The Time of the Angels (10 page)

Anthea Barlow sighed and put on her coat. “Ah well. I’m rather a madcap, I’m afraid. You’ll get used to me. People do.”

She looked at Pattie and then smiled appealingly, holding out a hand sideways in a way which invites, not a formal handshake, but the warm spontaneous clasp of friend with friend. Pattie ignored the hand.

“I shall come again,” murmured Anthea Barlow.

She went out into the darkness and a just audible movement of snowflakes covered her departing form. Pattie shut the door and bolted it. Then she listened and heard with relief from upstairs the distant strains of the Nutcracker Suite.

She took the paper off the snowdrops and dropped it, together with Mrs Barlow’s note, into a wastepaper basket. She had no intention of troubling Carel with Mrs Barlow’s importunities. She decided that she would give the snowdrops to Eugene. She looked at them. A clear line of the purest palest green was drawn round the scolloped rim of each drooping white cup. The flowers had a sudden presence, an authority. Pattie looked down at them with surprise. She saw them as flowers. They made, in the continuum of dark days, a pause, a gap as it were, through which she saw so much more than the springtime. Calling the lapsed soul, and weeping in the evening dew, that might control the starry pole and fallen, fallen light renew.

Holding the snowdrops lightly against her overall she moved to the window. A complicated frost picture was forming on the inside of the pane. She scratched it with her finger, making a round hole in the sugary frost, and looked through. The snow, just visible in the dusky yellow dark, was falling thickly now, the flakes turning slightly as they fell, composing together a huge rotating pattern too complex for the eye, which seemed to extend itself persuasively and enter the body with a sighing hypnotic caress. The whole world was very quietly spiralling and shifting. Pattie stood dazed and looked out at the snow for a long time.

Suddenly behind her in the house she heard a loud cry and the sound of opening doors and running feet. Someone was urgently calling out her name.

She turned quickly back to see Eugene, who had rushed into the hall, huge and distracted, his arms waving.

“Oh, Pattie, Pattie, it’s gone!”

“What’s gone?”

“My icon. Somebody’s stolen it. I left the door unlocked. Somebody’s stolen it away!”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Pattie. She opened her arms to him. He came straight to her and she hugged him. The snowdrops were crushed between them. Somewhere up above a head and shoulders moved in the dark. She smelt the perfume of the snowdrops crushed upon Eugene’s breast. She went on hugging him and saying “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

THE TREACLE TART was brown and crisp on top, golden and succulent and granular once the surface had yielded to the spoon. The Bishop covered his portion evenly with cream and delicately licked a finger. “One must not exaggerate,” he said.

Marcus stared gloomily at the tart. It was his favourite pudding. Only today he was without appetite.

Since his visit to Carel he had been in an extremely disturbed state. He had imagined that his boldness would procure him some automatic liberation, the switching on of some immediate calm. He had even imagined, with a naivety which came straight out of his childhood, that Carel was reserving for him, like an enormous treat, some quite special reassurance. What had come to him from that darkened encounter was a more fearful because more unintelligible agitation. He could not but regard it as significant that there had been no light. His desire now simply to see Carel’s face had become obsessively connected with a fear that he should find his brother disfigured or monstrously changed. Carel and Elizabeth haunted his dreams, huge obscure figures whose doings he could not afterwards remember. Hitherto he had at least been able to think of them separately. Now in some compulsive way which he could not quite understand he thought of them together, and the new connection, the new pattern had somehow the effect of perpetuum mobile. Marcus could not perceive the principle of this machine which so jerked him to and fro, but he felt it had something to do with Carel’s remark that Elizabeth “lived in her mind”.

Marcus did not know what was intended by the remark, but it did not occur to him to believe, or even conjecture, that Elizabeth was in fact out of her mind. What did come to him afterwards, obscure and disturbing as a large unpleasant-looking object rising through deep water, was the idea that Carel was out of his. Marcus had never before for a second, however much he had heard it reiterated by Norah, entertained the view that his brother was insane. If it was not madness then there was only one other thing which it could be.

These reflections were entirely new to Marcus, and he was amazed at how far he had come, or how far he had been rather as it were shot, through the violence of his meeting with Carel. Yet he could, he felt, have confronted rationally any possibility, any conjecture, concerning insanity or concerning that which was worse, if it had involved Carel alone. It was the addition of Elizabeth to the situation which made it tormentingly problematic and constituted the distressful machine which now gave him no rest. He needed desperately to see Elizabeth. Her image burnt in his mind, a steely dazzling point of pure innocence. It was not that he at all coherently thought of her as menaced. What he felt was very much more like some sort of monstrous jealousy.

