Free Providence by Anita Brookner Page B

hoped. Miss Fairchild being inexplicably absent, Larter and Mills had argued without restraint, both revealing rather more bad temper than was proper to the occasion. They were tired; it was getting near the end of term, and they had grown pale on cheap food and not enough fresh air. Kitty had decided to cut the afternoon short, for it would not get better, and had called a final class for the following week. This had not been a popular suggestion, and later that day Redmile had asked her how she was getting on. ‘Very well,’ she had said, smiling at him. ‘We are all looking forward to your lecture, Miss Maule.’ This was patently false, so she went on smiling at him. ‘Great stuff. Great stuff.’ He always said this. Then his eyes litup as his secretary approached with a file. ‘Have you got the latest estimates, Jennifer? Well, I mustn’t keep you, Miss Maule. And I think Jennifer has something to show me. The New Building, you know.’ And he was gone.
    Kitty felt a sort of irritated langour, very different from her usual state of calm if timid determination. Although she looked on Caroline’s activities sternly, she wondered with genuine humility if she could ever be such a woman, delighting in her own appearance, devoting much time and effort to embellishing it, regarding her small outing as a genuine point of reference in the day, fascinated by her ultimate fate and waiting for others to bring it about. Kitty had frequently felt that she lacked some essential feminine quality, that this resided in the folklore passed on by women who possessed a knowledge that she was forced to supplement by reading books. She had sometimes, but with a curious sense of secrecy, scanned the advice columns in the magazines she bought for Louise, even studied the horoscopes. She knew that she had chosen a more severe path of ascertainable information, but she was lured by the stratagems, the reassurances, the promises of that odd sub-consciousness shared greedily by, she supposed, women with a surer touch than herself. There must be ways of getting what she wanted, but she did not know what they were. This visit to the clairvoyant held out the dangerous attraction of such a hidden way, just as Caroline, with her confident and gratuitous self-adornment, represented another mode of being. As if Caroline, regarding herself as a prize, were simply waiting for someone to come and claim her. Whereas Kitty usually felt that she was the one who had to prove her worth, her desirability, her merit, her right. As if she lived in a world where moral imperatives obtained. She felt that she was serving an apprenticeship in more ways than one, and that, by analogy, she had to work hard onall fronts. She longed to join that more confident majority that made assumptions, that imposed a sense of superiority whether it had any basis in fact or not. She had been amused but also genuinely impressed by a small incident in the newspaper shop a few days previously. The girl behind the counter, a stringy and exhausted blonde, was selling a packet of cigarettes to a handsome young labourer from a nearby building site. The man had held out a ten-pound note. ‘Oh Christ,’ said the girl, ‘haven’t you got anything smaller? I’ll have to go next door for some change.’ ‘So what?’ he grinned. ‘Aren’t I worth it?’ ‘Dunno,’ said the girl, without a change of expression. ‘Haven’t tried you yet, have I?’ They were both delighted with this exchange. Kitty had joined in the laughter but had felt prim, knowing that she could never achieve such ease of manner, knowing also that on occasions it might be appropriate.
    They were passing this same shop on their way to the clairvoyant. Caroline undulated like a siren, clutching her bag, her scarves, touching her chains, her feet slipping about in ridiculously fragile sandals. From time to time she had to steady herself by hanging on to Kitty who assumed a martyr-like pose of rigid stillness until