The Time of the Angels

by Iris Murdoch

  “No.”

  “Odd. I’m sure I saw something.”

  Guilt wrenched and griped in Pattie’s bowels and she felt herself blush a dusky black blush, as if all the blackness in her blood had risen to accuse her.

  “Don’t go, Pattie, I want to talk to you.”

  Carel was wearing dark glasses. The two glossy ovals stared impenetrably, reflecting the pink light, reflecting in little the crowded towers of the city. Remote in the house Elizabeth’s bell tinkled a while and then stopped.

  “Pattie, would you mind pulling the curtains? I don’t like this glare from the snow.”

  Pattie pulled the curtains.

  “More carefully, please. There’s still some light showing.”

  For a moment the room was in total darkness. Then Carel switched on the lamp on his desk. He looked at her with his great dark night eyes, then he took the glasses off and rubbed his face. He began to walk up and down. “Don’t go. Just sit somewhere.”

  The room was very cold. Pattie sat down on a chair against the wall and watched him move. She noticed that he was barefoot under the cassock. The cassock swung with the energy of his steps and as he came near her with each turn it touched her knee with a rough caress. It seemed to Pattie now impossible that Carel should not know of her relations with Eugene, should not know everything that went on inside her mind. His presence subjugated her whole being with a dark swoop, with a pounce of automatic unconscious power. She closed her eyes and something, perhaps her soul, seemed to fall out of her and lie upon the ground underneath those bare marching feet.

  “Pattikins.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to talk to you seriously.”

  “Yes.” Pattie put two fingers into her mouth and bit upon them hard.

  “Shall we have some music. Could you put on the Nutcracker Suite?”

  Pattie went to the gramophone and put the record on with awkward hands. He must know about Eugene.

  “Turn it well down. That’s right.”

  Carel continued his marching. Then he went to the window and peered through a slit in the curtain. The pink flamingo sunset slashed the gloom momentarily. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?”

  Carel readjusted the curtain and turned back into the semidarkness. Then, not looking at Pattie, he began rather dreamily to unbutton his cassock. The heavy black stuff parted like a peeling fruit and revealed a triangle of whiteness. Carel began to slip his shoulders out and with a faint sough the black garment fell to the floor in a heap about his feet. He stepped out of it. Underneath it he seemed to be wearing nothing but a shirt. Pattie remembered this routine and she began to tremble.

  “Pattie, come here.”

  “Yes.”

  Carel sat down in the chair at his desk, turning it sideways. Dressed in the shirt he looked different, slim, young, almost vulnerable, in a way which Pattie could hardly bear.

  “There, you shall kneel. I am going to hear your catechism.”

  Pattie knelt before him. She could not then stop herself from touching his knees. When she touched the bone at the knee and the thin shank of the calf she gave a groan, and bowed her head against him, embracing his legs.

  “Come now, Pattie. You’ve got to listen to me sensibly.” He detached her gently from him, and she knelt back, looking up at his face which she could not see very clearly.

  “What is your name?”

  “Pattie.”

  “Who gave you that name?”

  “You did.”

  “Yes, I suppose I am indeed your godfather, your father in God. Do you believe in God, Pattie?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “And do you love God?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you believe that God loves you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Rest in that belief. It is for you.”

  “I will.”

  “Your faith matters to me, Pattie, it’s strange. Are you a Christian?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you believe in the doctrine of the redemption?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand the doctrine of the redemption?”

  “I don’t know. I believe it. I don’t know if I understand it.”

  “You answer well. Will you be crucified for me, Pattie?”

  Pattie stared up into the half-shadowed face. Carel’s face, usually protected by its curious stiffness, seemed uncovered now, as if a dry crust had been taken off it. His face was naked, moist and fresh, or perhaps it was that the expression was unusually concentrated in the eyes which had grown huge and intent. Carel looked beautiful to Pattie, softened and smoothed and young.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know what you mean.”

  “There will a trial, Pattie, there will be pain.”

  “I can bear pain.”

  “Bear it with your eyes fixed upon me.”

  “I will.”

  “You might make a miracle for me, who knows.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “We’ve been a long way together, haven’t we, Pattie beast. You won’t ever leave me, will you?”

  Pattie was choking now in a flow of emotion. She could hardly speak. “No, of course not.”

  “Whatever I do, whatever I become, you won’t leave me?”

  “I love you,” said Pattie. She gripped his legs again, collapsed at his feet, her head pressing against his knees. She felt her tears brushing against him. He did not now put her away but very gently stroked her hair with a touch she could hardly sense.

  “‘Woman would like to feel that love can do everything, it is her special superstition.’ But perhaps it is not a superstition. Can love do everything, Pattie?”

  “I think so, I hope so.”

  “Be faithful in your love, then.”

  “I will.”

  “Pattie, my dark angel, I want to bind you in chains you can never break.”

