by Iris Murdoch
13
‘Il est COCU, le chef de gare!’
MILES PAUSED OUTSIDE the house with irritation. He could hear Danby singing inside. Miles had been feeling all the morning as if he were going to a funeral. He was dressed for a funeral. He felt more than a little sick. He savoured the solemnity of his action in coming to see his father, and wished that solemnity to be recognised and respected by all concerned. He smoothed the frown from his face and rang the bell.
‘Il est COCU, le chef de gare!’
Danby opened the door still singing.
‘Ah, you’ve come, good, come in. Adelaide, meet the young master. This is Miles Greensleave. Adelaide de Crecy.’
A preoccupied young woman with a great deal of piled-up brown hair, wearing a blue and green check overall, nodded to Miles and disappeared beyond the stairs.
‘Adelaide the Maid,’ Danby explained. ‘I don’t suppose you want to go up straightaway? I think we’d better have a talk first. Would you like some coffee? Adelaide! Coffee!’
‘I don’t want any coffee, thank you,’ said Miles.
‘Adelaide! No coffee!’
Danby had led the way down some stairs and through a connecting door and entered what appeared to be his own bedroom. ‘Would you care for a drink? Dutch courage?’
‘No, thank you.’
Miles, who had never visited the house in Stadium Street, wrinkled his nose against the smell and the atmosphere of damp. The stairs seemed to be encrusted with earth or moss. Perhaps it was just old linoleum. Danby’s room, though quite large, was masculine and austerely untidy and rather dark: a bedstead with wooden slatted ends, a dressing table covered with a rather dusty litter of ivory-backed brushes and shaving tackle, a bookshelf full of paperback detective novels. The cheap flowered cretonne curtains were transparent with age. The big sash window showed a small garden, partly concrete, partly dark earth, sparsely dotted with dandelions. Above a dark brick wall one of the black graceless chimneys of the power station towered against a restless cloudy sky. It was raining slightly and the pitted concrete was a dark grey. Miles felt a sudden acute depression, a desolation of a quite new quality. He feared the whole experience, he feared its power to distract, to obsess, to degrade. He feared a defilement.
‘Won’t you take off your mackintosh? Adelaide can dry it in the kitchen.’
‘No, thank you. Look, there isn’t anything to say, is there? I’d better see him and get it over.’
‘I just wanted to tell you,’ said Danby in a low voice, ‘that you’ll find him very much changed. I thought I’d better warn you. He doesn’t look like what he used to look like at all.’
‘Naturally I’d expect him to have aged.’
‘It’s not just age. Well, you’ll see. You won’t upset him, will you?’
‘Of course I won’t upset him!’
‘He’s a poor old man. He just wants to be at peace with everybody.’
‘He is expecting me, isn’t he?’
‘Oh God yes. He’s been all agog. Couldn’t sleep last night. You see, he–’
‘Could I see him now, please? I don’t feel in a mood for conversation.’
‘Yes, yes, come on then, sorry–’
Danby led Miles back through the connecting door and up two flights of stairs. The crumbling stuff underfoot was disintegrating linoleum. On the small dark landing Danby opened a door without knocking and marched in. ‘He’s here, Bruno.’ Miles followed.
Miles was vaguely aware of Danby slipping away behind him and closing the door. Miles stared. Then he caught his breath and put his hand to his mouth in a sudden searing heat of shock and horror. He could feel himself blushing with shock and with shame. Bruno had indeed changed.
Miles had adjusted his picture of his father. He had imagined the silver hair thinned, the back bent a little, the face more hollow. What confronted him was not a death’s head. It was a huge bulbous animal head attached to a body shrunken into a dry stick. Bruno’s head seemed enlarged, the completely hairless dome swollen, bulging out over big sprouting ears. The face below, so far from being gaunt, seemed to have gained flesh. The nose was immense, a shapeless heap of fleshy protuberances. Hair unlike human hair sprouted upon it and upon his cheeks, together with fungus-like stains and excrescences. The bulgier parts of the face were unwrinkled, curiously smooth and pink, almost childlike. Under bushy brows, out of which a few much longer stiffer hairs emerged like probosces, were the slits of eyes, strangely luminous and liquid. Below the thin stalk of neck the tiny narrow body, on which pyjamas hung like garments draped upon a pole, lay extended in the bed. Blotched arms, the bones separately visible, promenaded two shrivelled sharpened hands upon the counterpane.
‘Miles!’ The voice quavered like the voice of an old man in a play. ‘My boy!’
‘Hello, father.’
‘Sit beside me, here.’
Miles felt a nausea which was also an impulse to weep, as if he would spew forth tears. He hoped that he was not exhibiting his state of shock. He sat down stiffly on the chair beside the bed. Perhaps mercifully Bruno did not know what he looked like. There was a sickening den-like smell of soiled sheets and old man.
‘How are you feeling, father?’
‘I feel all right in the mornings, that’s my best time. And evenings after six sometimes, that’s comfortable. But I won’t ever get better again, Miles. You know that, don’t you? They’ve told you?’
‘Oh come, father. When the warm weather comes you’ll be up and about.’
‘Don’t say that. You know it’s not true. It’s so cruel–’
To Miles’s horror two very large crystalline tears had come out of the wet slits of eyes and were making their way down through the ravines of the face.
