The Time of the Angels (27 page)

Muriel sat down and laid her head on Carel’s desk. The music continued, airy, substanceless, clear and mercilessly beautiful. The music continued cut off and far away in a beyond where nothing was sick or mortal. Here in the room Carel’s breathing was guttural and regular, a sort of quiet self-absorbed discourse. Muriel thought, if I do nothing these sounds are numbered now, in a little while they will simple cease, there will be a last breath and then no more. Mechanically she began counting. Then she thought, all breaths, all heart-beats of all humans are numbered. My life is as finite as his. Was she thinking and had she decided? No thoughts could help her now. She had never more positively felt the utter and complete absence of God. She was alone and rested on nothing and had recourse to nothing. There was no rock of ages.

She got up again and walked about a little. She came near to him and looked down upon the sleeping face. It seemed a terrible intrusion to look upon that face. The peace which it had desired had not yet come to it. The sleeping face was anxious. Oh God, does he want to be waked, does he want to be rescued, thought Muriel. If I could only know, if he could only tell me. If he had told me before I would have obeyed him. She leaned over him, staring, but the anxious sunken face had no message. Then suddenly she saw something white, held in Carel’s right hand which was resting between his side and the back of the couch. It was a piece of crumpled paper. Muriel reached out, hesitated, and then very gingerly plucked at the paper. What dreadful awakening was she now afraid of? That he should wake and know her act? Surely he knew even now. His fingers seemed to resist her. The paper came away.

Muriel smoothed it out.

My dear this is so awful I can hardly write it, I have to go, and if I saw you I couldn’t. You know I said I would never go dear. I wouldn’t have ever honest I wouldn’t. You know I love you my dear. Only this other thing I couldn’t bear. How could you have done it. You know what I mean about Elizabeth. Muriel told me. It has killed me. You have had the years of my life, all there was of me. You know I love you and I’ve been your slave only I couldn’t stay on with her you know and the only way to go is like this suddenly. When you get this I’ll have gone away and don’t try to find me, well you couldn’t, I’m going right away out of the country I think. Don’t worry of me I have money saved dear. You know I will be miserable and thinking of you always, I will be miserable all of my life for you. I could not be what you wanted of me, it was too hard for me. Forgive me please. You know it is all because I do love you so much, you know that. I love you and I can hardly write this letter. Goodbye.

Pattie

Muriel read the letter through twice and then tore it up into very small pieces. The letter steadied her, it was something to think about. So Pattie had had the resolution to get out. She had acted even faster than Muriel had. So it was for Pattie’s sake that he lay there. He knew that Pattie knew and he knew who had told her. What did he think of me, what did he ever think of me, Muriel wondered. Is he dreaming of me now? Are there strange huge dreams perhaps at the end in such a slumber? She began to look around the room. Perhaps there was a letter, perhaps he had written her a letter, left some scrap of message for her? He must have known that sooner or later it was she who would find him. She looked on the desk and searched the floor and all about the couch. At last she saw a piece of white paper lying a little under the couch near his head and quickly picked it up. It was a paper dart.

Muriel began to cry. She cried silently in a hot blinding stream of tears. She loved her father and she had loved him only. Why had she not known this earlier? There had always been a darkness in her relationship with her father and in that darkness her love had lain asleep. If only there had been no Pattie. If only there had been no Elizabeth. If only there could have been just herself and Carel together. She seemed now so strongly to remember a time when it had been so. She had loved him so much. She could have made him happy, she could have saved him from the demons. But Elizabeth had always intervened. All Muriel’s connections with the world, her connection with her father had had to pass through Elizabeth. She knew now that a special pain which Elizabeth had caused her, and to which she had become so accustomed that she scarcely noticed it, was the pain of jealousy.

Muriel’s tears continued and she moaned a little, very softly, and trembled, standing there in the lamp-lit room beside the sleeping figure. Would there be love again? Love was dying and she could not save it. She could not wake her father and tell him she loved him. Her love only existed in this awful interim between dark and dark. It was a love immured, sealed up. It could only have this demonic issue. To let him go was all that she could do for him now. She would not wake him to a consciousness which he had judged unbearable. She would not wake him like Lazarus from a dream of hell to hell itself, a place where love was powerless to redeem and save. She had been given her knowledge too late, and perhaps in the corruption of her heart could only have accepted it too late. And now she was condemned to be divided forever from the world of simple innocent things, thoughtless affections and free happy laughter and dogs passing by in the street.

The Swan music came abruptly to an end. Moving trance-like, Muriel leaned to put the record back to the beginning again. Her tears fell on to the drooping folds of the cassock. He had gone, and he had left her Elizabeth. There would be no parting from Elizabeth now. As she turned back to the sleeper she saw a bright streak of light between the curtains. Wearily, heavily she pulled the curtains back. The fog had gone away. There was a little blue sky and the sun was shining. Against a mass of moving clouds she saw the towers of St Botolph and St Edmund and St Dunstan and the great dome of St Paul’s. There would be no parting from Elizabeth now. Carel had riveted them together, each to be the damnation of the other until the end of the world.

“MARCUS.”

“Yes, Norah.”

