Angels and Men Read online

  Catherine Fox was educated at Durham and London Universities. She is the author of three adult novels, Angels and Men, The Benefits of Passion and Love for the Lost; a Young Adult fantasy novel, Wolf Tide; and a memoir, Fight the Good Fight: From vicar’s wife to killing machine, which relates her quest to achieve a black belt in judo. She lives in Liverpool, where her husband is dean of the cathedral.

  First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Hamish Hamilton Published in 1997 by Penguin Books

  This edition published in 2014

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  Copyright © Catherine Fox 1995, 1997, 2014

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  Extracts from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

  Scripture quotations taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION are copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, a member of the Hachette UK Group. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a registered trademark of International Bible Society. UK trademark number 1448790.

  Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–0–281–07230–9

  eBook ISBN 978–0–281–07231–6

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  FOR PETE

  Michaelmas Term

  CHAPTER 1

  The City is a galleon sailing on the river. Listen to the wind thrumming in the trees and singing round the chimney-pots. High on the crow’s nest of the cathedral hear the ping-ping-ping of rope against flagpole. This is where the angels pass by. These are the angel paths, the windy walkways. They are clothed with polished air and their faces are the faces of statues, bright as sunlight off water. No one sees them.

  Down below on the streets people are walking to and fro, going about their business. They come in and out of the doors of the houses and colleges, through archways, across cobbles, down the steps and the steep pathways that lead to the river. Sometimes they look back up at the cathedral and castle against the sky, wondering.

  Aunt Jessie could see angels; but then, she was mad. Ran mad in the Welsh revival in 1904. She lies now in a quiet graveyard. Her tombstone says: Nearer my God to thee.

  A few years ago, when Aunt Jessie would have been ninety-something if she had lived, her great-niece, Mara Johns, stepped out through the door of one of the colleges and looked up at the sky. High above in the cathedral tower the clock chimed midday. The notes trembled in the air, and a pigeon rose clapping into the blue October sky before wheeling away behind a rooftop. Mara paused, her face bleached white in the brightness, pale against her dark hair and clothes.

  Ah, this is a day for walking on air and climbing the wind, not for studying. With this thought she was about to run down the steps and off along the street where leaves scratched past on the wind, but the door behind her opened. She turned and saw a priest standing there. Damn. The Principal. He came down the steps towards her, smiling.

  ‘Mara. Settling in all right?’ She nodded. Too late to escape. He began to walk down the street with her. Her mind bobbed impatiently against the sky, a balloon tethered to the ground by his string of urbane small talk. Her work was going well, he trusted; and had she located the libraries, made contact with her tutor, met up with her fellow postgrads? Yes, yes, yes, no. The wind tugged at her skirt. Come on, come on. She saw her chance as they approached the archway which led into the cathedral close. They drew level with it and she stopped. The Principal paused too.

  ‘Off to the cathedral?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Good.’ Well, bugger off, then. But he hovered, frowning slightly. ‘You’re not Morgan Johns’ daughter, are you?’ She scowled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Aha.’ That would explain it, said his expression. ‘I’ve just been reading his article on women’s ordination. Excellent piece. Fine scholar, your father.’ He paused, but she made no comment. ‘He’ll have his enemies, no doubt. Still in parish ministry?’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes, yes. Her mind raced off, following the flight of a seagull as it circled high overhead. She scarcely heard his next sentence. Something about a sherry reception. ‘Yes. Thanks. Goodbye.’ He raised his hand graciously as though bestowing a priestly blessing and she turned and ran through the archway.

  She came out into the sunlit cathedral close. Her heart rose. There was nothing but the wind rushing in the trees and wires. The whole City was alive with it, a vast harp played by an unseen hand. People turned to glance at her as she passed. She watched them, seeing them wonder: Is that the newest fashion, those long dark skirts and black hat? Or is she just a bit odd? She broke into a run again, rounding the corner that led to the cloisters. The sun cast short arches across the floor as she slipped through: dark, light, dark, light, until she reached the great door.

  I’ll never go to church again. It was her own voice speaking in her memory on the day she had broken with the sect. She felt her face harden, her pale eyes glinting, and saw her father turning away and saying nothing at all. If I had been any poxy parishioner of his he would have argued with me, or asked me why. He was just giving her room, of course. Letting her make her own choices. But it always left her feeling as if she could have been dead to him. It was over three years ago, but she still felt the coldness of it.

  Some people passed out through the door. Suddenly she stepped forward. Why must everything be done with reference to her father? She squeezed past a woman in the doorway and entered. This year is for myself, not for him. She was in the cathedral.

  It swallowed everything, all noise and hurry, muffling the footfalls and voices. The sounds rose to the great vaulted ceiling and vanished. The stones of the floor were worn by countless forgotten feet, the centuries of the faithful. She listened for a whisper of them in the huge cave of the cathedral as it echoed with its tide of visitors.

