The Time of the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

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