Angels and Men

by Catherine Fox

‘Well, you’ll not get a degree if you take that attitude.’ If anyone else had said this, the girl would no doubt have replied (raising her eyes heavenwards), ‘So be it, if that is God’s will,’ but Mara was not surprised to see her accepting Johnny’s words submissively. She sat looking up at him, as if posing for a pre-Raphaelite picture of Mary of Bethany at the feet of Christ. Mara felt a sudden rush of understanding for Martha. No wonder she had stormed in and asked Jesus to tell her sister to help her with the serving. The surprise was rather that she had not hit Mary round the head with the kneading trough. On Johnny’s other side May rested her chin on her hand and looked up at him, too. The two women were now mirror images of each other, but Johnny was too intent on what he was saying to notice what May was doing.

  ‘It’s one thing to disagree with the scholars,’ Johnny was saying, ‘but it’s another to dismiss their ideas out of hand.’

  ‘I just find it all so confusing,’ said the girl. And she actually batted her eyelashes. Mara saw May mentally clapping her hands with delight. Johnny appeared to soften. God – he’s not going to be taken in by this, thought Mara in disgust.

  ‘Well, that’s a different matter,’ he said with a smile. ‘It will seem confusing at first. Maybe the real question you want to be asking yourself is whether the Bible can still be the Word of God without being literally true in every detail. I think it can.’

  This was the longest and most serious speech Mara had heard him make. The four of them sat in silence listening to his words, as though they were another pre-Raphaelite tableau of first-century Palestine. The scene was undermined by May’s look of rapt adoration, which Mara was convinced Johnny had now seen but was ignoring.

  ‘But it’s so difficult,’ she protested. Save me, Johnny! ‘If you can’t rely on every detail in the Bible, then it might all be untrue.’

  Johnny shook his head, turning so that he was facing Joanna more fully, and unable to see May, who was shaking her head in sympathy. ‘It might feel like that,’ he said, ‘but I’d say my faith is stronger now, rather than weaker, after a degree in theology.’ May nodded.

  ‘You’ve studied theology?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Maddy, wresting the scene back to herself. ‘They occasionally allow people with regional accents to read for degrees here. In his case it’s because he’s training to be a priest.’

  ‘God’s Man for Our Time,’ said May.

  ‘He’s celibate, of course,’ said Maddy. ‘But you will have realized that. Unless you thought he always sat that way.’ Johnny had a look of amused resignation on his face, and much though Maddy’s behaviour irritated Mara, she preferred it to Joanna’s brand of sanctified vamping. Maddy was opening her mouth for another speech, but Joanna was not to be upstaged without a struggle.

  ‘So you’re going into the ministry?’ He nodded, and her face seemed to glow. ‘That’s amazing. That’s really amazing. While I was reading my Bible this morning, Father told me I was going to meet someone today who had a special calling.’

  Father! Mara squirmed.

  ‘Do you have a Special Calling, Johnny?’ asked May gravely.

  ‘No. I just like the dressing-up,’ he replied.

  Mara watched the girl’s face to see how she would react to this flippancy, but the secret glowing look was still in place. Father had obviously told her that Johnny was that special man. Yes, thought Mara. This is exactly how I picture Martha Simmonds weaving her poisonous web round James Nayler. Her scalp prickled. There had been a girl just like her in the sect. Leah. A coy, manipulative trouble-maker. Always worming her way to the centre of every group, latching on to the most powerful and interesting people. Hester had never been able to see this. Nothing Mara said convinced her that Leah was evil. It sickened Mara to see her sister turned into a tireless campaigner for Leah’s rights.

  ‘It’s just that . . . well, I’ve got a calling, too,’ Joanna was saying. We’re supposed to gasp and ask for more, thought Mara.

  ‘Well,’ said Maddy, clearly determined that nobody should oblige, ‘you’d better pull your finger out and start working on your degree, then.’

  ‘Said the pot to the kettle,’ put in May.

  ‘It’s the Greek, really,’ said Joanna, ignoring them. ‘I don’t always understand it.’ This was aimed at Johnny and he was forced to look serious again.

  ‘Look, I’ll tell you what, pet,’ he said, ‘if you really are having difficulties with Greek –’

  No! thought Mara in alarm. Don’t do it! Johnny looked her way and stopped in mid-sentence. He stared at her in surprise. The girl turned to see what he was looking at, and instantly Mara’s face became expressionless.

