Less Than Angels (13 page)

She took a glass of sherry to him. ‘There’s something to encourage you,’ she said. ‘How does it go?’

‘Not very well.’

‘I’m sorry. It seems like some dreadful elderly relative doesn’t it, your thesis, always writh us. Won’t it be lovely when it’s finished? We can say it’s dead—Called to a Higher Sphere, perhaps—and give it a splendid funeral.’

‘Catty, must you always make everything into a joke?’

‘No, I’m very naughty,’ she said seriously. ‘I do sympathize really, you know.’

Tom got up from the desk and began to walk about the room. ‘The worst of it is that I think I’ve lost my faith,’ he said.

Immediately there sprang into Catherine’s mind the picture—surely a sepia daguerrotype—of a high-collared, bewhiskered Victorian clergyman, his beliefs undermined by Darwin and the rationalists. But she tried to shut it away and said reassuringly, ‘I didn’t think you had any faith, at least not the kind one loses, so I shouldn’t worry if I were you.’

‘I mean my faith in anthropology,’ he said rather impatiently.

‘Oh,
that’
The words were out before she could stop them. ‘But what
is
faith in anthropology -I didn’t know it was the kind of thing people had.’

‘Well, perhaps not quite in the usual sense. But I just wonder sometimes what’s the use of it all. Who will benefit from my work, what exactly is the
point
of my researches? Are my people out there going to be any happier because I happen to have found ouc that they have a double descent system? Who will be any better off for my having discovered new facts about the importance of the mother’s brother?’ Tom stopped in his pacing and stood over Catherine almost accusingly.

She felt then the general uselessness of women if they cannot understand or reverence a man’s work, or even if they can.

‘You make me feel like something in Milton,’ she said defiandy. ‘Towering over me like that. It’s like—oh, what?  
Paradise Lost
, I suppose. Adam and Eve.’

‘You’ve never even
fried
to understand,’ he said in a detached tone, which was more hurtful than if he had sounded angry.

‘Oh, Tom,’ she protested. ‘You know I tried to read those books, but I couldn’t get through them. I suppose I was too stupid,’ she added on a surprised note. ‘But obviously it’s the right thing for
you.’

‘I’m not so sure any more. I sometimes feel I should have stayed at home and helped Giles and my mother to run the place. That would at least have been useful.’

They sat down on the divan together and Catherine put her arms around him, wondering what Victorian wives and mothers had done with their menfolk who had lost their faith. What had they said to them? Matthew Arnold, she thought idly, the last lines of
Dover Beach
coming into her mind.

‘
Ah
 
love
,
let us be true to one another
’
she said softly.

Tom looked down at her, a little startled. He had certainly been seeing a good deal of Deirdre lately but nothing had really come of it so far.

‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.

‘I was quoting. You probably remember how it goes on, something about the world having neither joy nor love, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where igporant armies clash by night
,’

‘Oh, I see,’ he said inadequately. ‘But I don’t think your Victorian poets are much help these days.’

‘That’s not a comfortable poem, though,’ she said impatiently. ‘It isn’t meant to be. People have so many wrong ideas about the Victorians.’

‘All right, then,’ he smiled, ‘tell me the right ones.’

‘Shall we go out and have a meal?’ Catherine suggested, feeling that the Victorian wives and mothers would surely have provided a good meal for their doubting men, if nothing else ‘The
bœuf à
la mode
won’t be ready for a few hours.’

‘Yes, a good idea. A lot of food and drink.’

It was a successful and pleasant meal, eaten at the little Cypriot restaurant in the street opposite. Catherine found herself remembering it a few evenings later, when she was coming home, walking slowly because her string bag was laden with exotic foods she had bought in Soho. She decided to go into the restaurant for a bottle of wine. It was early for an evening meal and the room was nearly empty except for some dark-haired women with gold teeth talking Greek, and a couple, deep in conversation, sitting at the table she and Tom usually had.

‘Good evening, Mrs. Katerina,’ said the old fat waiter. ‘Mr. Tom is here early tonight.’

