He straightened up, hands on hips. ‘You ought to come with me, Kitty,’ he said. She turned away from him, to hide her trembling hands. ‘Why not?’ she said, after a minute, and with no particular inflection in her voice. ‘My dear child,’ he laughed, stretching out a long arm and resting it on her shoulder. ‘You know perfectly well why not. Just think of your reputation.’
This was his way and it confused her. She did not know whether, in his world, it would have been truly scandalous to contemplate such a journey with a woman not merely of marriageable age but of marriageable intentions. He was, after all, such a very superior person and it was typical of him to remain untouched by the inconclusive character that sometimes attends such episodes. Her being an orphan, she supposed, made him feel more responsible for her reputation, and he did not know that if only she could be seen to be with him a little more obviously, her reputation would be made for life.
Since that time he had continued to talk about his projected trip to France but had never again suggested that she should go with him.
And since that time their evenings together, and they were not very frequent, for during the term Maurice was greatly in demand, had filled her with a slight but persistent melancholy. From the moment at which she sat down to wait for him, to the moment some four hours later when she heard his car roar off into the dark and sleeping street, she was not certain why she could no longer respond with that unforced pleasure she had felt in the Senior Common Room on that first afternoon. She could still see him as she had seen him then, the fine vague smile, the polite manners that made him come forward to greet an obvious stranger, the glint of his ring beneath the saucer. It seemed to her, in retrospect, the best moment of her life: her recognition of him, her ease in welcoming whatever would come of it. Since then there had been intimacies, but he always left her afterwards, and she had had to try very hard to censor out of sight a feeling of dismay, almost of shame. For she never knew when she would see him again.
She had thought that he might guide her towards some conclusion, and because that conclusion had been so long delayed, she wondered if she herself might be too pressing and urgent in wanting it, pressed and urged by the need to justify herself in Louise’s eyes and to bring happiness to those grandparents whom she had so far disappointed. Although she knew that she was threatened – by their eventual death, which would leave her alone and undirected – she felt that she was at fault in failing to make some vital connection with Maurice’s desires and intentions, and when she thought this she was in despair, for how could she put right what her very ignorance had put wrong? She tried to read his mind, to follow his thinking more closely. She saw there something inaccessible. The vague, pleasant, and somehow mysterious smile closed her out, while closing in something highly significant, something that she did not know, something foreign to her. Tell me about England, she thought. She was tormented by rumours of a broken engagement in his past, for who would break an engagement to Maurice, and might it not be repaired? Once, in desperation, she had surmounted all her scruples and mentioned this casually to her friend Pauline Bentley in the Romance Languages Department.
‘Didn’t you know?’ said Pauline in surprise, and proceeded to tell her the story. Maurice and this girl had known each other since childhood. Lucy something or other. They had always known they would get married. Apparently they were the most beautiful couple and it was to have been the wedding of the decade. But Lucy something or other had been a bit unstable, had had religious doubts, with none of Maurice’s certainties, and two months before they were due to get married, she had broken off the engagement. Some sort of breakdown, apparently. She had then announced that she was going out to Calcutta, to work with Mother Teresa. Which was where she was now. Maurice had taken it surprisingly well.
‘Merde, alors,’ was Kitty’s immediate and uncensored reaction to this and she was so ashamed that she felt herself blushing hotly, as if she had been discovered in some major indiscretion. Since that time she had tried to be as pure and as noble as Maurice himself, for she now understood his unwillingness to commit himself after so great a disappointment. The news about Lucy had made her feel better (knowing that she was behind bars, as it were) and a great deal worse, for how could she compete? She began to search herself for any seeds of faith that could be cultivated, for she now saw that the key to Maurice was his belief in the divine will. Or the divine purpose, if that were the same thing. Something divinely sanctioned, anyway. In her own soul she found nothing, only the weariness, boredom, and fear that had afflicted her in those churches in Normandy, where the candles guttered and the obtrusive footsteps of the faithful sounded confidently behind her. She could not in all faith go to church but sometimes she picked up her mother’s Bible, for she believed that it contained the answers, if only she could ask a disinterested question. Which she could not. But one day she found a passage that seemed to have a message for her, purely for her. ‘Il m’a envoyé … pour proclamer à ceux de Sion qui pleurent, que la magnificence leur sera donnée au lieu de la cendre, l’huile de joie au lieu du deuil, un manteau de louange au lieu d’un esprit affligé.’ She was so strangely moved by this announcement that she sought it in the Authorized Version, as if doubting its authenticity in the language of her own family. And there it was, more splendid, more resonant, more authoritative, as if God’s native tongue were English: ‘… beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.’ She read no more, for everything else seemed irrelevant.
