by Iris Murdoch
‘If you marry me I won’t mind anything.’
‘I wonder. Will you give me an engagement ring?’
‘Of course! But we can’t make anything, you know, public for a bit—’
‘What an ardent impetuous fellow you are! I suppose I could wear my ring underneath a glove! No, you’d better not buy the ring just yet. You may still change your mind.’
‘Millie, I’ll get you a ring this afternoon—’
‘No, no, of course not! Anyway I want a little breathing space. I want a little time, time for a sort of holiday—’
‘You don’t mean a last fling do you, my darling?’
‘A last fling? Good heavens no. Whoever could I have a last fling with? No, don’t swing me, I can swing myself.’
She began to move the swing to and fro. She had opened the front of her coat, revealing a high-necked blouse of innumerable white frills pulled tightly over her bosom. Her legs bent and straightened vigorously with a flash of plump grey-stockinged calf and a hint of petticoat. The rope groaned on the tree and the fragments of bark fluttered down on to the red velvet epaulettes. Millie swung higher. Then something solid and glittering, dislodged from one of her pockets, plopped heavily on to the grass at Christopher’s feet. It was a revolver. He picked it up and saw that it was loaded.
Millie let the swing lose speed and in a moment, with a great swirl of skirts, she jumped out of it, her hand seizing Christopher’s shoulder. Her other hand gripped the revolver, crushing it against his palm and slipping it from him. As Christopher felt the weight of her body suddenly against him he made as if to embrace her, but she moved quickly from him to the other side of the swing.
Someone appeared at the side of the house and was now going in through the glass doors of the conservatory. It was Barnabas Drumm. He noticed them, hesitated, gave a vague wave and went inside.
Christopher felt suddenly uneasy. ‘He must be looking for Hilda. He doesn’t know she’s moved. He can’t have seen or heard anything, can he?’
‘No, of course not. He’s only just come.’
‘I don’t trust him. He’s full of malice and I believe he spies on you.’
‘Nonsense, he’s just a dear old sheepdog. Let’s go in, shall we? I think it’s beginning to rain again.’
They moved out from under the tree into the first drops of the rain. The weak sun still touched the tips of white flowering cherry trees against a leaden sky. Christopher halted. There was, to make his happiness complete, one thing he must say, one hazard more he must run. And surely now it was safe to run it. He meant to say, You know you needn’t marry me. I’ll do it all, but if you don’t want to you needn’t marry me.
The words came out differently. ‘You know you can always do anything that you want, Millie.’
She looked away from him. The small rain was already laying its drops in her dark hair and upon the shoulders of her coat. ‘I won’t want to do anything.’
‘You may do. You know you can command me. You can do what you please with me.’
‘So you think now,’ she murmured. ‘But there are deep roots of selfishness in both of us. And when we struggle you will always win, always.’
Chapter Ten
‘AT this period of my life I again became a frequent visitor at the house in Upper Mount Street, where I knew that a gay welcome always awaited me. It was, I knew, improper, doubtless unjust, to prefer the lively affection of the light-hearted “Millie” to the dour and dumb attachment of my wife. But the order of the world is unjust and with a natural spontaneity like moves to like and life flows towards life. My own congenital gaiety, so muted in the gloomy atmosphere of my home “had its fling” at Upper Mount Street, and at times Lady Kinnard and I would make each other laugh until the tears ran. The return to Blessington Street was always something of a penance. The house was usually untidy and often far from clean; and I was, I confess, offended by the, as it seemed to me deliberate, tawdriness and ill-kempt appearance not of my home only but of my wife’s person. That most regrettable, that unexpected but implacable physical distaste which had led me so unforgivably to fail my wife in the central sanctum of our marriage, early and silently divined by her, had led the poor sufferer perversely to accentuate just those features of her personal appearance which had been the initial occasion of my abstinence.’