He regretted having spoken of his experience to Norah. He had recounted simply the facts of the conversation and had made no attempt to render the atmosphere, nor had he, for some reason, brought himself to tell her that it had all taken place in the dark. But even this much he ought not to have told. He ought to have kept it all covered up and let its chemistry work within him in secret. On this subject Norah could utter only blasphemies. And utter them she did crowingly, understanding everything at the crudest level and frankly exulting at having acquired some more, and she imaged conclusive, “evidence” for her case.

“I trust I am not exaggerating, Bishop,” Norah was saying.

The Bishop had small hands and feet and a clean boyish face. It annoyed Marcus to hear Norah calling him “Bishop". He himself had started calling him “Sir” and had then realized with irritation that the Bishop was probably younger than he was. Marcus was at the age when he was still scandalized to find a younger person in a position of authority.

“As I see it,” Norah went on, “it’s a matter of responsibility to the public, to say nothing of the Church itself. It’s highly dangerous for an unbalanced man to have that sort of power. Anything could happen. There must be ecclesiastical machinery for at least investigating a case of this sort.”

“Well, well, who is to say in these days who is mad and who is sane? Let him who is without neurosis cast the first stone! What an absolutely delicious treacle tart. I find so few people are prepared to take trouble with puddings these days.”

“You ask who is to say,” said Norah. She was beginning to get a little cross with the Bishop. “I answer that I am prepared to say. Tolerance can go too far and in my view nowadays usually does. A spade must be called a spade. We are confronted here by a man who is both mad and wicked.”

“Can he actually be both?” said Marcus. He had not so far managed to get himself into the conversation.

“I should certainly call Carel an eccentric” said the Bishop. “The Anglican Church has been noted for its eccentrics. In the eighteenth century—”

“We are not, thank heavens,” said Norah, “living in the eighteenth century.”

It disturbed Marcus that the Bishop referred to his brother as “Carel” although it appeared that they had only met twice.

“I shouldn’t worry too much, Miss Shadox-Brown. As the psalmist says, ‘verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.’ Otherwise rendered, it’ll all come out in the wash! No, thanks, no more tart. I have rather wolfed mine, haven’t I. I’d love some of that delicious crumbly cheese.”

“Well, I think something ought to be done,” said Norah. She slid the cheeseboard briskly up to the Bishop’s plate. “Naturally we thought we’d consult you first. But Marcus will have to take some steps about Elizabeth. After all he is her guardian and he must be allowed to see her. I am certainly going to take legal advice.”

“I don’t think we should be too hasty,” said Marcus. He was annoyed and distressed and almost frightened by a vision of Norah, lawyers, even police, interfering in something as intensely private as what his relation with Carel and Elizabeth had now become. He regretted not having utterly discouraged Norah from the start.

“I agree with Marcus,” said the Bishop. “It’s easy to make an ill-considered fuss. Not so easy to pick up the pieces afterwards. Do you mind if I help myself to some more of that superb claret?”

Oh, so I’m Marcus now, am I, thought Marcus. The Bishop was a fast worker. It was a professional facility.

“My point would be that the fuss would not be ill-considered,” said Norah. “And I’m very surprised that you aren’t more interested in what Carel said to Marcus about having lost his faith.” This had already been recounted verbatim.

“Belief is such a personal matter, especially in these days,” said the Bishop vaguely.

“He may have been pulling my leg,” said Marcus.

“You know quite well he wasn’t,” said Norah. “He was being downright cynical. A priest, calmly announcing that he doesn’t believe in God!”

“Well, if I may say so without frivolity, it rather depends on the tone that is used! I understand you are writing a book on the subject, Marcus?”

“Not exactly, sir,” said Marcus. He felt like a schoolboy being interrogated and noted with annoyance his conditioned reactions. “I’m not writing about God. I’m writing about morality. Though I am going to devote a chapter to the ontological argument.”

“Excellent, excellent. The only sound argument in the whole of theology, in my humble view, only don’t quote me! I’m so glad. We need all the help we can get.”

“But I’m not a Christian,” said Marcus.

“Well, you know, the dividing lines are not by any means as clear as they used to be. Passion, Kierkegaard said, didn’t he, passion. That’s the necessary thing. We must remember that the Holy Spirit bloweth where it listeth. It’s not the gale, it’s the windless calm that is Godless. ‘Where’s the bloody horse?’ if you follow me!”

“But there’s still a difference between believing in God and not believing in God,” said Norah.

“Oh, certainly. But perhaps this difference is not quite what we once thought it was. We must think of this time as an interregnum—”

“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.”