The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch

the sea, love to!”
     
    “Eugene.”
     
    “Eugene.”
     
    “Then that’s fixed.”
     
    She smiled at him now out of her floating hair.
     
    After she had gone, Eugene stood for a while looking up at the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. No, he had not been too kind to Tanya. Then a moment later he started thinking about how he would take Pattie to see the sea.
     
     

 

     
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    MURIEL CLOSED THE front door of the Rectory softly behind her. The intensely cold air invaded her head and she sneezed. She still had that confounded cold. The fog, like a hushed lifted finger, imposed quietness. With her nose deep in her handkerchief she began to walk along the pavement and immediately the Rectory was lost to sight and she was walking on a roadway through the middle of emptiness. She could see the frozen earth, whipped up into little crests, for a short way on her own side of the road. The other side of the road was invisible. The sound of a fog horn resounded in the thick air and seemed to move round her in a circle. She moved silently in the middle of a dying echo of sound.
     
    After a while she stopped walking and listened. Nothing. The close thick dome of fog shut in her little ball of shadowy visibility and the hazy air stroked her cheek with a cold damp touch. The woollen scarf which she had drawn over her head was already quite wet. She pushed her handkerchief back into her pocket and breathed vigorously, pushing little streamers of vapour out in front of her face. She stood there wide-eyed, listening, waiting. The fog excited her.
     
    She had spent that morning trying to write about it. She had added a number of stanzas to her philosophical poem and the fog had somehow got in. Curling, creeping, moving and yet still, always receding and yet always present, everywhere and yet nowhere, imposing silence, imposing breathless anxious attention, it seemed to symbolize everything which at this time she feared. Fear had come into the poem and she had been surprised at it. Was she afraid? What was she afraid of? There was no place for fear. She had shaken her sleeping-tablets in their little blue bottle. Now as she stood there on the pavement with a fast-beating heart the emotion seemed more like love than fear. But can love be love of a dark nothing?
     
    She moved on slowly, her feet, sticking to the damp frosty pavement, making a very slight sound. She had decided that she would soon read some of her poem to Elizabeth, only Elizabeth had not rung that morning. Muriel was pleased with the poem. Perhaps it was the poem itself that had transmuted that strange fear into the equally strange love which made her now so thrilled and restless. She shivered, swinging her gloved hands, feeling herself all warm and fiercely alive, bundled inside her clothes. She breathed the cold foggy air with delight. Then suddenly she stopped again.
     
    Upon the waste land to her left, and now quite near to her, just emerging from the wall of fog, there was something upright. It was so still that she thought it must be a post. And yet it had the look of a human being. Only now did she realize how odd it was that there was absolutely nobody about. Next moment it seemed even odder, and frightening, that there was a person standing there in the fog before her, standing perfectly still, standing as she herself had stood, waiting perhaps and listening. It was certainly a person, a man, and he was facing towards her. Muriel hesitated and moved cautiously on another step. Then she saw that the man was Leo Peshkov.
     
    It was as impossible for them not to greet each other as if they had met in the deepest jungle.
     
    “Hello,” said Muriel.
     
    “Hello. Isn’t the fog wonderful?”
     
    “That was just what I was thinking,” she said. “I’m enjoying it terribly.”
     
    “I’ve been standing here for ages hoping to frighten somebody. I hope I frightened you?”
     
    “You certainly did! Isn’t it very odd that