Angels and Men

by Catherine Fox

  ‘Right. I’m awake, so you can bloody well make me some coffee.’ He sat on the desk scowling into the sunlight. Mara put the kettle on with a smile. ‘What are you so cheerful about, you cow?’ Shall I tell him?

  ‘It’s my birthday.’

  ‘It is? Why didn’t you warn me? Happy birthday. How old?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  He got up and hugged her. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’

  ‘I don’t want any fuss.’ He laughed and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Too bad. I’m going to take you out to dinner. Not tonight, though. I’ve got a concert.’

  ‘Or tomorrow night. Aren’t we supposed to be dining on High Table?’

  ‘Shit. I’d forgotten.’ He sat on the desk again. ‘You’ll hate it, you know. We’re supposed to be the Principal’s model postgrads and impress the old farts from the college council.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t go.’

  ‘Yes you bloody well will. If I’m going, you’re certainly not getting out of it.’ He pointed at her dress suddenly. ‘I recognize that. Part of the mad aunt’s wardrobe.’ She whirled round for him and he nodded in approval. ‘It needs a wide-brimmed hat. White.’

  ‘There wasn’t one.’ She paused, and looked at him. ‘I thought you were too drunk to remember anything.’

  He was smiling his hateful feline smile. Surely he couldn’t remember posing nude for her? No. Impossible, or he would have demanded to see the pictures by now. She began spooning coffee into the pretty blue and white mugs her mother had bought for her. When she turned round again Andrew was leafing through her sketch-book.

  ‘Give me that!’ she cried. He pushed her away.

  ‘Just checking to see if you’ve done anything new since I last looked.’

  ‘You sneaky, slimy little git!’

  ‘You shouldn’t leave it lying around.’ But her anger had already dwindled. She stood plucking at her dress, watching fearfully as he turned the pages. ‘Can I have this one?’ It was the picture of Johnny stripped to the waist.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cow.’ He continued to leaf through. What did he think of them? Her heart thumped. At last he looked up. ‘This is what you really want to do, isn’t it?’ Her hand fumbled in her damp hair. She nodded. ‘What’s the problem, then? You don’t have to do a PhD, you know. Grant applications aren’t the law of the Medes and Persians.’ She could feel her hand starting to tug at her hair. He was watching her in amusement.

  ‘Yes, but I ought . . .’

  ‘You believe in a very strange god, Mara.’

  ‘I don’t.’ She felt insulted. The god she so faithfully didn’t believe in wasn’t at all strange.

  ‘You don’t think irrational sadism is an odd quality for the Divine Being to possess?’ She looked blank. ‘Listen. God creates a woman and gives her the ability to draw like an angel. He fixes it so that there is nothing in the world she would rather do than draw, then he damns her in perpetuity if she picks up a pencil.’

  Mara stared at him. He’s right. That is what I believe. She turned away and faced the window in amazement. She saw the beautiful morning, heard the birds singing on the riverbank, the bells chime. Someone somewhere was laughing at her. She put her hand over her mouth to stop herself joining in. It was a theological gaffe of stupendous proportions. So that was the angel’s message. For an instant she saw it again in her memory, like sunlight flashing off a distant window, the fierce eyes, the wrathful joy. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, you fatheaded finite fool. How can you even have thought it? She remembered Andrew’s earlier words: What if there’s another kind of God? Gracious, slow to anger. She heard herself laugh.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s seven in the morning, and we’re talking theology. Give me my coffee, for Christ’s sake.’

  It had turned into a hot day. After lunch Mara sat with Andrew in the shade of the cherry tree on Coverdale lawn. She was wearing a white broad-brimmed hat which Andrew had bought for her as a birthday present. He was tucking cherry blossom into the petersham trim. She sat patiently. There was a clack of croquet balls from the next lawn behind the high wall, and up above the swallows dipped and nattered. It was the blissful hour before exams or revision started again for the afternoon. At any moment Maddy and May would appear, wailing, ‘Oh, God – I couldn’t answer a single question!’ and then waste the whole afternoon in post-mortems.

