by Iris Murdoch
‘Warm enough, Adelaide?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your hair’s all cool. Funny stuff, human hair. If you love me never cut your hair off.’
‘Shove over a bit, would you.’
‘Have I got a clean shirt for tomorrow? The Bowater chaps are coming.’
‘Of course you have.’
‘Did you hear the six o’clock news? What’s the river up to?’
‘Another flood warning.’
‘I hope we won’t have it in the back yard like we did two years ago.’
‘Did you have a nice day?’
‘Yes, fine. Did you? How was the old chap?’
‘Same as usual. He was on about Miles again.’
‘Oh.’
‘Talking about seeing him.’
‘Just talk.’
‘Well, I think he ought to see Miles. He is his son.’
‘Nonsense, Adelaide. There’d be no point after all these years. They’d have nothing to say. They’d just upset each other. By the way, did you remember to bring down the stamps?’
‘Yes.’
Danby did really think there was no point in his seeing Miles. It was not just that Danby hoped to get the stamps. Though of course he did hope to get the stamps. Anybody would.
‘Do you think he’s getting senile?’
‘Certainly not, Adelaide. He gets confused sometimes, but his mind’s very clear really.’
‘He will talk so about spiders. I think he imagines them.’
‘I suspect he attracts them. Have you noticed how his room is always full of spiders?’
‘Horrid things! How long do you think he’ll last?’
‘He sinks under a complication of disorders. Could be ages though.’
‘You said he wouldn’t talk business any more and it was a bad sign.’
‘Maybe. But he’s got a terrific will to live, poor old fellow.’
‘I can’t see why anyone would want to go on living when they’ve got like that. Whatever can he look forward to?’
‘The next drink.’
‘Well, you would! I think old age is awful. I hope I’ll never be old.’
‘When you are old, Adelaide, you will find that life is just as desirable as it is now.’
‘My Auntie’s senile. She’s got completely gaga. She thinks she’s a Russian princess. She talks some sort of gibberish she thinks is Russian.’
‘Funny how mad people go for titles. By the way, is your other cousin still out of work?’
‘Will Boase! He’s not even trying to get work! He just draws National Assistance. They give them too much.’
‘He could do that painting job for us. He needn’t tell the National Assistance people.’
‘He went to grammar school. So did Nigel.’
‘I daresay, Adelaide, but I’m afraid I haven’t any intellectual work to offer him just at the moment!’
‘He ought to be in a proper job. You paid him far too much last time.’
‘Well, one likes to help. He’s quite unlike Nigel, isn’t he. It’s odd to think they’re twins.’
‘They’re not identical twins. I wish you hadn’t got Nigel to work here. It wasn’t my idea.’
‘Well, that was not for charity. He’s terribly good with Bruno. It’s almost uncanny.’
‘What are Bruno and he always talking about?’
‘I don’t know. They shut up like clams when I come in.’
‘I think they’re talking about sex, about girls.’
‘Girls? Nigel? Mmmm.’
‘Fancy Bruno being interested in sex at his age.’
‘A topic of enduring fascination, my dear Adelaide.’
‘But he can’t do anything.’
‘We all live in a private dream world most of the time. Sex is largely in the mind.’
‘I’ve never noticed that you thought it was! I think Nigel knows all about it.’
‘About sex? No one knows that, my dear. You have to specialise. I intuit an interesting and unusual specialist in our Nigel.’
‘You’d need to be an odd sort of man to want to be a nurse.’
‘It’s a very honourable profession, Adelaide.’
‘Don’t be silly. Do you think Nigel takes drugs or something?’
‘He is a bit mystical. But I doubt it. One has enough creepycrawlies in one’s mind without positively encouraging them. Nigel has some sense.’
‘Well, I’m sure he takes something or other. His face is getting all lop-sided.’
‘I think Nigel’s rather beautiful.’
‘You’re mad. He’s a demon.’
‘I rather like demons, actually.’
