Less Than Angels Part 2

Washing a lettuce and cutting up the things to go with it was really almost as much trouble as cooking a hot meal, and she herself had never got over an old-fashioned dislike of eating raw green leaves. When her husband had been alive they had always had a hot meal in the evenings, winter and summer alike. He needed it after a day in the City. But now he was gone and Rhoda had been living with them for nearly ten years now and everyone said how nice it was for them both, to have each other, though of course she had the children too. Malcolm was a good solid young man, very much like his father, reliable and, although of course she never admitted it, a little dull. He did not seem to mind about the hot meal in the evenings. But Deirdre was different, clever and moody, rather like she herself had been at the same age, before marriage to a good dull man and life in a suburb had steadied her.

'Shall I lay the table?' Rhoda asked, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

'Oh, thank you, that would be a help. I've put the things out on the trolley.'

'You've forgotten side plates,' said Rhoda evenly, taking four from the plate-rack.

'Have I? Well, I hadn't really finished putting out the things. I just put out some to be getting on with. Then I thought it would be better to start washing the lettuce.'

Rhoda wheeled the trolley into the dining-room and began to lay the table. It irritated her to see Mabel in the kitchen, doing things so vaguely and inefficiently. Sometimes it was all she could do not to interfere, but they had had 'words' about this when Rhoda first came to live with the Swans and Rhoda was sensible enough to realize that it was Mabel's house and she must be allowed to do things as she liked. For, after all, they got on so well together. They both liked church work, bridge and listening to the wireless in the evenings. And then they looked so alike, both tall and dark with brown eyes; it was difficult to believe that Rhoda was the elder, for she was neater and better dressed, better preserved, one might almost have said. But then she had not been married and had two children. She had always lived very comfortably, keeping house for her parents, living alone for a short time after their deaths, and then coming to live here with Mabel and the children. It was a very satisfactory arrangement and Rhoda was not in the least envious of her sister's fuller life, for now that they were both in their fifties there seemed to be very little difference between them. She would perhaps have liked what she called 'the experience of marriagea vague phrase which seemed to cover all those aspects which one didn't talk about, but she would not have liked to have had it with poor Gregory Swan. She was still sometimes faintly interested in men, as she was now in Alaric Lydgate, but in what way she hardly knew. She certainly did not think of marriage any more.

Every evening there was the arrival of Malcolm and Deirdre to look forward to. After a day at work they were, or should have been, full of interesting little sc.r.a.ps of gossip and information about this and that, and if they sometimes seemed uncommunicative and withdrawn it was quite easy to draw them out with a little tactful questioning and perseverence.

Malcolm came in now as she was laying the table. He was a pleasant-looking young man of twenty-five with brownish hair and eyes and nothing particularly distinctive about him. He put his bowler hat and neat flat brief-case down on the hall table and went into the downstairs cloakroom to wash his hands.

'Had a good day?' Rhoda called out.

'Not too bad, thanks,' he replied, as always, and then went through to the kitchen to get his usual gla.s.s of beer.

Rhoda went into the hall and took up his evening paper which was lying neatly folded on top of his brief-case. There had been a nasty murder, or series of murders ; bodies of women had been discovered in a house in a not very nice part of London, and Rhoda, in common with a great many people in all walks of life, was anxious to read about the latest developments. It was dark in the hall, for the stained-gla.s.s windows on either side of the door did not let in much light, but she sat down and began to read avidly.

'Deirdre's rather late tonight,' said Mabel, pa.s.sing through to the dining-room with a dish of salad in her hand.

'Mm, yes,' murmured Rhoda, turning a page of the newspaper. ' They noticed a strong smell, it says, no wonder.'

