‘Yes, that is nice, I’m very glad,’ said Catherine. She was feeling tired now and wanted to get away.
‘That’s what I feel. You see she has always loved Tom, there has never been anybody else,’
‘Apparently there has never been anybody else,’ said Catherine to Deirdre as they walked away from the club. ‘You can imagine it somehow, can’t you, that sweet girl, and really so unsuitable for Tom. Oh, look? she exclaimed, for they were passing a pavement artist who was drawing dogs’ heads, ‘those dogs! You can see it all, can’t you, so solid and brown and faithful. What I wanted to ask was if Josephine ever visited the other aunt, the one who lives in a hotel in South Kensington. I have a feeling she’s rather old and neglected and pathetic somehow.’
‘Catherine, are you all right, would you like to go and have a cup of tea somewhere?’ asked Deirdre solicitously.
‘Yes, let’s have a cup of tea, but first I must find a coin for the dog-man.’
‘You won’t be lonely, will you?’ Deirdre asked. ‘You can always come and stay with us, you know.’
‘Thank you, Deirdre, but I never mind being alone. And my life isn’t quite over yet, you know,’ said Catherine a little fretfully. For a moment she almost fancied that life, that tiresome elderly relative, had tweaked at her sleeve in a playful manner. ‘I shall come and see you, of course, and I shall probably visit next door, too.’
‘You mean Mr. Lydgate? I suppose he is rather intriguing, in a way.’
‘It will be an interest, and it will take me out of myself to study somebody equally peculiar.’
‘You sound so very detached. Won’t it be any more than that?’
‘Who knows!’ Catherine called out in a gay tone as they parted outside the teashop.
Deirdre remembered these words when, some time later, she went up to her aunt’s room to ask her for something and found Rhoda and Mabel at the window. Rhoda was giving what appeared to be a running commentary on Alaric Lydgate’s doings in his garden.
‘All the masks out on the lawn,’ she said, ‘and now-oh, my goodness—he’s got a great big shield and two spears and some moth-eaten old feather thing, I can’t quite see what it is. I should think those things attract the moth terribly and will be all the better for a good airing. Now he’s gone into the house again.’
‘But he’s come out again and with Catherine too,’ said Mabel.
‘Oh, yes, and he’s got a knife in his hand. They’re going right to the bottom of the garden. Now he seems to be cutting something and Catherine is helping him-what can they be doing? Why, now she’s standing up and her arms are full of rhubarb! What a strange girl she is—first burning all those papers on the bonfire and now this. What odd turns life does take!’ And how much more comfortable it sometimes was to observe it from a distance, to look down from an upper window, as it were, as the anthropologists did.
‘We could have given her some rhubarb,’ said Mabel mildly. ‘We have plenty. She needn’t have troubled Mr. Lydgate.’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose he would regard it as being any trouble,’ said Rhoda. ‘Besides, it might not be quite the same thing, having it from our garden.’
This last point, she felt with some complacency, was of a subtlety that perhaps only an unmarried woman could fully appreciate. But oh dear, she thought, if ever Catherine and Alaric should marry, what a difficult and peculiar couple they would make!
Table of Contents
Less Than Angels
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels
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