Providence (4 page)

Beauty for ashes. She sat in her kitchen in Old Church Street, her plate washed up and put away, the crumbs for the birds strewn on the windowsill. She allowed her fears and griefs to come to the surface, in the timid hope that it was now safe to do so. Some day, unless a miracle took place, she would spend all her time in this kitchen and it would become her permanent and only home, instead of the temporary staging post she had always thought it might be. But this was too dangerous to contemplate, and she turned her head aside, to the window. It was a quiet evening. It was always a quiet
evening, for there were few passers-by at this time of day. The only sound was that of an insistent radio, from the flat of her neighbour Caroline, the divorcee. Across the street she could just see the publican’s wife, one hand fluffing out her blonde hair, taking the air on her doorstep before opening time. Kitty tried to imagine what Maurice was doing, and failed. She tried to remember the assurance of the words in Marie-Thérèse’s Bible. She did in fact remember that there was a staff meeting on the horizon, that she had a lecture to prepare – on the Romantic Tradition – and that in a week’s time she had to give a seminar, about which she had mixed feelings. Her subject was
Adolphe
, a short novel about failure. She did not care for it much, and worried about her ability to convey its quality.

As she moved, with the heaviness of a much older woman, from the table at which she had been sitting, the telephone rang. It was Maurice. ‘Are you in London?’ she asked in some surprise, for she had imagined him taking off for home. ‘Yes,’ he said mildly, ‘I quite often spend the weekends here. I rang up about Monday. I can’t make it, I’m afraid. My mother’s coming to town.’ Kitty laughed, though she felt panic. ‘It’s Monday week, you idiot. Didn’t you write it down?’ ‘Oh, fine,’ he said, ‘fine. I’ll see you then.’

After that she leaned out of the window for a bit, trying to get her thoughts into order. He had telephoned. He was coming. That was the thing to remember. Anyone could get a date wrong. In a little while she felt calmer, her life-line re-established. Then she got out her notes and began to work.

Oddly enough, she had never found her work difficult. On the contrary, it appeared to her in the guise of a neutral element in which there was no need for subterfuge, for watchfulness, or even for desire. Work, to Kitty, was something you did, not something you talked about. Her neighbour, Caroline, who had come down in the world, had often regaled her with stories of her fascinating past and would end such reminiscences with the words, ‘I really ought to write a book.’ ‘Why don’t you?’ Kitty Maule would ask, with genuine curiosity. She felt that the wish was father to the thought, and that no one need be without an occupation. Beauty, of course, offered its own dispensations: beautiful women, by a rule she acknowledged but did not understand, were somehow allowed to do nothing of worth and yet to command the time and attention of others. Kitty preferred her busy life, which she characterized as an easy life spent doing difficult things. At least, she supposed they were difficult. In fact, it took her more time to cook a special dish for Maurice than it did to write a paper or prepare a seminar. Yet she took no pride in the fact of doing such work and refused to think of it as important. Quite simply, it gave her no trouble and therefore she took no credit for doing it.

‘My God, Kitty,’ said Pauline Bentley, in the Romance
Languages Department. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are. I use work as a weapon against depression. I see it as a way of outwitting nervous illness. You’d be surprised how many people feel this way.’ As she said this she combed her hair viciously, for she was ashamed at revealing so much. Yet Pauline was a superb lecturer, polished and impeccable, and for this reason much admired by the students. With less desperation behind it, Kitty’s style was milder and more popular. She enjoyed her intellectual obligations and did not sense them as onerous. Secretly she regarded her task as a temporary and rather pleasant way of filling in the time until her true occupation should be revealed to her. She did not quite know what this was but she sensed that she would rather excel at duties other than the ones with which she had occupied herself over the last few years.

They were in Pauline’s room, preparing to go to a staff meeting. Pauline regarded these meetings, which took place once a term, with undisguised contempt. Kitty, on the other hand, rather liked them. As an occasional teacher she was grateful for the opportunity to attend, and although she could not always understand what was being discussed, she managed to look alert and even took notes. Her zeal, which was genuine, had been noted with approval by Professor Redmile. ‘I wonder if he’d notice if I marked a couple of essays,’ mused Pauline. ‘I tell you, Kitty, when I get to hell I expect to find a perpetual staff meeting in progress.’ She took a miscellaneous bundle of papers, which did indeed include a few essays, from her desk, and set off down the corridor. Kitty followed demurely in her wake.