'As we are just having salad, I think we had better start without her,' Mabel went on. '1 expect she'll be in soon,'

Deirdre was at that moment sitting on top of a bus which was moving very slowly along a suburban road. The drinks she had had seemed to have sharpened her perceptions and she looked about her in a detached way, noticing her surroundings as if she were a stranger visiting the neighbourhood for the first time. But she was not yet detached enough to appreciate any of the beauties of the scene. The houses seemed to her ugly and their well-kept gardens conventional and uninteresting. The wallflowers and tulips were the same every year and the lilacs and laburnums obviously could not grow in real country gardens. Even the magnolias were not the right kind, with shiny leaves and huge creamy flowers, which one saw growing against Georgian houses in country villages.

She got off the bus and hurried along her own road. Mr. Dulke who lived opposite, was cutting his hedge, but she pretended not to see him, walking along with her head bent, fearful of the facetious greeting or comment that might come. Towards the end of the road the houses became larger and there was the church, a modern red brick building with a vicarage to match. The Swans' house stood back from the road and the front garden was overgrown with trees and shrubs. Just inside the gate was a guelder rose bush; Deirdre had loved the greenish-white flower b.a.l.l.s when she was a child, but now the bush seemed to need pruning and the flowers, when they came, were full of green fly. Ah, my childhood, my innocent childhood, she thought, remembering a Tchekov play which she had recently seen. In the middle of the garden path lay a headless doll, no doubt left there by one of the Lovell children from next door. Deirdre pushed it aside with her foot.

'Is that you, dear?' Her mother's voice greeted her as she opened the front door.

'Yes. I hope you haven't waited supper?'

'No, we were just going to start.'

In the dining-room Rhoda and Malcolm were already sitting at the table contemplating their salads.

'I had salad for lunch,' said Deirdre.

'Oh, did you, dear? I hope you don't mind having it again.'

'Well, it's not madly exciting, is it.'

'You could have an egg,' her aunt suggested.

'I don't feel like an egg,' said Deirdre unhelpfully. 'I'd like something different.'

There was an expectant silence round the table.

'Some rice, all oily and saffron yellow, with aubergines and red peppers and lots of garlic,' went on Deirdre extravagantly.

'Oh, well, dear, it's no good wishing for that sort of thing Lere'said her mother with an air of relief.

'You look rather pink in the face, dear sister,' said Malcolm in a jocular tone. 'Almost as if you'd been drinking.'

'I've had three gla.s.ses of sherry,' said Deirdre rather defiantly. 'I was at the new Library place-Felix's Folly we call it-and there was a sort of party there.'

'I suppose it was for anthropologists,' said Rhoda, bringing out the word with difficulty.

'Yes, there were quite a lot there.'

'What about the one you rather like-was he there?' Mabel asked.

'The one I like?' said Deirdre coldly. 'I can't think who you can mean. I don't like any of them particularly.'

'I thought there was one who lent you some notes or something,' floundered Mrs. Swan. 'I'm sure you said something about it,'

'One of them may once have been a little more polite than the others,' said Deirdre, 'but I don't think I particularly liked him for it,'

'I expect the right one will come along one of these days,' said Rhoda with an aunt's confidence. She liked to think of her niece as being courted by suitable young men, though, from what she had heard of them, she rather doubted whether anthropologists could be so regarded. There was something disquieting about all this going out to Africa to study the natives, she felt. She would have preferred to see Deirdre married to one of Malcolm's friends and comfortably settled in a nice little house nearby.

'You must make us some of this rice you were talking about,' said Mabel quickly. 'I dare say it is delicious and if we weren't going out to bridge or seeing Father Tullivcr about anything it wouldn't really matter about the garlic, would it, Rhoda?' she turned to her sister, anxious to prevent her from making any more remarks about the right young man coming along. Spinsters didn't really know how to deal with young people, and even mothers said the wrong thing often enough.

'All right, I'll get the things in Soho one day,' said Deirdre quite graciously.

'Do you happen to know whether Mr. Lydgate's sister lives rent free with that Miss Clovis?' Rhoda asked.

'Why ever should I? You'd better ask Mr. Lydgate,' said Deirdre. 'Though somehow I can't imagine Miss Clovis letting anyone have anything for nothing.'

