The Time of the Angels (19 page)

“SUPPOSE SHE SCREAMS?”

“She won’t scream.”

Muriel and Leo faced each other in Muriel’s bedroom. The room was dark and cold. The sun was not shining today. Muriel sat down on the bed. She was feeling sick with apprehension and excitement.

How she had arrived at the firm decision to take Leo to Elizabeth she was not sure. Of course Shadox had counselled it, Shadox had seen it as a perfectly ordinary project. She had come back to it at the end of her conversation, in the course of which she had entreated Muriel to reconsider her decision about going to a university. Shadox had said, “Of course introduce the boy to her and do it now. Everything gets so stuffy and unnatural in your house.” But then Shadox didn’t know how things were. Or did she a little bit guess? Shadox was not such a fool as she seemed.

Shadox had certainly urged it as an ordinary and indeed obvious project. But of course it was not an ordinary project. It was a strange and significant move in a game the nature of which Muriel herself only half understood and which it now seemed to her that she had been playing for some time. There would be consequences. Muriel was excited and frightened, and although she had attempted to treat of the matter calmly with Leo she had not succeeded. Her mood had infected him and he was now as agitated as she was.

Why had this move, which was to be in effect simply a throwing of things into disorder, come to seem so necessary? When Muriel wondered this she heard again her father’s persuasive authoritative voice saying, “We have a precious possession which we must guard together.” She heard him say “Elizabeth is a dreamer,” she heard him repeat “She is trying to leave us,” and she saw Carel’s stiff intent face and his smile which looked so much like a grimace of pain.

The need to stir Elizabeth, to wake her, to do something unexpected, simply to see Elizabeth talking to another person had grown in Muriel as something connected with her own self-preservation. Elizabeth’s seclusion, the web which Carel said she was weaving, threatened Muriel too. Some process which had been going on for too long, and in which Muriel had herself co-operated, must be arrested. If it were not, Muriel feared, without altogether understanding her fear, that she might find herself somehow at last irreparably shut in with Elizabeth and Carel. For her own sake as well as Elizabeth’s there must be raised voices, shouting, opening of windows, and tramp of feet.

There was, besides this, another compulsion. Muriel had allowed herself to become fascinated by the idea of as it were loosing Leo at Elizabeth. There was excitement, of a more agreeable kind, in this too. They were both so good looking! To bring them together, even if this meant no more than juxtaposing them in the same room, would have something of the thrill of mating two rare animals, and Muriel found that her imagination had already busied itself in the matter. Some deep strange love which she had for her cousin had mingled itself with the plan, and it was not surprising that Leo was shivering with anticipation since he saw Muriel similarly afflicted. Muriel was excited, but she was also frightened. She was frightened of Carel, and although she said to herself “There is nothing he can do to me” she knew that there were things he could do. Just as when as a child, although he had never struck her, she had known of terrible punishments. She was frightened too of Elizabeth.

Muriel peered out of her room and listened. There was nothing to be heard except the vibration of a passing train and the familiar sound of Pattie turning Anthea Barlow away from the door. She turned back to Leo.

“I believe I’ve got a cold,” said Leo. “Do you think she’ll mind?”

“Damn your cold.”

“I’m dead scared. Wouldn’t it be a good thing just to warn her?”

“She’d say she wouldn’t see you.”

“She sounds a most peculiar girl. She’s not a bit odd in the head, is she?”

“No, of course not. She’s sweet and clever. You’ll see.”

“Do you think she’ll like me?”

“Sure to.”

“But what’ll she say, what’ll we talk about?”

“I don’t know,” said Muriel. She didn’t know. She didn’t even know whether Elizabeth mightn’t in fact scream. “You won’t do anything silly, will you, Leo? I mean you won’t jump on her, or anything? She’s led a very isolated life.”

“Jump on her! I don’t think I’ll have enough courage to speak to her!”

“Yes, you will, you’ll do fine. Just be natural.”

“Natural! What a hope!”

“Well, I think we should go along now.”

“Muriel, I can’t bear it, I’m funking it. Isn’t there any other way to do it?”

“No other way.”

“And must we go now?”

“Now.”

“Give me a minute,” said Leo.

He looked at himself in the mirror of Muriel’s dressing-table, stroking his furry hair and adjusting the collar of his shirt. He was more carefully, and Muriel thought less becomingly, dressed than usual; or perhaps it was just that his usual jaunty confidence was quenched. He looked a thin nervous scrap of a boy.

“Don’t think I’m ungrateful,” said Leo. “It’s just that I’ve thought about it so much. I keep saying to myself it’s just meeting a girl, but of course it isn’t just meeting a girl. And I’m terribly excited. Only just now sheer fright’s making me dry up a bit. You know Aristotle says a man dries up even in the middle if he hears someone is stealing his horse—”

“Never mind Aristotle. Come on.”

Muriel looked out again. She listened. The house was silent. Across the well of the stairs, Carel’s door was closed. She took Leo’s hand and squeezed it and led him out into the corridor.

Muriel was trembling. Simply opening the door of Elizabeth’s room and going through it with Leo, could that be so difficult and consequential? Was it really a door which led into an altered future? Muriel tried to calm herself. Nothing uncontrollable would happen. Later she should wonder why she had been so nervous.

Elizabeth’s room was on the next landing, up a half flight of stairs. Muriel, pulling Leo, had just reached the top of these stairs when she heard footsteps below. Somebody was coming up from the hall. The heavy clumsy tread announced Pattie. Muriel stood for a moment paralysed, seeing what Pattie would see, herself and Leo hand in hand near Elizabeth’s door, scandalously, patently guilty. She anticipated Pattie’s cries, her shouts for Carel.

