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

nature.
     
    Muriel, long ago convinced that she herself was exceptional, had lately begun to assume that she was not destined for any conventional love-life. Muriel was not only still a virgin, she was not even worried about it. She had never met a man of her own age who did not seem a very small object compared with herself. She had occasionally become attached to older men in what she thought of as a silly sentimental way. She had been in love with her Latin master and with a senior partner of the firm where she worked. Unrequited, and indeed unnoticed, her affections had died quiet deaths. She did not think that the great convention of passionate love was for her. She would be sombrely content with the solitary destiny of the artist and thinker. And of course it was also true that the energy of her heart was perfectly distributed and used up in the system formed by her relationship with Elizabeth.
     
    But for her cousin, Muriel perceived with a realism whose painfulness she found oddly invigorating, it might well prove in time to be different. Elizabeth’s fate was not, like Muriel’s, marked as the exception. One day Elizabeth would move into the happiness of ordinary life as into her birthright. She was far too delicious to be endlessly wasted in the dark unvisited cavernlike environment which Muriel’s father increasingly created round about himself and in which Elizabeth was indeed the only centre of light. Of course, Muriel had thought of taking Elizabeth away; at least the thought had visited her, but had always been turned off as somehow improper and premature. There was a point of fragility, not in her relation with Elizabeth but somewhere in the situation, which would not brook such a violence. Elizabeth after all had paid the price of her seclusion. She was not yet ready to face the world. But it was impossible that one day her prince would come. Or rather, should it ever become clear that a prince was required Muriel was determined to select and train him herself. She did not envisage marriage as the loss of Elizabeth. After these many years Elizabeth could not be lost. Between them they would manage Elizabeth’s husband.
     
    In thus setting her own destiny apart from her cousin’s, Muriel affirmed a superiority which she knew would bring its own burdens. She had, as she slowly glided away from the shores of ordinariness, her moments of panic. It felt like a loss of innocence; and there were times when she weakly yearned for she knew not what reunion with simple innocent things, with thoughtless affections and free happy laughter and dogs passing by in the street. She could not think why her asceticism seemed so like a kind of guilt. Yet there had always been, even in her long friendship with Elizabeth, a secret melancholy. The idea of suicide was not forced upon her by circumstances or disappointments, it was entirely and deeply natural to her, and she had early provided herself with a stock of sleeping-tablets sufficient to remove her promptly and painlessly from the mortal scene should she choose at any moment to quit it. The thought that she stayed on provisionally, and because from day to day she chose to, gave her a reviving thrill as she clutched and shook in their little bottle the precious liberating tablets whose existence she had not revealed even to Elizabeth. Well, she might go some day. But she was certainly not disposed to go just yet.
     
    “Muriel, Ariel, Gabriel.”
     
    “Yes, darling.”
     
    “Did old Shadox-Brown turn up like she said she would?” Elizabeth ground the cigar into the ash-tray and began to pick the leaves apart with restless fingers.
     
    “Yes, she came this morning with Uncle Marcus. I heard Pattie turning them away.”
     
    “I suppose Carel can’t keep them out forever. I can’t say I much want to see Uncle Marcus though. Do you want to see Shadox?”
     
    “Good God no. That woman of principle. Did I show you her letter? All about facing up to things and