The Time of the Angels (13 page)

“You don’t mean it. You know you’ve acted rottenly. You can’t jump out of morality as easily as that.”

“Can’t I, Muriel? Have you ever heard of quasars?”

“What?”

“Quasars. They’re a kind of star. Never mind. Just you cast an eye on the universe and then talk to me about morality. Suppose we’re all being directed from somewhere else by remote control? Suppose we’re just frogspawn in somebody’s pond?”

“Well, and suppose we’re not. You don’t mean any of this rubbish. You’re ashamed. You must be.”

Leo stared up at Muriel with a blank bland expression. “I may be prepared to enact shame. Will that do?”

“You must go to your father and tell him.”

“Prodigal son act?”

“You must say you’re sorry. You must be sorry. And you must get that icon back somehow, get it back.”

“I shall have other things to do. I’m just going to meet your virginal cousin.”

“Oh no, you’re not.”

“You promised!”

“I didn’t. It was a very bad idea. Oh God, I’m so confused.” Muriel put her hands to her face as if to find tears which she suddenly heard in her voice.

“Please. Look, if I confess to my dad and if I get the bloody icon back will you let me have your cousin?”

“Well, if you do those things I might let you meet her. Otherwise not. And that’s definite.”

“A quest! A quest! It’s on. I’ll take my chance. I’ll even take my chance on your estimate of her beauty.”

“Leo, Leo, I just don’t understand you. How could you have deliberately hurt your father so much.”

“Quasars, Muriel, quasars, quasars, quasars!”

“WELL, I MUST go,” said Pattie. “I’ve been here for ages. I don’t know when I’ve talked so much to anybody. You must think I’m a regular chatterbox. But I never talk usually.”

“Don’t go, Pattie.”

“I must.”

“When will you come again?”

“Soon. After all, I’m in the house, aren’t I?”

Eugene held out his hand to Pattie. He had now established a ritual of hand-shake greetings. It was a way of touching her. He enclosed her hand and his fingers momentarily caressed her wrist. He let her go reluctantly and she whisked out of the door with a wave and a smile.

Eugene fussed a little about his room. He stacked up the cups and saucers and brushed the cake-crumbs off the furry green tablecloth. Pattie had eaten four cakes. He watered the potted plant. He had taken to watering it rather too often since the icon had gone. He noticed that the leaves were turning yellow. Then he sat down on a chair and looked up at the empty space where the icon had been.

Where was it now? It was odd to think that it was somewhere. He would have preferred to think it had ceased to exist. He seemed to see it suffering, yearning, calling out vainly for him in a little voice, weeping miraculous tears. Of course this was idiotic, it was childish. The thing was only a bit of wood. He must have some sense of proportion, some sense of scale about his loss. He had tried to prompt Pattie into telling him so, but she was far too sympathetic to understand his cues. It was no good expecting brisk and bracing talk from Pattie. He would have to tell himself that it was only an old picture, after all. He had had real losses and survived them. Why this ridiculous grief now? He was better off without the thing. Perhaps he had prized it too much. It was his last real possession and it had shielded him from the knowledge that he had lost everything.

Yes, he thought, that was it. A sense of possession, a sense of being clothed, which he ought long ago to have surrendered had remained to him because of the icon. That object had seemed to concentrate, to keep with him somehow symbolically, all that he had lost, his dear ones, the years of his life, Russia. So long as he had it these things did not seem utterly gone. Yet should he not have known it, then and all along. That he was a man who had lost everything? There was nothing reserved or kept. What he had loved and valued had ceased entirely to be. What feebleness in him had deferred the message till now? Let it go, let it go. Now he was a stripped man and the better for knowing it. So he told himself; but he could not yet really think in this way. The icon had travelled so far and so long with his family, like a dear good animal. He kept grieving about it, pitying it, pitying himself and wanting consolation.

Pattie had supplied some of this. Her exclamations of distress were constantly renewed on his behalf as with raised hands she bewailed his loss. He had talked to her incoherently about the icon and had gone on to tell her more about his family, about his mother, about his sister. He had said things which he had thought could not be said or told any more. This bound Pattie to him. Some of his substance had passed into her. Of course she could not understand. She could not be an ageing Russian emigre with Europe in the bowels. But she knew about deprivation, and she looked at him with her dark reddish eyes all round and moist with concern and she smiled and nodded out of her drift of black hair and leaned sighing towards him as if so much sympathy was a physical pain.

