Two years before she came into her father’s money, Kitty moved into a home of her own. Both Louise and Marie-Thérèse encouraged her to do this, although Vadim was mournful. She found a tiny flat in Old Church Street, near the river in Chelsea, filled it with second-hand furniture of no great value, and worked at her research – for Louise was right and she turned out to be clever. But she went home at the weekends, and sometimes, as she came out of the station, she would see Vadim, in his Basque beret and his tennis shoes, pinching the fruit at the greengrocer’s to see if it was ripe, smelling the fish at the fishmonger’s, and demanding to taste the cheese. Part of her cringed with the imagined antagonism of the shopkeepers. Part of her admired his tenacity. Part of her wished her English father were alive. Yet another part noted what fashion magazines were on sale, and bought them for Louise.
To the family she was like a marvellous foreigner. ‘You know, my darling, there is no need for you to study so hard,’ said her mother. ‘I should like you to get out more and meet more people.’ She did not say where, for she did not know. Vadim unpacked her basket, inhaling with ecstasy the freshly ground coffee that she bought for him. Louise was mostly interested in her clothes. ‘Off the peg?’ she would say, incredulously. ‘Off the peg? Mais tu es folle, ma fille. I can still make you a dress that you would not find anywhere in London. Vadim, fetch me that piece of silk jersey in the bottom drawer.’ So Kitty would spend most of her weekend in her petticoat while Louise made her a dress and Marie-Thérèse watched or listened dreamily to the radio, her place in her novel marked by a handkerchief. After their dinner they would all watch television together, for Vadim and Louise followed the various serials with great intensity, like children. Marie-Thérèse tired quickly but felt obliged to sit up with them, vaguely moved by the absorbed expressions on her parents’ faces. ‘I can’t see much happiness there, can you, Papa?’ she would say, or, ‘You were right, Maman, she is after his money.’ ‘Belle fille tout de même,’ Louise would murmur, her eyes narrowed, as if taking measurements. They went to bed early, for Kitty yawned with boredom at the end of her day, and when she retired to her small room she would take one of Marie-Thérèse’s novels, being unable to face the books she knew she should be reading. Those books were waiting for her in Old Church Street. Her subject was the Romantic Tradition.
She applied for and got a research appointment at a small but richly endowed provincial university, famous for its departments of History and Microbiology. She was immediately noticed because of her exquisite clothes. ‘Milady Maule,’ observed the head of department’s secretary. ‘Must be rolling in it.’ Thus are reputations falsely made. In a few months the head of department’s secretary said to her friend, ‘If she can afford to go to Paris for her clothes, I wonder why she bothers to fill in time here.’ At the time when this remark was made Kitty was in Chelsea, disposing of a damp and overfilled sandwich pressed into her basket by Vadim who thought she needed a little pick-me-up after her journey home. The smell hung disagreeably about her hands, and she washed them several times before getting down to the Romantic Tradition. The transition from one life to another was not always easy.
After Marie-Thérèse’s death, quickly and quietly one evening at the dinner table, the old people became older and seemed to revert to their less illustrious days in Paris, before success had brought them their modest affluence. Louise’s dress was now dusty with ash; her swollen feet were stuck into slippers. Vadim did not bother to remove his beret in the house. Only when Kitty came, at the weekends, did he indulge in his vigorous and haphazard cooking: soft-boiled eggs greeted her when she arrived, longing for coffee, and cups of soup, rocking in their saucers, broke up the afternoon. She swallowed it all down for she was terrified of hurting him still more, and found it difficult to endure the long day sitting with Louise, whose eyes were now dull and vague. She asked them questions about the past in an effort to animate them, for she remembered them as the liveliest people she had ever known. All Louise would say was, ‘If only she had married again!’ ‘But Maman Louise, she is with Father now,’ said Kitty, her voice sounding as false to her as had the prayers she had murmured at school. Louise would shrug and an expression of pity would pass over Papa’s face, as if only now registering the fact that his grand-daughter had been affected by an alien and sentimental culture. In his world, and that of Louise, you had your youth and your energy and your determination. Nothing else was given to you, but all could be taken away. As it had been.
