The Time of the Angels (17 page)

“What a day!” said Norah. “Sit down, Muriel. I think we both need some liquid refreshment! I’ll just make us some coffee. Excuse me for a moment.”

Muriel continued to stand, smoothing her face all over with the handkerchief, and watching the steady descent of the snow. The snow filled the air, not seeming any more like separate flakes, but like a huge fleecy white blanket which was being gently waved to and fro just outside the window. The door opened again and the coffee-tray clinked down on the table.

“You look like a refugee, my child! Do sit down and tell me how you are. You ought to have answered my last letter, oughtn’t you. It would have been polite!”

“I’m sorry,” said Muriel. She came back towards the fire and sat down. “I’ve been—so depressed since I came to London.” She oughtn’t to have said that. It was just what Shadox wanted her to say.

Norah was silent for a minute or two studying Muriel. Then she said, “I think you’d better tell me all about it.”

Muriel looked round Shadox’s sitting-room. It was just as she remembered it. A coal fire blazed in the grate and cast sparks of light on to the big brass-handled fire-irons. The mantelpiece was covered with white china cups with elegant flower decorations upon their spotless gleaming sides. White wooden bookshelves filled the two recesses. Norah’s books, with all their paper covers still upon them, seemed as neat and clean and colourful as her china. The flowery chintz upon the chairs had faded to pleasant powdery hues. Excellent modern reproductions of recent French masters hung upon the walls. The wallpaper was spotty with very small roses. Muriel breathed it in with what she was amazed to find was a sense of relief.

She looked at Shadox. Shadox hadn’t changed either. Shadox never changed. She had looked just like that all the years Muriel had known her. The glittering silvery-grey straight hair framing the lined kindly face, a uniform colour of light biscuity brown. The strong mouth and shrewd confident eyes. Shadox had once represented everything which Muriel despised. Her kindness had seemed sloppy and intrusive, her confidence a blind reliance upon musty values. Now Muriel, giddy suddenly with a sense of having become infinitely older, apprehended Norah as being marvellously, perhaps savingly, innocent.

“I’m a bit worried about my father and my cousin,” said Muriel.

“I’m not surprised. Your father is a difficult man. And Elizabeth has a particularly tiresome sort of illness. Here, have some coffee. Tell me how it is.”

“It’s hard to say,” said Muriel. “I confess it’s getting me down. Of course, Elizabeth is ill, she can’t really go anywhere and she’s not supposed to lift things and so on. But I feel my father rather exaggerates it. He tends to keep her a bit too cooped up, and he’s so touchy about her having visitors. I think Elizabeth ought to see more people.”

“I entirely agree. I’ve always taken that view myself. Of course, your father is rather neurotic, isn’t he. He’s the sort of man who dislikes visitors of any description. I imagine he hates having strangers in the house.”

“Yes, he does,” said Muriel. It had not occurred to her that there might be this simple explanation of Carel’s reluctance to let anyone visit Elizabeth.

“I’ve known lots of people like that. It’s particularly unfortunate in parents who inflict their misanthropy on their children! Of course one has to use tact. How is the child herself? Morale fairly high?”

“Not bad. I’m amazed how cheerfully she puts up with it on the whole. Only she’s got rather sort of tired and apathetic lately.”

“It’s a wretched time of year and I expect it’s an anticlimax after the move. Naturally she needs a bit of a change, a diversion. Of course, what she needs most of all is men friends.”

“I thought of introducing her to Leo Peshkov,” said Muriel. She said this with a sense of uttering some extraordinary blasphemy in a concealed form. It was like saying swear words in a foreign language.

“Excellent idea,” said Norah. “He’s on the spot, isn’t he. A rather disappointing young man. Not much spunk. But he’s quite nice and you couldn’t want anything more harmless.”

“I doubt if my father will think so,” said Muriel.

“Why in heaven’s name should your father object? If you ask me he’s a neurotic, selfish, isolated, self-obsessed person. It’s a very familiar type among men. I hope you don’t mind my saying so Muriel, but a spade is a spade. You must just be firm with your father. You’re still a bit afraid of him, aren’t you?”