  ‘If it’s the Greek that’s worrying you, why not ask the tutor to go over it with you?’ said Johnny. ‘They sometimes put on extra classes in the department. You’ll probably find you aren’t the only one struggling.’

  Joanna shot Mara a swift malevolent look that was covered instantly by a smile. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said with downcast eyes to Johnny.

  ‘Of course he is,’ murmured May, but this, apparently, was going too far. Johnny rounded on her.

  ‘You watch it, young lady.’ There was a tense silence, and although he had not raised his voice, Mara remembered one of her earliest impressions of him from their meeting in Dr Mowbray’s study: that he had a quick temper. This was a mere spark, but enough to alarm Maddy. Mara saw her anxious look. It seemed odd that Maddy should be so nervous of anger, when so much of her behaviour seemed deliberately to provoke it.

  ‘Sorry,’ said May unrepentantly. She and Johnny eyed one another.

  ‘What about tea?’ asked Maddy, bursting in on the silence she was unable to bear. ‘That universal remedy to all wrongs, that panacea. A Greek word,’ she said, turning to Joanna, ‘meaning “universal remedy to all wrongs”. Who’d like some?’

  ‘Please,’ said Johnny.

  Mara’s attention had been diverted, so she had not seen how the staring match had ended. May was looking nonchalant – but was she blushing? Something had passed between the two. She looked at Joanna.

  ‘So you’ve done Greek?’ Joanna asked Johnny. Yes, she had seen something she did not like (a blown kiss?), and was now bending his attention back to herself, thought Mara.

  ‘For his sins,’ said Maddy, not allowing this to happen. ‘And what a lot of Greek he has done. Tea, Joanna? Mara?’

  Mara declined, and stood up to leave. As she was crossing the room, she saw Johnny give her a meaning look. I want a word with you, it said. She ignored him, and left. If it was that important, he could come and find her later.

  As she climbed the stairs back to her room, she began to doubt her own assessment of Joanna. Perhaps she was so jaundiced by her previous encounters with the charismatic Christians of the sect that she automatically tarred them all with the same brush. The girl might simply be unfortunate, not sinister. A fellow lame duck. She tried to remind herself that fundamentalists were not a subhuman life form. Plenty of students were unsettled by the implications of their academic studies. And plenty more were attracted to attractive men. She went over to her window and looked out, thinking she would never know objectively what the girl was like. Maybe all she could see in Joanna was her own projected fears. The night was dark. It was Hallowe’en, and the lit-up windows across the river gleamed like jack-o’-lantern eyes.

  CHAPTER 6

  The days of early November passed by. Most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Big black crows like tattered clergymen congregated in the empty branches, and the students went about in overcoats they had borrowed from their fathers. Some of the coats had walked around the City twenty-five years earlier when they were new and smart. Now the voice of fashion had resurrected them to walk along the same streets again.

  Mara was wearing her grandfather’s long black cloak. The wind blew and the cloak swirled, slowing her progress. As a child she had held the sides of her coat out like wings on days like these, half
believing the wind would pick her up and whirl her away. In her mind’s eye she had learnt to walk along above the rooftops, seeing the world spread out on all sides. I’m losing the knack, she thought. An empty can went clattering down the street. Other people tie me down. But it won’t be much work to cut myself free and dance off across the sky. I’m only here for a year, after all. I will keep all these people in my memory like a trunk full of things in the attic. A sudden gust of wind whisked her hat away, and she chased it as it rolled along the gutter. It came to rest outside the door under Maddy’s and May’s window as though it was meant to be. She had been intending for several days to visit her friends.

  She entered the room. There were books lying open, but she had found Maddy and May at that awkward time of a student’s day when it was too late to get in a really good afternoon’s work, but not late enough to abandon all pretence of working altogether. Her arrival solved the dilemma.

  ‘Time for tea!’ May went to fill the kettle. Maddy rolled over on the bed with a yawn among musical scores and sheets of manuscript paper. Mara sat down, craning her neck to read the title of the book which Maddy had just let slide on to the floor. Stormy Summer by Margaux Spreadeagle. She gazed at Maddy in disdain.

