Angels and Men by Catherine Fox Page A

But Mara had always wanted blue eyes, like Hester; to be pretty, like Hester. ‘They don’t look very alike, for twins,’ was the other thing people said. Mara had known how to interpret that from the age of about two and a half. She moved again and her face returned to normal. Just tired, with dark circles under the eyes.
    All around the City leaves broke from the trees and fell. Crews moved on the river, and in the marketplace stalls went up one by one. Here and there curtains in college windows opened to reveal pale faces wincing in the sun, wishing they had not drunk so much the previous night. Across the street the Canon – back from matins – filled his kettle. Toast was cooking in the basements where the college had its kitchens, and the smell crept up in the autumn air until it began to steal into the room where Mara was working. Breakfast, she thought, and left her books.
    As she climbed the stairs again some time later, she met the polecat going down. He gave her a look of glassy-eyed contempt, which she returned with a sneer. They said nothing as they passed one another. The wall between their rooms was thin, and from time to time she had heard him swearing articulately and profanely against his background of highbrow church music. He had not deigned to speak to her since that horrible drunken encounter in the corridor. For days she had feared some kind of repetition, or of running into the group of gropers again, but nothing had happened. Gradually her anxiety faded and she began to observe the polecat more closely. He was the first attractive man she had met who did not make it his business to charm the birds off the trees. She returned to her desk, but as she reached for her book, a thought crossed her mind. Her hand hovered over the page. His look – was it his natural expression, or was he imitating her? She ran the scene again mentally, and, at the moment of their passing one another, thought she saw a glint of amusement on his face.
    She was still at her desk some two hours later when there came loud rapping on her door. She went and let Maddy and May in.
    â€˜We’ve come to ask you if you want to come on a bar crawl with us tonight,’ said Maddy. ‘We intend to persuade Wupert and St John the Divine to join us.’ Here Maddy swooned on to Mara’s bed.
    â€˜They won’t come,’ said May, trying on Mara’s hat and looking at herself in the mirror. It was clear from her tone that this was an old argument. ‘They’ll have sermons to prepare, or something.’ She waltzed over to the window.
    â€˜Well, I, for one, rate my charms higher than the attractions of sermon writing,’ said Maddy. ‘Just think how starved they are of female company.’
    â€˜There are women in Coverdale Hall,’ said May.
    â€˜Yes, but what sort of women? Ask yourself. Have you ever met a woman training for the ministry who didn’t look like a warden in a Nazi concentration camp? They all have moustaches and no dress sense. And they all have some unfortunate characteristic entirely of their own. My father had a deaconess once who used to clear her throat like this’ – a demonstration – ‘like a seagull swallowing a marble. And they are all dull. Dull, dull, dull.’
    â€˜So are nine-tenths of the men,’ said May, as she tipped the hat forward over her eyes.
    Mara felt a knot of cold hatred for Maddy, who at that moment turned to look at her. Maddy seemed to read the expression, for at once her tone became placating: ‘I know, but one expects it of men, somehow. We should make every allowance for women clergy, I suppose. They only have men as role models, the poor things. No wonder they’re boring.’
    Mara looked away, out of the window, but Maddy went on: ‘Oh dear – what dreadful things I say! It’s because I think and speak simultaneously. Most people have a mental sieve to filter out the