by Iris Murdoch
‘The world is independent of my will.’
‘The sense of it must lie outside it. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value.’
‘And if there were it would be of no value.’
‘If good and bad willing changes the world it can only change the limits of the world. The world must wax and wane as a whole.’
‘The world of the happy is quite other than the world of the unhappy.’
‘As in death too, the world does not change but ceases.’
‘Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.’
‘If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, he lives eternally who lives in the present.’
‘Not how the world is but that it is is the mystical.’
‘Whereof we cannot speak.’
‘Thereof we must be silent.’
A beautiful woman has entered the room with a brow as broad and bland as the dawn. Her night robe of midnight blue sweeps the ground. She sets a tray before the disputants and sits between them patting them both with her hands. Looking upon her with love they sip Ovaltine dissolved in hot milk and nibble custard cream biscuits.
Nigel goes home. He kneels on damp slimy moss while Danby gazes at himself in a mirror. Danby smiles at himself, admiring his double row of even white teeth. Kneeling so close to him unseen Nigel smiles too, the tender, forgiving, infinitely sad smile of almighty God.
10
SLOW FOXTROT.
With eyes half closed Danby and Diana were rotating dreamily in each other’s arms. The dancing floor was filled with quiet gliding comatose middle-aged couples, all dancing very well. The lights were reddish and low. The marble pillars of the ballroom soared into an invisibility of cigarette haze. The walls were of golden mosaic with turquoise blue mosaic flowers figured upon them. Upon the pillars gilded cornucopias, cunningly fixed, leaned outward into the hall, above scalloped fringes of purple velvet. Jungles of ferns and palms occupied all corners and masked the entrance. There was a thick, sweet, powdery smell of inexpensive perfume and cosmetic. A few people sat at tables at the side, but most of those present were dancing with their eyes half closed and their cheeks glued together. A few conversed in low whispers. Most were silent. It was the afternoon.
‘Danby.’
‘Yes.’
‘We are the youngest people here.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think all those women are dancing with their husbands?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Will they tell their husbands?’
‘No, of course not. Will you tell your husband?’
‘Isn’t it odd to think it’s afternoon outside and the sun is shining?’
‘Yes.’
‘The afternoon is a wicked time. I think in hell it must be always afternoon.’
Diana spoke in a scarcely audible murmur as if in her sleep. Her attention was almost completely absorbed by the pressure of Danby’s cheek upon her own and by the light, firm, sensitive guiding movements of Danby’s right hand upon her back.
Diana was not sure how or why she was on the dancing floor with Danby. He had rung up. There had been a sense of fatality, a craving, extremely sharp and precise, to feel those authoritative cellist fingers once again touching her back. It was all very unusual. She had spent so many years waiting for children and only lately had consciously told herself that the wait was over. She had occupied so many years–how had she occupied them? Miles had been her occupation: Miles’s loneliness, Miles’s shyness, his nervous animism, his inability in some ways to take hold of life at all. She had soon ceased being ambitious for him in his work. She simply wanted to preserve and prolong her sense of protecting him, of warming him to life. Meanwhile she flirted a little with her friends of both sexes. She told herself that she was not naturally monogamous while remaining strictly so. She took notice of the fact that her vaguely erotic daydreams did not always concern her husband. Yet there was no one who could interest her as Miles constantly, consistently, passionately interested her. The umbilical cord of her early love for him had never been broken. She still counted herself fortunate. Though lately, perhaps prophetically, collected quietly in the kitchen at night, she had found herself looking a little with new eyes, had felt a vague need for change, had sensed even the possibility of boredom.
She had lived upon her inexhaustible love for Miles. She had also lived on something which was perhaps not inexhaustible, her dream picture of herself. Making the house had taken her years and within it she had occupied years in posing. She posed in a silk afternoon dress in the drawing room, in a nylon negligee in the bedroom. While doing the flowers she posed as a lady doing the flowers. She made up her face through solitary afternoons. Miles hated social life and they hardly ever entertained. She was like a prostitute waiting among the toys and trinkets of her trade, only the man she was waiting for was her husband.
Like a religious, she had meditated for years upon her luck in getting Miles. She had never dreamed of so distinguished, so aristocratic a catch. She would even have been contented with much less. Her father was dead, but she still visited her elderly mother in the house where she had been brought up, and she was kind to the old lady, but could not help contemplating with satisfaction the gap between her mother’s life and her own. Miles, without even noticing it, had lifted her across. She set herself to make a beautiful and elegant burrow for them both and within it over the years they grew together like two animals that come to develop a single telepathic personality.
She had played the passionate exacting mistress to Miles with the more conscious abandon since she knew that she was for him a second best. The idea of Parvati did not distress her, on the contrary. She charmed herself with her role of healer. She was not the damsel heroine in the castle, she was the mysterious lady of the fountain who heals the wound of the wandering knight, the wound which has defied all other touches. The role was the more grateful since the damsel heroine was long ago dead, not forgotten, but mercifully absent. There was only the fountain lady now. And the memory of the lost one remained as a guarantee of her husband’s fidelity. The dead Parvati reigned felicitously over their marriage.
