by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
The Red and The Green
1965
To Philippa Foot
Chapter One
TEN MORE glorious days without horses! So thought Second-Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White, recently commissioned in the distinguished regiment of King Edward’s Horse, as he pottered contentedly in a garden on the outskirts of Dublin on a sunny Sunday afternoon in April nineteen sixteen. The garden in question, secluded behind substantial walls of rough golden stone, was large, and contained two ailing but gallant palm trees. The house, a dignified villa called ‘Finglas’, with big square windows and a shallow slate roof, was washed a light slightly streaky blue. It was both neat and spacious, built in a style of confident ‘seaside Georgian’ which in Ireland had felicitously continued until the beginning of the present century and after. The house and garden, the walls and palm trees, the property of the father of Andrew’s fiancée, were situated in Sandycove Avenue, Sandycove, one of the bright little roads of multicoloured villas which run down to the sea from the main road which leads from Dublin out to Killiney and Bray. The road on which Finglas stood, or from which, conscious of a certain superiority over the other houses, it withdrew, was clean and very quiet, seeming always full of a grey luminous light from the sea, which could be seen and indeed heard at the foot of the hill where the road ended casually in the water and the pavement turned into yellow rocks, folded and wrinkled and shining with crystalline facets. The road partook indeed of the hardness and cleanness of the rocks and the coldness and clearness of the water. Visible to the left, if one went right down to the end, and visible too from the upper windows of Finglas, was the bulky headland with the Martello tower upon it, the Acropolis of the village. The headland concealed the view of Kingstown, but from the sea’s edge could be seen the folded back arm of Kingstown pier, its terminal lighthouse rising in the middle, seeming to end with the gaunt obelisk, happy commemoration of the departure from Ireland of George the Fourth. Straight ahead, across the very light dirty grey-green waters of Dublin Bay, lay the blue couchant silhouette of Howth Head, and to its right the open sea horizon, a line of cold mauve above the grey: whereon even now Andrew, pausing in his task, saw the smudge on the skyline which was the approaching mail boat. In spite of increasing activity from German submarines, the mail boats reached Kingstown with scarcely diminished regularity, though an erratic course, adopted in the interests of safety, brought the smudge of smoke into view at various and unpredictable points of the horizon.
The scene was, for Andrew, intensely familiar and yet disturbingly alien. It was like a place revisited continually in dreams, both portentous and fleeting, vivid to the point of necessity, but not entirely real. Here too it was as if his senses worked at a half pace, and smells of houses, rough feels of garden walls, echoes of voices in conservatories, were spread out and enlarged into something weird, too big and too close for comfort. Andrew’s family were Anglo-Irish, but he had never lived in Ireland, although he had spent most of his childhood holidays there. He had in fact, by what he regarded as a somewhat tiresome accident, been born in Canada, where his father, who had been in the insurance business, had once spent two years. Andrew had grown up in England and more especially in London, and felt himself unreflectively to be English, although equally unreflectively he normally announced himself as Irish. Calling himself Irish was more of an act than a description, an assumption of a crest or picturesque cockade. Ireland remained for him a mystery, an unsolved problem: and a problem which was in some obscure way disagreeable. There was of course the religious question. A far from devout and, in England, an uncontentious, uninterested, almost entirely non-practising Anglican, he felt, on arrival in Ireland, his Protestant hackles rise. There was an aggressive tingling, and something deeper which was unnervingly like fear. Today was Palm Sunday and Andrew, together with his mother and his fiancée, Frances Bellman, had attended matins at the Mariners’ Church in Kingstown. On emerging from the church they had found the streets filled with those others who, streaming in far greater numbers out of their chapels, were now parading about, more slowly, more confidently, carrying palms in their hands. For them it seemed, and for their sins Christ was even now entering Jerusalem, and their demeanour exhibited already a satisfaction, even a possessiveness, which made the congregation of the Mariners’ Church, trotting more soberly homeward with averted eyes, feel unreal and perfunctory, unconnected with the great events to honour which these arrogant strollers were almost casually decked. Andrew’s personal apprehension of this difference, this contrast with something gaudier, more vital and more primitive, was heightened by the fact that a number of his Irish relations had, to the extreme almost incredulous horror of his mother, become Roman Catholic converts.
