The Time of the Angels (8 page)

“I imagine you walk through their beds in much the same way.”

“Well, yes, I do, I suppose. But I don’t want that. Do you know that I’ve never had a virgin?”

“Tough luck. I suppose they’re hard to come by these days.”

“That’s the trouble. I wish I’d lived in the days when girls were secluded.”

“Secluded?”

“Yes, cloistered, shut up, just never seen. Girls are too easy these days. I want to find a girl that’s hard, protected by her family, a girl that’s hidden in a country house, a girl one isn’t allowed to see, kept behind screens and curtains and locked doors.”

“I dare say she’d be just as empty-headed when you got at her.”

“No, no. She’d be wonderful, pure. And think of the excitement. Like in Japan. Just catching a glimpse of somebody’s sleeve or smelling their perfume. Or scheming for weeks to look through a cranny and see a girl’s hair.”

“Not so nice for the girls,” said Muriel. It occurred to her with amusement that Leo still did not know of Elizabeth’s existence. She detached a lump of frozen matter from the wall and tossed it into the ring of amber water.

“I’m not interested in their welfare. Besides, any girl of spirit would enjoy it. Imagine the intriguing there’d be. All the endless planning to get a letter through, and waiting at windows at night, and bribing the servants and all the danger! I’m just fed up with ordinary women. That’s why I’ve never really been in love. I think I could only love a virgin, a girl who had been kept away from everybody, absolutely shut up and hidden and sort of reserved. She’d be a sort of sleeping beauty and I’d have the task of setting her free and I’d be the first man that she ever saw.”

“‘How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in it!’”

“What?”

“Never mind. You’ve given yourself a difficult programme.”

“Impossible. I shall have to turn homosexual.”

“Leo.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you tell me all those lies about your father?”

“Oh dear. How did you know they were lies?”

“Because I asked him a lot of questions about his life and he told me what was obviously the truth.”

“Of course. You’re the sort of person who’s good at finding things out. You’re sharp. I’m afraid of you.”

“But did you really expect me to believe all that stuff?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I think so. I just lied for practice, really. Artistry.”

“Artistry?”

“Yes, I’m an aesthetic type. I have no morals. You don’t believe in God and all that crap, do you?”

“No,” said Muriel. “Though that’s not the same as having no morals.”

“It is, you know. I’m one of the problems of the age. I’m a lone wolf, a bit like what’s-his-name, that chap in Dostoevsky. I want to train myself in immorality, really get these old conventions out of my system, so whenever I have a chance to tell a lie I do so. Values are only relative anyway, there are no absolute values. And life’s so short. And there’s the Bomb. And any day you may wake up to find yourself getting lumpy and hey presto it’s cancer.”

“I know. What do you want out of life, Leo?”

“I want to be famous and powerful and rich. That’s what everybody really wants, only they haven’t the nerve to say so. Moral people are just retarded. They haven’t got wise to themselves.”

“You could be right,” said Muriel.

“You agree, oh, goody! Let’s be juvenile delinquents together. At least it’s a social role.”

“Only I just don’t think it’s worth while to try to be what you call immoral. I think the conventions go deeper than you imagine.”

“You mean I’m acting out of morality by other means? What an awful thought.”

“It’s possible. What else do you do by way of immorality practice?”

“Well, I’m just going to demonstrate.”

“What?”

“I want you to lend me some money.”

Muriel laughed. “So that you could try your hand at not paying it back, I suppose!” She turned to look at him. His face was pink and wet with the fog. The leather cap of darkened hair made him resemble a racing driver or a young gladiator. “I haven’t any money,” she said. “How much do you want?”

“Seventy-five pounds.”

“I can’t help you. I haven’t a sou.”

“Too bad. It was worth trying, wasn’t it? You might have been filthy rich.”

“What do you want it for?”

“It’s something to do with a girl. You know.”

“Hmmm. Well, you’d better steal something. That would be worthily immoral.”

“Do you know, I think I will. I’ve been feeling for some time now that I must perform an act. I think I’ve never really performed an act. Have you?”

“Lots. I think we’d better go now.” The conversation, which had amused and exhilarated Muriel, had now become depressing. Perhaps the air had grown darker.

“Do you know, I think you’re a marvel. You’re somebody very special. You’re a free woman, free, like a man. I’ll be your cavalier. You’ll set me tasks. Like knights and ladies. I’m sorry I told you those lies.”

