‘The crossword,’ she said desperately.
‘I know that, for Christ’s sake.’ He waited. The whole room waited.
‘Is this going to happen every day?’
‘I was only . . .’ Mara thought there were tears in Sue’s eyes. Was no one going to do anything? She looked around. People were buried unconvincingly in their papers. Who the hell does he think he is? The hair on the back of her neck began to prickle. He’s no worse than you are, her conscience accused.
‘If you want to deface a paper, I suggest you confine yourself to one of the tabloids.’ With that, he crossed the room and sat down. Utter silence.
‘What a wanker,’ said Mara, and walked out of the room. The silence, broken only by her footsteps, lasted the full length of the corridor until she reached the stairs. Then came the sound of laughter. The red-head, followed after a moment by everyone else. In her mind Mara heard the satisfactory sound of an arrow whizzing with a thud into its target. Twang! She strode up to her room.
High up on the tower’s face the men were working. The City lay spread like a map beneath them, narrow streets with tiny people going back and forth about their business. Students streaming over the bridges, off to libraries and lectures, and the shoppers milling in the marketplace. The men toiled on, whistling in the wind and hearing the crooning pigeons that clustered in the stone crevices all around. The clock chimed three, and a pigeon took off, glided down, then landed on the builders’ sign halfway up the scaffolding. It sidled along the top and began preening itself. Allinson, Whitaker & Sons, said the letters.
Back down in the college Mara sat at her desk working. She heard the bells and leant back and stretched. From the other side of the wall she could hear classical music playing. She bared her teeth in a death’s head grin, picturing the polecat sitting at his desk facing her only feet away in the next room. The half-expected confrontation – face thrust in hers: Bitch! – had not occurred. Maybe he was biding his time. There had been something odd in people’s faces at lunchtime. She had the feeling that word had got round. That’s her – that’s the one who called whatsisname a wanker in the Junior Common Room. What is his name? she wondered now, but could not be bothered to go and look at his door to find out. Instead she reached for a pencil and her black book.
A face flowered in the centre of the page. A jester, perhaps, or the Joker from a pack of cards. She continued drawing. Around the face danced a circle of morris men. They always made her want to cry as a child, for all their bells and pig’s bladders and silly antics. Maybe it was the music. The trailing ribbons furled and unfurled until a wheel of dancers writhed around the Joker.
Her pencil continued to scratch, leaving behind another ring of tiny characters. They looked like figures from the margin of a medieval manuscript. Round the wheel they trudged with their buckets and ladders and tools. The cathedral builders. And outside them, so faint they could hardly be seen, were the seraphim. Each had six wings, burning, burning, and the wings of one touched the wings of the next and the whole wheel spun in fire around its focus.
Mara stared at what she had drawn. It depicted the ultimate silliness of the universe. This was how the world had seemed to her since she had turned her back on her faith. And yet she had a recurring sense that it all meant something, that it was worth working, building cathedrals, and that the whirling chaos was enclosed in the wings of the watchful seraphim. Ah, but that could be the last trick of all. At the very end your fingers would turn up the Joker again. But did it matter, even? Life might be everything, or it might be nothing at all.
There was an abrupt knock. Mara jumped. The Christian Union again? She sat motionless for a moment, tempted not to answer, but curiosity eventually drew her towards the door. She opened it, and there stood the red-head and the china doll.
‘Do you have any milk?’ asked the red-head. Was this a gambit, a sort of borrowing-a-cup-of-sugar from the new neighbours?
‘Yes,’ Mara said, watching them carefully.
‘She has milk,’ said the red-head in an undertone to her friend. She turned to Mara again. ‘And do you have any tea?’
Mara’s hand quivered to close the door. But no, she would just see what they were up to. ‘Yes,’ she answered, a hint of nastiness creeping into her voice.
The red-head turned to the other again and whispered, ‘She has tea as well!’
The china doll widened her blue eyes. ‘Tea!’ she breathed.
What were they playing at?
‘How very odd,’ said the red-head, ‘because we have cakes.’ She held up a box.