“Yes—” said Muriel. She looked into the dazzling fire and dug her fingers into the corners of her eyes.

“How old are you, Muriel my child?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Well, isn’t it about time you stopped being afraid of your father?”

“Yes—” said Muriel.

It was all perfectly simple after all, there were no nightmares. Elizabeth was a bit lonely. Naturally she needed a change, a diversion. Carel was tiresomely neurotic. He hated visitors. But Elizabeth must see some young people. Leo Peshkov was quite nice, perfectly harmless. Muriel must just be firm with Carel. Carel was a selfish, isolated, self-obsessed person. It was a familiar type among men. Muriel must simply be firm with him. Muriel was twenty-four and it was about time she stopped being afraid of her father. It was all quite simple and quite ordinary.

“Don’t cry, Muriel,” said Shadox. “There’s nothing dreadful. It’ll all come right. Drink up your coffee. It’ll all come right, my dear child.”

EUGENE PESHKOV WOKE up to the knowledge that something very odd indeed had occurred. He lay drowsily with eyes half-closed in the cavern of his lower bunk wondering what it was. It was something odd, disturbing and wonderful. Whatever could it be? He rolled over and propped himself up on an elbow, rubbing his eyes. Then he realized that the sun was shining into the room.

The room was bleached by the sunshine and lightened and enlarged by it as if it had been lifted up and opened out into an expanse of air. The sky to be seen through the high window was clear and pale and so quivering with radiance that it could scarcely be seen as blue, an azure as brilliant as a diamond. There was too a certain familiar quality in the light, a certain tinkling glittering pallor, which made Eugene’s whole body vibrate with a consciousness almost too piercingly physical to be called memory. He leapt out of bed and put on his dressing-gown. Then putting a chair against the wall and mounting upon it he looked out of the window.

The fog had been rolled away and the sun shone out of a sky of icy sizzling blue on to a vast expanse of deep untrodden snow. The building site had become a huge snowfield beyond which was revealed a great horizon of snow-touched domes and spires, twinkling in the intense crystal light.

The emotion which had metamorphosed Eugene’s body now located itself violently in his stomach and he got down in haste. The first thing on which his dazzled eyes could focus was the painted Russian box. He still could not remember what it was associated with the box which so much afflicted him. Some very similar box must have played a part in his childhood. He supposed it might be something to do with his mother or his sister. He put his hand on the box and felt its glossiness, hoping that touch might tell, but nothing came except some ray of unnamable anguish adding itself to the disturbance occasioned by the snowy light. Eugene dressed quickly. He had slept late. He could hear Pattie moving things in the kitchen, he could hear her singing. Even inside the house sounds rang with a difference, higher, as if they flew higher in the air, thinner, purer, like crystal echoes of the snow. This too in all his sinews he knew, he knew.

Eugene had gone to bed the night before in a state of misery. The loss of the icon had been simply painful, a blow. But the revelation of his son’s iniquity had been a shock of a different kind, something which forced him to become not just a victim but an actor, and an absurd and stupid one. He realized now how much he depended on quietness and order and passivity for his well-being and for the dulling of what he still knew of man’s inhumanity to man. Was his stoicism just a resigned forgetfulness after all? He could tolerate what was simple and could be endured passively, as he endured now in passive retrospect the catastrophe of his life. But Leo’s action was a personal attack which jabbed his personality and brought back the ugly particulars of the past. Those things too, at that time, had hurt and humiliated in this way. And then there had been the distasteful intrusion of Miss Muriel, what she had witnessed and what she had said. Eugene’s security was shaken, his indispensable dignity, his sense of decorum, everything which protected him utterly from the casual monkey race of the English and made him their superior. He felt menaced and diminished.

However, that had been yesterday before the great manifestation of the sun and the snow. Now Eugene felt disturbed and excited, distinctly better. He regarded himself in his shaving-mirror. Since Pattie’s arrival he shaved every day. He stroked his moustaches which curved stiffly, thick on the lip and tapering to two wiry points below. They were a rusty brown, the colour his hair had once been. His hair, a peppery grey, still grew in a wavy tonsure round his bald spot, luxuriant enough to conceal it except when the wind was blowing from a certain direction. He examined the hair in front. Perhaps it was getting a little thin. He coughed in a sympathetic way at his mirror image and then hurried out of his room and into the kitchen.

