The Time of the Angels Read Online Free Page A

appeared that there were no shops anywhere near the Rectory, and she had not yet been able to discover anyone who delivered. She had still to rely upon Eugene Peshkov who strode out into the haze each morning bearing Pattie’s list and returned later with all her requirements. The sight of the big man, smiling for her approval, with the bulging shopping bags one in each hand, was very consoling, only now Pattie had to be more business-like and make sure she did not forget anything. The needs of the household were in fact simple, even Spartan. Carel was a vegetarian and lived on grated carrot and eggs and cheese and whole-meal biscuits. His meals were, at his own wish, of an unvarying monotony. Pattie herself lived on beans on toast and sausages. She did not know what Muriel and Elizabeth ate. Elizabeth did not like to have Pattie in her room, and the girls, following a long tradition, cooked their own meals over a gas ring. It was another sign of their tribal separateness.
     
    Pattie had been born thirty years before in an attic room in a small house in an obscure industrial town in the centre of England. She had not been a welcome visitor to her mother, Miss O’Driscoll. Miss O’Driscoll, who had herself arrived in the world under similar auspices, knew at least that her own father had been a labourer in Liverpool and her maternal grandfather had been a peasant in County Tyrone. Miss O’Driscoll was a Protestant. The identity of Pattie’s father had been, during Miss O’Driscoll’s pregnancy (it was not her first), a matter for interesting speculation. The arrival of the coffee-coloured infant settled, up to a point, the question of paternity. Miss O’Driscoll distinctly remembered a Jamaican. As she could never, being much given to the drink, recall his surname the notion of Pattie’s bearing it had never arisen. In any case her father was a spectral entity who had, while Pattie was still a pinpoint of possibilities inside Miss O’Driscoll’s belly, departed to London with the intention of taking a job on the underground.
     
    Pattie was soon “in need of care and protection”. Miss O’Driscoll was quite affectionate as a mother but far from single-minded. She shed her usual tears and heaved her usual sigh of relief when the little brown brat was taken away from her and put into an orphanage. She occasionally visited Pattie there to shed more tears and to exhort her to be a good girl. Miss O’Driscoll was given to being Saved, at intervals, and when these fits were on would discourse fervently about the Precious Blood at the orphanage gates, and even burst into pious song. After a while, being once more in the family way, her visits ceased and she died of a disease of the liver, together with Pattie’s unborn younger brother.
     
    Throughout her childhood Pattie was sick with a misery so continual that she failed to recognize it as a sort of disease. No one was especially unkind to her. No one beat her or even shouted at her. Bright brisk smiling women dealt with her needs, buttoning and unbuttoning her clothes when she was little, issuing her with sanitary pads and highly simplified information about sex when she was older. Although she was very backward her teachers were patient with her. Classified as mentally retarded, she was moved to another school where her teachers were even more patient with her. Of course the other children teased her because she was “black", but they never actually bullied her. Usually they ignored her.
     
    From the moment when the uniformed man had carried her away in his arms from the alcoholic sobbing of Miss O’Driscoll nobody had loved her. Nobody had touched her or looked at her with the close attention which only love bestows. Among a mass of children she had struggled for notice, raising her little brown arms as if she were drowning, but the eyes of adults always passed vaguely over her. She had not, like more fortunate children, been licked into shape by love, as a