Mara leant against the sink while the other student talked. He seemed to regard her as a neutral presence, an honorary male, perhaps? At any rate, he appeared to need no help from her in keeping the conversation running smoothly. She looked round the corner and saw the two field mice folding paper napkins into fans and putting them into wine glasses.
A shout heralded the arrival of the next lot of dishes. The machines swished and steamed, and the young man talked on above the din. He was the one who had bellowed like a gorilla one breakfast, Mara remembered suddenly.
In the second lull Nigel brought them a bottle of wine. Condensation formed on the glasses as he poured. He handed them each a glass.
‘Don’t say I never give you anything,’ he said to Mara. Strands of her hair were escaping and corkscrewing up into curls in the steam. She pulled at one to straighten it. The wine was blissfully cold.
‘Look at her,’ said Nigel suddenly to the gorilla. ‘I’ll never understand women. The ones with straight hair spend a fortune having it permed, and the ones with curly hair try to straighten it.’ The gorilla focused on her with intelligent interest. ‘Why don’t you wear it loose?’ persisted Nigel. He turned to the gorilla. ‘Don’t you think she’d look better with her hair loose?’
The gorilla considered the idea with surprise, as though he had been called upon to judge the merits of a length of slub silk. ‘Yes. Much better.’
The arrival of the last lot of dishes prevented Mara from replying. She scraped platefuls of leftovers into the bawling metal god and continued the argument in her mind. I tie my hair back because I don’t want to conform to some male ideal of femininity. Then why do you grow it long? Because it’s cheaper and simpler than getting it cut every couple of months. She stared at the swirling prawns and melon. There was something else at work in her mind, she had to admit. Part of her was proud of her hair, that it grew so long and extravagantly. She kept it bound up, her secret, like the strength of Samson. Or was it really the hair of Rapunzel, which one day would bring the prince climbing up to her chamber?
At last it was all over. The chefs had gone and the machines dwindled into silence. From above came the music, shrieks and thumping feet. Mara and the gorilla looked at one another in the quiet kitchen and smiled.
‘I wonder if we can go?’ he asked. To the ball, the ball! whispered a voice in Mara’s head. But she remembered that she was not intending to join in. Nigel appeared.
‘Oh, I see. Stopped work already, have we?’ He scanned the room for some incomplete task, an unwiped surface, a stray fork.
‘We’ve finished,’ pointed out the gorilla.
For a moment it seemed that Nigel would be forced to agree; but then he said, ‘What about the floor?’ Dismay on the gorilla’s face. ‘Oh, it’s all right. I’ll do it. Go on. Bugger off. Enjoy yourselves.’ Nigel dismissed them like a bad-tempered fairy godmother worn out by a thousand ungrateful Cinderellas. ‘Go and buy her a drink,’ Nigel told the gorilla.
‘Um . . .’ The gorilla had clearly visualized a better way of spending the evening.
‘Ignore him,’ said Mara, and the gorilla flashed her a smile and disappeared.
‘Got other plans, have we?’ asked Nigel with a knowing look and, finding this did not bring a response, added, ‘He was upstairs in Coverdale dining-hall last time I saw him. He’s finished work, so this could be your lucky night.’ Mara simply turned and walked out, leaving Nigel to push the mop wearily about the floor.
Back in her room Mara stood and stared at the books and papers on her desk. The music below pounded on. It would be impossible to concentrate. Or to sleep. No wonder the polecat had disappeared to Oxford for the weekend. She might just as well go to the ball. Stuff the lot of them. They can think what they like. She would just wander about and watch people, then slip away again. Her pulse quickened as she went to the wardrobe and drew out the black dress. She would try it, and if it looked stupid, well, she had lost nothing. She had never intended to join in, anyway.
But as she slid the dress on she knew. It was perfect. Was this how Aunt Daphne had looked? Her reflection stared back at her and she watched her hands unravelling the long plait as though it were some other woman’s hands and hair a long time ago. She shook her head and the curls writhed out. I look like Medusa. Or a dead woman. I’m too pale. She coloured her lips and outlined her eyes; she pulled on a pair of long black gloves, gave herself one last look in the mirror and left the room. The thought of Jezebel filled her mind, painting her eyelids and calling from her high window. One final revelling in her power before the eunuchs came and cast her out, down to the stones below.