'It's a wonder she doesn't live with her brother,' mused Rhoda. 'Of course the house is smaller than this one, but there would certainly be room.'

The older woman speculated on this, while Malcolm finished his meal and left the room. He usually spent the evenings pottering about with his car or at the local club, where the young men of the neighbourhood gathered for mysterious manly purposes. Deirdre was reminded of the African men's a.s.sociations which she had read about in the course of her studies. But the object of many of these seemed to be to intimidate the women, whereas here women were allowed to belong to some sections of the club and might almost be considered as one of its amenities. Perhaps they intimidated the men. Certainly they often led them captive in marriage and Malcolm had recently become engaged to a girl he had met when playing tennis. Deirdre almost spoke her thoughts aloud, but then she realized that neither her mother nor her aunt would appreciate her points and would think she was trying to be 'cynical', which they thought a pity in a young woman of nineteen with a happy home and all her life before her.

When they had finished the meal Deirdre offered to help her mother with the washing-up.

'No, dear, don't you bother,' said Mabel. 'You've been working all day, Rhoda and I can manage it.'

'You always say that, Mabel,' Rhoda reminded her when they were alone together at the sink. ' What will she do when she has a home of her own?'

'I expect she'll leave everything until she has no more clean crockery left,' said Mabel, who sometimes felt as if she would like to do this herself.

'I can't settle down to listen to the wireless when I know there's washing-up to be done,' said Rhoda. 'It really worries me.'

'But there are worse things to worry about,' said her sister.

'Worse things?'

'Yes, things going on in the world, bigger things.'

Rhoda's face looked grave for a moment. She knew that there were worse things, but she also knew that her sister did not really worry about them. It was the same writh books and programmes on the wireless. There were the books they felt they ought to read and which they sometimes put down on their library lists; but they were secretly relieved when each time they went to get a book the librarian handed out yet another novel. For i by any chance she should produce that heavy work of politics or literary criticism it never happened to be the right time for reading it; it was not suitable for a week-end or a holiday or a hot summer or cold winter afternoon. And so it came about that, like many other well-meaning people, they worried not so much about the dreadful things themselves as about their own inability to worry about them.

When they had finished in the kitchen they took their seats by the wireless in the drawing-room, each with some sewing or knitting.

'There's a talk on the Third Programme,' said Rhoda, as if to make amends for worrying about such a trivial thing as unwashed dishes, 'something about the betrayal of freedom. It might be ... she stopped and began tuning the wireless set, for she had been going to say ' interesting ', but the word seemed inadequate. 'I think it's already started, but I expect we'll soon get the thread.'

They sat back in their chairs and a torrent of words rushed at them. A man seemed to be talking, at phenomenal speed, about tables and why they did not rise up into the air.

'I suppose this is the right programme,' said Rhoda doubtfully. ' He must be thirsty, talking so fast and for an hour, too. Still, I suppose he would have a gla.s.s of water by him.'

'It is a recording,' said Mabel, consulting the Radio Times. 'Perhaps they have put it on too fast.'

They listened for a little longer and then Mabel said tentatively, 'It would be a pity to miss the beginning of the play.'

Without a word her sister altered the tuning of the set. 'I dare say Malcolm and Deirdre might have understood some of it,' she said. ' We cannot hope to now.'

There was a certain tragic dignity in her utterance. What had freedom to do with tables? she wondered helplessly. And yet, they were not free to rise up into the air of their own accord, so there might be some connection there.

They were soon absorbed in the play, for it was about people like themselves, being an adaptation of a well-known stage success. After a while both the sisters realized diat they had heard it before, but neither could remember exactly how it ended. So life seemed to go round in a circle, with tables hurtling through the air.

