The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online

should see a stormy sky through the empty eyes of a statue.
     
    “Sorry to ring. I was just bored. Not a nuisance?”
     
    “Not a bit.”
     
    “Any news là-bas?”
     
    “Nothing special. That awfully nice Russian man has brought us some more grub. He’s cottoned on at last to the fact that Pattie and I are separate institutions.”
     
    It was a matter of pride to Muriel not to let Pattie serve her. Pattie rejoicing at Clara’s death had engendered a hatred in Muriel which time had merely dulled into a habit. When she was younger she had made one or two formal attempts to forgive Pattie, but there is no grace-aided sacrament of forgiveness. She pitied the pathetic brown animal sometimes, that was all. She had also tried to perceive her father’s fault. But some mechanism of her universe made Carel’s fault invisible. What she did grimly observe was that her father seemed to get some sardonic amusement out of the feud between his servant and his daughter.
     
    “You’ve lost my place, damn you.”
     
    Muriel had automatically closed the volume of the Iliad which lay beside her on the floor. Knowledge of Greek hung upon Elizabeth as an extra grace. Muriel regretted now that she had not learnt Greek. She regretted that she had not gone to a university. She felt old and regretted many things.
     
    “Sorry. I’m a bit nervy. It’s like being besieged here just now. The fog’s as thick as ever.”
     
    “I know. Rather exciting actually. I haven’t even bothered to draw the curtains back. It might as well be night.”
     
    Elizabeth’s new room, brightly lit with several lamps, had already begun to resemble Elizabeth’s old room. It was, like the latter, L-shaped, with Elizabeth’s bed in the recess, partly concealed behind a Chinese screen. Turning her head a little, Muriel could see in the mirror the very end of the bed. The sheets were trailing untidily, but the effect was of a nest of feathery silky stuffs composing a sort of Oriental couch. A long bookcase, already filled and ordered, occupied the nearer wall. Elizabeth’s work-table, with her little wireless and her typewriter which she called “the dog", stood between the wardrobe and the door. Facing the fireplace where a sulky fire was burning, and now supporting Elizabeth’s back as she rested from the puzzle, was the chaise-longue in pink velvet which Elizabeth had insisted on having, and which Carel had bought for her with care and expense, when she had first become ill. “If I’m going to be an interesting invalid I must have a chaise-longue,” Elizabeth had said then. Muriel admired, was always admiring, her courage and the almost uncanny cheerfulness with which she endured her narrow lot.
     
    “What did Carel want? I thought I heard him calling you.”
     
    It still gave Muriel a slight shock to hear her cousin call him “Carel". This she had done, and so addressed him too, from an early age with every naturalness. The girls never discussed Carel except at the level of speculating whether he might not be carried off to hell one day by the devil in person.
     
    “He asked me about getting a job.”
     
    “You didn’t tell him about the poetry jag?”
     
    “No.”
     
    Elizabeth never asked to see Muriel’s poetry, and when Muriel occasionally showed her something she made small comment. Muriel, who would have been very upset indeed by an adverse criticism, still hoped for a little more encouragement.
     
    In these days Muriel felt in an almost physical way the altering proportions of her relationship with Elizabeth. The five years which divided them had signified at different times different things. Elizabeth had always been somehow the delicate pure heart of the household, its kernel of innocence. No shadow had ever seemed to fall upon the gaiety of the orphan child, a gaiety curiously invincible and purged. Even Pattie had loved her. Muriel had felt both gauche and tenderly protective as Elizabeth pulled her impetuously forward