Beauty for ashes. She sat in her kitchen in Old Church Street, her plate washed up and put away, the crumbs for the birds strewn on the windowsill. She allowed her fears and griefs to come to the surface, in the timid hope that it was now safe to do so. Some day, unless a miracle took place, she would spend all her time in this kitchen and it would become her permanent and only home, instead of the temporary staging post she had always thought it might be. But this was too dangerous to contemplate, and she turned her head aside, to the window. It was a quiet evening. It was always a quiet evening, for there were few passers-by at this time of day. The only sound was that of an insistent radio, from the flat of her neighbour Caroline, the divorcee. Across the street she could just see the publican’s wife, one hand fluffing out her blonde hair, taking the air on her doorstep before opening time. Kitty tried to imagine what Maurice was doing, and failed. She tried to remember the assurance of the words in Marie-Thérèse’s Bible. She did in fact remember that there was a staff meeting on the horizon, that she had a lecture to prepare – on the Romantic Tradition – and that in a week’s time she had to give a seminar, about which she had mixed feelings. Her subject was Adolphe, a short novel about failure. She did not care for it much, and worried about her ability to convey its quality.
As she moved, with the heaviness of a much older woman, from the table at which she had been sitting, the telephone rang. It was Maurice. ‘Are you in London?’ she asked in some surprise, for she had imagined him taking off for home. ‘Yes,’ he said mildly, ‘I quite often spend the weekends here. I rang up about Monday. I can’t make it, I’m afraid. My mother’s coming to town.’ Kitty laughed, though she felt panic. ‘It’s Monday week, you idiot. Didn’t you write it down?’ ‘Oh, fine,’ he said, ‘fine. I’ll see you then.’
After that she leaned out of the window for a bit, trying to get her thoughts into order. He had telephoned. He was coming. That was the thing to remember. Anyone could get a date wrong. In a little while she felt calmer, her life-line re-established. Then she got out her notes and began to work.
THREE
Oddly enough, she had never found her work difficult. On the contrary, it appeared to her in the guise of a neutral element in which there was no need for subterfuge, for watchfulness, or even for desire. Work, to Kitty, was something you did, not something you talked about. Her neighbour, Caroline, who had come down in the world, had often regaled her with stories of her fascinating past and would end such
reminiscences with the words, ‘I really ought to write a book.’ ‘Why don’t you?’ Kitty Maule would ask, with genuine curiosity. She felt that the wish was father to the thought, and that no one need be without an occupation. Beauty, of course, offered its own dispensations: beautiful women, by a rule she acknowledged but did not understand, were somehow allowed to do nothing of worth and yet to command the time and attention of others. Kitty preferred her busy life, which she characterized as an easy life spent doing difficult things. At least, she supposed they were difficult. In fact, it took her more time to cook a special dish for Maurice than it did to write a paper or prepare a seminar. Yet she took no pride in the fact of doing such work and refused to think of it as important. Quite simply, it gave her no trouble and therefore she took no credit for doing it.
‘My God, Kitty,’ said Pauline Bentley, in the Romance Languages Department. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. I use work as a weapon against depression. I see it as a way of outwitting nervous illness. You’d be surprised how many people feel this way.’ As she said this she combed her hair viciously, for she was ashamed at revealing so much. Yet Pauline was a superb lecturer, polished and impeccable, and for this reason much admired by the students. With less desperation behind it, Kitty’s style was milder and more popular. She enjoyed her intellectual obligations and did not sense them as onerous. Secretly she regarded her task as a temporary and rather pleasant way of filling in the time until her true occupation should be revealed to her. She did not quite know what this was but she sensed that she would rather excel at duties other than the ones with which she had occupied herself over the last few years.
They were in Pauline’s room, preparing to go to a staff meeting. Pauline regarded these meetings, which took place once a term, with undisguised contempt. Kitty, on the other hand, rather liked them. As an occasional teacher she was grateful for the opportunity to attend, and although she could not always understand what was being discussed, she managed to look alert and even took notes. Her zeal, which was genuine, had been noted with approval by Professor Redmile. ‘I wonder if he’d notice if I marked a couple of essays,’ mused Pauline. ‘I tell you, Kitty, when I get to hell I expect to find a perpetual staff meeting in progress.’ She took a miscellaneous bundle of papers, which did indeed include a few essays, from her desk, and set off down the corridor. Kitty followed demurely in her wake.
The meetings were always held in a gloomy and oleaginous brown room, which had been a dining room when the building had been occupied, in baronial state, by the benefactor of the university. Professor Redmile sat at the head of the table that gleamed with a curious icy veneer in the bad light; at his side, importantly, sat his secretary, Jennifer, taking the minutes. They filed in reluctantly – the historians and the linguists – Dr Martinez, Professors Gault and Bodmin, Mme de Marcoussis, Mrs Vogel, Dr Oliphant, the Roger Fry Professor, whose hapless task it was to teach French art to the French Department, Italian to the Italians, German to the Germans, and still try to maintain some sort of autonomy, and last of all, Maurice Bishop. In front of every seat was a pencil and a pad of paper. With one accord, as Professor Redmile welcomed them at the start of a new term and looked forward to soon being able to give them some definite news about the New Building, all picked up their pencils and started drawing, a defensive move intended to drown out the hearty delight in Professor Redmile’s voice but one which gave them the appearance of a rather retarded occupational therapy class. Kitty, all innocent attention, watched the Roger Fry Professor incising a deep jagged abstract on his pad. Mme de Marcoussis favoured a delicate shading, involving ceaseless motion with the pencil. Professor Gault always drew an Archimedes spiral. Once, at the end of the meeting, Kitty had stolen round the table after everyone had left to see what Maurice had drawn: a flying buttress.
