Less Than Angels (8 page)

Each article, and some were now yellowed with age, had its memories, and Esther turned the pages thoughtfully, sometimes half smiling at the persons and incidents they recalled.
Mit bestem Grüssen
, Hermann Obst… This offprint, in heavy German script, was one of the first she had ever received and its auther was dead. Poor Dr. Obst… once, many years ago, at some learned conference abroad, they had been walking together one evening after dinner and he had taken hold of her in a most suggestive way. Not to put too fine a point on it, he had made a pass at her. Miss Clovis smiled; she was older and more tolerant now, and wondered if she need have slapped his face with quite such outraged dignity. Why had she done it? Had she been thinking of her rights as a woman, the equal of man and not to be treated as his plaything, or had it been because she had not found Dr. Obst particularly attractive? Would she have slapped Felix Mainwaring’s face if it had been he who had made the pass? The question hung in the air, unanswered. Her German was rusty now, but she could make out the title—
Blutfreundschaft,
Blood brotherhood—and perhaps it was pathetically appropriate. She was back in the warm velvety darkness, hearing the soft splash of fountains and seeing dimly the broad sword-shaped leaves of some exotic plant with huge red flowers-‘It is canna, I sink’, in Dr. Obst’s gentle foreign voice-and then the ‘incident’. Madrid, 1928 or 1929, she couldn’t remember the exact year. Such a thing had not happened to her since and it would not again. She put the offprint back into its folder and turned to the next one.

‘With all good wishes from Helena Napier and Everard Bone’. That had been a most promising partnership which had never come to anything. Two gifted young people, who had worked together, but Helena Napier had a husband and Miss Clovis’s efforts in the cause of anthropology had been in vain. After a short estrangement the Napiers had been reunited and Helena had retired to the country. Everard had married a rather dull woman who was nevertheless a great help to him in his work; as a clergyman’s daughter she naturally got on very well with the missionaries they were meeting now that they were in Africa again.

‘Esther Clovis from Alaric S. Lydgate.’ The next offprint bore this curt and characteristic inscription. Esther could not like her friend Gertrude’s brother, especially when she thought of those trunks full of notes which he would not let anybody else make use of. Dog in the manger, she thought angrily,
most
unChristian. She was not herself a Christian, and she doubted whether Alaric was either, in spite of being the son and brother of missionaries, but it seemed a useful standard to judge people by, though perhaps it hardly applied in rationalist circles. Most unethical, was perhaps what she should have said. Her hand moved over to the telephone and she dialled Alaric’s number. The bell went on ringing but there was no answer. Surely that ineffectual Mrs. Skinner could at least answer the telephone? No wonder Gertrude was not particularly anxious to live in his house, but he should certainly have asked her to. Esther let the bell go on ringing a little longer and then slammed down the instrument in disgust. She had been feeling in just the mood for an angry little talk, perhaps as an antidote to the slightly disturbing memories aroused by Hermann Obst’s offprint. Frustrated, she stumped off into the library to see if she could disturb any of the readers.

She was disappointed to find only two people there, and at first sight they looked unpromising, a lanky dark young man in a shabby corduroy velvet jacket and a young girl, making what Esther scornfully described as ‘sheep’s eyes’ at him. Then she looked more closely and saw that the girl was Deirdre Swan, who lived next door to Alaric Lydgate, and the young man Tom Mallow, one of the most promising of the younger anthropologists, who had been working among the tribe which Alaric had administered for so many years.

‘Ah, Miss Swan and Mr. Mallow!’ she called out in her terrifying genial voice. ‘You are just the two people who should get together. I wonder if you know why?’

Because I love Tom? Deirdre thought, but obviously that couldn’t be the answer. The wonderful surprise of meeting him here now seemed to be enhanced and the whole thing made respectable by Miss Clovis’s apparent approval.

Tom looked puzzled and was unable to supply any answer even of a superficially gallant nature, so Miss Clovis triumphantly enlightened him.

‘Miss Swan lives next door to Alaric Lydgate,’ she said meaningly.

‘Oh, you know him, then?’ said Tom, turning to Deirdre.

‘Well, not really. I mean, he’s only just come to live next door.’

