by Iris Murdoch
In fact, Andrew had in recent years seen happily little of his remoter relations who owned farms in Clare and Donegal. Frances and her father, Christopher Bellman, who had at one time lived in Galway, had now moved to Sandycove, and Andrew felt no urge, though his mother sometimes suggested it, to go on a familial tour. Dublin and its neighbourhood contained quite enough of the cousinry, and those indeed with whom Andrew had always had most to do. The exploration even of this branch of the family, which was needed in order to make clear his relationship with Frances, was in fact complicated enough. His paternal grandmother, Janet Selborne-Doyle, ‘a great beauty’ as his mother always said when she was referred to, had married twice. Her first husband was John Richard Dumay, from whom she had had issue two children, Brian and Millicent. Of these, Brian, it was always said whether truly or not as a result of a nervous breakdown, had become a convert to Catholicism when still a student at Trinity. The ‘great beauty’s’ second marriage, after the death of her first husband, had been to Arnold Chase-White, and the one offspring of this union had been Henry Chase-White, Andrew’s father. Henry married Hilda Drumm, and Brian Dumay had married one Kathleen Kinnard who was in fact a connection of Hilda’s mother’s family, and who had caused pain and scandal by forthwith adopting the religious faith of her husband. Millicent Dumay then married Kathleen’s brother, Sir Arthur Kinnard, and the third sister, Heather Kinnard, married Christopher Bellman, Frances’ father. Both Mrs Bellman and Sir Arthur Kinnard had died fairly young, and Andrew could not recall having met them. His Uncle Brian had produced two sons, Pat Dumay, who was a year older than Andrew, and Cathal Dumay, who must now, Andrew reflected, be about thirteen or fourteen. Uncle Brian had died when Andrew was about fifteen, and his Aunt Kathleen had caused some surprise and a good deal of adverse comment by subsequently marrying her co-religionist in the family, his Uncle Barnabas, who it appeared had been one of her early admirers. That marriage had been childless.
Andrew’s mother had been impressed and continually preoccupied by the goings on of her Irish relations, particularly the Kinnard family, possessors of an enviable mansion and an even more enviable title, who, especially in the days of Arthur’s father, had set a standard both of grandeur and of social freedom which must have made Hilda discontented with her restricted London life and with the ‘mad’ yet cosy society of her parents. There was no doubt that she coveted not only the traditional ease of the Kinnard household but also its Irish remoteness from the pettier aspects of the ‘bourgeois’ world. Hilda had never been quite sure that her father and mother were blessed with good taste.
Although Hilda had talked about these things to Andrew all his life, he had only very recently begun, in relation to her, to understand them. He had much earlier, and with a kind of nervous distress, apprehended his father’s quite different and strangely deep anxieties about Ireland. Some family demon haunted Henry Chase-White. He was fond of his relations, and especially fond of Aunt Millicent. But the source of the trouble, Andrew soon came to conjecture, was his half-brother Brian. Brian Dumay was older than Henry by several years and was a very different kind of man from Andrew’s father. Uncle Brian had occupied some post in the Bank of Ireland which never seemed to provide matter for discussion, but in so far as he entered into the life of his nephew he did so in the guise of the perfect all-round out-of-doors uncle. Andrew recalled the scenes, always the same, on hills or beaches, with Uncle Brian leading the way, leaping from rock to rock, followed by the shouting children, while Andrew’s father picked his way cautiously behind. And Andrew must have been about ten when he realized, with a tender protective pang which seemed to make him on the instant much older, that his father was a little jealous in case Andrew should compare him unfavourably with Uncle Brian. It was an occasion when they had all been swimming, except for Andrew’s father who had found the sea too cold and was sitting in the sandhills with a book. Andrew had run to him and been told almost roughly, ‘You don’t want to be here with me. Go back to your uncle.’ Since then Andrew had liked Uncle Brian less. But it was not until his uncle died that he realized how extremely attached his father really was to his half-brother who must have represented something robust, attractive and puzzling, which produced in him a characteristic tremor of awkwardness. Andrew met with the same awkwardness, the same shy disguised puzzled fondness in his father’s attitude to himself; this barrier was never removed and Andrew felt a special pain when his father died to think that perhaps he had never known how much his son loved him.
