The Green Knight

by Iris Murdoch

  Aleph closed the piano. Sefton was now supine on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, her book open upon her stomach. She often lay thus upon the floor, thinking. Moy had gone to kneel beside Anax. She watched him sleeping for a while, then wakened him.

  ‘Don’t disturb him,’ said Aleph, too late.

  Anax, removing his long nose from underneath his tail, licked Moy’s face. She caressed him, running her finger lightly along the black line of his upper lip, then laid her head down upon his warm flank, gathering her long plait into the basket with him. Louise had of course, as Joan pointed out, been wrong to suggest that Anax had forgotten his master, Bellamy. (Nor did Louise in fact believe this.) However, Moy had certainly, in a short time, established a profound relationship with the dog. The children had been in mourning for their old cat, Tibellina, when Bellamy’s surprising move had cut short their discussions about another pet.

  Aleph looked down at Moy’s long yellow plait lying upon the stiff light-grey fur. Then she went over to Sefton and kicked her gently. Sefton, without otherwise moving, took hold of Aleph’s foot and pulled the shoe off. Aleph, relinquishing the shoe, moved to an armchair and sat down, opening Milton’s Poetical Works. She read:Nay, lady, sit; if I but wave this wand,

  Your nerves are all chained up in alabaster,

  And you a statue, or as Daphne was

  Root-bound, that fled Apollo.

  Sefton, abandoning Fisher’s History of Europe, was now wondering: what would have happened if Harold had defeated the Normans? Or if Canute had lived longer? England would have become part of a Danish confederacy with its capital in Denmark. Europe would have been unified. Would that have been a good thing or a bad thing?

  Louise, who was convinced that the girls never discussed sex, was in fact wrong. They did discuss it, but only in a certain style. Perhaps most of the things they did were in a certain style, tacitly agreed upon, since each cared what the other two thought and a standard had to be maintained. Now some time had passed in silence. They often stayed thus together in the evenings. Sefton was still lying motionless, Aleph was still reading Milton, Moy, the restless one, was sitting beside Anax’s basket with her back against the wall, arranging beads upon the carpet to plan a necklace. Her hands smelt of basil. Anax, sitting up, watched her.

  Aleph said, ‘Has he been out in the garden?’

  Moy, intent, said ‘Yes.’ Then she said, ‘Oh how I wish we could get out of London. How I wish we could get to the sea.’

  Aleph had put down her book and folded her arms across her breasts. ‘I wish Bellamy wasn’t selling his cottage.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose there’s no other way of getting to the sea.’

  ‘Moy is a girl upon the land, but she is a silky in the sea.’

  ‘I dreamt about seals the other night, such a strange dream. When are you going touring with Rosemary, not before my birthday?’

  ‘No, no. I must be at your party!’

  Moy’s birthday was to make her sixteen. Rosemary was Rosemary Adwarden, daughter of Louise’s friend Constance Adwarden. Rosemary was a year older than Aleph. Her younger brothers, Nick and Rufus, were the ‘boys’ whom Joan Blacket had deemed to be so necessary. The Adwardens, still away, lived in London, but also possessed a house in Yorkshire. Rosemary had a car. She and Aleph were to explore the ‘North Country’.

  ‘It’ll be just a sort of family party this year,’ said Moy. ‘It’s much nicer like that really. Clement and Bellamy will be back, and Emil and Clive, and Joan will be still here, and there’s Tessa – I suppose – ’ The girls shared Louise’s irrational mistrust of Tessa Millen, but did not speak of it.

  Aleph said, ‘I think the Adwardens will be in Yorkshire, when they get back from America. A pity Harvey won’t be with us.’

  ‘Louie misses Harvey,’ said Moy. ‘She misses Bellamy too, since he can’t come here because of Anax.’ An unforeseen by-product of Bellamy’s donation was that he could no longer visit Clifton in case the sight of him were to upset the dog. ‘Louie’ was Louise. Early on the three had decided against ‘Mummy’ and could not bring themselves to call their mother ‘Louise’. They settled first upon ‘Lewis’, then upon ‘Louie’.

  ‘We all miss Bellamy.’

  Moy said, ‘This time next year you and Sefton won’t be here either.’

