The Time of the Angels (25 page)

Eugene stared at Muriel’s face. He thought at first that she must be grimacing at him. Her face was wrinkled up and drawn as if it was hung upon hooks. She had always had for him a certain repellent quality of ghastliness. Now she had the air of a demon in torment and he shrank from her.

Eugene had never liked Muriel, who seemed to him unwomanly and hard. He classified her in his mind with Miss Shadox-Brown, as that thin brusque efficient type of Englishwoman who has good intentions but cannot help being patronising. Some kind of tough self-confidence built into such women made them more insufferably superior than a man could ever be. Eugene, still sensitive to the tones and accents with which society addressed him, could detect the little strain of contempt in the midst of the most unassuming cordiality. Muriel had questioned him about his past with a quick thoroughness which did not seem like compassion or even curiosity. He felt that Muriel just wanted to “place” him tidily, to sum him up so as to be able to deal with him briskly and appropriately.

The gift of the Russian box had simply upset him. He forgave the box but not Muriel. The act was condescending or familiar and in either case offensive; while the choice of that particular present was an intrusion into a privacy and a mystery she could know nothing of. That she had thereby clumsily touched a nerve in his hidden past, acting on him in a way which he himself could not understand, was an added insult. He resented this, he resented her having witnessed his tears, and he resented her rude treatment of Leo in his presence, as if she could wield over the son an authority which was lacking in the father. He had early realized that she was Pattie’s foe. And since the odious scene of the saucepan of soup he had thought the girl both detestable and dangerous.

Eugene steadied himself now. His immediate thought was that Muriel had come to complain about something which Leo had done.

“Shut the door, please,” said Muriel.

“What is it, Miss Muriel?”

Muriel sat down again. She stared at him, her mouth open in a drooping arc. Her narrow glaring eyes burnt through the squeezed-up mask of her face.

Eugene, very uneasy, said, “I expect you want to—there’s something wrong—I expect Leo—”

“I want your help,” said Muriel in a sepulchral growl. She had some difficulty in speaking.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Muriel swallowed hard, took hold of the tablecloth, and bowed her head, shutting her eyes tightly for a moment in a grimacing frown. Then she said, “I found your icon for you.”

“What?”

“I found your icon for you. I brought it back. Pattie just found it in the hall. I should have brought it to you.”

“But did you have it then? Did you get it from— What do you mean?”

“It’s too complicated. I tell you I found it. I was just going to bring it back to you only Pattie stole it.”

“Stole it? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Eugene. She is dangerous, dangerous, he thought to himself. He looked at her with hostility.

Muriel regarded him with screwed-up burning eyes. Her face seemed to express hatred. She said. “When are the wedding bells going to ring out for you and Pattie?”

Eugene felt anger, a small red spot in the middle of his field of vision. He said, “That is our affair I think, Pattie’s and mine.”

“So you are getting married? You’re in love? That happy scene I saw in the kitchen—”

“Will you leave us alone, please? What did you come here to say? Say it please and then leave me to get on with my work.”

“You have no work,” said Muriel. She leaned back in the chair. Her face had suddenly become smooth and hard and cold, like ivory, like alabaster. She looked up at the icon. She said, “I think there are one or two things you ought to know about Pattie.”

A prophetic fear clutched Eugene’s heart. “I don’t want to talk to you—”

“Just listen then. You realise of course that Pattie is my father’s whore?”

Muriel’s gaze slowly returned to Eugene. Her eyes were large now and dreadfully calm.

Eugene stared at her. He tried to speak. “I don’t want—I don’t—”

“She has been my father’s mistress for years,” said Muriel, with a slow clear enunciation as if lecturing. “She took my father away from my mother and drove my mother to despair and to death. She has been at my father’s disposal ever since. They were at it only last week, making love on the floor of his study last Friday afternoon. I heard them at it, like two animals. Just you ask Pattie and see what she says.”

Eugene put his hand to his heart. He pressed his hand very hard against his chest and swallowed some blackness which was coming up from inside him. He said, but the words were little dry wisps, rustling and crackling in his mouth, “It’s not true.”

“Just you ask her.”

“Please go away.”

The conviction had fallen from her and she was thin and cold and hard as a needle. He hardly saw her go through the door.

“EXCUSE ME, DEAR, it’s Anthea again. I’m sorry to be so persistent—”

“He won’t see you.”

“I just wanted to explain to you—”

“He won’t see you. Can’t you understand English?”

“If I may be just the tiniest bit critical—”

“Go away.”

“I realize Father Carel is ill—”

“Mind your own business.”

“And the Bishop is—”

“Shut up and be off with you.”

“But Pattie, you see, Father Carel is—”

“Miss O’Driscoll to you.”

“But, Pattie, my dear, I know all about you—”

“No, you don’t. Nobody knows about me, nobody.”

“Poor Pattie, I can see you’re in some sort of trouble. Wouldn’t you like to tell me—”

“Go away, you interfering bitch. Take your bloody foot out of the door.”

With tears starting again, Pattie pushed with all her might. The Persian lamb gave ground. In a brown haze Mrs Barlow slithered and expostulated on the grey ridges of the frozen snow. The door banged.

Pattie, who was on her way to Muriel’s room, turned back into the empty hall and forgot the incident instantaneously. Misery filled her mouth and her eyes. Head drooping, she mounted the stairs. Near the top she lost a shoe and did not stop to pick it up.

Eugene had rejected her. She could not but tell him the truth, or rather admit the truth of what he already knew. She had tried to explain that last Friday, that was exceptional, it was just that once, it hadn’t happened before for a long time— But to speak of a date, of a happening at all, was something fatal. Even as she stammered to say how it was she was accusing herself. A destructive demon of despair seemed to leap out of her own mouth. This was not anything which could be explained and seen not to matter. She was unclean, she was unworthy, she was black, and she belonged to another, it was all true. Even if Carel had not taken her then he could have taken her at any hour, at any minute. Her will was his. He was the Lord God and she was the inert and silent earth which moves in perfect obedience. How much, how hopelessly, she did belong to Carel she realized as she faced Eugene’s anguished but relentless questioning. She had been bought long ago and could never now be ransomed.

It was not that Eugene would never forgive her or that his disgust would last forever or that he was not perhaps good enough to redeem her from the place in which she was fixed. It was that indeed she belonged there. What he charged her with clung to her and no gracious wedding-ring could change her now. Her feet could not run to reach him, the innocence of their converse had been a fake. Pattie did not even appeal to Eugene. He turned from her and she released him. It was the end.

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 then—”

“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.