Less Than Angels (3 page)

Deirdre looked round the room at the little groups of people and the realization came to her that although she was rather too tall and too thin and her clothes were not particularly smart, she was undoubtedly the best-looking woman in the room and certainly the youngest. This comforted her a little and almost gave her the courage to approach one of the groups, until she noticed that it contained Miss Lydgate, whom she wished to avoid. For Miss Lydgate’s brother Alaric had recently come to live next door to the Swans in their London suburb and they had not yet made his acquaintance, in spite of the efforts of Deirdre’s mother and aunt. Alaric Lydgate was apparently a retired Colonial administrator, and Deirdre, who had met him in the road once or twice, thought she had detected that ‘look’which being in Africa seemed to give to some people, a wild Ancient Mariner gleam in the eye which was usually a sign of some particularly persistent bee buzzing in the bonnet. She did not at all want him to engage her in conversation about Africa and she was afraid that if she made contact with Miss Lydgate it might lead to an introduction to her brother. So she had to go on standing there with her empty glass, praying that one of the young men might take pity on her.

At last Jean-Pierre le Rossignol moved away from his companions and came over to her.

“This is an interesting occasion, I think,’ he declared in his precise voice. ‘I have not been to such a party before,’

‘It isn’t like any other kind of party,’ said Deirdre rather desperately. ‘I suppose it is interesting if you can be detached about it,’

‘Oh, but one must be detached about so many things! Otherwise how could a Frenchman endure the English Sunday?*

‘It must be difficult. There’s very little to do on Sunday, really, unless you go to church.’

‘Exactly! And what a variety of churches to go to. There is so much choice -I am quite bewildered.’

‘Yes, I suppose there are a lot to choose from if you live right in London. Where I live there are only two.’

‘Last week I was at a Methodist Chapel—exquisite!’ Jean-Pierre cast his eyes up to heaven. ‘The week before at the Friends’ House. Next Sunday I have been recommended to try Mattins and Sermon at a fashionable church in Mayfair.’

Deirdre felt a little out of her depth. Churchgoing was a serious matter in her family, one either went to church or one didn’t; there was none of this light-hearted experimenting that Jean-Pierre seemed to indulge in.

‘I suppose,’ he went on, ‘you would say I was a Thomist.’He shrugged his shoulders and then fell to examining his nails, so much more exquisitely manicured than Deirdre’s were.

‘People seem to be going,’ she mumbled, thrown off her balance by not knowing what a Thomist was and not liking to ask.

‘I believe it is not correct to stay till the end,’ said Jean-Pierre, ‘ so I must be going. I like to do the correct thing where possible.’

People now began to leave as rapidly as they had arrived, and to pair off in a rather odd way. It was of course to be expected that Professor Mainwaring should escort Mrs. Foresight to her car and then drive away with her, but the man from the Colonial Office found himself walking down into the street with Father Gemini and being invited to ‘take pot-luck’ with Miss Clovis and Miss Lydgate. He protested feebly but it was in vain.

‘You can easily get a train to Dulwich-they are very frequent,’ said Miss Clovis firmly.

‘But it is
North
Dulwich I want to get to,’ he said weakly.

‘Oh, there isn’t such a place!’ said Miss Lydgate with rough good humour, leading him and Father Gemini away.

Deirdre found herself alone with Mark and Digby.

‘Time gemlemen, please!’ said Digby, lurching slightly against a table.

‘Did you enjoy the party?’ asked Deirdre politely.

‘Yes, it improved considerably towards the end,’ said Mark. ‘We found ourselves near the drink and took the liberty of helping ourselves to it.’

‘We are not used to drinking much,’ said Digby. ‘Do you think we seem the worse for it?’

‘I don’t know how you usually are,’ said Deirdre, disconcerted by their odd, stilted way of walking. Perhaps they
were
the worse for drink.

‘We are usually rather dim and hard-working,’ said Mark. ‘ You know,’ he added, turning to Digby, ‘I do feel we should have said a word to Dashwood.’

‘Dashwood? Oh, that man from the Colonial Office. Yes, I suppose we ought to keep in with him.’

‘Well, good-bye,’ said Deirdre shyly. ‘My bus goes from here.’

