The Time of the Angels

by Iris Murdoch

  She had known that Muriel had done it, and what Muriel had done, as soon as she had seen Eugene’s face on her return. The betrayal by Muriel now seemed to her inevitable. Could she have forestalled that betrayal by any words of her own and drawn its sting? It had seemed impossible, the confession itself would have shown her to him as unattainable and untouchable and treacherous. In speaking to him she would have had to admit to herself the impossibility of her love for him. Crying frenziedly in her own room, hatred for Muriel seemed to exist as something separate, growing by itself, a great black plant rising up beside her. She herself was to blame. But Muriel was hateful. As she got up to go to Muriel there was a kind of relief in it as if to talk to her would be almost a consolation.

  Muriel was sitting in her bedroom in an armchair muffled up in her overcoat. She greeted Pattie almost absently and then returned to staring fixedly in front of her, breathing just audibly through her lips with a soft whistling sound. The breath formed smokily about her mouth in the icy atmosphere. The curtains were drawn back and the window pane behind her displayed a huge frost picture which obscured the dim morning light, so that it was quite dark in the room.

  Pattie sat down on the bed. Muriel’s physical presence intimidated her, as it had always done. She felt empty and wretched, felt little more than a desire to cry piteously. She said, half whimpering, “Why did you do that to me?”

  Muriel did not reply and seemed not to have heard. Then after a while and as if she had been thinking it over she said, “I’m sorry about it now. But it doesn’t matter.”

  Pattie was shivering with cold. She said, “It was wicked—”

  After an equally long silence Muriel said absently, “Possibly.” She continued to sit immobile, her hands in her pockets, staring away and uttering the soft sibilant breaths.

  “I hate you,” said Pattie. She wanted to touch Muriel, to pluck at her, to strike her, but she could not move from the bed.

  Muriel shifted, crossed her legs, and began to look at Pattie with a curiously bland interested expression. “Oh, do shut up, Pattie. Don’t cry. We’re all in the same boat, in a way.”

  “You’re all right. You just did that to hurt me out of sheer wickedness. I might have got right away and been happy and you deliberately spoilt it all. I loathe you. I’d like to kill you.”

  “Oh, stop it. Can’t you see I’m wrecked, ruined.”

  Pattie looked at the bland smooth face. “What do you mean? You’re all right.”

  Muriel gazed at Pattie thoughtfully, her hands still deep inside her overcoat. She said, “You know that my father has told me to go away, to live somewhere else?”

  “I heard him say that.”

  “Do you know why?”

  Pattie, who had heard Carel’s words with pleasure, had immediately interpreted them as a salve to herself. Muriel had been cruel to Pattie so Muriel must go. Later she had been less certain and inclined to think Carel had not meant it at all. She said without conviction, “Because you were unkind to me.”

  “You! You don’t matter. No, no, there is another reason. Do you really not know it?”

  Pattie looked at Muriel with suspicion, with mounting horror. She had never before talked of Carel with Muriel and her whole body knew the danger of it. She ought to run from the room, she ought not to listen. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t know that my father is having a love affair with Elizabeth?”

  Pattie said, “Elizabeth. No.”

  “It’s true. I know it’s hard to believe, but I actually saw them through a crack in the wall. I just believed my eyes at first. Then there was so much other evidence. I can’t think why it didn’t occur to me before. They must have been lovers for some time. Poor Elizabeth.” Muriel spoke with a cool weariness. She looked vaguely away from Pattie now, showing no interest in her reception of the news.

  Pattie sat hunched up on the bed with her eyes closed. She tried to say “You’re lying,” but the words stayed in her mouth like stones. In fact she believed Muriel instantly. It was as if a veil had been taken from something whose form had long been familiar to her.

  Muriel went on in the same cool slightly drawling voice, “I don’t know whether it’s right to tell you, but everything’s collapsed, the house has fallen down, the only thing that’s left seems to be the truth and one may as well look it in the face. I hope you believe me. Ask Carel if you don’t.”

  “I believe you,” Pattie mumbled, head down, curled over the words. She felt as if she were holding Carel and that he had shrunk into a little thing the size of a nut.

  When Carel had asked for the assurance of her love she had thought that he knew of her relations with Eugene. When he had said “Will you suffer for me, will you be crucified for me?” she had thought that he meant ordinary suffering of the kind she was familiar with. In all her imagination of what she might suffer for Carel she had not conceived of this. This was the one thing in the world which she could not bear.

  “It’s so cold and hard and organized,” said Muriel, rambling on as if she were thinking aloud. “That’s what strikes me. And I can see it now in Elizabeth, she sort of wears it all. If it was something momentary and impulsive it would be different. But I don’t think it is. I feel it’s deep, it’s already become like an institution. And then telling me to go away like that. He’s settling down with Elizabeth. They’ll be like a married couple. They’re like it now.”

  They’ll be like a married couple, thought Pattie. And I shall be their servant.

