Air and Angels
About the Book
Celibate, irreproachable and distinguished, Thomas Cavendish is in his mid-fifties and the obvious choice to become Master of his college. But, walking by the river one hot May afternoon, Thomas sees a young girl standing on the bridge. It is a vision that is to alter his life irrevocably and tragically, but with the beauty and joy of a love never previously imagined.
Susan Hill’s novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is the author of over forty books, including the four previous Serrailler crime novels,
The Various Haunts of Men
,
The Pure in Heart
,
The Risk of Darkness
and
The Vows of Silence.
Her most recent novel is
A Kind Man
. The play
adapted from her famous ghost story,
The Woman in Black
, has been running on the West End stage since 1989.
Susan Hill was born in Scarborough and educated at King’s College, London. She is married to the Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, and they have two daughters. She lives in Gloucestershire, where she runs her own small publishing company, Long Barn Books.
Susan Hill’s website is
www.susan-hill.com
Featuring Simon Serrailler
The Various Haunts of Men
The Pure in Heart
The Risk of Darkness
The Vows of Silence
Fiction
Gentlemen and Ladies
A Change for the Better
I’m the King of the Castle
The Albatross and Other Stories
Strange Meeting
The Bird of Night
A Bit of Singing and Dancing
In the Springtime of the Year
Mrs de Winter
The Woman in Black
The Mist in the Mirror
The
The Man in the Picture
The Beacon
The Small Hand
A kind Man
Non-Fiction
The Magic Apple Tree
Family
Howards End is on the Landing
Children’s Books
The Battle for Gullywith
One Night at a Time
The Glass Angels
Can it be True?
SUSAN HILL
Air and Angels
Prologue
THE RIVER was crowded, and the lawns that sloped down to the river, there were young people everywhere, and the sun shone, as it properly should on such a scene, as it shines in stories, sparkled on the water and on the upturned young faces, and the parasols (for parasols were once again in fashion). And then, suddenly, there was a stir in the midst of it all, where the crowd was thickest,
and some of the young men raised a boat high, high above their heads, to a great shout … ‘Hurrah’ … ‘rah’ … ‘rah’, and water cascaded out of it onto their heads and shoulders and down their arms, in a brief silver stream. The crowd parted to let them through and they advanced slowly up the lawn in triumph.
Though what precisely the triumph was, or whose, he could not be sure. For there had been
so much noise and confusion, so many people, such a succession of triumphs, all that long, hot, golden afternoon.
For years, all the young men had looked alike to him, and he knew none of them any more, they blurred together with his memories of the young men of the past. Though at least they stood still in age now, at least they no longer seemed, as they once had, to be becoming disconcertingly
younger and younger, until he had feared they might turn into small children and then to babies and so finally disappear backwards altogether.
But they had remained simply boys. (Though they were young men in their own eyes, and perhaps that was all that counted.)
Then, standing half inside the entrance to the marquee, but looking out onto the throng on the lawn and the crowded river, for a
moment he panicked, clutching a cup of tea and a bowl of strawberries, quite alone, seeing no familiar face among so many. He wandered a few paces into the undersea light of the tent’s interior, where they sat in groups at small green tables that were set too closely together, and where the heat and the steam from the tea urns, and the babbling voices, seemed to rise and hover in a dense, visible
cloud just above their heads.
He fled, and collided with others, pushing in through the doorway, and stopped, panicking again, trying to clutch onto the sense of his own identity, and his reason for being here; and then, in trying to rescue his bowl of strawberries and steady himself by raising his cup to take a sip of tea, the tea spilled and slopped over and the saucer somehow spun out of his
hand onto the grass.
So he waited and let the crowd swirl around him, and gradually he felt calmer and knew once again why he was here, as he had been here every May Week of his adult life. Though he was still entirely surrounded by strangers. There were so few left who were not.
And out of a painted sky the sun shone and shone.
But
he
was known to them. Or at least, to some. They saw an old
man, who had once been handsome, and was still tall and upright, still had a full head of hair, springing up thickly, though entirely white. For although it was more than thirty years ago, before any of these young men and women were so much as born, the story – or at any rate, a public version of it – was known and remembered, and sometimes alluded to, had become one of the legends of the place.
So, milling about on the lawn, looking down to the river, on their way in or out of the marquee for the tea and strawberries, some whispered his name to one another.
‘Thomas Cavendish … the Reverend Thomas Cavendish … Did you never hear …?’
