Angels and Men (46 page)

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.

Love,

Hester

Mara buried her face in her hands and wept again. She wept for herself, and for her parents who had never received Hester's letter. She wept for Hester who had suffered so much, and yet could still spare a thought for her sister's exams; for Hester who had been coming home, but had drowned instead. Why oh why did you let her die like that? How could you let that bastard Roger Messenger walk free? What kind of a God are you that you let this happen? She saw Hester sinking, abandoned by God, one pale hand flailing above the waves, then nothing. She was coming home and you let her drown. And then in the midst of her raging grief a sense of calm drew near and nearer. A shining figure walking steadily across the waves, an outstretched hand pulling her up. ‘Fear not, it is I.' She didn't die alone. A blast of joy hit Mara's soul and vanished. The gate of glory ajar for a fraction of a second, then slammed shut again. Angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. She looked in amazement around the empty room.

The bells chimed four. She scrambled to her feet and wiped away her tears. Her mother would be here any time now and Mara still hadn't taken her library books back. She snatched the carrier bag of old calf-bound volumes and ran down the stairs. Oh, Hester. At least I know now. It's like the sudden lifting of a life sentence. For my parents, too. Oh, quick. The sooner I've done this, the sooner I'll be able to tell them. Her hand was on the doorknob.

‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?' Nigel. He came leering towards her as she stood at the main door, and she was surprised by a surge of affection for him. ‘Off home, are we?' She nodded. ‘Well, you be good, darling. I'll miss you. There aren't enough good-looking women in this place.' He slipped an arm round her waist and she remembered all the times he had been kind to her in his loathsome way.

‘Look, thanks for . . . being nice to me, Nigel.'

He waggled his eyebrows at her as though her words were a polite euphemism for a shag in the broom cupboard. ‘I'll be nice to you any time you fancy. Bye-bye, gorgeous.' He planted a kiss on her lips before she could dodge away. ‘Give my love to the stud.' She flushed.

‘And to Andrew?'

‘Oh, hah, hah.' He turned to leave and on impulse she reached out a hand and nipped his retreating backside. He yelped in shock and she darted out of the door before he could catch her. ‘You want a bloody good seeing to, you do,' he bawled along the street as she ran off. The fishwife raised her mighty arm in a clenched-fist salute.

Mara watched through the persistent drizzle, her mind still ringing with amazement at Hester's letter. It was as though she had been snatched back from the sect at the last moment. She thought of Roger Messenger and of Leah. You lost. And one day, one day there'll be a judgement. You won't walk free in the end.

She increased her pace and decided to cut through the cathedral to the library on Palace Green. She passed under the archway and through the cathedral close. There seemed to be a lot of clergy prowling about. She entered the cloisters and passed a group of elderly women wearing plastic rainhoods. Bad weather for a day trip. She rounded a corner and saw that a couple of them had strayed ahead and were peering through the window into what had once been the monks' dormitory. It was a curious window made of old fragments of glass, with random colours, bits of angels and saints and scraps of Latin. Mara went to admire it for one last time.

‘Oh, look, and there's a gentleman in red as well,' said one of the women as Mara drew level. She grinned, thinking how odd the church must appear to outsiders. I wonder what's going on? she thought as she peered in. The room was crowded with clergy all talking and busy robing up. Their surplices were dyed green by the glass. No sound from inside reached her as she watched. It could have been a silent underwater scene. The rain pattered on the cloister roof overhead. Suddenly she saw Johnny. He seemed to be looking straight at her and she flinched back out of sight. Don't be stupid, she told herself. He can't see you. She inched back and looked through a red pane. Blood-red surplices. Johnny was laughing with another young man as they fixed their stoles cross-wise like Miss World sashes. Deacons. Of course – he was getting ordained on Sunday. It was a practice. They started lining up for the procession. Mara began to be aware of the two women again and their stream of uninformed chat.