Andrew had felt as a child an acute and uncomfortable interest in all his relations, but the magnetic centre of that field of forces had usually seemed to be his cousin Pat Dumay. It occurred to Andrew later that his own peculiar anxiety about Pat somewhat resembled his father’s anxiety about Uncle Brian, only Andrew had never exactly felt any liking for his cousin. His interest in him was something more obscure and disturbing. He had spent a good deal of energy in earlier years in trying to impress Pat, and indeed it could scarcely be denied that the folly with the horses which had had such far-reaching results was an attempt to get even not so much with Frances as with Pat.
Pat, who was known in their childhood as ‘the iron man’, and who effortlessly excelled in all their sports and games together, had never paid much attention to Andrew. Andrew, a slow-growing child, had often, with rage, been relegated to play with ‘the little boys’, and he still felt that Pat casually took him to be younger than he was. There had never been any sort of confidence or friendship between them, although on a few occasions when they were older Andrew had made advances. Pat, who was not much given to talking, would then withdraw into a taciturn dignity, while at the same time seeming not to notice Andrew at all. He moved quietly, his eyes elsewhere, like someone avoiding a small obstacle in his path. In moments of revolt Andrew referred to his cousin as ‘pompous’ and affected surprise that he was not more frequently ragged. Yet somehow Pat’s formidable dignity seemed to impose itself on others less concerned than Andrew. Other children were usually a bit afraid of Pat, who was capable at times of a good deal of violence. Andrew was reluctant to admit that he had ever feared him. But he had, when younger, felt a sort of awe which had perhaps partaken of a childish horror at Pat’s religion. With years of reason and tolerance the horror had diminished, but in the quality of his persisting interest in his cousin there was still a sort of shudder as at something primitive and dark.
The younger brother Cathal, though commonly said to be cleverer than Pat, was of course of less moment to Andrew. He had spent a good deal of time in the past avoiding Cathal, who, being so much younger, had usually figured in one way or another as an impediment. The relations between the two brothers seemed not of the happiest, and Andrew conjectured the existence of some ferocious jealousy. Pat had always, ever since Andrew could remember them together, enjoyed knocking his little brother about, sometimes with a brutality which was alarming to witness. Andrew most poignantly recalled a scene when he himself was about thirteen when he had intervened to save Cathal, then a small child, from a particularly vicious attack. Pat, who had retaliated by giving Andrew a black eye, was subsequently beaten, presumably for this misdemeanour, by Uncle Brian. This occurrence had somehow, for Andrew, defined and confirmed his unhappy sense of connection with his cousin; though he doubted very much whether the incident had had any significance for Pat.
Since he had become more or less grown up, and more especially since he had become a soldier, Andrew felt with some relief that his childhood obsessions about Ireland were beginning to fall away. The tradition of the annual holiday was discontinued, and the dark wet island seemed less of the menace that it used to be. He had not been over there for some while, nor seen any of his relations apart from Frances and Christopher, who were frequent visitors to England. During this period Pat Dumay had been studying law at the National University, and was now apparently working in a solicitor’s office. Andrew, rather vaguely hearing news of him from time to time, was gratified to
learn that he had not specially distinguished himself in his studies: and the notion that he was after all more talented than his cousin came as a salve to his, in any case diminishing, consciousness of that old rivalry. He was rather surprised that Pat had shown no sign of enlisting, a matter commented on adversely by Andrew’s mother, who, vaguely conscious of him as a competitor with her own boy, rather disliked Pat. But this unexpected blemish in the heroic figure of his boyhood was in fact far from displeasing to Andrew, and although he publicly disowned his mother’s scornful opinion he secretly shared it.
