The Time of the Angels (9 page)

“Will the lights come on soon?” said Marcus. His voice was querulous like the voice of a child.

“Yes, they’ll come on soon.”

It seemed to Marcus that he had been in the dark for hours. The darkness in the room was velvety without any vestige of light. Marcus fumbled it like cobwebs from in front of his face.

“Oh Carel, I’m so glad to see you.”

“Rather an odd remark in the circumstances.”

“Carel, what’s that terribly strange noise?”

“It’s the underground trains.”

“You should have let me see you.”

“You smell rather agreeably of coal, which I suppose explains how you got in.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Carel, terribly sorry—”

“You have done me no harm, my dear Marcus. I am only afraid that you may have ruined your clothes.”

“Oh, hang my clothes. Please, why didn’t you let me see you?”

“We have little to say to each other.”

“It can’t be like that, it can’t be,” said Marcus. The darkness oppressed him terribly. Now it seemed to be running through his head. He closed his eyes tight to keep it out. “You are my brother,” he said, like the utterance of a charm or a vow.

“A somewhat conventional idea.”

“It’s not an idea, it’s a fact!” Marcus’s eyes blinked as if they were weeping black tears. He reached out an invisible hand, touching nothing, and nearly fell over. “Don’t speak like that, Carel. I must see you and I must see Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth is a sick girl. She does not receive visitors.”

“I’m not a visitor. I’m her guardian.”

“You have never succeeded in doing anything for Elizabeth. You have scarcely written her a letter for years. You are not her guardian.”

“I am, I am!” cried Marcus. The cry seemed like a futile assertion of his own existence.

“You would only upset her. She lives in her mind, far away.”

“What on earth do you mean? Do you mean she’s become—strange—unbalanced—or something?”

“What quaint language you use. No, no. She is just not in your world.”

“But I’ve got to satisfy myself—”

“Are you not becoming a trifle impertinent?” There was a laugh and a soft heavy-skirted movement. Marcus recoiled.

“I’m sorry, Carel. I’m very confused I’m afraid. I do wish the lights would come on. It’s so odd talking in the dark like this. I don’t feel quite myself. Carel, where are you? Haven’t you got a torch or a candle or something? I can’t find my matches.” Marcus groped. He needed to know where Carel was, he needed to touch him. Carel’s voice seemed to wander in the dark.

“Keep still or you will knock something over. In a minute I am going to take you out to the door.”

“Don’t torture me like this. You’ll see me tomorrow, won’t you?”

“Please don’t keep trying to see me, Marcus. I am not in your world either. It is only by some metaphysical mistake that we can apprehend each other at all.”

“Carel, how can you be so unkind, so unchristian.”

“Come, come. I don’t think we need descend to that.”

“You haven’t stopped believing in God, have you, Carel? That at least—”

“You are the one who knows that in this age no intelligent person really believes in God. I am told you are writing a book about it.”

“But it’s not true, is it, Carel, about you, all the things they say—”

“I don’t know what they say.”

“That you don’t believe any more but you go on—”

“If there is no God there is all the more need for a priest.”

“But, Carel, it would be wrong, awful—”

“If there is no one there no one is going to mind.”

“You’re not serious. It’s all part of this—torture—and the lights going out and—Carel, I just don’t understand. They say such odd things about you. If you’ve lost your faith surely you— But, no, you’re just laughing at me.”

“I think you are the believer in God, Marcus. You certainly seem to believe in the possibility of blasphemy.”

“But surely you ought to—”

“Come. No tribunal dreamt of by you could really concern itself with me. Now I shall take you out.”

“I don’t believe a word you say.”

“All the more reason for you to go.”

“No, no, no!”

Marcus felt a physical turmoil all about him as if the darkness were seething and boiling. He reeled, suddenly unable, after such a long blindness, to keep his balance. “Carel, where are you? Sorry, but I must touch you for a moment. Could you give me your hand? Carel, I’m here. I’m reaching out my hand.”

Marcus moved forward, reaching out in front of him in the dark. He touched something cool and fleshy which came to meet him, he clasped it and then uttered a loud cry. Something dropped heavily to the floor. The skirt of the cassock brushed by and Carel laughed.