The meetings were always held in a gloomy and oleaginous brown room, which had been a dining room when the building had been occupied, in baronial state, by the benefactor of the university. Professor Redmile sat at the head of the table that gleamed with a curious
icy veneer in the bad light; at his side, importantly, sat his secretary, Jennifer, taking the minutes. They filed in reluctantly – the historians and the linguists – Dr Martinez, Professors Gault and Bodmin, Mme de Marcoussis, Mrs Vogel, Dr Oliphant, the Roger Fry Professor, whose hapless task it was to teach French art to the French Department, Italian to the Italians, German to the Germans, and still try to maintain some sort of autonomy, and last of all, Maurice Bishop. In front of every seat was a pencil and a pad of paper. With one accord, as Professor Redmile welcomed them at the start of a new term and looked forward to soon being able to give them some definite news about the New Building, all picked up their pencils and started drawing, a defensive move intended to drown out the hearty delight in Professor Redmile’s voice but one which gave them the appearance of a rather retarded occupational therapy class. Kitty, all innocent attention, watched the Roger Fry Professor incising a deep jagged abstract on his pad. Mme de Marcoussis favoured a delicate shading, involving ceaseless motion with the pencil. Professor Gault always drew an Archimedes spiral. Once, at the end of the meeting, Kitty had stolen round the table after everyone had left to see what Maurice had drawn: a flying buttress.

To Kitty, who lacked extensive diversion, these occasions were ones of pure entertainment. They also gave her an opportunity to look at Maurice, if he were within her line of sight, and to savour the extreme delight of anticipating their next and more private meeting. Her expression was always rigorously schooled and she was discreet in a way that would have been becoming in a nineteenth-century governess; nevertheless, the Roger Fry Professor, looking up unexpectedly from his cubist design, had once noticed her look and was thus in possession of her secret. She had not seen him, but the
Roger Fry Professor had noted with an inward sigh that his wife had been right and that Maurice had made another conquest. His dislike of the man was becoming unmanageable. Maurice, all delicate attention to what Professor Redmile was saying, was not aware of any of this.

Maurice, thought Kitty, will you not look in my direction? I am only here for your sake. I do not, I confess, care about the New Building, or even believe in it. I am fond of all these people, even of Professor Redmile, but if you were to vanish and they were to remain I cannot think that I should stay here long. You have done so much for me. You have made me believe in what I am doing, whereas I really only started it as a sort of hobby; since knowing you, I have tried harder than I would have normally, and I have done better than I thought I could. And they are pleased with me; that is a new sensation for me. I find this work easy because in a way I am doing it for you. I want to be excellent, for you. The fact that Pauline is quite openly reading an essay – a fact noted by Jennifer; the fact that the Roger Fry Professor is once again demonstrating that he can knock off a respectable drawing in the manner of Delaunay; the fact that Mrs Vogel is making out her shopping list: all this delights me because we are in the same room and sharing the same experience. I shall remember a day like this, although you will not. You have more important things to remember. Will you not meet my eye?

But Maurice, with his pleasant smile, only leaned over to Jennifer and slipped a small note into her hand. Blushing, she looked at it, then, rather more slowly, handed it over to Professor Redmile.

Kitty, her hands idle, had seen Jennifer’s change of expression, and resolved sternly never, ever, to look like that. She switched her thoughts to the Romantic Tradition,
with which she was supposed to be eternally preoccupied, and wondered if it really existed. Could one build a tradition out of a series of defiantly autonomous individuals, all of them insisting that what they felt had never been felt before by any human being? They were an impressive but disheartening lot, she always thought, coming so rapidly to maturity, haggard with experience by the age of twenty-five, and somehow surviving their own disastrous youth into a normal life-span. Even an abnormal one: look at Victor Hugo. Except, of course, Gérard de Nerval. He was central to her thesis, for he did not survive. She did not know what she found more impressive: the ability to stagger on through a life exaggeratedly devoid of normal happiness, or the ability to admit a radiant fragmentation of the mind that would put one out of the struggle altogether. What worried her was that there appeared to be no middle way. She could not accept that so much ardour and longing, so much torment and courage, should peter out into the flatlands of middle and old age. And anyway, where did the Romantic Tradition end? Easy enough to decide when it began, and even how. But did it, terrible thought, still persist? Might she have started something that might prove to be more extensive than she had originally supposed? Might the Romantic Tradition outlive her desire to have anything more to do with it?