Lisa, poor Lisa, had come to be an occupation too, as she had been long ago in Diana’s childhood, when Lisa’s idealism and lack of common sense had constantly landed her in scrapes with which Diana had had to deal. Diana was devoted to her sister and enjoyed both admiring and patronising her, and had always been helped and supported by Lisa’s return of unquestioning love. With Lisa she had enjoyed by nature that animal closeness and identity which with Miles she had after many years achieved. Adult life parted them and at their rarer meetings they had had increasingly less to say to each other, though something of the old closeness still remained. Diana was glad that Miles liked Lisa; and after Lisa’s illness it had seemed natural for the married pair to ask her, for the time at any rate, to make her home with them. How she and Miles argued! It was all a novelty and somehow a felicitous one.
Diana felt infinitely sorry for Lisa, mediating her compassion through her sense of the utter alienness of her sister, through her sense of her own temperamental luck. Diana was a cheerful unanxious person, endowed with good looks and an aura of self-satisfaction. The faintly enigmatic smile which hovered about her lips like a resident cupid was really a very simple smile of satisfaction, a radiant outward sign of a totality of plump, healthy, gratified, successfully incarnate being. Lisa was without beauty, and such handsomeness as she had once had had gone with her illness. She was clever of course, and on the evidence she was tougher than she seemed. She held down a job as a school mistress at a school in the East End, one visit to which had made Diana feel quite sick. Yet in spite of this she appeared to Diana as a doomed girl. Diana had been surprised at her sister’s recovery. ‘Lisa wants death,’ she had said to Miles. ‘She certainly wants to suffer,’ Miles had replied. ‘That isn’t quite t
he same thing.’ ‘She’s a mystic,’ Diana had concluded. ‘She wants to be nothinged.’ ‘She is certainly a masochist,’ Miles had agreed.
I am middle-aged, thought Diana, looking round the ballroom at the dreamy couples who were so far from young. I belong with these people. The novelty of Lisa had worn off. Had Diana now reached an age where there had to be, at last, one novelty after another? Was this a kind of wickedness? She could not feel it. She could only feel an excited sense of rejuvenation and funniness in the unexpected advent of Danby. Of course she had thought about Bruno and she had thought about Danby, only imagining him quite unreflectively in terms of Miles’s picture. Even after Miles’s recent interview with Danby she had listened quite simple-heartedly to Miles’s exclamations about that fat dolt and that grinning buffoon. She had not expected to be instantly captivated. The sheer surprise of it was life-giving. Danby’s smooth brown humorous face, his drooping crest of white hair, his strong confident smile, hovered in her mind as she told Miles, in somewhat curtailed terms, of Danby’s visit, and while she listened in silence to Miles’s stream of sarcasm. The images accompanied her to bed.
‘The contact of bodies is the contact of minds.’
‘You are a philosopher, Danby.’
‘Think of all the ridiculous years we haven’t known each other.’
‘I feel I’ve known you for ages.’
‘I feel that too. I think we’re each other’s type. Yes?’
‘Maybe. You’re someone I can be entirely light-hearted with without feeling worried. It’s not so easy for a woman of my age to take this kind of–holiday.’
‘Light-hearted. You don’t mean frivolous, cynical?’
‘No, light-hearted. You make me laugh.’
‘Well, that’s all right. Let’s have a love affair.’
‘No, Danby, nothing like that. I love my husband. I’m permanently hooked.’
‘Oh. I think it’s rather bad form for a woman to say that when she’s illicitly dancing with another man.’
‘I’m afraid it’s true, my dear.’
‘Let me pay you the tribute of saying that your remark has caused me pain.’
‘Let me pay you the tribute of saying that I survey your pain with pleasure.’
‘We might get somewhere on that basis.’
‘No, no–’
‘You said no last time and then yes, so I’ll go on hoping.’
‘Don’t. I’m glad you wanted to dance with me, that’s all.’
‘That isn’t all, since we’re here together in this awfully deliciously wicked place.’
‘It is rather an image of sin, isn’t it.’
‘Let’s give the image some substance then.’
‘Have you got anybody, Danby?’
‘A girl, no.’
‘You’re not queer, are you?’
‘Good God no! Diana, you make me feel quite faint!’
‘All alone?’
‘All alone. There was someone, but she went to Australia. I mope.’
‘Poor Danby. But really I think one’s thoughts and feelings are not all that important.’
‘Mine are. I am thinking and feeling that I want you. What are you going to do about it? You realise that you’ve led me on?’
‘I’m nearly fifty. It doesn’t apply.’
‘I’m over fifty. It does.’
‘Don’t make difficulties. Just for the moment really I feel young again.’
‘It’s the music. This place belongs to the past. It’s something to do with movement, repetition. I feel young too, timeless, rather.’
‘Timeless, yes. You’re very attractive.’
‘Then what about it?’
‘No, no.’
‘You aren’t going to tell Miles and then write me a note saying you won’t see me again? I shall really make difficulties if you do that.’
‘No, of course not. But it must all be quiet and formal and romantic.’
‘Those seem to me contradictory terms. You mean chocolates, flowers–?’
