The Time of the Angels (2 page)

Once at the school, Leo had played the clever wayward boy in a style which somehow got through Marcus’s professional defences. Marcus was not deficient in self-knowledge and he was not ignorant of the more sophisticated hypotheses of modern psychology. Tolerant of himself, he was well aware of the subtle and important part which is played in the make-up of the successful teacher by a certain natural sadism. Marcus had taken his own measure as a sadist, he understood the machinery, and he had perfect confidence in his expertise. He was a good teacher and a good headmaster. But a sadism which in the ordinary hurly-burly of human relations remains within rational limits may surprise its proprietor as soon as the perfect partner appears on the scene.

Leo was the perfect partner. His particular brand of cunningly defiant masochism fitted but too well the peculiarities of Marcus’s temperament. Marcus punished him and he came back for more. Marcus appealed to his better feelings and attempted to treat him as an adult. Too much emotion was generated between them. Marcus was confiding and affectionate, Leo was rude, Marcus was blindingly angry. Leo stayed out his time, a troublemaker of genius. Marcus had destined him for the university, to read French and Russian. At the last moment, and with the connivance of the mathematics master whom Marcus, exasperated with himself, fell to treating as a rival, Leo went to a technical college in Leicestershire to study engineering. He was rumoured not to be doing well.

“It’s all part of the breakdown of Christianity,” Norah was concluding. “Not that I mind its disappearing from the scene. But it hasn’t turned out as we thought when I was young. This sort of twilight-of-the-gods atmosphere will drive enough people mad before we get all that stuff out of our system.”

“I wonder. Do we really want to get it all out of our system?” said Marcus, banishing the image of the disastrous boy. He found Norah’s brisk sensibleness of an old Fabian radical a bit bleak at times. The cleancut rational world for which she had campaigned had not materialized, and she had never come to terms with the more bewildering world that really existed. Marcus, who shared many of her judgements, could not help being a little fascinated by what she had called the twilight of the gods. Could it be that the great curtain of huge and misty shapes would be rolled away at last, and if it were so what would be revealed behind? Marcus was not a religious believer, but he was, as he sometimes wryly put it, an amateur of Christianity. His favourite reading was theology. And when he was younger he had felt a dark slightly guilty joy in having a priest for a brother.

“Yes we do,” said Norah. “The trouble with you is that you’re just a Christian fellow-traveller. It’s better not to tinker with a dying mythology. All those stories are simply false, and the oftener that is said in plain terms the better.”

They had differed about this before. Indolent, unwilling now to argue, Marcus realized sadly that his tea was over. He turned a little toward the fire, wiping his fingers on a stiff linen napkin.

He murmured, “Well, I shall go and see Carel tomorrow and I shall insist on seeing Elizabeth.”

“That’s right, and don’t take no for an answer. After all, you’ve called three times now. I might even come with you. I haven’t seen Muriel for some time and I’d like to have a straight talk with her. If there’s any trouble about Elizabeth I really think you should consider taking legal advice. I don’t say that your brother should be unfrocked or certified. But he must be made to behave a little more like a rational being. I think I’ll have a word with the Bishop about it, we often meet on the housing committee.”

Norah had risen and was gathering up the plates, now furred with golden cake-crumbs and greengage jam. Marcus was warming his hands and wrists at the fire. It was colder in the room.

“I wonder if you heard that odious rumour about Carel,” said Norah, “that he was having a love affair with that coloured servant.”

“Pattie? No. It’s impossible.”

“Why is it impossible, pray?”

Marcus giggled. “She’s too fat.”

“Don’t be frivolous, Marcus. I must say, I can’t get over her being called O’Driscoll when she’s as black as your hat.”

“Pattie’s not all that black. Not that it matters.”

Marcus had heard the rumour but had not believed it. Carel’s peculiarities were not of that kind. He was a chaste man, even puritanical. Here Marcus knew his brother because he knew himself. He rose to his feet.

“Oh, Marcus, you aren’t going are you? Why not stay the night? You don’t want to go all the way back to Earls Court in this frightful fog.”