As usual at these meetings, an extremely complicated change of timetable was being proposed, for no very good reason other than it gave them something to have a meeting about. Instead of a straight historical run through the syllabus, an elaborate schema, referred to by Professor Redmile as a four-tier structure, was to be substituted for a period of one year to see how the students adjusted to it. ‘They will turn up anyway,’ said Pauline wearily. ‘The only difference is that they will
not know exactly what they are turning up to.’

‘If you will refer to the outline which Jennifer has very kindly prepared,’ said Professor Redmile, ‘I think you will see, Dr Bentley, that this proposal has a great deal of virtue in it. The students will gain a more exciting historical perspective by being brought up against different periods in unexpected conjunction. Perhaps you will all study the outline and give me your views?’

Pushing aside their drawings, they bent their heads obediently over the sticky and unevenly photocopied sheets which represented their tasks for the coming academic year. There was a minute’s concentration, followed by a unanimous absence of comment. The silence was eventually broken by Maurice, who said, ‘If you adopt this scheme, Hamish, you will have the Dark Ages one morning and the Enlightenment the next. That is a conjunction to challenge even the most sophisticated student.’

They laughed heartily, delirious with boredom. The Roger Fry Professor ground his crepe-soled orange shoes together in a mixture of fury and despair: Maurice had just destroyed his chance of getting his lectures done by Christmas instead of having to give them all in the summer, when everyone stayed away. Professor Redmile, graciously joining in the laughter, gave a signal to Jennifer to have the tea brought in, and with that the meeting was to all intents and purposes over, although the talking was about to begin.

Tea and biscuits at the staff meeting were, for Kitty, the high point of an otherwise socially unadventurous week. She smiled with genuine pleasure as she accepted her cup; it was the only sort of party she enjoyed these days. She dressed with extra care for these occasions, at which she said nothing; she thought her amateur status entitled her merely to attendance. She was exactly the sort of person Professor Redmile liked to have around.

She knew this and it gave her added pleasure. The scene had, for her, a strange exoticism: the hideous room, the north light, the dull atmosphere, compounded of the smells of cigarette smoke and sheets of photocopied paper, the muted and rumpled appearance of everyone except Maurice and herself, the enormous amount of luggage they managed to bring in – bags, briefcases, mackintoshes – the ceremonial plate of chocolate biscuits handed round by Jennifer’s assistant, all this seemed to her stranger and more desirable than the home life of her grandparents with their variants on normal dress and erratic impromptu meals. It was on these occasions, ridiculed by her grandmother, that she felt that she had a definite if modest status, in a context which did not take into account her beginnings or her background, a context, moreover, which contained Maurice. To be at one with him, even on so tenuous a basis as this, seemed to her a factor which could not but have a bearing on the rest of her life.

She watched him covertly over the rim of her cup. He was talking to Professor Gault, a tiny, weary man who was an expert on Ariosto. Maurice was asking some question which Kitty could not hear, for the exchange of views, which had been noticeably absent during the meeting, now threatened to become vocal and even noisy. She watched Maurice’s fine hands, describing some parabola, shaping some outline – she could not hear what was being said and she strained slightly, then caught herself doing so, and consciously relaxed – and Maurice’s face, alight with enthusiasm and energy, as he made his point, whatever it was, seeming to have found the answer to the question he had been asking, for Professor Gault merely nodded, and when Maurice had finished talking, they both laughed. I wish he would look at me like that, thought Kitty with longing. Are we so civilized, so controlled, so expert in our concealment
that we are never allowed to reveal anything to the world about ourselves and each other? She looked down quickly at the sticky brown table, for she could feel her contentment ebbing away, felt it suddenly to be nugatory, laughable, a pretence that her rational self could not accept. She dreaded these moments, which came without warning, and waited with distress until they should have passed, leaving her once again in possession of her secret.