The Time of the Angels (proofread) by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch [Murdoch, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Books, London
Published: 1966-03-26T07:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

“MURIEL.”

“Yes.”

“Could I speak to you for a minute.”

Muriel came slowly back up the stairs. Her father had spoken through the half-open door and it seemed to be dark inside the room. The Pathetic Symphony, loud enough a few minutes ago to reach her in her own room, had now been turned down to a husky whisper.

Muriel pushed the door cautiously as if she expected some obstruction behind it and edged into the room. Although it was morning and slightly less foggy than usual, Carel still had his curtains drawn. The room was both cold and stuffy, and Muriel conjectured that her father had been up all night. A single anglepoise lamp shed light upon a book open upon his desk. Carel, invisible for a moment, materialized out of the black horsehair sofa. He moved to the desk and sat, pulling the lamp upward, and the room lightened a little.

“Shut the door. What time is it?”

“About ten.”

“Sit down, please.”

Muriel sat down uneasily, facing him across the desk.

“Have you found employment yet, Muriel?”

“Not yet.”

“I trust you will.”

“I will.”

“How is Elizabeth this morning? I heard her bell ringing.”

“She seems much as usual.”

“I want to talk to you about Elizabeth.”

Muriel stared across at her father’s handsome curiously stiff face. One side of it was revealed by the lamp, one blue eye illumined, the other side was dark. It was a face too much in repose, a face such as one might find in a remote mountain cave, belonging to some inaccessible indifferent hermit of an unknown faith, of a faith beyond faiths. Muriel shivered. A familiar feeling of depression, fear and thrill came to her from her father like an odour.

Muriel had awakened that morning in distress. She recalled with misgivings her interview with Leo and the curious bargain she had apparently made with him. The idea of introducing that irresponsible animal into the orderly and enclosed world of Elizabeth now seemed to her not ill-considered so much as senseless. She saw now more clearly that what had appealed to her in Leo and made her see him as perhaps “good for” Elizabeth, as even some “good for” herself, was precisely that moral, or rather immoral, friskiness, that cheerful willingness to behave badly which had had such an ugly issue in the unspeakable theft and in the scene with Eugene which she had overheard. She had thought of Leo as potent, as a sort of pure elemental force. It had been indeed some sense of the “purity” of that force which had led her so readily to conceive of him as an instrument. A creature so simple-heartedly egoistic could not be a menace. This was not the kind of thing which Muriel feared. It was the kind of thing which she flattered herself she could control. Yet now she felt both shocked and muddled, disgusted by Leo’s behaviour and yet unable resolutely to judge him, as if she herself had already become in some way his accomplice.

She found relief in an intense pity for Eugene, a pity potentiated by her failure to condemn his son.

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