Providence (3 page)

Kitty Maule, dressed in her best, although Maurice could not see her, would watch the handsome smiling figure mounting the steps to the platform, and try not to sigh as he surveyed the image on the screen before turning to his audience, his hands on his hips, his legs and buttocks braced as if for sexual activity. He was a beautiful man and everyone was faintly in love with him. Kitty herself had loved him for two years and had entertained secret hopes. But their brief affair had settled down into a strange comradely routine which puzzled her but which she accepted. She accepted his random telephone calls, too random for her taste, and his eventual reappearance at her dinner table, where he would talk about his work and eat her food appreciatively; and seeing him there, she too, at last, would eat.

Tonight was Friday, she would see him on Wednesday, and the following Monday he would come to dinner. She would have little chance of talking to him on Wednesday for he was always surrounded by eager questioners after his lecture, and indeed these occasions made the university so popular that the head of the Romance Languages Department, who was also the Dean, arranged small sherry parties which sometimes went on quite late. One these occasions the Friends of the University, who were also the wealthier ladies of the surrounding countryside, paid homage, their fine diamond rings glinting on hands weatherbeaten with gardening. She could hardly go up to him and ask him what time he would arrive at the flat, nor would he
bother to let her know, so she could only nurse her glass of sherry in a corner, watching him being charming to the Friends, and calculate when she could buy the meat and whether or not to prepare something that would only need reheating or whether to do something fresh on the night and therefore easier in terms of forward planning but more difficult in terms of realization.

From these preoccupations she was sometimes rescued by the jovial figure of Professor Sir Hamish Redmile, the Dean, two years past retirement but showing no signs of retiring, wearing a Vaughan Williams hat to indicate his status as an elder of the university tribe. He had earned his title by serving on a Royal Commission whose recommendations had never been heard of again. He was a tireless fund raiser and enjoyed these occasions, since he did not intend to leave the university until his great project – the New Building – was formally established. Sir Redmile, as the Roger Fry Professor called him, treated university life as an endless series of significant little social gatherings, at which contributions might eventually be raised. He appreciated Maurice Bishop not only for his scholarship, his presence, his popularity, and the fact that he had not yet defected to Oxford, but also for his background (‘impeccable’), his family home in Gloucestershire, his mother’s title, and Maurice’s private income. He also, in a lesser way, appreciated Kitty, who was doing research work for him and giving a useful number of seminars. She too, he was given to understand, had an income of her own, and indeed she wore such exquisite clothes that he supposed the income to be large, although it was not. ‘My dear Miss Maule,’ he would say in a noble and enveloping tone of voice, ‘were we not privileged this evening? To have the fabric of England brought to life in such a way! And,’ he raised a conspiratorial finger, ‘you and I are going to feel even more at home next year.

I hear our dear Maurice is planning a series on the cathedrals of France.’

Kitty knew about Maurice’s project. Even while she typed out his notes on the cathedrals of England, she knew that the cathedrals of France would follow. Indeed, Maurice had mentioned the idea at dinner one evening and had become more and more enthusiastic, getting his maps out of his briefcase and plotting his route on her kitchen table. He would take the car, he thought, and spend the whole of the Easter vacation driving from one site to another. Of course he could only concentrate on the major monuments: Laon, Rheims, Chartres, Bourges, Le Mans, Amiens, Rouen. ‘It will be a lot of work,’ said Kitty, ‘and it seems a pity to do only the big ones. Normandy is full of very pretty minor cathedrals. Coutances. Evreux.’ She had been there on holiday once and had spent long rainy days taking refuge in churches, whiling away the afternoon by reading her guide book in the dank and aromatic aisles, waiting until she could, with a good conscience, have her afternoon cup of chocolate in the nearby pâtisserie. ‘Troyes,’ mused Maurice. ‘Saint-Urbain. Very extraordinary church, that. Too florid for my taste, actually. I prefer the early and undecorated.’

Kitty preferred the later and the more exuberant. She liked evidence that some life was actually stirring in the stone and felt a sense of dread in the darker and more ancient of churches, where iron heels rang out pitilessly on flagstones and the candles burned more brightly in the gloom. She always lit one, for Marie-Thérèse, but she felt nothing, for she had no sense of Marie-Thérèse’s presence in her life and therefore did not believe that the dead could live eternally. She kept her scepticism to herself, paying respect to Maurice’s unquestioned beliefs, nourished on certainty, she thought, but none the worse for that. All the better, in fact.

