The Time of the Angels

by Iris Murdoch

  “Whatever Carel believes,” said Marcus, “he certainly believes it with passion.”

  “Precisely. I would myself conjecture that your brother is a profoundly religious man,” said the Bishop.

  “Oh, rubbish!” said Norah.

  “But what is it that he believes?” said Marcus. “That still matters, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yes and no,” said the Bishop. He was scraping the cheese out of his ring with a delicate finger nail.

  “What about Jesus Christ?” said Norah.

  The Bishop frowned slightly. “As I was saying, we have to consider this time as an interregnum. It is a time when, as one might put it, mankind is growing up. The particular historical nature of Christianity poses intellectual problems which are also spiritual problems. Much of the symbolism of theology which was an aid to understanding in earlier and simpler times is, in this scientific age, simply a barrier to belief. It has become something positively misleading. Our symbolism must change. This after all is nothing new, it is a necessity which the Church has always understood. God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.”

  “You haven’t exactly answered my question,” said Norah, “but never mind. I think if you’re going to ditch Jesus you ought to say so in plain terms. The religion is the myth.”

  “No mystic has ever thought so,” said the Bishop, “and whom can we better believe? ‘Meek darkness be thy mirror’. Those who have come nearest to God have spoken of blackness, even of emptiness. Symbolism falls away. There is a profound truth here. Obedience to God must be an obedience without trimmings, an obedience, in a sense, for nothing.”

  “I’d rather say he doesn’t exist and be done with it,” said Norah. “But are we all supposed to become mystics then?”

  “It is a time of trial,” said the Bishop. “Many are called but few are chosen. The Church will have to endure a very painful transformation. And things will become worse yet before they are better. We shall sorely need our faith. But the Lord will turn again the captivity of Zion.”

  “That’s as may be,” said Norah. “I think myself this scientific age needs to hear more about morality and less about the Lord.”

  The Bishop smiled. “I am not speaking of course about a person,” he said. “A person could be dispensed with. Indeed must be dispensed with. What we have to experience is not the destruction but the purification of our beliefs. The human spirit has certain deep needs. Do not misunderstand me when I say that morality is not enough. It was the mistake of the Enlightenment to imagine that God could be characterized simply as the guarantor of the moral order. But our need for God is something which transcends morality. The slightest acquaintance with modern psychology shows us that this is not a slogan but a fact. We are less naive than we were about goodness. We are less naive than we were about sanctity. What measures man as a spiritual being is not his conventional goodness and badness but the genuineness of his hunger for God. How does Jehovah answer Job? ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ is not an argument which concerns morality.”

  “Well, I’ve always thought it a very bad argument,” said Norah. “Goodness is good conduct and we all know what that is. I think you people are playing with fire. Coffee?”

  The turn of the conversation had upset Marcus. He did not like to hear the Bishop talking like this, he was almost shocked by it. It occurred to him now how much it mattered to him that all that business should still go on in the old way. He did not believe in the redeeming blood of Jesus, he did not believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but he wanted other people to believe. He wanted the old structure to continue there beside him, near by, something he could occasionally reach out and touch with his hand. But now it seemed that behind the scenes it was all being unobtrusively dismantled. That they should be deciding that God was not a person, that they should be quietly demoting Jesus Christ, this made him feel almost frightened.

  Norah was saying something, offering him a coffee-cup. A ship’s siren was booming on the river, somewhere outside in the foggy dark. The warm well-lighted well-curtained room seemed suddenly to be spinning with the immobile motion of a top. Marcus gripped the table. “But suppose,” he said to the Bishop, “suppose the truth about human life were just something terrible, something appalling which one would be destroyed by contemplating? You’ve taken away all the guarantees.”

  The Bishop laughed. “That’s where faith comes in.”

  “The supposition is meaningless,” said Norah. “Here, take your coffee.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  MURIEL FINISHED READING, tossed the last sheet down, and looked at Elizabeth. She had read to some twenty stanzas and had found herself extraordinary moved by her own poem. Towards the end her voice had quite faltered with emotion.

  They were sitting on the floor on either side of the fire in Elizabeth’s room. The chaise-longue, against which Elizabeth was leaning her back, faced the fireplace and boxed them snugly in. Muriel, who was sitting up against the Chinese screen, switched off the reading-lamp behind her. The blazing fire sufficiently lit the room, casting quick splashes of golden light on to Elizabeth’s face and making fugitive shadows rush to the corners of the ceiling. The curtains were pulled though it was still afternoon.

  There was a silence. Then Elizabeth said, “It’s rather obscure isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it’s obscure. It’s not half as obscure as most modern stuff.”

  “Have you made a plan of the whole thing?”

  “No, I told you. It just grows.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to know where you’re going?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I wonder if you are in love with somebody.”

  “I’m not in love! I’ve told you that too.”

