Less Than Angels

  ‘Well, they have money of their own, those girls,’ Giles reminded him. ‘Not that that really makes any difference to one’s feelings, but in this case it’s certainly a help. We shall be able to get a good many things done. Mother and uncle will move to the lodge, but mother will keep the garden, of course.’

  ‘I hope the lodge has a suitable site for the television set,’ said Tom.

  ‘Oh, yes, there is a good enough little room,’ said Mrs.

  Mallow casually. ‘Now here we are, and the mayor is waiting to receive us. Perhaps you will find this little ceremony of interest, Tom,’ she added dryly.

  They entered the large marquee. It was very hot and smelled of roses and warm canvas and humanity. There was a buzz of conversation which died away when Mrs. Mallow and her entourage appeared on a little dais at one end. Tom and Giles stood down below, not listening to their mother’s speech, which was rambling and confused, obviously not prepared at all. But as she was a member of the leading family in the neighbourhood and well known to her audience it did not matter what she said.

  Tom looked around to see whether anybody he knew was there, but the faces all seemed indistinct, the men ruddy and healthy or pale and worried according to their occupations, the women young or elderly all wearing light-coloured summer dresses and straw hats trimmed with various kinds of artificial flowers and fruits. Somewhere, at a lower level, there would be children, but Tom was not interested in them. Surely, he thought, Elaine and her sister Felicity would stand out in some way among this crowd, or had we really reached the point where all women looked alike, regardless of where they bought their clothes?

  ‘Well, Tom,’ said a voice, giving him what seemed to be the stock greeting here, ‘don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Elaine!’ He took her hand in his and held it for a long time. ‘I was looking for you.’

  She was, he noticed, dressed just like everybody else in a flowered silk dress with a white hat and gloves, but her pearl necklace and small stud ear-rings were probably real. She was a fair rather plump girl, the same age as Tom, with freckles and what are usually described as ‘candid’ grey eyes.

  They were standing by a table where some fruit was displayed, little dishes of raspberries and plums arranged on leaves. The roof of the marquee cast a greenish light on to their faces, giving an air of magic and unreality to the occasion, as if they were under water or in a forest.

  ‘You haven’t been home for such a long time,’ she said, but without reproach in her tone.

  ‘No. Just a week-end here and there, but I think you were away the last time,’

  ‘I wrote to you for your birthday last year—did you get it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you.’ He remembered now, such a very long letter, full of the daily trivia which can be so fascinating or so tedious according to the feelings of the recipient towards the writer.

  ‘You didn’t answer, so I wondered. I expect you were busy.’

  ‘Yes, there was the election of a new chief and trouble among the plantation workers, and we were cut off by the rains for six weeks—oh, and various other things.’

  ‘You always have such grand excuses, much grander than anybody else’s,’ she smiled. ‘You didn’t really need the “various other things”, did you, Tom?’

  He marvelled, as he had done before, at the sharpness of even the nicest women. All except Deirdre, but she would learn, he supposed.

  ‘Well, anyway, it’s very nice to see you now,’ he said. ‘Could we have tea together? I didn’t have any lunch, now that I come to think of it.’

  ‘Oh, TomI’ She was at once concerned and led him to the tea tent where she insisted on giving him all her share of the sandwiches and cakes provided. Somewhere a band was playing, its brassiness softened by distance into a pleasant background noise. ‘There’s the dance tonight,’ she said. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘Yes, I’d forgotten—there’s always a dance, isn’t there, at the King Edward Rooms, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course! How could it be anywhere else?’ She paused and then said, ‘Did you know, I imagine you did, that we’re going to be related?’

  ‘Yes, Felicity and Giles. It seems a very good thing.’

  ‘Obviously …’ she looked down at the tablecloth. ‘I heard you were attached too.’

  ‘I? Don’t you believe it,’said Tom heartily. ‘I’m wedded to my work.’

