Angels and Men

by Catherine Fox

  ‘Wrong,’ she said. But her mind winced.

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘Conscientious objection.’

  ‘To what? To speaking? Nonsense.’ His self-assurance irritated her.

  ‘Language distorts things.’

  ‘That depends on your view of the function of language,’ he said. By now they were nearing the bridge. ‘If you assume that its primary purpose is to express truth, then I take your point. But it isn’t. Its job is communication, the establishing of relationships. If I say to you, “Lovely weather,” who cares what the weather is actually like? It’s not intended as a statement of fact. I’m trying to establish contact with you. Human beings are social creatures, you know.’

  She burned against him, too outraged for a moment to respond. But . . . but . . . stuttered her mind. Don’t preach sociolinguistics to me, dickbrain. For all his fine words about communication he was using language to express truth. His truth, the truth that he was a man and therefore right, and that she was only a woman and by definition speaking nonsense. This was her main objection to language: that it was a means of domination, a tool in the hands of the privileged. But suddenly her indignation eluded her. Perhaps they were both speaking different types of nonsense? Rupert enjoyed a good argument. She felt a fleeting impulse to hit him with the book she was holding, to do physically what he was doing verbally.

  Instead she said: ‘I’d rather be left alone.’ They stopped in the middle of the bridge. He looked as stunned as if she actually had hit him, and when he made no answer, her words began to sound brutal to her. She rested the heavy book on the parapet. A college crew went under the bridge. Well, it’s true, she thought.

  ‘I’m sure there are times when we’d all rather be left alone,’ he said in the end. ‘But that’s not an option for a Christian.’

  ‘I’m not a Christian,’ she said. In some alleyway of her mind she heard St Peter’s cock crowing. The cathedral clock struck one. She looked at Rupert. He was leaning back against the bridge looking up at the sky. At last he turned to her again.

  ‘Look, Mara . . .’ he began, then broke off. He passed his hand over his face, then seemed to study the ground intently, apparently at a loss for words. She watched him with interest, wondering what he could be about to say. ‘I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. I can’t remember being disliked on sight like this.’ He spoke, heedless of the fact that she might mock. ‘I can see that I’m offending you at every turn, and I don’t know what to do. If you’d really rather I left you alone, then I will.’

  In a flash of self-knowledge Mara realized that for some perverse reason she had been punishing him because she was attracted to his friend.

  How could she make amends? Quickly. He was about to execute his slight, formal bow and vanish.

  ‘I don’t want you to leave me alone,’ she blurted out. Her ungracious tone was so much at odds with her words that he stood irresolute. Either this package was a birthday present, he seemed to be thinking, or it was a letter bomb. A mistake at this point might cost him an arm.

  ‘Well, OK,’ he said cautiously. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind having a prick like me for a friend.’

  She scowled. ‘Look, I’m sorry I said that.’ Well, the tone left room for improvement, but it was an apology.

  He took another tentative step. ‘Well, I’m told I asked for it.’ This was magnanimous, and on impulse Mara put out her hand. For a moment he seemed not to understand, then he shook hands at arm’s length with a flashing smile, as though he were a lion-tamer fending her off with a chair. The thought brought a smile to her lips. His own smile relaxed into something more natural.

  ‘You know, if you did that more often, people wouldn’t be scared of you, Mara.’ Exactly, she thought.

  They began to walk slowly back towards the college. Mara started to feel that some of the responsibility for making conversation now fell to her. This was one of the uncomfortable implications of friendship. ‘The upsurge of British chess over the last few years has been astonishing.’ In the end she remembered the question she had almost asked Johnny.

  ‘What were you doing before you started your training for the ministry?’

  ‘I worked for a law firm in London.’

  Coverdale Hall was in sight now. A few more sentences would see them safely there.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I was a solicitor.’

  Not a barrister, then. I was close, though. She bent her head forwards over the book to hide her smile, but not quickly enough.