‘I mean a sort of romantic friendship.’
‘Men aren’t good at romantic friendships. I want you in bed.’
‘You aren’t really in love with me, I’m not really in love with you. We’re just captivated.’
‘We can’t tell yet about being in love. And anyway what’s wrong with being captivated? I’m not all that often captivated, I can tell you!’
‘We care for each other with the less good parts of ourselves.’
‘Now you’re being philosophical. May I see you home?’
‘No.’
‘Miles won’t be there, it’s too early.’
‘No.’
‘Diana, I’ve just got to be alone with you for a minute. I want to kiss you.’
‘No.’
11
‘NIGEL!’
It was three o’clock in the morning, the terrible slough of the night time. Bruno had been dreaming. He dreamt that he had murdered somebody, a woman, but he could not remember whom, and had buried the body in the front garden of a house in Twickenham where he had lived as a child. People kept coming and staring at the place where the body was buried and pointing to it until Bruno noticed with horror that the shape of the body was clearly visible through the earth, outlined with a reddish luminous glow. Then he was in a law court and the judge, who was Miles, was condemning him to death. He woke up with a racing heart. He felt sudden instinctive relief at knowing it was a dream before he realised a moment later that it was true. He was condemned to death.
The room with its curtains closely drawn was pitch dark, but he could just see the time on the luminous dial of his watch. Bruno reached out to try to put his light on but could not find the lamp. It must have been moved from his bedside table to the table beside the window. Adelaide sometimes did this when she was dusting and forgot to put it back. Nigel had put the light out for him at eleven o’clock. Bruno lay with one hand pressed to his heart. His heart was jumping and missing beats like a runner who runs too fast and constantly stumbles. There was an acute pain in his chest in the region of the heart and a sense of constriction as if a wire which had been passed round his chest were being drawn tighter and tighter. He moved his feet feebly inside their cage, thinking he might get up and find the light, but he felt too weak to move. Then an agonising cramp seized his left foot. He tried to rub it against the other foot to ease the pain. He thought, it’s come, the time of prostration, of overwhelming weakness, of bedpans. The time of the dressing gown. Only, how odd, he would not be needing the dressing gown any more. The dressing gown would be a spectator awaiting its hour. But this was absurd. He had often felt weak before and it had passed off. Life is a series of unpleasant things which pass off. Except that there is one last one which doesn’t.
Bruno made an effort to restrain his tears. Odd business, trying to restrain tears, he said laboriously to himself. They live somewhere there at the back of your eyes, you can feel them moving in there like animals. Then there is the weak defeated pleasure of the warm tide rising, the water overflowing on to the cheek. The tears were a little relief. He moved his hand with difficulty and touched his cheek and took his salty finger to his lips. He thought, perhaps I won’t see Miles after all. His son now seemed to him the image of death. His heart was still stumbling along. And what was that noise, an intermittent buzzing noise, like an engine. Listening, Bruno could not decide whether it was a loud sound far away or a little sound near. Then he recognised it. It was the sound of a fly struggling in a spider’s web. It was probably in the web of a large Tegenaria atrica of whose friendly presence high up in the corner of the ceiling Bruno had for some time been conscious. The desperate bursts of buzzing continued, became briefer, stopped. The horror came back to Bruno. The time of the dressing gown. Then he began to call again.
‘NIGEL!’
The door opened softly. ‘Ssh, ssh, you’ll wake Danby.’ Nigel switched the light on at the door, moved to the table beside the window, switche
d on the dark green shaded lamp, and then switched off the centre light.
Bruno lay weak and relaxed with relief. ‘Could you put the lamp beside me, Nigel? Oh dear, I seem to have knocked over my water. Could you mop it up? I hope it hasn’t got on to the books.’
‘Are you feeling funny?’
‘I’m all right. I just got frightened. I’ve got awful cramp in my left foot. Could you just hold it, hold it tight, that’s fine.’
Nigel’s strong warm hands gripped the suffering foot and the pain immediately went away.
‘Thank you, it’s gone. I’m sorry I woke you.’
‘I was awake anyway.’
‘Nigel, could you prop me up a bit, I want to be sure I can still get my legs out.’
Bruno slowly edged up in the bed, pushing hard with his hands while Nigel raised him with a hand under each arm. Nigel lifted the bedclothes while Bruno very slowly manoeuvred his legs toward the edge of the bed. It seemed to be all right after all.
‘Do you want to go?’
‘No. I just wanted to be sure I could. I felt so weak just now. I had a bad dream. All right, let me be now. Nigel, would you mind staying just a short while until I feel better? Would you sit beside me?’
‘Sure.’
Nigel drew the chair up beside Bruno’s bed. He collected Bruno’s two hands which were straying spider-like upon the counterpane and began to caress them. This caressing movement, a firm smoothing down toward the tips of the fingers, always made Bruno feel relaxed. Perhaps it eased the rheumatism in his knuckles.
They spoke in low voices.
‘Why are you so kind to me, Nigel? I know I’m horrible. No one else would touch me. Are you mortifying the flesh?’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I impose on you.’
‘I exist to be imposed upon.’