He had tried to make her talk about herself, and she had told him a little about her early childhood. But she had said she had forgotten herself as a child and that as an adult she had had no history. She said once, “I haven’t begun to exist yet.” I will make you exist, Eugene had said to himself confidently. He had begun to want to touch Pattie. He did touch her, not only in hand-shakes, but in fugitive secretive ways, acting as if he were unaware of himself, tapping her arm as he told a tale, stroking her shoulder when he offered her some tea. He had plans for touching her hair. These touches made a sort of physical pattern in the room, a tantalizing incomplete Pattie, magnetically present and inviting. Inviting too he sometimes felt were her urgent eyes, blood-red in their corners, dark red somehow even in their blackness, passionate in their mute confused questioning of him. The idea came to him that he was falling a bit in love with Pattie, and when he thought this he calmed himself at once by a repetition of the things she so often repeated herself: I’m here, I’m in the house, I’ll be back soon. There was plenty of time for him to get to know Pattie. Meanwhile she was necessarily, consolingly, easily there.

“Oh, hello.” Leo had put his head round the door.

“Come in, come in.” Leo’s visits were rare. Eugene jumped up. He felt physically awkward in the presence of his son as if some electrical discharge had disabled and diminished him. He jerked himself away past the bed and dangled against the wall.

“I’ve been trying to see you for ages. I thought that female would never stop yapping.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk in that ugly way,” said Eugene automatically, wearily. He had said this to Leo so often.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt her, does it? All right, sorry. Won’t you sit down? You look so odd over there in the corner.”

Eugene sat down. He contemplated his tall slim son with a surprise that never diminished, a surprise at seeing him so grown-up, so large, so handsome, so impertinent. With the surprise came timidity and the muddled pain of an inexpressible love. Always they blundered at each other, there was no technique of contact, no way of taking hold. On Leo’s face Eugene read the equivalent of his own amaze: a look of uncertain apprehensive boldness. They were present to each other in the room as unintelligible, unmanageable objects. Eugene hunched himself.

“What is it?”

“I’ve got something to tell you. ‘Confess’ I suppose is the word.”

“What?”

“It’s about that old thing.”

“What thing?”

“That icon thing.”

“Oh. Has it been found?” Eugene forgot his physical distress. His body filled out again.

“Not exactly. But I know where it is. At least I think I do.”

“Where, where?”

“Not so fast,” said Leo. “It’s long story. Do you mind if I get on to the bed?” He crawled into the lower bunk and crouched there on his knees, peering out.

“Where is it, what’s happened to it?”

“Well, you see, I took it, in a manner of speaking.”

“You took it?”

“Yes. I needed some money, so I took it and sold it. I imagine it’s still in the shop I sold it to.”

Eugene was silent. He felt an immediate and intense pain of humiliation. He could not look at Leo, it was as if he himself were ashamed. He stared at the floor. Leo had taken the icon and sold it. It was not the clean loss that he had imagined and tried to make terms with. It was something muddled and ugly and personal, something twisted back into him, something that disgraced him. He drooped his head and continued to be silent.

“Well, aren’t you going to be angry with me?”

With an effort Eugene looked at the crouching boy. He felt no anger, only the shame and discomfiture of someone who has allowed himself to be hopelessly hurt and worsted. He felt the old shame of the years in the labour camp present like stripes upon his body. He said at last. “Get off that bed and let me see you properly.”

Leo got up promptly and stood before his father, bringing his heels together with a little jump. His long mouth turned involuntarily upward at the corners, almost like a caricature of a happy person. His pale freckled face was attentive and expectant.

“Why did you do that, what did you want the money for?”

“Well, you see, I know it’s rather awful, but I suppose I’d better tell you, I embezzled some college funds. It was the kitty of a club I was treasurer of. I spent the money on all sorts of things, frittered it as you might say. And then I had to account for it.”