  Elaine finished her cup of tea and they got up to look at the begonias, too big and too brilliantly coloured to be regarded as flowers but seeming for that very reason to demand exclamations of wonder and disbelief. Mrs. Mallow’s exhibit had won a first prize.

  ‘Is it as big as a dinner-plate—that yellow one?’ asked Tom. ‘That’s what one hears people saying.’

  Elaine laughed and looked up at him.

  ‘Could we slip off to a pub?’ he asked. ‘They’ll be open now.’

  ‘Not a pub,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I couldn’t really, Mummy wouldn’t like it, not here. If it were somewhere where I wasn’t known it would be different. But perhaps we can have a drink together at the dance tonight?’

  ‘Yes, of course, and lots of dances, I hope.’

  When he got home Tom was surprised to find his dress clothes hanging in the wardrobe in his old room, as if they had been waiting for this moment when he would come back and wear them. He hardly recognized himself in the long looking-glass at the top of the stairs, and decided that he looked easily as distinguished as Mark had done on another similar occasion. Of course his hair needed cutting, as Giles pointed out, but the detribalized must have some distinctive mark of their condition.

  The King Edward Rooms were full of childhood and adolescent memories for him. The large glowing head and shoulders portrait of the monarch had beamed down on him at children’s parties and at his first grown-up dance. The stags’ heads with their melting eyes had seen the beginning of his romance with Elaine, the palms and the little gilt chairs ranged round the room must surely be those of his early youth; only the banked hydrangeas and gladioli would be different, and the people older and perhaps sadder, conscious that a new generation were now the young and gay.

  He danced once or twice with Felicity, his future sister-in- law, but mosdy with Elaine, who seemed the perfect dancing partner and companion, her conversation conventional and gentle, so that he almost found himself praising the floor and the band and asking her what shows she had seen or whether she had read any good books lately. But when they were walking in the gardens one of them, or perhaps both, began a sentence with ‘Do you remember…’, that powerful insidious phrase which can upset the most carefully formal conversation. So there they were, remembering their rides together, the long walks, the dances, the first shy and somehow comic attempts at love. Once, Elaine reminded him and he had quite forgotten it, he had quoted a poem to her, something terribly sad, but she couldn’t remember what it had been. Catherine would have been able to guess it, he thought, Housman or something out of Poems of Today, probably something very obvious, but it had gone now. He found himself mourning the young man of those days, who went for long country walks and quoted poetry. Now he went into Regent’s Park and talked about his thesis. He wondered if the change was for the better.

  Elaine accepted his good-night kiss with a calmness which disappointed him after their intimate conversation in the gardens. But he could not know how she had trained herself not to think of him and to go on with her country activities, the dogs, the garden, the women’s institute, the church work, as if they were her whole life. The birthday letter, written on an impulse, showed that she had not quite achieved the friendly indifference she aimed at, and Tom’s sudden reappearance would disturb her for some time to come. The circumstances of her daily life, less usual now than fifty or a hundred years ago, were not conducive to an easy forgetting. While Delia and Felicity had been trained for careers, Elaine had been the one to stay at home. She might, if she had come upon them, have copied out Anne Elliot’s words, e
specially as she was the same age as Miss Austen’s heroine:’ We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ But Elaine was not much of a reader; she would have said that she had no time, which was perhaps just as well, even if she missed the consolation and pain of coming upon her feelings expressed for her in such moving words.

  A few days later Tom, in a confused and not altogether happy mood, returned to London. When he got to Paddington he rang up Catherine and they went and had rather too many drinks at one of their old haunts. He told her all about meeting Elaine again, but she seemed, rather to his surprise, not to be very sympathetic. He had imagined that she would be the one person who would understand his bewilderment and be able to advise him what he ought to do. Instead, she made frivolous remarks about Elaine’s dogs and that seemed to lead her on to Deirdre, and was he going to marry her or go back to Africa or what? He could only reply, rather crossly, that he wasn’t going to marry anybody at the moment, and that she knew perfectly well that he was going back to Africa as soon as he could make the necessary arrangements.

