The Time of the Angels

by Iris Murdoch

  “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.

  Anthea Barlow sighed and put on her coat. “Ah well. I’m rather a madcap, I’m afraid. You’ll get used to me. People do.”

  She looked at Pattie and then smiled appealingly, holding out a hand sideways in a way which invites, not a formal handshake, but the warm spontaneous clasp of friend with friend. Pattie ignored the hand.

  “I shall come again,” murmured Anthea Barlow.

  She went out into the darkness and a just audible movement of snowflakes covered her departing form. Pattie shut the door and bolted it. Then she listened and heard with relief from upstairs the distant strains of the Nutcracker Suite.

  She took the paper off the snowdrops and dropped it, together with Mrs Barlow’s note, into a wastepaper basket. She had no intention of troubling Carel with Mrs Barlow’s importunities. She decided that she would give the snowdrops to Eugene. She looked at them. A clear line of the purest palest green was drawn round the scolloped rim of each drooping white cup. The flowers had a sudden presence, an authority. Pattie looked down at them with surprise. She saw them as flowers. They made, in the continuum of dark days, a pause, a gap as it were, through which she saw so much more than the springtime. Calling the lapsed soul, and weeping in the evening dew, that might control the starry pole and fallen, fallen light renew.

  Holding the snowdrops lightly against her overall she moved to the window. A complicated frost picture was forming on the inside of the pane. She scratched it with her finger, making a round hole in the sugary frost, and looked through. The snow, just visible in the dusky yellow dark, was falling thickly now, the flakes turning slightly as they fell, composing together a huge rotating pattern too complex for the eye, which seemed to extend itself persuasively and enter the body with a sighing hypnotic caress. The whole world was very quietly spiralling and shifting. Pattie stood dazed and looked out at the snow for a long time.

  Suddenly behind her in the house
she heard a loud cry and the sound of opening doors and running feet. Someone was urgently calling out her name.

  She turned quickly back to see Eugene, who had rushed into the hall, huge and distracted, his arms waving.

  “Oh, Pattie, Pattie, it’s gone!”

  “What’s gone?”

  “My icon. Somebody’s stolen it. I left the door unlocked. Somebody’s stolen it away!”

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Pattie. She opened her arms to him. He came straight to her and she hugged him. The snowdrops were crushed between them. Somewhere up above a head and shoulders moved in the dark. She smelt the perfume of the snowdrops crushed upon Eugene’s breast. She went on hugging him and saying “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE TREACLE TART was brown and crisp on top, golden and succulent and granular once the surface had yielded to the spoon. The Bishop covered his portion evenly with cream and delicately licked a finger. “One must not exaggerate,” he said.

  Marcus stared gloomily at the tart. It was his favourite pudding. Only today he was without appetite.

  Since his visit to Carel he had been in an extremely disturbed state. He had imagined that his boldness would procure him some automatic liberation, the switching on of some immediate calm. He had even imagined, with a naivety which came straight out of his childhood, that Carel was reserving for him, like an enormous treat, some quite special reassurance. What had come to him from that darkened encounter was a more fearful because more unintelligible agitation. He could not but regard it as significant that there had been no light. His desire now simply to see Carel’s face had become obsessively connected with a fear that he should find his brother disfigured or monstrously changed. Carel and Elizabeth haunted his dreams, huge obscure figures whose doings he could not afterwards remember. Hitherto he had at least been able to think of them separately. Now in some compulsive way which he could not quite understand he thought of them together, and the new connection, the new pattern had somehow the effect of perpetuum mobile. Marcus could not perceive the principle of this machine which so jerked him to and fro, but he felt it had something to do with Carel’s remark that Elizabeth “lived in her mind”.

  Marcus did not know what was intended by the remark, but it did not occur to him to believe, or even conjecture, that Elizabeth was in fact out of her mind. What did come to him afterwards, obscure and disturbing as a large unpleasant-looking object rising through deep water, was the idea that Carel was out of his. Marcus had never before for a second, however much he had heard it reiterated by Norah, entertained the view that his brother was insane. If it was not madness then there was only one other thing which it could be.

  These reflections were entirely new to Marcus, and he was amazed at how far he had come, or how far he had been rather as it were shot, through the violence of his meeting with Carel. Yet he could, he felt, have confronted rationally any possibility, any conjecture, concerning insanity or concerning that which was worse, if it had involved Carel alone. It was the addition of Elizabeth to the situation which made it tormentingly problematic and constituted the distressful machine which now gave him no rest. He needed desperately to see Elizabeth. Her image burnt in his mind, a steely dazzling point of pure innocence. It was not that he at all coherently thought of her as menaced. What he felt was very much more like some sort of monstrous jealousy.