Andrew’s father, who had died just over two years ago, had been himself a scholar manqué, a gentle bookish man who had passed thoughtfully and ineffectually through life, always a little diffident and puzzled. He had wanted Andrew to be a scholar, and had been overjoyed when his son effortlessly collected a history scholarship at Cambridge in the year before the war. This achievement, however, seemed to have exhausted Andrew’s academic capacities and ambitions, and he had spent an idle though not particularly riotous year at the university when the war came. He left Cambridge with the intention of enlisting, taking with him a passion for Malory and a vague ambition to become a great poet, and very little else in the way of higher education. His desire to serve his country was checked, however, at the outset by a prolonged bout of asthma, an ailment from which he had suffered intermittently since childhood. Pronounced fit at last, he had joined up in the autumn of 1915 and had been rapidly commissioned.
Andrew detested and feared horses. It was therefore, to those who knew him well, a matter of some puzzlement that he had chosen to serve in a cavalry regiment. The key to this phenomenon lay in Andrew’s Irish cousins. He was himself an only child, and as such had pondered long and with fascination upon the mysterious and frightening sibling-relationship of which he was deprived. His various cousins, all of whom lived in Ireland, had served him in those long hated and yet loved holidays of childhood as sibling-substitutes, temporary trial brothers and sisters, for whom his uncertain affection took the form of an irritated rivalry. He felt himself indubitably superior to this heterogeneous and, it seemed to him, rather uncultivated and provincial gang of young persons, always noisier, gayer and more athletic than himself. But his superiority was rarely recognized. More often he found himself forced to play the dull one, left out of the game, not understanding the joke. This had especially been so in the matter of horses. All his cousins were natural, casual riders. They were a race of young horsemen, passing him by with the insolence of the mounted. Indeed, his earliest memories of Frances, who was herself a remote relation and had belonged to the ‘gang’, were of a swift mounted girl, a graceful side-saddle Amazon, outdistancing him, disappearing.
So it was that Andrew’s now so distressingly close association with horses had come about through a simple desire to impress his cousins. There was in it too, though Andrew recognized this less clearly, an element of masochism. It was like his irresistible desire always to dive off the highest board in the swimming baths, although he was terrified of heights. He had, for very fear, to press close to him the object of terror. He had established his relationship with King Edward’s Horse long before, in peacetime, with no other idea than that of getting some inexpensive equestrian experience. Since he could count himself for these purposes as a Canadian, he had found it easy and convenient to attach himself to this eminent and predominantly Colonial regiment. The arrival of the war converted his game into a dreadful seriousness and hoi
sted him with his own petard. Pride forbade any contemplation of a change of unit. And now in his dreams he found himself pursued and cornered by enormous horses wearing German uniforms.
Andrew had had a brief but entirely uneventful glimpse of France. He had completed a strenuous training at the cavalry depot at Bishop’s Stortford, where at that time hard-riding Australians were arriving weekly, and in February, shortly after receiving his commission, had been sent to join C Squadron of the regiment which was then stationed in exceptional luxury at the Château of Vaudricourt. When he arrived, the squadron, besides enthusiastically enjoying the amenities of the Château, were mainly engaged in felling trees and building stables, and the communal aims seemed distinctly domestic rather than military. It was only later that Andrew learnt that the desire to make one’s surroundings convenient and comfortable is one of the more important motives in the economy of war. After a week or so of this, the divisional mounted troops were all moved to Marthes to spend some days in the First Army training area. Here they encountered not the Germans but a devastating snowstorm, and for some time Andrew’s only concern was finding dry unfrozen places for horses. The horses survived the experience with equanimity, but Andrew himself went down with severe pneumonia and had to be shipped back to England. Pleurisy followed the pneumonia, and he crawled out of hospital at the end of March, an exhausted convalescent, told to report to the Reserve Squadron of his regiment in a month’s time. More than half of that month had now elapsed.