  The statement had a strange momentous ring. Aleph, her hands folded, did not reply at once. She said, ‘Who knows? We may be at college in London.’

  ‘No, no, you won’t be. You’ll be in Oxford. Everything will be different.’

  ‘Well, and then you’ll leave. You’ll be a painter in Italy. You’ll be married.’

  ‘I shall never leave, I shall never marry. Oh Aleph, how I wish we could all stay like this forever, we’ve been so happy, why can’t it go on and on!’

  ‘Because it just can’t,’ said Aleph, anxious to change the subject. She called, ‘Sef!’

  Sefton did not reply.

  Aleph said, ‘She is thinking history, she is an ancient Egyptian, she is Julius Caesar, she is the Duke of Wellington, she is Disraeli – ’ she called again, ‘Sefton!’

  Sefton in fact was being none of these persons. Abandoning the fortunes of Harold at the battle of Hastings, she had become Hannibal. If Hannibal had marched on Rome would he have taken it? There were arguments on both sides. And if he had taken it – ? Sefton loved Hannibal. For the last few minutes however she had been in a kind of trance which sometimes came to her when she lay on her back. It was as if she were being, as she lay, lifted off the ground, surrounded by a vibrating chord of atoms. This sensation was accompanied by a wonderful sense of total relaxation and of joy. She thought now, as with eyes closed she floated, oh how perfect this is, oh I am so happy! And yet, some other nearby thought-self was saying, how can I be happy now, when everything is going very soon to be dissolved into pieces and made as if it had never been.

  Obeying Aleph’s second peremptory call she sat up, feeling slightly giddy, raised her knees and put her arms around them, not looking at her sister.

  Aleph said, ‘I’ve been thinking of a question I want to ask you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why did the Greeks never use rhymes?’

  Sefton, already regarded as a polymath, had never reflected on this matter. However, she said promptly, ‘Because they felt instinctively that rhymes were puerile and mechanical and inimical to the true nature of poetry.’

  Aleph seemed content with this reply. She closed her Milton and let the book slide down her skirt onto the floor.

  Moy returned to her subject. She said, addressing them both, ‘You will get married!’

  ‘And so will you,’ said Aleph. ‘Throw me my shoe, Sef.’ Sefton threw it.

  ‘Never, never, never. I just can’t imagine being married or – or sex – we’re all right now, we haven’t fallen into all those traps, I want to stay as I am now, not be in all that mess, you know what I mean.’

  They knew. Aleph said, ‘Innocence can’t go on and on.’

  ‘Yes it can, if you just don’t do things.’

  Sefton said, ‘Being human, we are already sinners, we aren’t innocent, no one is because of the Fall, because of Original Sin.’

  ‘The Fall is ahead,’ said Moy, ‘and I am afraid of it. How can evil and badness begin in a life, how can it happen?’

  ‘Sefton is right,’ said Aleph. ‘We are all sinners. Surely you yourself have occasionally done what you ought not to have done and left undone what you ought to have done?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Moy. The others laughed. Moy went on, ‘But our lives are not in a muddle,’ we don’t tell lies, we all love each other, we don’t harm each other, we don’t harm anyone.’

  ‘We can’t abstain from doing things!’ said Sefton. ‘Besides, how do we know whom we harm?’

  ‘Don’t you want to fall in love?’ said Aleph.

  ‘I don’t want men and sex and all that roughness and disorder.’

  ‘Life is roug
hness and disorder,’ said Sefton.

  ‘I can’t see how anything can ever happen to us – I mean, I feel as if, if we leave this place, we shall crumble to pieces.’

  ‘I sometimes feel that too,’ said Aleph, ‘but it’s nonsense!’

  Sefton said, ‘You know, I can understand why people of our age commit suicide.’

  ‘Sefton! Well, why?’

  ‘Like what we’ve been saying, it’s the future, it’s so near and so secret and so different and so awful and so unavoidable and so crammed.’

  ‘The calm before the storm,’ said Aleph. ‘It is true that there is a barrier between us and the world like a wall of rays.’

  ‘You are romantic,’ said Sefton. ‘You like to think about what Moy’s so afraid of.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid of it too,’ said Aleph. ‘But perhaps I am romantic, I want romance!’