“Never mind. Only don’t practise on me in future.”

“I say, don’t you think you ought to punish me for the lies?”

“Possibly. What method do you suggest?”

“I don’t know. I must pay a forfeit.”

Muriel, who had started up the steps, turned again to the hurrying water. It was now a slightly purplish grey. “You must make a sacrifice to the Thames.”

“Oh, splendid! What shall I sacrifice?”

“Anything you have with you which you value.”

“I know. My college scarf. I’m rather fond of it really. It will symbolize the lovely new life without mathematics.”

He stepped down, tearing the scarf from his neck, and with a big gesture threw it curling out over the water. It fell noiselessly, darkened, and before it could sink was tugged away into the circle of fog.

It happened so quickly that Muriel gave a gasp of distress. It was a violence, like drowning something. She got to the top of the steps.

“Wait a moment, Muriel,” Leo was beside her.

“What is it?”

“Muriel. You told a lie too.”

“What lie?”

“You’re never thirty-four, my dear.”

She laughed, leaning her head back against the gritty wall. “All right. I’m not thirty-four. I won’t tell you how old I am. Leave it that I’m older than you.”

“An older woman. That’s it. But look, don’t you think you should pay a forfeit too?”

“Maybe. What is my forfeit?”

“Kiss me.”

Before she could move he had placed his hands on each side of her and was already closing his eyes. They stayed there motionless mouth to mouth. Muriel’s eyes closed too.

MARCUS FISHER HAD decided that things had gone far enough and should be allowed to go no farther. He had now called at the Rectory no less than six times and been turned away on each occasion by the inscrutable Pattie. Telephone calls simply evoked Pattie again, evasively adamant. His letters to Carel and Elizabeth remained without answers. He sat in his room at Earls Court, watching the window become totally dark at three o’clock in the afternoon, and found that he could no longer work. If his own telephone ever rang it was always Norah.

Marcus’s book, provisionally entitled Morality in a World without God, had got away to a good start before Christmas. He had hoped to be able to continue to write fast. He had plenty of material, it was simply a matter of putting it in order. He had decided to discard his historical introduction and to mention no names of earlier thinkers. Let his critics assign him to a tradition and a school. He would speak simply, with the sole authority of his own voice, and his crystalline densely textured argument need not be flawed by references to others, though at the close he might modestly admit to being, after all, just a Platonist.

His purpose was no less than what he proposed to call the demythologizing of morals. Compared with this the demythologizing of religion, upon which the theologians were so cheerfully and thoughtlessly engaged, was a matter of comparatively little moment. Deprived of myth, religion might die, but morals must be made to live. A religion without God, evolving so relentlessly out of the theological logic of the centuries, represented nothing in itself but the half-conscious realization that the era of superstition was over. It was its too possible consequence, a morality without Good, which was the really serious danger. Marcus’s intention was to rescue the idea of an Absolute in morals by showing it to be implied in the unavoidable human activity of moral evaluation at its most unsophisticated level, and in doing this to eschew both theological metaphor and the crudities of the existentialism which was the nemesis of academic philosophy.

He had completed a first chapter entitled The Metaphysics of Metaphor in which he argued that the idea of a spiritual world as something separate, magnetic and authoritative need not be regarded as a metaphysical concept. A rough draft of a section explaining the role of Beauty as a revelation of the spiritual had been set aside, and would probably appear as the climax of the work. Marcus was currently engaged on a chapter called Some Fundamental Types of Value Judgement, and found himself quite unable to make progress. He had put off the decision about whether to introduce the idea of the Synthetic A Priori as such, and was now paralysed by it. He had lost his grasp. His theories no longer radiated an energy of their own, they had been overcome by a superior power. He could think about nothing but Carel and Elizabeth. Imaginary conversations with Carel drifted like ectoplasm in the closed-in room. And the image of Elizabeth, her new face of a woman veiled in pale floating hair, followed Marcus to his bed and hung above his sleep.

After several days of this torment Marcus was resolved that he must end it by somehow getting inside the Rectory and confronting his brother. He very much wanted to see Elizabeth too. He had begun to be extremely troubled by the idea that she might have felt herself neglected by him. Why had he ever stopped writing to her? There were so many things he could quite easily have done to show her he still remembered her. It was especially unjust, since he had really thought about her a great deal. Why had it never occurred to him to send her some flowers? Should he perhaps do so now? He had idiotically allowed her to become a stranger, and now from within the hazy luminous globe of her peculiar seclusion she both attracted and menaced him.