Up in her room, which was over the drawing-room, Deirdre could hear the booming of the wireless voices, which prevented her from concentrating on the anthropological book she was trying to read. 'A ritual monster called mbusia' she read aloud in a serious tone. This was tough going and one could not afford to let one's attention wander for an instant; it was disconcerting the way it seemed to want to. She had often wondered why the atmosphere of her own room was so much less conducive to study than that of a library. Perhaps it was because of the bed, which was not a real divan and could not hope to look like anything but a bed, even when it was covered with a folk-weave spread and heaped with cushions. She had always been meaning to get Malcolm to saw off the ends for her, but he was generally too busy with his own odd jobs when he wasn't at the club. There were a few books in the room and the pictures reflected Deirdre's changing tastes from adolescence to young womanhood; wild duck flew in over an estuary, seemingly unconscious of the Braque still-life beside them. Most of the furniture had been painted turquoise blue when she was sixteen and had wanted an unusual colour scheme, but the curtains and carpet had become so faded that they would have gone with anything. Deirdre had lost interest in the room now and did not really care or notice how it looked, for somehow it had not fulfilled its promise. The work that was to have been done up here, the poems written, even the little informal parties that were to have been held, had not come to anything after all. As she sat at her desk in the window, her book open before her, Deirdre was conscious only of the booming of the wireless beneath her and Mr. Dulke watching her from his front garden opposite. Or if he was not actually watching her, he was there and she could hear the snip of his shears. Would he never go in to have his supper? Surely it was time for Mrs. Dulke to appear and summon him in? Deirdre looked up from her book and caught his eye. He waved up at her with an almost roguish gesture. He had known her since childhood and was one of the oldest residents in the road. He had lived in the same house for over forty years, as he never tired of telling people-he and Mrs. Dulke, their two sons and three daughters, all grown up and married now. He could remember when the district was little more than a village and there were fields opposite his house. Then more houses had been built and finally the church and the vicarage. There was something depressing, Deirdre felt, in a place that had grown up within living memory. She would have liked to live in the heart of London or deep in the country. There could be no dignity or beauty or even interesting squalor in a place that was no more and no less than a nine-penny bus-ride from Piccadilly Circus.

At last Mrs. Dulke appeared in the garden opposite, wearing a flowered smock, to summon her husband to his evening meal. They usually had some simple dish, scrambled eggs or macaroni cheese, Mrs. Dulke would explain to anyone who cared to listen; Edgar liked the big meal in the middle of the day, he couldn't take anything heavy at night.

Deirdre closed her book, marking the place carefully, for it was not the kind of book which one could pick up casually and remember exactly what point had been reached, and went downstairs to the drawing-room. The play had finished and Rhoda had just made a cup of tea. There was something rea.s.suring about the scene, her mother and aunt sewing and knitting in the pleasant chintzy room cluttered with photographs and ornaments, the silver tea-tray and the gay tartan tin of shortbread on the little oak table. Deirdre felt comforted without realizing that she had been in need of it.

A m.u.f.fled sound came from outside. It was like the cutting down of the trees in The Cherry Orchard, Deirdre thought, except that the sound wasn't quite sharp enough for an axe.

'That can't be Mrs. Skinner beating the rugs now? said Rhoda, 'She must be mad.'

'It might be Mr. Lydgate himself,' suggested her sister. 'In some ways, you know, he is rather strange.'

It must be his life in Africa, Rhoda thought later, as she stood in the dark uncurtained window of her room, looking down into the next door garden. She could just make out his shadowy figure in some long garment; if he had been a clergyman it could have been a ca.s.sock, but as he was not she was forced to the rather shocking conclusion that it must be a dressing-gown. He seemed to be moving about on the lawn, picking up the rugs which had been lying on the gra.s.s. When he had gone into the house she drew the curtains and put on the light, and began to get ready for her bath. She made her preparations slowly and efficiently, following a careful routine. She left the bathroom as she would wish to find it, folding her own towels and everyone else's in a special way that pleased her. It worried her a little that Malcolm was not yet in, for he would spoil the symmetrical arrangement of the towels and might splash water on the floor, in the way that men did when they had a bath. Still, if he was very late he might decide not to have one, there was always that.

