Air and Angels

by Susan Hill

  They reached the shrubbery and the bush, its branches starred with the sweet-smelling blossom. Thea sensed that Florence had a need to confide in her. But after a few moments of silence, nothing had been said, so that in the end, she herself asked more about the plans of the Committee for their Home in the country.

  ‘Perhaps we could help in some way here. We are all so very fortunate …’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘It must take up a good deal of your time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And energy.’

  Florence reached out a hand and touched the blossom.

  ‘But I think that you are so good and right … and … and brave to do it. It is so very important.’

  Thea’s round face shone, fresh and unblemished beneath the neatly plaited hair. She was a short, compact woman.

  Abruptly, Florence asked, ‘Is there nothing that you long for, quite passionately? Want?’

  ‘Oh, all human beings have aspirations!’

  ‘Aspirations! I was not talking of anything so elevated. Wants … Desires.’

  Florence looked round the garden wildly. It was cold and almost dark and the rain had begun again. In the buildings behind them, she felt the presence of studious, purposeful, dedicated young women.

  ‘This …’ she gestured. ‘I could never aspire to this.’

  Nor ever want it, she realised. For the air would surely suffocate her.

  ‘I must go back. Mother is on her own.’

  ‘Oh do, please, give her my warmest greetings. I mean to come and see her once the term is over. We lead such full lives.’

  They walked slowly to the gate. Shaking hands, Thea held onto hers for a moment.

  ‘If there is anything … if I can be of some help? I felt sure there was something you wanted.’

  ‘Ah.’ Florence drew away her hand, smiled a sudden, dazzling, distant smile. ‘What are mere “wants” beside so many aspirations?’

  And felt nothing but relief at leaving them behind, relief and a return of the old sense of superiority towards Thea, as well as – for she had told the truth – envy.

  But the outing had been for a purpose more considerable than friendship. It had been an exercise in keeping Thomas Cavendish from her mind, and as such, altogether unsuccessful.

  Wants, she thought now, in the darkness of the cab. I want.

  For she recognised that it was nothing so gentle or so honourable as love. She wanted him, and wanted to succeed in getting him to marry her.

  Like Thea Pontifex, his life was complete and satisfying to him, and he had not a moment’s need of her. She felt similarly towards them both, felt irritation, superiority, envy, anger.

  In the case of Thea, none of it greatly mattered.

  In the case of Thomas Cavendish, whom she wanted, it did.

  Well, she would go home. She would play backgammon or rummy with her mother, who had been too much alone, she would stay up late, as the old lady liked, would be companionable, affectionate. They would chat.

  If I do this, if I am not neglectful, if I look after my mother tenderly and with complete devotion, then it will come out, like a game of patience, and I will be rewarded, I will have what I want. Or so the thinking ran.

  At the corner, she stopped the cab. The driver was to wait.

  The blinds of the house had already been drawn.

  ‘Oh, Alice …’

  ‘Good evening, madam?’

  ‘It’s quite all right. I know I’m not expected, but perhaps you would say …’

  ‘I’m very sorry, madam, but there is no one at home. Mr Cavendish is in college, and Miss Georgiana has gone out visiting.’

  ‘Well, never mind … it does not matter in the least.’

  She did not know what she had hoped for. Only, on the spur of the moment, had wanted to be here, to step inside the house again. Perhaps to talk to Georgiana, have his name mentioned.

  Or he might have been at home.

  ‘But I would like just to leave some papers.’

  ‘Of course, I’ll put them on Miss Georgiana’s desk. She always goes to it when she gets in.’

  But Florence had swept away from her, down the passage.

  ‘No, no, Alice, please don’t trouble, I’ll do it. And they are for Mr Cavendish. Don’t let me interrupt you, I know where to go.’

  She closed the door sharply behind her.

  He was not there, of course. And yet he was, the room was full of him. The book he had been reading lay open on the arm of the chair. She went over to the desk.