“Are you going down to see them out at the Rectory?”

“There’s nothing I could do.”

“Are the girls going straight to the new house?”

“I believe so.”

“Where is it, Bromley or some such curious place?”

“Bromley.”

“I do wish Muriel would take a holiday, now the spring’s come.”

“She could afford to.”

“They’re both quite well-off now, aren’t they?”

“I do think Carel ought to have left something to Pattie.”

“Pattie’s all right. If you write to her again don’t forget to call her Patricia.”

“She seems to be enjoying her African refugee camp.”

“Misfortunes of others soon cheer us up.”

“Is that a cynical remark, Norah?”

“No.”

“Pattie took it well, don’t you think?”

“There’s a streak of ruthlessness in Pattie.”

“There’s a streak of ruthlessness in all of us.”

“You say the girls took it well.”

“Muriel did. I still haven’t seen Elizabeth.”

“Not a feather ruffled?”

“Not a feather ruffled.”

“Odd young woman.”

“You didn’t write to her again?”

“I’m through with trying to see Muriel.”

“They’ll be pulling the Rectory down next week.”

“Did you see in The Times about the Wren tower?”

“Yes, too bad. Found a new place for Eugene Peshkov yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I suppose his refugee pension will go on?”

“Don’t worry. I’m his pension.”

“What do you mean?”

“I pay him that pittance. He thinks it’s from a fund.”

“Norah, you’re extraordinary.”

“One must be rational about charity. I don’t think you are.

“You mean about Leo. Don’t forget he’s coming to tea, by the way.”

“Do you think he really means to do that degree in French and Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there was no need to give him three hundred pounds.”

“I told you, we’d earmarked it as an education fund.”

“He exploits you.”

“Nonsense. I think maybe I will go down to the Rectory after all.”

“You’ll stay here tonight?”

“No, I must get back to Earls Court. I want to work late.”

“So you are going on with the book?”

“Yes, but it’s all different now.”

“Have you arranged to have your furniture moved yet?”

“No, not yet, actually.”

“Would you like me to arrange it?”

“Oh, please don’t trouble, I’ll— Look, it’s stopped raining.”

“Well, I suppose you’d better go now if you’re going.”

“Sure you won’t come, Norah?”

“No. Muffins for tea.”

“Muffins. Goodie.”

The building site crawled with men and machines and over it a continuous mingled din of machinery and voices and transistor sets rose up into the weak blue sunshiny air. The recent rain had covered the black surface with little glassy pools, each of which reflected a faintly bluish silver light. Orange monsters with huge claws scored the sticky earth and cement tumbled noisily in huge revolving drums. In the distance a steel skeleton was already rising.

The Rectory could be seen from afar, a red blob beneath the soaring solid grace of Wren’s grey tower. Marcus picked his way along the muddied pavement past singing, shouting men in striped jerseys and slowly manoeuvring lorries. What did he want at the Rectory? Why on earth was he going there? In the course of the grim rituals after Carel’s death, and in the month and more that followed, he had seen a certain amount of Muriel, but nothing of Elizabeth. Muriel had been formal and polite and constantly refused his offers of assistance. She was decisive and calm and efficient and seemed entirely unmoved by her father’s suicide. She would not allow anyone to help, and there was nothing today which Marcus could do for her. He was come simply as a spectator to indulge some painful craving of his own.

Marcus had been living in a new time, the time since Carel died. It already seemed a long, long time, long enough to grow old in. After the first awful shock of the news Marcus had felt lost, deprived of use and purpose. Carel had been a great sign. Marcus had been ready to meditate on Carel, to fight with Carel, to be hurt by Carel, perhaps to redeem Carel. He had no resources to deal with this sudden parting. He was left with an old love for this brother which he could do nothing with. He wondered if with a greater show of affection, with a little more understanding, even with a kind of brutality he might have saved him? He was tormented by the idea that Carel had needed something from him.

What had Carel died of? What demon, what apparition, become too terrible to bear had quenched that dreadful vitality? Had Carel despaired, and what could that despair have been like? Or had his departure been something cool, another act and as it happened the last one in some long pattern of quiet cynicism? How did this act relate, how could it relate, to that passion in Carel which Marcus had been ready to revere? Had chance, sheer contingency choked Carel in the end? Had he died of a mood?

Marcus could not bear to think of his brother as defeated. He needed, and he realized how far this need stretched back into his childhood, to see Carel as a man of power. He himself had lived on that power, even when he had condemned it, perhaps especially when he had condemned it. In fact he had come to think Carel wise, a witch doctor, but wise. Carel’s black philosophy had cut him with an edge of truth. Truth almost always hurts a bit and that is why we know so little of it. Carel’s truth was an agony. But can such truths be borne, and if they cannot are they really truths? Carel had lived this, perhaps been maddened by it and perhaps died of it. Marcus had felt its faint touch and had started back, had felt only just enough to know the falsity of what he had written in his book. He had imagined that he had time to learn from Carel, to help Carel. This sudden ending left him aching with puzzlement and with a recurring doubt. Was it all dust and ashes, Carel’s passion and his own reflection? Did this death prove it? Perhaps any death proved it.