‘Yes, isn’t he,’ said Catherine. Now that she had recognized Tom and Deirdre over in the corner, she felt almost calm and not really surprised. She had suspected that they did sometimes have meals together, and why shouldn’t they? She stood very still, waiting for her bottle of wine to be brought, noticing Tom’s hand on the checked table-cloth stained with other people’s meals, with Deirdre’s lying comfortingly on top of it.

He is telling her about his lost faith, Catherine thought, and she, poor child, is wondering what on earth she can say to him. How awful if she too is quoting
Dover Beach
—Tom will think all women are alike. But did girls of nineteen know Matthew Arnold—was he much read nowadays?

The waiter brought à bottle of the cheap red wine Catherine usually had. She took it absent-mindedly and offered him a ten-shilling note.

Deirdre’s hand still lay on Tom’s; their moussaka would be getting cold, Catherine thought, and then pulled herself up, horrified at the sardonic detachment with which she had been watching them. When her change was brought, she hurried away and back into the flat, where she put down her shopping and the wine and then ran out again with no very clear idea of where she was going. I’m not one of those
excellent
women, who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid, she thought, but how useful it woulu be if I were! She thought wistfully of herself like this. But surely there was, or ought to be, some cosy woman friend, some old school contemporary to whom she could run? Somebody who lived in a bed-sitting-room, who would bustle about making scrambled eggs and coffee on the gas-ring and then sit ready to receive confidences? Catherine thought regretfully of all the people she had meant to keep in touch with, and rather shamefacedly of others whom she had rejected as being dull. Somehow the women she met in connection with her work weren’t the cosy, coffee on the gas-ring type, and they were nearly all married anyway. She imagined that Deirdre’s mother and aunt would be comforting sort of people, but she could hardly go there. The best she could do was to turn her steps towards a vast eating-place where people were helping themselves to a curious variety of foods, for it was really too late for tea and too early for supper. And yet how many souls—she thought of them in this hymn-like phrase—seemed to be eating here at this unusual time.

Catherine got herself a tray of oddments, welsh rarebit and bread-and-butter and a little cake shaped like a boat, and sat down at a table with two women. She allowed herself to get carried gently along on the flow of their conversation, which was unceasing.

They evidently worked in the same office, for they began by discussing the boss, how he came in and expected something to be done by half past five, which was naturally impossible. Catherine imagined that bosses were always discussed like this; she was more interested in the shortcomings of somebody who had just left and whose filing system was impossible for anybody else to understand.

‘Just you guess what she’s filed it under,’ said one in a tone of triumphant anticipation.

‘I really can’t think,’ said the other, pandering to her friend.

‘M. M for Miscellaneous, I suppose! Did you ever hear anything so silly?’

‘I always believe in plenty of cross references. When
I
leave there won’t be the slightest difficulty in finding things,’

Ah, but there will, Catherine thought. Understanding somebody else’s filing system is just about as easy as really getting to know another human being. Just when you think you know everything about them, there’s the impossible happening, the M for Miscellaneous when you naturally assumed it would be under something else.

Now, she realized, they had gone on to another subject, an ecclesiastical matter, it seemed.

‘The minister’s quite a
young
man and doesn’t always dress like a clergyman.’ This came from the woman Catherine had christened black-beede; the other was leopard-hat.

‘Of course,’ black-beede went on, ‘the
other
church, that’s the Anglo-Catholic one, has an old man as vicar. It’s a pity the Church of England doesn’t get some of these young men, they all seem to be old, haven’t you noticed.’

‘Well, youth isn’t everything,’ saia leopard-hat. ‘The young ones are sometimes a bit awkward. And even the old ones must have been young once.’

‘Oh, yes, I’ll grant you that. They must have
been
young. What I want to know is, what happens to the ones who’ve just been ordained? Who gets
themV
Black-beede’s voice had risen indignantly.

An electric organ, which Catherine had not noticed before, now began to be played by a capable-looking woman in a tailored suit. The sounds which came out of it, purring, treacly and at the same time bouncy, mingled with the flat voices of black-beede and leopard-hat in a nightmarish way.

Catherine could bear it no longer and she seemed to have no coffee either. ‘Do we get coffee brought to us?’ she asked black-beede.