These words, which he had penned early that morning in the National Library, ran automatically through Barney’s head, giving him but little pleasure since his thoughts were by now engaged elsewhere as he sat in the Butt Bar in Beresford Place on the afternoon of Wednesday, April the nineteenth. Previous to his arrival at the Butt Bar he had been in Little’s Public House in Harcourt Street, and before that in Nagle’s Bar in Earl Street, and before that at Bergin’s in Amiens Street. He had lunched, or it seemed likely that he had lunched, at the Red Bank Restaurant, but that was a long time ago by this time.
Barney was still in a shocked condition. Seeking Hilda that morning at Finglas he had, coming up the lane at the side of the house, become aware of Millie in the garden. From behind the hedge he had heard the greater part of her conversation with Christopher. Millie flirting with Christopher was one thing; Millie married to Christopher was quite another, and Barney had immediately felt: I cannot endure it. If Millie were married he could not go to her any more. This, which he had never thought, since he had never conceived of her second marriage, was instantly and horribly clear. His presence at Millie’s depended on certain assumptions, certain, he had to admit it, perhaps fictions or illusions. He had to feel himself, with her, ‘as good as anybody’. He had to feel her somehow potentially his. And Millie was often so gay with him, might he not really be the most necessary man of them all? He could be Millie’s spaniel now, but not the tolerated pet of a married Millie, even if he were in fact tolerated.
He was appalled too, almost frightened, by the sudden image of Millie under duress. With an ear attuned by love, or by his own specialized self-interest, he had heard in her bantering voice the hidden whine of despair. Millie was acting under coercion, and there could be only one reason for this coerced decision: she was marrying money. Barney was not so much shocked by this revelation as horrified by it on Millie’s behalf. Millie was so essentially a free animal. What awful desperation must lie behind this choice to wear the collar of slavery? Barney could not envisage her as in love with Christopher. That pain at least was spared him. She was not in love; but she would with all the vitality and all the duplicity of her nature play the part of a rapturously happy wife. And she would be utterly lost to him.
At a certain point in these miserable reflections, possibly in Little’s Public House, Barney felt an obscure lightening. This sense of relief shortly became explicit as the resolution: it must not be. She would certainly regret her decision: better then if she were prevented from carrying it out. Whatever Millie’s financial embarrassments, and Barney had for some time had an inkling of their existence, they were better for her than a forced marriage which her free nature would resent and soon detest. Barney, who after all knew her better than anyone else did, was certain of this. It was for him, doubtless not unrewarded, to rescue Millie from herself. She must be stopped. But how?
To turn from fruitless grinding pain to the envisaging, however vague, of counter-measures, is an invigorating change. Barney had sat up, ordered another whiskey, and focused his eyes sternly upon the Meeting of the Waters which was wanly represented in a diamond of stained glass in the window of the bar. And at once there arose, commanding the new perspective of his thoughts, the figure of Frances. Frances was not yet to be told of her father’s intentions. Why? Clearly because Christopher wished the girl to be safely married and packed away before he made his move. Again why? Because he was afraid of his daughter’s reactions. Barney, who had by now conveyed himself as far as the Butt Bar, beat his forehead and tried to focus his eyes upon the Snowy Breasted Pearl who was wanly represented in a diamond of stained glass in the window of the bar. The young la
dy, who would otherwise have been hard to identify, was thus labelled. The letters danced before his eyes, but he had read them on a previous occasion. The matter of Frances was complicated.
Barney had always experienced with Frances a simplicity and gentleness of communication which he had otherwise hoped for in vain from the world of women. Through Frances he had glimpsed that absolute of love, which is the only thing which heals the humiliated spirit. But he was aware too, inside this quiet girl, of a woman both strong and complex. The will of Frances was a powerful machine. If he were to release that machine into the situation he had just discovered, what would happen? That Frances was capable of preventing her father’s marriage Barney did not doubt. Though whether she would decide to do so was another thing. The beginning of the argument was that Millie ought not to marry Christopher. But granted that, it was still not absolutely clear that it was wise to involve Frances. Frances would be desperately upset; and was it right to upset her just upon the verge of her own marriage? Though of course if Frances did engage in a struggle with her father this might induce her to put off leaving Ireland or even to put off getting married, especially if her struggle were successful. She would feel it necessary to stay with her father and comfort him if she had effectively crossed him.
