The Time of the Angels Read Online Free Page B

bear licks its cubs. Pattie had no shape. Her mother, it is true, had once provided a sort of love, an animal clutch, which the adolescent Pattie recalled with an uncomprehending wistful gratitude. She carried this shred, which was scarcely even a memory, about in her heart and prayed for her dead mother nightly, trusting that, though her sins were as scarlet, the Precious Blood had proved as efficacious as Miss O’Driscoll could have hoped.
     
    And well, of course, God loved Pattie. The brisk women had taught her this very early on, turning her over as it were to God when they had, as they usually had, other things to do. God loved her with a great big possessive love and Pattie of course loved God in return. But their mutual affection did not stop her from being, nearly all the time, brutalized by unhappiness into a condition which resembled mental deficiency. Much later some merciful power out of the darkness which Pattie had worshipped in ignorance drew an oblivious sponge over those years. Adult, Pattie could scarcely remember her childhood.
     
    When she was fourteen, still hardly able to read or write, she left school, and as she seemed incapable of further training she went into service. Her first employers were a continuation of her teachers, lively enlightened liberal-minded people who seemed to a more resentful, more conscious Pattie to be always converting her misery into their cheerfulness by a relentless metabolic process. In fact they did a lot for her. They taught her to live in a house, they convinced her that she was not stupid, they even put books in her way. They were very kind to her; but from their kindness the chief lesson she learnt was the lesson of the colour bar. As a child she had not distinguished between the affliction of being coloured and the affliction of being Pattie. As a girl she took stock of her separateness. Her employers treated her in a special way because she was a coloured person.
     
    Pattie now began to feel her colour, to feel it as a physical patina. She constantly read it too in the looks of others. She exhibited before herself her arms, so indelibly dyed to a dark creamy brown, and her hands with the greyish pallor upon the palm and the slightly purple tint upon the nail. She looked with puzzlement, almost with astonishment, into mirrors to see her round flat face and her big mouth set upon a scarcely perceptible arc so that when she smiled almost all her gleaming white teeth were visible together. She fingered the curls of her very dry black hair, pulling them into straightness and watching them return like springs into their natural spirals. She envied proud delicate-featured Indian girls in saris with jewels in their ears and noses whom she sometimes saw in the street, and wished that she could wear her own nationality with such an air. But then, she realized, she had no nationality except to be coloured. And when she saw Wogs go home scribbled upon walls she took it to herself as earnestly and piously as she took the sacrament at the church which she attended on Sundays. Sometimes she thought about Jamaica, which she pictured as a technicolour scene in a cinema when soft music weaves together a vista of breaking waves and swaying palms. In fact, Pattie had never seen the sea.
     
    Of course there were other coloured people in the town. Pattie began to notice them and to observe with a sharp eye their features and their different shades of colour. Now it was as if there were only two races, white and black. Not all the half-and-halfs were as dark as herself; her father must have been a very dusky man indeed to have injected so much of darkness into his half-Irish daughter. Pattie brooded upon these distinctions, though she did not know what value she set upon them. She felt no sense of unity with the other coloured people, even when they were most evidently akin to herself. Whiteness seemed to join all the white people together in a cosy union, but blackness divided the