Andrew was a confused soldier. The role of ‘soldier’ was perhaps the first role in life into which he had made a positive attempt to fit. He had played the part of an ‘undergraduate’ casually and, somewhat to his own surprise, not very whole-heartedly. He did not entirely like the mores of those who set the tone at Cambridge and, what was perhaps a more serious matter, he lacked the money to compete with them. So he had set himself up a little defiantly and yet not very confidently as a recluse. His work had benefited little. The idea of himself as a soldier, an idea which would have been entirely repugnant to him in peacetime, was now of course backed up by the enthusiasm of an entire community. Yet Andrew had still not been able to draw on to him the skin of soldiery or to swagger into the part with the ease which he envied in many of his contemporaries. His persona as a soldier was still disparate, composed partly of childish romanticism, partly of schoolboy conscientiousness, and partly of some yet veiled adult attitude of fear and resignation. Of these perhaps the first was at present the most active, though Andrew would have blushed to admit how much his zeal depended on early impressions of the more patriotic passages of Shakespeare and a boyish devotion to Sir Lancelot.
From the details of warfare his imagination still shuddered away. A knowledge of the facts of the war in the trenches had not destroyed his attempt to make sense of it all by means of romanticism, but it had increased the quite separate and veiled area of his fear. In the snowstorm at Marthes, as on training exercises at home, it was his plodding conscientiousness that he relied upon, and he hoped that in a situation of danger it might at least serve him in lieu of courage. Whether he possessed courage was an agonizing mystery. He despised himself for being glad that the routine concern for the welfare of the horses tended to keep the mounted troops behind the front line. He could not help being relieved rather than otherwise that the concept of the cavalry charge appeared to be outmoded. But he viewed these sentiments with alarm as deep symptoms of funk. He was intensely disappointed that he had not, during his short time in France, broken his duck in this respect.
It was an additional sorrow to him that, since he had to do a soldiering trade, he had not managed to get himself into some more modern and highly mechanized unit. He was a keen amateur of wireless telegraphy and of motor cars, and at Cambridge had been much in demand as a mechanic among his wealthier car-owning companions. He had even at one time privately decided, though he never told his father this, that he would go in for motor car design when he was through with his tripos. He would have been prepared now, though with his imagination strictly switched off, to interest himself in machine guns, and he had learnt what he could at Bishop’s Stortford about the Vickers and Hotchkiss guns which were there in inadequate and intermittent supply. But during his training he had spent much more time with his rifle and even with his sword, an object which had given him initial pleasure and which he now detested. At Vaudricourt he gathered that little wireless work was to be hoped for and that C Squadron had not yet been issued with machine guns. The most directly warlike regimental occupation, now popular in B Squadron, was something known as ‘bombing from horseback’, which involved galloping in single file past Boche gun-emplacements and hurling in Mills bombs. Andrew, who did not like the sound of this, noticed that his senior officers approved of the Mills bomb and suspected the Hotchkiss because with the former a mounted detachment could still emulate the traditional behaviour of cavalry. There was a nostalgia, among the regulars especially, for a vanished superiority, a once useful expertize; and when one evening in the mess young Andrew had loudly remarked, ‘After all, a horse is only a means of conveyance’, there had been a shocked and scandalized silence.
The Reserve Squadron of the regiment had moved to Ireland the previous year, and after being stationed at the Curragh had just now moved out to Longford. It was there that Andrew was to report at the end of his leave. Meanwhile he was trying, with a certain amount of success, to ignore the future and to live as fully as possible within the little world of feminine claims and pamperings represented by Frances and his mother. He found himself almost loving the complex pre-occupied triviality of the lives of these two near and dear beings, and he stayed close to them as if to claim the protection of some small, forlorn yet powerful innocence. It was not only that he grasped their little world as a contrast to ‘out there’; it was also that it somehow represented a necessary defence against all the other things that Ireland meant, the men of Ireland, his male cousins. Andrew put it to himself: I really cannot be bothered with Ireland just at the moment. And he had in fact put off, now disgracefully long his mother told him, going to visit other members of his family.
