Angels and Men (4 page)

‘I can't believe it. They're lapping it up!' said Maddy. It's because we pose no threat, thought Mara.

‘Look! Here comes Rupert,' exclaimed May. Maddy craned her neck further out while Mara drew back.

‘And Johnny Whitaker,' said Maddy. ‘We discovered his name, by the way. Could you ever
truly
admire a man called Johnny?' The footsteps drew nearer. ‘Contraceptives spring unfortunately to mind at the mention of the name.'

‘Or fortunately,' whispered May. ‘If you see what I mean.'

‘Ah, yes. Take me, take me, Johnny! – talking of which, would you mind putting this on? A timely reminder in the heat of the moment.'

‘Ssh!' said May.

By now the men were passing beneath them. An impulse seized Mara. Infected by the puerile atmosphere, she put her fingers in her mouth and let out an ear-splitting whistle. Maddy and May leapt, then squealed with laughter. Both men stepped out into the street and looked up. Mara stood out of sight in the shadows.

‘Was that for him, or for me?' That was Johnny speaking. Mara's heart raced.

‘Stop playing to the gallery, Whitaker.' Rupert. Just a hint of polite Edinburgh in his accent. She had not noticed it earlier.

‘I'm not sure,' said Maddy. ‘Well, fish them out, boys, and let's have a look.'

‘Maddy!' May was shocked.

There was a laugh from below, then, ‘
Whitaker
!' Maddy and May shrieked, and the footsteps disappeared off down the street.

‘I thought for a minute he was going to!' giggled Maddy. ‘He was undoing his belt.'

‘Maddy, you're awful!' said May in delight.

In the distance they just caught Rupert's voice saying, ‘You're a disgrace, Whitaker.'

There was a long silence.

‘The upsurge of British chess,' said Maddy at last, ‘has been a-
ston
ishing.'

‘Over the last few years,' agreed May, and the two of them went into whoops. Mara felt herself starting to join in, sitting on the desk swinging her legs.

‘Just a minute,' said May, ‘you told us you couldn't whistle!' Mara said nothing, just sat where she was on the desk smiling.

‘Show me!' pleaded Maddy. ‘I've always wanted to be able to wolf-whistle.'

Mara was still refusing to explain some minutes later when there was a knock at the door. Maddy went across to open it, then retreated with a scream.

‘Get the knickers off the radiator! It's Johnny Whitaker.'

He came half in, and leant against the edge of the door, hand resting on the top. He looked from one to the other. Mara stopped her legs from swinging. The smile left her face. Then he shook his head and laughed.

‘What are you like?' he asked. What was the accent, Mara wondered, waiting for him to speak again. North-east?

Maddy and May looked at one another, baffled. ‘What are we
like
?' repeated Maddy. ‘Are you asking for a list of synonyms, or was that merely idiomatic?'

‘Give me a dictionary, and I'll tell you.'

Mara looked at him sharply. This drew his attention and she turned casually away again. You're only acting the ignoramus, she thought.

‘I could never marry a man who didn't know what an idiom was,' said Maddy. ‘Could you, May?'

‘I might have an affair with one,' said May after a moment's consideration.

‘Sorry, girls – can't help you. I'm celibate.'

Mara stared. You're joking. He had
legover
practically tattooed across his chest.

‘Oh, no!' said Maddy and May together.

‘Oh, yes.'

There was a pause. He's serious, thought Mara in amazement, flicking her eyes away as she sensed he was about to look at her.

‘Celibate? Why? Not permanently, surely?' asked May.

‘Not now you've met us,' said Maddy.

But he would only smile.

‘Isn't that rather like losing your driving licence and then being given a new Porsche?' persisted Maddy.

‘Well,' he said, ‘or a new JCB.' For an instant Maddy was open-mouthed in disbelief at being outdone by a man who didn't know what a synonym was. But the moment passed.

‘
Whitaker
!' she rapped out in fine Andersonian manner.

Johnny laughed and asked her name.

‘I'm Maddy, this is May, and this is Mara.'

‘Maddy and May. Mara I've already met.'