‘I suppose we could have taken her to have a meal somewhere,’ said Digby, looking after the moving bus.

‘Whatever for?’

‘It would have been a nice gesture.’

‘We might have taken Prof. Mainwaring out—that would have been even nicer. Anyway, I expect her mother would have supper waiting for her at home.’

‘Yes, probably. She seems quite a nice girl, but hardly …’

‘Not very interesting really.’

‘No.’

The two young men had stopped outside a cinema and were gazing at a poster which showed a young woman, with more obvious charms than Deirdre’s, reclining seductively in a transparent négligée across what seemed to be Niagara Falls.

‘I have that seminar paper to prepare,’ said Mark reluctantly. ‘Yes, of course,’ said Digby meekly. So they crossed the road and waited for the bus which would take them to their lodgings in Camden Town. But even on the bus they felt reluctant to return to work.

‘I know,’ said Digby, ‘let’s go and see Catherine. She’ll probably have some news of Tom.’

‘And she may be cooking something,’ said Mark practically. ‘It’s so depressing cooking for one person, or so one hears. Let’s go and make it worth her while to prepare a good meal.’

 Catherine
was still speculating about Professor Fairfax and Dr. Vere on her way home. She lived on the shabby side of Regent’s Park in a flat over a newsagent’s shop which she had taken cheaply at the end of the war. She sometimes felt, as she climbed the worn linoleum-covered stairs, that she was worthy of a more gracious setting, but then there are few of us who do not occasionally set a higher value on ourselves than Fate has done. Generally she was quite happy, for she was naturally of a sanguine disposition, and the flat, with its three rooms, kitchen and bathroom all self-contained, was so very ‘desirable’ in these days that she knew she was lucky to have it. It was furnished in a way that is sometimes described as ‘bohemian’ but which is just as often the result of not being able to buy quite enough furniture and carpets. Yet the general effect was comfortable, for Catherine was domesticated in a casual way and a good cook. Her small hands were often rough with housework and sometimes smelled of garlic. Tom used to tease her and say that it was a good thing the custom of hand-kissing was not much practised in England.

Catherine and Tom had met on a Channel boat, during a bad crossing from Dieppe to Newhaven. When they arrived in London it seemed that Tom had nowhere to go that night, so Catherine had offered to put him up in her spare room. After he had stayed a night or two it seemed pointless for him to look for lodgings when in a few days time he was going to stay with his parents in Shropshire, and when he returned to London he had come back to Catherine’s flat as naturally as if it had been his own home. They had become fond of each other, or perhaps used to each other; it was almost like being married except that there were no children, which Catherine felt she would have liked. The fact that she tended to regard most men, and Tom in particular, as children wasn’t quite die same thing. Catherine had always imagined that her husband would be a strong character who would rule her life, but Tom, at twenty-nine, was two years younger than she was and it was always she who made the decisions and even mended the fuses. It did not seem to occur to Tom that they might get married. Catherine often wondered whether anthropologists became so absorbed in studying the ways of strange societies that they forgot what was the usual thing in their own. Yet some of them, she had observed, were so highly respectable and conventional, that it seemed to work the other way too, as if they realized the importance of conforming to the ‘norm’, or whatever they would have called it in their jargon.

She went into her sitting-room and noticed that the tulips in the window were nearly out. They should be at their best by the time Tom came. Now they were in bud and looking almost like hard-boiled eggs, but with more yellow than white in them. She reached for her note-book and jotted down the little simile; these odd details often came in useful. There was a page in her typewriter, half typed, and she sat down, hoping to finish the story she was writing. But the inspiration seemed to have gone and the falsely happy ending she had planned seemed unbearably trite and removed from life. She imagined women under the drier at the hairdresser’s, turning the pages lazily and coming to
1  
‘The Rose Garden’ by Catherine Oliphant. They would read the first page, the one that had the drawing of a girl standing with a rose in her hand and a man, handsomer than any real man could possibly be, standing behind her with an anguished expression on his face: but would they turn to the back of the magazine, where the continuation and ending were to be found? Catherine wondered gloomily.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
she typed idly, but was it likely that her hero would have read Tennyson or quoted the line aloud like that? Not very, she thought, getting up and walking about the room.

