by Iris Murdoch
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing. Home, McGrath.” He said to Mary, “Watch this.”
Ducane pressed a button and a glass screen rose up silently between the front and back of the car.
Ducane looked into the eyes of Mary Ducane. His married life would not be without its problems. But he could explain everything to her, everything, in time. He began to laugh again. He took his wife in his arms.
“Uncle Theo, may I have that Indian stamp?”
“Yes, Edward. Here.”
“Edward, you pig. I did see it first!”
Theo quickly tore the stamp off the corner of the envelope. The writing was unknown to him. But the postmark made him tremble.
“Where are you going, twins?”
“Up to the top of the cliff. Like to come?”
“No, I’m just going to the meadow.”
Theo thrust the letter into his pocket. He watched the twins depart. Then he walked across the lawn and through the gap in the spiraea hedge and sat down on the seat. Out to sea a small pewter-coloured cloud was coming up over the horizon. Theo squinted into the sunshine and pressed the letter, still in his pocket, against his side. Then with a sigh he slowly drew it out and opened it.
The old man was dead. Theo had known this from the first moment of seeing the letter. Only to tell him this would someone else have written to him now from that place. The old man was dead. He had spoken kindly of Theo just before he died. The old man was dead with whom he might have made his peace and who alone of mortals could have given him peace.
Theo had never revealed to his family that while he was in India he had taken vows in a Buddhist monastery. He had thought to end his days there. But after some years he had left, fled from it, after an incident involving a young novice. The boy was later drowned in the Ganges. Everyone who wrote to Theo about it said that it was certainly an accident.
Only the old man could release me from this wheel, Theo thought as year after year he wondered if he should go back and year after year felt it all recede from him past hope, past endeavour. He saw in dreams the saffron robes, the shaven heads, the green valley where he had thought to end his days. He could not find his way back there. He remembered the doubts the old man had had at the start. “We like to take people young,” he said, “before they are soiled by the world,” and he had looked doubtfully at Theo. But Theo was ardent then, like a man in love. He wanted that discipline, that silence, and the thing which lay beyond it.
I am sunk in the wreck of myself, thought Theo. I live in myself like a mouse inside a ruin. I am huge, sprawling, corrupt and empty. The mouse moves, the ruin moulders. This is all. Why did I ever leave them, what was I fleeing from? What spoilt scene that I could not then endure? He had fled from a broken image of himself and from the very certainty of understanding and of being drawn back into the structure which he had damaged. He had seemed to leave his past utterly behind when with a passion which seemed a guarantee of renewed life he had entered into the community of these men. To find himself even there the same being as before shocked his pride, the relentless egoism which he now saw had not suffered an iota of diminution from his gesture of giving up the world. The place was spoiled for him. He had given it his free and upright self. He could not humbly surrender to it his broken self. Perhaps he had loved the old man too much.
Yet was it just this broken image, or was it something more terrible still which he had feared and fled from, the appalling demand made upon his nature? Theo had begun to glimpse the distance which separates the nice from the good, and the vision of this gap had terrified his soul. He had seen, far off, what is perhaps the most dreadful thing in the world, the other face of love, its blank face. Everything that he was, even the best that he was, was connected with possessive self-filling human love. That blank demand implied the death of his whole being. The old man was right to say that one should start young. Perhaps it was to calm the frenzy of this fear that he had so much and so suddenly needed to hold tightly in his arms a beautiful golden-skinned boy as lithe as a puma. What happened afterwards was hideous graceless confusion, the familiar deceitful jumble of himself breaking forth again in a scene from which he thought it had disappeared for ever. He had not really changed in those years. He had experienced joy. But that was the joy of a child at play. He had played out in the open, for those years, beside the unchanged mountain of himself.
How does one change? Theo wondered. He might have gone back some time and asked the old man that question. And yet he knew the answer really, or knew its beginning, and this was what his nature could not bear.
Theo got up and began to walk slowly back to the house. As he came into the hall the inward smell of the house conjured up for him the image of Pierce, with his long straight strokable animal brow and nose. The kitchen was empty, except for Mingo and Montrose curled up together in the basket. The door of Casie’s sitting-room was ajar and a sound came from within. Casie was watching television.
Theo entered behind her in the twilight of the contained room, and taking a chair sat down beside her as he often did. He saw that she was crying and he averted his face, stroking her shoulder with a clumsy pawing movement.
Casie said, mumbling into her handkerchief, “This play’s so terribly sad. You see this man was in love with this girl and he took her out in his car and crashed the car and she was crippled for life and then.…”
Theo kept his hold upon her shoulder, kneading it a little with his fingers. He stared into the blue flicker of the television screen. It was too late to go back. There was a hand which could never, in grace and healing, be laid upon him now.
Yet was it not for that very reason, that it was too late, that he ought now to return? The old man would have understood this, the action without fruits. The image of return had been the image of a very human love. Now it was the image of that other one. Why should he stay here and rot? Perhaps the great mountain of himself would never grow less. But he could keep company with the enlightenment of others, and might regain at least the untempered innocence of a well-guarded child. And although he might never draw a single step closer to that great blankness he would know of its reality and feel more purely in the simplicity of his life the distant plucking of its magnetic power.
Tears suddenly began to stream down Theo’s face. Yes, perhaps he would go back. Perhaps he would die after all in that green valley.
The twins lay on the cliff edge up above Gunnar’s Cave. The beautiful flying saucer, spinning like a huge noiseless top, hovered in the air not far away from them, a little higher up, over the sea, in a place where they had often seen it come before. The shallow silvery metal dome glowed with a light which seemed to emanate from itself and owe nothing to the sun, and about the slim tapering outer extremity a thin line of lambent blue flame rippled and leapt. It was difficult to discern the size of the saucer, which seemed to inhabit a space of its own, as if it were inserted or pocketed in a dimension to which it did not quite belong. In some way it defeated the attempt of the human eye to estimate and measure. It hovered in its own element, in its own silence, indubitably physical, indubitably present and yet other. Then, as the children watched, it tilted slightly, and with that movement which they could never confidently interpret either as speed or as some sort of dematerialising or actual vanishing, was gone.
The twins sighed and sat up. They never spoke when the saucer was present.
“It stayed a long time today, didn’t it.”
“A long time.”
“Isn’t it odd how we know that it doesn’t want to be photographed.”
“Telepathy, I expect.”
“I think they’re good people, don’t you?”
“Must be. They’re so clever and they don’t do any harm.”
“I think they like us. I wonder if we shall ever see them.”
“We’ll come back tomorrow. You haven’t lost that ammonite, have you, Henrietta?”
“No, it’s in my skirt. Oh Edwar
d, I’m so happy about Daddy coming back.”
“So am I. I knew he’d come back, actually.”
“I did too. Oh look, Edward, it’s getting quite dark, it’s raining out there over the sea.”
“So it is. And look real breakers at last. How super!”
“Why it’s starting to rain here now, real rain at last, lovely rain!”
“Come on, Henrietta. Let’s go and swim in the rain.”
Hand in hand the children began to run homeward through the soft warm drizzle.