  ‘And what’s so funny about that?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She managed to look serious. ‘I’m sure you were very good at it.’ They were standing in front of the main entrance to Coverdale Hall. Rupert gave the girl an old-fashioned look. Then he said goodbye, and with his hint of a bow, disappeared into the building. Mara walked on without troubling to hide her amusement.

  When she arrived in Jesus College for lunch a few moments later, she found a parcel from her mother waiting for her. It sat beside her on the bench with the large book throughout the meal, and she wondered what it contained. It was not her birthday until May. At least there would be a letter, she hoped. Her mother was an entertaining correspondent.

  As soon as she was in her room she began pulling the paper apart. Although she had formed no idea at all of what might be in it, she was nevertheless surprised to find a strange black dress and a pair of old shoes. What was her mother up to now? There was a letter several pages long, which Mara settled down to read. As she read, she was aware of smiling and even murmuring comments out loud. It was as though her mother were in the room. She was one of the few people Mara loved without reservation. This did not blind her, however, and many of her smiles were at her mother’s continual, neat papering over of cracks. So large and so numerous were the cracks in the Johns family that Mara felt that by now the house must be made entirely of paper. Such well co-ordinated William Morris paper, of course, but one good stormy blast would blow it away altogether.

  The shoes and dress, she learnt, had belonged to Mara’s Great Aunt Daphne, her mother’s father’s sister. ‘Why Grandma kept them all these years is beyond me,’ wrote her mother. ‘I suppose the world is divided into two types of people: the snails and the squirrels. The snails carry their all with them, while the squirrels hoard. Grandma is the worst hoarder I’ve come across. You can’t imagine the amount of things she has managed to collect over the years . . .’

  Grandma, she discovered, had suffered another stroke and was no longer capable of looking after herself, having set fire to the kitchen curtains one morning by accident. She had been moved to a private nursing home. Her large house was to be sold, and Mara’s mother was now sorting through the things, trying to decide what to do with them all. It was typical of the family that Mara had been told nothing of this. ‘We didn’t want to worry you, darling. There was nothing you could have done. Besides, Grandma is very cheerful. She has decided that she is staying in a rather nice hotel, where she is taking a residential course in paper-flower making. They do craft activities in the afternoons, sometimes, and we think that’s where she has got the idea from. The matron is very nice . . .’ Grandma could transform the grimmest of realities into something cheerful. Her strokes had not changed her so much as distilled her character. In the end they would be left with quintessence of Grandma.

  The dress had probably only been worn a few times by Great Aunt Daphne when she was a debutante in the 1920s. ‘You can see from the label that it was made by one of the better London dressmakers. Georgette, and very good quality, of course. I thought you might enjoy wearing it, and I think it will fit you. Your wonderful gamine figure is perfect for those 1920s styles.’ Mara grinned at this deft little piece of papering. In other words, Well, you won’t have to bandage up your bosoms like they did in those days, dearie. Mara shook out the dress and held it to herself. Maybe it would fit. She kicked off her boots and slipped her feet into the bobbin-heeled
shoes. They felt all right. She did a few charleston steps, but then felt a pang for poor Aunt Daphne. Tall and scrawny, like me. ‘She was quite an accomplished Latin scholar,’ papered her mother. Aunt Daphne had never married, and had been unable to avoid a life of looking after her irascible donnish father. Keeping his home, tolerating his whims, editing his notes. No escape on those black georgette wings into a good marriage. Unless, thought Mara suddenly, she had chosen her lot with care. Maybe she had thought it better to tolerate the demands of a dwindling father than the growing calls on her time of a husband and children. Once he was dead, her life was her own. She could behave as she chose in that rambling house, with no one to please but herself. Daphne – turned into a laurel by her father to escape the attentions of a lustful Apollo, and living defiantly on to be a tough old shrub that nobody could budge. The dress seemed more appealing in this light.