Her main preoccupation was whether Maurice would ask her to go with him to France. She would be useful, she knew, could do all the boring things, while he got on with driving the car and getting from one place to another and being inspired by what he saw. French, after all, was her mother tongue; she could save him a lot of time and trouble. But how to suggest this? The suggestion must surely come from him, and he was still bent over his maps, his hand blindly reaching for the cup of coffee she had poured for him. It seemed as if he could take the cathedrals of France without any human company to dilute them, his passion for the absolute, for God and beauty, sustaining him where she herself would have counted the hours on her own and calculated the moment at which she might have crept out to the pâtisserie. She felt humbled by the comparison between them, as always; he was finer, larger, better than she was, his insights nobler, his whole fabric superior. With his background, I suppose, she thought vaguely, imagining spacious lawns and grey stone and summer afternoons and his impeccable mother receiving guests.

Although anyone who saw Maurice and Kitty together would have thought them a charming couple, she would have been remarked upon as the luckier of the two, lucky to attract such a man as Maurice. Both were tall and graceful, but there the comparison ended, with their silhouettes. Kitty was artfully put together, manufactured and tutored by her grandmother in the way of presenting herself advantageously, given the names of shoe designers and handbag makers and a special price because of the trade connections. She felt exhausted sometimes by the sheer effort of composing her appearance, and not always sure of the results. Was she perhaps too elaborate? Maurice was ineffably natural. He wore fine clothes, but carelessly, handmade shirts without a tie, cashmere pullovers instead of
jackets. She had first seen him drinking tea in the Senior Common Room at the university, a place where low armchairs housed many spreading bottoms and stomachs clad in grey flannel or beige tweed, where legs could be seen protruding in maroon socks and ginger suede shoes, where blouses and shirts gave off the dingy glare of nylon. Kitty, alarmed by her first entrance into this important place and dressed as her grandmother decreed a lady should be dressed, instinctively felt drawn to the tall figure wandering around with a cup in one hand and a saucer in the other, a signet ring just visible on the finger beneath the saucer, his brown hair – the hair of a formerly blond child – curling behind his ears and on the nape of his neck. That day he had worn a white shirt, with a red pullover, narrow grey trousers, and black leather mocassins. He had swung round and greeted her with a pleasant vague smile, the smile she had come to know so well, and because she was not yet afraid of him she had responded naturally and they became friends. They both lived in London and commuted to the university, which was strictly against the rules, and this created a further bond between them. Very occasionally he gave her a lift back to town and it was during one of these late evening drives that she had fallen in love with him.

That had been two years ago. Since that time, his smile had become no less pleasant and no less vague, for however much she pined for him she knew that she was not indispensable to him. And at bad moments, when she woke in the night, she knew that she was not even necessary. She congratulated herself on her ability to hide her feelings, unaware of the fact that the Roger Fry Professor’s wife had observed to her husband, with some satisfaction, ‘Well, she doesn’t appear to be getting anywhere with him. Trying too hard, if you ask me.’

On the evening with the maps she had moved quietly round him, only too happy to have him in her kitchen, and willing to forgo even the cathedrals of France if only she could be sure that he would come back to her. As he plotted his course, with his diary in one hand, she permitted herself to gaze at his fine head, since he could not see her doing so. The longish brown hair, the skin healthy with the country air of his weekends at home, the clear green eyes, and the delicate ivory ears filled her with longing and delight. There was so much that she wanted to ask him, but she knew that with Maurice questions never met with answers. He remained formal and pleasant, but he disarmed her easily. She wanted to know if he ever thought about her (but she supposed not, for he was always busy) and anyway, to ask that sort of question was unimaginable. But if he took her to France, that would be a sign, and moreover a sign that the world would see, a sign that her grandmother would welcome.

He straightened up, hands on hips. ‘You ought to come with me, Kitty,’ he said. She turned away from him, to hide her trembling hands. ‘Why not?’ she said, after a minute, and with no particular inflection in her voice. ‘My dear child,’ he laughed, stretching out a long arm and resting it on her shoulder. ‘You know perfectly well why not. Just think of your reputation.’

