‘Bastard.’
‘Bitch,’ he replied. ‘Slag, whore, cow, slut – I think Roget’s on my side, here, Princess.’ He was lying with his head propped on one hand looking down at her.
‘The whole world’s on the man’s side.’
‘I know. Get reconciled, sweetheart.’ He stroked her hair back from her forehead. Such lover-like gestures. She watched his face as he smiled and played with her curls.
‘Don’t you ever find women attractive?’ she asked.
‘Are you asking if I find you attractive?’ He opened his dressing-gown and peered down at himself. For God’s sake! ‘Sorry – honest Peter says no. Why?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘Just idle curiosity, hmm?’ He bent his head and kissed her softly on the lips.
‘Don’t,’ she said faintly, heart starting to race. But he did it again, this time more slowly, just teetering on the extreme edge of what could be called brotherly. ‘Don’t play games with me. Please.’
‘Games?’ His lips were brushing hers. She could smell the coffee on his breath. Oh, God. ‘Am I confusing you?’ She jumped, remembering her words to Johnny. Andrew was smiling his malicious smile. ‘This isn’t making everything too complicated, I hope?’ She shoved his face away and sat bolt upright.
‘He told you!’ Her voice shook with rage. ‘I can’t believe he talked about me like that!’
‘Don’t be stupid. Of course your friends talk about you.’
‘What did he say? What – Oh, God. Tell me.’
‘He seemed to be under the impression that I’m deliberately enticing you to Oxford to wreck his chances. “No, no,” I said. “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s her devotion to Art, not me, that’s to blame. You’re being sacrificed on the altar of her vocation, Whitaker.” ’
‘That’s not true!’
‘I know it’s not,’ said Andrew. ‘The truth is, you’re shit scared of commitment. You don’t believe in being happy. Whether you have the right to go around systematically inflicting unhappiness on the rest of us is an open question, however.’
‘I don’t! I do believe . . . You . . .’ He laughed at her inarticulate anger.
‘Want to know what he thinks of you?’
She clutched him, anger forgotten. ‘Yes!’
He was smirking again. ‘Ask him.’
‘No. Tell me. Please.’ She shook him in exasperation. ‘Tell me, Andrew.’
‘Shan’t.’ He stretched languidly and looked up at her with a sly grin. ‘I’ll admit I did give him a piece of disinterested, friendly advice.’
‘That he’d be better off with you?’
‘Precisely – I’m brighter, better looking, and I’m not certifiable.’
‘And what did he say to that?’
Andrew laughed. ‘ “Pity you’ve got a dick.” ’
‘Well, only a very small one. Ow!’ She was too slow again.
Andrew got to his feet. ‘Go and talk to him, Mara.’
‘I’ll try,’ she muttered, knowing she would not dare. He patted her cheek and left. A moment later she heard him singing as the bath filled.
Trip no further pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
It was the last day of term. The weather was sullen with occasional spiteful bursts of rain. An elegiac mood settled over the City. By now the worst – and best – was known. The degree results had been posted on noticeboards in Palace Green days before. The anxious crowds had gone for that year. No more eyes scanning nervously through the lists, no more squeals of delight, no more ashen disbelief. Raindrops trickled down the glass, blurring name after name as they meandered down from First to Upper Second to Lower Second to Third. The wind blew across the empty Green.
Mara paused on the old bridge and looked down at the brown fast-flowing river. It was over a year since Hester had died. She had meant to mark the day out in some way, to sit and think about Hester and reflect on death, but it had slipped past without her realizing, just as the actual day had done a year before. She pictured herself in her room at Cambridge on that evening. She had probably been revising her sociolinguistics. Turning the pages of my notes while she was drowning. Mara could not keep the two events together in her mind. They seemed so unconnected.
The water swirled under the archway. ‘She won’t have suffered,’ people had said reassuringly. ‘It’s not an unpleasant way to die.’ Liars. Snorting water into your terrified lungs, clawing, sinking, smothering, eyes bulging – this is it, I’m drowning, I’m going to die. Oh, Hester, there must have been a dozen better ways to go. Why did you choose drowning?