The other two rounded on Mara accusingly.

So what? said her expression.

‘We met before term started,' said Johnny. ‘Then I ran into her in the Divinity School this morning.'

Mara looked at her watch, and this – as she had hoped – prompted May to say, ‘Lunch.'

Maddy turned to Johnny. ‘So glad you could call,' she said graciously.

‘It's a pleasure to know you,' he replied in kind.

‘It's a pleasure to be known,' she said. ‘Even if not in the biblical sense.'

‘Though that, too, no doubt . . .' May let the sentence trail like a discarded silk stocking.

‘We may never know,' he said affably.

Mara found herself wondering why he allowed himself to be the target for this kind of witticism. Was he enjoying it? She picked up her books, and they all began to leave the room. ‘Come and see us again,' the others were saying. ‘And bring Rupert.' I'm not free any more, she thought, I am bound up in Maddy and May, and they will bring me in contact with others whether I like it or not.

Mara was out running a mile or so from the City, following the path as it wound through the woods. She was trying to regain her sense of perspective, her broad horizon. People were crowding too close and she could not focus on them with the cool detachment she usually enjoyed. Voices still clamoured in her mind, memories jostling as she ran, like a pocketful of pebbles. Rupert's face as she grabbed her books from him, and then Johnny saying, ‘Sorry, girls – I'm celibate.' Well, that solved that problem. Not that it had ever been a problem. She thrust the thought of him to one side.

Occasionally she met other runners coming the other way, but mostly she was alone, hearing only the sound of her feet through the fallen leaves, or on the path, her breath coming and going – three paces in, three paces out, in, out, in, out. A blackbird started up out of the undergrowth pinking angrily. On and on she ran to see where the path went.
Rejoicing as a strong man to run a race
. She laughed in the silent wood. A Bible verse for every occasion. I must know thousands.

She was in her stride now, running easily. The path now led her up a steep incline, and she ran on without slackening her speed. It hurts, she thought, as each breath became shorter. Why do I do this? ‘Pace yourselves, girls!' called the voice of her PE mistress. Cross country. Thirty girls setting off, winter-white legs, navy knife-pleated skirts. I was always first, she thought, panting. And I was always sick afterwards. Halfway. ‘Dewi, Dewi, wait for me!' That's where I learnt to run. Chasing after my cousin. Three-quarters. I'm slowing. He was four years older than me and I loved him fiercely. But he didn't want a six-year-old girl with him. His friends jeered. ‘You can play with us if you can keep up.' And off they went on their bikes. With me – pant, pant – running behind. A mile, two miles. Maybe three. Tears streaming down my face. Sometimes I never caught them. Sometimes they simply set off again. The top. She stumbled on.

The woods opened out into a field and there in the distance was the City with the cathedral standing guard over it. The sight of it made her stop. Her breath came in huge gasps. Even up here I can hear the bells. They chimed, remote and quiet in the distance. Three o'clock. A slight wind touched her burning face. Two crows were walking in the field and the sun shone off them as though their feathers were made of black glass. She tried to see Dewi's face. All she saw was his photograph. Where is he now? Not a month went past without her asking that, or dreaming that she had found him at last. She began to run again. His bones might lie in some shallow grave, for all she knew, with crows walking back and forth over his head. The family view was that he had probably gone to Australia. He had never written. But he wouldn't. Mara brought out another picture: Dewi on a sheep station. She had drawn it to comfort herself. But her memories were worn to threads. He was gone. Why can't I accept that? Why must there be an explanation for everything?

She crossed over a road and ran down to the old bridge across the river. When she reached the parapet, she stopped and looked over. A glassy cathedral hung upside down in the water, then fell into a million dancing shards as a boat passed. Slowly it gathered itself again. Walking now to catch her breath, she set off up the road to the college.

