The Time of the Angels (3 page)

How this event was straightway known to the household Pattie never found out. But it was at once sombrely apprehended as if the whole place had been dyed with a dye as dark and indelible as the pigment in Pattie’s skin. The children knew it in their own way and withdrew into a merciless childish silence. Clara knew it and changed oh so scarcely perceptibly and yet entirely in her treatment of Pattie. Nothing was said, but the condemnation was absolute. Pattie scuttled from place to place, seeking a reassurance, an explanation, even a direct glance, but found none. Henceforth she was to be alone in the world with Carel.

Pattie was so intensely surprised at what had happened and so confused by her new experience and so frightened of its consequences that it took her some time to become aware that Carel was really in love with her. When she realized this a dreadful happiness took possession of her, a dark exotic happiness, not like the innocence of her joy, but very strong. A darkness entered into her like a swarm of bees. Pattie strengthened and hardened. She lifted her crest and faced the household, henceforth prepared to be their foe. She felt some guilt, but she wore it boldly as the badge of her calling.

Whether Clara ever fully called her husband to account Pattie never knew for certain. Pattie would never have dared to question Carel, whose silence about everything to do with his family was authoritative and bland. But Carel managed his affair with a kind of confident grace which persuaded Pattie that as he so evidently did not feel, so he had never been made to enact, a guilty person. Also everyone in the house was a little afraid of Carel, and now that their relations were no longer innocent Pattie soon began to be afraid of him too.

Clara became ill. Arriving with the tea-tray, the dinner-tray, Pattie was silently reproached by eyes which became very more large and luminously sad. Pattie responded with the black hard look which she turned now upon everything that was not Carel. Carel sat upon his wife’s bed, stroking her hand and smiling at Pattie over the top of her head. The head sank lower on the pillow, the doctors talked in low voices with Carel in the hall. Carel told Pattie that he would soon be a widower and that when he was free he would make her his wife.

Pattie did not grieve for Clara. She did not grieve for the children who came weeping out of the room where Clara grew daily thinner. Pattie held her head high and with a ferocity of will stared past the horror of the present into the all-justifying all-reconciling future when she would be Mrs Carel Fisher. Her destiny bore her stiffly up, a stronger force than sentiment or guilt. She was the elect, the Crown Princess. She would become what she had been born for, and let a million women die and a million children wring their hands.

Clara died. Carel changed his mind. Why he changed it Pattie never knew. She must have made some mistake. What could it have been? This brooding upon the awful “only because” was to be Pattie’s daily bread in the years that followed. She had smiled at Clara’s funeral. Could it be that? Or was it after all her colour, which Carel could tolerate in a concubine but not a spouse? Or was it her lack of education or her voice or something to do with personal hygiene or having had an inopportune cold? Or letting Carel see her once in her underclothes? (He was puritanical about the peripheries of love-making.) Or was it just his pity for Clara at the last, or that Muriel, who quietly hated Pattie, had somehow persuaded her father of his folly? Pattie never discovered and of course she never asked. Carel’s bland silence covered it all like the sea.

Carel came to her bed as before. Pattie still trembled at those macabre unrobings when the dark cassock unsheathed the naked man. Pattie loved him. He was, as he had been before, the whole world to her. Only now there was a kind of resignation in her surrender to him. She began to know, first vaguely and then more consciously, what it was like to be a slave. She became capable of resentment. Carel had instituted a sort of cult of Clara, photographs everywhere and references, half ironical, half in earnest, to his late espoused saint. Pattie resented too, what before she had scarcely noticed, Carel’s assumption that Muriel and Elizabeth were socially her superiors. But this sharpening consciousness brought with it no impulse to rebellion. She lay beside him, Parvati beside Shiva, and with her eyes wide open in the night occupied herself with her guilt.

Pattie’s guilt had bided its time. As soon as she knew that Carel would not marry her she began at once to feel more guilty. A crime for a great prize seems less wicked than a crime for no prize. She twisted her hands in the night time. She knew that she had caused Clara a great deal of pain. Clara had died in grief and despair because of Pattie. And there remained still, like a sentence held up in front of her face, the implacable hostility of the two girls. This hostility had not troubled Pattie at first, but now it became a torment to her. Her intermittent, feeble and vain efforts to reconcile her foes by flattery and humility only led her to dislike them more. Elizabeth especially, indulged and spoilt by Carel, seemed to Pattie a living insult to her own menial blackness. As the girls grew older and as they fell, with Elizabeth’s illness, more closely into each other’s company, they constituted a menace, a united front of ruthless condemnation. Those two pale cold unforgiving forces haunted Pattie in the night. Pattie wilted. Pattie repented. But she repented alone, could do nothing with her repentance, and it was in vain that she murmured, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, so why not every man?

Then one day, as mysteriously and as naturally as they had begun, Carel’s attentions ceased. He left her bed and did not return. Pattie was almost relieved. She fell into an apathetic sadness which had a kind of healing in it. She neglected her appearance and became aware that she had grown fat. She moved about slowly and grunted as she worked. She had, during all this time, never ceased to practise her religion. She said her prayers each night, repeating her childhood solicitations. Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me. Perhaps a child’s God would be able to preserve a place of innocence in her. She had knelt each Sunday to take communion from the hands which had glorified her and had not felt herself a blasphemer. Carel’s own faith had always been, like so many other things about him, a mystery to her, but she had had faith in his faith as she had had faith in God. That he had never seemed to doubt himself as a priest, equally confident in church and in bed, had given Pattie at first a sort of moral insouciance which was like a kind of sublimated cynicism. When Carel was no longer her lover and Pattie could repent more laboriously and with impunity she became for a while both more pious herself and more puzzled about him.