“What was it?” said Marcus in an incoherent mutter.

“Just a carrot. Flesh of my flesh.”

“I think I’d better go,” said Marcus.

“Good. This way.” A firm hand upon his shoulder propelled him from behind.

As Marcus emerged on to the landing it confusedly occurred to him that he might call out Elizabeth’s name. But the darkness daunted him. A cry in that thick obscurity would have been something dreadful. He passed down the stair and stood submissively while the door was opened. The foggy air opened a cold shaft of space.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” he said, and found that he was whispering.

“No, don’t. Goodbye.” A light push propelled him out of the door.

Marcus took a step or two on the icy pavement. He heard the door being bolted behind him. Then his legs gave way and he fell over rather slowly, kneeling and then sitting upon the pavement. As he sat there he saw all the lights go on inside the house.

“EXCUSE ME, IT’S Anthea. Anthea Barlow from the pastorate. You remember me. I wonder if—”

“I remember you, Mrs Barlow. If you want the Rector I’m afraid you’re unlucky again. He’s not seeing any visitors.”

“Oh dear. You see I actually—”

“I’m sorry.”

Pattie was thoroughly unhappy. She did not like being in London. The fog and the solitude oppressed her terribly. She had now found her way to the shops, but it was a long and tiring journey, and coming back across the building site she always felt nervous. Once she had seen a man standing very still upon the earth near the pavement and had found herself quite unable to walk past him. After a moment or two she had realized that it was Leo Peshkov who had suddenly laughed and vanished away, leaping and waving his arms, into the fog. She found the young man disagreeable and the incident frightened her.

She was also finding her task as doorkeeper an increasing strain. At the other parish people had understood Carel’s eccentricities. Here it was often difficult to know what to say. Carel had told her to turn everyone away. The effort was become really exhausting. As Carel decreed that the door should not be answered in her absence, she often came back from shopping to find several people hopefully waiting outside. Marcus Fisher had kept on calling, and Mrs Barlow called every day, and there were others who seemed to expect to see the Rector, including a man from some committee who was very disinclined to take no for an answer, especially after he had had it three times. However, Pattie did not complain.

Pattie’s anxieties about Carel, which never became anything clear or definite, were growing more intense. At the other parish Carel had been protected by a carapace of custom. He was “that strange Rector” and people were even rather proud of his peculiarities. Here he seemed both more alarming in himself and more utterly unprotected. He stood out, huge and monstrous, from his surroundings, as if he were the only just perceptible inhabitant of some other dimension. He scarcely seemed to be in the Rectory at all. And in guarding his door Pattie sometimes felt as if she were shielding a creature which would be automatically attacked by the ordinary people who rang the doorbell should they ever get to know of his existence, crushed in scandalized horror: unless the apparition of Carel should perhaps on the contrary maim or destroy his enemies.

Pattie knew that these were scarcely sensible thoughts. But as she had no defence for herself against the perpetual hostility of the world, so she had no defence for him. The menace came straight through. She was also, on her own account, going through a time of being frightened of him. He was very moody and frequently harsh with her. He had been extremely angry with her for not having locked the door of the coal hole, and so having let in Marcus Fisher, who still appeared to Pattie in memory as a huge Negro. After scolding her, Carel had shaken her and pushed her away from him. Pattie wept for long afterwards in her own room about this. She felt rejected, as if her whole person must have repelled him. It was true that she had not had a bath since she arrived at the new Rectory. The bathroom, which was in the part of the house not served by the central-heating system, was very cold.

Pattie continued to indulge her daydreams of going away and starting life all over again, but they lacked seriousness. They hovered like faintly illuminated strip cartoons at the back of her mind, performing some automatic soothing function as Pattie cleaned the house. A certain amount of new material had been added to these phantom pictures by Eugene Peshkov’s stories of his life in the various camps. Pattie pictured herself as a selfless welfare worker, giving her life a meaning by her devotion to those who suffered. Anonymity had been forced upon her. She would make anonymity her glory and her crown. She had of course attended to Eugene’s rather cynical remarks about the self-satisfaction of the welfare workers. Must one, really to help the sufferer, suffer oneself? A purely good person would do so automatically just like Jesus Christ did. Eugene had said one would have to be a saint. Well, Pattie might be a saint. How did she know that she was not since she had never tried? Yet wasn’t it a desire simply for happiness, for a happiness without guilt which she could enjoy, which made her dream these dreams at all? It was all very confusing.