  “Well, I’m going,” said Muriel. “I’m clearing out. And I advise you to go too, Pattie. Leave them to it. I think that’s the kindest thing I’ve ever said to you. One must keep one’s sanity. One ought to.”

  Pattie lifted her head. “I don’t think I can keep my sanity,” she said. She put her hand over her mouth as if she were going to be sick. Her whole body felt in tatters of wretchedness. After all there was no salvation, no one to call the lapsed soul or weep in the evening dew. The house had fallen down. Nothing was left to Pattie except a last desire to tear and to destroy. The world had finally punished her for her blackness. She said, “Now I’m going to tell you something which is so secret I had almost forgotten it.”

  “What?”

  “He made me swear never never to tell and I locked it so away in mind I hardly remembered it any more.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you know who Elizabeth is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Elizabeth is your sister.”

  Muriel sprang up. She came and shook Pattie violently by the shoulders. Between her hands Pattie jolted inertly to and fro.

  “Pattie, what are you talking about? You’re saying mad things—”

  “Leave me. I’m telling you the truth. You should be grateful. You said you wanted the truth. Elizabeth isn’t Julian’s daughter, she’s Carel’s daughter. Julian never had a child. Julian and Carel quarrelled over some girl, it was after they were both married. Carel was in love with the girl, but Julian ran away with her and left his wife. Carel seduced Julian’s wife just out of spite, for revenge. When Julian knew that his wife was pregnant he killed himself.” Pattie added after a moment. “He told me all this—long ago—when he loved me.” Her voice became a sob.

  Muriel was standing quite still with her head turned away in an awkward deformed attitude. Her whole body seemed to have been wrenched. Then she sat down rather carefully on an upright chair, her head still turned. “Do you swear that this is true, Pattie.”

  “I swear it. As you said yourself, ask him.”

  “I suppose there was no doubt—who the father was?”

  “No doubt.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t invent it all?”

  “No. He always told me the truth in those days. And I found some letters too. He destroyed them later. But ask him, ask him.”

  “Do you think Elizabeth knows?”

  “I don’t know. Ask her.”

  “How can he the
n—”

  “Just for that very reason. With him, it had to happen. I should have known. He thinks I’ll stand anything. But I won’t stand this.”

  “I think you’d better go now, Pattie,” said Muriel. “I’ll talk to you about this again later.”

  As Pattie rose, Muriel came and stretched herself out on the bed and closed her eyes. She lay there inert and pale, her arms straight by her sides, the little plume of breath hanging above her lips. She seemed already to have lost consciousness.

  Pattie stumbled out of the door, leaving it open. She crawled along the wall of the corridor like a bat. Tears gushed from her eyes and nose and mouth. She would have to go, she would have to leave him at last. She loved him, but she could do nothing with her love. It was for her own torment only and not for his salvation. She did not love him enough to save him, not that much, not with that suffering. She could not stay and see him with Elizabeth. She could not love him that much. She could not make his miracle of redemption.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MURIEL WAS ALMOST ready to leave. She had not spoken to Pattie again. She had not seen Elizabeth again. She believed what Pattie had said. She preferred not to speak more of it, she wanted no discussions or assurances or proofs. She wanted nothing which would further enforce into her mind this thought which she would have to live with for the rest of her life. Better to leave it quiet and hope that in the end, like Pattie, she would seem to forget it.

  Muriel had spent most of the previous day, after Pattie’s revelation, lying upon her bed in a state of coma. The intense cold seemed to dim and lower her consciousness until there was nothing except a faint flickering awareness which was scarcely aware of itself. Something lay upon her, pinning her to the bed. Perhaps it was an angel of death that lay there, slowly chilling the inert body. The little daylight went soon and darkness came. Time passed. Footsteps passed. A light turned on in the corridor shone in through the half-open door of the room. But nobody came to her. Pattie did not come. Carel did not come. And Elizabeth did not ring her old familiar bell. The house fell silent.

  Muriel thought she must have slept a little. Her limbs were long and stiff with cold, the joints frozen. She could not bend her legs or her arms. She rolled a little to and fro on the bed. Pain passed through her body like an alien distilment, a sensation she could hardly recognize. She knew objectively that this must be pain which her awakening body felt. She made it return again and again. She felt that if she continued to lie still she would soon die of cold and of the extinction of the will. The will, returning to her, was pain too and she closed her eyes and bared her teeth upon it. At the end of a long time she managed to sit up and put her foot down to the ground. Her feet seemed curled and cramped into balls which would not flatten to meet the floor. She moved them awkwardly about upon her ankles, and the blood forced its way onward in anguish. She was able at last to stand, take her overcoat off and put on an extra jersey. Putting the coat on again was an almost impossible feat but she got it on after a lot of slow struggling. She looked at her watch in the light from the corridor and found that it was only ten o’clock. She went quietly downstairs, left the house, walked to the nearest telephone box, and telephoned Norah Shadox-Brown.

