Angels and Men (6 page)

‘Of course. You think I'm a rookie, or something?'

Mara's face burned. Then she jumped as someone opened the door to come down the steps.

‘Whitaker, you're
supposed
to be an ordinand,' she heard Rupert say as she stepped out into the corridor. ‘You can't seduce every lame duck you come across just because it's a challenge.'

‘Seduce? Me?' More laughter, then the door swung shut on the students going down to the bar.

For a moment she was unable to move, then she walked to a door which led out on to the terrace behind the college. She stepped out into the night and stood motionless. The stars looked down, remote and unfeeling, from above the rooftops.

CHAPTER 5

Several days later Mara was searching along the shelves in the basement of the library on Palace Green. The librarian had given her a key and allowed her to wander freely among the outsize and old books. The room was completely silent, apart from the buzzing of a strip light. She was all alone. You could go mad down here. Maybe she would pull a volume off a shelf and see a manic eye gleaming through on the other side.

Her eyes wandered along the book spines, and she craned her neck this way and that. If she ruled the world, then a law would be passed which compelled publishers to print all book titles one way: either up or down the spine. She reached an old folio volume, and intrigued, pulled it from the shelf.
The Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation
. It appeared to be the collected writings of an early Quaker. She opened it at random, and read:

This is the day of thy visitation, O Nation, wherein the Lord speaks to thee by the mouth of his servants in word and writing . . . The Lord will overturn, overturn the nation, and will create new heavens and new earth . . . and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh, and the slain of him will be many . . . the fire is kindled and the sword is drawn
. . .

She closed the volume, and hugged it. Here was raw fanaticism, the fiery vision of the end of the age.
The fire is kindled and the sword is drawn
. The writer was long dead, buried perhaps in some steep Quaker burial ground under the bowing grass. She looked at the crumbling calfskin binding and the browned pages. What would the writer have felt if he could have known that some three hundred years later she would be there studying his tracts as part of a research project? She tried to cast her mind forward three centuries and imagine students examining the delicate leaves of ancient twentieth-century works. But we will probably have blown ourselves out of existence by then, she thought. It struck her suddenly that this idea was not too distant from the early Quaker vision. Perhaps each generation believed in a catastrophic end. She saw a section of her thesis unfolding:
This phenomenon may account in part for the recurring appeal of the Book of Revelation in the lives of religious sects
. . .

She went down the lane beside the Divinity School and turned along the road back to college. A pigeon hobbled along a low wall. Mara stopped to watch its progress. The pigeon stopped too and seemed to mistrust her, for it took off and disappeared on to a roof. An unpleasant memory stirred as she began walking again.
Lame duck
. Her eyes narrowed. To be regarded as strange, or nasty even, was one thing. But to be dismissed as a lame duck . . . She had gone back to this conversation repeatedly. It was not Rupert's words that really tormented her though, for who gave a fish's tit what Rupert Anderson thought or said? But Johnny Whitaker. That smug bastard. He'd been listening to her with such seeming attention while all the time thinking, A sad little person, but I'll soon have her eating out of my hand. Hah!

Her mind was buzzing so angrily as she walked that she was not aware that someone was falling into step beside her until she heard a voice saying, ‘Psst!'

She turned. It was Rupert, and he received the full blast of her ill humour. He seemed not to notice, and held open his overcoat as though he were offering her stolen watches or dirty postcards. In the inside pocket she saw a well-known feminist text. For an instant her scowl wavered, but she clamped it firmly back in place and turned away.

‘Would you like to come for a walk?' She looked at him in surprise, and he made a walking motion with his fingers in the air, as if to clarify the suggestion. ‘Down to the river?'

She was so taken aback that she nodded. They continued down the road in silence. After about twenty yards Mara began to wonder whether he wanted to say something, or whether they would promenade solemnly to the bridge and back without uttering a word. She pictured him giving her a slight formal bow and retreating into Coverdale Hall. The caption:
Rupert remained unerringly polite, despite the girl's rudeness.
But at this point he spoke.

‘Tell me, why are you so silent?' She flicked him a glance, but said nothing. ‘Some people say you're shy, but I doubt that.' She still made no reply. ‘I've come to the conclusion that you do it deliberately. It's a pose.' They walked on. ‘You want people to look at you and ask, “Who is that beautiful, silent woman? Why is she so angry? Why is she so mysterious?” '

‘Wrong,' she said. But her mind winced.