On the last two occasions of visiting the Rectory he had, after his failure at the front door which he had grown to expect, walked round the house, looking at the lighted windows and speculating about which room was which. He had even tried a back door, which turned out to be locked. This exercise had occasioned feelings of guilt and fear which Marcus had unflinchingly enjoyed. He said nothing to Norah about these investigations. Norah had her own plan of campaign and had invited the Bishop, together with Marcus, to dinner at the beginning of the following week. The topic for discussion was to be “what to do about that man". Norah was in danger of becoming irrational on the subject of Carel. Of course, poor Norah had her own troubles where the Rectory was concerned. Marcus knew that she had written several letters to Muriel and had received only one short evasive reply which ignored Norah’s plea for an early meeting. Norah blamed Carel for this. “He makes everyone round him as mad as he is,” she had said, and did not now moderate her language. She had been used to call Carel “neurotic". Fortified lately by further “stories” from the other parish, she had moved on to calling him “unbalanced", “psychotic” and “a thoroughly evil man". He ought to be removed from his post. There was after all a responsibility to the community. The Bishop must be made to realize. Marcus had pooh-poohed these enthusiasms, but later had grown pensive. Some ray from Carel had fallen even upon himself.

Following some instinct, Marcus had all along concealed from Norah the degree of his distress about his brother. She would certainly not approve of what he had come to call his “expedition” and was best left in ignorance of it. It would seem to her melodramatic, ill-advised, and lacking in what Norah valued above all else, straightforwardness. Marcus reflected with a little satisfaction on how impenetrably unstraightforward he felt about everything to do with Carel. Moreover, given that the venture was unpredictable, he was better off without witnesses to what might simply prove an exercise in making himself ridiculous. He was in a mood for avoiding Norah in any case. She was becoming embarrassingly eager about her plan for having him as her upstairs lodger, and appeared to have switched from regarding it as a possibility to regarding it as a certainty, only whose details remained to be fixed. Marcus could not recall having said anything to occasion this change.

What Marcus proposed to do was simply to get inside the Rectory somehow, preferably by a back door or window, but if necessary by forcing Pattie, and to introduce himself into his brother’s presence. As the need to see Carel grew greater and greater in his mind the obstacles grew smaller and smaller. He would certainly enter the Rectory. He thought he knew his brother well enough to hope that once he was actually there Carel would subject him to nothing worse than calm irony, would perhaps enact surprise. Why so much fuss over so little? He was just on the point of replying to his letter. Why this extraordinary agitation, my dear Marcus? Why indeed? Then he would see Elizabeth. And then all would be well. A great peace would descend and a great light would shine like the light of a lost childhood. Or would something unimaginably different happen?

Marcus was glad of the fog that evening. It was after eight o’clock and there was no one about as he walked along the pavement through the building site. Moving as softly as he could, he heard his steps resound a little as if the sound were curling back about his feet, not able to get away through the thick air. In the heart of the extreme cold he apprehended the warmth of his body with an exhilaration which made him feel dazed and drunken. He had decided to pause as soon as he saw the lights of the Rectory and stand quite still to collect his wits and to make his breathing more normal, for he was beginning already to gasp a little with emotion. It was not unpleasant. He must be getting near now. But as he strained his eyes to discern the lighted windows his left hand came sharply into contact with something. It was the Rectory wall. Marcus had come right up to it without noticing it. The house was in total darkness.

Marcus touched the wall, and his fingers slid over the sharp corner of it, feeling the brick on one side and the flat cement on the other, and he shuddered. He felt like someone who has walked into an ambush. He held on to the house and felt a menacing heart beat inside it. It rose above him, seemed to lean over him, and vanished into the fog. He held on to the house, but helplessly, as one might for a moment hold on to a much stronger opponent. Why were there no lights? They couldn’t all have gone out. If there was one thing that was certain about that household it was that they kept indoors. It was almost as if they had been expecting him. He imagined some appalling colloquy within as they waited, listening. Marcus began to move along the sheer cement face of the house, slithering now upon frozen earth. The iron-hard bumpy ground hurt his feet. The face of the house sweated with cold. He moved along it like an insect, touching it with his hands and his knees and the toes of his shoes. There must be some simple explanation. Doubtless the lights were on on the other side of the house. They were all together perhaps in the dining-room or the kitchen. Then quite suddenly the wall gave way in front of him.