To Kitty, who lacked extensive diversion, these occasions were ones of pure entertainment. They also gave her an opportunity to look at Maurice, if he were within her line of sight, and to savour the extreme delight of anticipating their next and more private meeting. Her expression was always rigorously schooled and she was discreet in a way that would have been becoming in a nineteenth-century governess; nevertheless, the Roger Fry Professor, looking up unexpectedly from his cubist design, had once noticed her look and was thus in possession of her secret. She had not seen him, but the Roger Fry Professor had noted with an inward sigh that his wife had been right and that Maurice had made another conquest. His dislike of the man was becoming unmanageable. Maurice, all delicate attention to what Professor Redmile was saying, was not aware of any of this.
Maurice, thought Kitty, will you not look in my direction? I am only here for your sake. I do not, I confess, care about the New Building, or even believe in it. I am fond of all these people, even of Professor Redmile, but if you were to vanish and they were to remain I cannot think that I should stay here long. You have done so much for me. You have made me believe in what I am doing, whereas I really only started it as a sort of hobby; since knowing you, I have tried harder than I would have normally, and I have done better than I thought I could. And they are pleased with me; that is a new sensation for me. I find this work easy because in a way I am doing it for you. I want to be excellent, for you. The fact that Pauline is quite openly reading an essay – a fact noted by Jennifer; the fact that the Roger Fry Professor is once again demonstrating that he can knock off a respectable drawing in the manner of Delaunay; the fact that Mrs Vogel is making out her shopping list: all this delights me because we are in the same room and sharing the same experience. I shall remember a day like this, although you will not. You have more important things to remember. Will you not meet my eye?
But Maurice, with his pleasant smile, only leaned over to Jennifer and slipped a small note into her hand. Blushing, she looked at it, then, rather more slowly, handed it over to Professor Redmile.
Kitty, her hands idle, had seen Jennifer’s change of expression, and resolved sternly never, ever, to look like that. She switched her thoughts to the Romantic Tradition, with which she was supposed to be eternally preoccupied, and wondered if it really existed. Could one build a tradition out of a series of defiantly autonomous individuals, all of them insisting that what they felt had never been felt before by any human being? They were an impressive but disheartening lot, she always thought, coming so rapidly to maturity, haggard with experience by the age of twenty-five, and somehow surviving their own disastrous youth into a normal life-span. Even an abnormal one: look at Victor Hugo. Except, of course, Gérard de Nerval. He was central to her thesis, for he did not survive. She did not know what she found more impressive: the ability to stagger on through a life exaggeratedly devoid of normal happiness, or the ability to admit a radiant fragmentation of the mind that would put one out of the struggle altogether. What worried her was that there appeared to be no middle way. She could not accept that so much ardour and longing, so much torment and courage, should peter out into the flatlands of middle and old age. And anyway, where did the Romantic Tradition end? Easy enough to decide when it began, and even how. But did it, terrible thought, still persist? Might she have started something that might prove to be more extensive than she had originally supposed? Might the Romantic Tradition outlive her desire to have anything more to do with it?
As usual at these meetings, an extremely complicated change of timetable was being proposed, for no very good reason other than it gave them something to have a meeting about. Instead of a straight historical run through the syllabus, an elaborate schema, referred to by Professor Redmile as a four-tier structure, was to be substituted for a period of one year to see how the students adjusted to it. ‘They will turn up anyway,’ said Pauline wearily. ‘The only difference is that they will not know exactly what they are turning up to.’
‘If you will refer to the outline which Jennifer has very kindly prepared,’ said Professor Redmile, ‘I think you will see, Dr Bentley, that this proposal has a great deal of virtue in it. The
students will gain a more exciting historical perspective by being brought up against different periods in unexpected conjunction. Perhaps you will all study the outline and give me your views?’
Pushing aside their drawings, they bent their heads obediently over the sticky and unevenly photocopied sheets which represented their tasks for the coming academic year. There was a minute’s concentration, followed by a unanimous absence of comment. The silence was eventually broken by Maurice, who said, ‘If you adopt this scheme, Hamish, you will have the Dark Ages one morning and the Enlightenment the next. That is a conjunction to challenge even the most sophisticated student.’
They laughed heartily, delirious with boredom. The Roger Fry Professor ground his crepe-soled orange shoes together in a mixture of fury and despair: Maurice had just destroyed his chance of getting his lectures done by Christmas instead of having to give them all in the summer, when everyone stayed away. Professor Redmile, graciously joining in the laughter, gave a signal to Jennifer to have the tea brought in, and with that the meeting was to all intents and purposes over, although the talking was about to begin.
Tea and biscuits at the staff meeting were, for Kitty, the high point of an otherwise socially unadventurous week. She smiled with genuine pleasure as she accepted her cup; it was the only sort of party she enjoyed these days. She dressed with extra care for these occasions, at which she said nothing; she thought her amateur status entitled her merely to attendance. She was exactly the sort of person Professor Redmile liked to have around.
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