Providence Read online

  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.

  It was almost dark in the gloomy room, and in that moment before the lights were switched on, she thought ahead in panic to her return home, with its docile routines that she longed to bring to a violent end. Her sedulously careful rituals for outwitting the long nights, the exorcism of her various familiars and dreams, were losing their virtue and their ability to soothe her. And yet, she thought, I have so much to look forward to; at least, I have next Monday. Perhaps it will go well, better than I have ever dared imagine. Perhaps I can reintroduce the subject of the cathedrals of France. Perhaps I can initiate some sort of change for the better. I cannot stand it, she thought suddenly. I cannot stand the waiting and the carefulness. It should not be like this. And, immediately, she suppressed the thought.

  The Roger Fry Professor, noting the alarm in her eyes, got up and switched on the lights. Then he sat down again, heavily, beside her, and asked, ‘How does this fit into the Romantic Tradition, Miss Maule?’

  Kitty thought. ‘Impossible to imagine. Romantics never consult others on their plans and behaviour. They are always performing for an unseen audience. Spontaneously. Erratically. Oh, I suppose Chateaubriand attended many meetings, but one thinks of him, with his chair turned aside, brooding, and making notes on the folly of recent history. He was not a man for the barricades.’

  ‘I am,’ said the Roger Fry Professor, surprisingly. ‘I think you have to be. There comes a point at which it is no longer wise to do nothing.’

  Kitty turned her eyes away from Maurice and considered this.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ she asked. ‘What about that wise passiveness we are always hearing about?’

  In the corner of her line of vision she could still see Maurice’s dark blue pullover, and she wondered if it were new – she had not known him to wear it before. But she kept her eyes on the Roger Fry Professor’s permanently red, permanently hurt face, and wondered if he were right.

  ‘Wise passiveness gets you nowhere,’ he said. ‘By the way, do call me David. Wise passiveness gets you left behind. If I hadn’t been so wisely passive a moment ago, I could have got all my lectures over by Christmas. Instead of which I shall have to plough on through the summer when everybody with any sense is sitting on the lawn.’

  ‘But David, you know there wasn’t the slightest chance of the timetable being changed. This proposal is put forward at least twice a year. It’s a way of giving Jennifer something to do. And Professor Redmile loves the idea of upheaval. You remember when he wanted to move the library from the basement to the second floor? No one could think of any reason for stopping him, especially as the librarian wasn’t at the meeting.’

  ‘Yes, how did that one end?’

  ‘In a compromise, I think. Someone suggested a new date-stamping system, and he let it go at that. They never got round to it, of course.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘But that is still not an argument in favour of wise passiveness. Wise passiveness is a front. It means you don’t do any work.’

  ‘The Romantics, of course, were compulsive workers,’ said Kitty. ‘Reams of memoirs, acres of painting, hours of music. They liked to pretend it all came to them in a flash. I find that rather fine, that assumption of effortlessness. It’s a pose, of course, but it has a certain elegance, you must admit.’

  Her expression lightened, for she had found the key to her difficulties, and a pointer to future behaviour. An assumption of effortlessness. Whatever it cost her. The elegance of a behaviour calculated to disarm, never to give offence. No apparent pain. The dandyism of great endeavour combined with a gracious ease of manner. Like a Stoic. Like a Romantic. Why, she thought, in some surprise, they were both. She turned to the Roger Fry Professor and smiled. ‘Thank you, David,’ she said. ‘You’ve given me an idea for my lecture.’

  ‘That may be the first time an idea has ever come out of one of these meetings,’ he replied, and smiled reluctantly as he saw her face, pleasant and composed once more, as he wished it to remain.

  A burst of laughter from the other end of the table signified that the meeting was getting out of hand, had in fact ended some half an hour ago. But now, paradoxically, no one was willing to leave, except Pauline, who was shoving her arms into her cardigan, her pencil held between clenched teeth, her pile of marked essays stacked beside her. Kitty looked round her once more with appreciation. It had been quite a good afternoon. Even if these bad moments came – and she did not know why they should – she would deal with them by means of her new strategy of smiling them out of the way. A strategy of elegance appealed to her, for although it was a way of giving the lie, it was also a way of cherishing the truth.

  Her expression, alert and tender with contemplated possibilities, swept round them once more and this time her eyes encountered those of Maurice, who smiled at her. She smiled back, but did not allow herself to linger over the pleasure of seeing him look at her in this way. Instead, with beating heart, she turned back to the Roger Fry Professor, and said, ‘I like your drawing. But why do you always do the same one?’