Before going back to her own room, Rhoda went quietly downstairs to see if her sister had laid the breakfast satisfactorily. She saw that Mabel had made an effort, but there were one or two things missing, the marmalade spoon and the mats for the coffee; she put right these omissions and then returned quietly to her room.

What is she doing, creeping about like that? Mabel wondered, lying in bed listening to Rhoda's careful footsteps. Then she heard Malcolm's key in the door and relaxed herself for sleep. He too crept quietly in. No raucous voice or drunken shout disturbed the peace of the suburban road; the occasional screech of an owl made it seem as if one were in the country. The moon shone through the stained-gla.s.s window on the landing as Malcolm took off his shoes and started to creep upstairs.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Dierdre seemed to have been awakened by the sound of organ music and voices singing a hymn. At first she thought she must be still dreaming, but then she realized that it was probably some Festival or Day of Obligation and that Father Tulliver must be having an early morning Sung Ma.s.s. It gave her an uneasy feeling to have the church so near her bed and she felt almost guilty that others should be up and singing, such very high hymns too, the voices did not seem able to rcach the top notes. They were, of course, predominantly women's voices.

'I do hope the vicar will be having a good breakfast,' said Mabel Swan, as they sat having theirs. 'Something hot, I should imagine; even cereal would be hardly enough.'

'What funny things you hope for, mother,' said Malcolm looking up from his paper.

'Well, dear, he ought to have a good breakfast after taking such a very early service.'

'And I think I ought to have something hot too,' said Rhoda, coming in wearing her hat and coat.

'Why, have you been to church? I didn't know there v,'as anything today.' Mabel looked a little annoyed, for there was a certain amount of rivalry between the sisters about church-going, and Father Tulliver was so much higher than the former vicar that it was sometimes difficult to keep up with him. 'It wasn't a Day of Obligation, was it?' she asked rather self-consciously, for these new expressions did not come easily as yet.

'No, not of Obligation, but of Devotion,' said Rhoda, unable to help sounding a little smug.

'Well I never,' said Mabel, rather ruffled. 'I suppose you didn't have a cup of tea before you went out?'

'Well, hardly,' said Rhoda, but she too remembered the old Low Church days of their girlhood, when a tray of tea and even a plate of thin bread-and-b.u.t.ter was put out for the early church-goers. 'I will fry myself an egg,' she declared. She felt slightly resentful, as if her sister should have offered to fry it for her, but Mabel, piqued at what seemed to be Rhoda's deceit, sat firmly reading the Daily Graphic.

Malcolm and Deirdre finished their breakfast and got ready to go to their work. Malcolm always travelled to the City by Underground, but Deirdre preferred the bus ride although it was much slower. She sat in a kind of dream, an anthropological book open on her lap, realizing that it was a lovely morning but not thinking about anything in particular. She was conscious of little vague longings and a slight feeling of discontent, but these were not unusual. She wished she were cleverer and had a flat of her own and she would have liked to be in love. She remembered that she was going out to the theatre that evening with a friend of Malcolm's, who was rather fond of her in a dull sort of way, but the prospect did not fill her with any particular excitement. Bernard Springe was the kind of young man her mother and aunt regarded as 'suitable', which was enough to d.a.m.n him in Deirdre's eyes. Stiil, it might be a fitting occasion to wear her new dress, which had a strapless bodice.

When she arrived at the school of anthropology, or rather the corner of some other building which was all that the college authorities could allow to the study of this new and daring subject, she found two third-year students, Vanessa Eaves and Primrose Cutbush, preparing to go to a seminar. This barbarous ceremony, possibly a throwback to the days when Chrisdans were flung to the lions, took place every week.

Somebody prepared and read a paper on a given subjcct, after which everybody else took great pleasure in tearing it and its author to pieces and contributed their own views on various matters not always entirely relevant.

