Barbara Pym - Less Than Angels

What would this Man? Now, upward will he soar,

And little less than angel, would be more;

Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears

To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

Alexander Pope

A confused impression of English tourists shuffling round a church in Ravenna, peering at mosaics, came to Catherine Oliphant as she sat brooding over her pot of tea. But then she realized that of course she wasnt in Italy, and the shuffling figures werent tourists but men and women from nearby offices, coming away from the counter with their trays and settling down at the tables with hardly a glance at the mosaics on the walls. These were large bright peacocks with spreading tails, each one occupying a little alcove, almost like a side chapel in a cathedral. But why didnt the tray-carriers make some obeisance as they passed the peacocks, or lay offerings of buns, poached eggs and salads on the ground before them? Catherine wondered. Obviously the cult of peacock worship, if it had ever existed, had fallen into disuse.

She poured herself another cup of tea which had become dark and stewed, as she preferred it. She felt no guilt, sitting idly at her table in the window, watching the sun streaming through the amethyst and gold stained-glass borders, while everyone around her gulped and hurried to catch trains home, for she earned her living writing stories and articles for womens magazines and had to draw her inspiration from everyday life, though life itself was sometimes too strong and raw and must be made palatable by fancy, as tough meat may be made tender by mincing.

Catherine was small and thin and thought of herself, with a certain amount of complacency, as looking like Jane Eyre or a Victorian child whose head has been cropped because of scarlet fever. It was natural for her to look a little ragged and untidy, and the fashions of the day, when women in their thirties could dress like girls of twenty in flat-heeled shoes and loose jackets, their hair apparently cut with nail scissors, suited her very well.

Looking out of the window and down into the street, she saw the rush-hour crowds beginning to move towards the bus-stops. Soon they began to take on a human look, to become separate individuals who might even be known to her. This seemed a good deal more likely, though less romantic, in London than in Paris, where it was said that if you sat long enough at a certain caf on the pavement, everybody you had ever known or loved would pass by eventually. Surely though, Catherine thought, peering down, it couldnt be quite everyone, that would be far too emotionally exhausting.

On this spring evening she knew that she couldnt possibly see Tom, her present love, because he was in Africa studying his tribe, but it was odd that when the moment did come, the familiar faces in the crowd should be those of two senior anthropologists she had once met at a learned gathering he had taken her to. They seemed to be walking in the wrong direction, against the hurrying stream, and Catherine would hardly have remembered them if they had not been rather an unusual pair, like comics in a music-hall turn. Professor Fairfax was tall and thin with a rather shrunken-looking head; it was a strange coincidence that the particular tribe he had studied went in for head-shrinking and his students had not been slow to point it out. Dr. Vere, his companion, was small and rotund, the perfect antithesis.

Where could they be going at this time, in the wrong direction? Catherine wondered. Was it perhaps significant that two anthropologists, whose business was to study behaviour in human societies, should find themselves pushing against the stream? She hardly knew how to follow up her observation and made no attempt to do so, only asking herself again where they could be going. Curiosity has its pains as well as its pleasures, and the bitterest of its pains must surely be the inability to follow up everything to its conclusion. Professor Fairfax and Dr. Vere continued to push their way through the crowds, then they disappeared into a side street and were lost from view. Catherine finished her tea and stood up reluctantly to go.

Down in the street a taxi slowed down opposite to where she was waiting to cross over. She could not have known that the distinguished-looking elderly man inside it, stroking his small silver beard, was Felix Byron Mainwaring, one of the older professors of anthropology, now living in retirement in the country.

The taxi turned into the side street and Professor Mainwaring leaned forward in pleasurable anticipation. He told the driver to stop before he had reached the number he really wanted, so that he could see the house from the outside. He tried to imagine how it would strike his colleagues, approaching in their shabby motor-cars or on foot, laden with the paraphernalia of their academic calling, raincoats, brief-cases, files of notes, from which they seemed so unwilling to be parted even on social occasions. Would they raise their eyes to the beautiful Georgian faadewould they even know that it was Georgian?and envy his skill in having persuaded Minnie Foresight that some, at least, of her late husbands wealth could not be more nobly used than in founding a new anthropological library and research centre and endowing a number of fellowships for young men and women? Certainly they could not have done as much. He remembered the first-class railway carriage and the distant church spires of Leamington Spa seen in the greenish light of a spring evening last year, and Mrs. Foresightit was difficult to think of her as Minnie which was surely an unworthy nameleaning back against the white lace antimacassar, her large blue eyes full of admiration and bewilderment while he talked and explained and persuaded Felix was almost chuckling to himself at the memory of it and gave the driver an unnecessarily large tip as he got out of his taxi.

Fairfax and Vere, trudging along on the opposite side of the street, were talking loudly as they approached the house. Each had a penetrating voiceWilliam Vere because, as a refugee, he had been forced to build a new life in a strange country and make his impression in a foreign language, and Gervase Fairfax because he was the youngest of a large family and had always had to assert himself. Now they were discussing their students, by no means unkindly, for there was a friendly rivalry between them in getting the young people fixed up with research grants which would take them into the fieldAfrica, Malaya, Borneo or any remote island where there remained a tribe still to be studied.

Number twenty-threethis must be it, said Fairfax shortly.

Yes, I think so.

They made no comment on the elegance of the house because they did not even glance at it, except to see the number on the door. They were curious to see the placeFelixs Folly, they called it among themselvesbut they had both had a hard day and needed a drink.

I hope everything is ready inside, said Fairfax, glancing at his watch. Its a bad thing to arrive too early, you know. I hope Esther Clovis and her helpers have been cutting sandwiches, or perhaps Felix will have been wise enough to leave that side of it to a catering firm.

I suppose he would hardly concern himself with the domestic side of things, said Vere. But we must hope for the best, He had told his wife that he would not be needing a large meal that evening.

Inside the house there was plenty to eat and drink, but a crisis had arisen. The library had already been open to readers for some days and at this particular moment it happened to be full of young anthropologists, some of them mere students, who had not been invited to the party, which was to take place in the library itself.