As she rounded the corner, she saw Dr Mowbray disappearing into Coverdale Hall and the sight jolted a missing memory into place. ‘Does your father still have his legendary violent temper?' How could she have forgotten that? It was so extraordinary. Did that mean he had not always been as he was now – cold, reserved? She heard his biting voice telling her, ‘Control your temper' when she was in some childish rage. But ‘he was always so passionate about everything'. This would require a lot of thought. She began walking and, as though it were an important form that must be filled in carefully, she set the idea to one side in some safe place or other and forgot it again.

CHAPTER 4

It was Saturday morning. Behind her open curtains Mara was already at her desk working. Another bad night. As she made herself some coffee, she felt as tired as if she had not slept at all. Her face stared at her from the kettle. The curved steel distorted her reflection. Staring eyes, pale hollowed-out face, black brows and hair. She moved her head until her reflection seemed to be all eyes. Her father's eyes. That was what everyone said: ‘She has her father's eyes.' But Mara had always wanted blue eyes, like Hester; to be pretty, like Hester. ‘They don't look very alike, for twins,' was the other thing people said. Mara had known how to interpret that from the age of about two and a half. She moved again and her face returned to normal. Just tired, with dark circles under the eyes.

All around the City leaves broke from the trees and fell. Crews moved on the river, and in the marketplace stalls went up one by one. Here and there curtains in college windows opened to reveal pale faces wincing in the sun, wishing they had not drunk so much the previous night. Across the street the Canon – back from matins – filled his kettle. Toast was cooking in the basements where the college had its kitchens, and the smell crept up in the autumn air until it began to steal into the room where Mara was working. Breakfast, she thought, and left her books.

As she climbed the stairs again some time later, she met the polecat going down. He gave her a look of glassy-eyed contempt, which she returned with a sneer. They said nothing as they passed one another. The wall between their rooms was thin, and from time to time she had heard him swearing articulately and profanely against his background of highbrow church music. He had not deigned to speak to her since that horrible drunken encounter in the corridor. For days she had feared some kind of repetition, or of running into the group of gropers again, but nothing had happened. Gradually her anxiety faded and she began to observe the polecat more closely. He was the first attractive man she had met who did not make it his business to charm the birds off the trees. She returned to her desk, but as she reached for her book, a thought crossed her mind. Her hand hovered over the page. His look – was it his natural expression, or was he imitating her? She ran the scene again mentally, and, at the moment of their passing one another, thought she saw a glint of amusement on his face.

She was still at her desk some two hours later when there came loud rapping on her door. She went and let Maddy and May in.

‘We've come to ask you if you want to come on a bar crawl with us tonight,' said Maddy. ‘We intend to persuade Wupert and St John the Divine to join us.' Here Maddy swooned on to Mara's bed.

‘They won't come,' said May, trying on Mara's hat and looking at herself in the mirror. It was clear from her tone that this was an old argument. ‘They'll have sermons to prepare, or something.' She waltzed over to the window.

‘Well, I, for one, rate my charms higher than the attractions of sermon writing,' said Maddy. ‘Just think how starved they are of female company.'

‘There are women in Coverdale Hall,' said May.

‘Yes, but what
sort
of women? Ask yourself. Have you ever met a woman training for the ministry who didn't look like a warden in a Nazi concentration camp? They all have moustaches and no dress sense. And they all have some unfortunate characteristic entirely of their own. My father had a deaconess once who used to clear her throat like this' – a demonstration – ‘like a seagull swallowing a marble. And they are
all
dull. Dull, dull, dull.'

‘So are nine-tenths of the men,' said May, as she tipped the hat forward over her eyes.

Mara felt a knot of cold hatred for Maddy, who at that moment turned to look at her. Maddy seemed to read the expression, for at once her tone became placating: ‘I know, but one expects it of men, somehow. We should make every allowance for women clergy, I suppose. They only have men as role models, the poor things. No wonder they're boring.'

Mara looked away, out of the window, but Maddy went on: ‘Oh dear – what dreadful things I say! It's because I think and speak simultaneously. Most people have a mental sieve to filter out the unspeakable from the speakable, but I was born without one. The obstetrician who delivered me said it was the worst case he'd ever known.'

