by Iris Murdoch
I am writing this the next morning. I was sitting writing the above late last night in my drawing room when something very disconcerting happened. I looked up and was for a moment perfectly sure that I saw a face looking at me through the glass of the inner room. I sat absolutely still, paralysed by sheer terror. The vision was only momentary but, although I cannot now describe the face, very definite. Perhaps it is significant that I cannot remember the face? After an interval of course I got up to investigate. The new oil lamp is easy to carry so I was not reduced to peering about with a candle. And of course there was nothing to be seen. I even walked round the house. I felt, I must confess, very odd. I went, with a sort of deliberate slowness, up the stairs to bed and took a sleeping pill. I thought I heard the bead curtain clinking in the night, but that is a natural phenomenon. A little wind has arisen today and the sea is blue and white again.
I have considered two possible explanations of my apparition. One is that it was simply a reflection of my own face in the blackness of the glass. But (unless I had unconsciously risen?) I was sitting well below the level at which I could have been thus mirrored. Also, the face appeared rather high up in the window, and so (a further thought) must have belonged to a very tall person or to someone standing on something. (Only there is nothing to stand on, since I have moved the folding table in here.) Another theory I shall check tonight. The window that gives onto the sea was uncurtained and there was an almost full moon. Could I have seen the moon reflected in the inner glass?
‘Everything is full of gods’, cousin James once said, quoting somebody. Perhaps I have been surrounded by little gods and spirits all my life, only the magic of the theatre exorcized or absorbed them? Theatre people are notoriously superstitious. Now we are all alone together! Well, I have never gone in for persecution mania and do not propose to start now.
I must soon go over to the Raven Hotel to get some more wine. I think I will stop talking about ghosts and monsters in the Black Lion.
Decided not to swim today.
I have been out shopping. The shop keeps promising lettuce but so far has had none. No fresh fish of course. I found some more letters in my stone dog kennel. Nothing from Lizzie. A communication from Peregrine Arbelow however. For lunch made my heavenly vegetarian stew of onions, carrots, tomatoes, bran, lentils, pearl barley, vegetable protein, brown sugar and olive oil. (The vegetable protein I brought with me from London.) I add a little lemon juice just before eating. With that (it is very light) a baked potato with cream cheese. Then Battenberg roll and prunes. (Carefully cooked prunes are delicious. Drain and add lemon juice or a dash of orange flower water, never cream.) If any one wonders at the absence of ‘eating’ apples from my diet let me explain that this is one case where I have spoilt my palate with an aristocratic taste. I can eat only Cox’s Orange Pippins, and am in mourning applewise from April to October.
I will transcribe as an introduction to him, Peregrine’s letter.
Charles, how are you getting on? We are all consumed with curiosity. No one admits to having been invited. But don’t you miss us terribly? Perhaps you have sneaked back to live secretly in your new flat, not answering the phone and going out at night? Someone said your house was on a lonely wave-washed promontory but that can’t be true. I see you in a cosy marine bungalow on the sea front. After all, how could you live without your liquidizer? I couldn’t bear it if you had really changed your life. That is something which I have always wanted to do but never could and never will. I shall die with my boots off, the bastard I have ever been. I have been drinking for a week after returning from hell, alias Belfast. Civilization is terrible, but don’t imagine that you can ever escape it, Charles. I want to know what you are doing. And don’t imagine that you can ever hide from me, I am your shadow. I think I shall come down and see you at Whitsun. (Someone dared me to and you know I can’t resist dares.) Various people would send their love if they knew I was writing, but of course it isn’t love, it’s insolent curiosity. Few are worthy of you, Charles. Is the undersigned one? Time will show. Shall I come and bring my swimming trunks? I haven’t swum since our epic days in Santa Monica. Another theory is that you are not in England at all but gone to Spain with a girl. To disprove which you must write. Your shadow salutes you.
Peregrine.
It is after lunch (it is perfectly true that I miss my liquidizer) and I am sitting at my upstairs seaward window. It is cloudy and the sea is a choppy dark blue-grey, an aggressive and unpleasant colour. The seagulls are holding a wake. The house feels damp. Perhaps I am still depressed by last night’s experience, which was of course a simple visual illusion. (However I will check about the moon.) And at least I can write ‘depressed’ and not ‘afraid’. There is nothing to be afraid of.
Perhaps I shall make some notes for a character sketch of Peregrine. This will involve writing something about Rosina, and I would rather forget that lady. Well, autobiography cannot be self-indulgent fun all of the time.