  Bird notes. His handwriting was spare, abbreviated, in black ink. Not easy to read. She stared at it, trying to force it to yield up something of the man to her. She felt a curious flutter of excitement, as though she were gazing into some intensely private diary, learning secrets. But they were simply names, descriptions, measurements.

  She lifted her eyes from the book, to look slowly round the room again, wanting to hoard every detail of it, to remember everything. Thought, this would be my world. I would no longer be an intruder. But there was an acute, guilty pleasure in being in here alone, as though she had in some way caught and held something of him.

  Across the room, the glass doors that led to the conservatory, and the other birds. She did not understand at all the appeal they held for him.

  But she saw herself, seated in another chair, beside the lamp and opposite to him, reading, belonging.

  Absorbed, she had heard no sounds. Now, there was Alice’s voice, quite close, explaining, protesting, and the door had opened, Thomas came quickly, angrily, into the room.

  11

  ‘BUT YOU can hardly blame Alice. You have heard what she told you, that Florence simply marched in. Alice could not stop her. You know what she is like.’

  ‘Incompetent.’

  ‘Florence.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. It is becoming all too clear. How dare she enter my room, and pry and poke about like that. What possible reason could she have?’

  ‘Alice said something about papers …’

  ‘Papers! She wanted to push her way in, to …’

  ‘Oh, to what, Thomas?’

  The door was ajar. From the hall, they heard the slightest of noises, instantly suppressed.

  ‘You had better lower your voice.’

  They were in Georgiana’s small sitting-room. She had come in, soaked to the skin, from having walked down the avenue, to find her brother raging, as she had never seen him before, Alice stiffly self-defensive, Florence gone.

  ‘Please sit down. If we must discuss this before I am even changed out of my wet clothes, then let us do so quietly and calmly.’

  To her surprise, he did sit, and, looking at him, she saw that the anger had left him, and his face was pale, weary.

  ‘I am sorry. Of course you are uncomfortable. Don’t trouble about this, please.’

  ‘I do trouble.’

  She sat opposite him. He asked where she had been.

  ‘Being patient while Adèle Hemmings’s aunt shouted at me about fallen women. Why is it that those who cannot hear well themselves believe the rest of us are stone deaf too?’

  He smiled. ‘Fallen women?’

  ‘Adèle Hemmings’s aunt is extremely rich.’

  ‘Ah–the Committee …’

  ‘But it was all a great mistake. I should never have gone. I had to shout my head off trying to explain what it was all about, and then be harangued for an hour about Jezebel. It would have been a good deal more satisfactory if I had been appealing for money to rescue fallen cats. Really, the house does smell so.’

  ‘Perhaps Adèle Hemmings’s aunt has lost her olfactory sense too. We must be charitable, Georgiana.’

  ‘There, you are laughing now, so that is better.’

  ‘You are very brave to go off on your fund-raising. Brave altogether, in such a cause.’

  ‘Not brave, no. But we are so needed.’

  ‘So I realise. It is all a great pity.’

 
‘Well. Shall I ask Alice to bring in a glass of madeira? I feel I need to be warmed.’ She reached for the bell. ‘And you were home earlier than I had expected.’

  ‘Yes. A pupil did not arrive. I was already concerned about him, he sent no excuse or apology. I left a message in his rooms. The servant seemed to think he had gone home rather suddenly.’

  ‘Some family matter then?’

  ‘He is supposed to ask for leave of absence. But he has been disturbed, I know. Well, I shall have to get to the bottom of it.’

  Alice came in with the tray. Thomas spoke at once.

  ‘Alice, I must apologise for my curtness earlier. Of course it was not your fault.’

  Georgiana waited for some moments after the door had closed, before saying, ‘Thank you. That was the right thing to do.’

  They sipped the sweet, dark wine. She was about to tell him some remark of Adèle Hemmings’s aunt, when he said quietly, ‘I want you to assure me that you will say something to her.’