  “Your people wait for you,’ said Catherine. ‘How soothing it will be to get away from all this complexity of personal relationships to the simplicity of a primitive tribe, whose only complications are in their kinship structure and rules of land tenure, which you can observe with the anthropologist’s calm detachment.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Tom’s departure for Africa was an experience that those of his friends who shared it with him would not willingly have undergone a second time. He went about looking haggard and flustered, seeming unable to decide what he wanted to take with him or how his heavy luggage which he could not take on the plane was to be sent.

  ‘I suppose this is good practice for us,’ said Digby mildly as he hammered nails into a crate.

  ‘I thought there were firms that did this kind of thing,’ said Mark irritably. ‘When J go I shall see that things are better organized. I can’t imagine why he’s left everything to the last minute like this. And why must he go back in such a hurry, anyway?’

  ‘I suppose it’s the shock of getting his thesis finished when it seemed that he never would,’ said Digby. ‘And then the visit home, that apparently upset him in some way. He saw himself excluded from his family and all the useful things they were doing, perhaps he hadn’t realized before how completely he had alienated himself.’

  ‘Yes, even in sophisticated societies a man needs to feel the security of the kinship bond.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that there is some likeness between Tom and Prof. Mainwaring?’ Digby went on. ‘In their circumstances, I mean. Both have broken away from a rather high-class background.’

  ‘But there the similarity ends, I should think. I don’t imagine that Felix had such trouble with his girl friends- if they were that—as Tom is having now.’ Mark leaned back on his heels, seeming to bask in his friend’s troubles. ‘There was the girl at home, reminding him of what might have been. Then Catherine, abandoned and deserted, a continual reproach to him. And now Deirdre, who has flung herself at him—how difficult it sometimes is to resist the admiration of a young girl!’ He sighed reminiscently.

  ‘I’m sure Deirdre did no such thing,’ said Digby angrily.

  ‘Well, be that as it may, to quote Fairfax, Tom feels that only in Africa is he really appreciated. There he can do the work for which he is really fitted and which nobody else could possibly do, namely, the investigation into the role of the mother’s brother in marriage ceremonies.’

  ‘You sound almost bitter.’

  ‘Perhaps I am, a little. Where are we going to get money to go into the field? Tom seems to have no difficulty.’

  ‘No, but perhaps we can’t really consider ourselves on a level with him.’

  ‘You mean this myth about Tom’s brilliance? What signs have you seen of it?’

  ‘Oh, well, one doesn’t expect to see signs of a thing like that, does one?’

  ‘I should have thought that one might have discerned the faintest glimmer of his genius by now.’

  ‘Certainly his conversation isn’t brilliant, perhaps even ours is a little better than his,’ said Digby uncertainly. ‘And I thought that paper he read in the seminar last term was—well—confused,’ he added, plunging further into disloyalty.

  Mark took him up eagerly on this point and they went into a rather technical discussion at the end of which they had the satisfaction of proving, at least to themselves, that Tom, far from being brilliant, was in some ways positively stupid and not always even ‘sound’.

  ‘Almost a diffusionist,’ said Mark, his eyes sparkling with malice.

  ‘Oh, come? said Digby in a shocked tone. Feeling that they had perhaps gone a little too far, he changed the subject. ‘You’ve heard the latest about the Foresight Fellowships, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, I was there when Fairfax was talking about them. The candidates to be invited down for a week-end at Prof. Mainwaring’s country seat in November-it seems an odd arrangement but I suppose it will be a good thing to get it settled. There are two grants to be made, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  At this moment the bell rang. Digby hurried to answer it and found Catherine on the doorstep, a pile of neatly laundered shirts and shorts in her arms.