  ‘There,’ said Andrew at last. He held her at arm’s length. ‘You look beautiful.’ She felt herself flush with pleasure.

  ‘You said that to me once before.’ She knew as she spoke that she would regret it.

  ‘It was true once before.’ He picked up the book he had brought with him and opened it. ‘The rest of the time you just look indescribably bad-tempered and plain. Like a partially resurrected Jane Morris with a hangover.’ He lay down and rested his head in her lap.

  ‘But that’s twice in one academic year!’ He ignored this quip. She looked down at him, enjoying the black of his hair against her blue dress. His eyelashes flickered slightly as his eyes moved across the page. Pity she didn’t have her sketch-book.

  ‘You’re beautiful all the time,’ she said. He made no reply, taking it as his due, but she knew he was waiting for the sting in the tail. What would annoy him most, she wondered idly. A bee droned past them.

  ‘In a slightly prissy Little Lord Fauntleroy kind of way.’

  She yelped as he pinched her leg. He continued to read, and she tilted her head back and looked at the blue sky behind the blossom. Anyone could be beautiful on a day like this. Even the students leaping and catching their frisbee seemed more lithe and graceful in the sunshine. Mara watched them as they played. Creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life. She looked down at Andrew again.

  ‘What kind of God don’t you believe in, then?’

  ‘Any kind.’ His eyes continued to travel down the page.

  ‘Be more specific.’

  This made him look up disdainfully. ‘You, my girl, are philosophically crass. A discussion of qualities pre-supposes existence. I’m an atheist.’ He returned to his book. ‘And don’t wheel on the ontological argument.’

  Mara watched as a small shower of petals fluttered down from the tree. She could never quite remember what the ontological argument was. It was like the spare keys to the house: important, but forever being mislaid. Andrew was smiling as he read. He knows I don’t know, she thought.

  ‘I’ve got a theory about your atheism,’ she said.

  He read on as though he had not heard. She was beginning to feel like Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice remarking on the evenness of Mr Darcy’s lines. She watched one of the young men leaping for the frisbee, but it floated up high on some unknown path of its own and lodged in the branches of the hawthorn tree. A different shower of petals fell. Various missiles were hurled up, but the frisbee was stuck. It hung there, pale yellow, like some strange fruit amongst the blossom. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, thought Mara, watching their attempts to dislodge it.

  ‘What’s your theory about my atheism?’

  ‘It’s not as rigorously intellectual as you pretend. I bet it’s rooted in something deeply uncool, like personal experience.’

  He sat up and treated her to his most unpleasant stare. ‘Are you gambling on the chance I won’t make you cry on your birthday, Princess?’ Aha. She must be close to the truth. I can’t believe in a God who would let this happen. Something as unsophisticated as that? ‘What sort of “personal experience”?’ She heard the insulting inverted commas. The death of his friend. She dared not say it.

  ‘Something to do with the Church? Maybe you were molested by a priest.’ At this point they saw Johnny walking towards the group under the hawthorn tree. They watched him in silence for a moment as he talked with the other students.

  ‘You never know,’ said Andrew thoughtfully. ‘That might drive me straight into the bosom of Anglicanism instead.’ He turned and looked
at her. ‘It would depend on the priest.’

  ‘Stop drooling. Anyway, he’s not a priest.’

  ‘No, but he will be. Don’t get your hopes up.’

  She blushed. Some such thought had been lying around unacknowledged in the back of her mind. If he doesn’t get ordained, then maybe . . . Andrew grinned, seeing his bolt hit home.

  There was a cheer from the other end of the lawn. Mara and Andrew turned back. Johnny was standing on the top of the high wall, sure-footed and fearless against the sky.

  ‘Over there,’ called the students below, pointing to the frisbee.