Something in her tone made Mara turn back and look at her again. Maddy's face seemed as if it might at any moment tremble, and Mara realized in amazement that despite her crowing self-confidence, Maddy longed desperately for approval. With one cold look she had punctured Maddy as surely as if she had stabbed her with a needle. There was a silence, and in the end Mara tried a tentative smile. It was answered at once with a relieved grin. Maddy began talking again about her plans for the evening, although some of her usual boisterousness had gone.

‘And so you'll come, then, Mara?' asked Maddy.

Mara shook her head. At once she read Maddy's thought balloon:
She doesn't really like me
.

‘Please,' persisted Maddy, ‘you've got to come. Our names sound so good together – Maddy and Mara and May. Like something out of Enid Blyton.'

‘ “A Night on the Tiles with the Three Ms”,' suggested May.

‘ “The Three Ms and the Amazing Piss-up”,' said Maddy.

‘What about your surnames?' asked Mara, who could not be bothered to think of a title. ‘I don't fit in there.'

‘Ah, yes,' said May, ‘but what about your nickname?' She tossed the hat with a spinning motion on to the chest of drawers. Mara gave her a look.

‘Rupert and Johnny call you Mara Sweetie,' said Maddy.

They were watching for her reaction. She raised a disbelieving eyebrow. There could be few epithets she was less likely to attract.

‘I'm still not coming,' she said. At length she managed to convince them, and they left her to her work, with instructions that she must join them if she changed her mind.

After they had gone Mara read for another half-hour about the lives of various women fanatics of previous generations. Fragments of Maddy's and May's conversation kept intruding. ‘
Rupert and Johnny call you Mara Sweetie
.' She had to admit to a pathetic flutter at the thought, and repeated her vow that she would never descend to Maddy's and May's level. They were pursuing the two men blatantly and relentlessly. Mara frequently caught snatches of facetious banter between the four of them and, knowing she would be unable to join in, she had tried to remain aloof. On one occasion she walked into Maddy's and May's room before she realized the men were there too. Rupert rose to his feet instantly. Johnny remained sprawled in a chair until a hiss from Rupert appeared to rouse him. He got up with a grin.

‘Sorry. He's training me up to be middle class.'

‘It's not a class issue, Whitaker,' snapped Rupert. ‘It's a question of common courtesy.'

Mara withdrew at once.

‘Don't worry,' she heard May saying as she hurried back down the stairs. ‘She's always like that.' Mara paused to see if there would be a response.

‘Actually, she's really a serial killer,' Maddy's voice said. ‘But they've got it controlled by drugs. The college is helping rehabilitate her.' There was general laughter and Mara slipped away.

She sat and rattled her pencil against her desk edge, still thinking about Rupert and Johnny. What had drawn two such very different men to the same vocation at the same time? Why were they friends?

Maybe they needed one another. Certainly Rupert, left to his own devices, would soon become insufferably pompous. A perfect cleric, in fact. Whereas Johnny – she stopped, realizing she was getting dangerously close to daydreaming about the pair of them. Mara Sweetie, Mara Sweetie. She shook her head briskly and bent over her book again.

When the clock struck eleven, she picked up her hat and cloak and went out. She made her way down the cobbled street past the windows and doorways of Coverdale Hall, conscientiously not glancing in. When she reached the old bridge, she turned right and began to walk along the path beside the river, which led to the town centre, where she had some shopping to do. The wooded bank rose steeply, and from above the topmost branches the cathedral towers looked down. Leaves fell in ones and twos as she passed, and the air was tinged with the smell of smoke and decay.

Before long she came to the weir and stood watching the river folding over the ledge and falling into the white water below. Branches and tree trunks were caught here, carried downstream in some storm. Above the weir the water was calm, reflecting the arch of the bridge into a full circle in the river. You could almost walk on it, thought Mara. The sky and the clouds would lie under your feet as you went by. Jemima Wilkinson had claimed she could walk on water. Mara had just been reading about her. She had gathered a circle of devotees around her in the eighteenth century, and at some stage had promised to demonstrate her high calling by a miracle. One night they gathered at the lake's edge. ‘There she goes,' the disciples would cry, watching the pale figure crossing the lake. ‘Praises be to the Most High! This is the One of whom the Scriptures prophesied – the woman clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet!' But it had not been like that. Jemima had brought them to the water's edge and asked if they believed she had the power to walk on water. ‘Yes, yes!' they chorused. ‘In that case,' she replied, ‘your faith has no need of a demonstration.' Mara smiled.