She checked herself. She didn’t know that it was a choice. Perhaps Hester had been out swimming when a sudden squall hit the lake. Galilee was like that – winds whipping down the tunnel of hills and lashing the water up into a storm. The disciples in the boat. Master, carest thou not that we perish? Mara’s hands gripped the damp stone of the parapet. Why am I so scared of the thought that she killed herself? The fear that I am destined to do the same? After all, we’re cut from the same genetic cloth. A congenital propensity to despair. Oh, let it have been an accident. Oh, God, don’t let her have died alone, lost and without you at the last. That’s what I can’t bear. Tears began to roll down her cheeks.
Hester, I can’t believe you’re gone. I keep seeing you disappearing round a corner or going past in a car. Yes, I know what it is. It’s one of the stages of grief. I’ve read all about it, but I still have to stop myself from calling out and running after you. Maybe if we’d spent more time together I could believe in your death. Each day would drive it home; minutes without you like nails hammered into your coffin. Dead, dead, dead. But I keep forgetting that this absence is different from any other. I can’t hold on to it. Whenever I think of going home, I’ve already wondered ‘Will Hester be there?’ before I remember. We should have said goodbye. I can’t even remember when I last saw you. Was it this day, or that? It slipped from me. It was too ordinary.
Another sharp shower began. Mara walked back to college, the cold rain mingling with her tears.
The bells chimed three. Mara paused in her packing. The last note died away, and there was no other sound apart from the rain on the window. All her friends had gone weeks before. Her mother was due to arrive in about an hour to collect her. She would be late, of course. Mara knew of no one else with such a blithe innocence of the points of the compass. She felt a twinge of childhood resentment that her father was always too busy to drive anywhere for her. He never came to collect them from school trips. He never met their trains. It would have been nice, just once, to have him greet them at the door. ‘Daddy’s busy, darling.’ Daddy doesn’t care, you mean. Oh, leave it, she told herself. Surely you’re reconciled to his indifference by now? The room was almost bare. Bookshelves empty, bed stripped, hat-stand dismantled. Beside her was the pile of clothes ready to go into the trunk on top of the layer of books and files.
She picked up Aunt Judith’s white party dress with the rosebuds on it. Poor dress, you deserve a better owner. Mara had worn it to the end-of-term party, and although it had looked beautiful, an odour of awkwardness and failure now seemed to cling to it. She could see the crumples on the skirt where she had clutched it during all those badly executed farewells. The bow on the bodice was limp, too. She could still feel herself fingering it, back to the wall as the endless goodbye dances went on. Rupert had asked her to dance, gallant as ever. Johnny had spent the time fooling around with Maddy and May, treating the college to his Elvis impersonations and avoiding Mara completely. She folded the dress. Into the trunk with it. She crushed the net petticoat on top, hearing in her memory the late night madrigals on the river, voices from the boats echoing under the old bridge, the singers’ faces lit by the candles they were holding. The music had been so beautiful she had wept. Even the drunken rowdiness on the banks and bridge could not mar it.
All gone now, she
thought. Maddy and May had come crashing in and out of her room for the last time. May had been full of her unexpectedly good exam results – ‘take that, Jacks, you bastard’ – and Maddy had talked of nothing but her imminent trip to Florence with Cuchulain. She’d miss them.
Mara folded and packed more of Aunt Judith’s dresses. She wrapped her teapot carefully and put it in the trunk.
The rain still pattered on the window. She got to her feet and unhooked the mirror from the wall. You’ve seen a lot in your time, she told it as she wrapped it carefully in her cape to protect the gilt cherubs. For a second her face stared up at her before the black folds covered the glass. The final curtain coming down. She folded the grey dress which was exactly right for impressing a future mother-in-law. Rupert. Guilt had gnawed away at her, and when Rupert came to say goodbye, she couldn’t help blurting out an inadequate apology.
‘Look, I feel as though I’ve treated you really badly, and –’
‘No, no, of course you haven’t, Mara,’ he broke in. ‘If anything, I’m the one who behaved badly.’ Rupert could and would have the last apology.
She smiled up at him. ‘You’re too good for me, Rupert.’