A very large furniture-van was standing outside the Rectory and the last of the furniture was just being carried out. Marcus stood a little way off rather wistfully and watched. He recognized some of the pieces as having been long ago in his father’s house. Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of. He was hurt that Muriel had not consulted him about the disposal of the furniture, not all of which was going to Bromley. He felt too that she should have offered him something of Carel’s as a keepsake. Now it was as if Carel too were being packed up and carted briskly away. The mystery of Carel had shrunk to the size of a footstool.

The back of the van was closed up with a loud clang and the men climbed up into the front. Slowly the van drew away. Its big square shadow passed along the red brick facade and touched the grey base of Wren’s tower. The door of the Rectory remained open, and from where he stood Marcus could see into the empty hall. The house had become a vacant shell whose significant spaces would soon be merged into the empty air. It would soon exist only in memory; and indeed in the faint clear sunshine it looked like a memory already. It seemed unreal, vivid and yet not truly present, like a coloured photograph projected in a dark room. Marcus wondered if he should go in, but he was afraid to. He was sure that Muriel and Elizabeth were still inside.

As he waited, and the sounds from the building site flew chattering upward over his head into the big rivery air, another shadow fell beside him. A taxi had arrived and was now drawing up outside the house. The taximan got out and went to the open door and rang the bell. The bell sounded loud and differently in the empty house. Marcus watched. From far within there was an echo of slow strangely heavy footsteps. Then framed in the doorway he saw the two girls, immobile as if they had been there for some time, their two pale heads close together, their bodies seemingly entwined. With a shock he realized that Muriel was carrying Elizabeth in her arms. The taximan ran forward. Gingerly Elizabeth’s feet touched the slippery pavement. Marcus saw her face turned towards him, long and without colour, half hidden in the drooping metallic hair which gleamed in the sunlight a faintly greenish silver. It was and was not the face of the nymph he had known. The large grey-blue eyes blinked painfully in the bright light and met his vacantly and without interest. Now she was being helped into the taxi. Muriel followed her and the door slammed. The taxi moved away, diminishing through the lanes of the building site until it disappeared into the narrow labyrinth of the city. Elizabeth had not recognized him.

Marcus sighed and for a moment felt his beating heart. Then almost automatically he walked to the open door and entered the Rectory. There could be no peril now, no ghost even which he could encounter there. Those dangerous presences were gone. The girls had taken elsewhere their mysterious solidarity, their pale impenetrability. And he he, had ceased to be. From that great light, smoky and lurid, the central incandescence had been removed and the glow would slowly fade away. The old fear would fade, and the love would fade too or else unrecognizably change. The relentless vegetable vitality of human life would grow in this case as in all others to eclipse the dead.

Standing in the middle of the hall Marcus had a sudden eerie sensation. Somebody was near, looking, moving. He turned slightly and saw with the corner of his eye the shade of a disappearing figure. It was Eugene Peshkov who had seen Marcus and who was now gliding away under the stairs hoping not to be observed. For a moment, Marcus thought to call to him but then decided not to. He felt a little hurt and sad that Eugene should hide from him. But he had never troubled to make friends with Leo’s father. He wondered if he should tip Eugene, give him a pound, say. Had the girls remembered to? But no, it was impossible. On this day all they could do was avoid each other, not know each other, and turn away as if ashamed.

Marcus began to mount the stairs. He trod softly but his footsteps made little echoes. He turned at the top and made for what he thought had been Carel’s study. The door was open and the sun was shining through it. The room was completely empty and dust was already thick upon the floor. Nothing that Marcus could see identified it as the dark cluttered cavern where he had last seen his brother alive and where Carel had struck him that blow which had seemed to him such an indubitable proof of love. Had he been right? It was better not to ask.

He went to the window and looked out. The spires of the city twinkled a little in the light as if just faintly visible stars had alighted upon them and were moving elusively from place to place. Marcus began to think about Julian. He pictured him vividly, as he had not done for years, clothed in all the grace of a barely grown-up boy. They had loved him. Indeed they had loved each other, all three. Now Carel was gone too and seemed already to recede so fast, as if he were in haste to find his way back to Julian in some distant land of youth. Only Marcus remained, heavy with these deaths, these lives. Only with him did all that was singular of them upon this earth live and grow now.

There was a sound behind him and he turned sharply. A woman was standing in the doorway. She was dressed in a smart blue tweed coat and her greyish fair hair was fluffy under a diminutive blue hat. Her sudden appearance, her stillness, her staring face gave her for an instant the quality of a ghost. Then she moved. Marcus stared at her. Something in those wide rather ecstatic eyes was familiar to him. In a contortion and shock of memory he spoke.

“Anthea!”

“Marcus!”

“I can hardly believe my eyes! Wherever did you spring from? Is it really you? You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Neither have you, not a bit!”

“But where have you been all these years? And whatever in the world are you doing here? You’re the last person I expected to see.”

“I work in this area now. I’m a psychiatric social worker.”

“A psychiatric social worker! But why haven’t I come across you or heard about you?”

“Well, you might have heard of me as Mrs Barlow. I don’t think you ever knew my married name.”

“Good heavens, are you Mrs Barlow?”