Angels and Men by Catherine Fox Page A

with downcast eyes to Johnny.
    â€˜Of course he is,’ murmured May, but this, apparently, was going too far. Johnny rounded on her.
    â€˜You watch it, young lady.’ There was a tense silence, and although he had not raised his voice, Mara remembered one of her earliest impressions of him from their meeting in Dr Mowbray’s study: that he had a quick temper. This was a mere spark, but enough to alarm Maddy. Mara saw her anxious look. It seemed odd that Maddy should be so nervous of anger, when so much of her behaviour seemed deliberately to provoke it.
    â€˜Sorry,’ said May unrepentantly. She and Johnny eyed one another.
    â€˜What about tea?’ asked Maddy, bursting in on the silence she was unable to bear. ‘That universal remedy to all wrongs, that panacea . A Greek word,’ she said, turning to Joanna, ‘meaning “universal remedy to all wrongs”. Who’d like some?’
    â€˜Please,’ said Johnny.
    Mara’s attention had been diverted, so she had not seen how the staring match had ended. May was looking nonchalant – but was she blushing? Something had passed between the two. She looked at Joanna.
    â€˜So you’ve done Greek?’ Joanna asked Johnny. Yes, she had seen something she did not like (a blown kiss?), and was now bending his attention back to herself, thought Mara.
    â€˜For his sins,’ said Maddy, not allowing this to happen. ‘And what a lot of Greek he has done. Tea, Joanna? Mara?’
    Mara declined, and stood up to leave. As she was crossing the room, she saw Johnny give her a meaning look. I want a word with you, it said. She ignored him, and left. If it was that important, he could come and find her later.
    As she climbed the stairs back to her room, she began to doubt her own assessment of Joanna. Perhaps she was so jaundiced by her previous encounters with the charismatic Christians of the sect that she automatically tarred them all with the same brush. The girl might simply be unfortunate, not sinister. A fellow lame duck. She tried to remind herself that fundamentalists were not a subhuman life form. Plenty of students were unsettled by the implications of their academic studies. And plenty more were attracted to attractive men. She went over to her window and looked out, thinking she would never know objectively what the girl was like. Maybe all she could see in Joanna was her own projected fears. The night was dark. It was Hallowe’en, and the lit-up windows across the river gleamed like jack-o’-lantern eyes.

CHAPTER 6
    The days of early November passed by. Most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Big black crows like tattered clergymen congregated in the empty branches, and the students went about in overcoats they had borrowed from their fathers. Some of the coats had walked around the City twenty-five years earlier when they were new and smart. Now the voice of fashion had resurrected them to walk along the same streets again.
    Mara was wearing her grandfather’s long black cloak. The wind blew and the cloak swirled, slowing her progress. As a child she had held the sides of her coat out like wings on days like these, half believing the wind would pick her up and whirl her away. In her mind’s eye she had learnt to walk along above the rooftops, seeing the world spread out on all sides. I’m losing the knack, she thought. An empty can went clattering down the street. Other people tie me down. But it won’t be much work to cut myself free and dance off across the sky. I’m only here for a year, after all. I will keep all these people in my memory like a trunk full of things in the attic. A sudden gust of wind whisked her hat away, and she chased it as it rolled along the gutter. It came to rest outside the door under Maddy’s and May’s window as though it was meant to be . She had been intending for several days to visit her friends.
    She entered the room. There were books