The Time of the Angels

  From the moment when the uniformed man had carried her away in his arms from the alcoholic sobbing of Miss O’Driscoll nobody had loved her. Nobody had touched her or looked at her with the close attention which only love bestows. Among a mass of children she had struggled for notice, raising her little brown arms as if she were drowning, but the eyes of adults always passed vaguely over her. She had not, like more fortunate children, been licked into shape by love, as a bear licks its cubs. Pattie had no shape. Her mother, it is true, had once provided a sort of love, an animal clutch, which the adolescent Pattie recalled with an uncomprehending wistful gratitude. She carried this shred, which was scarcely even a memory, about in her heart and prayed for her dead mother nightly, trusting that, though her sins were as scarlet, the Precious Blood had proved as efficacious as Miss O’Driscoll could have hoped.

  And well, of course, God loved Pattie. The brisk women had taught her this very early on, turning her over as it were to God when they had, as they usually had, other things to do. God loved her with a great big possessive love and Pattie of course loved God in return. But their mutual affection did not stop her from being, nearly all the time, brutalized by unhappiness into a condition which resembled mental deficiency. Much later some merciful power out of the darkness which Pattie had worshipped in ignorance drew an oblivious sponge over those years. Adult, Pattie could scarcely remember her childhood.

  When she was fourteen, still hardly able to read or write, she left school, and as she seemed incapable of further training she went into service. Her first employers were a continuation of her teachers, lively enlightened liberal-minded people who seemed to a more resentful, more conscious Pattie to be always converting her misery into their cheerfulness by a relentless metabolic process. In fact they did a lot for her. They taught her to live in a house, they convinced her that she was not stupid, they even put books in her way. They were very kind to her; but from their kindness the chief lesson she learnt was the lesson of the colour bar. As a child she had not distinguished between the affliction of being coloured and the affliction of being Pattie. As a girl she took stock of her separateness. Her employers treated her in a special way because she was a coloured person.

  Pattie now began to feel her colour, to feel it as a physical patina. She constantly read it too in the looks of others. She exhibited before herself her arms, so indelibly dyed to a dark creamy brown, and her hands with the greyish pallor upon the palm and the slightly purple tint upon the nail. She looked with puzzlement, almost with astonishment, into mirrors to see her round flat face and her big mouth set upon a scarcely perceptible arc so that when she smiled almost all her gleaming white teeth were visible together. She fingered the curls of her very dry black hair, pulling them into straightness and watching them return like springs into their natural spirals. She envied proud delicate-featured Indian girls in saris with jewels in their ears and noses whom she sometimes saw in the street, and wished that she could wear her own nationality with such an air. But then, she realized, she had no nationality except to be coloured. And when she saw Wogs go home scribbled upon walls she took it to herself as earnestly and piously as she took the sacrament at the church which she attended on Sundays. Sometimes she thought about Jamaica, which she pictured as a technicolour scene in a cinema when soft music weaves together a vista of breaking waves and swaying palms. In fact, Pattie had never seen the sea.

  Of course there were other coloured people in the town. Pattie began to notice them and to observe with a sharp eye their features and their different shades of colour. Now it was as if there were only two races, white and black. Not all the half-and-halfs were as dark as herself; her father must have been a very dusky man indeed to have injected so much of darkness into his half-Irish daughter. Pattie brooded upon these distinctions, though she did not know what value she set upon them. She felt no sense of unity with the other coloured people, even when they were most evidently akin to herself. Whiteness seemed to join all the white people together in a cosy union, but blackness divided the black, each into the loneliness of his own special hue. Pattie’s clear apprehension of this loneliness was her first grown-up sentiment. She recalled a little poem which had troubled her at school: “And I am black, but oh my soul is white"; and Pattie decided that she was damned if her soul was white. If she had a soul and souls had a colour, hers was a creamy brown a little darker in hue than a cappuccino. She had found in herself after all a little nugget of pride, something which she had brought along perhaps wrapped up in that shred of love which poor Miss O’Driscoll had blindly given to her little wisp of a daughter. Pattie began to think.

  She learnt to read properly now, teaching herself in her room in the evenings. She read a lot of romantic novels, including some she had been taught to call classics, she read the women’s magazines from cover to cover, and she even read some poetry and copied pieces of it into a black notebook. She liked poems that resembled songs or charms or nursery rhymes, fragments that could be musically murmured. The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair. Pattie felt with this that she knew all that she needed to know about the Spartans. The world of art remained fragmented for her, a shifting kaleidoscopic pattern which yielded beauty almost without form. She amassed small pieces of poems, of melodies, faces in pictures, laughing Cavaliers and Blue Boys, scarcely identified, happily recognized, easily forgotten. She took no concepts away from her experiences. For the rest, a devout Low Church Christianity provided her cosmology. Lo where Christ’s blood streamed in the firmament. The idea of redemption, vague and yet somehow for her entirely factual, stayed with her as a consolation of a special kind. All manner of thing might not be well, might never be well, but the world could not be quite as terrible as it often seemed.