Peregrine (he detests being called ‘Perry’ as much as I detest being called ‘Charlie’; only people who do not know me call me ‘Charlie’) is one of those who have a strong concept of the life they want to lead and the role they want to play and lead it and play it at the expense of everyone, especially their nearest and dearest. And the odd thing is that such people can in a sense be wrong, can as it were miscast themselves, and yet battle on successfully to the end, partly because their ‘victims’ prefer a definite simple impression to the pains of critical thought. Peregrine, although in many ways a gentle kind man, has cast himself as a noisy bear. This ‘role-playing’ makes him stupidly careless of making enemies. Whereas I think it shows a lack of professional skill to make unnecessary enemies in the theatre, or indeed in life. Peregrine is always blundering along. He lacks the meticulous quality of the true artist. I always had to terrorize him to get him onto the stage sober. He has the makings of a fine actor, only he is too damn conceited and casual, there is a sort of slapdash Irishry about him, he has too many off-days.
Peregrine is an Ulster Catholic who started out as a medical student at Queen’s University, Belfast, and then ran away to the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He hates Ireland as only the Irish can hate it. He early abandoned religion for Marxism, then abandoned Marxism. I first saw him as the Playboy (he was slim in those far-off days) and coveted his talents at once. He is now, since he parted professional company with me some years ago, going to seed as a fat charming television villain. He knows what I think of his career. But we remain friends; and this in spite of the fact that I stole his wife. He has married again, equally disastrously, an ex-actress called Pamela Hackett, who has a little daughter by her earlier awful marriage to ‘Ginger’ Godwin. (Ah, where is he now?) Why do people ever marry?
Yes, well, I shall have to talk about Rosina and maybe it will do me some good to write it all down. Not that I could write it all down if I wrote volumes. Rosina was a huge phenomenon. She was already married to Perry when I first encountered her. They met in America in some interval after I had first spotted him at the Gate. I was still fairly young though becoming known as a playwright and as a director. Some further time must then have passed (how I wish I had kept a diary), since I started to pursue Rosina after a period when I had again been living with Clement. What a lot of energy in my life I have spent escaping from women. Rita Gibbons comes into that story too, so perhaps it was later still. Clement tolerated Rita and Lizzie and Jeanne but she detested Rosina. Of course I lied to Clement (she lied to me) but various people made a point of keeping her informed.
Rosina is of course Rosina Vamburgh, and is probably the most famous person in this book, after me. Her real name, which she keeps secret, is Jones (or Davis or Williams or Rees or something) and she is Welsh, with a French Canadian grandmother. I was never ‘in love’ with Rosina. I would like to reserve that phrase to describe the one single occasion when I loved a woman absolutely. (Not dear Clement of course.) But I was certainly mad about Rosina. (Moreover,
when a beautiful witty woman is passionate about you you cannot but feel that she has the root of the matter in her.) I am not sure whether she was ‘in love’ with me. A furious mutual desire for possession dominated the whole affair while it lasted. At one stage she certainly wanted to marry me, whereas I never had the slightest intention of marrying her. I simply wanted her, and the satisfaction of this want involved detaching her permanently from her husband. Clement, when younger, was probably the most beautiful woman I ever knew. But Rosina is the most stylish, the most gorgeously adorably artificial. There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She has a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.
She was (and is) a good actress and a very intelligent woman. (These qualities do not always go together.) She had a mixture of Celtic and Gallic good looks, with blue eyes and wiry dark hair and a big moist sensual mouth. God, how different kisses are. Lizzie’s kisses were dry and chaste yet clinging. Rosina’s kisses were those of a tigress. Rosina had the fierce charm of the rather nasty girl in the fairy-tale who fails to get the prince, but is more interesting than the girl who does, and has better lines too. She was a good comic actress and excelled in rubbishy Restoration Comedy, a genre I have never cared for. She made a memorable Hedda Gabler, and a rather touching Natalia Petrovna in A Month in the Country. Unfortunately she was never able to play Honor Klein. When I worked with her I used to cast her against her type; I often did this successfully with actors. She was surprisingly good as La Présidente in Sidney’s adaptation of Liaisons Dangereuses. I never let her play Lady Macbeth but Isaiah Mommsen did much later on and it was a disaster. After I left her Rosina lost her way for some time in silly films and television. I was glad. After I left her I no longer wanted to see her name in lights in Shaftesbury Avenue, nor did I care to know who directed her. La jalousie naît avec l’amour, mais ne meurt pas toujours avec lui.
The interval between possession and hell was short though I admit it was wonderful. Rosina was one of those women who believe that ‘a good row clears the air’. In my experience a good row not only does not clear the air but can land you with a lifelong enemy. Rows in the theatre can be terrible and I avoided them. Rosina more than once called me a coward for this. She liked rows, any rows, and she believed in loving by rowing. I began to grow tired. The golden bridge for the departing lover I have always, I hope, provided when it became necessary. Rosina, when she saw me cooling, had no such merciful contraption ready. She clung closer and closer and screamed louder and louder. She was always insanely given to jealousy, even more than I was. How very much jealousy, the spectacle of it, the suffering of it, has been a feature of my whole life. I think now of something so different but equally awful, my mother’s silence after the departures of Aunt Estelle.