‘Nonsense.’ He took her hand and she saw him hesitating. Oh, God, not another declaration, please. ‘You’re not going to change your mind, are you, Mara?’ She shook her head. ‘So it was Johnny all along.’
‘But we’re not – I mean, there’s nothing going on between us.’
‘Yes. He told me that.’ He was hesitating again. ‘Mara, I don’t think you realize how much –’ He caught himself back. ‘What am I saying? He’s capable of pleading his own cause.’ He waited to be prompted, but she couldn’t open her mouth. ‘Well, all the best with your painting.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We’re still friends, I hope?’ ‘I’ll never forget the sweet times we had together,’ cried Rupert.
‘Of course.’
‘You know, I had my life so beautifully organized till I met you, Mara.’
‘Well, I expect you can lick it into shape again.’
‘Maybe. I think I’ve changed, though.’ They lapsed into silence.
‘Your mother will be relieved,’ said Mara at last, for the pleasure of hearing him say ‘nonsense’ one last time.
‘Nonsense. My mother thinks you’re wonderful!’
‘Nonsense!’ she said back. He grinned.
‘Well, she’d have come round.’ He squeezed her hand.
‘Wish me well, Mara.’
‘Of course I wish you well.’ She felt tears in her eyes.
‘Off to a lifetime at the beck and call of “twelve thousand bloody parishioners” twenty-four hours a day.’ She smiled to hear her own words bouncing back. ‘Of course, if I had any sense, I’d do what Johnny’s doing and go in for industrial chaplaincy. No parish at all. No PCC, no Mothers’ Union, no church bazaar . . .’ She felt herself grow very still. Was he pleading Johnny’s cause again? He kissed her goodbye and left.
Mara piled the rest of her folded clothes swiftly in the trunk. Oh, why did you have to say all that, Rupert? She knew he had meant well. All her hopes about Johnny – pruned back so ruthlessly – had come springing up again. Maybe it would be different, she kept thinking, maybe it would work if he wasn’t a parish priest. The new shoots waited quivering when Johnny appeared at her door to say goodbye, but his casual manner soon blighted them. She was reduced to inarticulate muttering and they parted without her showing him her drawings or saying any of the things she had planned. Just as well, she thought. She imagined him having to say, ‘Look, I’m fond of you, sweetie, you know that, but . . .’ At least she was spared that. She felt herself starting to cry as she folded the Chinese silk dressing-gown, remembering Johnny’s hands sliding the heavy satin from her shoulders that drunken night. She blotted her tears on the cold fabric. Toughen up, Mara. There’s nothing special about unrequited love. It happens to everyone. Think of Rupert. She pictured him, poleaxed in orgasm on the hillside under the beech trees. The wild strawberries will be ripe now, with nobody there to pick them. She shut the trunk and sat on it. That’s that. Only the books to return now. On her desk was the pile which belonged to Dr Mowbray and which she had shamefully never taken back to him. She picked them up and set off through the empty college to Coverdale Hall.
‘I’m returning your books,’ she said when Dr Mowbray opened his door. ‘Sorry I’ve hung on to them for so long.’
He waved his hand as though nobody seriously expected books to make their way back to their owners in anything less than five years. ‘I hope they proved useful.’ She followed him into the flat and put the books on his desk. ‘Coffee?’ She glanced at her watch, conscious both of the time and of the fact that the last time he had offered her coffee she had refused very rudely.
‘Um . . . yes, please. I’m afraid it’ll have to be quick. My mother . . .’
‘Of course, of course.’ He disappeared and she heard him pottering in his kitchen. This room – it looks so different. In the gloomy summer afternoon it no longer looked like the quarters of an old seafarer. Her eyes skimmed over piles of papers and books. It all seemed shabby and sad without the golden touch of the lamplight. The wind had been wild and blustery that night months before. ‘Set sail, set sail,’ it had seemed to say, ‘the whole world’s before you.’ Now it blew across the City in a weary wash of rain. It’s all over. That was the sofa where Johnny had lounged. She turned away and tried to block out the pain. Her gaze fell on some old framed photographs on the opposite wall and she crossed to look at them. Coverdale Hall students down the ages. She studied one from the late twenties. Stiff young men with centre partings ranked on the lawn. The buildings of Coverdale behind them looked unchanged, and she could see the cathedral tower looming over the rooftops. Dr Mowbray came back into the room.