  During this time Pattie led a life which was appallingly solitary. She did not even conceive of finding company, and when her employers tried to encourage her to join a social club she shrank from the idea in horror. She was seventeen. She put on make-up and did a great many of the things which her magazines told her to do and went regularly to a hairdresser to have her hair straightened, but these were entirely private rituals. Black men looked at her furtively, with a kind of yearning hostility which she understood. White men of a kind she found repulsive whistled after her in the street. And then one day her kind liberal-minded employers told her that they were going to move to London. They had no further need for her services, but they would give her an excellent reference. An employment agency recommended her to a post at a country rectory some way distant from the town and Pattie walked through a door into the life of Carel Fisher.

  At the time of Pattie’s arrival Elizabeth was six and Muriel was eleven. Elizabeth’s parents were both dead, but Carel’s wife Clara was still alive. Pattie could not recall being interviewed by Clara. It seemed to her in retrospect that she must have been welcomed instantly by Carel, as if a long arm had come through the doorway and a reassuring hand had caressed her before she was over the threshold. She entered into Carel’s presence as into the presence of God, and like the souls of the blessed, realized her felicity not through anything which she distinctly saw but by a sense of her own body as glorified. Carel immediately touched her, he caressed her, he loved her. Indeed Pattie’s dazed senses could scarcely have distinguished these things from each other. Carel took her into his possession with a beautiful naturalness and tamed her by touch and kindness as one might tame an animal. Pattie flowered. Carel’s divine hands created her in her turn a goddess, a dark swaying being whose body glowed with a purple sheen, glorious as Parvati at the approach of Shiva. For a year Pattie laughed and sang. She was fond of the other members of the household, especially of Elizabeth and accepted them naturally as the properties of her master. She attended to the children and obeyed Clara. But what built the house and made it topless as the towers of Ilion, what constructed the hollow golden universe all ringing with joy, was Carel’s sweet affection, his quick touch upon her arm as he spoke to he
r, his finger tracing out the bones of her neck, his tug at her hair, his clap to her behind, his strong grip sometimes upon her wrist, his playful flick at her cheek. Pattie felt she could have been happy so forever. And then one day, with the same beautiful naturalness, Carel took her to bed.

  How this event was straightway known to the household Pattie never found out. But it was at once sombrely apprehended as if the whole place had been dyed with a dye as dark and indelible as the pigment in Pattie’s skin. The children knew it in their own way and withdrew into a merciless childish silence. Clara knew it and changed oh so scarcely perceptibly and yet entirely in her treatment of Pattie. Nothing was said, but the condemnation was absolute. Pattie scuttled from place to place, seeking a reassurance, an explanation, even a direct glance, but found none. Henceforth she was to be alone in the world with Carel.

  Pattie was so intensely surprised at what had happened and so confused by her new experience and so frightened of its consequences that it took her some time to become aware that Carel was really in love with her. When she realized this a dreadful happiness took possession of her, a dark exotic happiness, not like the innocence of her joy, but very strong. A darkness entered into her like a swarm of bees. Pattie strengthened and hardened. She lifted her crest and faced the household, henceforth prepared to be their foe. She felt some guilt, but she wore it boldly as the badge of her calling.

  Whether Clara ever fully called her husband to account Pattie never knew for certain. Pattie would never have dared to question Carel, whose silence about everything to do with his family was authoritative and bland. But Carel managed his affair with a kind of confident grace which persuaded Pattie that as he so evidently did not feel, so he had never been made to enact, a guilty person. Also everyone in the house was a little afraid of Carel, and now that their relations were no longer innocent Pattie soon began to be afraid of him too.

  Clara became ill. Arriving with the tea-tray, the dinner-tray, Pattie was silently reproached by eyes which became very more large and luminously sad. Pattie responded with the black hard look which she turned now upon everything that was not Carel. Carel sat upon his wife’s bed, stroking her hand and smiling at Pattie over the top of her head. The head sank lower on the pillow, the doctors talked in low voices with Carel in the hall. Carel told Pattie that he would soon be a widower and that when he was free he would make her his wife.

  Pattie did not grieve for Clara. She did not grieve for the children who came weeping out of the room where Clara grew daily thinner. Pattie held her head high and with a ferocity of will stared past the horror of the present into the all-justifying all-reconciling future when she would be Mrs Carel Fisher. Her destiny bore her stiffly up, a stronger force than sentiment or guilt. She was the elect, the Crown Princess. She would become what she had been born for, and let a million women die and a million children wring their hands.

  Clara died. Carel changed his mind. Why he changed it Pattie never knew. She must have made some mistake. What could it have been? This brooding upon the awful “only because” was to be Pattie’s daily bread in the years that followed. She had smiled at Clara’s funeral. Could it be that? Or was it after all her colour, which Carel could tolerate in a concubine but not a spouse? Or was it her lack of education or her voice or something to do with personal hygiene or having had an inopportune cold? Or letting Carel see her once in her underclothes? (He was puritanical about the peripheries of love-making.) Or was it just his pity for Clara at the last, or that Muriel, who quietly hated Pattie, had somehow persuaded her father of his folly? Pattie never discovered and of course she never asked. Carel’s bland silence covered it all like the sea.

