by Iris Murdoch
“Don’t let Mingo get at the cake, please,” said Theo. “It looks rather a good cake and I’m certainly proposing to eat it. Would you mind putting it on to this?” He held out a sheet of newspaper.
Mary picked up the larger fragments of the cake and put them on to the newspaper. Then, with her nose wrinkling rather like Mingo’s, she began to collect the debris on to the tray. Uncle Theo’s room, which he rarely permitted anyone to clean, smelled superficially of medicines and disinfectants, and more fundamentally of old human sweat. This rancid odour was alleged by the twins to be the basis of the affinity between Uncle Theo and Mingo, and Mary had come vaguely to believe this, although she regarded the aroma more as a spiritual emanation from the dog-man pair than as a mere physical cause.
The dog was on the bed again now, clasped about the waist by Theo, his four legs sticking out helplessly, his woolly face beaming, his tail, on which he was sitting, vibrating with frustrated wags. Theo was beaming too, his face plumped out with a kind of glow which was too pervasive and ubiquitous to be called a smile. Looking at them sternly, it occurred to Mary that Mingo had come to resemble Theo, or perhaps it was the other way about.
Uncle Theo puzzled Mary. She was also rather puzzled by the complete lack of curiosity about him evinced by other members of the household. When informed, as if this were part of his name or title, that Theo had left India under a cloud, Mary had, as it seemed to her naturally, asked what cloud. No one seemed to know. At first Mary imagined that her question had been thought improper. Later she decided that really no one was much interested. And the odd thing was that this lack of interest seemed to be caused in some positive way by Theo himself, as if he sent out rays which paralysed other people’s concern about him. It was like a faculty of becoming invisible; and indeed Uncle Theo did often seem to have become almost imperceptible in a literal sense, as when someone said, “There was nobody there. Oh well, yes, Theo was there.”
Why did Uncle Theo paralyse other people’s concern about him in that way? On this problem Mary held two contradictory theories between which she vacillated. There was a shallow reassuring theory to the effect that Uncle Theo had so much animal placidity and so few thoughts that he was just not very noteworthy, in the same way in which a spider in the corner might not be noteworthy. It was true that he behaved like an ill person, at any rate he spent an inordinate amount of time in bed, always taking breakfast and tea there, sometimes lunch and dinner as well. He talked a lot about familiars whom he called his ‘viruses’. But no one had ever believed that Theo had any definite, indeed any real, illness. And although he was sometimes sharp-tongued and often morose his glooms had a positive slightly buffoonish quality which forbade their being taken too seriously. Theo also had a considerable gift for being physically relaxed. He seemed a totally non-electric, nonmagnetic person. Perhaps it was this air of blank bovine ease which made his neighbours rightly so incurious. There was nothing to know.
Yet there were times when Mary favoured another and more unnerving theory according to which Uncle Theo’s invisibility was something more like an achievement, or perhaps a curse. At these times Mary apprehended his laziness and his relaxation not exactly as despair but as something on the other side of despair of which she did not know the name. It was as if, she thought, someone had had all his bones broken and yet were still moving about like a sort of limp doll. It was not that she caught, through the mask of Uncle Theo’s behaviour, any momentary flash or flicker from some other region of torment. There was no mask. It was simply that the ensemble of Uncle Theo’s particular pointlessness could take for her the jump into a new gestalt which showed him to her as a man who had been through the inferno and had by the experience been deprived of his will.
Mary looked at Uncle Theo now as he was, by a familiar technique, exciting Mingo by sniffing over his fur with the audible eagerness of a terrier after a rat. Unlike his younger brother, to whom his resemblance was minimal, Theo was a gaunt man and rather tall. He was partly bald, with longish strings of greasy grey hair curling down his neck. He had a large brow but the features of his face were cramped and concentrated well to the front, as if the hasty hand of his creator had absently drawn them all toward the point of his rather long nose. So although he had a large head his face looked small and poky and canine. Mary could never determine, even on fairly close inspection, the colour of his eyes. Tidying his room once she had found an old passport, and opening it to see what colour Theo himself considered his eyes to be, had found the description: ‘Mud’.
Mary had been distressed to find her curiosity and concern about Theo lessening as time went on. Perhaps those invisibility rays were gradually killing her interest in him too and she would soon be just as indifferent as the others. Mary, who was accustomed to receiving confidences, had once or twice tried to question Theo about India, but he had only beamed in his dog-like way and changed the subject. She felt compassion for him and willed to help him, but her relationship to him remained abstract. The sad truth was that Mary simply did not love him enough to see him clearly. He repelled her physically, and she was one of those women who could only care deeply for what she wanted to touch.
“Will you make me some more tea, please?” said Theo.
“Yes. I’ll send Casie up with it. You must make peace with her. You really do make her unhappy.”
“Don’t worry. Casie and I are good friends.” This was true. Mary had noticed a sort of positive bond between these two.
“I wish you’d go up and see Willy,” she said. “You haven’t seen him for three weeks. Have you quarrelled or something?”
Theo closed his eyes, still beaming. “You can’t expect two neurotic egomaniacs like me and Willy to get on together.”