There was perhaps another reason why Pattie’s visions of sanctity were less than urgent. Eugene Peshkov was beginning to occupy a place in her life and in her mind. Pattie had walked straight into a friendship with Eugene like someone walking through an enormous open doorway. She was just surprised to find herself inside. “Getting to know somebody” was usually for Pattie a very difficult task involving a lot of anxiety and effort on her part and which never really emerged from a sort of confusion. In fact, apart from Carel, she had never properly got to know anyone. But she had become completely at ease with Eugene almost straight away. That a sort of complicity of fellow-servants had helped here did not trouble her in the least. She was only sorry that she had not forestalled his calling her “Pattie” and made him call her “Patricia". But then she was not yet worthy to be called “Patricia”.

There was a kind of wonderful confidence and completeness in Eugene which attracted everything in Pattie that was tattered and bedraggled. He was so “full of himself". Something glowed out of him, some light perhaps from his very earliest childhood, which seemed everything that Pattie needed and had always lacked. Also he seemed to her an innocent person and this warmed her heart in an almost mysterious way. Pattie coveted his innocence, scarcely knowing what this meant, she rubbed herself dog-like against it. Eugene represented the good clean simple world out of which she had irrevocably slipped. Also she loved his sufferings and envied him their significance. “Hitler", “Prague", these were names which gave sense to what one had suffered. Of course, at the time there had been no sense. But it was a consolation to be able to understand afterwards that something with a name had happened to one. When she had tried to tell Eugene about her own childhood she had failed to make a story. It was all little senseless pieces. His life had its meaning all the way through. The meaning of her life was hidden in the future, in the time when she would become Patricia.

Of course, she had said nothing to Eugene about her relations with Carel. This troubled her very much and in fact prevented her new friendship from sufficing to make her happy. Some very lively and very central part of her responded to Eugene. But all round this, like old thick vegetation, there remained the unintelligible tangle of her involvement with Carel. This was the stuff of which she was made, she was in this huge matted thing. Indeed, in some terrible inescapable way she was Carel. The Pattie who was Eugene’s friend was just a tiny hopeful puppet inside the real Pattie. Could she ever tell this to Eugene? She thought that she could not.

As Pattie looked down now into the bright eager face of Anthea Barlow she was thinking about Eugene’s suggestion that he should take her to see the sea. Would Carel mind? It was extraordinary that such a question could even arise. But still it seemed to her, in a quite separate and special way, a pure and joyful thing that she should some day go with Eugene to see the sea.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Barlow,” she said again, and began to close the door.

“I ventured to send him a little note by the post.”

“I’m afraid he won’t have read it.”

“Well, may I come inside just for a second? There’s a little something I’d like to leave.”

Mrs Barlow had somehow got past Pattie into the hall. Worried, Pattie hesitated and then closed the door. She cast a quick look behind her towards the stairs. The hall was bleak and dim in the light of a single naked electric-light bulb which hung down in its centre, distributing a sort of quasiluminosity which made things shifty and insubstantial. The furniture was uneasy in the cold watery light. Wicker chairs, a table with bamboo legs, a modern imitation oak chest, stood purposelessly about. Pattie stood in the space and looked at Anthea Barlow. She knew that Anthea Barlow was her enemy.

“Do you mind if I slip my coat off? It’s just to feel the benefit, you know, when I go out again. Really, I think it’s colder than ever. It’s just starting to snow. I find snow so exciting, don’t you?”

Pattie now saw that Mrs Barlow’s curly black fur coat was covered all over with minute white crystals, as if some very fine lace had been drawn over it. The heavy coat flopped on the back of one of the chairs and from there to the floor. Pattie let it lie.

“What did you want to leave? I’m afraid I’m rather busy.”

