The Time of the Angels (16 page)

Muriel turned slowly. She got herself through the door of Leo’s room. Then she began to cry.

“Deary deary deary me,” said Leo. “Sit down. Here on the bed. Have my hank, it’s quite clean.”

Muriel took the handkerchief and mopped her eyes. She gave a very long exhausted sigh, staring with unfocused gaze at Leo’s feet. The source of tears, touched for an instant, had dried again. Muriel had few tears.

Leo knelt beside her and put an arm round her shoulder. Then he squeezed her rather clumsily with both arms and drew away, squatting before her on the floor. “What is it? Tell Uncle Leo.”

“It’s nothing,” said Muriel in a cold tired voice. “I just got into a—terrible irrational state. I’m all right now.”

“No you’re not. I can see. Do tell.”

“It’s too complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Well, stay and talk to me anyway. Talk about anything. I’m good for you, you know.”

Perhaps he was right. She stared at the touchable fur-like hair and the pale grey eyes, luminous with solicitude and laughter. He was a being who did not tolerate nightmare. “All right. You tell me some things. Have you got that icon back?”

Leo stood up. “No I haven’t, but I will, I certainly will. Look, let’s really talk to each other, shall we? I’m tired of all this fighting and joking. You must make me be serious. You can if you try. Will you try?”

She looked up at him. “I can’t do anything with you.”

“Because you think so badly of me? You do think badly of me, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Muriel. “It doesn’t matter. I think so badly of myself.”

“It’s not play.”

“I know it’s not play.”

“About the icon. I will get it back. And if you don’t mind I won’t tell you how. But I’m not proud of myself. I’ve just done something which even I—”

“You haven’t been stealing again?”

“No. Worse. But I won’t tell you that. There’s something else I want to tell you, though it’s less important. Symbolic really. Why should you care?”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I told you why I sold the icon I wasn’t telling you the truth. In fact I told one lie to you, another one to my father and another to—well, a third party who’s got involved.”

“I gathered you wanted money for an operation for a girl.”

“Well, it wasn’t quite that. What I mean by ‘quite’ was that— Well, you see there was this operation, only that was some time ago, months ago, and the girl really has gone off with someone else. It’s not her. You see, the point is I borrowed money at the time for the operation. I borrowed it, well, from an older woman who was, well, sympathetic.”

“I see. So now—”

“This had consequences,” said Leo. “I don’t mean anything sensational, I mean I didn’t have to go to bed with her to get the money. It’s not like that at all. She’s awfully correct. But she’s so—we’ve had to become intimate friends, if you see what I mean. She’s so friendly and sympathetic and wants to know about me and help me. I feel like a wasp stuck in the jam. And while I owed her the money—”

“You couldn’t very well ditch her.”

“Yes. Though I wouldn’t put it quite like that. After all she isn’t my girl friend. I just wanted to get away and I couldn’t.”

“You were prepared to use her but not to face what you call the consequences?”

“I suppose it comes to that. Not very nice is it? Though I was pretty desperate at the time. The fact is I can’t stand her. And I feel all the time I’m half lying to her, well more than half. And while the bloody money’s still at stake—”

“I suppose she doesn’t want the money?”

“No. She keeps telling me I can have it as a present. But I can’t. That’s not morals, it’s psychology.”

“Often the same thing. I see the difficulty.”

“You do believe all this, don’t you?” said Leo. “I’ve told you a lot of things which aren’t true. This is true.”

“I believe this,” said Muriel. She did. “Have you paid her the money now?”

“Well, no,” said Leo. “That’s the point. At least this is what, in a way, you are doing for me, or I am doing for you. I didn’t expect this.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I’d made a plan for keeping the money to pay the debt and getting this third party to buy back the icon for me, but I can’t do it.”

“What’s stopping you. Surely not the demon of morality this time?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I’ve always imagined that I could just give up morals, but it’s not so easy. I’m not as free as I think.”

“It was true that you got seventy-five pounds for the icon?”

“That was true. Well, I’m going to hand it over today to the person who—well, the person who’s going to get the icon back for me.”

“And from whom you’d concealed that you still had the money?”

“Precisely. He’ll have to pay a little bit more than that for the thing I’m afraid. But it’s a gesture.”

“Which you’ll accompany with some other suitable falsehood?”

Leo stared at her and then laughed. “Yes! I’ll hand it over anyway. Oh God! Are you pleased with me, Muriel?”

“But you’re still in the fix with your sympathetic older woman.”

“Yes. I can’t think about that now. I’ll find some way out. Look, my dear, you did mean it, didn’t you, about your cousin?”

Muriel looked away from him. An apparition rose before her, a stifling darkness which buzzed in the corner of the room like a tower of bees. She turned quickly back to Leo. “Yes.”

“Do understand,” said Leo, “that I’m not an utter fool. I act the fool a lot of the time, but I won’t be out of order here. I do want to meet your cousin, just meet her, whatever happens next and even if nothing happens. Of course I’ve thought about her endlessly since you told me. I can’t help being romantic about her. But if you’ll let me meet her I’ll be good. I swear I’ll be orderly and do whatever you say.”

“Yes,” said Muriel.

“Won’t you tell me a little more about her? What’s she like?”

Muriel set her teeth. She could feel that source of tears in her again, like something vibrating far away. She stood up. “Not now. Some other time. Now I must go.”

“I’ve said something wrong.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Don’t be cross with me, Muriel.”

“I’m not cross.”

“Don’t be unhappy.”