Her glance came to rest on the little table where she kept drink, when she had any. There was half an inch of sherry in the decanter, no gin, and a sticky bottle of orange squash, half full. The table was dusty, too. Feeling more cheerful, she went into the kitchen and got a duster and mop. She loved housework when she felt in the mood for it and was often inspired with ideas for romantic fiction when shaking the mop out of the window or polishing a table.

The sitting-room window looked out on to a row of small shops with flats above them. Almost opposite was a restaurant run by Cypriots, where Catherine often went to have a meal or to buy cheap wine. She was just wondering whether she could afford to have a meal out this evening, when she saw Digby and Mark approaching. She waved her mop at them and hurried to let them in. She would have to see whether she had anything to give them to eat, for they came like trusting animals, expecting to be fed, and she could not disappoint them.

‘Does she do housework in the
evenings?’
said Mark as they came up to the house. ‘ She seemed to have a mop in her hand.’

‘Yes, it’s odd. People usually do that kind of thing in the mornings,’ said Digby almost disapprovingly. ‘I don’t know what my mother would say.’

‘Does it really worry you?’

‘Well, I shouldn’t like my wife to do housework in the evenings, would you?’

‘No, I suppose not, but women usually have their own way.’

By this time Catherine had opened the door and welcomed them in.

‘We’ve brought some beer,’ said Digby. ‘There’s been a party at Felix’s Folly, and it seemed a pity to stop drinking.’

His last words seemed a little out of character, Catherine thought. Digby and Mark were such sober, hard-working young men, though Mark was sometimes rather spiteful in his conversation.

‘Oh, was
that
where the two anthropologists were going?’ said Catherine. ‘ I saw them from a window when I was having tea. How nice that you were invited too.’

‘We weren’t exactly invited,’ said Digby. ‘We happened to be working there and Miss Clovis couldn’t very well leave us out. The party would have gone on around us, as it were.’

They were talking in the kitchen, where Catherine had started to prepare a risotto with whatever remains she could find. She was mincing some cold meat in her mincing machine, which was called ‘Beatrice’, a strangely gentle and gracious name for the fierce little iron contraption whose strong teeth so ruthlessly pounded up meat and gristle. It always reminded Catherine of an African god with its square head and little short arms, and it was not at all unlike some of the crudely carved images with evil expressions and aggressively pointed breasts which Tom had brought back from Africa. When he had gone away she had shut them all up in a cupboard, but now she supposed she must bring them out again or his feelings might be hurt.

Digby was laying the table in the sitting-room, pausing to read the sheet in Catherine’s typewriter. ‘Oh, my darling love,’ she sighed, laying her head on his shoulder, ‘it’s been so long.’ ‘I know—
dear as remembered kisses after death,
he said gently. ‘Did people
really
say things like that to each other? Digby wondered. His life did not seem to have allowed much time so far for what he called ‘amorous dalliance’. Either they said nothing, ‘submitted to his embraces’ he supposed Catherine might write, or pushed him away indignantly.

Catherine ran into the room and snatched the sheet out of the typewriter. ‘You mustn’t look,’ she cried. ‘It’s not your kind of story.’

‘ Will you say that to Tom when he comes back? After all, it hasn’t been so
very
long—less than two years. When do you expect him?’

‘Next week-at least that’s when the boat docks. He may go to see his mother first, it would be on the way.’

‘We’ve decided to fly when we go out to the field,’ said Mark, ‘then there won’t be any danger of our being expected to change for dinner. We consider it an outmoded custom, but I suppose Tom was brought up to it and finds it hard to shake off.’

‘Surely he wouldn’t take a dinner jacket into the field?’ asked Digby in a shocked tone.

‘No, of course not. Tom has broken away from his upbringing very successfully. He is even shabbier than you are,’ Catherine added, not meaning to be unkind.

‘I suppose you’d call him an impoverished young man of good family, wouldn’t you?’ said Mark. ‘I heard that the Mallows have quite a big place in Shropshire which is now falling into decay.’ There was a hint of satisfaction in his tone.

‘Yes, but it’s sad,’ said Catherine. ‘His brother manages the place and I believe his mother works very hard too.’