Marcus stood perfectly still. There was a greater blackness. There was a door which the pressure of his hand had already opened. There came to him again the sense of a trap. He could not recall having seen this door, and for a moment he wondered whether he had not in the darkness come to some quite different house. He pushed the door a little further and a strong familiar smell which he could not for the moment identify mingled with the foggy air. Marcus hesitated. Then he thrust his head forward and took a step. The next instant he had fallen headlong in through the doorway.

The difference of level was in fact little more than a foot, but it seemed to Marcus like a sudden descent into a deep pit. The door swung to behind him leaving him in total blackness, lying full length upon an uneven surface. It was like a sudden attack, and for a moment Marcus lay quite still in sheer shock and fright, not even quite sure that he had not been pushed or struck from behind. Then he began to be dreadfully afraid of suffocating. He tried to sit up, gasping for breath. There was a strange noise which seemed to come from underneath him. He was probably not inside the Rectory at all, but had fallen into some sewer or underground working where terrible fumes would take his consciousness from him. He managed to get into a sitting position and tried more deliberately to calm himself. He breathed slowly and evenly and as he did so he recognized the strange smell. It was the reassuring smell of coal. He had fallen into the Rectory coal hole.

Greatly relieved, Marcus began to shift himself cautiously about upon the slope of coal. His shoulder was extremely sore from the impact and one leg seemed to be absent. He rubbed his limbs and gradually reassembled his body round about him. The sheer darkness was now beginning to appal him and he fumbled in his pocket for some matches. It had also occurred to him that if this were indeed the coal hole then there must be a way from it into the interior of the Rectory. He struck a match and held it up.

He had seemed to be in an enormous black void as large as an amphitheatre. Now the walls almost crushed him by their closeness and the ceiling descended to touch his head as he sat awkwardly upon the slope of coal. He seemed monstrously large in the little cellar. He saw his black hand trembling in the light and the corner of the wall, banded with triangular cobwebs, all shivering slightly. His hand trembled and the flickering light went out, but he had seen the other door. It was just before him, inches away, set two feet up in the wall. A moment later Marcus was entering the Rectory on his hands and knees.

Here too it was pitch dark. He rose stiffly to his feet and began to grope until he touched a wall. He stood listening, and then began to shuffle forward as quietly as he could, one hand on the wall and the other held out in front of him. His breathing seemed to be making a great deal of noise in the expectant stillness of the dark. His forward hand touched something, recoiled, and touched again. He felt the panel of a door, drew his fingers down it until he found the handle, and very slowly opened the door into another black space. He moved a step or two and began to search for his matches again. Then he heard voices suddenly quite near to him.

A voice he recognized as Pattie’s said, “It’s no use phoning the Electricity Board again.”

Another voice, he thought it must be Muriel’s, said, “Why not? You didn’t make enough fuss the last time.”

“You telephone then! It isn’t just us. The whole area’s blacked out. It’s no use making a fuss.”

“Why the hell you didn’t have enough ordinary common sense to buy some candles—”

“All right, all right.”

“Pattie,” Marcus said, or rather tried to say. His voice quavered so much that all he produced was a little raucous cry. At the same moment he struck a match and immediately dropped it. The match went out.

There was silence in the space in front of him. Then Pattie’s voice in an alarmed whisper said, “There’s someone there.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out who it is.”

A match flared a little distance away. Marcus gestured towards the light. He wanted to be known.

“Ooh! It’s a black man. He’s waving his arms.”

“Don’t be a fool, Pattie. My God, it’s Uncle Marcus.”

As the match went out Marcus dimly saw figures near to him. He took a step forward. A new voice murmured, footsteps receded. Then there was a rustling of heavy stuff and something displaced the darkness beside him. A hand brushed against him, sought his sleeve, and closed firmly over his wrist.

“Marcus.”

“Carel.”

It was like the apprehension of a criminal, but Marcus submitted to it with the most profound relief. Guilt and fear passed away from him completely.

“Come upstairs, Marcus. You find us in a strange moment.”

The hand tugged his wrist and Marcus followed, stumbled at a stair, and began to mount. The stuff of the cassock impeded him, touching his knees and thighs at each step, and a memory, perhaps of being so led by his mother, dazed him for a moment. When he reached the top of the stairs he found that he had closed his eyes. He was led in through a doorway and a door closed behind him. His wrist was released.