‘Then why?'

‘Conscientious objection.'

‘To what? To speaking? Nonsense.' His self-assurance irritated her.

‘Language distorts things.'

‘That depends on your view of the function of language,' he said. By now they were nearing the bridge. ‘If you assume that its primary purpose is to express truth, then I take your point. But it isn't. Its job is communication, the establishing of relationships. If I say to you, “Lovely weather,” who cares what the weather is actually like? It's not intended as a statement of fact. I'm trying to establish contact with you. Human beings are social creatures, you know.'

She burned against him, too outraged for a moment to respond. But . . . but . . . stuttered her mind. Don't preach sociolinguistics to me, dickbrain. For all his fine words about
communication
he was using language to express truth.
His
truth, the truth that he was a man and therefore right, and that she was only a woman and by definition speaking nonsense. This was her main objection to language: that it was a means of domination, a tool in the hands of the privileged. But suddenly her indignation eluded her. Perhaps they were both speaking different types of nonsense?
Rupert enjoyed a good argument
. She felt a fleeting impulse to hit him with the book she was holding, to do physically what he was doing verbally.

Instead she said: ‘I'd rather be left alone.' They stopped in the middle of the bridge. He looked as stunned as if she actually had hit him, and when he made no answer, her words began to sound brutal to her. She rested the heavy book on the parapet. A college crew went under the bridge. Well, it's true, she thought.

‘I'm sure there are times when we'd all rather be left alone,' he said in the end. ‘But that's not an option for a Christian.'

‘I'm not a Christian,' she said. In some alleyway of her mind she heard St Peter's cock crowing. The cathedral clock struck one. She looked at Rupert. He was leaning back against the bridge looking up at the sky. At last he turned to her again.

‘Look, Mara . . .' he began, then broke off. He passed his hand over his face, then seemed to study the ground intently, apparently at a loss for words. She watched him with interest, wondering what he could be about to say. ‘I don't think this has ever happened to me before. I can't remember being disliked on sight like this.' He spoke, heedless of the fact that she might mock. ‘I can see that I'm offending you at every turn, and I don't know what to do. If you'd really rather I left you alone, then I will.'

In a flash of self-knowledge Mara realized that for some perverse reason she had been punishing him because she was attracted to his friend.

How could she make amends? Quickly. He was about to execute his slight, formal bow and vanish.

‘I don't want you to leave me alone,' she blurted out. Her ungracious tone was so much at odds with her words that he stood irresolute. Either this package was a birthday present, he seemed to be thinking, or it was a letter bomb. A mistake at this point might cost him an arm.

‘Well, OK,' he said cautiously. ‘If you're sure you don't mind having a prick like me for a friend.'

She scowled. ‘Look, I'm sorry I said that.' Well, the tone left room for improvement, but it was an apology.

He took another tentative step. ‘Well, I'm told I asked for it.' This was magnanimous, and on impulse Mara put out her hand. For a moment he seemed not to understand, then he shook hands at arm's length with a flashing smile, as though he were a lion-tamer fending her off with a chair. The thought brought a smile to her lips. His own smile relaxed into something more natural.

‘You know, if you did that more often, people wouldn't be scared of you, Mara.' Exactly, she thought.

They began to walk slowly back towards the college. Mara started to feel that some of the responsibility for making conversation now fell to her. This was one of the uncomfortable implications of friendship. ‘
The upsurge of British chess over the last few years has been astonishing
.' In the end she remembered the question she had almost asked Johnny.

‘What were you doing before you started your training for the ministry?'

‘I worked for a law firm in London.'

Coverdale Hall was in sight now. A few more sentences would see them safely there.

‘Doing what?'

‘I was a solicitor.'

Not a barrister, then. I was close, though. She bent her head forwards over the book to hide her smile, but not quickly enough.

‘And what's so funny about that?'

‘Nothing.' She managed to look serious. ‘I'm sure you were very good at it.' They were standing in front of the main entrance to Coverdale Hall.
Rupert gave the girl an old-fashioned look
. Then he said goodbye, and with his hint of a bow, disappeared into the building. Mara walked on without troubling to hide her amusement.