On the other side of the lawns, Georgiana caught sight of him, lost him as the crowd milled around, then saw him again, as he shambled forwards, an old man
who had spilled his tea and was being jostled. And a sudden dart of the purest anguish struck her through the heart, so that she all but cried out loud at the pain of seeing him as he was, and thinking that she had not wanted him to come to this, had wanted something quite other for him, had dreamed of …
But, glancing up and catching sight of him again, she saw, too, how fine a figure he still
was, and how the shadow of his former handsomeness lay over him, and for a few seconds then, saw him not as her only brother on this May Week afternoon, not in time at all, but timelessly, as an immortal. And became inattentive to the chatter of Professor Bulmer’s moustachioed widow (for Georgiana had companions, there were plenty of faces here that were familiar to her).
I used to challenge
him, she thought, aware of how much had gone before. But now, I simply accept. What does he think of, or feel? What does he believe in?
But she did not know. Perhaps she had never known, only assumed.
For no reason at all that was apparent, a picture came into her mind and she saw him on another summer afternoon, in another place and a lifetime ago.
She was a small child, standing at a window
watching out for him to come back from fishing with the son of the tinker, Collum O’Cool, fretting because she herself had nothing to do, and the deathly silence of after-lunch and her parents’ rest lay thick as a blanket over the house.
Then, as she willed and longed for him to come, there he was, striding ahead of the little, dark, nut-faced Irish boy over the grass, a bag and a rod slung from
his shoulder. Looking up, he saw her at the window, stopped, and beckoned, and she went flying from the room and down the stairs and out of the front door to meet him, and he lifted her up and swung her through the air, she saw his face, laughing up at her and smelled the sea-salt, fishy smell on him. And behind them stood Collum O’Cool. She had been five years old and her brother Thomas fourteen,
and the Irish summers were immaculate in the memory.
Fifty yards away, by chance or the curious process of telepathy acting between them, he too stood, and dreamed a vivid, momentary, waking dream of Ireland, and it brought with it the overwhelming desperation he had known so often in his later life.
He saw himself in a boat, the little, low-bottomed boat of Collum O’Cool, who was rowing them
far out on a grey sea, at first light. Behind them, the low shoreline, the house, and the violet shadow of the mountain, grew small and distant, as if they were being blotted out of a picture, and above them there was only sky, and all around them only sea, and the two merged together on the horizon towards which they rowed, and the only sound was the creaking oar and the slap of its blade into
the water and the thin whistling that Collum O’Cool made through his teeth.
A great surge of excitement and joy, a wave of exultation in the space and the freedom, and their own progress away, far away, from house and land and people, surged through him, so that he wanted to shout and sing, to stand up in the little boat and reach out in rapture to embrace the sky.
He felt the ripple of the
memory of it now, as he stood watching more young men with boats on the jostling river, but it was not felt as pleasure but as frustration, a longing for freedom again, and the days of the past, for sea and sky and space, and the Irish summers of boyhood, or the Scottish holidays, or the bleached winter dawns on the Norfolk marsh. He felt rage at the cramping and confinement of old age, and of this
low-lying, miasmic, oppressive place.
From the river, more shouting. Puzzled, he stared down at a saucerless teacup and a bowl full of strawberries – a fruit he especially disliked.
The Professor’s widow was chattering again, talk seemed to issue from her as effortlessly as breath.
‘Yes’, Georgiana said, and then ‘No’, and ‘Yes, indeed’. But otherwise could be inattentive.
From somewhere behind
the white boat-house, music, a band.
In a moment, she would detach herself politely and go to him, for she wondered how he had ever come to be over there alone. He hated these occasions, had always hated them. But always came. Even that first summer, after it all.
She thought, I am keeping an eye on him, as if he were a small child. But
he
used to look after me.
Brightly the band played on,
and everywhere people were smiling. It was, after all, simply the most perfect day …
When she looked over to him again, she saw that he was standing a little apart from the crowd, and that he was quite motionless, frozen, staring ahead to where the bridge spanned the river. She followed his gaze, and saw his absolute intentness, even at this distance. Saw what he saw.
And she knew at once what
was in his mind, what he felt and thought, for how could she ever have forgotten? In those seconds of seeing him so transfixed she understood completely that the anguish had never lessened but was as raw as it had ever been and would remain so and the only thing that would ever alter it was death.
He had looked up vaguely from his saucerless cup and bowl of strawberries and seen her.
The low
bridge arched over the water and the girl stood alone upon it. One hand rested on the rail and the other held a parasol (for parasols were once again in fashion).
Her hair was dark, and the white dress brushed her ankles.
