Less Than Angels Part 8

'I think you make it sound horribly depressing, if it's just a question of having the same face around all the time.'

'Yes, that's what I feel too, in a way,' said Tom almost eagerly. 'I mean, there might come a time .. ,' ' When you wanted a different face,' said Catherine promptly. 'Well, not all the time perhaps, but sometimes.' 'Unfortunately we can't yet cope with that very well,' said Catherine. 'Two wives or even two girl friends need a good deal of time and skill and even money to manage successfully, and you've got your thesis to finish, don't forget.'

'Oh, Catty, you're really too responsive-you understand things almost too well.' "There isn't all that much to understand, is there?' 'She seems so unhappy, perhaps that's it,' said Tom in a puzzled tone. 'In a way, I feel that she needs me and a man likes to feel that sometimes,' 'Of course he does,' Catherine agreed. 'That's what seems wrong with so many relations.h.i.+ps now, the women feeling that they are the strong ones and that men couldn't get on without them. In the olden days,' she smiled at the phrase, 'it was quite different-or so we always imagine. Or were women more diplomatic then?*

'She lives in that rather depressing suburban house, where n.o.body really understands her,' Tom went on. 'Oh, yes, I know it was very pleasant going to tea there... ,' 'So it is Deirdre we're talking about.' Tom looked starded. 'But of course. Who else did you think it could be?'

'I don't know, but you seem to meet so many girls in the course of your studies. How do I know which ones are likely to hold your hand in restaurants? I hope it was one of the better meals this evening, by the way? We know how the food can vary there.' She darted an amused look at him, and he thought how different her merry sardonic grey eyes were from Deirdre's intense brown ones with their spaniel-like look of devotion. The trouble was that he liked-perhaps even loved-both of them. He began to form a sentence about polygamy and how primitive societies were really rather better arranged than our own civilization, but another glance from Catherine stopped him.

'Yes, I did see you,' she said. 'Now, Tom, what practical arrangements will this involve? You can't bring her to live here, you know. Her mother and aunt wouldn't like it and there isn't room, anyway.'

'No, I suppose there isn't,' said Tom, as if he had been seriously considering bringing Deirdre to live in Catherine's flat. 'Perhaps I could take a room with Mark and Digby.'

'Oh, Tom, in that depressing mouldering house by the railway, and with that dreadful geyser in the bathrooml'

'I can finish my thesis there as well as anywhere,' said Tom rather stiffly.

'And anywhere will do for love, won't it. Now I can see what Donne meant when he wrote about love making one little room an everywhere. And it will be such a very little room, quite poky, you might say...' she began to laugh in an uncertain way.

Catty, please don't.' He came and sat beside her. 'I don't have to go, you know. I didn't mean to start all this, and I don't think I did. It seems to be all your idea.'

'But it's a good idea, and you'll be able to finish your thesis much better away from me,' She looked up at him, apparently recovered.

'I believe I could have Ephraim Olo's room in a week or two,' said Tom thoughtfully. 'He's going back soon.'

'Has he finished his studies then?'

'Yes, he's going to be a Cabinet Minister.'

'Of course, they've got their own sort of government now, haven't they. It's comforting to know you'll occupy the room a Cabinet Minister once had. It's a bit like Marx and Lenin living in London and then going back to Russia. It would be even more comforting if it were somebody like Mr. Gladstone, wouldn't it?'

'Yes, darling,' he said, humouring her.

'I suppose we can see to your packing in the morning?'

'Good heavens, yes. I shan't be going for a week or two.'

'It seems rather cold-blooded, doesn't it, not going for a week or two? In books and films and even in life, too, people go and pack suit-cases there and then and hurry out of the house,'

'Catty, please, I don't want to go now.' Tom suddenly realized that he was very tired. The long and unaccustomed walk with Deirdre in the park must have taken it out of him. He hadn't really meant to start anything; perhaps in the morning they would realize that it had all been a mistake.

CHAPTER TEN.

That same evening Rhoda Wellcome sat writing a letter to the Electricity Board. The bill for the last quarter had just arrived, and it was preposterously large, more than if they had left all the electric lights and fires on in the house all day and all night. Round her on the table were strewn the bills for past quarters, which she was studying and comparing, reading out extracts to her sister, who sat knitting and trying to listen to a popular humorous programme on the wireless.

'There must be a mistake,' Rhoda repeated for the fifth or sixth time. 'And now that I come to think of it, the man couldn't get in to read the meter last time, or said he couldn't, though I'm sure there must have been somebody in, so I filled in the card myself.'

'Perhaps you did it wrong,' said Mabel Swan mildly.

'Well, I'm going to look now.'