This introduced a new consideration so interesting to Barney that, scarcely noticing, he put on his hat, heaved himself up and walked with dignity out of the Butt Bar on to the quay. The Butt Bar stood next door to Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Transport and General Workers Union, and now of James Connolly’s Citizen Army. As Barney crossed the cobbles in the direction of the Loop Line Railway he noticed that a number of people were gathered outside Liberty Hall. There was a familiar figure in the group. He realized that it was Pat, and stopped with a quick instinct of concealment. Pat was dressed in the vivid green uniform of the Volunteers, complete with slouch hat and Sam Browne. He carried a revolver at his belt and a rifle slung at his back. The other men in the group wore the darker green uniform of the Citizen Army. Some sort of argument seemed to be going on. After a moment they all moved inside the building.
The glimpse of Pat sobered Barney and made him realize that he had in fact drunk quite a lot of whiskey. He was glad that Pat had not seen him; and he felt a spasm of that special, unique pain which was caused in him by his stepsons. This pain was compounded of love, shame and an acute sense of injustice. Barney saw his stepchildren as superior, almost perfect, beings, and he loved them with a peculiar, private, incapsulated love. He had never been able to find any language for this love. There was no touch, no look, no gesture, no tone of voice which could give expression to it at all. At the same time he knew, and knew it daily, that he was a cause of scandal to the two boys. They resented what they saw of his attitude to their mother. Even more perhaps they simply resented their stepfather as an object upon the scene, as a debased version of human existence. The contrast between the purity and perfection of his inward love and the meanness and absurdity of his outward performance, between the gravity of his heart and the oafishness of his manner, seemed to Barney something miserably unjust. At the same time he felt ashamed before the two boys with a genuine piercing shame which seemed itself to belong to what was most profound and uncorrupted in him, and which was sometimes almost pleasurable in its intensity.
Barney walked a little way and then leaned against the warm rounded granite of the quay. The sky above him was that particular sort of cold Irish pale blue, looking like thin wet paper down which highly diluted blue paint is almost imperceptably running. A steady wind tilted the masts of ships outside the Customs House and kept the rippling Union Jack squarely on display. Dublin, or perhaps it was the Liffey, smelt of yeast. Barney looked down at the river. Great iron rings hung upon the river walls, joined by loops of rope, shaggy with seaweed, resembling huge coarse Georgian decorations, and below the gluey water passed slowly by, foaming a little like stout, its dark, dirty brown smudged with rusty white lights and thin overlaid blues and shimmers of old tarnished gold. A flight of whitewashed steps was chalkily reflected and now a tower of white gulls descending to investigate some more than usual opacity in the viscous stream. As Barney stared at it and smelt it, and listened to the clatter of the traffic and the quarrelling of the gulls, he thought about the silent unpolluted Shannon at Clonmacnoise and the big open-handed Christ upon His ancient cross, and the empty land there.
He walked on as far as the bridge. Ahead of him the multicoloured quays of the cluttered city meandered away, starkly clear, in the direction of the Four Courts with its green pencilled dome. A construction of clouds, whitish brown like the light upon the Liffey, was rising above Guinness’s brewery. Perhaps it was going to rain after all. Barney stroked his moustache, sniffing the whiskey from it. He paused to gaze idly at the array of posters on St George’s quay. A large one affirmed, with a modesty which always puzzled him, that Monkey Brand would not wash clothes. Smaller notices announced that Vaseline Helped the British to Victory, and His Skin Turned Black, Zam-buk the Only Cure. A recruiting poster showed a white-haired woman admonishing her dubious son, Go, Lad, It’s Your Duty. A photographer’s advertisement claimed a willingness to Enlarge Any Photo of Your Wife, Sweetheart, Child or Dearest Friend to Full Life Size for only one and sixpence. Did they really mean it? Barney imagined himself in possession of a Full Life Size picture of Millie. He would have to keep it locked in his room. Probably the only safe place would be under the mattress. This led to other disturbing thoughts.