  ‘Aleph, you are joking!’ said Sefton.

  ‘As for this stuff about being innocent and harmless and pure in heart, we are really just lucky and sheltered and naive. We are awfully nice to people, but we don’t go out into the violence and the chaos and help people, like – ’

  ‘Like Tessa does!’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t thinking of her, she does of course. I wonder if it’s harder to be good in this age?’

  ‘I want us to stay together forever,’ said Moy.

  ‘As old maids?’ said Aleph.

  ‘Perhaps we could make our beastly husbands live near each other,’ said Sefton.

  ‘We won’t have beastly husbands,’ said Moy, ‘anyway I won’t. I’d rather become a nun.’

  ‘Like Bellamy.’

  ‘It’s said unlucky love should last, when answered passions thin to air.’

  ‘Who said that, Aleph?’ said Sefton.

  ‘A poet. I suppose there’s a moral there. Shall we sing again? What about the “Silver Swan”?’

  ‘I’m retiring,’ said Sefton, jumping up. Aleph had gone to the window and was peering through the curtain. ‘I think the rain has stopped. Oh – ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That man is there again.’

  The other two joined her. A man was standing on the other side of the road under a tree.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ said Moy. ‘He seems to be looking at our house.’

  ‘He may be waiting for somebody,’ said Aleph. ‘He’s nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Close the curtain!’ said Moy. ‘He’ll see us!’

  Sefton had already disappeared down the stairs and into her room.

  In her bedroom above, Louise, moving the curtains to open the window slightly (for she liked fresh air at night) had also seen the man whom she had seen near the house twice before. She turned out the light, returned to the window and continued to watch him. He was a tall robust man wearing a trilby hat and a mackintosh, just folding up his green umbrella. He certainly did seem to be watching the house. She closed the curtains, turned on the lamp and prepared for bed. She put on her nightdress. Raising her arms to put on her nightdress gave her a strange feeling of being young again, a young girl, feeling a strange solitary thrill of vulnerability, going to bed and dreaming of marriage. Marriage, she thought. But I’m all confused. Marriage is in the past. I was married. Besides, even when I was a young girl I didn’t really think about that. It came suddenly out of the blue, suddenly like a storm wind. And now it’s all over and I shall grow old.

  Later, silence reigned in the house. The man was gone. Louise turned out the light. She dreamt that it was her wedding day and that she was dressed in black. She was in a room waiting for her bridegroom whom she had never seen. She kept saying aloud, ‘How terrible! I’m late, I’m late.’ The door opened slowly and a man in a black trilby hat and a black mackintosh stood outside. As he beckoned her to follow him, she felt a violent thrill like an electric shock. She thought, but this is not my wedding day, this is that other day. She ran sobbing in darkness, stumbling over black obstacles, the humped backs of animals; and she thought and they are dead too. Downstairs Sefton, not yet undressed, was thinking about Hannibal’s tactics at the battle of Cannae, and pressing yellow gingko leaves between the pages of her Liddell and Scott. In the little room opposite Louise’s room Aleph, in her long cotton nightdress, dark blue with little white flowers, was looking at herself in the mirror. She smiled faintly at herself, then by the tiniest movements of her face dissolved the smile into a pensive pout, then into an ugly demented gasp. Her teeth captured the fullness of her lower lip, her nose wrinkled, her eyes narrowed and filled with tears. She thought, it’s a mask – and sometimes the mask is so heavy, and it is pulling me to the ground where I shall lie face downward. Perhaps this was a dream which I had and then forgot. Strange thoughts were in Aleph’s head. She knelt down beside the bed, lifting the hem of her long nightdress and spreading it out around her. She knelt there for some time, open-eyed, breathing deeply. In the attic above, in her nightdress, dark red and voluminous, Moy was standing beside her bed. Over the bed hung the picture of her beloved, the Polish Rider. He was looking, with his authoritative pensive mouth and his calm wide-apart eyes, past Moy, over her left shoulder and away into some vast distance. He was a knight upon a quest. He was brave, innocent, chaste, good. But Moy was looking now, not at her hero, but at where her grotesque ugly flint stones were arranged upon a shelf. She was gazing at one stone in particular, golden brown, shapeless as crushed brown paper. She moved, reaching out her hand towards it. After a moment the stone shifted slightly, it rocked, then slid evenly forward off the shelf and through the air into her open hand. Moy knew about poltergeists and why, or at any rate when, they were present. She had said nothing to the others, but had, by investigative hinting, satisfied herself that she was the only one to whom the ambiguous gift had been given. She accepted it as. a strange not unfriendly presence or form of being which joined her life with the life of things. Only sometimes, for it had various manifestations, it frightened her.