‘And biscuits,’ said the other, showing the packet.
‘I have a terrible sense of foreboding,’ continued the red-head. ‘It’s almost as if something is about to happen. Do you think this strange coincidence of tea things is significant?’ She turned to her friend. ‘I sense an impending tea party.’
They both turned to Mara and asked, ‘What do you think?’
Mara stood and considered. She could close the door in their faces, or open it and let them in. If she let them in, nothing would ever be the same again. Fear touched her. Shut the door! But a memory rose up and swallowed her mind; and there she was again, aged fourteen, turning the corner in the grounds of the clinic, the stitches still prickling in her slashed wrist. Sunlight was slanting down through the trees with smoke from the bonfire hanging in its shafts, and in that moment came the thought: I choose to live. This was another such moment. She opened the door.
‘Oh frabjous day!’ exclaimed the china doll, and the two of them burst in. Mara watched their gaze sweeping around looking for clues or demonstrations of her personality.
‘But you’ve done nothing to your room!’ protested the red-head. ‘No pictures, no plants, no nothing.’
Mara began to fill the kettle and make the tea, moving between them as they talked and snooped, as alien as a foreign maid.
‘She has nice cups, though,’ said the china doll.
‘Yes, I’ll admit she has nice cups.’
Mara glanced at the pretty blue and white china. Her mother had bought them for her. For a moment there was silence, and the three of them stood as though listening to the kettle.
‘You may be wondering who we are,’ said the red-head suddenly.
Mara raised an eyebrow. In fact, she had been wondering nothing of the sort, since their beings were fixed in her mind by the labels she had attached to them.
‘May was at school with you,’ said the red-head, indicating the other girl.
‘Only I was several years younger,’ said the china doll, ‘so you won’t remember me. And anyway, we moved house years ago when Papa was made vicar of St Botolph of the Holy Nails.’ Mara said nothing, and the girl went on: ‘You were brilliant at drawing. We used to have RE lessons in your form room after lunch on Fridays, and there were always rude pictures of the staff on the blackboard.’
With these words the girl leapt into life in Mara’s mind. She was no longer a doll, but another young woman with a memory, a past that included both of them. So the family had moved. Good. I must have forgotten that.
‘May Poppett,’ she said, and saw the girl’s face light up.
‘You remembered!’ How easy it was to please. ‘Do you still draw?’
Mara shook her head.
‘I’m Maddy,’ said the red-head. ‘Madeleine. Only don’t call me that, or I’m afraid I shall have to kill you.’
A pause followed. ‘I’m Mara Johns,’ she said at last, as though hauling the phrase up from her memory. She made the tea.
‘Yes, yes. We know that,’ said Maddy. ‘Mara Johns, the one who dared to call Andrew Jacks a rude word in the JCR. You’re famous.’
So that was his name. She wondered if he was listening through the wall at that very moment.
‘I thought I’d die,’ Maddy went on. ‘Laugh? I haven’t laughed so much since Grandma’s left tit got caught in the mangle. Where’s the tea, then? I’m gasping.’ She seized the pot and
began to pour. ‘Milk?’ Mara felt dazed but, collecting herself, went outside and along the corridor to the fridge. She stood for a moment with the bottle in her hand. Why did I let them in? I could just walk away now and leave them. But she knew she would not.
Maddy and May had opened the cakes and biscuits, and there was a Sunday school-party smell in the air. Mara poured milk into the tea and they began to eat and drink. In the silence Mara began to call back her empty moorland. I’m flying. The heather stretches beneath me.
‘Do you know what the three of us have in common?’ asked Maddy through a mouthful of cream slice. ‘How rude,’ she commented, smacking her lips. ‘Yum, yum. Well?’ She rounded on Mara. ‘What do we have in common?’ she repeated.
Nothing in this world, thought Mara. But they were both waiting for her answer.
‘X chromosomes?’
‘She doesn’t know,’ said Maddy. ‘We’re going to have to tell her.’
‘Our fathers are all clergymen,’ said May.
The wind shivered in the empty heather bells.
