Air and Angels (2 page)

She was looking towards the boats, which were some yards away, so that her face was turned from him, and in the shade cast by the willows. She was completely still.

It was
her.

Of course, it was not.

But the shock made him gasp for breath, and time went spinning out of control, and the past came racing, like a wave, up the lawn towards him, and broke over him, and he drowned in it …

He felt Georgiana’s hand on his arm, knew that it was hers, and let her lead him away, and did not once look back. After a while, the young woman on the bridge lifted her arm and
waved to one of the laughing groups and the picture was broken, and then she moved, ran lightly down and was lost among them. But he did not see her.

And in any case, who was she?

His sister nodded and smiled and spoke here and there, saying goodbye. But he was far away, immersed in the past. In the cab home, driving between the high walls of the college buildings, softened by sunlight, he was
quite silent, sunken into himself. She kept her hand on his arm, but knew better than to speak.

In the quiet, late afternoon avenue, the shadows were long. There was no one about, and faintly, from the Backs, the music of the band came floating, and the distant cheering.

‘I think we should like some tea, Alice.’

For urn tea really was not the same.

But Thomas shook his head and went down the
hall and through the door that led to the conservatory, and closed it behind him.

For some time after it had gone cold, Georgiana sat over her tea beside the open french windows that gave out onto the garden. Occasionally, the house creaked in the silence. From the kitchen, a faint clang, and the rolling of a saucepan lid across the floor.

She thought, Alice is getting old, along with us, she
needs a rest. Perhaps she would really like to retire. But put the thought out of her mind at once, dreading change and upheaval, the whole business of beginning again with someone new. Though in many ways Alice had become less than satisfactory.

From the conservatory, there was no sound. Perhaps he slept. Slept, or dreamed his waking dream. But there was nothing that she could do for him, she
could not go to him or reach him. Had never.

Trees lined the garden and stood, stately at the far end of it against the sky, this part of the town was rich in trees, and just now they were at their fullest and freshest and best, the limes, the walnut, the horse-chestnuts and the great, dark, heavy copper beech, whose branches swept like outspread skirts to the ground.

She saw a table covered
with a white cloth, and laid for tea beneath it, and herself pouring cup after cup, and Thomas talking earnestly to one of the young men, pacing beside the flowerbeds. And other young men sitting cross-legged on the grass, awkwardly balancing cups and plates, laughing too loudly at her jokes.

Florence, elegant in grey, teasing them.

But Kitty was not there.

And the monkey puzzle tree that she
loathed. But they had never bothered to do anything about it.

Now, the lawn was empty, the young men did not come here any more. But she still took care of the garden. The flowerbeds were stuffed with fat, pink, blowsy peonies, and the rose Albertine cascaded over the wall; the front of the borders needed attention. She would go out later, cut some of the flowers to fill a bowl, snip dead heads
and clip the whiskery grass. Fidget. But for now she sat on, looking out at it all, the picture in the frame, and thought of the other garden, this morning, and Florence lying staring at it, but unseeing, unknowing. Uncaring? And her skull pink and shining beneath the sparse, downy white fluff, what remained of her beautiful hair. Oh and the Home was the best place for her, the only possible place,
that was clear. They fed her well, she had become quite fat, she who had always had such a good, such a disciplined figure, though full, and set on a broad frame. Now, the fat spread in flabby rolls, pale as raw dough beneath her chin.

They kept her clean and moved her bed to give her a view of the other side of the garden and a glimpse of the street, people walking by. She had refused to get
up for almost a year.

But there was no love.

Whichever way her bed faced did not interest her, and when she spoke, she raved and knew no one.

‘Why have you let this woman in here?’ she said, of Georgiana, and rang the bell furiously. ‘Get rid of her.’

‘Is it Christmas yet?’

‘Why did no one bring me breakfast?’

‘They let a cat in at night to pee on my bed.’

‘Thomas? Thomas who?’

‘My teeth
ache.’

A Home, Georgiana thought, leaving that morning. But not a home. Yet what else is there? Demented, senile, the woman who was Florence but was not Florence had to be cared for and protected from herself, and from matches and gas taps and boiling water and wandering out naked into the street.