Gradually Kitty came to dread the weekends which were symbolized for her by the food thrust lovingly in front of her. She began to refuse it and her heart ached as Vadim, dejected, bore it away again. They spoke little, her attempts at cheering them up proving fruitless. They were waiting for news and she had none to tell them. Occasionally Louise, energized by a strange kind of malice, would stir from her semi-permanent doze, would open her eyes, survey Kitty from head to foot, and question her. ‘Well, ma fille, where are your lovers? Who will take you home tonight? For whom do you wash your hair? And your studies, will you ever finish them?’ Turning her puffy hands in her lap in a strange mute appeal, she said, ‘I do not understand your life. Are your colleagues real men? Is it so different here? What do you discuss over your tea and biscuits? Come,’ she would say, with a glint in her eye, but the hands still turning, sadly, ‘come, ma fille, tell me about England.’
TWO
When dining alone, Kitty Maule tended to dispatch the meal as quickly as possible and also to distract herself from the actual business of eating. She found it helpful to balance a tray on her knees rather than to sit down forlornly at an empty table, and to read, listen to the radio, or even sometimes to wander about, as if only lending herself to the task of digestion. The vagaries of her appetite had increased since her mother’s death, at dinner, some three years earlier. It had been a strange and peaceful death, her mother collapsed in her chair, one small hand trailing through some fragments of walnut shell. The faintly sour scent of her grandmother’s discarded fruit peel was still in Kitty’s nostrils, as well as the sight of her grandfather, with tears pouring down his face, crying, ‘Marie-Thérèse! Marie-Thérèse!’ Somehow the event had been incorporated into their family life, but Kitty Maule could never sit down to a hearty plateful of food without hearing the plaint, ‘Marie-Thérèse! Marie-Thérèse!’ Her throat would close and a faint trembling would start in her hands. People had given up asking her out. She was better off at home, where she could concentrate on feeding the birds with the crumbs from her plate. Sometimes she was perfectly all right, as now. Sometimes she ate with enjoyment, as when she prepared a meal for her lover, Maurice Bishop. But when she was alone, there hovered faintly in the background of her mind the memory of the hand and the walnut shells, and the cry, ‘Marie-Thérèse! Marie-Thérèse!’
On an evening such as this, a Friday, she made an omelette and ate it carelessly, wandering about her little kitchen, absently waving her fork. In her mind she was going over her last conversation with Maurice, who had telephoned earlier and thus both calmed and unsettled her. She would see him, officially and discreetly, at a lecture the following week; she would sit in the audience with all his other admirers while he discoursed on the cathedrals of England, for, although an historian by profession, he was also a romantic and devout Christian, a strange combination which appeared to keep him perfectly happy. His dispositions and predispositions manifested themselves in a series of public lectures which regularly filled the main theatre of the small provincial university lucky enough to retain him as its Professor of Mediaeval History, although offers were continually coming from Oxford, where, it was predicted, he would take up his next post. His devotion to the cathedrals of England, on which he offered a series of inaccurate but moving insights (with slides), entranced his audience and enraged the Roger Fry Professor of Significant Form who writhed in his seat but was forced to attend through sheer pressure of public opinion. ‘Charismatic shit,’ he was once overheard mutter
ing to his wife. ‘Sanctimonious bastard. How does he know what Canterbury was supposed to look like? I suppose he’ll get Durham sorted out next. Is there no end to this?’ ‘I thought it was lovely,’ said his wife, clapping stolidly, along with all the other ladies, the Friends of the University, the departmental secretaries, the retired librarians. ‘And anyway, he comes to your lectures on Cézanne. You can hardly do less than return the compliment.’ ‘Oh yes, he casts his nets wide, does our Maurice,’ agreed the Roger Fry Professor. ‘Nothing human is alien to him. He really feels at one with those simple mediaeval masons.’ ‘Oh, shut up, David,’ said his wife, adding, fatally, ‘You’re jealous, that’s all.’ After which, they said nothing to each other for the rest of the evening.