CHAPTER 8
Mara was sitting in a stone archway in the cathedral cloisters listening to the rain. It was a week before Christmas and the City was almost empty of students.
She hugged her cloak more tightly round her and nodded her head to shake a drop of rain off the brim of her hat, as one or other of the mad aunts might have done when it had belonged to her.
Maddy’s voice came drifting into her mind: ‘I’m not a pillar of the Church. I see myself as a flying buttress: lending valuable support, but from the outside.’ The whole episode played itself again in Mara’s mind. They had been sitting in Rupert’s room one afternoon towards the end of term. She remembered thinking how nice it must be for Maddy to feel excused from the obligation of going to church by one clever metaphor. It was probably a quotation from somewhere, but Maddy would never admit this. Rupert had been intensely irritated. The word ‘nonsense’ buzzed like an angry bee about him, but he was thwarted by the neatness of the image. Or was he trying to locate the quotation? It had been Johnny who had answered, blowing smoke from his cigarette up to the ceiling.
‘The buttresses in the cathedral here are on the inside.’ There was an interesting pause. Were they? Was he making it up, or did he really know?
‘Buttresses are always on the outside, you ignorant northern fool,’ said Maddy, ‘as anyone who knows the first thing about building would be able to tell you.’ And for some reason both Johnny and Rupert had found this amusing. Maddy registered surprise – it had not been one of her wittier offerings – then annoyance, when she realized they were laughing at her. ‘And in any case, the cathedral doesn’t have buttresses,’ she added with the calm authority of a guide-book.
‘What – no buttresses?’ asked Johnny. Maddy eyed him with sudden caution. Could a man who didn’t know what an idiom was be au fait with church architecture? He continued to smoke.
‘What?’ demanded Maddy. ‘What, what?’
‘Interesting.’
‘Why? In what way?’
At last she extracted an answer.
‘I was just wondering what stopped the outward pressure of the vaults.’
‘Oh,’ said Maddy airily, ‘the whole structure is held together by some mystical spiritual process known only to the godhead.’
‘Is that right, pet?’
And Maddy, seeming to sense she had been outdone, changed to another tactic: ‘Why do you call me “pet” the whole time? It’s so patronizing.’
‘Because I think you’re an animal.’
Mara smiled. The rain continued to fall. The City was becoming a castle in a folk tale. When I leave, a hedge of dense thorns will spring up all around it, till only the topmost stones of the cathedral tower remain visible. And inside the people I know will remain for ever as they are now, unchanging, bright. She knew she was missing her friends. That very evening they would all be meeting up at Rupert’s party, and she would not be there. He had invited her, but she had chosen to stay behind, studying. She watched the rain, regretting her choice. Biblical fancy dress – what would I have gone as? Jael, with her tent-peg. Or Judith, if we’re including the Apocrypha. Come in, my Lord. Have a drink. Why not put your feet up? Chop, chop. The archetypal castrating heroine.
She cast her mind back over the term. The City and its people already seemed to be part of the distant past, as though she wer
e an old woman looking back on them. But as she thought about this, she realized that it was only now that she was alone and her friends had gone home that they appeared in her memory with this clarity. While she was with them, there were always blurrings. How could she know what they were really like? It was as though she were painting pictures and saying, ‘They are like this.’
Was there a slight tenderness creeping into the brushwork? At any rate, she would keep the portraits when she left. They would not be worth exhibiting, but they were too interesting to throw out. She would come across them when she was sixty, perhaps. Oh yes. Rupert something or other. Anderson. Well, well. I remember him. And Johnny Whitaker. Yes. I wonder what they’re doing now?