  ‘Oh, get that bloody superior expression off your face,’ said Maddy, looking, Mara thought, like someone on a diet caught in the act of eating a whole pound of Belgian chocolates. ‘I suppose you’ve never read a single romance in your life.’ This was a clever move, Mara realized. Either she was the pot calling the kettle black, or she was a mass of prejudice and ignorance. She picked up the book.

  ‘His dark eyes blazed,’ she read aloud. May came back into the room and stood with the kettle, staring at her. ‘“You damned little bitch,” he bit out. “You want me as much as I want you! Don’t think you can get away with this!” He strode from the room, leaving her white and trembling on the bed. As the door slammed, the realization swept over her. “My God! I don’t hate this man – I love him!” ’

  She looked from Maddy to May in disbelief, and they crowed with laughter. ‘What is this crap?’ and she flung it aside.

  ‘She doesn’t understand,’ said Maddy in throbbing tones. ‘She has never been left white and trembling on the bed with the realization, “My God! I love this man!” ’ Maddy retrieved the book and began reading again with such feeling that Mara was torn between disgust and amusement.

  ‘It’s a different Weltanschauung, you see,’ explained Maddy, reaching for the mug May was handing her, ‘but one entirely compatible with a feminist outlook. The men are masterful, overbearing and loose-limbed, yes, I know,’ she said as Mara was about to break in, ‘but they invariably end up marrying the heroine, which – let me finish – in terms of the genre, is a triumph of the female world view. He is tamed and subdued by the love of a good woman. Harmony and fruition prevail – like in All’s Well That Ends Well. And you have to admit’, concluded Maddy, ‘that that is the most compelling and tightly reasoned justification for reading crap that you have ever heard.’

  ‘I intend to do my dissertation on that very subject,’ said May from where she was standing at the mirror experimenting with various lipsticks. ‘ “Beauty and the Beast: Fairy-Tale Motifs in Popular Romantic Fiction, with Special Reference to Margaux Spreadeagle’s Stormy Summer”. What do you think of this?’ She turned to them with a vivid, coral-coloured mouth.

  ‘Ghastly,’ said Maddy. May wiped it off and reached for another tube.

  ‘ “Vermilion Flare,” ’ she read. ‘It sounds like the title of another romance.’ She tried it, and turned to them again.

  ‘An improvement,’ said Maddy. ‘It’ll go better with your dress, too.’ Preparations for the approaching college ball, Mara realized.

  ‘Are you going to the ball, Mara?’ asked May, blotting lipstick kisses on to a tissue.

  Mara shook her head.

  ‘Oh, but you must, you must!’ they protested.

  ‘Who with?’

  This was supposed to be unanswerable, but they both replied promptly, ‘The polecat?’

  Mara had a vision of herself and the polecat locked in an endless snarling waltz, and laughed.

  ‘Did I hear a strange sound?’ asked Maddy.

  ‘An unfamiliar sound!’ said May.

  Yes, ha ha, thought Mara, returning to her usual sour expression. She told them that she had agreed to wash up instead. There were plenty of jobs with a modest amount of pay at the college ball, and taking one of these was the honourable refuge of the overdrawn or the under-confident. Or the celibate. She had seen Johnny’s name on the list of workers.

  ‘Cinderella,’ sneered Maddy.

  ‘ “Vermilion Flare: The Cinderella Myth in Post-War Light Romance”,’ said May.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Rupert to take you?’ persisted Maddy. ‘He likes you.’ There was a pause. With two seconds’ thought she might have phrased this more delicately, her expression said. ‘He likes you, even if nobody else does,’ read the subtext. Mara suppressed a smile.

  ‘But he’s got a partner already,’ said May. ‘He’s taking someone called Cordelia Chauffeured-Bentley, and a party of Somebody Someone-Somethings he was at Oxford with.’ She started to apply eye-shadow.

  ‘Could you marry a man with a double-barrelled name?’ asked Maddy.

  ‘It is our destiny,’ replied May. Mara stopped listening to them as they began to talk about their own partners for the ball. Her mind was full of dancing and the black georgette dress. She heard the music and saw the swirling beads and the nodding of tall feathers. Aunt Daphne danced by herself to her own tune, while the other girls hovered white and trembling under the moon in male embraces. Off across the chiffon clouds went Aunt Judith’s plane as the lights of the great house twinkled below; and there, dancing from star to star, went Great Aunt Jessie, who could see angels.

