“Con men know they’re going to be rich.”

“But I knew!”

“Hell, what’s a professor anyway? When I was young I thought a professor amounted to something. They’re no better than writers. I eat ’em for breakfast. Taste different, that’s all.”

“Critics, Wilf! They make or break!”

“But what about John Crowe Ransom? From your letter I got the impression he was a real buddy. Did you tell him you were a professor?”

Rick’s face went from scarlet to puce. Since I was looking sideways at him, I now saw from a new angle a curious bit of his individual body language. I’d seen it years before when he came to the house, bashfully determined to beard me in a lair rumoured to be dangerous. Later I’d seen it at that conference. I’d thought then it was some sort of illusion, I don’t know why, that drawing back of the chin into the neck, that look up under lowered brows. But no. When embarrassed Rick really did draw back the bottom half of his face, project a forehead supposed to be, hoped to be, brazen and look up under his eyebrows like a crab from under a rock. He did it now and not even to me. It had become mechanical and he did it to the lake as if determined to be undaunted by that pewter sheet.

“Come on, Rick—out with it!”

“It began with a mistake by my—our—secretary in the office. Ella. I used to get letters addressed to Professor Tucker. It was the same for everybody, a sales pitch, flattery.”

“So you took a leaf out of the commercial handbook. Bravo!”

“You’ll never know what your work’s meant to me.”

“If anyone lets on what a con man you are, you’ll be drummed out of the academic regiment.”

“It was that goddammed girl. Me too, I have to say. I let it ride.”

“You took a risk. Congratulations.”

“Worth it, though. Her mistake earned me this, hopefully, intimacy, sitting here like this, side by side.”

“How the hell else could we sit?”

“That girl, Wilf—” chin drawn back again, leaden waters fronted—“she liked me. She thought she was doing me a favour.”

“And John Crowe Ransom?”

“I really forget, Wilf. I really do. We did meet.”

Suddenly I saw that the waters were lifeless.

“What does it matter? I’m leaving tomorrow. Then Mary Lou’ll be able to sit on this bench without falling off it.”

There was a pause. Rick broke it.

“But you’ll have dinner with us tonight?”

“All three of us?”

“Surely.”

“Right. But you’ll be my guests. Old man’s privilege. The only one.”

“Mary Lou’s shy, Wilf. She always was. But she does know what a really warm person you are under that British exterior.”

“And I thought I was international.”

Rick stood up. He came out with one of his prepared statements.

“We’ve always thought of you, sir, as a really fine example of and credit to your Great Country.”

He took himself off down the bluff after his wife. He left me there nodding solemnly like a porcelain mandarin and murmuring, Be wary of Mary, don’t be a prick with Rick.