A real fanatic would have plunged into the inky waters and drowned, believing to the last watery gasp that God would intervene and fulfil his promise. Such people were the Chosen Ones, raised up by God to perform mighty acts, to proclaim mysteries, to gather the one true Church before the close of the age. Reason and common sense could gain no purchase on their minds. Mara knew this from bitter experience, from hours of arguing with her sister and trying to persuade her to leave the sect. A waste of breath. No matter how strange the thing which God commanded, he was to be obeyed. Who could question his wisdom? It was unsearchable. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so much higher are my ways than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,' saith the Lord. In fact, the more bizarre the command, the better, for this proved that it was God speaking.

Maybe fanaticism was like being desperately in love. The sense of being special, chosen, the moving of mountains for the beloved. By now Mara had reached the steps which led up to the next bridge. She began to climb and, as if by word association, she found herself thinking of Johnny again. He would make a highly successful prophet, drawing off a group of bewitched women. She could picture them following him through the streets of the City, squeaking with excitement, like the rats scampering after the Pied Piper. Then she shook her head, realizing that she was trying in some way to protect herself by ridiculing him. She had been aware of this before, knowing that her expression whenever she happened to pass him in the street or in a corridor was one of aloof contempt. His expression was harder to analyse, and she was not entirely satisfied with it. It seemed bland and courteous, but sometimes she suspected that he had only just removed the smile from his face.

The marketplace was busy. She passed the stalls selling fruit and flowers, cheap clothing, toys and shoes. The far end was overshadowed by a church. Young people lounged around the monument that stood in the paved area, and pigeons dabbed this way and that in the sunshine, hoping for crusts.

Mara was watching idly when her attention was caught by the sight of a girl standing alone in the middle of the square. She had long fair hair partly covered by a headscarf and her head was bowed as though she were studying the ground in front of her. Then she looked up. Her lips began to move. From where she was standing Mara could not hear what she was saying, but she saw how the people passing glanced and paused, then walked on again. Some of the youths under the monument called out. To be speaking to no one – the girl must be unbalanced. There were looks of embarrassment on the faces of the passers-by. Perhaps someone would come and take her kindly by the arm and lead her off.

Mara was about to turn away when she noticed that the girl was holding a black book. A Bible. She was preaching. For an instant the marketplace stood still as if it were carved in crystal, then a sound of hissing filled Mara's head and she turned and ran. Off up another street she went, passing through the crowds of shoppers, back towards the college. As she climbed the steps to her room she remembered what she had gone out to buy. A hyacinth bulb. She could almost have wept.

No one could fault Mara's determination
. These words had appeared in one of her school reports; implying, of course, that practically everything else about her could be faulted. After lunch she had read doggedly about medieval mysticism until well into the evening, forgetting to go for tea as she strove to stifle the fears of the morning. By the time the clock was striking half-past seven she felt secure enough to put down her book.

She yawned and stretched, and tentatively let her mind return to the image of the girl in the marketplace. It had been like one of those occasions when a smell – flowering currant, creosote in the sunshine – rockets you straight back to childhood. The sight of a girl preaching in a marketplace had been like a box of snakes bursting open. All those feelings of suffocation, of loathing, of rage, had come writhing out of her memory, and for a moment she might have gone back three years and been standing once again in the Church of the Revelation, with the praying hands reaching to touch her and cast out the demons of pride and rebellion. Those hands. Clutching, pressing. She had never been able to bear being held and restrained. ‘We command the spirit of pride to come out of Mara in Jesus' name!' shouted a voice in her memory. And she had wept, trying desperately to believe it was true. Here at last was the reason for all her unhappiness. She could be exorcized and free. The hands pressed. The voices claimed the victory.