  ‘I see it,’ he said. He began to walk towards the hawthorn tree, keeping his audience entertained with a pantomimed tightrope walk and a spoof commentary on his progress. Impersonations of several well-known sports commentators carried across to where Mara and Andrew were sitting, and even Andrew was betrayed into a smile. Johnny reached the tree, leant out and retrieved the frisbee, then sent it whizzing back to its owner. After a brief conversation with the croquet players on the other side of the wall, he leapt back down amidst laughter, cheers and cries of ‘Don’t do it, John!’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Andrew in disgusted admiration. Johnny caught sight of them. Oh, God, he’s going to come and talk to us. Her heart began to race as he crossed the lawn to where they were sitting. Bad enough to face him alone, but infinitely worse with Andrew’s eyes on her. Fortunately a distraction arrived at that point in the form of Maddy and May. They swooned down theatrically on to the lawn and howled about the brutality of the exam system. Johnny laughed at them and sat down. May stationed herself close to Andrew and began to make a daisy chain.

  ‘I wonder what kind of degree I’ll get,’ May said.

  ‘A nice girly Lower Second. You’re only moderately bright, and you do bugger all.’

  ‘Smack his face,’ ordered Maddy.

  ‘What if I worked really hard for the next two years?’ persisted May.

  He shrugged. ‘What if you had brains? Who knows?’

  May flushed, but she carried on with her daisy chain nonchalantly. ‘Well, who cares?’ she said. ‘Joanna might be right. The Second Coming could’ve happened by then.’ But her face said, Only moderately bright? I’ll show you.

  Mara glanced at Andrew and caught his eye. There was a flicker of amusement there. Interesting. So he cared enough about May to try and spur her into studying. Another figure joined the group. Mara looked up and saw Rupert standing there against the sun. She shaded her eyes. He smiled down at her.

  ‘You look ravishing.’

  She blushed and smiled back as he sat down beside her. Her eyes fled to Johnny and instantly away again. He was watching her. Andrew chose this moment to lie down and rest his head once more in Mara’s lap.

  ‘Comfortable?’ asked Johnny.

  ‘Mmm, hmm.’ Andrew was deep in his book again. Mara gazed off towards the hawthorn tree, feeling Johnny’s eyes still on her. At this point Maddy asserted herself, evidently dissatisfied with the way the male attention was being shared out.

  ‘I used to have a hat almost exactly like that once, only it blew away and a bus ran over it. I wept for weeks because I loved it to bits.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said May airily. ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ She reached over and draped her daisy chain around Andrew’s hair. He brushed it away as if it were a fly.

  ‘Hah,’ said Mara, inadvertently drawing the group’s attention back to herself.

  Andrew lowered his book. ‘Does that grunt mean you take issue with Tennyson here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mara. ‘You might just as well say it’s better to have got drunk and fallen downstairs and broken your leg than never to have got drunk at all.’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘Well, isn’t it?’ asked Johnny. Andrew laughed, but Rupert most decidedly did not.

  Mara could read hostility in his expression, but before she could analyse it Joanna appeared. Mara stiffened. The girl said hello and sat on the edge of the group. She had the gorilla in tow, and he sat beside her like a man under an evil spell. Mara could have wept for him. She had not realized it had got that bad. All his animal high spirits had vanished. Impossible to believe it was the same man she had washed up with. He was staring at the ground. He must have swallowed Joanna’s story whole, believing he could help her, that nobody had ever really listened to her before. He was trapped.

  Mara felt Andrew stroking her hand. Her fist clenched into a tight ball. Andrew smoothed the fingers out and kissed her palm. He smiled up at her and shook his head: She’s not worth it. Mara smiled back. He was right. She let him lace her fingers together with his, and looked up in time to catch May’s eyes swerving away. Oh, hell. She’s probably sitting there hating me.

  Her suspicions were confirmed a moment later when May said to Rupert, ‘Do you think getting drunk’s a sin?’ She was venting her anger by stirring up trouble.

  ‘I suppose it depends on the circumstances,’ he replied, barely managing to be diplomatic. Johnny sighed and lay back on the lawn looking up at the sky.

  ‘Good God. Situation ethics,’ said Andrew, adding his mite. ‘What’s happened to you, Anderson? You always used to be a man of absolute values. Surely the Word of God is quite clear about sin?’