‘Oh, but you must have spoken over the garden fence,’ said Miss Clovis confidently. ‘Borrowing a lawn-mower and that kind of thing.’ She knew life in the suburbs even if only at secondhand, people were always talking over garden fences and borrowing things from each other.

‘He doesn’t seem to bother much about cutting his lawn,’ said Deirdre, feeling that they were getting off the point whatever it might be.

‘Do you know what he has hidden away in his attic?’ Miss Clovis asked.

‘His African girl friend?’ suggested Tom quickly, without thinking.

‘Oh, you naughty young man!’ Miss Clovis let out a bark of laughter. ‘No, I was of course referring to his eleven years work on
your tribe
. He has this silly idea about not letting anyone see his notes till he’s written his book, but I know he’ll never write it. He might have some material that would be useful to
you*

‘Well, he might,’ said Tom doubtfully. ‘ But these people are usually rather weak on social structure, you know. They haven’t had the proper grounding.’

‘You mean Professor Fairfax’s seminars,’ said Miss Clovis in what might have been a sarcastic tone. ‘Well, that may be so, but I do know Alaric was a glutton for land tenure. You must ask Miss Swan to make love to him for you,’ And with that rather horrifying suggestion she stumped out of the room in high good humour.

Deirdre turned to Tom with an expression of dismay on her face. ‘But he wouldn’t listen to anything
I
said,’ she protested..

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘Esther Clovis always has these little plots. And now,’ he looked at his watch, ‘I really must go.’

‘Good-bye, then.’ Deirdre could think of nothing to say that might detain him. There seemed no reason why they should ever meet again unless Tom wished it; perhaps she would have to do something about Alaric Lydgate after all.

Tom stood up and gathered his books together. In her eyes he had read the unspoken question, that was so often in women’s eyes, ‘When shall I see you again?’ His first impulse had been to ask ‘Are you any good at typing?’ for Catherine seemed to have so much work of her own to do at the moment, but his country upbringing had made him kind-hearted and fond of animals, and Deirdre was rather sweet, really, like a puppy or a colt. So what he did say was rather different.

‘Are you free on Saturday evening?’ he asked. ‘A friend of mine is giving a party—perhaps you’d like to come?’

Catherine
poured herself rather a large glass of gin. ‘I need some inspiration in the kitchen,’ she explained, ‘and cooks in literature are always drunken, aren’t they?’

Tom looked up from the desk where he sat at his typewriter. ‘Where did this gin come from?’ he asked. ‘We usually have beer and cider at these parties, don’t we? It might create a precedent if we offered gin.’

‘Yes, of course. This is only for private drinking, so that we shall be able to face our guests. I had a cheque for a story today, so I went out and cashed some of it and then I suddenly found myself in St. James’s Street, standing in front of one of those very grand wine merchants with no bottles in the window. I was quite astonished to find that they sold low ordinary things like gin. And the man was so nice—he gave me another little wine book.’

Catherine collected wine lists and booklets and was liable to read aloud from them to anybody who would listen.

Tom, feeling that such a reading might be imminent, turned quickly again to his work, but he could think of nothing to type, and so was forced to listen to her babbling away about something, port he supposed, ‘very old in wood and of great delicacy’.

‘It sounds like something out of the Psalms, doesn’t it,’ she said. ‘Long-suffering and of great goodness, is that what I mean? And when you’ve finished your thesis, Tom, we’ll have a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé.’

‘A bottle of
what?’
he asked, amused but exasperated, for Catherine was sometimes very trying and, for an intelligent woman, remarkably frivolous at times.

‘Oh, I can’t say it again! Anyway, it’s only twelve shillings a bottle. Now what shall I make to eat? They’re always hungry, unfortunately. I sometimes wish we moved in the kind of circles where people just nibble at salted almonds and potato crisps….’ Catherine was standing in the kitchen now, for it led out of the sitting-room and she was able to carry on a conversation while she worked. Or rather she talked while Tom sat at the desk, brooding over his typewriter, as if by looking at it long enough he could make it write words that would turn themselves into a thesis.

We’re just like an old married couple, Catherine thought, a little depressed, for she meant it in the worst sense, where dullness rather than cosiness seemed to be the keynote of the relationship. Not much rapture now, but it was nice to have him about the place again, the bathroom all untidy and pages of typescript lying on the floor in the sitting-room.