  She waited.

  ‘It is intolerable, Georgiana. I will not have this. I cannot bear it – I do not – I am not interested in that woman – or in any. I do not want to be – hunted. Hounded. Above all, I do not want to think that you are in some sort of conspiracy about this – whispering, plotting, like silly young girls, behind my back. I have spoken of it before and I have listened to the things you have said. But please understand me now. I was angrier than I know how to express to you when I came in this evening.’

  ‘Yes. It was wrong of her, very wrong. Of course she should not have gone into your room. But I am sure that she meant no harm.’

  ‘We neither of us know what she meant and I do not wish to hear any reasons, or excuses. I do not wish to hear the matter mentioned again. I would just ask that you – say something – make my feelings plain. I know I can trust you to behave tactfully – to – to respect my wishes.’

  ‘Of course. It is only – oh, that I am so sorry you feel as you do. Not only about Florence but … you are my brother, I should so like to see you settled – loved. You are a good man, a …’

  But she could find no way to continue. Only said, ‘I am sorry if I have done anything to disturb you.’

  He inclined his head. ‘Let us talk no more about it. I know that you have understood. And now, you had better have a second glass of wine and go up to put on dry clothes.’

  Obediently, she did so.

  Old Mrs Gray played her cards wth meticulous slowness, periodically looking up from them to scrutinise her daughter’s face.

  But Florence was giving nothing away. She was only grateful for the pauses and that she was not required to think or to play quickly. She was still considerably upset.

  There is something, Mrs Gray said, something, and soon, I shall go to bed and think about what it can be.

  In the meantime, she contemplated the queen of spades.

  No one tends the garden behind the house of Adèle Hemmings and her aunt, it is entirely overgrown, as the garden of some ruin or uninhabited place, and so the cats have it quite to themselves, and rustle and slink there and often pounce, among the weeds and the tall grasses, and the skeletons of years lie unburied, white and frail, and the soft, furred, rotting bodies of those more recently murdered, it is a graveyard of small mammals.

  But in the house, the cats preen themselves and are cosseted, they lie sleekly on cushions and in the folds of eiderdowns, with bland, closed faces.

  When it is very late, Adèle Hemmings opens the door and stands, listening to the night, and imagines herself a cat, free to walk off alone and where she chooses, wonders about possibilities, shadowy in her mind.

  But she does not move, goes nowhere. Only the cats flick past her skirts and merge with the darkness.

  Florence was trying to remember what it was like to be married. She had a photograph of Chester Bowering, wide-browed, with the huge moustache that made his face look so foolish. But it yielded nothing, she could not breathe life into it, make him the reality he had been.

  Deliberately, she thought of walking beside him, her hand in the crook of his arm. But she had taken the arm of other men in the formal, everyday manner, many times since then, and so the thought was meaningless.

  Occasionally, she had woken in the night, and it had all been absolutely clear, so that she had almost believed he had been there, she had felt his hands, smelled the hair oil he had used. But fleetingly, confusedly, and nowadays rarely, so that even the wedding photographs and the ring she wore hardly convinced her that she had been married at all.

  Chester Bowering had been an American. They had returned to live in Boston after a protracted honeymoon tour of Europe and she had begun to settle into society there as the wife of such a prominent man (he was a widower and almost forty, when he had married her), into being an American.

  Eight months later, Chester Bowering was dead, fallen on his bathroom floor one morning from a haemorrhage of the brain. Florence had returned to Cambridge a few weeks later, bewildered and rather rich but, otherwise, strangely untouched by the whole business. The episode of her marriage seemed scarcely to have left a mark upon her.

  Now, she wondered what she had ever felt for her husband. She had no recollection of it. She supposed there must have been love. She remembered a fondness, and an excitement, and she had been flattered, certainly. Above all, there had been a reassurance about him, he had seemed, in spite of being American, safe and familiar. Nothing more. But perhaps nothing more had been necessary.

