Free Angels and Men by Catherine Fox Page B

to have to explain that remark.’ He was no longer smiling.
    She shrugged.
    â€˜No, no. Come along, I’m afraid that’s not good enough. If you’re going to dish out insults like that, I think I’m entitled to an explanation.’ Perhaps he had been a teacher? She drank some of her drink. ‘Well?’
    â€˜How much feminist literature have you actually read?’ she asked.
    â€˜I think I have a fair grasp of feminist principles,’ he said after a slight pause.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Yes. Stop laughing, Whitaker,’ and he began with great confidence to outline what he thought they were. No, not a teacher: a barrister. She watched him dispassionately as his arguments got flimsier. He stopped before he was really floundering and held up his hands in surrender. ‘All right. Tell me about feminism,’ he said with his charming smile once more in place.
    â€˜Read about it.’ She stood up, thanked Johnny for the drink, and walked off. Being an unpleasant young woman, however, she did not leave the bar completely, but waited at the top of the stairs to hear what they would say.
    Rupert’s voice carried up to her with wonderful clarity: ‘Good God. What a dreadful girl! That was like being savaged by a clam.’
    They both began to laugh.
    â€˜Serves you right,’ came Johnny’s voice.
    â€˜What did I do? I have never in my life – I suppose she was eating out of your hand before I arrived?’
    â€˜Of course. You think I’m a rookie, or something?’
    Mara’s face burned. Then she jumped as someone opened the door to come down the steps.
    â€˜Whitaker, you’re supposed to be an ordinand,’ she heard Rupert say as she stepped out into the corridor. ‘You can’t seduce every lame duck you come across just because it’s a challenge.’
    â€˜Seduce? Me?’ More laughter, then the door swung shut on the students going down to the bar.
    For a moment she was unable to move, then she walked to a door which led out on to the terrace behind the college. She stepped out into the night and stood motionless. The stars looked down, remote and unfeeling, from above the rooftops.

CHAPTER 5
    Several days later Mara was searching along the shelves in the basement of the library on Palace Green. The librarian had given her a key and allowed her to wander freely among the outsize and old books. The room was completely silent, apart from the buzzing of a strip light. She was all alone. You could go mad down here. Maybe she would pull a volume off a shelf and see a manic eye gleaming through on the other side.
    Her eyes wandered along the book spines, and she craned her neck this way and that. If she ruled the world, then a law would be passed which compelled publishers to print all book titles one way: either up or down the spine. She reached an old folio volume, and intrigued, pulled it from the shelf. The Memorable Works of a Son of Thunder and Consolation . It appeared to be the collected writings of an early Quaker. She opened it at random, and read:
    This is the day of thy visitation, O Nation, wherein the Lord speaks to thee by the mouth of his servants in word and writing . . . The Lord will overturn, overturn the nation, and will create new heavens and new earth . . . and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh, and the slain of him will be many . . . the fire is kindled and the sword is drawn . . .
    She closed the volume, and hugged it. Here was raw fanaticism, the fiery vision of the end of the age. The fire is kindled and the sword is drawn . The writer was long dead, buried perhaps in some steep Quaker burial ground under the bowing grass. She looked at the crumbling calfskin binding and the browned pages. What would the writer have felt if he could have known that some three hundred years later she would be there studying his tracts as part of a research project? She tried to cast her mind forward three