Air and Angels Read Free Page B

between the cook and the boy over utensils, may equally well signify riot, sickness, madness or sudden death.
    In her innermost heart, she is still terrified of this bright, passionate, impenetrably strange country.She has merely learned to overlay her fears with apparent calm and indifference.
    ‘The flowerbeds are very gay again,’ she bends her head to write, ‘they sow seeds one day and it seems they are all but up the next! I am still unused to the sight of hibiscus and plumbago and bougainvillea, cheek by jowl with pansies, asters, petunias and snapdragons.’
    Kitty dozes, to the plashing of the fountainbeneath her window. But in the Hills, there is always water, the ceaseless tumbling of it, down between the tree trunks into the river that flows far below. And the river forms the background to everything, though after a day or two there, one simply ceases to notice it.
    In the end, between the fountain and the slight stirring of the breeze, she does fall soundly asleep. Come in to her some timelater, Lady Moorehead is taken aback by the extreme whiteness of her daughter’s skin, its delicacy. But above all, by the fact that she looks so young, so child-like again in sleep, and touches a finger to her cheek, and then bends to kiss her. Kitty stirs, but does not wake, and Eleanor Moorehead leaves the room quietly troubled, and rendered indecisive all over again by the subject that hasbeen so preoccupying her, and about which she had all but made up her mind to speak to Lewis that night.
    For what has flared up anew within her, fierce and fresh, is helpless love for her child, and the desperation of having Kitty, and only Kitty, as the focus of all her hopes and longings.
    In her room, she sits again, without calling for the shutters to be opened, upright and tense, and thinksthat time is cruel. It is a thought she is not particularly aware of having had in relation to herself before, so that the truth of it strikes her all the more forcefully.

3
    THE VERGER was lifting the taper to light the candles on either side of the altar, and as they sprang to life, so did Giorgione’s great picture that stood behind it. Pools of light fell here and there, on the sallow face of the potentate and the nut-brown face of the shepherd, upturned in adoration and on the gilded Offerings, and the serene young Madonna, the waxen-fleshed child and the roseatecherubs. Outside the lighted areas, the remainder of the picture was in gloom, though it was a coloured gloom, deep brown and indigo and the red-brown of old, dried blood.
    It was a formal expression of religious sentiment, a glorious, distant thing. There was nothing personal, nothing intimate about it, and it neither invited nor repelled belief, it was simply a statement. Here, it said, is theWord made flesh; bow down and adore.
    Only in the ecstasy of the expression of one kneeling figure, of no importance, in the bewilderment and humility and rapture that transformed it from an earthbound human being to one potentially immortal, did Thomas ever catch a glimpse of the glory of it all, only this obscure and shadowy corner moved him to more than dutiful admiration.
    Now, in cassockand surplice, seated in his stall, he looked up at it again, and thought, yes, I see it. It is still there and it will never fade or be unavailable to me. In that one face …
    The choir stood to sing the Magnificat. In the body of the chapel, a dozen worshippers knelt in the dimness. But the music and the voices would be raised, the worship conducted, regardless of whether there were eight or eighthundred in the congregation, and that pleased and satisfied him, that things were ordered as they should be.
    He himself felt no religious fervour. What uplifted him, moved him to praise and wonder, was all elsewhere and had long been so, in a world quite outside this building, these people, this order of service. He had never truly felt even the young believer’s ardour. He did not feel guiltyabout this. He