“Just these snowdrops. A little gift for the Rector. I’ve ventured to write a scrap of a note to go with them. Aren’t they darling?”

“Mmm,” said Pattie.

Mrs Barlow, solid now in a black woollen dress with a diamond-looking clasp shaped like a basket of flowers, had produced a small paper bundle from the recesses of her person. The points of snow upon her fur hat, melted now, were like little glass beads. She handed over the bundle to Pattie. The letter had been pinned to the rustling paper. Peering in as one peers at a baby, Pattie saw the flowers, crisp as white icing or peppermint. They gave off a faint fragrance.

“So sweet, aren’t they. February Fair Maids, folklore calls them. They’re supposed to bloom on February the second, that’s Candlemas Day of course, in honour of Our Lady’s purification.”

“They’re pretty,” said Pattie grudgingly.

“These ones have come early, they just couldn’t wait! I expect they’re from the Scilly Isles. Most of those early flowers are. Little sillies, I always call them!”

“Well, thank you, Mrs Barlow and now—”

“Oh, please let me stay just one more minute. I really won’t keep you. There’s so much I want to ask. You know this appeal about restoring the church—”

“I don’t.”

“Oh, I see. I imagined Father Carel would have talked to you about it.”

“The Rector has said nothing about it.” Pattie resented the familiarity of the title.

“Well, perhaps it’s not the sort of thing he’d tell you. Anyway there’s this plan to launch a big appeal to restore the church and the idea is that Father Carel is go to America to appeal for funds—”

“I’m afraid I know nothing about it, Mrs Barlow. And now I really must ask you—” Pattie was afraid that Carel would be very angry with her for having let this troublesome woman into the house. She had an almost superstitious fear that he might come out on to the landing and be seen by the intruder.

“But it’s very important. There’s this committee meeting tomorrow and that’s why I really did want a little word with Father Carel. You don’t think—?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is he ill?”

“No, he’s not ill,” said Pattie. She did not like the change of tone. Mrs Barlow was a determined woman and not by any means such a fool as she looked.

“But I mean, well, is he perhaps feeling a little overburdened? We all find life a little too much for us sometimes, don’t we? We get a little off our balance, a little depressed, a little—”

“The Rector is perfectly well,” said Pattie.

“I’d be so glad to have a chat with him. A sympathetic outsider with a little experience—I might even be able to help. And in fact I’m—”

“Sorry, no,” said Pattie.

“I do wish there was anything, anything that I could do.”

“I’m very busy,” said Pattie.

“Well, we are all busy, especially we women. I do wish you’d let me help. Helping people is what I’m for. For instance, I’d be awfully pleased to take Elizabeth out for a run in my car, when the weather’s a little better, that is.”

“Elizabeth?” said Pattie. She stared at Mrs Barlow’s rather large and crazily enthusiastic face, damp and flushed a lobster red now with the comparative warmth of the house. “Elizabeth? How do you know anything about Miss Elizabeth?” As she spoke she apprehended Elizabeth, in a way that was familiar to her, as if she were a guilty secret. Often it happened that people did not know of Elizabeth’s existence at all. Carel said it was better so. Even Eugene did not yet know that there was another girl in the house. Pattie had been inhibited from telling him partly because “Elizabeth” was also the name of his lost sister.

“Oh well, parish gossip, you know. You can’t keep anything private in this parish. A lot of regular old chattermaggers we are, I’m afraid!”

“But it isn’t a real parish. There aren’t any people. I can’t think how—”

“Elizabeth must feel a little dull sometimes. It’s so hard on a young girl. I’d be so glad to come and talk to her.”

“I think you’d better go, Mrs Barlow.”

“Of course, she’s got you and Muriel. Quite a family. You must all be very devoted to Father Carel. I know you are, Pattie. I may call you Pattie, mayn’t I? After all we’ve met quite a number of times now. You’ve been with Father Carel a long time, haven’t you?”

“Here’s your coat,” said Pattie. She thrust the damp furry bundle on to Mrs Barlow’s black woollen bosom and opened the door wide. The almost total darkness of the afternoon loomed coldly in, and a few very small snowflakes came twisting and turning onto the doormat.