But what kind of picture would she paint of Johnny ? He, of all her new friends, was the one she was least able to understand. She heard Rupert’s voice in her mind: ‘The trouble with you, Whitaker, is that you’re constitutionally unable to be serious. You undermine any sensible conversation in two seconds flat simply by opening your mouth.’ Yes, it was his sense of humour that made him so difficult to pin down. It kept people at arm’s length, while creating the impression of intimacy. She cast her mind back to that same afternoon in Rupert’s room, remembering the leap in her pulse when Maddy asked Johnny and Rupert one of the things she had been longing to know herself.
‘So why are you here, then? I mean, tell us your conversion story, boys.’
‘Yes,’ joined in May. ‘When did you ask the Lord Jesus into your heart and life? Tell us, and we’ll give you marks out of ten.’
‘For drama and lurid details,’ said Maddy.
‘And uplifting gospel content, of course,’ added May.
Rupert’s story had been pretty much as Mara had expected it to be. As the son of a clergyman, he had grown up in the Christian faith. School chapel each week, hearty Christian camps in the holidays. He had gone ‘off the rails a bit’ at Oxford.
‘How? How? What did you do?’ Maddy and May had demanded immediately.
‘Oh, the usual things,’ was all Rupert could be made to say. In any case, he had been brought back into the fold during the Christian Union mission in his final year, and, after a few years working as a solicitor in London, he had started his training at Coverdale.
‘You’re so boring, Rupert,’ said Maddy. ‘I mean, that’s hardly the Damascus road, is it?’
‘I think we’ll give him four out of ten,’ agreed May.
Johnny, by contrast, had been converted by a vision on the way home from the pub one night. After a lifetime of doing – sidelong glance at Rupert – ‘the usual things’.
‘What things?’ demanded Maddy and May.
‘Well, you know. Getting drunk, screwing around, nicking cars.’ Their eyes grew rounder with each admission. ‘GBH, armed robbery, the usual things.’
‘You lying git!’ said Maddy, realizing belatedly that he was laughing at them.
‘What did you do, seriously?’
‘I never did anything seriously in my life.’
They persisted, but he would not part with any lurid details, leaving them wondering whether he had done any of the things he claimed.
‘What sort of vision did you see?’ asked May in the end.
‘Well, it all began when the vicar came over to me in the pool room. He started to tell me this story about a man with two sons. The older one was a model son, the younger was a rebel.’
‘What – the prodigal son?’ said Maddy, as though she was being short-changed.
Johnny laughed. ‘Aye, but I didn’t know that at the time. I thought, some bastard’s been talking about me. Or else my dad’s put him up to it.’
‘Were you a rebel, then?’ asked May.
‘What precise form did your rebellion take?’ persisted Maddy. But he would only grin at them.
Full marks to both of them for not glamorizing their sinful past, thought Mara. She had heard too many testimonies which dwelt pruriently on the pre-conversion life. Salvation always seemed dull by comparison.
‘Anyway, the younger son got half his dad’s money and blew the lot, ended up down and out, then decided to go home and ask his dad for a job. “And what do you think his father did?” he asks me.’
Mara remembered the curious effect Johnny’s account had had on her. It was almost as though she, too, were hearing the old story for the first time. She wondered if he would preach like this when he was ordained. His congregation would be tricked for once out of making mental shopping lists, or wondering whether they had left the iron on.
‘So I said, the father comes out of the house and says, “Oh, it’s you, is it? Well, you can bugger off. You’ve wasted my money, you’ve upset your mother, now piss off and don’t show your face round here again.”’
They had all laughed at this. But wasn’t that what it ought to have been like? Mara wondered. The real outrage in the parable was the fact of the father’s forgiveness. No wonder the older son had been so angry. That was the problem of knowing the Bible so well. It lost its power to shock.
‘Go on,’ prompted Maddy.
‘And the vicar says, no, his dad sees him coming and runs out to meet him. He forgives him, gives him a big hug and throws a party for him. “Does he, bollocks,” I said.’
A protest from Rupert.
‘First official warning, Mr Whitaker,’ said Maddy, like a Wimbledon umpire. ‘We’re penalizing you one point for bad language.’