'AH right, dear. I'll come and make a cup of tea, that would be nice, wouldn't it. Perhaps Deirdre will be in soon and would like some when she comes in.*

Rhoda crouched among the metres, holding a torch to read the little clocks, but whatever she saw there did not seem to solve the mystery. Finally she wrote a sharp note, being as rude as one can only be to an impersonal body, and flinging at them a kind of challenge, which was perhaps irrelevant but which relieved her feelings. 'I have also noticed,' she concluded, 'that the light has become much dimmer lately and should be glad to know how you would explain this. Yours truly, Rhoda Wellcome.'

She sealed up the envelope and addressed it, but her remark about the dimming light had left her with a faint sense of disquiet, as if it might have a wider and more disturbing significance. Though perhaps it could be put right by some comparatively simple means, such as the buying of more powerful electric light bulbs.

'Let me see now,' said Mabel, 'who is Deirdre out with tonight?' There was an undertone of pride in her voice, which Rhoda did not fail to notice for she said quickly and with an air of inner knowledge, 'Oh, Tom, of course! He's definitely the one now.'

'Poor Bernard,' sighed Mabel. 'Still, men must put up with these things and I never thought she was really very keen on him.'

'Oh, certainly not! She endured his attentions,' said Rhoda, feeling that she had read the phrase somewhere in a novel, 'but that was all. She and Tom have so much more in common.'

'Yes, and he is older than Bernard. I feci she's been needing an older man, someone she can respect and look up to. From what she says Tom seems to be just that kind of person.'

'And his people have an old place in Shrops.h.i.+re, so I dare say there will be some money there,' said Rhoda in a full tone. 'Of course he is a brilliant anthropologist.'

The sisters were silent for a moment, either in tribute to Tom's brilliance, or because there seemed nothing to say about a profession of which they were almost totally ignorant. If Mabel thought rather wistfully of Bernard's steady position with his father's firm, she did not mention it.

'Of course there is Catherine,' she said uncertainly. 'One doesn't quite know if there is any attachment there.'

'You mean Miss Oliphant?' said Rhoda in a surprised tone. 'Oh, surely she is just a friend. I thought her very nice but rather an odd little tiling, not the kind of girl to attract a man.'

'All the same, I shouldn't like to feel that Deirdre was-well, causing any unhappiness there.'

'If should think Catherine is well able to look after herself,' said Rhoda positively, 'and after all, women must put up with these things too, as you said about Bernard. That's life, isn't it.' She spoke with an almost callous detachment, for although she knew that it might be life for other people it had not been so for her. An aunt can if necessary fight as tenaciously for a niece's rights as a mother can for a daughter's.

'There's Deirdre now,' said Mabel, her sharper mother's ear having heard the key in the lock. 'But she seems to be going straight upstairs.' She lifted the lid of the teapot and peered inside it. 'There is some tea here if she'd like it-it hasn't been made long.'

'I expect she'll come down if she wants any,' said Rhoda sensibly.

Upstairs in her room, Deirdre combed her hair and put on more powder and lipstick to compose herself for meeting the searching glances of her mother and aunt. She would have preferred to go straight to bed, to go over in her mind the dinner at the little Greek restaurant, the walk in Regent's Park and the things they had said to each other which, for a girl of nineteen, are full of the magical freshness of never having been said before. This evening she could almost have believed that Tom loved her as much as she loved him; only the thought of Catherine, so sweet to her at the party and altogether such a nice person, cast a slight cloud over her happiness. Naturally they had not spoken of Catherine during dinner and certainly not when they were stumbling over the gra.s.s in Regent's Park. Deirdre salved her conscience by remembering that Catherine had laughed about Tom and his thesis, and this seemed such a very dreadful thing that perhaps she deserved to lose him.

When Deirdre came into the drawing-room she could feel her mother and aunt consciously restraining their curiosity, asking her if it had been raining outside, if she would like some tea or anything to eat.

'No, thank you,' Deirdre said. 'I couldn't eat. Tom gave me a very nice meal at a Greek restaurant and then we went for a walk in Regent's Park.'

'Regent's Park,' Rhoda exclaimed, unable to hold herself in check any longer. 'How lovely that must have been! Queen Mary's garden,' she added, hardly conscious of the slight incongruity of her words.

'We didn't go there,' Deirdre smiled.

'You must bring Tom here again some time,' said Mabel, encouraged by her daughter's friendliness. 'We could ask Malcolm to ask Phyllis, or you could invite that nice girl Catherine who came to tea and that young Frenchman. We could have quite a jolly party.'

'Yes, I'll ask Tom to come to supper one evening,' said Deirdre absently. But not Catherine, of course, her mother and aunt did not know about Tom and Catherine and she herself did not want to think about them now.