Remembering, and trying not to remember, blotting both the past and that morning’s visit from her
mind, Georgiana wept, as she regularly wept; for the loss of her friend and the waste and her own helplessness, and guilt lay like lead in her chest.

On the lawns that led down to the river, the crowds were thinning at last, though slowly, for people were reluctant to go, and so bring an end to the glory of the day. One by one, the boats were brought out of the water and carried in.

Somewhere,
refusing to catch the eye of her Mama, lost in the centre of a group, the girl stood, her shoulder just touching that of a young man with a blond moustache, her eyes shining with the thought of the ball to come, and of dancing out of the marquee onto the moonlit grass. One of any number of pretty girls with dark hair and a white dress (the parasol folded now and put away).

The band had stopped
playing, but the sun, lower in the sky, still shone benignly and there was no cloud to mar the perfect end to the perfect day.

I must get up, she thought. I cannot sit here, doing nothing. For she was very conscious of being the only one of them who still could ‘do’ things, this or that, find some purpose in life.

Yet she sat on, feeling her age more and more. Thought, where might it all have
ended if it had not ended here? With my brother old and shambling and dropping his saucer and spilling his tea, and Florence, angry and demented and all unknowing, unaware.

And she herself, spinning in circles of busyness and usefulness and sociability, for fear of the alternative.

Looking up, then, she saw that the sun had gone off the lawn, slipped down behind the monkey puzzle tree she had
always hated.

And Kitty?

AN AFTERNOON in November. Mist rising off the water, water dripping from the trees, and the cobbled lanes and passageways greasy and treacherous. Not quite four o’clock but already dark. Here and there on the street corners, braziers, and beyond them, black shadows.

The gas lamps flared, haloed in mist, and in so many college rooms, the lamps were lit and young men bent their heads over books
or the toasting of muffins.

Thomas Cavendish leaned back in his chair, watched this one particular young man, shuffling papers together at the table. His name was Eustace Partridge.

There is something wrong, Thomas thought. The boy had been vague, tense, had lost his train of thought several times, made elementary mistakes in the translation. It had happened before, the previous week, but that
for the first time.

‘Is something troubling you?’

The boy stood up, startled as a young horse, flushed, sent Munro’s
Homeric Grammar
flying to the floor.

‘You seem rather unsettled.’

‘No. Thank you, sir. There’s nothing wrong, absolutely not. Of course. Thank you.’

He darted a glance across the table, apologetically, Thomas thought, as if to say, I am lying and you know it, and there’s nothing
to be done. I’m sorry.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Very well.’

He nodded his dismissal and Eustace made for the door.

‘The boy has’, his school High Master had written, ‘one of the finest minds it has ever been my fortune to encounter. He is in every way exceptional.’ So he had arrived in the college, garlanded, the Masterman scholar and set fair to sweep the undergraduate scholarship board. A runner,
an oarsman, and of alarming beauty, fair-haired, Grecian-featured.

Thomas went to the window and watched him go at a half-run across the court and under the archway. And suddenly, remembered another early evening standing looking out onto these buildings, the chapel tower, the court, the same horse-chestnut tree, set in the middle of the lawn. The first evening.

He had been surprised by the
size of the rooms he was put in, had paced up and down the sitting-room and touched the furniture reverently, stood facing the blazing fire, and then with his back to it.

The servant had brought a jug of hot water and a bowl, clean linen.

‘Dinner is at seven in Hall, sir, and if you would care for a glass of sherry now?’

He had examined the books all round the room. Plato. Lehr’s Aristarchus.
Plautus. Tulse’s Commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul. On another shelf, the complete novels of Sir Walter Scott.

Then, he had gone to stand at the window and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened it wide and leaned out, and the smell of the damp, dank November air, of river and earth and coal smuts and fog, had filled his nostrils and gone deep down not only into his lungs but into the deep
and permanent well of memory, so that over all the years that were to come, though there would be so many other evenings, in cold winter or high, drowsy summer, when the smell of Cambridge below and beyond and all round him, was quite different, it was this, exactly this, this autumnal mist and smoke, that became for him the one reliable trigger for nostalgia.