When she arrived in Jesus College for lunch a few moments later, she found a parcel from her mother waiting for her. It sat beside her on the bench with the large book throughout the meal, and she wondered what it contained. It was not her birthday until May. At least there would be a letter, she hoped. Her mother was an entertaining correspondent.

As soon as she was in her room she began pulling the paper apart. Although she had formed no idea at all of what might be in it, she was nevertheless surprised to find a strange black dress and a pair of old shoes. What was her mother up to now? There was a letter several pages long, which Mara settled down to read. As she read, she was aware of smiling and even murmuring comments out loud. It was as though her mother were in the room. She was one of the few people Mara loved without reservation. This did not blind her, however, and many of her smiles were at her mother's continual, neat papering over of cracks. So large and so numerous were the cracks in the Johns family that Mara felt that by now the house must be made entirely of paper. Such well co-ordinated William Morris paper, of course, but one good stormy blast would blow it away altogether.

The shoes and dress, she learnt, had belonged to Mara's Great Aunt Daphne, her mother's father's sister. ‘Why Grandma kept them all these years is beyond me,' wrote her mother. ‘I suppose the world is divided into two types of people: the snails and the squirrels. The snails carry their all with them, while the squirrels hoard. Grandma is the worst hoarder I've come across. You can't imagine the amount of
things
she has managed to collect over the years . . .'

Grandma, she discovered, had suffered another stroke and was no longer capable of looking after herself, having set fire to the kitchen curtains one morning by accident. She had been moved to a private nursing home. Her large house was to be sold, and Mara's mother was now sorting through the
things
, trying to decide what to do with them all. It was typical of the family that Mara had been told nothing of this. ‘We didn't want to worry you, darling. There was nothing you could have done. Besides, Grandma is very cheerful. She has decided that she is staying in a rather nice hotel, where she is taking a residential course in paper-flower making. They do craft activities in the afternoons, sometimes, and we think that's where she has got the idea from. The matron is very nice . . .' Grandma could transform the grimmest of realities into something cheerful. Her strokes had not changed her so much as distilled her character. In the end they would be left with quintessence of Grandma.

The dress had probably only been worn a few times by Great Aunt Daphne when she was a debutante in the 1920s. ‘You can see from the label that it was made by one of the
better
London dressmakers. Georgette, and very good quality, of course. I thought you might enjoy wearing it, and I think it will fit you. Your wonderful
gamine
figure is perfect for those 1920s styles.' Mara grinned at this deft little piece of papering. In other words, Well,
you
won't have to bandage up your bosoms like they did in those days, dearie. Mara shook out the dress and held it to herself. Maybe it would fit. She kicked off her boots and slipped her feet into the bobbin-heeled shoes. They felt all right. She did a few charleston steps, but then felt a pang for poor Aunt Daphne. Tall and scrawny, like me. ‘She was quite an accomplished Latin scholar,' papered her mother. Aunt Daphne had never married, and had been unable to avoid a life of looking after her irascible donnish father. Keeping his home, tolerating his whims, editing his notes. No escape on those black georgette wings into a good marriage. Unless, thought Mara suddenly, she had chosen her lot with care. Maybe she had thought it better to tolerate the demands of a dwindling father than the growing calls on her time of a husband and children. Once he was dead, her life was her own. She could behave as she chose in that rambling house, with no one to please but herself. Daphne – turned into a laurel by her father to escape the attentions of a lustful Apollo, and living defiantly on to be a tough old shrub that nobody could budge. The dress seemed more appealing in this light.

She put down the dress and took off the shoes. The next part of the letter described another cache of clothes discovered in a trunk in the attic. ‘They belonged to your Aunt Judith.' This had been Mara's mother's older sister – something of a romantic figure, flying her aeroplane gallantly across the skies of the Home Counties until some terrible accident had cut her life short. ‘If you have a penchant for wearing clothes from the Fifties, here is your chance. I'm sure they will fit you, and it seems a shame to throw them out. I won't give anything away, until you've seen it. Judith was rather like you.' Mara paused for a moment. A vague sense of family history hung in the room, like the smell of an old chest opened after years of being undisturbed. She saw herself fleetingly as one of a long line of tall, thin, difficult women, and wondered how much of her behaviour was predetermined by them.