Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym Read Free Book Online Page B

not come easily as yet.
    ‘No, not of Obligation, but of Devotion,’ said Rhoda, unable to help sounding a little smug.
    ‘Well I never,’ said Mabel, rather ruffled. ‘I suppose you didn’t have a cup of tea before you went out?’
    ‘Well, hardly,’ said Rhoda, but she too remembered the old Low Church days of their girlhood, when a tray of tea and even a plate of thin bread-and-butter was put out for the early church-goers. ‘I will fry myself an egg,’ she declared. She felt slightly resentful, as if her sister should have offered to fry it for her, but Mabel, piqued at what seemed to be Rhoda’s deceit, sat firmly reading the Daily Graphic .
    Malcolm and Deirdre finished their breakfast and got ready to go to their work. Malcolm always travelled to the City by Underground, but Deirdre preferred the bus ride although it was much slower. She sat in a kind of dream, an anthropological book open on her lap, realizing that it was a lovely morning but not thinking about anything in particular. She was conscious of little vague longings and a slight feeling of discontent, but these were not unusual. She wished she were cleverer and had a flat of her own and she would have liked to be in love. She remembered that she was going out to the theatre that evening with a friend of Malcolm’s, who was rather fond of her in a dull sort of way, but the prospect did not fill her with any particular excitement. Bernard Springe was the kind of young man her mother and aunt regarded as ‘suitable’, which was enough to damn him in Deirdre’s eyes. Stiil, it might be a fitting occasion to wear her new dress, which had a strapless bodice.
    When she arrived at the school of anthropology, or rather the corner of some other building which was all that the college authorities could allow to the study of this new and daring subject, she found two third-year students, Vanessa Eaves and Primrose Cutbush, preparing to go to a seminar. This barbarous ceremony, possibly a throwback to the days when Chrisdans were flung to the lions, took place every week.
    Somebody prepared and read a paper on a given subjcct, after which everybody else took great pleasure in tearing it and its author to pieces and contributed their own views on various matters not always entirely relevant.
    Deirdre listened with a certain amount of awe to the conversation of the two girls. Primrose, a tall fair Amazon, had strong political views, while Vanessa, who was dark and languorous, was generally in the throes of some desperate love affair. Today, it seemed, she had a hangover and was due to read a paper at the seminar.
    ‘I feel exquisitely brittle,’ she moaned, ‘as if I were spun out of Venetian glass and the merest breath would shatter me,’
    ‘If you really haven’t finished your paper you can expect some rough handling from Fairfax,’ said Primrose brusquely.
    ‘I know—just think of the exquisite agony of it! The heavy sarcasm of that special voice he puts on—do you suppose he practises it? I wronder if he’ll be wearing his rough tweedy suit—so manly , isn’t it,’
    ‘I can’t think what you see in Professor Fairfax,’ said Primrose sensibly. ‘He isn’t even good-looking,’
    ‘I know, bless him,’ murmured Vanessa in a fond silly tone, ‘but ugly people can be so desperately attractive, I always think.’
    Deirdre listened scornfully now. She had thought that only female undergraduates at Oxford talked in this affected way, but then she remembered that Vanessa lived in Kensington from wrhich anything might come. She settled herself down to work in the dark depressing room, which had many tattered books in shelves round the walls and some moth-eaten African masks, put there either to inspire the students in their work or because no museum really wanted them. There was even the skeleton of a small animal, a relic of the days when the room had been used for the study of Zoology.
    As the morning went on, Deirdre was not alone in her