The Time of the Angels

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

Book: The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online
Authors: Iris Murdoch
by the hand through the years of childhood. Muriel, who had a solid and even relentless confidence of her own, had naturally cast herself as Elizabeth’s teacher. Elizabeth had been apt, affectionate and loyal. Now of late Muriel had felt the balance shifting, and felt her five years’ lead diminish. As a cultivated educated person her cousin was nearly her equal, and Muriel now intuited in the almost grown-up Elizabeth a strength of character not inferior to her own. Intuited, because this power was never deployed against her, scarcely even shown in her presence. Elizabeth still acted the gay dependent child for Muriel’s benefit, and indeed for Carel’s, but now with a kind of spontaneous feigning. What had been, what still seemed, so adorably soft and silky now showed an occasional glint of steel.
     
    This quiet hardening had, to Muriel’s mind, completed Elizabeth’s beauty. The pale face was sadder, seemed stretched a little longer, as if some authoritative structure had been scarcely perceptibly introduced behind. The dark blue-grey eyes were more veiled now, looked out of a more consciously inhabited, more formidably defended fane. Muriel had always accepted that Elizabeth was “the pretty one", and there was no shadow of envy in her admiration of her cousin’s good looks. Muriel, who never tended in any way to underestimate herself, knew that she was not unattractive. Her face in fact notably resembled Elizabeth’s, but without the extreme pallor and distinction of feature. Her hair, which she cut short in a boyish way, was a stripy golden brown and her rather narrow eyes were a dark and speckled blue. Muriel did not doubt her own handsomeness. But here she was content to be good and to delight in Elizabeth as excellent.
     
    With things of the mind of course it was different. Elizabeth was bright rather than reflective, a clever but hardly a creative mind. Elizabeth had rapidly mastered Greek, and her Latin was now better than Muriel’s. But Muriel had approved and ratified Carel’s decree, issued partly on grounds of health, that Elizabeth should not go to a university. Elizabeth had been unmoved, confident, as Muriel had been at that age, in her power to educate herself, and Muriel had been pleased to be able to continue to form and inform a mind for whose future development she still had detailed plans. Muriel knew that she must continue, where her cousin was concerned, to be the boss; and indeed Elizabeth had never been, and she was sure could never be, a menace to her consciousness. There had never been anything approaching a conflict of wills between them. Their relationship, as they had so often had occasion to exclaim to each other, was remarkable, was perfect.
     
    Muriel worried sometimes about the degree of seclusion which Elizabeth seemed to accept as natural. In the Midlands they had had a small circle of friends whom the two girls had invariably regarded as their inferiors, teasing and bossing them in their presence and mocking them in their absence. Any young person other than their two selves was sooner or later voted “awfully dim". In fact they treated their friends as a pair of sophisticated young princesses might have treated the children of their servants. Better company might perhaps be hoped for in London, but it would take a long time to find suitable friends for Elizabeth. Carel never made any attempt to procure her society, and Elizabeth herself seemed curiously indifferent to her solitude. Muriel had watched the adolescent Elizabeth a little anxiously for signs of interest in boys, for any incipient clutching at the other sex, but Elizabeth had done no more than laugh at her few male acquaintances. Muriel had listened in vain for any inward echo of a need, and she did not think there was in the crippled girl’s acceptance of her present life a single grain of despair. Only of late, and in an uncanny silence, she had felt in Elizabeth the growth of a passionate

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