The Time of the Angels (7 page)

“So you do believe in an after life?”

“No, no. I just mean nothing matters all that much. We are not here for long.”

His words sounded into a silence in the brightly lit room. Pattie twisted her hands a little and then as the silence continued she got up. “I must get back to my work. I’ve stayed far too long. And I shouldn’t have made you talk about those things.”

“No, it’s done me good. One must talk about things and not hide them. Next time you will tell me about you.”

“There’s nothing to tell about me,” said Pattie. She brushed the crumbs off her skirt.

“Why, there must be. Everyone has had their adventures. Oh, I’m so glad! You’ve eaten three cakes!”

“I oughn’t to have. I’m much too fat. I keep meaning to go on a diet.”

“Please don’t! You’ve a wonderful shape. I like you just exactly the way you are.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. You should be thankful. One day you’ll be thin and you’ll wish you weren’t. A thin woman is a reminder of death.” He recalled poor Tanya, thinned to the bone, looking at him with accusing dying eyes. She was a wisp in his memory, denuded of substance. He had not been too kind to her. He had resented her pregnancy, resented her illness. And she had become so thin, so thin.

“I must go now.”

“You’ll come again, won’t you, like this?”

“Well, yes, I’d love to.”

“And look—when the fog lifts—let me take you to see the sea.”

“The sea—oh, could you?”

“Nothing easier. And promise you won’t go with someone else first!”

“There’s no one else who— Oh, I love to go with you to see the sea, love to!”

“Eugene.”

“Eugene.”

“Then that’s fixed.”

She smiled at him now out of her floating hair.

After she had gone, Eugene stood for a while looking up at the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. No, he had not been too kind to Tanya. Then a moment later he started thinking about how he would take Pattie to see the sea.

MURIEL CLOSED THE front door of the Rectory softly behind her. The intensely cold air invaded her head and she sneezed. She still had that confounded cold. The fog, like a hushed lifted finger, imposed quietness. With her nose deep in her handkerchief she began to walk along the pavement and immediately the Rectory was lost to sight and she was walking on a roadway through the middle of emptiness. She could see the frozen earth, whipped up into little crests, for a short way on her own side of the road. The other side of the road was invisible. The sound of a fog horn resounded in the thick air and seemed to move round her in a circle. She moved silently in the middle of a dying echo of sound.

After a while she stopped walking and listened. Nothing. The close thick dome of fog shut in her little ball of shadowy visibility and the hazy air stroked her cheek with a cold damp touch. The woollen scarf which she had drawn over her head was already quite wet. She pushed her handkerchief back into her pocket and breathed vigorously, pushing little streamers of vapour out in front of her face. She stood there wide-eyed, listening, waiting. The fog excited her.

She had spent that morning trying to write about it. She had added a number of stanzas to her philosophical poem and the fog had somehow got in. Curling, creeping, moving and yet still, always receding and yet always present, everywhere and yet nowhere, imposing silence, imposing breathless anxious attention, it seemed to symbolize everything which at this time she feared. Fear had come into the poem and she had been surprised at it. Was she afraid? What was she afraid of? There was no place for fear. She had shaken her sleeping-tablets in their little blue bottle. Now as she stood there on the pavement with a fast-beating heart the emotion seemed more like love than fear. But can love be love of a dark nothing?

She moved on slowly, her feet, sticking to the damp frosty pavement, making a very slight sound. She had decided that she would soon read some of her poem to Elizabeth, only Elizabeth had not rung that morning. Muriel was pleased with the poem. Perhaps it was the poem itself that had transmuted that strange fear into the equally strange love which made her now so thrilled and restless. She shivered, swinging her gloved hands, feeling herself all warm and fiercely alive, bundled inside her clothes. She breathed the cold foggy air with delight. Then suddenly she stopped again.

Upon the waste land to her left, and now quite near to her, just emerging from the wall of fog, there was something upright. It was so still that she thought it must be a post. And yet it had the look of a human being. Only now did she realize how odd it was that there was absolutely nobody about. Next moment it seemed even odder, and frightening, that there was a person standing there in the fog before her, standing perfectly still, standing as she herself had stood, waiting perhaps and listening. It was certainly a person, a man, and he was facing towards her. Muriel hesitated and moved cautiously on another step. Then she saw that the man was Leo Peshkov.

It was as impossible for them not to greet each other as if they had met in the deepest jungle.

“Hello,” said Muriel.