Andrew’s satisfaction at being liberated from Ireland was a little checked by the excessive nervous disturbance which he now felt on visiting the place again, and especially on hearing that his mother proposed to settle there. He had reckoned on seeing very little of Ireland in the future. He had decided, though without announcing this to anyone, to remove Frances from it completely as soon as this could be arranged. The removal of Frances indeed represented for him a sort of final triumph over the past. He felt irritated, and in a curious way a little frightened, to find that the severance could not be quite so complete. He told himself rationally that he must really begin to behave about the whole thing in a more grown-up way. Yet when he thought of the visit which he was to pay the Dumay household on the following day, he was not only childishly pleased at the idea of showing off his uniform and his newly grown moustache: his heart beat faster, he did not know why.
This visit, and a subsequent visit to his Aunt Millicent, had been urged upon him as a duty by his mother, although as he well knew she felt no particular affection for any of the people concerned. Hilda regarded ‘the family’ as having an importance which, while she might not have used this language, transcended affection. She would not have professed actually to like any of her relations, with the exception of Christopher Bellman, Frances and her own brother; and even in these two latter cases there were cross-currents of a hostility very obvious in origin. Millicent Kinnard and Kathleen, as she now was, Drumm, aroused in Hilda, whenever they were mentioned, a particular sort of almost physical jerky nervousness. These two very different persons were, Andrew knew, in different ways a disappointment and a scandal to his mother. Stationed at important points within the family machine they simply failed to turn the right handles.
Andrew’s father had been extremely though rather nervously fond of his half-sister, and this may not have endeared Millie to Hilda. He had also been devoted to Kathleen, though not in any way which could have caused rational annoyance to his wife, his gentle and complete devotion to whom had been a show-piece of the family. It was for Andrew felicitously axiomatic that his parents had been a happy united pair, and he was even now curiously conscious of his father’s presence as a support to his mother and himself. Hilda’s irritations with Aunt Millicent and Aunt Kathleen were more largely social in origin. Andrew was tolerantly aware that his mother was a fearful snob and that ‘keeping up with Millie’, which was presented as a tiresome duty, was made considerably less disagreeable by the fact that Millie had a title. There was also the wealth, the splendour and what was left of the ceremony. But it was just here that Aunt Millicent failed.
Andrew could remember when he was quite small hearing a side-whiskered gentleman at a garden party saying to another, ‘I say, Millie Kinnard is rather fast, isn’t she?’ The idea seemed to please the gentleman, but Andrew’s mother, who was standing near by, had indignantly hustled Andrew away in the course of the reply. There had never been, as far as he knew, any positive scandal connected with his aunt, but he was given to understand that she was a person who habitually ‘went too far’, although whither it was she proceeded with unwonted celerity, overstepping what barriers, he never altogether discovered. Millie was of course known to hold rather progressive views on ‘the woman question’, had taken a nurse’s training, contrary to the family’s wishes, during the South African war, and had managed to get herself briefly to the scene of action. She had, it was said, not mourned too long after her husband’s death. She was rumoured to wear trousers and smoke cigars. She possessed and could fire a revolver. She had a great many gentlemen friends.
‘Millie has style’ was the sort of remark which people tended to make and which Hilda hated to hear. For her, Millie’s style was bad style and Millie’s undeniable form was bad form. Andrew’s mother was anxiously conventional and indeed regarded convention, which she preferred to think of as ceremony, as a fortress against all that she most feared. Perhaps in the end it was a fortress against her father’s practical jokes. Aunt Millicent represented, just where one might have expected an access of strength, a dangerous breach in the defences. Andrew had chanced not to see his aunt for some years, since she had been away on his last visit, and his memories of her went right back to a scene in some summer garden where what seemed a pretty girl in a white dress, under the dappled shade of a parasol, had laughed at him, but not unpleasantly, making him laugh too. He felt a certain interest in seeing her again.