‘He gives me the creeps. I wish he wasn’t here. I’m terrified he’ll guess about us.’
‘We’re quite shut off in this part of the house, dear kid. Don’t be so anxious about Nigel. He’s sweet and perfectly harmless.’
‘He isn’t. I know him. He’s bad. He’d tell people.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t matter.’
‘It would. You know I don’t want people to know.’
‘All right, kid, all right. Sleepy-byes, sleepy-byes.’
The image of Gwen moved upon Danby’s closed eyes. She was slowly turning her head towards him. Her heavily curled dark brown hair crept on her shoulder, tangled in her cameo brooch. The great-eyed brown glance gathered him into its close attention. ‘Here comes your old comic relief, Gwen my darling.’
There was another image which sometimes came with sleep and which was terrible. Gwen had been drowned in the Thames. She had jumped off Battersea bridge to save a small child which had fallen from a barge. The child swam to the shore. Gwen had a heart attack, became unconscious and drowned. Danby identified her dripping wild-haired body at the mortuary. It was just like Gwen, he told himself over the years, to jump off Battersea bridge in March to save a child who could swim anyway. It was just the sort of lunatic thing she would do. It was typical. Comic, really.
Adelaide said, ‘Bruno told me yesterday that spiders existed a hundred million years before flies existed.’
‘Mmmmm.’
‘But what did the spiders eat?’
Danby was asleep, dreaming of Gwen.
3
NIGEL, WHO HAS been sitting cross-legged on the floor outside Danby’s bedroom, listening in the darkness to Danby and Adelaide talking together, rises silently, elegantly, his legs still crossed. There is nothing more now to be heard within except a counterpoint of snores. He glides up the stairs to his own room, enters and secures the door.
It is dark in the room. The door is locked, the curtains thick as fur. Deep somewhere in the darkness a single candle is burning. Nigel in black shirt, black tights, rotates with outstretched arms. The furniture against the wall is sleek and flat. The brown walls fold away into receding arcs about the glimmering sphere where Nigel turns and turns, thin as a needle, thin as a straight line, narrow as a slitlet through which a steely blinding light attempts to issue forth into the fuzzy world.
Concentric universe. Faster and faster now sphere within sphere revolves and sings. The holy city turns within the ring of equatorial emerald, within the ring of milky way of pearl, within the lacticogalactic wheel, the galaxy of galaxies, that spins motionless upon a point extensionless. The flake of rust, the speck of dust, the invisible slit in the skin through which it all sinks down and runs away.
The candle has grown into a huge luminous cylinder made of alabaster or coconut ice. It glows palely from within and impulsates and breathes. Nigel has fallen upon his knees. Kneeling upright he sways to its noiseless rhythm song. In the beginning was Om, Omphalos, Om Phallos, black undivided round devoid of consciousness or self. Out of the dreamless womb time creeps in the moment which is no beginning at the end which is no end. Time is the crack. Darkness upon darkness moving, awareness slides from being. Vibrations clap their wings and there is sound. An eye regards an eye and there is light.
In the dimness he is squatting huge and
blocks the sky. Little hands vibrate like hairs but he squats huge and broods on self. His idly stirring foot may crush a million million while he scratches, fidgets, brushes away a myriad buzz of littlenesses whose millenia of shrieking are to him the momentary humming of a gnat which between two fingers he idly crushes as he squats still and broods on self.
The humming light is waxing, the mountainous black is waning, the screaming is swelling into a harmony, a dazzling circlet of visible sound. Two indistinct and terrible angels encircle the earth, embracing, enlacing, tumbling through circular space, both oned and oneing in magnetic joy. Love and Death, pursuing and pursued.
The sounds diminish and in the empty pallid azure the golden quoit spins away. At last, it has become a spot of radiance, a stain of gold, a fading flash, a lazar beam, a single blinding point of light which absorbs all light into itself. The colourless soundless silence vibrates and sways. He is near. Nigel trembles pants and shudders. His wide open eyes see nothing, he, Nigel, the all-seer, the priest, the slave of the god. Time and space crumple slowly. He is near, He is near, He is near. They fold and crumple. Love is Death. All is one.