“Hello. Isn’t the fog wonderful?”

“That was just what I was thinking,” she said. “I’m enjoying it terribly.”

“I’ve been standing here for ages hoping to frighten somebody. I hope I frightened you?”

“You certainly did! Isn’t it very odd that there’s nobody about?”

“Not specially. There’s nothing down here except warehouses, and anyway being Sunday—”

“Oh, it’s Sunday, is it. I hadn’t realized.”

“Call yourself a parson’s daughter and not know it’s Sunday!”

Muriel thought the young man rather pert. She said a little coldly. “Well, good day. I’m just going down to the river.”

“You’ll never find the river that way.”

“I expect I’ll manage. Goodbye.”

“Look, I’ll show you the way to the river. Honestly you won’t find it otherwise. There are just little alleys in between the warehouses and you have to know them. Do you mind walking across all this muck?”

“But the river must be this way. If I go straight on—”

“The river’s all round us here. We’re on a sort of peninsula, it loops round. This is the quickest way, come on.”

The boy moved away as he spoke and was vanishing into the fog. Rather exasperated, Muriel stepped off the pavement and followed him. She had been in a mood for being alone.

The earth of the building site, which had seemed fairly level, was covered with hummocks and slippery cups of ice. The surface of the earth was frozen but brittle and there was mud beneath.

“Wait a minute, don’t go so fast.”

“Sorry. I expect your high heels— Oh I see you’re wearing what they call sensible shoes. You can take my arm if you like.”

“I’m all right. Is it far?”

“Only a step. It’s rather exciting, this sort of wilderness, isn’t it. I’ll be very sorry when they build on it. There’s a super view of St Paul’s and lots of other churches. You’ll see when the fog lifts.”

It was strange to Muriel to think that they were surrounded by invisible domes and towers and spires. She had ceased to think that she was in a city at all.

“Here’s the pavement again, we’re almost there.”

A blank wall suddenly towered up in the fog and there was another darkness near. Muriel felt herself enclosed.

“This is one of those alleys I told you about. It gets narrower and there are some steps. Watch out, it’s rather slimy. Hang on to the wall if you can.”

Muriel touched the wall with her gloved hand. Great cakes and scabs of semi-vegetable matter fell into the slimy stuff at her feet. She could feel it getting inside her shoes. She cautiously descended some steps holding on to a chain slung against the wall. There was a space of pavement and a lamppost. Then some more steps and suddenly water.

“Well, there it is,” said Leo. “Not that you can see much of it at the moment. But you wanted it and there it is.”

Here the fog seemed lighter in colour and slightly less dense as if it dreamed that somewhere the sun shone. Muriel could see fifteen to twenty yards of swift flowing water, a dark luminous amber, which was whisking along with it a strewing of woody fragments and long weeds resembling hair. Again very near a fog horn sounded and Muriel felt the same emotion of which she could not say whether it was fear or love. The steps descended into the water. She went to the bottom step and then turned to look up at Leo.

He was leaning against the wall at the top of the steps. He was dressed in a short shabby black overcoat with its collar well turned up around a striped woollen scarf, and his close-cropped hair, darkened by the damp air, looked like a sleek leather cap. He had the bright provisional look of a diving duck or a water sprite which has just that minute broken the surface. Muriel, appraising him for a moment as if he belonged to the world of art, noted the satisfying roundness of his head. What made him so beautiful? Perhaps the coolness of those very wide-apart eyes.

To cover up what had become too long a stare she said, “Is there a bridge near here? Can one get across?”

“My good woman, there aren’t any bridges here. We’re down in dockland. It’s easy to see you’re a country mouse.”

Muriel reflected for a moment. She could not let this one pass. Yet if she picked it up she was inviting something approaching a relationship.

She said, “If you and I are going to see anything of each other with any sort of pleasure, on my part at any rate, you will have to mend your manners quite considerably.”

A looked of poised cunning satisfaction replaced the bland mask and then faded into it again. Leo came down a step or two towards her, but still not close. “Shall I kneel down and apologize?”

A moment before Muriel had attributed his jauntiness to a natural “I’m as good as you” attitude of a servant’s son. Now she realized that he had wanted exactly what he had got, something which made them familiars, accomplices. She had fallen into a trap.

She said coldly, “Don’t be silly. I just don’t care for your being quite so familiar. Now I think we should go back. I’m sorry to have to ask you to guide me again, but I should certainly get lost by myself.”

