The professor

Fiction, about two adults over 18. There is an article that gets sent to her twice a year explaining why women like her want this, and it is wrong in a way she can be precise about.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

There is an article that gets sent to me about twice a year, usually by someone being kind. It has a photograph of a woman in a suit looking out of a window, and the argument is always the same: high-achieving women secretly long to surrender, because the burden of power is heavy and underneath it all we want to be relieved of it.

I am fifty-two. I chair the appointments panel, I sign the letters that decide whether somebody's contract is renewed, and on a Thursday evening my husband tells me what to do and I do it.

And that article is wrong. Not offensively wrong. Just lazily wrong, in the way that a thing can be roughly the right shape and still have got the mechanism completely backwards.

Start with the obvious objection, which is that I do not surrender anything.

Thursday evening exists because I asked for it, negotiated it over a period of about six months, wrote down what was in it, and retain, at every single moment, the ability to end it with one syllable. Rupert has never once tested that and I have used it twice in nine years, both times for reasons that had nothing to do with him.

It is the most tightly controlled hour of my entire week. My working day contains far more genuine uncertainty than that hour does. If surrender is what is on offer, I have never been sold any.

So what is it, then.

The first part is small and I did not understand it for years.

All day, every day, I have to be right.

Not right in a grand sense. Right in the sense that forty people are arranging their year around a decision I made in eleven seconds, and if it was the wrong decision it will be my name on it in June. I have been doing this long enough that the pressure is not exciting any more. It is just the weather.

What I get on a Thursday is the opposite of that. I am wrong about something tiny, on purpose, in a room with one other person, and it is dealt with, and then it is over. The whole thing has edges. Nobody will still be affected by it in June. Nobody is affected by it at all except me.

Being wrong about something that does not matter, in front of somebody who has already decided to keep me, is the closest thing to a holiday I have found.

The second part took me even longer, and it is the one I would put in the article if anybody asked me.

Nobody tells me the truth any more.

That is what seniority actually does. It is not power, it is a slow deafness. People agree with me in meetings and then send each other messages about it. Junior colleagues laugh at things that are not funny.

My feedback comes in through anonymous forms and through what people are careful not to say. I have not had a straight sentence from a person at work in about six years, and the worst of it is that I understand exactly why, because I did the same to my own head of department when I was thirty-four.

On a Thursday, Rupert tells me that what I did was not good enough.

Out loud, to my face, in a flat voice, with no hedging and no career consequences and no possibility of appeal.

It is the only unmanaged feedback in my life. I have got so used to a world of diplomatic layers that hearing one plain unpadded sentence about myself does something to me that I struggle to write down without sounding unhinged. It is an enormous relief. It is like being seen after a long time behind glass.

Rupert is an electrician. He is fifty-five and he has read three books this decade and he is the most emotionally competent person I have ever met.

He does not do a character. He has never called himself anything, has no interest in any of the vocabulary, and once asked me, with real bafflement, why anybody would want a title for something they were already doing.

His entire method is that he takes the arrangement seriously and does not negotiate at the point of delivery. If Thursday says nine o'clock then it is nine o'clock, and my being tired or important or in the middle of an email does not enter into it. I have watched him refuse to be talked round by a woman who talks people round for a living, and it works precisely because he is not enjoying the refusing.

Afterwards he makes tea and asks about the panel, and I answer him as an equal, because that is what we are for the other one hundred and sixty-seven hours.

I was forty-three when I asked, and I did it the way I do everything, which is to say I prepared a case. Three arguments, in order, with an anticipated objection and a fallback position. Rupert listened to the whole thing, which took some time. Then he said that I could have just asked, and that he had been waiting for me to reach the end so that he could say yes.

I have never been more efficiently defeated by anybody in my life.

The risk is real, and I have weighed it more carefully than I have weighed most things.

I sit on panels that decide whether people keep their jobs. If this were known it would not finish me, but it would become the first fact about me, and every decision I ever made about a man would be read back through it by somebody. A few colleagues would find it delicious. Two would use it.

So we are careful in ways that would look absurd to somebody with less to lose. Nothing is written down with my name near it. There are no photographs of anything, ever.

I do not go to events, which is a genuine loss and one I have decided to absorb. I am also aware that the freedom to be relaxed about all this is not handed out evenly, and that the people most likely to lecture me about secrecy are the ones with the least to lose by being open.

What I would say to the woman in the photograph, if she is real.

It is not that the power is too heavy. I like the power. I fought for it, I am good at it, and I have no intention of giving any of it back, which is the part the article never allows for.

It is that a life spent being correct and being agreed with is a life in which almost nothing lands. Everything arrives filtered. You stop being able to tell which of the nice things said to you are true.

And once a week somebody tells me, plainly, that I got something wrong, and then deals with it, and then it is finished and we have tea.

That is not surrender. That is the only room in my week with the glass taken out.