  She put the stone, warmed and reassured by her hand, back on the shelf. She had, as usual, brought Anax’s basket up from the Aviary, and put it in a corner where she could see it from her bed, and Anax was sitting in it, very erect, his tail neatly curled about his front paws, and he was gazing at her. She said to him, for he had watched the moving stone, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But his judgmental eyes said to her: ‘Where is my lord, for you have taken him away and I know not where you have hidden him.’

  ‘Well then, I dare you to walk across!’

  In the bright morning light, somewhere in the Apennines, Bellamy James, Clement Graffe, and Harvey Blacket were standing on a bridge. On the previous evening, at the moment when Aleph and Sefton and Moy had been wondering where he was, Harvey had been taking part in the evening passeggiata in the square of the little town. The square, in warm waning light, was crammed with people walking, mostly young or youngish, mostly walking in a clockwise direction, though there were many older people too and many who chose to stumble into confrontations by walking anti-clockwise. In fact with so many people in the small square, it was impossible to avoid stumbling and confrontations. Harvey, who had experienced this phenomenon elsewhere in Italy, had never seen such a lively crush. It was like being inside a shoal of fishes who were confined by a net into a huge compact ball. His bare arms, since he had rolled up his shirt-sleeves, were being liberally caressed by the bare arms of passing girls. Faces, smiling faces, sad faces, young faces, ancient faces, grotesque faces, appeared close to his and vanished. People hastening diagonally through the throng thrust him gently or brusquely aside. Good temper reigned, even a luxurious sensual surrender to some benign herd instinct. Girls walked arm-in-arm, boys walked arm-in-arm, less often girls linked with boys, frequent married couples, including elderly ones, walked smiling, now at least in harmony with the swarming adolescents. Predatory solitaries pushed past, surveying the other sex, or their own, but well under the control of the general decorum. Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so m
uch society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows. Clement and Bellamy, briefly amused by the show, had soon retired to sit in the big open-air café whence they viewed the intermittent appearances of Harvey, who with parted lips and shining eyes, in a trance of happiness, was blundering round and round the square.

  ‘He’s so happy,’ said Bellamy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clement.

  They did not actually sigh, but the bleak tone of the statement and the laconic assent conveyed the fact that they were not happy. This was not the result of envy, they were both very fond of Harvey, they could have taken pleasure in his pleasure were it not that both were afflicted by grave and pressing uncertainties, even fears. Bellamy was feeling little less than horror at the prospect of the extreme self-denial to which he was now it seemed irrevocably pledged. While Clement was suffering a profound and secret anguish at the prolonged and mysterious absence of his brother, whom he knew to be quite capable of committing suicide.

  The two men, friends since college days, brought together by their friendship with that enchanting sweet-natured bon viveur Teddy Anderson, could scarcely have been more unlike each other. Bellamy found simply living a task of amazing difficulty. It was as if ordinary human life were a mobile machine full of holes, crannies, spaces, apertures, fissures, cavities, lairs, into one of which Bellamy was required to (and indeed desired to) fit himself. The machine moved slowly, resembling a train, or sometimes a merry-go-round. But as soon as Bellamy got on (or got in), the machine would soon eject him, sending him spinning back to a place where he was once more forced to be a spectator. Perhaps, that was in some mysterious sense his place, his destiny. But Bellamy did not want to be a spectator, nor could he (having no money of his own) afford to be one. Moreover he had never really mastered the art, apparently so simple for others, of passing the time. His failure to find a métier, to find a task which was his task, caused him continuous anxiety, nor did it occur to him to emulate the majority of mankind who positively resign themselves, seeing no alternative, to alien and unsatisfying work. At one time he had suffered from depression, and was nearer to despair than his friends realised.