He was not a man who, on the whole,
yearned for his youth; he had often felt uneasy then, being young had not suited him in some essential way, he had felt ill at ease with it, as though he were wearing someone else’s suit of clothes. With the coming of middle age, he had relaxed and begun to feel settled in and with himself, and in a right relationship to the world.

Now, at fifty-four, standing at the open window of this other
set of college rooms and smelling the damp, he remembered again vividly but without any yearning how it had felt to be eighteen years old and up for the scholarship examination. And how, smelling that smell, and hearing the sweet, gentle sound of the chapel bell begin to ring across the dark deserted spaces, a passionate desire to belong here, settle here for life, had risen up in him. The emotion
had been so strong that it had taken him aback, for he had never been given to any kind of passionate feeling, to yearnings and ambitions.

‘I have to,’ he had said to himself, and gripped the ledge, ‘I have to. I
must
.’

And so he had. So that now, all those years afterwards, he was filled with a great, indulgent tenderness towards his younger self, and for the passion of his own longings.

From across the court that same sweet chiming of the bell. He took his gown from the hook behind the door, turned the lamp down and left the room.

Eustace Partridge set his books down on the table in a neat pile. Disarranged them. Sat down. Stood up again. Knew that he had to go out again, as he had been out every night for the past week, to walk anywhere, restlessly, aimlessly. To think, and
try not to think.

But, going to the door, he heard the chapel bell for Evensong, and realised that now he must wait, or else meet others on his way and be obliged to speak, and so he simply stood in the middle of the room, eyes closed, clenching his hands, willing the minutes away.

In the grate, the whitening embers shuffled and slipped down upon themselves with scarcely a glow at the core.
But he made no move to put on fresh coals and so restore a blaze. Only stood in the darkness, as the bell rang relentlessly on.

IT IS one of the handsomest houses in the old residential district of Calcutta, with a drive and gravelled paths that are swept and raked three times a day, lawns, flowerbeds and fountains, and a flight of steps up to the porch, lined with geraniums in pots.

On her bed under the mosquito net, in the middle of the afternoon, Kitty drifts pleasantly in and out of sleep and a half-dream, half-recollection
of the great snow-peaks of the Himalayas, glimpsed across the blue-shadowed valley, and it seems as if, in her dreams, she can smell, even taste, the coldness, and that the mountains are near, near, only a leap away. If she could simply take off, lift her skirts and fly. She has often stood like this, since she was a small girl, and dreamed of flying, longed and longed to fly, itched
with the frustration of feeling her own leaden clumsiness, of being bound in the confines of flesh and bone.

And, putting her hand up to her face, she can feel the air that blows across with snow on its breath, it is blissfully cold on her cheek.

But, coming to, half opening her eyes, sees that it is, after all, only the curtains, blowing a little in the slight breeze that comes in from the
garden – for Kitty does not close her shutters, and she keeps the window open.

It is the Cold Weather season now, to everyone’s relief, they are back from the Hills. But it is still hot enough, in the middle of the afternoon, and besides, rules never change, she is obliged to come to her room and lie down on her bed and sleep.

Try to sleep. And it is pleasant enough to lie in her trance, here,
and yet elsewhere.

Everyone else sleeps, Kitty thinks.

And yes, a corridor away, Lady Moorehead, fully dressed in coffee-coloured muslin with cream lace, sleeps nevertheless on her day-bed, sleeps peacefully, deeply, stilly and quite without dreaming, under the gently revolving fan. But her shutters are tightly closed, and the room is shadowy.

In a more modestly proportioned room at the side
of the house, as befits her station (though the Mooreheads are kindness itself, they treat her with great respect, offering friendliness, if not exactly friendship, she had never been made to feel at all inferior, although naturally it is quite understood between them that she is), not asleep, nor even lying down, but sitting quietly, pen poised over a letter she is writing, Miss Amelia Hartshorn
thinks of the Hills too, and with greater nostalgia and affection because she knows she is unlikely ever to see them again.