Deirdre listened with a certain amount of awe to the conversation of the two girls. Primrose, a tall fair Amazon, had strong political views, while Vanessa, who was dark and languorous, was generally in the throes of some desperate love affair. Today, it seemed, she had a hangover and was due to read a paper at the seminar.

'I feel exquisitely brittle,' she moaned, 'as if I were spun out of Venetian gla.s.s and the merest breath would shatter me,'

'If you really haven't finished your paper you can expect some rough handling from Fairfax,' said Primrose brusquely.

'I know-just think of the exquisite agony of it! The heavy sarcasm of that special voice he puts on-do you suppose he practises it? I wronder if he'll be wearing his rough tweedy suit-so manly, isn't it,'

'I can't think what you see in Professor Fairfax,' said Primrose sensibly. 'He isn't even good-looking,'

'I know, bless him,' murmured Vanessa in a fond silly tone, 'but ugly people can be so desperately attractive, I always think.'

Deirdre listened scornfully now. She had thought that only female undergraduates at Oxford talked in this affected way, but then she remembered that Vanessa lived in Kensington from wrhich anything might come. She settled herself down to work in the dark depressing room, which had many tattered books in shelves round the walls and some moth-eaten African masks, put there either to inspire the students in their work or because no museum really wanted them. There was even the skeleton of a small animal, a relic of the days when the room had been used for the study of Zoology.

As the morning went on, Deirdre was not alone in her work, for the room, as well as being a general dumping-ground for unwanted anthropological specimens, was also regarded as a kind of no-man's land, where former students of the department, who had nowhere else to go, might find a corner in which to write up their field-notes. There were one or two tables spread with papers and these were spasmodically occupied by these shabby hangers-on. They lived in the meaner districts of London or in impossibly remote suburbs on grants which were always miserably inadequate, their creative powers stifled by poverty and family troubles. It would need the pen of a Dostoievsky to do justice to their dreadful lives, but they were by no means inarticulate themselves, often gathering in this room or in a nearby pub to talk of their neuroses and the pyschological difficulties which prevented them from writing up their material. Some of them had been fortunate enough to win the love of devoted women-women who might one day become their wives, but who, if they were thrown aside, would accept their fate cheerfully and without bitterness. They had learned early in life what it is to bear love's burdens, listening patiently to their men's troubles and ever ready at their typewriters, should a ma.n.u.script or even a short article get to the stage of being written down.

On this particular morning one pale wretched-looking young man sat in a corner, murmuring a strange language into a kind of recording machine, while another banged furiously at a typewriter for a quarter of an hour, then tore out the sheet of paper, crumpled it up on the floor and hurried out of the room, his hand to his brow in a stricken gesture. n.o.body took any notice of Deirdre, but she found it hard to concentrate and was glad when lunch-time came. She was just gathering her books together when the door opened yet again and another young man came in. He was of about the age of the desperate ones-twenty-eight or nine-but Deirdre could not remember that she had ever seen him before. He was tall and dark, with thin aristocratic features and brilliant grey eyes-or this was how Deirdre always described him afterwards. Perhaps at the time she was conscious only of the shabby raincoat and the battered brief-case, and the fact that he stood over her rather disconcertingly, as if he expected a welcome.

'I suppose we don't know each other,' he said at last, smiling at her. 'I've been away nearly two years and feel like Rip Van Winkle,'

Deirdre was so astonished that he should take notice of her that she could think of nothing to say and at the best of times she was always too shy to have a quick reply ready. 'I think most people are at the seminar,' she ventured.

'Of course-the Friday seminar I One might just as well come back on the Judgment Day and expect to find things normal and I believe one would. I'm Tom Mallow, by the way,' He began walking about the room, taking books out of the shelves and making derogatory comments on them, as if he could not decide whether to go or stay. 'And what's your name?' he asked.

'Deirdre Swan,' she mumbled, thinking what a silly name it was.

'Deirdre of the Sorrows,' he said, but somehow she did not mind the old joke from him. 'And you do look rather sad sitting here all by yourself. Shall we go and have a drink?'