Getting to the door, Muriel seemed to stumble against Leo. He put his arms round her in the same awkward way and she held on to him fiercely for a moment. As she went out she could hear Pattie’s voice still speaking in Eugene’s room.

A few minutes later Muriel was quietly letting herself out of the front door. It was very silent outside. The fog was a little less dense and the air was filled with snow. Huge soft white flakes gyrated noiselessly round her, seeming to touch the ground and rise again to flitter through the air in a design which just baffled the eye. The flakes came so thickly they seemed to pack the atmosphere with dense stifling furry cold. Muriel beat them away from in front of her face and then went on with head lowered. The thick snow squeaked under her boots. A bundled-up figure materialized and passed her, going in the direction of the Rectory. It looked like Mrs Barlow.

Muriel walked swiftly, not looking where she was going, trying to think. At least her ability to think seemed to have come back to her. She had been subjected to a strong pressure. Carel had used authority, and though he had uttered no specific threats it was an authority with a menace in it. Yet what could he threaten her with? Muriel felt she was in danger of losing touch with reality. She had had no time to reflect between seeing Carel and seeing Leo; yet she had instinctively clung to her plan of somehow using Leo. She was frightened of Carel, she was frightened of disobeying Carel. But she was even more frightened of something else, of an isolation, a paralysis of the will, the metamorphosis of the world into something small and sleepy and enclosed, the interior of an egg. She felt as if Carel had tried to recruit her for some diabolical plot, or rather to hypnotize her into a sense of its inevitability. She had needed the roughness, even the absurdity, of Leo to persuade her again of her own existence as a rational independent creature.

Yet why did she suddenly think of it all as a diabolical plot? If it was a plot it was one with which she had herself long cooperated. She had never challenged the view that Elizabeth was ill and needed to be protected from the shocks of the world. She herself had been Elizabeth’s chief protector from those shocks. She herself had made, and made with deliberate care, the bower in which Elizabeth now seemed so alarmingly drowsy and entranced. It had all seemed necessary. Doctors had come and gone and shaken their heads and warned against exertion and recommended complete rest. Elizabeth was an invalid and was leading the life of an invalid. What was mysterious about that?

Why can’t I think of it all more simply, thought Muriel. Perhaps it was inevitable that Elizabeth should lead a rather quiet life. But it was not inevitable that she should see so few people. Carel had somehow jumbled everything together. It just needed a little sorting out. It wasn’t such an all-or-nothing business. Why shouldn’t Muriel just go to her father in a firm straightforward way and say to him that she thought Elizabeth needed more company and why shouldn’t she meet young Leo Peshkov for a start? It wasn’t a monstrous suggestion. Why then did she so immediately feel that it was?

Certainly what she ought to do was to try to explain the whole thing to Eugene. He was there, he was wise, and the idea of thus “involving” him was at once consoling. But would he approve of the idea of Leo being introduced to Elizabeth? Well, why on earth shouldn’t he? It was only to Muriel herself that the plan appeared like a violent action, like the sudden breaking of a mirror. To a rational outsider the idea would seem quite ordinary. Though to make the outsider really understand would it not be necessary to infect him a little with her own more lurid vision of the scene? Yet could she? Would not these fires pale then and seem quite unreal? Were they not quite unreal? I must talk to Eugene, Muriel said to herself. But her image of talking to Eugene was of being held very closely and tightly in Eugene’s arms.

“Muriel!”

Muriel shied, slipped, and nearly fell off the pavement. A figure was standing near her in the brownish-white flurry of the snow. Where am I? was Muriel’s first thought. She had walked at random and now someone was calling her by her name.

“Muriel—”

Muriel recognized Norah Shadox-Brown. “Oh, hello—”

“My dear girl, what luck to run into you. I was just going down to call. That brown demon on the door always says you’re out. I was going to call her a liar this time, so it’s just as well I met you!”

“Oh, yes—” said Muriel. She felt so cut off from Shadox, so listlessly unable to conceive of her, it seemed hardly worth replying.

“Muriel, I want to have a serious talk with you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Muriel. She wondered how she could get away from Shadox, but she had no strength to invent a lie.

“What did you say? Look, there’s no point in standing about in the snow. You’re looking perished with cold. You’re not in a hurry, are you? It’s not far to my house. We can walk it in five minutes. A brisk walk will warm us up. No talking on the way! Come along then, quick march!”

Norah thrust her arm through Muriel’s and began to urge her along the road. Their boots sank into the deepening snow. Snowflakes like cold wool drifted into their panting mouths. Speech would have been impossible in any case.

Muriel struggled feebly for a moment. Then she quietly, gasping to herself, resented the pressure of Norah’s arm on hers, of Norah’s thigh against her. Then she became indifferent and allowed herself to be hauled along. She even shut her eyes and fell into a sort of trance.

“Here we are. Up the stairs. I’m up on top. No one lives down below. But of course you’ve been here before.”

Muriel had been there once before, on an occasion she preferred not to remember, when Shadox had been trying to persuade her to go to the university.

The sudden warmth of the sitting-room was almost painful. Her thawing feet ached and a fiery touch seemed to outline her face. Automatically Muriel took off her coat and her scarf and laid them on a chair. With some difficulty she took off her gloves. Her hands were stiff and white with cold. She thrust one under her arm and compressed the stiffness, expecting to hear it crack. Her hands were becoming five-fingered patterns of pain. Muriel realized that those tears were going to start again. She felt their glow in her eyes. Whatever happened she must not cry in front of Shadox. She went to the window and coughed gruffly into her handkerchief.