  ‘Ah, that is called stylistic mastery. In years to come, young men at Sotheby’s will look through their portfolios and say, “Yes, a typical example”. It may surprise you to know, Kitty, that I despise a great deal of non-representational art. Have you realized that it is very easy to practise something you despise?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it. In that case, why not despise lecturing in the summer? You’ll sail through the whole term.’

  Again, out of the corner of her eye, she could see Maurice noting down something in his diary, and wondered what it was. But her face was still resolutely turned away from him, and she knew that there was no point in her trying to speculate. It was, moreover, not elegant.

  ‘I long,’ said the Roger Fry Professor, ‘for the unqualified admiration of the multitude. I want to be bor
ne from the rostrum and carried aloft in triumph. I want them to believe me as they once believed Savonarola or John Knox. But above all, I want them to turn up in droves and to fight for their seats. In the summer, most of them are sitting on the lawn doing their revision and making plans for their holidays.’

  ‘I didn’t know you enjoyed lecturing.’

  ‘I hate it. I am frightened to death every time. My wife thinks I am an idiot. But I contend you have to be an actor to do it well. Like Maurice Bishop.’

  She smiled at him quite calmly. ‘I don’t know about that. I quite enjoy it myself. Although I must confess to being nervous about this public lecture on the Romantic Tradition. It’s by way of being a test, I think. If I pass the test, I am no longer on probation.’

  He nodded. ‘I can see that. I’m surprised that you enjoy it, though. You seem to me to be too honest to go for that kind of pleasure.’

  ‘It’s the only time I ever really forget myself,’ said Kitty. ‘Real life seems to impose such insuperable problems that it is quite restful to think about something entirely different and for-which I take no responsibility. I did not cause the Romantic Movement, after all. It is not my fault. And no one is going to accuse me of perpetrating it on the rest of the world. It is like the war. I am not guilty. It happened, but I was not there. There is a marvellous freedom in that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Do you feel responsible for everything else?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  But they had no time to discuss this further, for briefcases were being snapped shut and chairs vacated. Someone shoved open a window, to air the room, and there was a sudden draught as the door swung wide. Knocking on the table with a heavy glass ashtray, Professor Redmile attempted to halt their move away from the meeting. ‘One moment, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, as they half turned back to where he was still seated, at the head of the table. ‘One moment. Jennifer has an announcement to make.’

  They looked over their shoulders expectantly. Jennifer cleared her throat, blushed scarlet, and announced, ‘Fire drill will be on the second Wednesday of term. Please see that you know who your fire officers are and where the hydrants are placed.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said the Roger Fry Professor, and with that they were free to go.

  FOUR

  To Kitty’s resolutely professional eye, Adolphe was mainly interesting for its conjunction of eighteenth-century classicism and Romantic melancholy. If she concentrated on this aspect of the story, she could overlook its terribly enfeebling message: that a man gets tired of a woman if she sacrifices everything for him, that such a woman will eventually die of her failure, and that the man will be poisoned by remorse for the rest of his life. She decided to ask her students to analyse the use of words, and to dedicate the last half-hour of her class to a wider investigation of Romantic accidie. She feared that her students might become sentimental on this point and was mainly interested to see if they had any views on it that she had not encountered before.

  These students were three in number. ‘Larter, Mills, and Fairchild,’ said Professor Redmile. ‘Larter an obvious First. Mills, as you know, older than the other two. I understand that he is on a year’s sabbatical from some teacher training college. Miss Fairchild quite promising but obviously not up to the standard of the others. Miss Fairchild will need a little cosseting, Miss Maule. I know I can count on you.’

  They were indeed a very disparate group, hardly a group at all. John Larter, the obvious First, was a disruptive influence but a very necessary one. Painfully thin, excited and excitable, unshaven, anxious to please, chain smoking, irritating, and, Kitty recognized soberly, after she had known him some weeks, a kind, honest, and potentially brilliant scholar, the rarest thing in the world. He would settle down if given the right scholarships, the right fellowships; his filthy jeans and sweater, which did not suit him, for his whole demeanour was too anxious, too adult, too wary, would eventually give way to something more conservative and presentable; he would have his wispy hair properly barbered; he might even learn to withstand the blandishments of the elitist life he would be called upon to live, and thus maintain the extraordinary purity of his intellect. For at the moment there was no mystification in him. That would come later, with public success. If life tripped him up, on the other hand, failed to provide him with those essential opportunities, he would go all the way down, ruin his health, drink too much, make do sadly with substitutes. ‘What did you do in the vacation?’ she had once asked him. ‘Well, I was going to Grenoble to do my Stendhal stuff,’ he had answered. ‘But I met someone on the train and got off when he did. You know how it is.’ He had flashed her a smile that was both malicious and wistful. She feared for him, but recognized that she could do nothing to help him. She was a restraining voice when his words threatened to spin out of control or run out of sense; she restated the position for him, enabling him to start again after a wrong direction too energetically pursued. At the same time, she marvelled at the profundity of his thought, the generosity of his ideas. Theirs was in fact an ideal alliance. He made her feel like a teacher. She did not make him feel like a student.