  ‘She isn’t listening to a word we’re saying,’ came Maddy’s voice.

  Mara turned to them indifferently. May had just finished her work at the mirror.

  ‘Who am I?’ She faced them. The eye-liner made her eyes appear enormous, and she cast her gaze heavenwards, taking up a swooning pose.

  ‘Teresa of Avila?’ suggested Mara. May laughed, and picked up a tea-towel and tied it over her hair. Martha Simmonds. Joanna.

  Maddy snorted in recognition. ‘Lucretia the poison woman. God, I hate that girl.’

  ‘Well, we all know why that is,’ said May.

  ‘Because she’s a tape-worm,’ said Maddy.

  ‘Because you can’t hog the stage when she’s in the room,’ said May.

  ‘I wouldn’t demean myself by trying. “Johnny, let me worship you. Let me suck the sweat out of your second-best jockstrap!”’

  ‘You thought that one up in advance,’ accused May.

  ‘She’s a fool,’ said Maddy, ignoring this. ‘The one thing you must never, ever do is treat men like Johnny with respect. They get cocky. Except he was all cock to begin with.’

  ‘In your fevered imagination,’ said May.

  ‘I’ve got eyes,’ said Maddy. ‘Unless that’s a pair of socks down his underpants, of course. I’ll have to ask him.’

  Mara laughed.

  ‘There’s that funny noise again,’ said May.

  ‘Yes, and another thing,’ said Maddy, rounding on Mara. ‘You can bloody well stop signing Joanna into meals as your guest! We always end up having to look after her.’

  Mara sat in silent fury. She had done no such thing. Had Joanna forged her signature?

  ‘Mara denies all knowledge,’ said Maddy. ‘In which case St Teresa has signed herself in illegally. Outrage!’

  ‘The Lord told me to,’ said May, folding her hands and looking pious. Then, whisking off the tea-towel, she became herself again. ‘You’ll have to have a word with Mr Nasty Pasty,’ she said. ‘He controls the meal lists with a fist of iron.’ This must be the catering manager and head chef.

  ‘Nigel,’ said Maddy scornfully. ‘He always r
eminds me of a professional snooker player – the cockney accent, the hair slightly too long, the pasty, pale complexion. I bet he even has a snooker table down in the bowels of the earth in his Salmonella Emporium.’

  ‘She’s scared of him,’ explained May, wiping off the make-up. ‘He caught her eating a lunch she hadn’t signed in for.’

  Mara stood up to leave, forgetting as usual to say thank you, or goodbye.

  ‘Goodbye, Mara,’ said Maddy with emphasis. ‘No, no – it was our pleasure.’

  ‘Yes,’ said May. ‘Please don’t mention it.’

  And so she did not, but gave an idle wave as she left to return to her room. Her anger had been dissipated by their chatter.

  She was still working that evening, but when she heard the clock chime nine, she paused and listened to the rain against the window. She reached for her black book to do some drawing. In her mind’s eye she saw Aunt Judith’s plane, and her pencil touched the paper. Then it suddenly seemed to her that the book was too small. She took two sheets of unlined file paper and sellotaped them together. Her pencil hesitated. She felt like a child turned loose in a field when it had been used to a narrow garden. The rain pattered on the glass again, and she began to draw.

  This is Aunt Judith in her plane. She died years before I was born. I don’t think I’ve even seen a picture of her. Then her mother’s letter came back: Aunt Judith was rather like you. And so it could have been her own face behind the goggles, and her own black hair streaming out in the wind. The little biplane was high above the clouds, heading for realms unknown. Mara paused. The picture looked like an illustration for a story. Aunt Judith, she wrote underneath in gothic script. She enclosed the letters in a scrolled ribbon, and now she was reminded of stained-glass windows; of Gabriel with Latin words unfurling from his lips in a kind of medieval speech bubble, and the Virgin with a polite frown, casting in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. Mara’s pencil began moving again. Another ribbon rolled out, this time from the back of the plane, as though Aunt Judith were towing a motto across the sky. What should it say? With a smile Mara filled in the words of the Miller of Dee: I care for nobody, no, not I, if nobody cares for me. And now the picture was complete. Or was it? As she looked at it, Mara began to sense that this was only a part of a larger picture.