Kitty Maule, dressed in her best, although Maurice could not see her, would watch the handsome smiling figure mounting the steps to the platform, and try not to sigh as he surveyed the image on the screen before turning to his audience, his hands on his hips, his legs and buttocks braced as if for sexual activity. He was a beautiful man and everyone was faintly in love with him. Kitty herself had loved him for two years and had entertained secret hopes. But their brief affair had settled down into a strange comradely routine which puzzled her but which she accepted. She accepted his random telephone calls, too random for her taste, and his eventual reappearance at her dinner table, where he would talk about his work and eat her food appreciatively; and seeing him there, she too, at last, would eat.
Tonight was Friday, she would see him on Wednesday, and the following Monday he would come to dinner. She would have little chance of talking to him on Wednesday for he was always surrounded by eager questioners after his lecture, and indeed these occasions made the university so popular that the head of the Romance Languages Department, who was also the Dean, arranged small sherry parties which sometimes went on quite late. One these occasions the Friends of the University, who were also the wealthier ladies of the surrounding countryside, paid homage, their fine diamond rings glinting on hands weatherbeaten with gardening. She could hardly go up to him and ask him what time he would arrive at the flat, nor would he bother to let her know, so she could only nurse her glass of sherry in a corner, watching him being charming to the Friends, and calculate when she could buy the meat and whether or not to prepare something that would only need reheating or whether to do something fresh on the night and therefore easier in terms of forward planning but more difficult in terms of realization.
From these preoccupations she was sometimes rescued by the jovial figure of Professor Sir Hamish Redmile, the Dean, two years past retirement but showing no signs of retiring, wearing a Vaughan Williams hat to indicate his status as an elder of the university tribe. He had earned his title by serving on a Royal Commission whose recommendations had never been heard of again. He was a tireless fund raiser and enjoyed these occasions, since he did not intend to leave the university until his great project – the New Building – was formally established. Sir Redmile, as the Roger Fry Professor called him, treated university life as an endless series of significant little social gatherings, at which contributions might eventually be raised. He appreciated Maurice Bishop not only for his scholarship, his presence, his popularity, and the fact that he had not yet defected to Oxford, but also for his background (‘impeccable’), his family home in Gloucestershire, his mother’s title, and Maurice’s private income. He also, in a lesser way, appreciated Kitty, who was doing research work for him and giving a useful number of seminars. She too, he was given to understand, had an income of her own, and indeed she wore such exquisite clothes that he supposed the income to be large, although it was not. ‘My dear Miss Maule,’ he would say in a noble and enveloping tone of voice, ‘were we not privileged this evening? To have the fabric of England brought to life in such a way! And,’ he raised a conspiratorial finger, ‘you and I are going to feel even more at home next year.
I hear our dear Maurice is planning a series on the cathedrals of France.’
Kitty knew about Maurice’s project. Even while she typed out his notes on the cathedrals of England, she knew that the cathedrals of France would follow. Indeed, Maurice had mentioned the idea at dinner one evening and had become more and more enthusiastic, getting his maps out of his briefcase and plotting his route on her kitchen table. He would take the car, he thought, and spend the whole of the Easter vacation driving from one site to another. Of course he could only concentrate on the major monuments: Laon, Rheims, Chartres, Bourges, Le Mans, Amiens, Rouen. ‘It will be a lot of work,’ said Kitty, ‘and it seems a pity to do only the big ones. Normandy is full of very pretty minor cathedrals. Coutances. Evreux.’ She had been there on holiday once and had spent long rainy days taking refuge in churches, whiling away the afternoon by reading her guide book in the dank and aromatic aisles, waiting until she could, with a good conscience, have her afternoon cup of chocolate in the nearby pâtisserie. ‘Troyes,’ mused Maurice. ‘Saint-Urbain. Very extraordinary church, that. Too florid for my taste, actually. I prefer the early and undecorated.’