Carel, who had been hitherto a minimally correct though unenthusiastic parson, began about this time to develop those small but unnerving eccentricities which contributed to the reputation which had preceded him to town. He became a recluse, refused to see callers or to answers letters, leaving it to Elizabeth, who sometimes acted as his secretary, to amass a pile of correspondence and send out replies at intervals. He introduced curious variations of his own into the ceremonial of his services and even into the liturgy. He began a sermon by saying, “And what if I tell you that there is no God?” and then left his congregation to fidget uneasily during a long silence. He once conducted a service from behind the altar. He was given to laughing in church.

These manifestations frightened rather than embarrassed Pattie. As Carel was endowed for her with an ineradicable grace she could not see his antics as other than somehow natural. Yet she felt frightened of something which was happening in his mind. What she could only express as his dryness appalled her. Amid all his oddity he remained a cool, temperate even circumspect person. He had, she thought, no excesses except the great one, and what that was she could not name. More simply she supposed that Carel was losing his faith. Pattie did not therefore lose hers; but it became for her more of a talisman than a simple fact. Her universe had altered and was altering. “Life has no outside,” she said to herself one day, scarcely knowing what she meant. Her morning prayer on waking, her prayer that eased that nightly load of horror, became something vaguer and more formal. The Precious Blood had lost some of its magic power, and Pattie no longer felt on easy personal terms with God, although a veiled figure still towered to call the lapsed soul.

Occasionally now she thought about leaving Carel; but the thought was like a prisoner’s dream of becoming a bird and flying over the wall. Love and passion and guilt had wrapped her round and round, and she lay inert like a chrysalis, moving a little but incapable of changing her place. She was very unhappy. She worried interminably about Carel and the feud with the two girls poisoned her existence. Yet she did not conceive of leaving Carel for an ordinary life elsewhere, and although she was sometimes conscious of an acute clear wish to be the mother of children she did not really picture another world where she might love in innocence. She felt she was irrevocably soiled and broken and unfitted now for ordinary life. In past days someone like her would have found refuge in a nunnery. She sometimes tried imagine some modern equivalent. She would go far away and dedicate herself to the service of humanity and be Patricia for ever and ever after, Sister Patricia, perhaps Saint Patricia. She read the newspapers and represented to herself the vast sea of human misery. With this she associated a vision of herself, purified and unworldly, ministering to the wretched, an anonymous and yet oddly mysterious figure. Sometimes she even thought of herself as being nobly martyred, eaten perhaps by black men in the Congo.

Pattie really knew the falseness of this dream. She knew it as with the passing of time she realized that her bond with Carel was now stronger than ever. She was not left to herself. The physical connection between them still cobwebbed the house with its electric silk. Carel who had once danced with her, danced alone now to the Swan music, a shadowy figure moving in the darkness of his room, whose door for some protection he usually left a little open; but she felt sure that he danced for her, that he was her, dancing. She was aware of him and he was aware of her. By other means she was his mistress still. And Carel seemed to need her more than before. They did not talk a great deal, but they had never talked a great deal. They existed together in a constant sort of animal communion of looks and touches and presences and half-presences.

It was in this closeness that Pattie apprehended at last something like a great fear in Carel, a fear which afflicted her with terror and with a kind of nausea. It seemed to her now that, for all his curious solitary gaiety, she had always seen him as a soul in hell. Carel was becoming very frightened and he carried fear about with him as a physical environment. His fear had some curious manifestations. He saw animals in the house, rats and mice, when Pattie was sure there were none. He complained of a black thing which kept whisking out of sight. Pattie was aware that such imaginations could come from drinking, only Carel did not drink. In any case Pattie knew that what frightened Carel did not belong to the material world even in the sense in which pink elephants did.

And then there had come, quite unexpectedly, the move to London. This had been terrifying in prospect, terrifying in the event. Pattie realized then how much her weird world depended on the solid simplicity of its surroundings for its semblance of a decent reality. Like the Hindu mystic who used to conceal the supernatural glowing of his body in a closely wound sheet, so Pattie would don her three-quarter length coat and put on her red velour hat and her suede gloves to visit the supermarket. It had mattered to her that she shopped in certain shops, gossiped with certain women, went to a certain picture house, had her hair straightened at a certain hairdresser’s where there were certain magazines. There was a whole reassuring domain where Pattie was known in her ordinariness and where the lurid purple glow was veiled. There had once been a trifle of speculation about her and Carel, but it had died down and no one had been unpleasant to her. Pattie existed in this everyday world and had her title there. She had heard a woman utter it one day as she was coming out of church. “Who is that?” “The coloured servant at the Rectory. They say she’s a treasure.”

Pattie was afraid that, like some relic which turns out in the end to be composed of dust and cobwebs, her existence with Carel might suddenly fall to pieces if they were removed to another place. In her agitation all difficulties seemed equally charged with menace. Where should she go now to have her hair straightened? And where would she ever find a charwoman as good as Mrs Potter? And how on earth in the extraordinary desert in which the Rectory seemed to be situated was she even to feed Carel? Eugene Peshkov was still unable to procure any carrots. Eugene, big, friendly, calm and reassuringly unamazed by the phenomenon of Pattie, was in fact the only consoling feature in the situation.

The fourth day had brought no diminution of the fog. It was dark even at noon, and the house remained exceedingly cold even though Eugene assured her that the central heating was in working order. Pattie had shut Mrs Barlow out and forgotten her. And now the front door bell was ringing again.

Pattie opened the door a crack and saw outside Marcus Fisher, who had already called several times, accompanied by a woman whom Pattie vaguely recognized. The woman spoke.

“Good morning, Pattie. I am Miss Shadox-Brown, you remember me, I visited Muriel at the place where you lived before. I’ve come to see her now, if you please. And Mr Fisher has come to see the Rector and Elizabeth.”