  Then she began to walk towards the chancel. It felt like visiting the house where you grew up. Everywhere there were touches of recognition: I remember that smell, that colour, that ray of light. A tall clergyman inclined his head at her as she entered the chancel. She shot him a look: Leave me alone. He read the message and blinked. She walked on. This was where the choir sat service by service in their carved wooden stalls. Behind them the organ pipes rose up, decorated bright with red and gold. At that moment someone began to play. The notes climbed higher and higher, lingering and merging until the whole chancel was one mounting sound. The playing stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but the chords echoed on for a moment like the sound of the sea in a shell. Then the silence ebbed back.

  By now she had reached the communion rails and was standing looking at the altar. How empty it was, as though God had been called temporarily away. Was that the faint smell of wine lingering? The sun came blazing through a south window, and she walked into it away from the roped-off altar.

  At last her eyes wandered
back down the chancel. A young man was kneeling in one of the choir stalls in a shaft of sunlight. She had not noticed him earlier. His hands were grasping the pew in front, and his dark head was bowed, resting on them. She looked away in embarrassment, as though she had caught sight of some intimate act; but then her eyes strayed back again, and suddenly he raised his head, fixing dark eyes on the source of light. For a moment he was still, burning in the sun like an icon, then he sat back into the shadow.

  She turned and slipped away, making for the door as swiftly as she could, leaving the cathedral and heading for the college. She could feel her heart pounding again. Had she ever seen him before?

  The bells called out once more across the City. Mara disappeared into a building. Jesus College, said the stone above the door. The windows stared. Behind some of them students were walking back and forth unpacking books and clothes. Halfway up the building Mara appeared briefly at another window as she climbed the stairs. Across the street, other windows stared back from one of the houses on the cathedral close. A large geranium stood in a quiet room. At another window the Canon rinsed a teacup at his sink. A pigeon swept past, then up, up, and over the rooftop where it glided along the backs of the college buildings that looked down over the river far below.

  Mara was back in her room on the top floor, her dark head bent over a book. The pages were blank, and in her left hand she held a pencil. She was drawing. On the page tiny figures began to form. Some were like mythical beasts or parts of architectural plans, others like old alchemical drawings. It could almost have been writing, secret hieroglyphs, a record of her thoughts in a language of her own.

  An apple tree. The fruit nestled in the wreaths of leaves like jewels in an ornate setting. I could see an apple tree out of my bedroom at the vicarage at home. The wasps ate the fruit that fell. This was one of the garden’s secret horrors – the perfect skin gleaming on the lawn, but when you rolled it over it was gnawed out and empty, like the head of a doll with empty eye-sockets hiding in the grass.

  The tree stood complete on the page. It looked like a woodcut from a seventeenth-century pamphlet. A pamphlet called something like ‘The Fruit of the Tree of LIFE: Or The Way Back through the Flaming Sword, being a Reply to So-and-so his Book . . .’ Too much reading. I need to be with people. She began drawing a branch of a tree with a bird roosting there. She needed people; not for company, but to define herself against, as markers for the boundaries of her personality.

  She flipped back through the pages, reminded of the first time she had used this as a method of sorting her thoughts out.

  ‘Why don’t you draw me something?’ the psychiatrist had asked. Maybe he’d been worn out by this silent obstinate fourteen-year-old. ‘Draw me a picture of your father.’ But she wasn’t going to be caught out that easily. To foil him she scribbled a little stick man. ‘Draw your mother.’ Another stick man. She drew him her sister, her teacher, a nurse, a farmer, a stranger. A row of little identical stick men. There was a long silence. She folded her arms smugly.

  ‘Look at what you’ve done,’ he said. She looked. Suddenly the significance leapt out. All the same. Blank. Interchangeable. A stranger meant as much to her as her mother. Her hand holding the pencil had started to tremble.

  Surely I’ve changed a little since then? She sat frowning for a moment, then closed the book and walked across to the open window. Down on the terrace below small groups of people were standing. They looked awkward. New students just arrived, some still accompanied by their parents. It was like an airport. Just go. Wave them off and go. Don’t stand around drinking tea from the college cups delaying your children’s departure. Wave them through passport control and on to the plane and off, up through the clouds to a new world.

  She looked down on them, seeing the tops of their heads. Voices were murmuring, but no words reached her. In her mind she floated down until she was hovering above the talking groups. Back and forth go the questions in a kind of desperate, verbal gavotte, grouping, moving on, regrouping. I remember it from Cambridge. How terrible to be an undergraduate. A fresher. This time I’ll stay out of the way until it is all over. All alone like a princess in an iron tower. Unless I make a new beginning here, take a risk and try to make some friends for a change?

  Almost at once there was a knock at the door, as though someone were coming to test this tentative thought. Mara went to open it. A breathless girl stood there holding out an invitation card.