  “I am bound.”

  “I meant to deify you. I wasn’t able to. I meant to make you my black goddess, my counter-virgin, my Anti-Maria.”

  “I know I’ve been no good—”

  “You have been infinitely good. You are my sugar-plum fairy. Lucky the man who has the sugar-plum fairy and the swan princess.”

  “I wish I could have been better—”

  “You’re a goose, Pattie, a dear, dear coffee-coloured goose. You belong to me, don’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Carel’s hands descended to her shoulders and he pressed lightly upon her as he leaned forward out of his chair and came down to the floor, blocking the light. Pattie groaned, relaxing her hold and falling back, wrapped into darkness. She felt his hands fumbling now to undo the front of her blouse.

  “Hail, Pattie, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed are thou among women.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “SUPPOSE SHE SCREAMS?”

  “She won’t scream.”

  Muriel and Leo faced each other in Muriel’s bedroom. The room was dark and cold. The sun was not shining today. Muriel sat down on the bed. She was feeling sick with apprehension and excitement.

  How she had arrived at the firm decision to take Leo to Elizabeth she was not sure. Of course Shadox had counselled it, Shadox had seen it as a perfectly ordinary project. She had come back to it at the end of her conversation, in the course of which she had entreated Muriel to reconsider her decision about going to a university. Shadox had said, “Of course introduce the boy to her and do it now. Everything gets so stuffy and unnatural in your house.” But then Shadox didn’t know how things were. Or did she a little bit guess? Shadox was not such a fool as she seemed.

  Shadox had certainly urged it as an ordinary and indeed obvious project. But of course it was not an ordinary project. It was a strange and significant move in a game the nature of which Muriel herself only half understood and which it now seemed to her that she had been playing for some time. There would be consequences. Mu
riel was excited and frightened, and although she had attempted to treat of the matter calmly with Leo she had not succeeded. Her mood had infected him and he was now as agitated as she was.

  Why had this move, which was to be in effect simply a throwing of things into disorder, come to seem so necessary? When Muriel wondered this she heard again her father’s persuasive authoritative voice saying, “We have a precious possession which we must guard together.” She heard him say “Elizabeth is a dreamer,” she heard him repeat “She is trying to leave us,” and she saw Carel’s stiff intent face and his smile which looked so much like a grimace of pain.

  The need to stir Elizabeth, to wake her, to do something unexpected, simply to see Elizabeth talking to another person had grown in Muriel as something connected with her own self-preservation. Elizabeth’s seclusion, the web which Carel said she was weaving, threatened Muriel too. Some process which had been going on for too long, and in which Muriel had herself co-operated, must be arrested. If it were not, Muriel feared, without altogether understanding her fear, that she might find herself somehow at last irreparably shut in with Elizabeth and Carel. For her own sake as well as Elizabeth’s there must be raised voices, shouting, opening of windows, and tramp of feet.

  There was, besides this, another compulsion. Muriel had allowed herself to become fascinated by the idea of as it were loosing Leo at Elizabeth. There was excitement, of a more agreeable kind, in this too. They were both so good looking! To bring them together, even if this meant no more than juxtaposing them in the same room, would have something of the thrill of mating two rare animals, and Muriel found that her imagination had already busied itself in the matter. Some deep strange love which she had for her cousin had mingled itself with the plan, and it was not surprising that Leo was shivering with anticipation since he saw Muriel similarly afflicted. Muriel was excited, but she was also frightened. She was frightened of Carel, and although she said to herself “There is nothing he can do to me” she knew that there were things he could do. Just as when as a child, although he had never struck her, she had known of terrible punishments. She was frightened too of Elizabeth.

  Muriel peered out of her room and listened. There was nothing to be heard except the vibration of a passing train and the familiar sound of Pattie turning Anthea Barlow away from the door. She turned back to Leo.

  “I believe I’ve got a cold,” said Leo. “Do you think she’ll mind?”

  “Damn your cold.”

  “I’m dead scared. Wouldn’t it be a good thing just to warn her?”

  “She’d say she wouldn’t see you.”

  “She sounds a most peculiar girl. She’s not a bit odd in the head, is she?”

  “No, of course not. She’s sweet and clever. You’ll see.”

  “Do you think she’ll like me?”

  “Sure to.”

  “But what’ll she say, what’ll we talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” said Muriel. She didn’t know. She didn’t even know whether Elizabeth mightn’t in fact scream. “You won’t do anything silly, will you, Leo? I mean you won’t jump on her, or anything? She’s led a very isolated life.”

  “Jump on her! I don’t think I’ll have enough courage to speak to her!”

  “Yes, you will, you’ll do fine. Just be natural.”

  “Natural! What a hope!”

  “Well, I think we should go along now.”

  “Muriel, I can’t bear it, I’m funking it. Isn’t there any other way to do it?”