  Muriel desperately wanted Elizabeth to tell her that the poem was good. That was all that she wanted to hear. Now with a dull half-conscious obstinacy which Muriel felt and saw as clearly as if it were a physical emanation Elizabeth was preparing to say anything and everything about the poem except that.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter!” said Muriel. She got up abruptly, crumpled the scattered sheets together in her hand and threw them over the back of the chaise-longue. Then she said, “Sorry, Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth seemed not to have noticed. She sat staring into the fire, her eyes huge with some kind of private puzzlement. She shifted restlessly, undulating her body, caressing her legs. A long sigh turned into a yawn. Then she said “Ye-e-es” half under her breath. Muriel looked down at her with exasperation. She hated these times when Elizabeth was “switched off". It seemed to her that they came more often now. A sort of apathetic coldness, a vagueness, would drift over her cousin like a cloud. Her limbs would creep and twitch, her eyes fail to focus, and her will be present only as an animal determination to evade contact, to deny satisfaction. All that remained undimmed then was her beauty, which glowed with the soft chill of a wax effigy. There was still something dreadfully fascinating about this artificial deadened Elizabeth.

  Was the poem any good, Muriel wondered. Could one really tell with one’s own stuff? She was well aware of the golden glow of ideal intention which, for the artist, covers so often the achieved reality of his own art so that it is hard to see the contours of what he has done amid the shimmering lights of what he might have done. Sometimes she felt that her work was good, and felt, what was perhaps even more important, that she was on the road, that she had got a technique and knew how to improve. She was no longer a scribbler down of random inspirations. She knew now how to work, steadily and for hours on end, like a carpenter or a shoemaker. She could dissolve and reassemble her best felicities without a craven fear of spoiling them. She could even a little compel and invite those dark regions out of which the images drifted like miraculous kites. She felt all this at times. At other times, and for no special reason, it was all dust and ashes. She had a versifying facility
but there was nothing solid there upon which she could rest a lever to lift herself up into the free air of real poetry, though she should work till doomsday. It would all end in nothing.

  Muriel had been amused and then annoyed by Elizabeth’s insistence earlier in the day that Muriel must be in love. This was something in fact which Elizabeth said at regular intervals, interpreting as symptoms some trifling vagueness or some ephemeral euphoria on her cousin’s part. Muriel was always touched on these occasions by a sense that Elizabeth exclaimed so much about it because she constantly feared that it might happen. Muriel provided the reassurance that was wanted, and the subject was dropped. This time, however, Elizabeth was being more than usually hard to convince. “Who, after all, could I possibly be in love with?” Muriel had asked her. Elizabeth had looked enigmatic and had later interrupted the reading of the poem to point out that Muriel’s verses were a further piece of evidence.

  Muriel had reflected a good deal afterwards about her curious encounter with Leo Peshkov. Since the scene by the river she had seen little of him, she thought he had been away, neither had sought the other’s company. The scene itself had amused her, even excited her by a harsh bizarre quality, a touch of an oddness, which she felt missing from her life; but about the boy she felt detached to the point of coldness. His physical youthfulness repelled her and she found his pertness and his affected cynicism unattractive. Muriel had in her constitution a kind of dignity which demanded slow approaches, reticences, subtlety. With a younger person too it was essential that she should be in control. She could not altogether forgive Leo for having surprised her, though she laughed a little about it as well. She was prepared to be “amused” by Leo and to admire his beauty as she might have admired an animal or a work of art. But on the whole she found him “juvenile” and there was nothing about him which touched her heart.

  When Elizabeth had started this latest “you’re in love” campaign the image that had in fact quite suddenly surged up, startling Muriel for a moment, had been that of Eugene Peshkov. Of course Muriel was not in love, least of all with a broken-down janitor, old enough to be her father, with whom she had only talked a few times. Yet some warmth of which the source was Eugene did for her pervade the house. Some plainness about him, some absolute simplicity attracted her. He seemed to represent that world of thoughtless affections and free happy laughter and dogs passing by in the street from which she felt herself to be totally separated. Sometimes she thought, but hopelessly, that it might be just this separation which damned her poetry. Whatever the barrier was, Eugene was on the other side of it, an emblem of something which Muriel wanted but which her nature forbade her to have. But also simply as himself he moved her, she liked his drooping moustaches, his old-fashioned politeness, the curious way he bowed to her, his big bland kindly face and his extremely dirty corduroy trousers. He was an utterly harmless and friendly presence, like a Russian house spirit, or Domovoi, whose pictures she had once seen in a book of mythology. Muriel was moved too by his history, she felt whole-heartedly sorry for him. And she had been especially upset by the recent theft of his precious icon. She was beginning to want to touch him, to stroke him consolingly. But of course this did not amount to being in love, it was just that the prospect of getting to know him was a pleasant one. Once or twice seeking him out in his room she had been inordinately irritated to find Pattie there.