“Oh, Pattie, look. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Wonderful! Everything’s different.”

“Let’s go out quick. You’ve taken his breakfast up, haven’t you?” For some reason Eugene could not name the Rector.

“Yes. Wouldn’t you like an egg?”

“No, no, not today. Let’s go out. Get your coat.”

“I don’t know if I ought to—”

“Come on. I’ll show you the river. I’ll show you the snow.”

A few minutes later they were walking on the snow with long shadows behind them. The snow on the building site was untrodden, crisp and frosty on the top, so that their boots broke the crust with a brittle sound. The low bright sun slanted across the snow making little blue wave-like shadows on its surface, and making the snow crystals here and there shine so brightly that Pattie kept stopping with an exclamation, hardly able to believe that there were not jewels strewn about her feet. The air hummed with brightness and Eugene’s body ached with memory.

He was wearing his old trench coat, a garment so stiff and hard that it was like putting on a mould of clay. Pattie wore her grey coat of rather rabbity fur and a red woollen scarf round her head. Her black hair, beginning now to be a little frizzy, made a dark frill about her round brown astonished face. She walked a little gingerly, as if hesitating to break the dry crust of the frozen snow which the sun now made to look golden as if it were baking. She turned often to look back at their footprints. The snow below the surface was woollier, bluer. She stared at Eugene with spellbound exhilaration and surprise. Eugene laughed too. The vapour from his breath, freezing upon his moustache, had made it stiffen with a pleasant tickling feeling. He felt a little giddy with the light and the opened hugeness of the past. He put an arm round Pattie’s shoulder. “The sun suits you. It’s funny, but I keep thinking you’ve never seen snow before.”

“I feel as if I’ve never seen snow before.”

“Of course this isn’t real snow.”

“It is real,” said Pattie.

After a moment Eugene said, “Yes, you’re right.” He felt crazy and happy. He kept his arm on her shoulder, guiding her.

“Where’s the river? I haven’t even seen it.”

“I’ll show you. I’ll show you the river. I’ll show you the sea.”

They had come into a street where the snow was trodden a little and where wavy ridges of white patterned the blackish red of brick walls. A few people passed, bundled up in coats and scarves, with a strained dazed smiling look upon their faces. Eugene and Pattie came round a corner past a little public house and out of the shadow of the street on to a quay where the curve of the huge river lay before them, full to the brim and moving fast, a steely bluey grey covered in scaly golden flecks, and beyond it the skyline again of towers and domes and spires, all pale and clear against a sky of light blue, like a blue stone polished until it glittered.

“Oh!” said Pattie.

They stood a while watching the water move. They had the quayside to themselves.

“It’s so fast.”

“The tide is running.”

“And so huge.”

“It’s near the sea.”

“Which way is the sea?”

“That way. We’ll go there soon.”

Eugene leaned on the granite wall of the quay. The snow, dry and almost warm, lightly powdered the sleeves of his coat. He took off his glove and felt with pleasure the bite of the air upon his hand. He scooped the snow a little and fingered the dry hard ridges of the granite. The huge echoing light, the dense feel of the stone, the hastening movement of the wide river, the glittering arc of buildings low upon the horizon, dazed and transported him. He felt himself the centre of some pure transparent system, infinitely spinning, infinitely still. There was no place in this limpid universe where darkness could hide. He said, “Pattie, I feel so full of joy, I hardly know where I am.”

He took a handful of snow. It was light, almost substanceless. He turned to Pattie. She was looking at him, dazed too, smiling. The cold made dark red fires glow in the brown of her cheeks. With her hair confined by the scarf her face looked round and plump, sweetly childish, wholesome like fruit. Eugene lifted his handful of snow up to the curve of her cheek and felt the warmth of her with his snowy hand. A little whiteness dusted on to her glowing skin. She was brown and warm and laughing beside him.

“Ouf! It’s going down my neck!”