‘This place is literally riddled with the sons of the clergy,’ remarked Maddy, reaching for another cake.
‘Brightest and best of the sons of the clergy,’ sang May. ‘There’s a bishop’s son training for the ministry at Coverdale Hall. Rupert Anderson, he’s called. Keep nepotism in the family, as my father’s uncle used to say. He was a canon. Until the court case, of course.’
‘O Rupert the Fair, Rupert the Brave,’ said Maddy. ‘Have you met him yet? His father is May’s father’s bishop, and he’s quite, quite wonderful.’ Their conversation went on, drifting up to her as she flew by, as though they were picnicking on the edge of her dream with the radio turned up too loud. ‘It’s a shame Rupert’s such a sissy name. It makes me think of Wupert the Bear. He looks more like a William to me. You know – dependable rugger bugger type.’
‘Oh, definitely,’ agreed May. ‘He’s probably got an Oxford Blue for looking like a dependable rugger bugger type called William.’
‘ “Rupert”? Never! There was obviously a cock-up with his birth certificate,’ said Maddy.
‘And,’ said May, ‘he has a wonderful friend with dark eyes, whose name we haven’t discovered yet. One of those smouldering animal types.’
Mara’s attention came back with a jolt. John Whitaker. It had to be.
‘Yes. He probably has to keep a fire extinguisher strapped to his leg in case of spontaneous combustion,’ agreed Maddy.
‘Is that a fire extinguisher in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?’ said May. They were both giggling.
‘I wonder how old they are?’
Too old for you, thought Mara.
‘Rupert’s twenty-eight. I just happen to know that,’ said May. ‘I did some careful angling when his father last came to do a confirmation. “So how old’s your son then, Bishop?” I asked subtly. I expect his friend’s the same age.’
‘Younger. Twenty-six, I’d say. He looks a bit like a workman, though,’ said Maddy with a frown. ‘He has an ear-ring. Could you marry a man with an ear-ring?’
‘Shakespeare had an ear-ring,’ said May.
‘Shakespeare was a pederast,’ said Mara. A slight pause followed this contribution.
‘Which Rupert’s friend isn’t, we devoutly pray and hope,’ said May. ‘We admire him from afar.’
‘Admire, my arse,’ said Maddy. ‘We lust, my dear, we lust. Our room overlooks the street, so we can hang out of the window and watch the men come and go.’
‘Talking of Michelangelo,’ added May.
‘Ignore her. She’s an English student.’
Mara looked at Maddy. She’s as tall as I am, only she has coped with it differently, growing an extravagant personality to match.
‘And I am a music student,’ continued Maddy, and let forth a tremendous arpeggio.
There was an angry thump from the other side of the wall.
‘What was that?’ asked Maddy and May together.
‘The polecat,’ said Mara. They looked around in alarm, as though they believed she might well keep one in a box under her desk. ‘Next door,’ she said, pointing at the wall. ‘Whatsisname. The wanker.’ They stared at her in astonishment, then laughed long and hard. Mara covered her smile with her hands.
‘Shut up!’ snarled Maddy, breaking into an impersonation of him. ‘Some of us are trying to work, for Christ’s sake! Oh, howl, howl. The polecat. I think that’s wonderful.’
Their laughter died away as the cathedral bell began tolling for evensong.
‘Is that the time?’ asked Maddy. ‘We’ll be late for choir practice. Come along, Poppett.’
‘All right, Darling.’ Maddy caught Mara’s questioning look.
‘It’s my surname: Darling. You cannot conceive how I have suffered. Isn’t it bizarre that we should have ended up sharing a room? Rumour has it that the Principal arranges everyone into an amusing order. There’s a whole corridor of men called James and John. But can you really imagine the Principal doing anything amusing?’ She folded her hands piously. ‘Welcome to Jesus College. I trust –’
‘Oh, come on,’ said May, breaking into Maddy’s impersonation. They bundled out of the door.
‘Come for coffee before lunch tomorrow,’ said Maddy, sticking her head back into the room. ‘It’s very important. Bye.’