Aunt Kathleen was quite another matter. While Aunt Millicent failed through frivolity, Aunt Kathleen, née after all Kinnard, failed through dullness. Millie’s form might be regrettable, but Kathleen was formless; and it was this, even more than the monstrous fact of being a Roman Catholic, which Andrew’s mother held against her. The Dumay house in Blessington Street was shabby, disorderly, even dirty; and in this Hilda deplored a sheer lack of inherited discipline. ‘When you think of Kathleen’s opportunities,’ she would say as prologue to a denunciation. Nor could she forgive Kathleen for marrying Barnabas, and thereby confirming her benighted brother in a state of insanity from which he might otherwise have recovered. Hilda also resented, though for fear of giving it further publicity she never mentioned, the fact that Kathleen supported her husband financially. Barnabas, who had latterly been employed in the public service, gave up this work soon after his marriage to devote himself entirely to research. Hilda blamed his wife for what she regarded as his progressive demoralization, and when the drinking bouts began she would say, ‘It’s all of a piece!’: meaning Catholicism, Kathleen, alcohol, and the Irish saints.
As Andrew meditated rather vaguely in the cool April sunshine of that Sunday afternoon concerning his forthcoming visit to the Dumays, he was engaged in the task of fixing Frances’ red swing. The swing, its wooden seat painted with a sort of peasant design of white hearts upon a scarlet background, had been ever since long ago a feature of the Bellman’s much larger and wilder garden in Galway. That morning when he had been looking at a photograph album with Frances they had come upon a picture of her, a little girl with a big straw sunbonnet, sitting upon the swing, while Andrew in a sailor suit stood rather ungraciously by. As Andrew began reminiscing about the swing Frances had said that in fact they had brought it with them, it was somewhere around, and Andrew had said that of course he would fix it up forthwith. Then they had both fallen silent.
Andrew thought of and indeed referred to Frances Bellman as his fiancee, although nothing had yet been quite formally fixed between them. It was rather that an understanding, dating from somewhere very remote in their childhood, had gradually grown up, like a tall genie taking shape between them and joining their hands. They had been, on the many occasions when they had been able to be together, ‘inseparable’ as children; and as soon as Andrew was ready to fall in love he fell in love with Frances, as if this were an inevitable and natural aspect of growing up. The frenzy of love had been calmed almost at once by the sense that he could not possibly lose her. There was already the security of a long attachment. He had felt no interest in any other woman although he had had his share of opportunities and indeed of flattering attentions.
He was sometimes surprised at the ease with which he had been immediately conducted into this congenial haven, and attributed it somehow to the same kindly gods who had made him the only child of happily married parents. Frances too was an only child, and this made her seem quite especially of the same race as himself. Andrew adh
ered to no general theories of a romantic nature concerning the importance of a stormy initiation into love, and particularly now, with the prospect of a return to the war opening before him like a black hole, he was prepared to settle gladly for a security in his personal life which seemed likely to exist nowhere else. France, not Frances, would lay his soul naked.
Andrew had never formally proposed, though he assumed that some absolutely explicit suggestion, such as the naming of a day, would be necessary before the ceremony could be performed. In a way he would have preferred simply to wake up one morning and find that Frances was his wife; and he felt sure that she felt exactly as he did. She accepted and completed his half-voiced assumptions about the future, and their conversations were like a song sung in snatches by persons who know their parts so well that they need only by a note or two suggest them. He knew that Frances understood him perfectly. That was why they had both fallen silent suddenly together when they were speaking of the swing, since a swing suggested a child. Andrew was still a virgin. Where Frances was concerned, two ideas were curiously enlaced in his mind, the idea of his first introduction to sexual intercourse and the idea of his death. The hours of both these events he pictured as flying towards him through the darkness like great scarlet darts; and although he did not doubt that the former would arrive before the latter, he sometimes, and especially in sleepless nights, thought that the latter might not come far behind. This returned his thoughts to what had made him and Frances suddenly silent.