  ‘Would you believe it,’ she said. ‘Tom discovered all these things in a trunk with his notes and as there wasn’t time to send them to the laundry he rang me up, so here they are.’

  ‘Won’t you come in?’

  ‘No, I think not. Is Tom there?’

  ‘Yes, I think he’s getting changed into some respectable clothes ; he seems to be going out somewhere.’

  ‘Ah, yes, to have a last evening with Deirdre, I expect,’ said Catherine in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I can imagine what that will be like. I’m coming to the air terminal to see him off tomorrow, by the way, so I’ll see you there.’

  ‘I suppose a last evening with Deirdre might not be quite tne same as one with Catherine,’ said Mark thoughtfully, ‘so I wonder if Catherine really can imagine it.’

  ‘Writers like to think that they can imagine everything,’ suggested Digby, ‘or do you think that Catherine has now reached the age when she has had so many partings and last evenings that she really does know all that can possibly happen?’

  ‘How dull the life of an experienced woman must be, if everything has happened before,’ said Mark. ‘They do say, don’t they, that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ He smiled his malicious little smile. ‘It could be that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there was any fury about her. She looked rather flushed, certainly, but that was probably because she’d been bending over the ironing-board—ironing is hot work, you know,’ said Digby sensibly. ‘I suppose I’d better take these things to Tom.’

  He found him taking a swig of brandy out of a small flask. ‘Going on a journey always makes me feel sick and nervous,’ he explained rather apologetically, ‘and one needs strengthening to face the good-byes.’

  Digby made no comment but put the laundry down on the bed and left the room. A few moments later he heard Tom hurrying out of the house. He imagined him meeting Deirdre in a restaurant, making light gay conversation, perhaps getting a little drunk, then kissing her good night and coming home reasonably early, a little relieved that the last evening was over.

  He seemed hardly to have setded down to his evening’s reading when he heard Tom’s key in the lock, and then looked up to find him standing in the room, blinking in the unaccustomed bright light.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Digby heartily, ‘I’ll look after her for you.’

  Tom smiled wryly. ‘I must finish my pack
ing,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s hope it will be a nice day tomorrow,’ said Digby, conscious that he was being banal but feeling that any other kind of talk would be too difficult.

  He awoke next morning feeling rather smug as if he alone had been responsible for the brightness of the day.

  ‘This sunshine will make everyone feel better,’ he declared, as he and Mark cooked breakfast in the kitchen.

  ‘Digby, what is this coming out in you, this hearty manner in the early morning?’ said Mark irritably. ‘I feel it should be nipped in the bud.’

  ‘I was thinking of Deirdre and Catherine, really. It won’t affect us. Do you think the air terminal is more romantic than a railway station?’ Digby asked, as they approached the looming grey bulk of the building.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, because one imagines longer and more fantastic journeys, and there is the possibility that the plane might crash,’ said Mark in a detached tone. ‘And people are going to the uttermost ends of the earth, perhaps for years.’

  ‘I shouldn’t stress that aspect of it before Catherine and Deirdre,’ said Digby. ‘It might upset them.’

  ‘I almost wish they weren’t coming,’ said Tom. ‘I really prefer to slip away quietly without anyone knowing it.’ He was a little distracted with last-minute things left undone, and was still wearing his raincoat and carrying his brief-case; it would be some hours yet before he could discard these characteristic insignia of his calling. ‘ Oh, look, there they are.’

  ‘They seemed to have arrived together,’ said Mark. ‘Both staking a claim at the last minute. Well, my dears, I hope you are feeling equal to this,’ he greeted them.

  Deirdre, who had been feeling for some days past as if she had been dealt a heavy blow in the pit of the stomach, had been unable to eat breakfast at all. Catherine had managed toast and even a boiled egg—not of course a fried egg—of which she felt slightly ashamed, but she told herself that Tom’s going back was different for her this time, and that it was fitting that it should be distinguished from the other times, even if only by the eating of a larger breakfast.