“Must go, work to do,” he mumbled. And when, some ten minutes later, he was walking over pavements sticky with frost, his lonely steps resounding inside the heavy cloak of the fog, he had forgotten all about Norah and felt instead the warm seed of joy in his heart which was the prospect of seeing Elizabeth again.

“SO SORRY TO bother you. My name is Anthea Barlow. I’m from the pastorate. I wonder if I could see the Rector for a little minute?”

“I’m afraid the Rector is not seeing anybody at present.”

“Perhaps I could leave him a note then. You see I really—”

“I’m afraid he hasn’t got round to dealing with any letters yet. Perhaps you could try again later.”

Pattie closed the door firmly upon the faintly wailing, faintly fluttering figure in the fog. She was a hardened door-keeper. Used to this sort of scene, she had forgotten it the next moment. Upstairs she could hear the sound of the little tinkling hand-bell which Elizabeth used to summon Muriel. Retrieving the slipper which had come off as she crossed the hall, Pattie flip-flopped back towards the kitchen.

Pattie was nervous and uneasy. The constant noise of the underground railway jolted her by day and disturbed her dreams by night. Ever since their arrival the fog had enclosed them, and she still had very little conception of the exterior of the Rectory. It seemed rather to have no exterior and, like the unimaginable circular universes which she read about in the Sunday newspapers, to have absorbed all other space into its substance. Venturing out on the second day she had, to her surprise, been unable to discover any other buildings in the vicinity. The fog hummed intermittently with mysterious sounds, but there was nothing to see except the small circle of pavement on which she stood and the red brick facade of the Rectory, furred with frost. The side wall of the Rectory was of concrete, where it had been sliced off from another building during the war. Pattie’s gloved hand touched the corner where the concrete met the brick and she saw a shape to her right which she knew must be the tower built by Christopher Wren. She could just see a gaping door and a window in the dark yellow haze.

Walking along a little further she found herself in a waste land. There were no houses, only a completely flat surface of frozen mud, through which the roadway passed, with small humps here and there under stiff frozen tarpaulins. It seemed to be a huge building site, but an abandoned one. Straying from the pavement, Pattie’s feet crunched little cups of ice and frozen weeds which looked like Victorian ornaments under their icy domes. Frightened of the solitude and afraid of losing her way she trotted hastily back to the shelter of the Rectory. She passed nobody on the road.

The problem of shopping still remained unsolved. Shopping was for Pattie a natural activity, a fundamental form of her contact with the world. Never organized or systematized, it had been a daily ritual, and rushing out again for something forgotten a little busy pleasure. Without it she felt like a hen in a battery. Some instinctive bustling movement was denied her. It appeared that there were no shops anywhere near the Rectory, and she had not yet been able to discover anyone who delivered. She had still to rely upon Eugene Peshkov who strode out into the haze each morning bearing Pattie’s list and returned later with all her requirements. The sight of the big man, smiling for her approval, with the bulging shopping bags one in each hand, was very consoling, only now Pattie had to be more business-like and make sure she did not forget anything. The needs of the household were in fact simple, even Spartan. Carel was a vegetarian and lived on grated carrot and eggs and cheese and whole-meal biscuits. His meals were, at his own wish, of an unvarying monotony. Pattie herself lived on beans on toast and sausages. She did not know what Muriel and Elizabeth ate. Elizabeth did not like to have Pattie in her room, and the girls, following a long tradition, cooked their own meals over a gas ring. It was another sign of their tribal separateness.

Pattie had been born thirty years before in an attic room in a small house in an obscure industrial town in the centre of England. She had not been a welcome visitor to her mother, Miss O’Driscoll. Miss O’Driscoll, who had herself arrived in the world under similar auspices, knew at least that her own father had been a labourer in Liverpool and her maternal grandfather had been a peasant in County Tyrone. Miss O’Driscoll was a Protestant. The identity of Pattie’s father had been, during Miss O’Driscoll’s pregnancy (it was not her first), a matter for interesting speculation. The arrival of the coffee-coloured infant settled, up to a point, the question of paternity. Miss O’Driscoll distinctly remembered a Jamaican. As she could never, being much given to the drink, recall his surname the notion of Pattie’s bearing it had never arisen. In any case her father was a spectral entity who had, while Pattie was still a pinpoint of possibilities inside Miss O’Driscoll’s belly, departed to London with the intention of taking a job on the underground.