Muriel could not bring herself to rush for refuge right on into Elizabeth’s room. To burst in, and immediately enjoin silence, that was hardly the way to do it. “Quick,” she murmured. She took two long strides along the corridor and threw open the door of the linen room and pushed Leo into the darkness inside. She was inside herself and had quietly closed the door by the time Pattie had rounded the bend of the staircase. She prayed that Pattie was not in quest of linen.

Pattie’s heavy footsteps passed the door and then paused further along the landing where there was a cupboard containing the china which was not in general use. Muriel could hear her fiddling about there, clinking things against each other. Leo began to whisper something but she put her hand to his mouth.

Muriel could hear Pattie’s movements and now she could also hear Elizabeth’s wireless playing softly in the next room, amazingly close by. Her own heart was being hugely, like some big thing breathing in the house. She was at once very conscious of the thin lighted slit in the wall. With a rumble and a shudder an underground train went by far below them.

Under cover of the train noise Leo whispered, “Who was that?”

“Pattie. She didn’t see us. Just wait.”

Muriel was beginning to feel an overwhelming desire to look through the slit into Elizabeth’s room. Her attention had been concentrated on Elizabeth, like that of a hunger upon a quarry, for so long. To see Elizabeth unseen now seemed the longed-for climax of that attention. For a moment she almost forgot Leo and it was as if what made her breathless with excitement concerned herself alone. She felt reckless and free. But of course with Leo there it was impossible. She must not let Leo know that Elizabeth was in the next room. Leo was temporarily intimidated and subdued, but he was also overexcited and capable of getting suddenly out of hand. Even with a subdued Leo Elizabeth would have enough of a shock. The proximity of Elizabeth during this suspense, the very idea of the spy-hole, might be enough to drive him into wildness.

Then Elizabeth very audibly sighed. The sigh was uncannily close to them. Against her will Muriel found herself staring at Leo in the dark. She could just make out his eyes questioning, motioning toward the wall. Another train passed.

“Is she in there?”

“Yes.”

She felt Leo’s hand pass like a ring down her arm and clamp on to her wrist. He pressed her hand against his thigh, staring at her. Then he looked a little sideways at the slit in the wall. Muriel could still hear Pattie in the corridor outside.

At the next train Leo said, “We could look through.”

“No.”

“Please. Looking at girls through screens. Just like in Japan after all. We must.”

“No. You said you’d obey me.”

The train passed. Muriel stood rigid, very close to Leo in the little dark space, listening to the soft murmur of the wireless and the irregular clink of china. There was a soft shifting flopping sound in the adjoining room and the sigh again. Muriel took deep breaths. She had a dazed sense of her own body as enlarged and strange and then realized that Leo was leaning against her, touching her from shoulder to knee. He released her hand and began to whisper something hot and tickling into her ear. “No,” said Muriel, without knowing what he had said. Her own need to look through the spy-hole into Elizabeth’s room was now overwhelming. She took hold of Leo’s arm, half restraining him, half seeking restraint herself. She felt irresponsible, dangerous. She gripped Leo, and they clung together like two falling angels. “No.”

The drone of music filtered through the lighted crack, sleepy, enticing. Muriel got her two hands firmly on to Leo’s forearms and her face brushed the soft fur of his head, fragrant of hair and boy. He said very clearly but almost totally inaudibly into her ear, “You brought me here. Don’t drive me mad.”

“She may be undressed,” said Muriel. They were traitor’s words. She was losing the struggle with herself.

“Well, you look first and see.”

Pattie’s movements could still be heard in the corridor. Muriel knew now that she had to look, it had become impossible not to. Was it after all so grave, to steal this illicit glimpse of her cousin? Why was she trembling? Yet she knew that it was grave. Elizabeth was a secret thing whose dignity and separateness was a peril. Elizabeth was taboo. But Muriel was drawn irresistibly now by some concentrated siren ray and she felt awed and afraid as one who faints outside a sibyl’s cave.

“You will obey me?”

“Yes, yes, but look.”

Leo, hot and shivering, seemed glued like a parasite to her side. He was uttering a continuous very soft hissing buzzing sound. Muriel thrust him away and turned her shoulder to him. Now the murmurous strip of light was before her face. It seemed to Muriel that she too was uttering a soft sibilant noise. She knelt quietly with one knee on the floor and leaned upon the shelf, shifting the linen which obscured the lower half of the crack. She thrust her head further forward.

The crack was thin and not easy to see through. Muriel approached until her nose was almost touching the partition wall, and shifted about a little trying to focus her eyes. At first she could see nothing but darkness and a sharp dazzle of empty light. Then she began to see through into the room beyond.

It was like looking into clear water and it took Muriel a moment to realize that she was looking straight into the big French mirror. Light seemed to fall like a faint concealing veil between her and the mirror. She stared through the arch of the glass trying to fix her gaze upon the dimmer gauzier forms of the reflections which seemed to lie in some reserved and further space beyond the near familiar brightness of her cousin’s room. The image of the alcove began to take shape for her and the head of Elizabeth’s bed.

Muriel felt a touch on her shoulder. She twitched herself away, trying to recompose the fragile image which was quivering now like water disturbed. She concentrated her vision at last into a small circle of perfect clarity. She saw the end of the chaise-longue close up against its mirror double. Beyond it in the mirror she saw the heaped and tousled bed. She began to see Elizabeth, who was on the bed. She saw, clear and yet unlocated like an apparition, Elizabeth’s head, moving, half hidden in a stream of hair, and Elizabeth’s bare shoulder. Then there were other movements, other forms, an entwining suddenly of too many arms. And she saw, slowly rising from the embrace, beyond the closed eyes and the streaming hair, white and dreadful, the head and naked torso of her father.