This was his way and it confused her. She did not know whether, in his world, it would have been truly scandalous to contemplate such a journey with a woman not merely of marriageable age but of marriageable intentions. He was, after all, such a very superior person and it was typical of him to remain untouched by the inconclusive character that sometimes attends such episodes. Her being an orphan, she supposed, made him feel more responsible for her reputation, and he did not know that if only she could be seen to be with him a
little more obviously, her reputation would be made for life.

Since that time he had continued to talk about his projected trip to France but had never again suggested that she should go with him.

And since that time their evenings together, and they were not very frequent, for during the term Maurice was greatly in demand, had filled her with a slight but persistent melancholy. From the moment at which she sat down to wait for him, to the moment some four hours later when she heard his car roar off into the dark and sleeping street, she was not certain why she could no longer respond with that unforced pleasure she had felt in the Senior Common Room on that first afternoon. She could still see him as she had seen him then, the fine vague smile, the polite manners that made him come forward to greet an obvious stranger, the glint of his ring beneath the saucer. It seemed to her, in retrospect, the best moment of her life: her recognition of him, her ease in welcoming whatever would come of it. Since then there had been intimacies, but he always left her afterwards, and she had had to try very hard to censor out of sight a feeling of dismay, almost of shame. For she never knew when she would see him again.

She had thought that he might guide her towards some conclusion, and because that conclusion had been so long delayed, she wondered if she herself might be too pressing and urgent in wanting it, pressed and urged by the need to justify herself in Louise’s eyes and to bring happiness to those grandparents whom she had so far disappointed. Although she knew that she was threatened – by their eventual death, which would leave her alone and undirected – she felt that she was at fault in failing to make some vital connection with Maurice’s desires and intentions, and when she thought this she was in despair, for how could she put right what her
very ignorance had put wrong? She tried to read his mind, to follow his thinking more closely. She saw there something inaccessible. The vague, pleasant, and somehow mysterious smile closed her out, while closing in something highly significant, something that she did not know, something foreign to her. Tell me about England, she thought. She was tormented by rumours of a broken engagement in his past, for who would break an engagement to Maurice, and might it not be repaired? Once, in desperation, she had surmounted all her scruples and mentioned this casually to her friend Pauline Bentley in the Romance Languages Department.

‘Didn’t you know?’ said Pauline in surprise, and proceeded to tell her the story. Maurice and this girl had known each other since childhood. Lucy something or other. They had always known they would get married. Apparently they were the most beautiful couple and it was to have been the wedding of the decade. But Lucy something or other had been a bit unstable, had had religious doubts, with none of Maurice’s certainties, and two months before they were due to get married, she had broken off the engagement. Some sort of breakdown, apparently. She had then announced that she was going out to Calcutta, to work with Mother Teresa. Which was where she was now. Maurice had taken it surprisingly well.

‘Merde, alors,’
was Kitty’s immediate and uncensored reaction to this and she was so ashamed that she felt herself blushing hotly, as if she had been discovered in some major indiscretion. Since that time she had tried to be as pure and as noble as Maurice himself, for she now understood his unwillingness to commit himself after so great a disappointment. The news about Lucy had made her feel better (knowing that she was behind bars, as it were) and a great deal worse, for how could she compete? She began to search herself for any seeds of
faith that could be cultivated, for she now saw that the key to Maurice was his belief in the divine will. Or the divine purpose, if that were the same thing. Something divinely sanctioned, anyway. In her own soul she found nothing, only the weariness, boredom, and fear that had afflicted her in those churches in Normandy, where the candles guttered and the obtrusive footsteps of the faithful sounded confidently behind her. She could not in all faith go to church but sometimes she picked up her mother’s Bible, for she believed that it contained the answers, if only she could ask a disinterested question. Which she could not. But one day she found a passage that seemed to have a message for her, purely for her.
‘Il m’a envoyé … pour proclamer à ceux de Sion qui pleurent, que la magnificence leur sera donnée au lieu de la cendre, l’huile de joie au lieu du deuil, un manteau de louange au lieu d’un esprit affligé.’
She was so strangely moved by this announcement that she sought it in the Authorized Version, as if doubting its authenticity in the language of her own family. And there it was, more splendid, more resonant, more authoritative, as if God’s native tongue were English: ‘… beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.’ She read no more, for everything else seemed irrelevant.