  ‘Hi! Welcome to Jesus College. My name’s Sue and I’m from the Christian Union.’ Mara felt herself tense. ‘We’re having a tea party, and I wondered if you’d like to come?’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  The girl flushed, but managed to hold out a different card to Mara. ‘Well, maybe I can leave you this? It’s a programme of this term’s events.’

  ‘I said I’m not interested.’

  The girl gave a little bubbly laugh. Mara could see tears starting in her eyes. Take it. Just take the card, for God’s sake. You can always throw it away. But she couldn’t bring herself to accept it.

  ‘Well, sorry to have bothered you.’

  The girl’s footsteps scurried off down the stairs. Mara shut the door. Her scalp was prickling at her unnecessary harshness. But I can’t help it. If it had been any other group – the Students’ Union, the Boat Club, even the sodding Tolkien Society . . . Why am I still so hysterical about it all?

  She crossed back to her desk and sat with her head in her hands. Gradually she admitted that the girl’s earnest manner had reminded her of her twin sister. She could picture that same look on Hester’s face as she had begged her to go to those praise meetings. Miracles, healings, baptism in the Holy Spirit. Please, Mara. Just try it. Eventually she went, sneering at first, then suddenly and violently convinced. She saw a vision. For two months she had walked on air, a handmaid of the Lord. But somehow it had not lasted. Lies. All lies. Over three years ago.

  Mara went back to the window again. She could freeze off the self-assured without a pang, but people like Sue were different. She hated herself for snubbing them. There were two of the same type living in the room next door, quiet studious young women in their Finals year who had smiled nervously at her and said ‘Hello’ before darting back into their room again. Field mice. Suddenly a thought struck her, and her lips twisted a little. What if she had been put on the same corridor because someone saw her in that light? The studious mousy postgraduate next to the serious mousy Finals students. A little murine blue-stocking enclave, books and cocoa and early nights.

  There was a loud and naughty laugh from the lawn below. She looked down and saw a tall, red-haired girl with a small crowd around her. Beside her was a shorter girl with brown curly hair and a wide-eyed pretty-pretty look, like an Edwardian china doll. The tall red-head said something, and the other laughed. Now the red-head laughed again. It was the sort of laugh that drew others in, and soon even those not close enough to hear what was being said were smiling. Put them in the hyena section. They don’t belong up here. But then Mara felt a pang, like the little match-girl outside in the cold watching Christmas through the windows. What would it be like to have those two as friends?

  Look, they must have been called in. She watched as the last students and their parents disappeared beneath her into the college. Someone closed the French windows and the murmuring voices were hushed. The wind worried on through the trees. She found herself thinking about the curly-haired girl. A china doll, smiling and showing its pearly little teeth. A row of china dolls, she thought suddenly. Then she knew. The girl was the oldest daughter of the vicar of a parish near her father’s. She probably even went to the same school as I did. What will she know about me? What will she have heard? This year will not be the blank volume I have designed for myself. There is already a preface. She stood up and closed the window, and walked back to her desk. As the light gradually faded she was still there, reading and making notes with close concentration. The cathedral clock chimed the passing h
ours, three, four, five, six. All around the roofs and chimney-pots the wind rushed free.

  At about eight she sat back and told herself to do what she had been avoiding. Go and ask for that book. She had looked for a particular volume in the college library only to discover that it had been taken out by one of the tutors in Coverdale Hall, the City’s Anglican theological college. Mara had realized to her dismay shortly after arriving that Coverdale was not only next door to Jesus, but it was actually part of the same foundation. Was there no escaping the long arm and limp wrist of Anglicanism? Her door swung shut behind her.

  I hate going to meet people, she thought as she ran down the stairs. Even the simplest utterance seems to take on a peculiar ring. The more I try to be normal the more dangerous I feel, like Morgan le Fay interrupting a sherry party. She passed through several corridors, moving, she supposed, roughly parallel to the street outside. This must once have been a series of different houses. She thought of the previous occupants – what if they had looked up from their papers in the breakfast room one morning and seen into the future? Dozens of strangely dressed young people appearing suddenly through one wall, hurrying past, and vanishing through another. Up another set of stairs she went, peering at doors until she found one which said ‘Rev. Dr James Mowbray’.

  ‘Do try to be nice, darling,’ pleaded her mother’s voice in her mind. Mara knocked. Someone called her in, and she entered the flat. It was like the study of some eighteenth-century intellectual. Her glance took in green walls with framed prints, faded rugs, rank on rank of books, and an old brown globe. A man stood under a light like a portrait of himself, an old seafarer, maps and charts about him. Outside the wind was a restless sea. He greeted her inquiringly. On the sofa facing her was a young man. A flash of recognition – the man in the cathedral.

  ‘How can I help you?’ Dr Mowbray asked. The young man burned on the edge of her vision.