  Beyond Elizabeth’s dreaming head, eyes closed now, alternately darkened and made to shine like a shaft of goldened aluminium, was a vase of flowers, chrysanthemums, which had been sent to Elizabeth by Uncle Marcus. The girls had composed a number of thank-you notes, each wittier than the last, but none had been sent yet. Elizabeth particularly disliked chrysanthemums. They would have to see Uncle Marcus sooner or later, Muriel supposed. Elizabeth was indifferent. Muriel had not spoken to her father about this or indeed about anything else for some days. She was aware that he was seeing nobody. Callers, determined or even desperate ones, including the wailful Mrs Barlow, were all turned away. Letters were unanswered and in fact unread. Muriel was vaguely uneasy, but she had seen her father in such moods before. She herself would have to form a policy soon about Uncle Marcus and Shadox. Of course there was no question of their seeing Elizabeth until Carel permitted. Muriel would have to see them though, placate them perhaps. There was no hurry. She was always a bit fussed at the thought of meeting Shadox. She disliked, but also a little feared, that dreadfully robust common sense. There was the faint but ever-persistent possibility that Shadox might be right.

  As Muriel stood looking down at Elizabeth’s still spell-bound head she leaned back a little against the angle of the wall where it turned into the alcove where the bed was. Her hand groping behind her touched the place where the two partitions joined and she felt the crack in the wallpaper, the place from which in the linen room one might peep through into Elizabeth’s room, into her room and into the further darker subaqueous cave of the French mirror. Muriel removed her hand guiltily. She thought immediately of Elizabeth’s corset and for a second she seemed to see it, to see her cousin X-rayed, hollowed out, a skeletal maiden of steel with a metal head. The vision excited her strangely. She banished it the next moment and began to think about Elizabeth’s illness. There was so much fatalism now in her thoughts. Did she really believe that Elizabeth would ever be well or able to lead a normal life?

  They had all become so used to shielding Elizabeth, to keeping her with them as a sort of hidden treasure. Was there something odd and unnatural about it? It occurred to Muriel that what made the whole regime seem simple and ordinary was Elizabeth’s own attitude to it, her co-operation, her even gay co-operation, in what, with another twist, might have seemed an imprisonment. Yet had this too, lately, imperceptibly, changed? Perhaps Elizabeth, with growing up, had become more fully conscious of her plight, of an awful separation from life. Perhaps she had soberly judged by now that she would never be cured, never be healthy and free. This might account for the increasing apathy, the slight withdrawal of warmth, which afflicted Muriel and made her feel for the first time and on her own account a sort of claustrophobia, a sense of being shut in somewhere with her cousin. Elizabeth had for so long played the gay child, the sunshine of the house. It startled Muriel to find herself, as she now regarded the drowsing entranced head, seeing something different, something even a little alarming. La Belle Dame sans Merci.

  Of course this was nonsense. Her imagination was becoming morbid. This interminable fog was making them all a bit nervy. Still it was true that Elizabeth was living an absurdly isolated life. She ought to meet more people, she ought to meet young men. She ought not to be immured to the point at which communication became difficult. Should they not, before it was too late, break out? Muriel was surprised to find how strongly she took to this metaphor. What exactly was there to break out of? What was she afraid of here which made her dream vaguely of an escape, a rescue, a shock which might dissolve barriers and bring to something which seemed dark and cramped the sudden light of change?

  Muriel shook herself and began to pick up the scattered papers from the floor. She said quietly to Elizabeth, “My dear.”

  “Mmm?”

  “I must go and shop for us, otherwise we’ll have to have eggs again. I’ll be about an hour, in case you thought of ringing.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “I’ll take the plates away. Sorry they got left.”

  “I hadn’t noticed them.”

  “Can I get you anything special?”

  “No thank you, sweetheart.”

  “I’ll bring you a little present.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “The fire should be all right till I get back. Don’t try to lift that coal-scuttle yourself.”

  “I wonder if it’s still snowing.”

  “I think it’s stopped.”

  “I wish it would snow properly. I feel it would drive the fog away. I haven’t been able to look out of my window since we arrived.”

  “
I know, darling. Soon will. Oughtn’t you to write to Uncle Marcus?”

  “Maybe. Shove over my cigars, would you.”

  “What will you do while I’m away?”

  “Jigsaw. Nothing. More like nothing.”

  “I won’t be long. Don’t smoke too much.”

  The eyes were closed again as Muriel moved to the door. She went out quietly. Outside the linen room she paused. What was Elizabeth like when she was alone? For a second Muriel visualized some extraordinary change which might come over her cousin as soon as the door was shut upon her. Some metamorphosis from passivity into activity, from calm into despair. Suppose she were to creep in and look through the crack? She hurried herself on. Spying was a meanness she could not stoop to. But it was not just that. She would be afraid to look.

  Muriel dumped the lunch plates in the upstairs pantry and went to her own room, where it was extremely cold, and put on her overcoat. She locked the room after her, a precaution she used since the recent theft, though the only things which she feared to lose were her poems and her bottle of sleeping-pills which she imagined nobody would want to steal. She came down the stairs to the strains of the Eighteen Twelve Overture. A softly closing door cut them off. The image of Elizabeth faded. Muriel decided that she would just go and ask Eugene Peshkov if she could buy him anything at the shops. She had asked him this several times. He always said no, but it was a pretext for seeing him and Muriel regretted that since the dreadful loss of his icon she had not had an opportunity to condole with him properly. Also she wanted, just now, a reassurance, the reassurance of Eugene’s presence in the house.