He began to walk up toward the Pillar. Sackville Street was full of the blue uniforms of wounded soldiers, conspicuous in the weak sunshine. A small detachment of lancers, armed with carbines and lances, trotted past in the direction of Phoenix Park, and after them a brake full of police. Barney detached his mind from the interesting possibilities of a life-size replica of Millie, and began to wonder again about Frances and whether her deep dislike of Millie, which he had observed but never fully understood, would lead her, should she be apprised of the situation, to oppose her parent’s wishes in the matter of his marriage. As it began to seem to him bleakly probable that Frances would prove all that a magnanimous daughter should be, it occurred to him that there was yet another card which he might play. He might tell Frances about what had happened at Maynooth. He paused at the corner of Rutland Square. The clouds were massing now above the green dome of the Rotunda Hospital, and the clock on Findlater’s Church stood at ten minutes to five. Frances had always wanted to know what woman ‘had been his downfall’, and Barney had often wished to tell her, not in order to discredit Millie, but simply in order to draw Frances closer to him. He had sometimes envisaged telling her everything and making her his confessor and his judge. But a sense of loyalty to Millie had always prevented him from unfolding to Frances the full pattern of his woes, though she herself had often prompted him to do so in O’Halloran’s Bun Shop. Frances intuited wickedness in Millie. Should he not, in revealing that this woman was to marry Christopher, also reveal how far that intuition had been correct?
* * * *
Barney let himself in very quietly at the front door of the house in Blessington Street. It was just beginning to rain. He paused in the dark hall to hang his hat upon the stand, and drew out of the drawer a velvet skull cap which he had lately bought at Finnegans, the Gentleman’s Outfitter, and which he liked because it kept his bald head warm and gave him a slightly ecclesiastical appearance. He noticed that the hall-stand was thick with dust. He drew a face quickly in the dust, then carefully fitted on his velvet cap and peered at his dim image in the mirror. The cap, in a way which he found satisfactory, made him look much older. He observed how white his eyebrows had become. He was aware of an urgent desire to lie down somewhere and close his eyes. He began to creep quietly up the stairs. He always went up like a mouse so as to avoid any possible interview with his wife.
He passed the stained-glass lavatory window, inhaling the smell and avoiding the stair that creaked. On these occasio
ns he eschewed the ostentation of the lavatory, reserving himself for the discreet quiet of his own chamber-pot. He passed through the glass bead curtain, grasping it with a practised hand to prevent the jangle, and had his foot upon the next flight of stairs when he heard Kathleen’s voice calling from the drawing-room. ‘Barney, is that you? Could you come in for a minute?’
Barney groaned. He turned back and inserted himself noncommittally through the drawing-room door. It now seemed to be raining hard outside, and the room was dark and cold. No fire had been lit in the grate, which was still full of yesterday’s ashes. There was the usual stuffy musty smell of dust and old thick feathery textiles.
Kathleen was standing at the far end of the room by the window, plucking at the lace curtain. She must have seen him come in. As she turned her head he saw the big outline of her bun, from which some untidy hairs were sprouting. Her face was a worried pale blur out of which those big light brown eyes glared at him with a luminous intensity. She was wearing her usual old-fashioned brown skirt down to the ground and had drawn a knitted shawl round her for warmth. Not feeling very strong, Barney sat down on an upright chair near the door. The shiny slippery seat, unaccustomed to being sat on, nearly ejected him. He experienced the immediate physical sense of guilt which a confrontation with Kathleen always occasioned. His skin turned black. Zam-buk the only cure.