'I dare say Father Tulliver would come too, and of course if we could get Mr. Lydgate as well...' Rhoda's ambition was driving her almost into the realms of fantasy. 'It would be a cold meal, as it's summer, a fork supper, and perhaps a wine cup of some kind.' She could see it all laid out on the table like one of those lovely coloured pictures in Good Housekeeping.

Deirdre, like Tom, was tired after the long walk and was glad when the time came to go to bed and dream about him. But dreams can seldom be arranged as we wish them, and Deirdre's were of Digby Fox, of all people. They were walking in a garden full of flowers and he kissed her. She woke up feeling disappointed and cross, and was quite rude to him when she met him the next morning. And yet he was very kind to her, offering to lend her some notes he had made on a long and difficult book, which would save her the trouble of reading it.

'How refres.h.i.+ng to meet a feminine and unscholarly girl,' he said to Mark, 'not too proud to accept my humble offering of a few notes. Most girls would throw them back in your face.' He wondered if he should ask her out to lunch with him but then thought better of it. No amorous dalliance until the Foresight Fellows.h.i.+ps were setded, but then, ah then ... he promised himself.

Deirdre and Tom had arranged to meet in the afternoon at Felix's Folly, where they could sit quiedy side by side reading dieir books. They had been doing this for about ten minutes, when Tom began to talk to Deirdre in a low voice. Opposite them sat Miss Lydgate, surrounded by sheets of paper covered with lists of words and charts in brightly coloured chalks. Her white hair stood up on end, for she had been running her fingers through it. The expression on her face was almost one of anguish, her eyes glared through her spectacles and seemed to fix themselves on Tom and Deirdre.

'Come outside a minute,' he whispered. 'I've got something to tell you. We'd better not talk here as we seem to be annoying Miss Lydgate.'

'Yes, she's positively glaring at us,' said Deirdre.

In all fairness to Miss Lydgate, it must be said that she was not glaring at them at all and was, indeed, totally unconscious of their presence. She had been making a comparative study of the vocabularies of some little-known languages and had come across a feature in one of them which reminded her of something in another. But where had she met it before? She plunged through the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, but it was not there; then up to Lake Chad, hovering around the bit that was always drying up and looking so odd on the map, then down through French Equatorial Africa to the Belgian Congo, where she lingered for a moment among the pygmies. 'Tyrell Todd? Impossible' she breathed impatiently, and swept right across to the spicy coasts of Tanganyika, up through troubled Kenya and into the hills of Ethiopia. Here she stopped and murmured the poetical-sounding names of well-known Italian ethnographers and linguists-Cerulli, Robecchi-Bricchetti, Vanutelli, Citerni-but still it evaded her. Then suddenly she took a leap across the border into the Sudan, stood up and cried out something that sounded like 'Jebel Pingpong! Well, I'll be jiggered! Come here at once, Father Gemini!'

Father Gemini, who had been cowering quietly out of sight in a book-lined alcove, ran across the room. The other readers, pleased to be interrupted in their studies, sat back expectantly.

Meanwhile Tom had led Deirdre into the little room where Mark and Digby had recently put the horsehair sofa. The room now contained a small coffee-table, stained with the rings of wet cups, two straight-backed chairs, a bookcase full of old foreign periodicals, and a model African village, laid out on top of a packing-case which was covered with an orange tablecloth. On the mantelpiece stood a vase of pink daisy-like flowers.

'I've found this funny little room,' Tom said. ' I was looking for the Gents and walked in here by mistake. I can't imagine what it's for.'

'Perhaps for having private conversations in,' Deirdre suggested, 'I mean for Miss Lydgate and Father Gemini and people like that.'

'Not our kind, perhaps,' said Tom. 'Shall we sit on this sofa?'

They sat down. Tom took hold of Deirdre's hand. It lay in his without moving, like a dead bird, he thought, conscious that this was just the kind of thing Catherine might have said.

'I don't think we ought to hold hands here,' said Deirdre rather anxiously.

'No, perhaps not, but we will just the same. I wanted to tell you that next week or thereabouts I'm going to get a room in the flat where Mark and Digby live.' 'Oh, but what will Catherine do?' 'Well, she'll be as she was before we met, I suppose.'

'Surely not quite that?*

'No, perhaps not quite. I meant she'll live by herself as she used to. She was always quite happy you know, she's a very solitary person, really.'

'Yes, she may have been, but now perhaps she'll be just lonely, and I couldn't bear that. Though, she did say-don't you remember-that the loneliness of men was so much worse than the loneliness of women?' Deirdre looked up at Tom, distressed and puzzled, hoping for rea.s.surance.