  He regretted having spoken of his experience to Norah. He had recounted simply the facts of the conversation and had made no attempt to render the atmosphere, nor had he, for some reason, brought himself to tell her that it had all taken place in the dark. But even this much he ought not to have told. He ought to have kept it all covered up and let its chemistry work within him in secret. On this subject Norah could utter only blasphemies. And utter them she did crowingly, understanding everything at the crudest level and frankly exulting at having acquired some more, and she imaged conclusive, “evidence” for her case.

  “I trust I am not exaggerating, Bishop,” Norah was saying.

  The Bishop had small hands and feet and a clean boyish face. It annoyed Marcus to hear Norah calling him “Bishop". He himself had started calling him “Sir” and had then realized with irritation that the Bishop was probably younger than he was. Marcus was at the age when he was still scandalized to find a younger person in a position of authority.

  “As I see it,” Norah went on, “it’s a matter of responsibility to the public, to say nothing of the Church itself. It’s highly dangerous for an unbalanced man to have that sort of power. Anything could happen. There must be ecclesiastical machinery for at least investigating a case of this sort.”

  “Well, well, who is to say in these days who is mad and who is sane? Let him who is without neurosis cast the first stone! What an absolutely delicious treacle tart. I find so few people are prepared to take trouble with puddings these days.”

  “You ask who is to say,” said Norah. She was beginning to get a little cross with the Bishop. “I answer that I am prepared to say. Tolerance can go too far and in my view nowadays usually does. A spade must be called a spade. We are confronted here by a man who is both mad and wicked.”

  “Can he actually be both?” said Marcus. He had not so far managed to get himself into the conversation.

  “I should certainly call Carel an eccentric” said the Bishop. “The Anglican Church has been noted for its eccentrics. In the eighteenth century—”

  “We are not, thank heavens,” said Norah, “living in the eighteenth century.”

  It disturbed Marcus that the Bishop referred to his brother as “Carel” although it appeared that they had only met twice.

  “I shouldn’t worry too much, Miss Shadox-Brown. As the psalmist says, ‘verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.’ Otherwise rendered, it’ll all come out in the wash! No, thanks, no more tart. I have rather wolfed mine, haven’t I. I’d love some of that delicious crumbly cheese.”

  “Well, I think something ought to be done,” said Norah. She slid the cheeseboard briskly up to the Bishop’s plate. “Naturally we thought we’d consult you first. But Marcus will have to take some steps about Elizabeth. After all he is her guardian and he must be allowed to see her. I am certainly going to take legal advice.”

  “I don’t think we should be too hasty,” said Marcus. He was annoyed and distressed and almost frightened by a vision of Norah, lawyers, even police, interfering in something as intensely private as what his relation with Carel and Elizabeth had now become. He regretted not having utterly discouraged Norah from the start.

  “I agree with Marcus,” said the Bishop. “It’s easy to make an ill-considered fuss. Not so easy to pick up the pieces afterwards. Do you mind if I help myself to some more of that superb claret?”

  Oh, so I’m Marcus now, am I, thought Marcus. The Bishop was a fast worker. It was a professional facility.

  “My point would be that the fuss would not be ill-considered,” said Norah. “And I’m very surprised that you aren’t more interested in what Carel said to Marcus about having lost his faith.” This had already been recounted verbatim.

  “Belief is such a personal matter, especially in these days,” said the Bishop vaguely.

  “He may have been pulling my leg,” said Marcus.

  “You know quite well he wasn’t,” said Norah. “He was being downright cynical. A priest, calmly announcing that he doesn’t believe in God!”

  “Well, if I may say so without frivolity, it rather depends on the tone that is used! I understand you are writing a book on the subject, Marcus?”

  “Not exactly, sir,” said Marcus. He felt like a schoolboy being interrogated and noted with annoyance his conditioned reactions. “I’m not writing about God. I’m writing about morality. Though I am going to devote a chapter to the ontological argument.”

  “Excellent, excellent. The only sound argument in the whole of theology, in my humble view, only don’t quote me! I’m so glad. We need all the help
we can get.”

  “But I’m not a Christian,” said Marcus.

  “Well, you know, the dividing lines are not by any means as clear as they used to be. Passion, Kierkegaard said, didn’t he, passion. That’s the necessary thing. We must remember that the Holy Spirit bloweth where it listeth. It’s not the gale, it’s the windless calm that is Godless. ‘Where’s the bloody horse?’ if you follow me!”

  “But there’s still a difference between believing in God and not believing in God,” said Norah.

  “Oh, certainly. But perhaps this difference is not quite what we once thought it was. We must think of this time as an interregnum—”