  But now, there was more. Passion, she thought. Passion. Though still, she knew it was not love.

  Thomas had been white-lipped with anger. He had spoken to her as to a servant, caught in an act of petty theft, had asked her coldly to leave his house. Confused, disconcerted, she had not known how to respond, had simply gone. But outside, the feeling that had flared up within her had been anger. Anger, and a bitter determination.

  Want, she thought. I want. And calmly, turned the photograph of her husband face downwards in the drawer.

  In the end, weary of thinking, Mrs Gray fell asleep, though it irritated her that she had not found a solution. There is something, she said, over and over again, something. But, waking in the middle of the night, as she regularly did, realised that she had not been able to understand what there was because her daughter had looked and behaved in a way she had never done before.

  12

  EUSTACE PARTRIDGE put his head in his hands and wept and the tears ran between his fingers and down his wrists.

  Thomas, watching him and shocked beyond belief, had no idea what to do or say. The boy had burst into his rooms, white-faced, in the middle of the morning, had said what he had to, and then, simply, sat down and wept.

  A girl was to have his child. He scarcely knew her. She was the sister of an acquaintance from school, daughter of neighbours in the country. But otherwise, it seemed, quite insignificant.

  He had been home. The whole story was out. There had been confrontations with both families. And now, Thomas.

  After a while, Eustace raised his head and pushed a hand through his hair, said, ‘I am most dreadfully sorry, sir.’

  ‘Yes.’ Thomas could not look at him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course, I shall have to go down. I am to marry her.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I … I really don’t know. That is – there is talk of the army. India. I don’t want that at all. Or there is a possibility of helping to run the estate. They are … it is all being discussed.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘It is hardly necessary to apologise to me.’ Though of course, he believed that it was.

  The boy stared miserably at his hands. You are a child, Thomas thought, glancing at him, for the face was open with misery and had somehow become a child’s face again, soft, unformed.

  A strange desire to console him came to Thomas, to treat him as tenderly, as lovingly, as he supposed one would treat a small boy w
ho had come to confess some trivial offence, and burst into tears in just this way.

  But the offence was not trivial, though commonplace enough. And it disgusted him, he could neither understand nor sympathise with it. Above all, he felt, somehow, personally rebuffed, and was angry. So that in the end, rather than trust himself to speak at all, he simply sent the boy away.

  Eustace Partridge went hopelessly, to stare out of the window of his room down onto the college courtyard and across the roofs of the town, in despair that through a folly he scarcely understood, or even remembered, he was to lose everything.

  But the bitterest shame had been having to speak to Cavendish, and the bitterest disappointment too, for he had believed that his tutor not only thought highly of but warmly towards him. He had seemed to be an ally and a friend. The contempt on his face, the way it had closed against him, had shown him that there was no one on his side, and that he had no supporter, after all.

  He remained at his window, brooding, regretting, and already felt quite detached from his surroundings, as though the college and its life and purpose already excluded him.

  Of his future, and of the pert, pretty Mary Wimpole, he could not bear to think at all.

  In the end, Thomas saw the Dean, and the Dean, who was a broad-minded and tolerant man, heard him out patiently, soothingly. Though Thomas could not be soothed.

  ‘It is the waste, the foolish, unnecessary waste. He was a pupil I was proud to teach, he had one of the finest brains it had been my good fortune to encounter. There was excellence, there was achievement, and then, there was such promise.’

  ‘You speak as if the boy were dead.’

  ‘He is dead to me.’

  ‘Try to see it this way – that this incident, and the disgrace of it, have ruined his life. To us, it is merely a passing disappointment. We have been let down. But he has failed his whole self. And so, we must be charitable.’

  ‘He has thrown everything away – and for what?’

  ‘Perhaps for a good wife and family, a happy life? We cannot tell. The situation could have been considerably worse. At least the girl is marriageable.’