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She looked up at her master, tall and dense in his black cassock as a tower of darkness. An underground train rumbled beneath them, possibly bearing Pattie’s father about his daily work.
     
     

 

     
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    “MURIEL.”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    Requested when very small to call her father “Carel” and finding herself unable to do so, Muriel had been thus early deprived of the ability of call him anything.
     
    “Could you come here for a moment?”
     
    Carel always said “Come here” as if his presence were a definite locality. There was also a certain menace in the phrase as if a blow were to be expected.
     
    Muriel stood uneasily in the doorway. She feared her father.
     
    “Come nearer, please.”
     
    She moved into the study. The books, shifted now from the hall, covered the black horsehair couch and half of the floor with an indistinct dark fungus. A single adjustable reading-lamp revealed upon the desk a circle of scored red leather and a glass of milk, and showed beyond and above, more dimly, Carel’s handsome face, always seeming to Muriel a trifle glazed and stiffened. The troll King.
     
    “I was wondering what arrangements you proposed to make, Muriel, about finding yourself employment in London.”
     
    Muriel thought quickly. She had no intention of telling her father the truth, which was that she intended to remain unemployed for six months and devote all her time to writing poetry. Muriel, a composer of verses since childhood, had long been tormented by the question: am I really a poet? In these six months she would find out, one way or the other, forever. She would give a last chance to the demon of poetry. After all, the only salvation in this age was to be an artist. At the moment she was engaged on a long philosophical poem, in the metre of the Cimetière Marin, of which she had already composed forty-seven stanzas.
     
    “I’ll start looking round,” she said.
     
    “That’s right. You should find no difficulty in obtaining a secretarial post in the city.” Carel said “obtaining a post” and not “getting a job". It was part of a bureaucratic manner which, Muriel noticed, he kept reserved for her.
     
    “I’ll look around.”
     
    “Are you just going in to Elizabeth?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “That’s right. I think I hear her bell ringing now. Go along then.”
     
    As Muriel reached Elizabeth’s door she heard the voice behind her calling softly “Pattikins". She frowned, knocked carefully upon the door and then entered.
     
    “Hail to thee.”
     
    “Hail to thee.”
     
    Elizabeth was sitting on the floor, smoking a cigar and engaged on the enormous jigsaw puzzle which had occupied the girls now for nearly two months. It had been brought to London in its half-finished state precariously in the boot of the hired car.
     
    “These bits of sea are so difficult, all the pieces look alike.”
     
    The picture on the puzzle represented sailing-ships in a sea battle. The girls had not been able to identify the battle.
     
    Elizabeth continued to smoke and to fiddle with the pieces, while Muriel sat down against the mirror of the French wardrobe and watched. She liked to see the thick brown cylinder of the cigar twisting between those thin paper-white fingers.
     
    Elizabeth was in full beauty. Since her illness she always dressed simply, in black trousers and a striped shirt, and yet continued to have the slightly exotic feathered appearance of a favourite page. Her straight pale yellow hair fell in even pointed locks to her shoulders, metallic and decorative as a mediaeval head-dress. Her long narrow face was pale too, seeming sometimes to be almost white, but with the golden white of a southern marble. Her indoor life had bleached her, like a darkened plant, yet there was radiance in the pallor. Sometimes her whole head seemed to have been whitened as if a very cold light shone upon it. Only her large eyes, a dark grey-blue, glowed more richly, as if one