  She put down the dress and took off the shoes. The next part of the letter described another cache of clothes discovered in a trunk in the attic. ‘They belonged to your Aunt Judith.’ This had been Mara’s mother’s older sister – something of a romantic figure, flying her aeroplane gallantly across the skies of the Home Counties until some terrible accident had cut her life short. ‘If you have a penchant for wearing clothes from the Fifties, here is your chance. I’m sure they will fit you, and it seems a shame to throw them out. I won’t give anything away, until you’ve seen it. Judith was rather like you.’ Mara paused for a moment. A vague sense of family history hung in the room, like the smell of an old chest opened after years of being undisturbed. She saw herself fleetingly as one of a long line of tall, thin, difficult women, and wondered how much of her behaviour was predetermined by them.

  The rest of the letter was chit-chat about the parish, and a request for Mara to phone home occasionally. ‘Daddy is out so much at the moment now he’s rural dean. There’s an interregnum at St Peter’s, meetings every Monday and Wednesday, and now on Friday evenings as well.’ This was another papered crack. If Mara phoned on those evenings, there would be no risk of having to talk to him. The letter ended with the hope that she would spend Christmas at home, and possibly go out with them to celebrate their twenty-second wedding anniversary. Mara grinned at this uncharacteristic error. Her mother had lost count, for this would have made her four months pregnant when she walked down the aisle. And her a bishop’s daughter! An image of the wedding came before her eyes: on one side the rows of unsmiling Welsh peasant faces, and on the other the large hats and charming politeness of her mother’s family. The occasion would have been dreadful enough without episcopal shot-guns.

  ‘And if you have a special friend you would like to invite too, then that would be lovely.’ Mara tutted despairingly. Hope springs eternal in a mother’s breast. After childhood parties mother would always ask: ‘What did you have to eat?’ Now it was: ‘Did you meet anyone nice?’ Mara supposed she would know her mother had finally abandoned hope when the wheel turned full circle and she asked about food again. They would talk companionably about salmon patties and asparagus tips long after men were forgotten. ‘And Daddy sends you his love,’ concluded the letter. Daddy did no such thing, of course, any more than she sent him hers, but her mother went on mediating these non-existent messages between the two of them in the immaculate paper house. She put the letter aside and turned to her books.

  The days passed and she continued to read early Quaker tracts until their thunderous prose began to ring in her ears as she tried to sleep at nights. It was a far cry from the carefully structured arguments of modern scholarship. They preferred the blunderbuss approach. Any available material was stuffed randomly into the tract and then discharged in the general direction of the enemy. Like a theological version of the marital row. And another thing! Your doctrine of the atonement sucks! So much for the gentle, pacific Quakers.

  George Fox strode through her mind barefoot, crying, Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield! James Nayler rode into Bristol in the rain, mounted on an ass as his followers cried thrice holy. Blasphemer! Flogged through the streets, branded, tongue bored through. His persecutors had turned him into a clearer symbol of Christ than his followers could ever have done. His fate troubled her. She felt he had been manipulated by a group of fanatics who were all driven by the wild forces let loose in times of eschatological fervour. A group of men as well as women, she noticed, although the books seemed to speak only of ‘hysterical women’. She read and reread the texts, trying to understand what had happened. And then another figure began to haunt her – Martha Simmonds, long dead and forgotten, except for the part she played in Nayler’s fall. Mara saw her at first as a victim of the patriarchal times, a strong, charismatic woman whom the Quakers felt they had to suppress. But gradually another image superseded this. Mara began to picture her with long hair like that girl in the marketplace, always ready to wash her master’s feet. Not a victim: a calculating, manipulative woman. A woman who must have all eyes on her, who must have all the glory, under the guise of giving the glory to God. Mara recognized the type even across the centuries.

  At last she reached the point where she could not force herself to read another word of Quakerly rant. She left her room to go and read the papers before lunch, but when she reached the common room it was already noisy and crowded. So she set off for Coverdale common room instead. A small voice inside her chanted, We know what you’re doing! as she hurried through the college. It’s just that it’s always more peaceful there, she said. No farting undergraduates.