  Her relief at hearing Norah’s voice was so intense that she could hardly speak at first. During this time Norah, who seemed somehow immediately to understand, kept up a monologue of sensible soothing remarks. When Muriel started incoherently to talk Norah forestalled her explanations. Of course Muriel wanted to leave her father’s house and to leave it early tomorrow morning. What could be more natural? Of course Muriel could come and stay with Norah for as long as she liked. In fact, what Muriel really needed was a holiday. Norah was going off in a few days to stay with a cousin who had a villa at San Remo. Why shouldn’t Muriel come along too? They might even get some sunshine, though of course even in Italy at this time of year one couldn’t be sure. She would expect Muriel early tomorrow morning. Muriel left the telephone box murmuring “San Remo, San Remo.” Perhaps after all there was a world elsewhere.

  She could not really believe it though. Her misery was waiting for her in the house. Here was the machine in which she belonged. Here was the stuff she was made of and running away could make no difference. She got into bed with her coat on and lay there shivering. She tried to think about Elizabeth but the familiar image was so altered that it was not like thinking about her any more. The iron maiden. She pictured Elizabeth’s room with the fire flickering and the jigsaw puzzle laid out on the floor. Perhaps it was finished now. She pictured the flickering fire and Elizabeth’s eyes open in the half dark and she dreaded the sound of Elizabeth’s bell like a summons from the dead.

  She could not sleep, turning and turning in her bed, there was no warmth in her. What was Elizabeth thinking now, what could she be thinking? Did she regard Muriel as a spy, a traitor who had for a long time watched and suspected and schemed? Muriel thought: I must be hated for my knowledge. Oh God, if only I had never known. If only I had taken Elizabeth away without every having known. But would Elizabeth have come? It was impossible now to think of taking Elizabeth away; and yet to what was she being left? Muriel could not conceive of Elizabeth as a victim. But had she no pity for her cousin? Had the long years of their friendship suffered a metamorphosis so that even their childhood was changed? She thought: poor Elizabeth. But the thought was empty. She thought: my sister, but she could not give the words a meaning. The only thing which at last stirred her with a warm shudder of emotion was the realization that she had not fed Elizabeth. Would her cousin die there in the house like a neglected animal? Her bell had not rung. It was unspeakably weird to think that someone else must have fed her. Muriel fell asleep and dreamed of her father as he had been long ago.

  When the morning came it felt like the end of the world. Muriel thought, this is the worst day of my life, let me just stiffly live through it. She opened the window to a paler twilight. The fog seemed to be clearing. It was no colder out there than it was in her bedroom. Nothing spoke in her now, not even the little voice of self-preservation which continues after reason is silent. She just remembered, as if from long ago, that she had somehow decided she must go. The notion that she could even now if she chose to walk to Elizabeth’s room and open the door was present to her mind painfully but remotely like a detailed and academic hypothesis of a torture. She moved about mechanically and her teeth chattered with a localized self-pity.

  It was already nearly nine o’clock. She began to pack a suitcase, picking things up with clumsy frozen hands. She put her notebooks into the bottom of the case, and the loose sheets on which her long poem was written. She glanced at the poem as she put it in and saw in a flash that it was no good. She quickly stuffed some jerseys and a skirt in on top of it. Her fingers were too cold to fold anything and she was now almost weeping with exasperation. The case would not shut. She must be making a lot of noise. She jammed the case down on the bed, half sitting on it, and got one lock to snap. She looked for her overcoat and found that she was wearing it. She did not look round the room but went straight out of the door. The electric light was still burning on the landing. She moved with long quiet strides along the landing and down the stairs. She could hear the gramophone playing in her father’s study. She opened the front door.

  “Excuse me,” said Anthea Barlow, “for calling so early in the morning. I was just wondering if I could see the Rector.”

  Muriel stared at Mrs Barlow who had materialized, huge as a bear, in the pale brown light of the doorway. Mrs Barlow was too big, too material. Muriel felt like a spirit before her, and for a moment it did not occur to her that they could communicate.

  “It is rather an early call, but I do rather urgently want to see him. You see—”

  Muriel made a tremendous effort to speak. Her voice came out precise and clear. “I’m afraid my father is not here.”

  “Oh, really? Could you tell me—”

  “He has gone,” said Muriel, “to
stay at his villa at San Remo.” Her voice piped, thin and high.

  “Really? Could you—”

  Muriel closed the door. She waited in the hall until she heard the slow footsteps going away. Then as she was about to open the door again she paused. There was something which she had forgotten. The sleeping-tablets.

  It occurred to Muriel to notice, and she noticed it grimly, that during all her recent pain she had never for a moment considered leaving a world which had become so appalling. She evidently preferred the agony of consciousness. She had packed her poem and forgotten the tablets. Perhaps she would survive after all. She half decided to leave the tablets behind, but some old prudence turned her back. About the future, one never knew.

  She put her suitcase down beside the hall door and mounted the stairs again very softly two at a time. The music was still playing in her father’s room. She reached her own room and quickly opened the cupboard where the tablets were kept. They were gone.