  Philip Mills had disconcertingly grey hair, which made Kitty unsure of her role. He was a teacher himself and some years older than she was, kind, polite, cautious, bifocalled. She wondered if he were satisfied with his year off, or whether he found them all disappointing. Not Larter, surely? For Mr Mills was a good foil to Larter, argued with him, was irritated by what he called his free association, was given to unseemly exasperation, which he had surely never been able to express so freely. ‘What do you mean, tragic? How can a word be tragic in itself? It can only have tragic implications.’ ‘It can have a tragic sound,’ Larter would cry and immediately produce a flood-tide of tragic-sounding words. ‘You have lost the point again,’ Mills would answer testily. ‘You always go past it. Your analyst has got a lot to answer for.’ At this stage Kitty would intervene; sometimes it would take her a couple of minutes to impose her will on their perfectly valid disagreement and restore a sense of unity to her class. She enjoyed these episodes, for she possessed a sense of fairness, and was happy to see them chattering amicably a few minutes later, or when they bundled their books together at the end of the seminar and went off for a cup of tea. She was on excellent terms with both of them.

  Not so with the troubling Miss Fairchild, who had never been observed to open her mouth unless invited to do so. When Miss Fairchild read an essay, it ran quite sensibly for about seven minutes, ending with a complete sentence and a full stop. Then Miss Fairchild would lift her limpid eyes to Kitty and say, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t have time to write any more.’ There would be no answer to this. For she was so extremely beautiful that it seemed a concession for her to have written anything at all. Even Larter was half hypnotized by her. She had long pre-Raphaelite tendrils of beige hair with which she played throughout the seminar, drawing them back briskly behind her neck as if in preparation for some sort of announcement, or winding a lock round and round her fingers and across her lips, her immense eyelids lowered in obviously meaningful reminiscence. Her skin would retain its even golden character throughout the extremes of heat and cold experienced in Kitty’s little attic room; the greenish eyes would watch unblinkingly as Larter and Mills went for each other. She usually wore a cotton skirt and a dark blue jersey, borrowed from a brother, Kitty supposed, for its sleeves nearly covered her hands. Her full and rather low bosom occupied most of the front of it.

  By mutual and unspoken consent, the two men left her out of their discussions. But Kitty, who was obscurely unsettled by her speechless presence, made sure, like a good hostess, that her questions were regularly addressed to Miss Fairchild. When thus addressed, Miss Fairchild would clear her throat, uncross her legs or shift her position in a sensuous fashion unsuited to the occasion. She would sometimes answer quite reasonably but was clever enough to let Larter run away with her argument, which he did without even noti
cing he had been activated. At such moments Miss Fairchild would give a faint smile, push her hair behind her head, and then let it fall forward, shielding her face. Kitty was rather frightened of her. She recognized that Miss Fairchild was unteachable, and this in itself was frightening. But more than that; Miss Fairchild was unteachable because she felt she knew enough already.

  ‘Will you describe to me,’ said Kitty calmly, ‘some of the tristes équivoques of which Adolphe accuses himself?’

  ‘In fact,’ said Larter, ‘there is no equivocation there at all.’ He took a massive drag on his eighth cigarette. ‘Adolphe decides to seduce this woman, then grows tired of her, and wants to return to a more suitable way of life. She hangs on. His weakness in the face of her suffering is not equivocation. It is cowardice.’

  ‘But Adolphe himself calls this suffering something else. And he is in a state of conflict. Hence, équivoques. Look at the words and trust them more. After all, this is Constant’s story, not yours. And a novel is not simply a confession, you know. It is about the author’s choice of words.’

  Mills pondered. ‘He never uses the word amour.’

  ‘Yes, he does,’ said Kitty, ‘but he is talking about love as a phenomenon, not about his love for this particular woman. I am sorry to hammer this point but you must take notice of how the words are handled, in which context they are used. They will tell you everything. For her part, Ellénore considers Adolphe misérable. What do you make of that? Miss Fairchild?’

  Miss Fairchild raised her startling eyelids and smiled, to herself rather than at the question, as Kitty feared. ‘Well,’ she said, very slowly, ‘this woman is a nuisance. She’s old and she’s foreign. She’s ruining his career. Obviously, she’s being unfair.’

  Kitty, trying to control her annoyance, said, gently, ‘That’s not quite what I meant. None of these words is used accidentally. The word misérable is used because there is a great deal of shame involved. How do we know this?’