‘But that was before I was converted,’ explained Johnny.
‘So you wouldn’t use that kind of language now?’ said May.
‘Certainly not,’ he replied in a prim Anderson manner. ‘But the vicar says, yes, that is what he does, because that’s what God’s like. No matter where you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done, he’s waiting for you to come home.’
There had been a pause. The words echoed in a hollow place inside Mara’s mind.
‘And?’ said May.
‘Then some of my mates came in and started taking the piss. You know – “Our John’s seen the light”, all that stuff. So I said, “Listen, I don’t need God, or you or anyone else telling me what to do. I can run my own life.” Well, the vicar gave up and went home and I had a few more pints before closing time. On the way home I saw a vision.’
‘I think the technical term is DTs,’ said Maddy, getting on top of the situation again.
Johnny laughed. ‘I don’t know what it was. All I know is I turned the corner and there was this bloody great angel blocking the path.’
‘Angel?’ Maddy and May snorted with laughter, then fell silent, not knowing what to make of it. They sat watching him uncertainly to see if he was serious. Mara glanced at Rupert. He looked as though he had heard the story before.
‘Well, go on. What did it say?’ asked Maddy. ‘ “Hail, thou that art highly favoured”?’ May giggled.
‘No. He said, “Don’t mess with me, you arrogant little sod.” ’
‘You liar,’ said Maddy. ‘Angels don’t speak like that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do. They come wafting along in their tinsel-trimmed nighties and say, “Fear not.” It says so in the Bible, only you wouldn’t know that, of course.’
‘Being an ignorant northern fool,’ added May.
The rain pattered overhead. Maddy and May had awarded him nine out of ten for dramatic content, then disqualified him on the grounds that it was a pack of lies. But it had rung true for Mara. It seemed to her that this was exactly how an angel might speak. Terrifying warriors, not effete pre-Raphaelite musicians. The bells chimed eleven. She roused herself and left the cloisters as she heard the sound of voices and feet approaching.
Mara was at her desk staring blankly at the wall. The room was silent. Only the ticking of the radiator kept her company. Even the polecat had gone home. She sighed and looked at the notes in front of her. Had she grown so accustomed to being with other people that she no longer really relished her own company? She cast her mind
back to the day before term had begun, and saw herself looking down on the tops of people’s heads and vowing to remain alone. At the age of six she had taken hold of the realization that she had no friends and transformed it into a fierce resolve never to have any. The transformation had been so powerful that this was the first time she could remember wondering whether somewhere inside her there was a six-year-old crying out for a friend. Her cousin Dewi had become her imaginary companion. He was so constant and loyal a champion that the real Dewi could only disappoint her, and finally vanish from her life without a word. I must be careful, she thought, binding up my happiness in other people. She opened her desk drawer and took out two photographs.
The first was a snapshot of her and Rupert at the ball. He was standing behind her with his arms wrapped round her waist, and he was laughing. Her hand was halfway to her mouth to cover her smile. Rupert had given her the photograph and told her to contemplate it every morning before breakfast. One of those impossible things: Mara Johns smiling. She studied her face. My mouth is too wide, she thought. The teeth were no longer crooked and the ugly metal brace had gone, but she still cringed at the mocking names of childhood echoing in her memory. Bugs Bunny. Dracula. Her teeth were too big and had crowded her narrow jaw. Well, they were straight now, at least, although that gap between the front teeth was very noticeable. But other than that, the smile wasn’t too bad. Rupert and Johnny had taken to greeting her rare smiles by reeling back in a parody of stunned bliss, as though someone had let off a blunderbuss full of rose petals in their faces.
She leant the photograph against a pile of books. It had begun to seem like a still from a film: a young woman puts on an old black dress and is transported magically into another world for an evening. She walks and dances among ghosts and bright images until at last the pale light of morning gleams over the rooftops. Up the stairs she goes, back to her room. She takes off the dress and sinks into sleep. When she wakes, the spell is broken. Lying on her desk are two photographs: all that remains of her night of bliss.
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