Andrew’s mother had lately and precipitately decided, very much to Andrew’s dismay, to sell her London flat and move to Ireland. The efficient cause of this decision was the Zeppelin raids on London, which Mrs Chase-White represented to her eager and credulous Dublin friends in vivid, even lurid terms. Her nerves, she claimed, could not stand it, with those Zepps always coming over. Andrew felt extreme irritation, not only at what he regarded as a shameful lack of stamina on the part of his parent, but also at what he suspected to be the formal cause of her decision, an atavistic urge to return to the soil of Ireland. Hilda Chase-White, née Drumm, was, like her husband, Anglo-Irish; but whereas Andrew’s father had spent most of his childhood in Ireland, Hilda and her younger brother Barnabas had been brought up in London. Andrew was vaguely aware that his mother and his uncle had in some way not got on with their parents, but he had never troubled to diagnose what was wrong, nor indeed been in a position to, since his grandparents both died when he was a small child. His maternal grandfather had been a civil servant of small means, but well known in his circle as a gay social man and a party-giver. He was also by way of being a famous practical joker. It may have been that these antics offended Hilda’s sense of dignity, or it may more simply have been that she compared the London menage unfavourably with the bigger, grander and altogether more ceremonious houses of her Irish relations. Andrew recalled from childhood the tone of slightly querulous envy with which she spoke of these establishments: a sentiment not shared by his father, who, although he retained a strong nervous interest in his family there, and especially in his half-sister Millie, seemed always thankful to have escaped from Ireland.
The purchase therefore, just completed, of a house in Ireland no doubt represented for Hilda the fruition of a very long-term intention; and, especially since her head was turned by the extreme cheapness of Irish
properties, it was with difficulty that Andrew had persuaded her not to acquire one of several available castles, each one damper and mouldier than the last though undeniably inexpensive, and had coaxed her at last into buying a pretty and reasonably sized house in Dalkey. His uncle Barnabas, for some long time now settled in Ireland, had been of little assistance. But as Hilda often said, not much could now be expected of Barney. Barnabas, who had figured as notable in Andrew’s childhood because he was a crack shot rather than because he was a promising mediaeval scholar, had latterly, it was generally agreed, gone to the dogs. Barnabas too had felt the urge, as Hilda herself put it, ‘to escape from the parents’, though Andrew could not understand what in this case was felt as menacing. His uncle was the reverse of snobbish. But he too had evidently felt some imperative need to return to Ireland, had married into another branch of the family there, and, to Hilda’s and indeed to Andrew’s intense horror, had become a Roman Catholic. He was even, so Hilda would sometimes report in a whisper, said to be writing a history of the Irish saints, an activity which his sister found for some reason highly improper. It was in addition said of him that he had at one time wanted to become a priest, but Hilda would never publicly countenance this rumour. The fact that Uncle Barnabas had also apparently taken to drink was almost welcomed as a more normal manifestation of black sheepishness.
That some of the family were converts was something which Hilda felt as a continual affront to herself. It caused her real pain, and she spoke about it as little as possible, even to the point of keeping it dark. She had been deeply wounded by her brother’s defection, for although her conception of family ties in general struck Andrew as rather worldly, she was, or had been, extremely fond of Uncle Barnabas. ‘The family’ was a great subject with Hilda, and Andrew had become a little reluctantly interested in the matter himself, especially as he somehow found it necessary always to explain that Frances was a distant relation. The situation was complicated. ‘We Anglo-Irish families are so complex,’ Hilda used often to exclaim with a kind of pride, as if complexity in families were a rare privilege. ‘We’re practically incestuous,’ his Aunt Millicent had once added. ‘What does that mean?’ the child Andrew had asked, but no one had enlightened him. He sometimes felt now that ‘the family’ had indeed something of the fascination of the snake that eats its own tail. He was both interested and repelled, and the sense that the family occupied or pervaded Ireland, managing to inhabit most of its corners, largely composed for him the sinister power of that island.