  Carel came to her bed as before. Pattie still trembled at those macabre unrobings when the dark cassock unsheathed the naked man. Pattie loved him. He was, as he had been before, the whole world to her. Only now there was a kind of resignation in her surrender to him. She began to know, first vaguely and then more consciously, what it was like to be a slave. She became capable of resentment. Carel had instituted a sort of cult of Clara, photographs everywhere and references, half ironical, half in earnest, to his late espoused saint. Pattie resented too, what before she had scarcely noticed, Carel’s assumption that Muriel and Elizabeth were socially her superiors. But this sharpening consciousness brought with it no impulse to rebellion. She lay beside him, Parvati beside Shiva, and with her eyes wide open in the night occupied herself with her guilt.

  Pattie’s guilt had bided its time. As soon as she knew that Carel would not marry her she began at once to feel more guilty. A crime for a great prize seems less wicked than a crime for no prize. She twisted her hands in the night time. She knew that she had caused Clara a great deal of pain. Clara had died in grief and despair because of Pattie. And there remained still, like a sentence held up in front of her face, the implacable hostility of the two girls. This hostility had not troubled Pattie at first, but now it became a torment to her. Her intermittent, feeble and vain efforts to reconcile her foes by flattery and humility only led her to dislike them more. Elizabeth especially, indulged and spoilt by Carel, seemed to Pattie a living insult to her own menial blackness. As the girls grew older and as they fell, with Elizabeth’s illness, more closely into each other’s company, they constituted a menace, a united front of ruthless condemnation. Those two pale cold unforgiving forces haunted Pattie in the night. Pattie wilted. Pattie repented. But she repented alone, could do nothing with her repentance, and it was in vain that she murmured, Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, so why not every man?

  Then one day, as mysteriously and as naturally as they had begun, Carel’s attentions ceased. He left her bed and did not return. Pattie was almost relieved. She fell into an apathetic sadness which had a kind of healing in it. She neglected her appearance and became aware that she had grown fat. She moved about slowly and grunted as she worked. She had, during all this time, never ceased to practise her religion. She said her prayers each night, repeating her childhood solicitations. Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me. Perhaps a child’s God would be able to preserve a place of innocence in her. She had knelt each Sunday to take communion from the hands which had glorified her and had not felt herself a blasphemer. Carel’s own faith had always been, like so many other things about him, a mystery to her, but she had had faith in his faith as she had had faith in God. That he had never seemed to doubt himself as a priest, equally confident in church and in bed, had given Pattie at first a sort of moral insouciance which was like a kind of sublimated cynicism. When Carel was no longer her lover and Pattie could repent more laboriously and with impunity she became for a while both more pious herself and more puzzled about him.

  Carel, who had been hitherto a minimally correct though unenthusiastic parson, began about this time to develop those small but unnerving eccentricities which contributed to the reputation which had preceded him to town. He became a recluse, refused to see callers or to answers letters, leaving it to Elizabeth, who sometimes acted as his secretary, to amass a pile of correspondence and send out replies at intervals. He introduced curious variations of his own into the ceremonial of his services and even into the liturgy. He began a sermon by saying, “And what if I tell you that there is no God?” and then left his congregation to fidget uneasily during a long silence. He once conducted a service from behind the altar. He was given to laughing in church.

  These manifestations frightened rather than embarrassed Pattie. As Carel was endowed for her with an ineradicable grace she could not see his antics as other than somehow natural. Yet she felt frightened of something which was happening in his mind. What she could only express as his dryness appalled her. Amid all his oddity he remained a cool, temperate even circumspect person. He had, she thought, no excesses except the great one, and what that was she could not name. More simply she supposed that Carel was losing his faith. Pattie did not therefore lose hers; but it became for her more of a talisman than a simple fact. Her universe had altered and was altering. “
Life has no outside,” she said to herself one day, scarcely knowing what she meant. Her morning prayer on waking, her prayer that eased that nightly load of horror, became something vaguer and more formal. The Precious Blood had lost some of its magic power, and Pattie no longer felt on easy personal terms with God, although a veiled figure still towered to call the lapsed soul.

  Occasionally now she thought about leaving Carel; but the thought was like a prisoner’s dream of becoming a bird and flying over the wall. Love and passion and guilt had wrapped her round and round, and she lay inert like a chrysalis, moving a little but incapable of changing her place. She was very unhappy. She worried interminably about Carel and the feud with the two girls poisoned her existence. Yet she did not conceive of leaving Carel for an ordinary life elsewhere, and although she was sometimes conscious of an acute clear wish to be the mother of children she did not really picture another world where she might love in innocence. She felt she was irrevocably soiled and broken and unfitted now for ordinary life. In past days someone like her would have found refuge in a nunnery. She sometimes tried imagine some modern equivalent. She would go far away and dedicate herself to the service of humanity and be Patricia for ever and ever after, Sister Patricia, perhaps Saint Patricia. She read the newspapers and represented to herself the vast sea of human misery. With this she associated a vision of herself, purified and unworldly, ministering to the wretched, an anonymous and yet oddly mysterious figure. Sometimes she even thought of herself as being nobly martyred, eaten perhaps by black men in the Congo.