  The room was empty. She leafed through the papers and found the Guardian. Then her eye fell on a book which said Coverdale Quotes on the cover. This should be interesting, she thought with a smile. It was full of several years’ worth of witty and unfortunate sayings. Most of them were clearly amusing only when you knew the people who said them. She turned to the most recent pages and hunted for names she knew. Hugh: I’m sorry, but I make no apology for this. Rupert: I know we all have to learn from one another, but I’m right. Mara laughed out loud. Suddenly her own name leapt off the page: If the good Lord hadn’t intended us to fornicate, why did he create girls like Mara Johns? Johnny. Her face burned. What was that supposed to mean? It seemed to be in response to another student telling him that if the good Lord had intended us to smoke, he would have given us chimneys on the top of our heads. Did he mean she was an easy lay? But before she could decide, she heard his laugh in the corridor. She put the book down and hid behind her paper, seething. A child’s voice carried across to her:

  ‘Read a story.’

  ‘Don’t pester him, Michael,’ came another voice. The mother.

  ‘I want a story,’ insisted the child.

  ‘OK. Ha’away in.’ Feet pattered to the door, then hesitated.

  ‘There’s a lady in there.’

  ‘Ssh. That’s not a lady,’ whispered Johnny. ‘That’s a woman.’

  Bastard. Mara stood up abruptly and threw the paper back on the table.

  He gave her a cheerful grin. ‘Are you off, pet? – Sorry! Mara.’

  She walked out, leaving him with the child still demanding a story.

  Later that afternoon Mara made her way to Maddy’s and May’s room. As she climbed the stairs she heard a laugh. Johnny was there. She paused, wondering whether to come back later. No. Sod him. I want to see my friends. She took another step and heard an unfamiliar female voice. It was speaking insistently as she approached the door. She entered the room. It was the girl from the marketplace. Too late to retreat. Maddy called her in as though her appearance was a welcome diversion.

  ‘Come in, come in. Let me introduce you to everyone. This is Johnny Whitaker,’ she said. ‘Only you know him already; although not, as we established earlier, in the biblical sense. Or do you? He hasn’t mentioned it. Perhaps he is too much the gentleman?’ Doubt showed on every feature. ‘We’ll have to rely on you for details, in that case.’

  While this banter went on Mara was aware of the strange girl. Was it her own
morbid curiosity that made her want to look at her, or did the girl have some drawing power? Their eyes met. Mutual assessment. Instant loathing.

  ‘And this is Joanna.’

  The girl said hello, but Mara crossed the room without replying, and sat on May’s desk.

  ‘And that was Mara,’ said Maddy. ‘Don’t take it personally. She’s visiting us from a different planet, where politeness is seen as a sign of weakness.’ Mara’s lips twitched at this description of herself, and then she caught sight of Johnny grinning too from where he was sitting on the other desk across the room. At once all amusement left her face and she stared at him coldly.

  ‘Well . . .’ began Maddy, but for once she was talked down.

  ‘The thing with theology,’ said Joanna, ‘is that it’s taught without faith.’ Mara felt a surge of contempt rising up inside her. ‘The lecturers don’t believe that the Bible is the Word of God.’ This conversation must have been going on before I arrived, Mara thought. The girl’s glance went darting and flickering from one to another. Her every gesture seemed designed to draw attention to herself. She continued earnestly: ‘When one of them says something which contradicts the Bible, I simply put down my pen, stop writing, and fold my arms.’

  Suddenly it became clear. The display was aimed solely at Johnny. Mara searched each face for reactions. Maddy seemed sullen. May, on the other hand, was hugely amused. It was she who broke the silence.

  ‘Why are you doing theology, then?’ Her face was perfectly serious, but Mara suspected she was attempting to draw the girl into further absurdities. The girl’s face took on the look of a hidden and inward smile, as if she were secretly with child by the Holy Ghost. Before she could answer, however, Johnny broke in.