Pattie was soon “in need of care and protection”. Miss O’Driscoll was quite affectionate as a mother but far from single-minded. She shed her usual tears and heaved her usual sigh of relief when the little brown brat was taken away from her and put into an orphanage. She occasionally visited Pattie there to shed more tears and to exhort her to be a good girl. Miss O’Driscoll was given to being Saved, at intervals, and when these fits were on would discourse fervently about the Precious Blood at the orphanage gates, and even burst into pious song. After a while, being once more in the family way, her visits ceased and she died of a disease of the liver, together with Pattie’s unborn younger brother.

Throughout her childhood Pattie was sick with a misery so continual that she failed to recognize it as a sort of disease. No one was especially unkind to her. No one beat her or even shouted at her. Bright brisk smiling women dealt with her needs, buttoning and unbuttoning her clothes when she was little, issuing her with sanitary pads and highly simplified information about sex when she was older. Although she was very backward her teachers were patient with her. Classified as mentally retarded, she was moved to another school where her teachers were even more patient with her. Of course the other children teased her because she was “black", but they never actually bullied her. Usually they ignored her.

From the moment when the uniformed man had carried her away in his arms from the alcoholic sobbing of Miss O’Driscoll nobody had loved her. Nobody had touched her or looked at her with the close attention which only love bestows. Among a mass of children she had struggled for notice, raising her little brown arms as if she were drowning, but the eyes of adults always passed vaguely over her. She had not, like more fortunate children, been licked into shape by love, as a bear licks its cubs. Pattie had no shape. Her mother, it is true, had once provided a sort of love, an animal clutch, which the adolescent Pattie recalled with an uncomprehending wistful gratitude. She carried this shred, which was scarcely even a memory, about in her heart and prayed for her dead mother nightly, trusting that, though her sins were as scarlet, the Precious Blood had proved as efficacious as Miss O’Driscoll could have hoped.

And well, of course, God loved Pattie. The brisk women had taught her this very early on, turning her over as it were to God when they had, as they usually had, other things to do. God loved her with a great big possessive love and Pattie of course loved God in return. But their mutual affection did not stop her from being, nearly all the time, brutalized by unhappiness into a condition which resembled mental deficiency. Much later some merciful power out of the darkness which Pattie had worshipped in ignorance drew an oblivious sponge over those years. Adult, Pattie could scarcely remember her childhood.

When she was fourteen, still hardly able to read or write, she left school, and as she seemed incapable of further training she went into service. Her first employers were a continuation of her teachers, lively enlightened liberal-minded people who seemed to a more resentful, more conscious Pattie to be always converting her misery into their cheerfulness by a relentless metabolic process. In fact they did a lot for her. They taught her to live in a house, they convinced her that she was not stupid, they even put books in her way. They were very kind to her; but from their kindness the chief lesson she learnt was the lesson of the colour bar. As a child she had not distinguished between the affliction of being coloured and the affliction of being Pattie. As a girl she took stock of her separateness. Her employers treated her in a special way because she was a coloured person.

Pattie now began to feel her colour, to feel it as a physical patina. She constantly read it too in the looks of others. She exhibited before herself her arms, so indelibly dyed to a dark creamy brown, and her hands with the greyish pallor upon the palm and the slightly purple tint upon the nail. She looked with puzzlement, almost with astonishment, into mirrors to see her round flat face and her big mouth set upon a scarcely perceptible arc so that when she smiled almost all her gleaming white teeth were visible together. She fingered the curls of her very dry black hair, pulling them into straightness and watching them return like springs into their natural spirals. She envied proud delicate-featured Indian girls in saris with jewels in their ears and noses whom she sometimes saw in the street, and wished that she could wear her own nationality with such an air. But then, she realized, she had no nationality except to be coloured. And when she saw Wogs go home scribbled upon walls she took it to herself as earnestly and piously as she took the sacrament at the church which she attended on Sundays. Sometimes she thought about Jamaica, which she pictured as a technicolour scene in a cinema when soft music weaves together a vista of breaking waves and swaying palms. In fact, Pattie had never seen the sea.