‘I can only make a really
smooth
sauce when I’m a little drunk,’ she called out gaily. ‘I can stir it more like a madman then, less inhibited.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought you were ever that,’ said Tom rather dryly, giving up his attempt to work and coming into the kitchen. He stood behind her and leaned his cheek against hers. She seemed very small because she was wearing flat shoes, slopping about in espadrilles like an old Frenchwoman—so bad for the feet, she had often written articles on this subject for her magazines. Even when she was dressed up there was usually some detail of her appearance that was not quite right, but although she was often conscious of this it did not disturb her unduly. She was too much aware of herself as a personality to make much effort to change, and she had become so used to writing about such things that she could have summed herself up very quickly in her bright, magazins style-‘red skirt and black top (could be velvet), long jet car-rings
(not
if you’re five feet two or under), and (oh dear I) those shabby blue espadrilles bought in the market in Perigueux on a fine June morning,’

‘I suppose I’ll do for the party except for my feet,’ she said, ‘What’s wrong with your feet?’

‘Well, I ought to wear high-heeled shoes and stockings,’

‘Those black dangling ear-rings,’ said Tom doubtfully, ‘will you be wearing those?’

‘Why not? Don’t you like them?’

‘They seem so very black.’

‘Of course I And men don’t always like women in black, do they? Does it foreshadow death, or are they afraid that it has some depressing significance, like Masha in
The Seagull
,
in mourning for her life? Or Thurber,’ Catherine laughed, ‘the unfolding of some dreary tale about a past love affair that went wrong that makes a man want to reach for his hat?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Tom, frowning. He sat down on the kitchen table. Catherine had told him once that somebody she loved had been killed in the war, and he was sensitive to other people’s unhappiness, especially when they made light of it. Then a memory of his grandmother, cutting grapes in the conservatory at home, came to him. There had been a feeling of oppression in the house—it must have been just after his grandfather’s death. ‘ Didn’t people wear jet for mourning,’ he said, ‘I seem to remember my grandmother …’

‘So I remind you of your grandmother.’ said Catherine lightly. ‘I wonder what the psychoanalysts would make of that?’

‘It was just the feeling of them, so heavy and black-looking and when you touch them, so light.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought she’d wear jet in those days. It could only have been about twenty-five years ago.’

‘Ah, but she was old, you know, and it was in the country,’

‘
Yes, of course.’ Tom’s childhood in the house in Shrop-

shire with his brother and sister had always seemed so enviable to Catherine who had lost both her parents when young and been brought up by an aunt who was now dead. ‘We aren’t getting on very fast with your welcome-home party,’ she said, disengaging herself from his arms.

‘I wish we weren’t having it now.’

‘Oh, you’ll enjoy it once it gets going.’

‘By the way, I asked a little girl anthropologist to come along, her name’s Deirdre. I found her sitting all alone.’

‘Good. What pretty names your girl friends have,’ said Catherine, busily grating cheese. ‘Did you see Elaine when you were at home?’

‘No, she was away.’

‘Had she taken the dogs with her?’

‘I don’t know—I shouldn’t think so. I suppose one of her sisters could look after them.’

‘But are the sisters as fond of them? And think of the dogs, too. I always imagine them as being so
very
devoted to their mistress, and they might pine. Are they loose-limbed bounding dogs, or heavy solid ones with broad backs, the kind you see with money boxes strapped on to them, collecting for charity?’

‘Catty, I really don’t know and I
don’t care!’

‘All right, go and see what the room looks like, will you? Tidy away all bits of your thesis, please.’

The room looked quite tidy to Tom. He pushed Catherine’s work-basket under one of the arm-chairs, emptied an ash-tray into the fireplace and straightened cushions as he had seen women do. Catherine hurried in and out with plates of food and bottles and glasses. Then the bell rang, so she ran to her bedroom where she hid the bottle of gin behind her dressing-table. She sat down in front of the looking-glass, splashed scent over herself in a haphazard way, moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, pushed up her short-cropped hair at the sides and straightened one of the jet ear-rings. But she forgot to change her espadrilles and it was this one flaw in her appearance which reassured Deirdre when she arrived some time later to find herself in a room full of what seemed to be complete strangers and Catherine coming forward to greet her in a most friendly and charming way.