The Time of the Angels Read Free Page A

girl, she had nevertheless refused the university place which she could easily have had, and had become, of all things which Norah abhorred, a shorthand typist. Marcus thought that Norah had been a little too urgently ambitious for Muriel. Perhaps she had been a little too fond of Muriel.
     
    Marcus, who was himself the headmaster of a small independent school in Hertfordshire, had made Norah’s acquaintance in the course of his professional duties. He liked and admired her. Only lately he had begun, imperceptibly and uneasily, to apprehend her as a problem. A woman of immense energies, Norah had been forced by ill health into an early retirement, and had installed herself in a decrepit eighteenth-century house in East London. Of course, she at once found herself other employments, far too many of them, according to her doctor. She did voluntary work for the local council, she was on library committees, housing committees, education committees, she busied herself with benefiting prisoners and old-age pensioners and juvenile delinquents. But she still gave the impression of someone restless and insufficiently absorbed. Emotions which had previously supplied the energy for her work now stalked and idled. Marcus noticed in her a new sentimentality which, ill-matched with her old persona of a brisk sensible pedagogue, produced an effect of awkwardness, of something almost pathetic or touching. She displayed a more patent affection for former pupils, a more patent affection, he nervously noticed, for himself. And just lately she had made the alarming and embarrassing suggestion that he should move into the vacant flat at the top of her house. Marcus had returned an evasive reply.
     
    “I’m afraid Muriel is rather typical of the modern young,” Norah was going on. “At least she’s typical of the brighter ones. She’s naturally a strong-willed high-principled person. She ought to make a decent citizen. But somehow it’s all gone wrong. She has no social place. It’s as if her sheer energy had taken her straight over the edge of morality. That’s the sort of thing you ought to discuss in your book.”
     
    Marcus had taken two terms’ leave from his school in order to write a book about which he had been reflecting for a long time, a philosophical treatise upon morality in a secular age. It would, he hoped, create a certain impression. It was to be a fairly brief but very lucid and dogmatic work, designed to resemble Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in its streamlined rhetoric and epigrammatic energy.
     
    “I know what you mean about Muriel,” he said. “I’ve seen it in other clever young people. As soon as they start to reflect about morals at all they develop a sort of sophisticated immoralism.”
     
    “Of course that doesn’t necessarily make them delinquent. Deliquency has other causes, usually in the home. That Peshkov boy, for instance, seems to me a natural delinquent, if you don’t mind my being rude about one of your former pupils! In his case—”
     
    Marcus groaned to himself while Norah went on explaining her views of the causes of delinquency. It was not that Marcus was bored by this, but he did not like being reminded of Leo Peshkov. Leo was one of Marcus’s failures. Norah in the course of her work on local housing problems had discovered the Peshkovs, father and son, in an unhygienic den from which she had moved them, first to a church hostel, and later, with the connivance of the Bishop, to their present quarters at the Rectory, just before the arrival of the odd-looking crippled priest beforementioned. Leo, then a schoolboy, had been attending a rather unsatisfactory local institution, and Norah had asked Marcus to make a vacancy for him at his own school. In fact, Marcus and Norah had paid for Leo’s education, but this was not known to the Peshkovs.
     
    Once at the school, Leo had played the clever wayward boy in a style which somehow got through Marcus’s professional defences. Marcus