Of course there were other coloured people in the town. Pattie began to notice them and to observe with a sharp eye their features and their different shades of colour. Now it was as if there were only two races, white and black. Not all the half-and-halfs were as dark as herself; her father must have been a very dusky man indeed to have injected so much of darkness into his half-Irish daughter. Pattie brooded upon these distinctions, though she did not know what value she set upon them. She felt no sense of unity with the other coloured people, even when they were most evidently akin to herself. Whiteness seemed to join all the white people together in a cosy union, but blackness divided the black, each into the loneliness of his own special hue. Pattie’s clear apprehension of this loneliness was her first grown-up sentiment. She recalled a little poem which had troubled her at school: “And I am black, but oh my soul is white"; and Pattie decided that she was damned if her soul was white. If she had a soul and souls had a colour, hers was a creamy brown a little darker in hue than a cappuccino. She had found in herself after all a little nugget of pride, something which she had brought along perhaps wrapped up in that shred of love which poor Miss O’Driscoll had blindly given to her little wisp of a daughter. Pattie began to think.

She learnt to read properly now, teaching herself in her room in the evenings. She read a lot of romantic novels, including some she had been taught to call classics, she read the women’s magazines from cover to cover, and she even read some poetry and copied pieces of it into a black notebook. She liked poems that resembled songs or charms or nursery rhymes, fragments that could be musically murmured. The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair. Pattie felt with this that she knew all that she needed to know about the Spartans. The world of art remained fragmented for her, a shifting kaleidoscopic pattern which yielded beauty almost without form. She amassed small pieces of poems, of melodies, faces in pictures, laughing Cavaliers and Blue Boys, scarcely identified, happily recognized, easily forgotten. She took no concepts away from her experiences. For the rest, a devout Low Church Christianity provided her cosmology. Lo where Christ’s blood streamed in the firmament. The idea of redemption, vague and yet somehow for her entirely factual, stayed with her as a consolation of a special kind. All manner of thing might not be well, might never be well, but the world could not be quite as terrible as it often seemed.

During this time Pattie led a life which was appallingly solitary. She did not even conceive of finding company, and when her employers tried to encourage her to join a social club she shrank from the idea in horror. She was seventeen. She put on make-up and did a great many of the things which her magazines told her to do and went regularly to a hairdresser to have her hair straightened, but these were entirely private rituals. Black men looked at her furtively, with a kind of yearning hostility which she understood. White men of a kind she found repulsive whistled after her in the street. And then one day her kind liberal-minded employers told her that they were going to move to London. They had no further need for her services, but they would give her an excellent reference. An employment agency recommended her to a post at a country rectory some way distant from the town and Pattie walked through a door into the life of Carel Fisher.

At the time of Pattie’s arrival Elizabeth was six and Muriel was eleven. Elizabeth’s parents were both dead, but Carel’s wife Clara was still alive. Pattie could not recall being interviewed by Clara. It seemed to her in retrospect that she must have been welcomed instantly by Carel, as if a long arm had come through the doorway and a reassuring hand had caressed her before she was over the threshold. She entered into Carel’s presence as into the presence of God, and like the souls of the blessed, realized her felicity not through anything which she distinctly saw but by a sense of her own body as glorified. Carel immediately touched her, he caressed her, he loved her. Indeed Pattie’s dazed senses could scarcely have distinguished these things from each other. Carel took her into his possession with a beautiful naturalness and tamed her by touch and kindness as one might tame an animal. Pattie flowered. Carel’s divine hands created her in her turn a goddess, a dark swaying being whose body glowed with a purple sheen, glorious as Parvati at the approach of Shiva. For a year Pattie laughed and sang. She was fond of the other members of the household, especially of Elizabeth and accepted them naturally as the properties of her master. She attended to the children and obeyed Clara. But what built the house and made it topless as the towers of Ilion, what constructed the hollow golden universe all ringing with joy, was Carel’s sweet affection, his quick touch upon her arm as he spoke to her, his finger tracing out the bones of her neck, his tug at her hair, his clap to her behind, his strong grip sometimes upon her wrist, his playful flick at her cheek. Pattie felt she could have been happy so forever. And then one day, with the same beautiful naturalness, Carel took her to bed.