Kitty preferred the later and the more exuberant. She liked evidence that some life was actually stirring in the stone and felt a sense of dread in the darker and more ancient of churches, where iron heels rang out pitilessly on flagstones and the candles burned more brightly in the gloom. She always lit one, for Marie-Thérèse, but she felt nothing, for she had no sense of Marie-Thérèse’s presence in her life and therefore did not believe that the dead could live eternally. She kept her scepticism to herself, paying respect to Maurice’s unquestioned beliefs, nourished on certainty, she thought, but none the worse for that. All the better, in fact.
Her main preoccupation was whether Maurice would ask her to go with him to France. She would be useful, she knew, could do all the boring things, while he got on with driving the car and getting from one place to another and being inspired by what he saw. French, after all, was her mother tongue; she could save him a lot of time and trouble. But how to suggest this? The suggestion must surely come from him, and he was still bent over his maps, his hand blindly reaching for the cup of coffee she had poured for him. It seemed as if he could take the cathedrals of France without any human company to dilute them, his passion for the absolute, for God and beauty, sustaining him where she herself would have counted the hours on her own and calculated the moment at which she might have crept out to the pâtisserie. She felt humbled by the comparison between them, as always; he was finer, larger, better than she was, his insights nobler, his whole fabric superior. With his background, I suppose, she thought vaguely, imagining spacious lawns and grey stone and summer afternoons and his impeccable mother receiving guests.
Although anyone who saw Maurice and Kitty together would have thought them a charming couple, she would have been remarked upon as the luckier of the two, lucky to attract such a man as Maurice. Both were tall and graceful, but there the comparison ended, with their silhouettes. Kitty was artfully put together, manufactured and tutored by her grandmother in the way of presenting herself advantageously, given the names of shoe designers and handbag makers and a special price because of the trade connections. She felt exhausted sometimes by the sheer effort of composing her appearance, and not always sure of the results. Was she perhaps too elaborate? Maurice was ineffably natural. He wore fine clothes, but carelessly, handmade shirts without a tie, cashmere pullovers instead of jackets. She had first seen him drinking tea in the Senior Common Room at the university, a place where low armchairs housed many spreading bottoms and stomachs clad in grey flannel or beige tweed, where legs could be seen protruding in maroon socks and ginger suede shoes, where blouses and shirts gave off the dingy glare of nylon. Kitty, alarmed by her first entrance into this important place and dressed as her grandmother decreed a lady should be dressed, instinctively felt drawn to the tall figure wandering around with a cup in one hand and a saucer in the other, a signet ring just visible on the finger beneath the saucer, his brown hair – the hair of a form
erly blond child – curling behind his ears and on the nape of his neck. That day he had worn a white shirt, with a red pullover, narrow grey trousers, and black leather mocassins. He had swung round and greeted her with a pleasant vague smile, the smile she had come to know so well, and because she was not yet afraid of him she had responded naturally and they became friends. They both lived in London and commuted to the university, which was strictly against the rules, and this created a further bond between them. Very occasionally he gave her a lift back to town and it was during one of these late evening drives that she had fallen in love with him.
That had been two years ago. Since that time, his smile had become no less pleasant and no less vague, for however much she pined for him she knew that she was not indispensable to him. And at bad moments, when she woke in the night, she knew that she was not even necessary. She congratulated herself on her ability to hide her feelings, unaware of the fact that the Roger Fry Professor’s wife had observed to her husband, with some satisfaction, ‘Well, she doesn’t appear to be getting anywhere with him. Trying too hard, if you ask me.’
On the evening with the maps she had moved quietly round him, only too happy to have him in her kitchen, and willing to forgo even the cathedrals of France if only she could be sure that he would come back to her. As he plotted his course, with his diary in one hand, she permitted herself to gaze at his fine head, since he could not see her doing so. The longish brown hair, the skin healthy with the country air of his weekends at home, the clear green eyes, and the delicate ivory ears filled her with longing and delight. There was so much that she wanted to ask him, but she knew that with Maurice questions never met with answers. He remained formal and pleasant, but he disarmed her easily. She wanted to know if he ever thought about her (but she supposed not, for he was always busy) and anyway, to ask that sort of question was unimaginable. But if he took her to France, that would be a sign, and moreover a sign that the world would see, a sign that her grandmother would welcome.
Providence Page 2