Nigel clutches his heart. He gasps, he groans, he reels. He falls forward on his face on the ground, his forehead strikes the floor. His eyes are screwed together against the glaring dark. The presence is agony, punishment, stripes, the extended being tortured into a single point. Annihilation. All is one.
Later, far away in another world, an old man calls out, calls out, then weeps alone in the dark slow hours of the night. With magnified precision Nigel hears the calling and the weeping. He lies prostrate upon the floor of the world.
4
‘Our Lodger’s such a nice young man,
Such a nice young man is he.’
DANBY, SINGING, AIMED a friendly smack at Nigel’s backside. Nigel tossed his long dark hair and lowered his eyes and left the room with a spiritual smile.
Bruno said, ‘Danby, I am going to summon Miles.’
‘Oh Lord!’
Bruno was sitting propped up in bed. The whitish counterpane was covered with a polychrome scattering of stamps. On top of these lay an open copy of Gerhardt’s Neue Untersuchungen zur Sexualbiologie der Spinnen. Bruno felt clearer in the head today. His legs ached and ached; but that sickening point of malaise in the middle of his being, that possibility of awful pain, had dimmed to nothing. He just felt almost agreeably limp and weak. He had had a long relaxing conversation on the telephone with the weather report man who had been reassuring about the possibility of the Thames flooding. These conversations with polite impersonal official voices soothed Bruno’s nerves. He felt he was a voice himself, a disembodied citizen. After that he had had some excellent wrong numbers.
It was necessary to talk to Miles. He would talk to his son about ordinary indifferent things, about the printing works, about Miles’s job, about Danby’s kindness, about Nigel’s skill. They would talk and talk, and the room would grow dimmer, and then by some quiet scarcely notable transition they would be speaking the names of the women, Parvati, Janie, Maureen, in grave relaxed sadness together contemplating these conjured shades. Miles would be a little formal at first, but as he listened to Bruno’s voice, naming the women, speaking of them with humility and simplicity, he would bow his head and then look upon his father with great gentleness and the room would be filled with an aura of reconciliation and healing. Earlier and alone, repeating to himself the words ‘reconciliation and healing’, Bruno had found tears in his eyes. He wept so easily now. Any story in the newspaper about a lost dog or cat could bring tears to his eyes. Even something about the Royal Family could do it.
It all went back to the beginning. That was something which he would like to try to explain. ‘Bruno’ his father had named him, but his mother, who could not get on with the name, had called him ‘Bruin’, ‘Little Bear’. How had he become corrupted and lost the innocence which belonged to his mother’s only child, and how could the child of such a mother ever have become bad? Yet had he become so bad, and how bad had he become? Most men deceive their wives all the time, statistics say. He had only had Maureen. And his later excesses amounted to little more than holding hands in Notting Hill. He had lived a chaste life really. It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him.
It all seemed so accidental now. Yet could anything have been different on that night, when he proposed to Janie in St. James’s Theatre in an atmosphere of sugar and Shakespeare and the sweet craziness of the London season? He wrote Marry me, Janie on a page from his programme, folded the page into a paper dart, and threw it from the stalls into her box. She caught it in the air and read it with a faint smile as the lights dimmed after the interval. The play was Twelfth Night. Afterwards he searched for her frenziedly in the crowded foyer. Turning away with her party she tapped his arm with her fan. ‘I quite like your suggestion, Bruno. Come and discuss it tomorrow.’