Tom thought with irritation, how like Catherine to say a thing like that, for surely the loneliness of a woman abandoned by her lover is the worst of all? She probably hadn't been thinking of that and of course it wasn't that. She had driven him away, really, when it came to the point, and so far he hadn't even done his packing. Perhaps he wouldn't go after all. Suddenly it all seemed unbearably complicated.

Deirdre, noticing how the bright sun showed up the lines of strain and weariness round his eyes and mouth, put her hand gently on his arm and said, 'Perhaps you're right. After all Catherine isn't so very young, and she has lots of interests and her writing.'

Tom's face cleared, 'Ah, yes,' he said with an air of relief, 'she has her writing. Of course she isn't really a very good writer.'

'That doesn't matter,' said Deirdre with unusual firmness. 'When people write, they feel they're doing something creative and worth while and that's supposed to make up for everything else. Perhaps she doesn't really care about anything but that.'

'No, I don't think she does,' said Tom more comfortably. 'All the same, I shall worry about her a little.'

'Oh, naturally,' said Deirdre, feeling it a little unfair that to the worry of Tom's thesis should now be added the worry of Catherine, abandoned and perhaps lonely. 'But she's such a strong character.'

'Yes, she's certainly that,' Tom agreed.

'What did you say to her?'

'I didn't have to say much. She guessed that I might want to make a change,' he frowned over these last words, for he had not meant to commit himself when he really had no idea what he did intend to do except to move away from Catherine's flat. 'She saw us in the restaurant.'

At this point voices were heard outside the door, the loud ringing tones of Professor Mainwaring and Miss Clovis, and a soft rather fluttery woman's voice which could not be identified.

The door opened. Deirdre and Tom moved quickly away from each other.

'Now here is the little room we use for-ah, I see it is already being used for just that purpose.' Professor Mainwaring stood beaming in the doorway, his silvery beard glinting in the sun. Beside him stood Mrs. Foresight, in pink and mauve flowered crepe-de-chine and a straw hat trimmed with sweet peas; just behind them hovered Miss Clovis, in one of her better-looking grey flannel suits.

Tom and Deirdre, feeling a little foolish, stood up.

'Two of our younger readers,' said Professor Mainwaring, turning to Mrs. Foresight. ' We felt that we needed a small room where anthropologists-and linguists too-could discuss points that cropped up in connection with their work. You would hardly believe what problems do crop up where two or three anthropologists are gathered together. Isn't that so, Mallow?'

Tom agreed that it was so.

'I'm sure Mrs. Foresight would be interested to know what you have been discussing,' Professor Mainwaring went on.

'Housing, mostly,' said Tom smoothly. He turned to Mrs. Foresight with his charming smile. 'When a man wants to take another wife he has to build her a separate hut, you know.'

'How very sensible,' said Mrs. Foresight, fixing him with her round blue eyes. 'But I expect you have seen some very dreadful things out there,' she breathed hopefully.

'Well, I suppose they might be thought dreadful by the non-specialist,' said Tom soothingly, 'but we have to be detached, you know,'

'And no expression of disgust, astonishment or amus.e.m.e.nt must show on the face of the investigator,' recited Miss Clovis, who had once read this in an anthropologists' manual.

'I'm mainly interested in problems of local government, land tenure and that sort of thing,' said Tom, 'so I concentrate on those.'

Disappointment and relief showed themselves on Mrs. Foresight's pink babyish face. 'I'm very glad to hear it,' she said. 'I'm sure this young man wouldn't be likely to write the kind of article that that nasty Professor Fairfax wrote in the magazine you sent me, would he?' she asked, turning to Professor Mainwaring.

'Oh, dear me, no!' laughed the Professor merrily, giving his beard a sharp tweak. ' Mallow is doing valuable work which the Administration is finding most useful. When he publishes anything'-the quizzical look he threw at Tom took away the slight sting in his words-'you can be sure it will be a model of dullness, quite unreadable, I should imagine.'

Tom gave an uncertain laugh.

'And what is this young lady doing?'

Deirdre went rather pink and murmured that she was just a student, still reading for her degree.

'And do you hope to go out and work among natives?' Mrs. Foresight asked.

'I don't know, really, I expect so.'

'A woman can be a great help out there,' said Professor Mainwaring. 'Many workers have found a wife a most useful a.s.set, particularly if she has had the right kind of education.'

'And a man needs love and companions.h.i.+p wherever he is,' said Mrs. Foresight, a little reproachfully, seeming to address Miss Clovis whom she judged to be out of sympathy with this view.

'I did not have that,' said Professor Mainwaring in a rather high tone. 'I wonder if my work has suffered from the lack of it?'