In the end we both became half mad. I remember my cousin James quoting some philosopher as saying that ‘it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger’. Rosina and I reached a state (though I would not have described it as a rational one) where we definitely preferred the former. I remember Rosina once hurling herself downstairs in a fit of rage. On several occasions I was quite ready for her to jump out of an upstairs window and rather hoped that she would. I came to feel, perhaps I always felt, again in the words of some Frenchman: elle n’a qu’une faute, elle est insupportable. Sometimes even now I wake up in the middle of the night and think, at any rate thank God that woman has gone out of my life. Of course when I left her she never went back to Peregrine.
I was intensely grateful to Perry, and indeed admired him, for the way he behaved. Cynics said he was glad to have Rosina taken off his hands. I knew better, he suffered. I am sure that he and Rosina had lived in a perpetual state of war, but many not unhappy couples do so. I think he loved her, though he probably came, as I did, to find her simply impossible. So there may well have been an element of profound relief in having the problem removed without his will. Later, he went out of his way to make quite a show of masculine solidarity. He remains very attached to me, and I value this. One result of his truly remarkable generosity and kindness was that although I saw objectively that I had behaved badly, I felt practically no guilt. This was because Perry never reproached me. Just as, on the other hand, I have always felt guilty about my chauffeur Freddie Arkwright because he once flew at me, and not because I had occasioned his resentment by keeping him waiting hungry for hours while I was guzzling at the Connaught Hotel. Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.
I have been out picking flowers upon my rocks! I collected a fine mixed bunch of valerian and thrift and white sea campion. The campion has a very strong sweet smell. I cannot stop collecting stones, and the trough is overflowing even though I have put some of the best ones into my lawn border. This border looks a little ‘quaint’, I will have to see how I like it when it is finished. It is a good way to display the stones, but will the earth discolour their undersides?
This morning I swam in the rain from the stony beach. The beach is about a mile from the house on the village side, so I took bathing trunks, but did not don them as there was no one there. The rain had a quieting effect on the sea, making it smooth and pitted, almost oily. I had no difficulty getting out. I collected more stones. Then I went home and sat naked in the warmish rain on Minn’s bridge and watched the glossy water running into the deep enclosure. Even on a calm day it runs in and out like a tidal wave.
I was unable last night to check my theory that my ghostly ‘face’ was a reflection of the moon, since the sky was cloudy. But I feel sure now that it was an optical illusion and needs no further explanation. I occupied the little red room in the evening and lit the fire there. The chimney smoked again, perhaps because of the direction of the wind. As I rescued a spider running upon a half-burning piece of wood I remembered my father. Since I came here I have lived with naked flames for the first time for some years. Clement always loved an open fire. What a strange process burning is. How utterly and sort of calmly it transforms things, it is so clean, as clean as death. (Shall I be cremated? Who will arrange it? Let me not think of death.) So far I have been keeping my wood in the larder, only there is not enough space and the floor is curiously damp. I might make the downstairs inner room into a fuel store. The driftwood is so beautiful, smoothed by the sea and blanched to a pale grey colour, it seems a shame to burn it. I set several pieces aside and admired the grain. Perhaps I shall make a collection of driftwood ‘sculpture’.
It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves. Thank heavens I have had no more such hallucinations, and the extent to which I have forgotten what I saw persuades me that it was indeed an after-effect of that drug which I so foolishly took. Or did I really ‘see’ anything which needs even this much of an explanation? I keep a careful watch upon the flattened rainy sea but no great coiling form comes rising up! (No seals either.) It did, oddly enough, occur to me afterwards to reflect upon what the Black Lion yokels said about ‘worms’. ‘Worm’ is an old word for dragon. Well, this is getting a little too picturesque: dragons, poltergeists, faces at windows! And how restless this rain makes me feel.
I reread my pieces about James and Peregrine and was quite moved by them. Of course they are just sketches and need to be written in more detail before they become really truthful and ‘lifelike’. It has only just now occurred to me that really I could write all sorts of fantastic nonse
nse about my life in these memoirs and everybody would believe it! Such is human credulity, the power of the printed word, and of any well-known ‘name’ or ‘show business personality’. Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!
Since I started writing this ‘book’ or whatever it is I have felt as if I were walking about in a dark cavern where there are various ‘lights’, made perhaps by shafts or apertures which reach the outside world. (What a gloomy image of my mind, but I do not mean it in a gloomy sense.) There is among those lights one great light towards which I have been half consciously wending my way. It may be a great ‘mouth’ opening to the daylight, or it may be a hole through which fires emerge from the centre of the earth. And am I still unsure which it is, and must I now approach in order to find out? This image has come to me so suddenly, I am not sure what to make of it.