It had gone on, the froufrou and the wit and the bright artificial lights, right on it seemed to him until that moment in crowded sale-time Harrods when Maureen had been struggling with the dress. It was the early days of zip fasteners. Bruno, who often bought her clothes, was standing just outside the curtain of the trying-on room. Maureen had got the dress half over her head, but because the zip had stuck she could get it no further. She came out to Bruno, masked by the dress, her arms helplessly waving, a foot of frilly petticoat showing. ‘Quick, Bruno, get it off, I can’t breathe.’ Bruno laughed, pulled. Then there was suddenly a moment of panic. ‘Maureen, keep still, you won’t suffocate, you fool. You’re tearing the dress.’ The dress came away. Bruno looked over Maureen’s bare shoulder into the eyes of Janie. Janie turned at once and disappeared among the shoppers. Bruno, for whom Maureen no longer existed, darted after her. He sought for her desperately in the slow crowds as he had sought her long ago in the foyer of the theatre. He glimpsed her ahead, hurrying, and then she was gone. He came back to the department and paid the assistant for the torn dress. Maureen had vanished too. You taught me how to love you. Now teach me to forget.
As he waited at home for Janie to come back he felt that the quality of time had altered, perhaps forever. She did not come until the late evening. Janie made him take her to see Maureen. How had she made him? That terrible sense of being punished. Thrusting in front of him she went into Maureen’s flat first and locked the door. He could hear Janie’s voice speaking on the other side of the door and then the sound of Maureen crying. He knocked on the door, calling to be let in. The other lodgers in the house came out of their rooms to watch. They mocked him. ‘His wife’s telling off his mistress!’ ‘Been found out, have you?’ ‘Hard luck, old man.’ They laughed. Bruno went home. More waiting.
He never saw Maureen again. But Janie visited her over a period of several months. ‘I want her to understand what she’s done.’ ‘I want her to know that we were happy together before this happened.’ ‘I want to help her.’ Strong avenging Janie, weak defenceless Maureen. Years later, after Janie was dead, he put an advertisement in The Times. Maureen. At the parting of the ways. Please contact BG. Just to talk of long ago. There was no answer. He had not really expected one. It was an attempt to propitiate her shade. Years later still he saw a terrible news item in the paper. A Mrs. Maureen Jenkins, a widow living by herself in Cricklewood, had been found by neighbours lying dead in her home, suffocated by a dress which she had been unable to pull over her head. There was a picture of a tired stout elderly-looking woman. He could not decide if it was her or not.
Danby had come to sit on the end of the bed. He pushed the stamps into a pile. ‘I do wish you’d be more careful with those stamps, Bruno. I found a Post Office Mauritius on the floor the other day.’
‘Nothing can happen to them.’
‘They could fall through chinks in the floor-boards.’
‘There are no chinks. The room is too dusty to have chinks. The chinks are full of dust.’
‘There’s no point in your seeing Miles, I sho
uldn’t think.’
‘You don’t understand. There are things I can only talk to Miles about.’
‘You want to make a life confession?’
Bruno was silent. He looked down at the stamps, caressing their gay innocent faces. He looked up at Danby’s big healthy handsome face. How odd human faces were. They differed so much in size, apart from anything else. Danby was no fool. ‘Maybe.’
‘Well, make it to me. Or better still to Nigel. He’s in touch with the transcendent.’
‘Why are you against it?’ said Bruno. He could hear his voice quavering. He had a little touch of the fear which he sometimes had now when he realised his utter helplessness. He was a prisoner in this house for ever. If they wanted to keep him from Miles they could do so. They could fail to give messages. They could fail to post letters. There was the telephone. But they could cut the wire. Of course these thoughts were insane.
‘You haven’t really imagined it,’ said Danby. ‘You’d just embarrass each other horribly. You know how you brood as it is. Something unfortunate would be said and you’d just be utterly miserable.’
‘I’ve got to talk to him,’ said Bruno. He looked at his poor blotched hands crawling over the stamps. They looked like huge spiders.
‘Why this fuss all of a sudden when you’ve managed without him for years? You never even answer his letters.’
‘There’s not much–time left.’ Bruno looked involuntarily at his dressing gown.
‘Miles might refuse to come,’ said Danby. ‘Then you’d be terribly upset. Have you thought of that?’