“Willy isn’t a neurotic egomaniac.”
“Thanks, dear! The fact is I gave up Willy for Lent and then found I could do without him.”
“I’m just going to see him now and he’s sure to ask after you. Suppose he—needs you?”
“Nobody needs me, Mary. Go and make my tea, there’s a dear girl.”
Mary went away down the stairs in a state of irritation with herself. I’m no good, she thought. These encounters with Theo, her inability to reach him or see him, often brought on a sort of self-pity which rendered his image even more indistinct. Mary depended, more than she might have been willing to admit, on a conception of her existence as justified by her talent for serving people. Her failure with Theo hurt her vanity.
Downstairs she found Casie, no longer tearful but furious, already banging together another tea tray for Theo. As Mary passed on toward the back door she could now hear Barbara upstairs beginning to play something on her flute. The piercing husky hard-achieved beauty of the sound wrought on Mary’s nerves. Her own utter inability to remember any tune gave music a special exasperating poignancy for her. Barbara’s flute, although the child now played it well, was almost an instrument of torture to Mary. She wondered where Pierce was and whether the boy, lying in his room or hidden somewhere in the garden, was also listening to those heart-rending sounds.
The summer afternoon was very hushed in the garden and the air, thick with sun and pollen, dusted Mary’s face like a warm powder-puff. The agonising sound of the flute grew fainter. Mary mounted the pebble path and let herself out of the gate in the wall and began to go up the hill between the high banks of the lane. The banks were covered in white flowering nettles, a plant which Mary liked, and she picked a few as she went along and tucked them into the pocket of her blue and white check dress. When she got to the shade of the beech wood she sat down automatically, out of a compulsive afternoon languor, upon a fallen tree, sitting astride the tree and gently rustling its skirt of curled beech leaves with her sandalled feet. The tree was smooth and grey above, but beneath the level of the leaves it curved inward with the colour and consistency of flaky milk chocolate, and as Mary sat upon it and stirred its flanks it gave off a light fungoid odour which made Mary sneeze. She began to thin
k about Willy Kost.
Mary had for some time now been conscious of a sort of mounting distress which she connected with her relationship with Willy. She felt with him something of the same exasperated sense of failure as she felt with Theo, only with Willy it was different because she loved Willy very much and found him pre-eminently touchable. He had arrived at Trescombe Cottage when Mary was already well established as whatever she was established as at Trescombe House, and she had immediately assumed a special responsibility for him. “How’s Willy?” other members of the household would tend to ask her. She had at first taken it for granted that Willy would soon confide in her and tell her all about his past, but this had not happened. No one even seemed to know for certain where Willy had been born. Ducane said Prague and Octavian said he thought Vienna. Mary had no theory, coming at last to accept Willy’s sad European mysteriousness as a sort of physical quality and one which racked her tenderness more than any positive knowledge could have done.
Mary constantly told herself how lucky she was to live with so many people whom she loved and that surely so much love was enough to fill a woman’s life. She knew perfectly well, with her heart’s blood as well as with her mind, that loving people was the most important of all things. Yet she knew too that she was deeply discontented and she sometimes suffered fierce feral moods of confused yearning during which it seemed to her that her whole life was a masquerade and that she was piously acting the part of a kindly affectionate serviceable woman who was just not herself. Yet it was not that a rapture or a glory which had once shone around her had passed away from the world. The rapture and the glory whose hauntings she suffered had never manifested themselves in her life at all. Her love for men had always been somehow neurotic and unfulfilled, and this had been true even of her love for her husband. She had loved Alistair very much, but in a nervous, plucking, plucked at way, and though both her body and her mind had been involved in this love they had never been in accord about it. She had never been filled with her love like a calm brimming vessel. She had rather suffered it, as a tree might suffer a cold wind, and the image of a coldness was somehow mingled with her memories of marital love. Mary did not believe in analysing herself, and she had left vague the notion that sometimes came to her that this anxious unfulfilled sort of loving was the only kind of which she was capable.
Her relationship with Willy Kost was unsatisfying and even maddening to her but by now it had become very important and Mary could quite rationally hope that it would in time become better, easier, fuller. She did not any longer expect any great ‘break through’. She did not expect, as she had done at first, that Willy would suddenly seize her hands and tell her all about what it was like in Dachau. In a way she no longer even wanted this to happen. But she did hope that some shrewd little genius which watched over her strange friendship with this man would see its way to bringing them, in gentleness and tenderness, much closer together.
“Willy, may I come in?”
“Oh, Mary. Come in, come in. Yes, I was expecting you. Have you had tea?”
“Yes, thanks.” In fact she had not had tea, but she did not want Willy to be moving about. She wanted him still, seated in a chair, while she moved about.
Willy subsided back into his low chair by the hearth. “Some milk? I’m just drinking some.”
“No thanks, Willy.”
She began to roam up and down the room, as she usually did, while Willy, his legs stretched straight out and his heels dug into the wood ash, sipped his milk and watched her. They were often silent thus for a long time after Mary’s arrival. Mary herself found that she needed some kind of physical recollection after she had entered Willy’s presence. His presence was always a slight shock to her. In order to withstand him she had to weave her own web about his room, proliferate, as it were, her own presence to contain his.