They rushed off along the corridor. Mara listened to their footsteps thundering down the stairs. Poppett and Darling. She sat at her desk neither reaching for her books, nor tidying away the remains of the tea. The bell called on and on, and outside the sky faded and streetlights flicked awake. From a hidden tree a robin sang. The tolling stopped and the clock chimed five, but she continued to sit, until darkness filled the room, wondering what she had done. Down on the riverbank the robin continued to sing. My friends, Maddy and May. She experimented with the sound. Maddy and May, friends of mine. It won’t last.
After dinner Mara roused herself, picked up a file and made her way to the college library. It was empty. Everyone else had better things to do with their evening. The university would be alive with music and talk. All those freshers’ events. She found the book she was looking for and tried to settle down to work. Her thoughts wandered to Maddy and May. Where would they be now? What mischief would they be making? For a moment she wondered whether she was missing out by refusing to attend student parties, but then she pictured the humiliation of trying and failing to fit in. It would be like Primary School all over again. Hanging around on the edges waiting to be picked. Grammar School had been marginally better. At least the other girls had only ignored her, not baited her.
It was ten o’clock by the time she was climbing the stairs back to her room. As she crossed the first landing, a door burst open and a group of young men staggered through, arms round one another’s shoulders, bellowing a song. Drunk, thought Mara. She shrank back to let them pass.
‘Get stuck into that,’ said one. Suddenly they were on to her. Her file was knocked from her grasp as they bundled her up against the wall. A hand grubbed around at her crotch. Beery breath in her face, a slobbering mouth. Then just as suddenly they released her, and stood jeering as she scrabbled on the floor for her notes and stumbled off.
She reached her room sick with shame and fear. Oh Jesus – what if they follow me? Keys, keys! A noise made her whirl round. The polecat emerged from the bathroom still doing up his flies. His cold eyes travelled over her.
‘What, sweeting, all amort?’
‘Fuck off.’ But her voice shook. He came and leant on the door frame. She caught a whiff of whisky. Not him too! He was watching as she fumbled at the lock.
‘Having difficulty putting it in?’ Her face burned. ‘Calm down, little one. Deep breath. Just let it slip in – there.’ Somehow she got the door open. ‘Relaxation,’ he drawled. ‘Always works for me.’ She shut out his loathsome face and stood in the room trembling and trying not to cry.
Why me? What is it about me? She hu
gged herself to stop the shaking. I’m not even attractive. I must smell like a victim. Men come sniffing round like dogs and piss on me. She longed for a bath to wash their foulness off her, but what if the polecat was still out there with his disgusting, sneering innuendoes and undone flies? She sat at her desk and tried to read. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She told herself she was safe, but it was a long time before she dared try to sleep.
CHAPTER 3
‘And how are you settling in, Mara?’ The last chime of eleven died away as Mara sat down.
‘All right,’ she said. Then, catching herself, added, ‘Thank you.’
‘Tell me what you’ve managed to read.’ It was all so low-key. ‘What you’ve managed to read’, as if having read anything at all would be admirable in the circumstances. What circumstances? She’s looking at me as though my entire family have just been tragically killed. Mara listed the books she had read, outlining her thoughts on what she had discovered.
‘Well, that sounds like a good beginning.’
There was a pause, and Mara began to feel that her tutor was allowing the silence, reading her in it, and reflecting on what she read. A strange sensation. Mara was used to observing other people’s growing discomfort in the face of her own silence. Dr Jane Roe. She can only be about ten years older than I am. Church historian.
‘I wonder why you want to study this subject?’ Mara made no reply. ‘I read your father’s article, by the way. What do you make of it?’
‘It’s very good,’ said Mara lamely. This was the problem. She agreed with his conclusions, and was now haunted by the fear that whatever she wrote people would simply say, ‘Well, of course, she would think that. She’s Morgan Johns’ daughter.’
She was relieved when her tutor went on: ‘Will you be examining the role of women in modern sects at all?’
‘No.’ Ah, just a little too quick, that answer. Dr Roe looked at her questioningly, but after a moment simply nodded. She had read that one, too.
Angels and Men Page 3