‘Oh, yes, they bring it round. But it won’t be
coffee
till seven o’clock,’

Catherine pondered over the strangeness of this for a moment. So it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. What was she going to do with the evening? Would Tom and Deirdre go to her flat? she wondered. It might seem to be the obvious place to go if they wanted to go on quiedy holding hands. Men appeared to be so unsubtle, but perhaps it was only by contrast with the tortuous delicacy of women, who smothered their men under a cloud of sentimental associations—
our
song,
our
poem,
our
restaurant—till at last they struggled to break free, like birds trapped under the heavy black meshes of the strawberry net, she thought, changing her metaphor. Yet she
had
regarded that little restaurant as being hers and Tom’s, and it only now occurred to her that it had happened to be near and cheap and that perhaps that was all there was to it.

A young man in a white coat was pouring some rich fragrant liquid into her cup. She accepted it with gratitude and resignation, for it was strong and bitter, almost medicinal, and as she drank she was conscious that it was doing her good. Tea is more healthy than alcohol and much cheaper, she reflected, and there must be thousands of people who know this.

‘A nice cup you get here,’ said black-beetle in a rather friendly tone.

‘Yes, it’s good and strong,’ said Catherine. ‘One needs that sometimes.’

‘Excuse me for asking,’ leopard-hat began, ‘but is there- have you—er—recently suffered a bereavement?’ she brought out in a rush.

‘I? Oh, no, not exactly,’ said Catherine, feeling rather flustered and unsure of herself.

‘It was your black dress and those jet ear-rings—excuse me for mentioning it,’

‘Oh, that’s quite all right. I easily might have done, after all,’

‘Yes, we must be prepared,’ said leopard-hat. ‘My friend here has just lost her mother,’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry .. ,’ Catherine looked at black-beetle in a kind of wonder and thought how strange it was that anybody who looked as old as she did should have had a mother recently living.

‘Now that mother’s gone I’ll be able to go to the Congregational church,’ said black-beetle confidingly. ‘ The minister’s quite a
young
man and doesn’t always dress like a clergyman. Of course the other church, the Anglo-Catholic one, has an
old
vicar… ,’

Catherine stood up rather abruptly. The nightmare, which the strong tea had temporarily dispelled, seemed to be coming back. She wondered how long they would sit there discussing the ages of clergymen, and whether they would ever discover who got the young ones just ordained.

‘Please excuse me,’ she said, ‘I have to go now-good night I’

Now that mother’s gone … it would have been a sad loss, certainly, but at least she could now go to the place of worship she preferred. If Tom went, she would be free too, but there wasn’t the comfortable certainty of the Congregational church and the young minister waiting for her. She imagined him standing at the door, shaking hands after the Sunday evening service, perhaps with a special word for those who had recently suffered a bereavement….

There was no sign of life when she looked up at the window of the flat, though she hardly knew whether she had expected to see any. In the sitting-room the desk was littered with pages of Tom’s bad typing. She took one up and read a sentence, ‘prior to the commencement of my second field trip …’ it began. She remembered suggesting some simplification of this phrase, but he had not heeded her. I suppose we love people for what they are and not for what we hope to make them, she thought, holding the page against her cheek. She wandered aimlessly about the room, watching the darkness come outside and wondering if Tom and Deirdre were still in the restaurant. They might well be, since it was still not very late, and with all that holding of hands they must be making very slow progress with their eating. Perhaps they would go for a walk in the park. Tom was not as a rule fond of Nature, but Catherine knew that in the early stages of a love affair it was not at all unusual for people to act out of character.

She now remembered that she had not been able to have any coffee with her supper, so she made some and then settled down at her typewriter at the table in the window. There was, as usual, a half-written page in it, stopped in the middle of a sentence, so she was able to go straight on, filling in the French background of the story she was writing, where two strangers, soon to become hero and heroine, found themselves with three hours to wait between trains in the middle of a hot afternoon and wrandered into the square of the little French town. They sat on a seat and looked at the pink and white oleanders, making conversation to the strains of a distant military band … Catherine became so absorbed that nearly two hours went by, until she heard a step on the stairs and found Tom standing, looking over her shoulder.