  ‘It says that anything which doesn’t spring from faith is sin.’ This was an unexpected offering from Joanna. She was casting her eyes down modestly, saying to the gorilla, ‘Doesn’t it, Dave?’ Rather ostentatiously flashing that ‘imperishable jewel of a gentle and quiet spirit’ that St Peter talks about, thought Mara. Johnny lit a cigarette and lay back with his arm over his face in the sunlight. Mara watched the smoke drift.

  ‘Oh, what is sin?’ said Maddy impatiently.

  ‘Said jesting Pilate,’ interjected May.

  ‘That was truth, dumb-dumb,’ said Maddy. ‘Everyone knows definitions of sin are culturally conditioned. It’s all relative.’

  Aha, thought Mara. She’s sleeping with her Irishman and feeling guilty about it. Andrew began to play with one of Mara’s curls, twining it in and out of his long fingers. He was looking at Rupert and smiling maliciously.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘Because I don’t think you’re interested.’ Rupert was very angry indeed.

  ‘Oh, but I am.’ Andrew was playing languidly with her fingers now, still smiling at Rupert, who met his gaze with level antagonism. ‘Come on – let’s hear the fruits of three years’ training. What is sin?’

  Am I missing something again? wondered Mara.

  Then Johnny sat up and said, ‘I’ll tell you a story.’ Maddy and May clapped their hands and squealed like excited three-year-olds. Johnny began: ‘When I was about eleven and my brother Charlie was about thirteen, we were both given air rifles.’ Maddy and May gasped and clutched one another. Johnny went on good-naturedly against the backdrop of their mockery. ‘We were out in the woods on a sunny day –’

  ‘A bit like this?’ said May.

  ‘A bit like this, and there was a bird singing its heart out on the top of a tree. Charlie said –’

  ‘What sort of bird?’ interrupted Maddy.

  ‘No idea. Charlie said, “I bet you can’t hit it.” So I took my gun . . .’ They all watched as he mimed the action. Eleven-year-old concentration, the careful aim, the finger on the trigger. ‘Bang. Then there was silence, and we watched the bird falling down through the branches.’ They all sat still on the lawn. Mara heard the silence after the echoing shot, then the sound of the small body dropping through the summer leaves. She felt cold.

  ‘The poor bird!’ said Maddy for all of them. ‘I bet it was a robin. You’re horrible, Johnny!’

  ‘Yes.’ He drew on his cigarette and did not smile.

  ‘But why did you do it?’ asked May.

  ‘Because I could.’ There was another silence. The words cast a shadow.

  ‘Well, well. Arguably the best working definiti
on of sin since the Reformation,’ said Andrew. ‘I see the Church hasn’t wasted its money entirely.’

  He got to his feet and the group began to break up. Maddy and May went reluctantly back to their room for more revision, May with a look of steely determination which was not lost on Andrew, judging by his smile. Joanna left, too, clutching the gorilla’s arm and talking earnestly to him. He looked dazed and unhappy as he allowed himself to be led off.

  I can’t bear it, thought Mara. Has no one else noticed what’s happening to him? She looked round and saw Rupert disappearing into Coverdale Hall. She ran and caught up with him in the corridor.

  As he turned, she said without preamble, ‘I’m a bit worried about –’ Shit, what was his name? She couldn’t say ‘the gorilla’. ‘You know, the one with Joanna. He looks terrible.’

  ‘David? Yes.’ Rupert paused. She watched in astonishment. He was almost visibly counting to ten. ‘I’ve decided you were right about Joanna all along, Mara.’ His tone was repressive, implying that in this one instance she was right, but her behaviour in general was still totally reprehensible. ‘Several of his friends are worried, too. Apparently he’s not doing any work, just spending hours on end talking to Joanna. They went and had a word with the Principal about it this morning, in fact. It’s all got totally out of hand. Another girl passed out in one of her exams the other day, and it turns out she’s been fasting. They’ve all been doing it.’ He glared at Mara as if were her fault, somehow. There was another pause.

  ‘Are you . . . You’re not mad at me for some reason?’ she ventured.