Free The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch Page B

Very slowly it had come to him that after all the building was empty. The vast presence was simply some trick of the gloom. There was nothing but the darkness. And now he had a son who could not conceive of God.
     
    “I love the icon,” he said. “I burn incense for it. It’s like feeding it. It’s more than a symbol.” Yet what could it be but a symbol? He was a sentimental superstitious man. He loved the icon because it had been his mother’s and had lived with them in Petersburg. Perhaps it somehow satisfied his defeated sense of property. He loved it too as a blank image of goodness from which all personality had been withdrawn.
     
    “And you came to England?”
     
    “In the end, yes.”
     
    “And then—?”
     
    “Nothing special then. I worked in various jobs. And here I am now talking to Pattie.” How had the years passed? Well, they had passed. Sometimes in memory the time seemed telescoped and it seemed that it was Hitler who had knocked on the gates of St Petersburg. His manhood had been somehow casually taken from him. Fifteen years in camps, the whole middle of his life. More than that, indeed, since he had never really stopped living in a camp. In England he had moved on from one shanty and nissen hut to another. He was living in a camp even now. He had made his corner. That was all.
     
    “I wish I could work in one of those places,” said Pattie.
     
    “You mean a refugee camp? Why?”
     
    “It would be real—one would be near to real misery—helping people—”
     
    “Nothing’s more unreal for the people who live there. Camp life is a dream, Pattie. It’s all right for the welfare workers. Oh, I’ve seen so many of them, so cheerful, so pleased with themselves! Nothing makes people feel happier and freer than seeing other people suffering and shut in! Well, they were good enough people those welfare workers, you mustn’t think me a cynic. But between their self-satisfaction and our dream somehow the reality was lost. Perhaps God saw it. Only a saint could be in the truth there.”
     
    “Well, I should like to be a saint, then.”
     
    Eugene laughed. “All the world’s a camp, Pattie, so you’ll have your chance. There are good corners and bad corners, but it’s just a transit camp in the end.”
     
    “So you do believe in an after life?”
     
    “No, no. I just mean nothing matters all that much. We are not here for long.”
     
    His words sounded into a silence in the brightly lit room. Pattie twisted her hands a little and then as the silence continued she got up. “I must get back to my work. I’ve stayed far too long. And I shouldn’t have made you talk about those things.”
     
    “No, it’s done me good. One must talk about things and not hide them. Next time you will tell me about you.”
     
    “There’s nothing to tell about me,” said Pattie. She brushed the crumbs off her skirt.
     
    “Why, there must be. Everyone has had their adventures. Oh, I’m so glad! You’ve eaten three cakes!”
     
    “I oughn’t to have. I’m much too fat. I keep meaning to go on a diet.”
     
    “Please don’t! You’ve a wonderful shape. I like you just exactly the way you are.”
     
    “Really?”
     
    “Yes, really. You should be thankful. One day you’ll be thin and you’ll wish you weren’t. A thin woman is a reminder of death.” He recalled poor Tanya, thinned to the bone, looking at him with accusing dying eyes. She was a wisp in his memory, denuded of substance. He had not been too kind to her. He had resented her pregnancy, resented her illness. And she had become so thin, so thin.
     
    “I must go now.”
     
    “You’ll come again, won’t you, like this?”
     
    “Well, yes, I’d love to.”
     
    “And look—when the fog lifts—let me take you to see the sea.”
     
    “The sea—oh, could you?”
     
    “Nothing easier. And promise you won’t go with someone else first!”
     
    “There’s no one else who— Oh, I love to go with you to see