  “No other way.”

  “And must we go now?”

  “Now.”

  “Give me a minute,” said Leo.

  He looked at himself in the mirror of Muriel’s dressing-table, stroking his furry hair and adjusting the collar of his shirt. He was more carefully, and Muriel thought less becomingly, dressed than usual; or perhaps it was just that his usual jaunty confidence was quenched. He looked a thin nervous scrap of a boy.

  “Don’t think I’m ungrateful,” said Leo. “It’s just that I’ve thought about it so much. I keep saying to myself it’s just meeting a girl, but of course it isn’t just meeting a girl. And I’m terribly excited. Only just now sheer fright’s making me dry up a bit. You know Aristotle says a man dries up even in the middle if he hears someone is stealing his horse—”

  “Never mind Aristotle. Come on.”

  Muriel looked out again. She listened. The house was silent. Across the well of the stairs, Carel’s door was closed. She took Leo’s hand and squeezed it and led him out into the corridor.

  Muriel was trembling. Simply opening the door of Elizabeth’s room and going through it with Leo, could that be so difficult and consequential? Was it really a door which led into an altered future? Muriel tried to calm herself. Nothing uncontrollable would happen. Later she should wonder why she had been so nervous.

  Elizabeth’s room was on the next landing, up a half flight of stairs. Muriel, pulling Leo, had just reached the top of these stairs when she heard footsteps below. Somebody was coming up from the hall. The heavy clumsy tread announced Pattie. Muriel stood for a moment paralysed, seeing what Pattie would see, herself and Leo hand in hand near Elizabeth’s door, scandalously, patently guilty. She anticipated Pattie’s cries, her shouts for Carel.

  Muriel could not bring herself to rush for refuge right on into Elizabeth’s room. To burst in, and immediately enjoin silence, that was hardly the way to do it. “Quick,” she murmured. She took two long strides along the corridor and threw open the door of the linen room and pushed Leo into the darkness inside. She was inside herself and had quietly closed the door by the time Pattie had rounded the bend of the staircase. She prayed that Pattie was not in quest of linen.

  Pattie’s heavy footsteps passed the door and then paused further along the landing where there was a cupboard containing the china which was not in general use. Muriel could hear her fiddling about there, clinking things against each other. Leo began to whisper something but she put her hand to his mouth.

  Muriel could hear Pattie’s movements and now she could also hear Elizabeth’s wireless playing softly in the next room, amazingly close by. Her own heart was being hugely, like some big thing breathing in the house. She was at once very conscious of the thin lighted slit in the wall. With a rumble and a shudder an underground train went by far below them.

  Under cover of the train noise Leo whispered, “Who was that?”

  “Pattie. She didn’t see us. Just wait.”

  Muriel was beginning to feel an overwhelming desire to look through the slit into Elizabeth’s room. Her attention had been concentrated on Elizabeth, like that of a hunger upon a quarry, for so long. To see Elizabeth unseen now seemed the longed-for climax of that attention. For a moment she almost forgot Leo and it was as if what made her breathless with excitement concerned herself alone. She felt reckless and free. But of course with Leo there it was impossible. She must not let Leo know that Elizabeth was in the next room. Leo was temporarily intimidated and subdued, but he was also overexcited and capable of getting suddenly out of hand. Even with a subdued Leo Elizabeth would have enough of a shock. The proximity of Elizabeth during this suspense, the very idea of the spy-hole, might be enough to drive him into wildness.

  Then Elizabeth very audibly sighed. The sigh was uncannily close to them. Against her will Muriel found herself staring at Leo in the dark. She could just make out his eyes questioning, motioning toward the wall. Another train passed.

  “Is she in there?”

  “Yes.”

  She felt Leo’s hand pass like a ring down her arm and clamp on to her wrist. He pressed her hand against his thigh, staring at her. Then he looked a little sideways at the slit in the wall. Muriel could still hear Pattie in the corridor outside.

  At the next train Leo said, “We could look through.”

  “No.”

  “Please. Looking at girls through screens. Just like in Japan after all. We must.”

  “No. You said you’d obey me.
”

  The train passed. Muriel stood rigid, very close to Leo in the little dark space, listening to the soft murmur of the wireless and the irregular clink of china. There was a soft shifting flopping sound in the adjoining room and the sigh again. Muriel took deep breaths. She had a dazed sense of her own body as enlarged and strange and then realized that Leo was leaning against her, touching her from shoulder to knee. He released her hand and began to whisper something hot and tickling into her ear. “No,” said Muriel, without knowing what he had said. Her own need to look through the spy-hole into Elizabeth’s room was now overwhelming. She took hold of Leo’s arm, half restraining him, half seeking restraint herself. She felt irresponsible, dangerous. She gripped Leo, and they clung together like two falling angels. “No.”