Tony doesn’t mind its shabbiness. Even as a student she liked it here—compared, that is, with where she could have been. A rented room, an anonymous studio apartment. Some of the other, more blase students called it McFungus, a name that has been passed down over the years, but for Tony it was a haven, and she remains grateful.

Her own office is on the second floor, just a couple of doors down from her old room. Her old room itself has become the coffee room, a wilfully cheerless place with a chipped pressboard table, several mismatched straight chairs, and a yellowing Amnesty poster of a man tied up in barbed wire and stuck full of bent nails. There’s a drip coffee machine that spits and dribbles, and a rack where they are all supposed to keep their environmentally friendly washable mugs, with their initials painted on them so they won’t get one another’s gum diseases. Tony has gone to some trouble with her own mug. She’s used red nail polish, on black: it says Gnissapsert On. People occasionally use one another’s mugs, by mistake or from laziness, but nobody uses hers.

She pauses at the coffee room, where two of her colleagues, both dressed in fleecy jogging suits, are having milk and cookies. Dr. Ackroyd, the eighteenth-century agriculture expert, and Dr. Rose Pimlott, the social historian and Canadianist, who by any other name, would still be a pain in the butt. She wonders if Rose Pimlott and Bob Ackroyd are having a thing, as Roz would say. They’ve been putting their heads together quite frequently in recent weeks. But most likely it’s just some palace plot. The whole department is like a Renaissance court: whisperings, gangings-up, petty treacheries, snits, and umbrage. Tony tries to stay out of it but succeeds only sometimes. She has no particular allies and is therefore suspected by all.

Especially by Rose. Tony continues to resent the fact that, two years ago, Rose accused one of Tony’s graduate courses of being Eurocentric.