“Take your glove off,” he said. “You must feel the snow. It’s not cold really. There.” He took her ungloved hand in his. He wanted to see her brownness against the white. He sank their joined hands slowly into the snowy coping of the granite wall.

“Oh, it is cold!”

“It’s lovely.”

“It’s like cold sugar.”

“Oh, Pattie, I feel so strange and good. Are you warm enough? I wish I could get you inside my coat like a little cat!”

“I’d purr!”

“Let me warm you.” He put an arm awkwardly round her. His overcoat stood up between them like a board. He fumbled his coat a little open and tried to draw Pattie nearer. Her hand, which he was still holding, he tucked in under his arm, leaving it to claw a hold upon the material of his jacket. Shifting the pressure from her shoulder and edging back the collar of his coat with his chin he tried to get a grip on her waist and move her nearer in between the flaps of the coat. He held on to the slippery bunchy fur, pulling at it. It was a gauche embrace. They stood face to face, two rotund bundles of clothing, unable to get close enough, excluding each other. Pattie stared past him, her cheek wet where the snow had melted on it. He felt the cold air assault his body. Then Pattie somehow moved and sidled, and got herself inside the overcoat. He felt her warmth and the weight of her leaning body. With a little grunt she pushed her face into his shoulder. The scarf fell back revealing a drift of curling blue-black hair. Eugene’s hand moved to caress it. He said, “I love you, Pattie.”

She said, muffled in his coat, “I love you too.”

Eugene gave a groan and tried to get his arm right round the fur coat. They shifted, dislodging the snow from the granite wall into their boots. Pattie let go of the back of his jacket and leaned upon him more heavily. She pressed on him like a falling pillar and he felt her warmth from his chest to his knees. He braced himself against her, his hands flat on her shoulders, immobilized and blind. Some time passed. Then with a reflex movement like a slow spring her head gradually lifted and his face inclined upon hers, bone feeling for bone. He kissed the curve of the cheek where he had laid his snowy hand, and began to look for her lips. When he found them some more time passed. With a series of twitches and pressures Pattie began to detach herself.

“Oh dear,” she said.

“My dear,” said Eugene.

“I’m so sorry,” said Pattie.

“What are you being sorry about?”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“Why ever not? Come, Pattie, we’re not children.”

“It’s wrong—”

“Well, let’s make it right. Pattie, will you marry me?”

“Oh—”

“Don’t be upset, my dear. It’s just an idea. We’ll think about it, shall we? We don’t have to hurry each other. Pattie, please—”

“You can’t want to marry me,” said Pattie, “it’s impossible.” She had moved away and was standing looking out over the hurrying river. Her ungloved hands, unconsciously cold, clasped and chafed each other.

“Don’t look so desolate. Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I? I know it’s sudden— And I know I’m not much of a—”

“It’s not that. You’re wonderful to me. Oh, you don’t know— But you mustn’t want me like that. I’m no good.”

“Now, don’t be silly—”

“I’m—well, I’m coloured—and I’m—”

“Pattie dearest, don’t talk utter nonsense. I might as well tell you that I’m Russian. We are ourselves, two very special people, and we’re both exiles and we’re both lonely and we’ve found each other. You’ve made me so happy and so different since you’ve been in the house, you must know that. Of course I must seem a hopeless broken-down sort of a case. But I could change things, I’m not a fool. I could earn much more money if I wanted to. We’d live in a proper house—”

“Don’t—” said Pattie. She hid her face for a moment. Then she moved, hands in pockets, and bored her head into his shoulder. “I love you, I love you.”

“Oh, Pattie, I’m so glad. There, I’m sorry I startled you. Don’t worry about anything, there’s plenty of time, we’ll see. I want to prove to you that I can make money—”

“Money doesn’t matter.”

“Well, think about it, won’t you, Pattie. If we do love each other—”

“But you can’t love me.”

“Pattie, stop it.” He held her very close, his chin burrowing in the stiff black hair.

Pattie pushed him away again. She put on her gloves and adjusted her scarf. Her face shuddered a little as if her teeth were chattering. She said, “You—you stay here. I’ll go back.”

“Let me come—”

“No, you stay here. I want you to stay here. Keep it for me little. I can find my way.”