Willy’s cottage, a rectangular brick structure erected on the cheap by Octavian’s predecessor, consisted simply of a large sitting-room with kitchen, bathroom and tiny bedroom beyond it at the west end. Most of the walls were covered with the bookshelves which Octavian had had the village carpenter make for the cottage after he had taken one look at Willy’s crates of books. But on the south side looking toward the sea was a long narrow window with a wide white window ledge upon which various things were placed, usually by Willy’s visitors, who seemed to have an urge to propitiate or protect him by the donation of often quite pointless gifts, offered or simply left, rather in the spirit of those who place saucers of milk outside the lair of a sacred snake.
Touching the window ledge automatically as she passed to see if it was dusty, Mary noticed two light-grey stones, lightly printed with curly fossil forms, probably donated by the twins, a small cardboard box full of birds’ eggs, also doubtless from the twins, a mound of moss and feathers which looked like a disintegrating bird’s nest, a paper bag containing tomatoes, a jam jar with two white Madame Hardy roses from a bush which grew outside Willy’s door, a wooden plate with edelweiss painted on it which Barbara had brought Willy from Switzerland, a pair of binoculars, also the gift of Barbara, and a dirty tea cup which Mary picked up. As she did so she remembered the white flowering nettles which were still in the pocket of her dress. She went into the little kitchen and washed up the tea cup and one or two plates and knives which were on the side. Then she took a large wine glass out of Willy’s cupboard and put the drooping nettles into it and brought them back to the window sill. Who had brought the roses in, she wondered. It would hardly have occurred to Willy to do so.
“You’ve brought me flowering nettles and put them in a wine glass.”
“Yes.”
“If I were a poet I would write a poem about that. Cruel nettles put into a wine glass by a girl—”
“They aren’t cruel,” said Mary. “These ones have no sting. And I’m not a girl.” Willy’s steady refusal to learn the flowers of the countryside, indeed to recognize the details of the countryside at all, had first exasperated and then charmed her.
“A girl, a girl—” he repeated softly.
Did Willy wish he was a poet, Mary wondered. She was beginning to want to touch him but knew that she must not do so yet. She said, “Willy, I do wish you’d go down and see Theo.”
“I don’t go down and see people. People come up and see me.”
“Yes, I know. But I think he somehow needs you—”
“No, no. As far as Theo is concerned I am an unnecessary hypothesis.”
“I don’t agree. I think you’re special for him.”
“Only one person is special for Theo, and it certainly isn’t me. Tell me, how are the others, how is your handsome son?”
“Oh that reminds me, Willy. Would you mind coaching Pierce in Latin again these holidays? He’s awfully worried about his Latin.”
“Yes, certainly. I can take him any day round about this time.”
Willy banned visitors after six o’clock. He said that he was always working then, but Mary wondered. In her search for the key to Willy’s interior castle she speculated often about the quality of his solitude. What was it like in the evenings and in the night for Willy? Once a violent curiosity had driven her to call on him unexpectedly about nine. The lights were switched off and he was sitting in the glow of the wood fire and she had the impression that he had been crying. Willy had been so upset and annoyed by her late visit that she had not ventured to repeat it.
“He seems to think his Greek’s all right. Though I must say it doesn’t seem to be a patch on the twins’ Greek.”
“Yes,” said Willy, “the twins’ Greek is indeed erstaunlich.”
It irritated Mary when Willy used a German word or phrase. The first summer he had been there she had persuaded him to teach her German, and had spent an hour with him on several mornings a week. Willy gently terminated this arrangement after it became clear that Mary never had enough time to do the necessary learning and exercises, and tended to be very upset by her failures. Mary hated to think about thi
s. The following summer he gave the same time to Paula, and they read the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey aloud together. During this period Mary suffered acute physical pains of jealousy.
“What ees eet?”
“Nothing,” she said shortly, but she knew that Willy knew exactly what she was thinking.
“What is the matter with Paula?” said Willy. His thoughts and Mary’s often became curiously intertwined during these times when she prowled the room and he watched her.
“Is anything the matter?”
“Yes. She seemed to me to be worried or frightened or something.”
“I expect it’s just the end of term,” said Mary. “She’s overtired. Did she come up to see you?” It might have been Paula who brought in the two white roses.
“No, I met her on the beach when I was having my early walk.” In the summer Willy often took very early walks by the sea before anyone was up.
Mary paused again at the window where her questing finger had drawn in the light dust a twining pattern which showed up clearly in the bright sunlight. Trescombe House could not be seen from the cottage as the wood intervened but there was a view, over the sloping tree tops, of a part of the beach, with the rust-coloured headland known as the Red Tower to the right, and to the left, over a curvy green field, a glimpse of the abandoned graveyard, the little green dome of the geometer god, and greyer and hazier in the far distance the pencil line of the Murbury sands with the black and white lighthouse at the end. Straight ahead of her Mary could see something bobbing on the sea, quite near in to the shore, and she picked up the binoculars to have a look at it.
“Ouf!” she said.
“What?”
