt a tender understanding of his predicament and was, in a way, relieved that he had been able to achieve some comfort during his long years of deprivation.
During the day, in passing, she saw Hunter several times, and now observed him with a keen eye.
At lunchtime, he was in the cafeteria. Her attention was drawn to him, and she kept him under furtive surveillance. As he chatted with his colleagues, he sat straight in his chair. He spoke freely, and from time to time his stern face would break into a winning smile. When he finished lunch, his plate was clear, save for his cutlery, which was set at right angles to the table's edge. Five minutes before the bell rang for afternoon classes, he checked his watch, rose, tugged on the lapels of his jacket to ensure it hung correctly, and strode with purpose towards his classroom. His reluctant companions rifled in the paper garbage in front of them for the final biscuit, then slouched off, two minutes after the bell rang, to arrive last, in a classroom in chaos.
As an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, Bethany quickly learned that it was a mistake to arrive promptly in class. Most lecturers would seek to foreshorten their ordeal by arriving five minutes late, and a prompt teaching assistant would find herself, shorn of authority, but responsible for the behaviour of an unruly students.
Not so with Hunter's classes. She had heard that before the first student arrived, he was there. As they trooped in, he greeted and seated them and set them some useful task to keep them productively occupied. Unless he gave permission, he permitted no voice other than his to be heard. When he gave instructions, no discussion was permitted; he expected them to be promptly carried out. She remembered, at the beginning of the semester, his voice could be heard at the other end of the college as he reprimanded those who were slow to adapt to his rules. However, over the first two weeks, such occasions had grown fewer, and now he was rarely audible outside his classroom.
Chapter
3.
Febrile Imagination.
After lunch, through a long period of tests, when her function was to invigilate, Bethany occupied her mind once more with teasing speculation about Hunter's history. Respectable though he was, she wondered how corrosive the sexualised punishments she fancied he was forced to administer, would have been to his moral fibre. Through all those years, could he really have resisted the temptation to seek relief in purely recreational contact? Surely, like a lawfully prescribed painkiller, such just chastisement would become addictive, and the desire become for - more often - and more powerful. This would lead him to stray onto the dark side to meet his needs.
She remembered that in Africa there were so many pretty girls, just as naughty as any you find here, but poor and amenable to any offer of "une petite cadeau", especially if no work was involved. In all those years, could he really have resisted the temptation to place the prettiest girl, the one who excited him most, in detention, and offer her the possibility of, not just early release, but also some pocket money to buy a new dress? Bethany asked herself what she would do in that girl's situation. She knew what Charlene would do, but would she do it herself? Charlene was one of those girls who misbehaved so often that you knew she deserved chastisement for something, even though you knew not precisely what. Indulging her fantasy, Bethany imagines Charlene, in Africa, in poverty, in detention, in Hunter's lecture room.
She pictures that greedy, lustful expression on the face of her Troll, superimposed on Hunter, and imagines the disturbance in his cavalry twills as he admires this lovely student sat in detention before him. The wretched girl is coquettish, and he knows she has been up to something. They are alone in the room, neither wishing to be there but knowing that they cannot leave until Charlene has atoned. Hunter sees a way that this can be achieved and they can both be on their way.
"Charlene," he says sharply, "your behaviour seems to be getting worse, what have you been getting up to."
"Nothing," she says.
"I know you haven't been getting up to nothing, you've been getting up to something, but I don't yet know what it is, I'm disappointed in you, I expected better."
Charlene hangs her head, and stares guiltily at the floor.
"This isn't detention only for you, you know, it's detention for me also. Do you think I enjoy wasting my evening sitting here supervising you?"
"No." says Charlene, faintly.
"I think it would be better if I simply spanked your bottom now. Get this over with, and then we could both go home, what do you think?"
"I don't like being spanked. It hurts," says Charlene.
"In the circumstances I don't suppose I have to spank you hard, after all ...I don't really know all you've been doing, so I can give you the benefit of the doubt. I can be lenient; I won't be like your father."
"I don't know," she replies, still looking at the floor.
"Look at me Charlene," Hunter instructs.
She glances up at him, starts, and asks anxiously, "Why do you look like that? Your face frightens me."
"I'm sorry if I appear frightening, I just feel a little unwell and really do want to go home as soon as possible, but you're keeping us both here."
"Sorry."
"Look, would it make any difference if I promised to smack you gently, and gave you one of these," he holds up a bank note.