‘Admiring the rogues’ gallery?’ He rubbed his hands together briskly, and it occurred to her that he was the sort of man who had found women very difficult in his younger days. He chatted to her about the history of Coverdale Hall while the kettle boiled. Yes, he probably grew up in the all-male world of boarding school, Oxbridge and theological college. It must have come as a relief when he actually met women and realized they were essentially quite rational beings (pace Andrew Jacks).
‘Of course, there was a strict teetotal line in those days,’ he was saying. ‘Ah, the kettle.’ He vanished into the kitchen and came back a moment later with two steaming mugs. Suddenly he became the old sea captain again. She pictured him sloshing a tot of rum into the coffee as the kitchen pitched this way and that.
They drank and chatted about mysticism and Mara’s MA. Maybe I’ve mellowed in the last year, she thought, remembering how nastily she had cut him off on the previous occasion. He’s a nice man.
‘Well, give my regards to your parents,’ he said when she rose to leave. She nodded and smiled. He smiled back in a slightly startled way. She ran back down the stairs. Yes, definitely nervous of women. And rightly so – at any moment we could cast off our education and bay at the moon in primitive matriarchal blood rituals.
She made a detour and checked her pigeon-hole for the final time. One last overdue library book and a letter forwarded from her Cambridge college. She was puzzled by it. Foreign stamp. She peered at it as she climbed back up the stairs. Israel. Her heart jolted, and she ran to her room.
Someone in the sect. It had to be. She didn’t know anyone else in Israel. She had received letters before, rebuking her for her unbelief, preaching repentance to her. Would they never give up? She crumpled it and made as if to drop it in the bin. But what if it were about Hester? She smoothed the letter, turning it over and over with trembling fingers, studying the envelope as though it would reveal the truth to her. Then suddenly she tore it open. A folded airmail letter addressed to Mara. Hester’s handwriting on it. And a note. Mara fumbled with it.
Dear Mara, you won’t remember me, but we were at school together. Mara turned to
the bottom of the letter. From Beverley Henson. The girl with the healed leg. So she’d stayed in the sect and gone to Israel, too. Mara read on hurriedly.
I’m writing from the hostel where your sister was staying. I’m sending you a letter I found in her Bible. I haven’t read it. I know I should have sent it to you last summer, but I was afraid. They would have wanted me to hand it over to them if I’d told them about it. They took away the letter she wrote to your parents. I didn’t know what to do, so I hid it and waited till I could make my mind up. Now I know I’m leaving. I’ll post this to you as soon as I’m out. I just wanted to say sorry. Please don’t try to contact me. There’s nothing I can tell you.
Oh, God. Poor Beverley. Mara began to weep for the other girl’s suffering. At least she was out of it by now. She picked up her sister’s letter. What fresh misery was about to spill out? Her hand tore the envelope open. She was shaking as she read.
Dear Mara,
This is to wish you well for your Finals. I’ve written to Mum and Dad and asked them to take me home. I tried so hard to carry on believing but I’ve no strength any more. I know you thought I was mad, but please try to understand. It all seemed true to start with, and then later it just had to be true, otherwise I had committed a sin too terrible to bear. Letting Roger do those things and believing it was God’s will. But God does ask people to do strange things. You only have to read the prophets. Mara, that poor baby. It should never have been born, only they said it would be healed if I had the faith. Sometimes I wanted to kill myself, because I had let it die by not believing enough. Now I think it was meant to die anyway. Mara please pray for me if you feel you can. I’m so tired. I just want to come home. Sometimes I think there is still a God, only different from the one I tried to believe in. Bigger and cleaner and stronger, like the air. I hope he hasn’t abandoned me. I have no framework any more. Nowhere to put anything. Please come and see me when I’m home. You’re the only one who knows what it’s like to lose everything. Don’t hold all this against me. I never thought you were a child of disobedience like they said you were. I hope your exams go well.
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