The Time of the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

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