“Oh, don’t go yet,” he said. “Please. It’s rather wonderful here.”

It was rather wonderful, and Muriel in fact felt no urge to move. The enclosed solitariness of the place made the spot significant in an almost religious way. The intense cold did not numb but heightened consciousness. Muriel turned back to the silent hurrying river. It smelt of rotten vegetables and somehow too, and very purely, of water.

“You’re at some sort of technical college?” she said to Leo, not looking at him. He had now come to stand close beside her.

“Yes. I hate it though. I’m not good enough at maths. There’s a chap there just down from Cambridge who puts us through it. I can’t keep up. Were you good at maths?”

“Not bad. But I imagine school maths are different.”

“Well, yes they are. I can’t cope with this stuff at all, it’s the whole way of thinking that’s beyond me. It hurts my mind all the time. He keeps saying he’s being exact about something and I just can’t see that he is. Oh, I can’t explain. I think I’m going to chuck it and take a job.”

“Won’t your father be disappointed?”

“My father? What the hell do I care what my father thinks?”

“Why, aren’t you fond of him?”

“Fond of him? Haven’t you read your Freud, girl? Sorry, I’m not supposed to talk like that, am I. You know all boys hate their fathers. Just like all girls are in love with them.”

Muriel laughed. “I’m not in love with mine. But I’m sure your father is proud of you, getting yourself a grant and all that.”

“He doesn’t care. He’s got plenty of money. He’s a writer, really, or thinks he is. He just does that portering job for fun. When he’s tired of it he’ll move on. He’s just an eccentric.”

“Really.”

“He pretends he’s a poor Russian refugee, but he isn’t Russian at all, he’s German. A banking family from the Baltic, you know. Been in England all his life. Pots of money.”

“Oh. Well, well. What about your mother?”

“My mother’s a wonderful person, you must meet her. She’s English of course. They separated years ago and she’s married again. She married a baronet in the north of England. I quite often go there. They’re awfully grand people. I’m in love with my mother.”

“Really. How interesting.”

“My mother is a great beauty and fearfully extravagant. We’re a family of eccentrics, I’m afraid. Do you know what my father’s passion is?”

“What?”

“Gambling. All Russians are gamblers, you know.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t Russian.”

“Well, those Baltic Germans model themselves on Russians. He adores roulette. Just as well he can afford it. He goes to Monte Carlo, then he has an attack of conscience and does penance by taking some beastly obscure job. He’s doing penance, at the moment. He’ll break out again quite soon.”

“I see. I trust he makes you a generous allowance.”

“Not a bean. That’s because he hates me. He wishes I’d been a girl. All fathers hate their sons. They’re afraid of them. The young sapling threatens the aged and all that. It’s an old story.”

“Too bad. How old are you, Leo?”

“I’m twenty. May I call you Muriel?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“May I ask you how old you are, Muriel?”

“Yes, I’m thirty-four.” It occurred to Muriel the next moment she could have said forty-four and been believed.

“I expect you must be terribly experienced.”

“What about?”

“Sex, of course. What else is there to be experienced about?”

“Oh yes, I’ve had plenty of experience.”

“I suppose you’re heterosexual? So many girls aren’t these days.”

“I’m fairly normal.”

“Nobody’s normal, nobody worth meeting, that is. What kind of fellows do you fancy?”

“I prefer older men. I mean, a good deal older than myself.”

“Pity. Not that I was going to offer my services. That would be what you call impertinent. Anyway I’ve got a girl friend. Well, no, I haven’t. I’ve ditched her.”

“I’m not all that interested in sex,” said Muriel. “I’ve been around. One does get tired.” Leo’s pertness together with the extreme cold infected her with a sort of light-headed insouciance. She was quite moved by the vision of herself as a weary experienced middle-aged woman. She wished she had claimed to be at least forty.

“Girls get tired. Men don’t. I’m dying to experiment, but I can’t find anybody witty enough. As it is, it’s just the same old thing over and over and over again. You wouldn’t believe how easy the birds are at my college. You just look at them and they roll on their backs.”

“So you are bored already.”

“Oh no, not really. I suppose at my age biology prevents boredom. But it is rather dull. They haven’t anything inside their minds, and I do think sex is talk too, don’t you? I couldn’t argue with them like I could argue with you. They’re flabby. And it’s all so casual, there’s no drama, no mystery, no tension. They’ve been had before, they’ll be had again. They just walk through one’s bed as if it were a railway station.”