Eugene had a sense of being cornered which he had often had before. Leo was enacting a scene and forcing him to enact a scene too. Was there no way out of this, no means by which they could talk simply and directly to each other, no appeal or cry which could break through that so familiar flow of patter? He looked down at Leo’s pointed shoes. Anger might help, but he could not feel anger, only a miserable hangdog sense of defeat. He was a man derided by his son who could do nothing.

“It was a wrong thing to do.” The words as he uttered them seemed to Eugene totally meaningless. One might as well have said them to Hitler or a hurricane.

“I know, but I had to have the money.” Leo’s tone was explanatory and eager. “Otherwise I’d have been disgraced.”

“You are disgraced. Oh well, it doesn’t matter now.” Eugene wanted Leo to go away. He wanted the thing to stop hurting him in this way.

“Good heavens, you can’t say that. Of course it matters. Anyway, I’m going to get it back for you.”

“I don’t see how you can. If you’ve spent the money. Anyhow, I don’t want it back. I can live without it.”

“You mustn’t let me off like this!”

“I’m not letting you off. I just don’t want to talk about it any more. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, please don’t be so sort of quiet. You ought to be furious with me. You ought to box my ears.”

“I can hardly start now,” said Eugene. He looked up, frowning like a dazzled man, into the pale eager face. He added, “Now please go away.”

“But I haven’t said I’m sorry.”

“You aren’t sorry.”

“Well, it’s just a state of mind, you know. There’s nothing to it.”

“It’s enough that you’ve stolen my icon,” said Eugene. “I don’t want to listen to your half-crazy chatter too. I don’t understand you. I never have.”

“That’s better. You’re getting cross. It’ll do you good. Perhaps it’ll do me good. Look, I am sorry, you know. It wasn’t one of my better ideas. But I will get it back. I expect I’ll just have to steal it again.”

“If you steal it,” said Eugene. “I’ll hand you over to the police.”

He rose to his feet. He felt quite suddenly the release of anger. It came as a relief, a sense of contact. It was if he had taken a grip upon Leo at last.

“But you want the thing, don’t you?”

“Not any more. You’ve spoilt it. You’ve spoilt everything. And you’ve done it deliberately. You sicken and offend me. I’ve tried to bring you up properly and you’re a liar and a thief.”

“Well, maybe I didn’t have much of a chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never lived in a real house. How can I have any sense of property?”

“I did the best I could for you, I did everything for your sake,” said Eugene. The plaintive tone came naturally, then anger again. How could he be so taunted?

“We’ve just camped out all our life. You’ve never wanted to do anything.”

“I’ve worked as I can, and I’ve supported you. I’m still supporting you.”

“No you aren’t. And you haven’t even tried to be English.”

“I couldn’t try. Anyway why should I try? I’m Russian. So are you.”

“No I’m not. I’m not anything. I can never make you understand it’s all meaningless to me, it’s nothing.” The playful tension had gone from Leo’s face. His mouth drooped, his eyes were screwed up, he looked like a threatened almost tearful child.

“You can’t deny what you are.”

“I’m not that. I hate it all. I hated that bloody icon too. You’ve made a little Russia all round you. You’re living in a dream world. All you ever really wanted was a bolt hole.”

“Stop shouting at me!”

“I’m not shouting. And you’ve forgiven the Soviet Union.”

“I haven’t forgiven the Soviet Union. Well perhaps I have. I can’t alter history. Why should I hate my country?”

“It isn’t your country. You haven’t got a country. And you’ve made me not have one either. God, I wish I were American!”

“That’s the most dreadful thing I’ve ever heard you say. And keep your voice down. They’ll hear you in the Rectory.”

“What do I care if they hear me in the Rectory? Let them hear. We’re as good as they are, aren’t we? You with you ‘Miss Muriel’ and your ‘please sir’, like a bloody slave.”

“Stop speaking to me like that, and get out of this room. You’ve never respected me. You’ve never loved me as you ought to.”

“Why should I love you? You’re my fucking father.”

“Please, please, please,” said Muriel, who had just come in the door.

Leo immediately turned his back and put his hands up to his face. Eugene stared at her stonily, still rigid with his fury. He was intensely upset at the intrusion and extremely angry that Muriel had overheard.