Miles had expected to be irritated by his father in old familiar ways, he had expected everything to be awkwardly and distressingly familiar. He had determined to play and had pictured himself playing some politer more abstract version of his old role. Then at best it might be like a sort of negotiated peace, old foes round the conference table. There would be all the old emotions and conflicts, but checked and muted. He feared the emotions but with a familiar fear. This ordeal was something he had not dreamt of. He had no resources for dealing with the monstrous thing which was still indubitably his father and which seemed to be wanting tenderness and pity. The father he had known had never wanted pity. Miles felt panic. He had relied upon dignity and dignity seemed at the first moment to be vanishing, revealing beyond it some awful naked demand of one human being upon another which he was totally unprepared to face. Bruno had changed terribly. He can’t be in his right mind, thought Miles, he can’t be, looking like that.
‘I’m–sorry, father. Please don’t–tire yourself. I won’t stay long.’
‘Oh, you’re not going, you’re not going!’ The spotted claw hands with their swollen knobbly joints crawled at him convulsively.
The hands wanted to touch him. Miles moved his chair slightly back. He shrank away and could not bring himself to look into the big tearful animal face.
‘No, but I don’t want to–tire you, father–’
‘Miles, I want to explain everything to you. There isn’t much time left and I know you’ll be kind and listen to me. I’ve got to tell it all, all, all. Janie didn’t understand, she never understood, she made it all into something bad. You see, this girl, Maureen, was playing chess in a café–’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, father.’
‘She was playing chess–’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I think you’re getting excited. I’d better call–’
‘Did you know about it, Miles? Did Gwen know? Did Janie tell you about me and Maureen? Oh, Janie was so cruel to me–It wasn’t much after all, it really wasn’t–’
‘I don’t know anything about this, father.’
‘Janie didn’t tell you? I thought she must have done, I was so sure. You were so–stern with me–and Gwe
n too. Oh God. Forgive me, Miles–’
‘Really, father–’
‘Forgive me, forgive me. Say you forgive me.’
‘Yes, naturally, of course, but–’
‘I must tell you all about it. I want to tell you everything. I had this love affair with this girl Maureen–’
‘Really, father, I don’t think you should tell me this–’
‘I used to go to her flat–’
‘I don’t want to listen–’
‘I lied to Janie–’
‘I don’t want to listen!’
‘I would have liked Parvati, Miles, I would have accepted her and loved her, if only someone had made me meet her, if only you’d all given me a chance, it all happened so quickly, I just said something foolish without thinking and then it somehow got fixed that way, if only you’d given me a little bit more time and not got so angry–’
‘Please, father, all this is totally unnecessary. I don’t want to talk about Parvati.’
‘But I do, Miles. Don’t you understand that I’ve been thinking about it all these years, that it’s been torturing me?’
‘I’m sorry to hear it, but I don’t see–’
‘I’ve got to have your forgiveness. You’ve got to understand.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything, father. It’s all over long ago, it’s gone.’
‘It isn’t gone, it’s here, it’s here–’
‘Don’t excite yourself, please.’
‘I would have liked Parvati. I would have loved her, we could all have been happy, I would have loved your children. Oh Miles, your children–’
‘Stop it, please.’
‘You must forgive me, Miles, forgive me properly, when you’ve understood it all. If only Parvati–’
‘I don’t want to talk about Parvati. She’s nothing to do with you. Please.’
There was a silence. Bruno drew back among his pillows. His hands crawled about his neck. The narrow luminous eyes glowed. He stared at his son.
‘You haven’t been to see me for years.’
‘You never answered my letters.’
‘They were lying letters.’
‘Well, father, if you feel like that I scarcely see the point–’
Bruno’s pointed knees were hunched up toward his chest. His huge head lolled and rolled on the pillows as he leaned on one hand trying to lever himself up. The big bulbous face quivered. The quavering voice issued like a jet of steam.
‘Why did you come here to be so unkind to an old man? You never loved me, you always sided with your mother, you never came near me, you were never affectionate and forgiving like other children, you were cold to me, and you still hate me now and you wish me dead, dead and gone, like all those things you said didn’t exist any more. All right, I’ll soon be dead and you can forget me and bury me and tidy me away for ever. You can’t take the trouble even now to try to see what I’m really like. You just think that I’m dying and I smell of death and I’ve lost my mind and I’m just a heap of stinking rotting flesh that you can’t bring yourself to touch, but I’ve still got enough spirit left to curse you–’
‘Father, please–’
‘Get out, get out, get out!’ Bruno’s quivering hand fumbled with a glass of water which stood on the bedside table. He made as if to hurl it, but he had not the force to lift the glass and the water spilled darkly down the side of the counterpane and the glass crashed into pieces on the floor. ‘Aah–Danby! Danby!’
Miles backed away, stumbled through the door, blundered across the dark landing and began to run down the stairs. At the bottom he cannoned into Danby. For a moment Danby seized hold of his wrist. ‘You’ve upset him, damn you! I told you not to!’
Miles wrenched himself away, and as he got out of the front door he could hear the voice above him screaming now. ‘And you shan’t have the stamps! You shan’t have the stamps!’
He began to run away down the street in the rain. He ought never to have gone. It was like a doom, it was more terrible than he could have imagined. He was back in that awful world of stupidity and violence and muddle. He was utterly utterly defiled.
14
‘PLEASE MAY WE see him? We didn’t telephone in case you said no.’
Danby stared at the two women. It had stopped raining and an east wind was running through a smudged grey sky. The women were wearing mackintoshes and scarves over their heads. Their faces were anxious, large and pale and looming in the sullen light. Diana’s mackintosh had a harlequin pattern of pink and white and she was carrying a bunch of narcissus. The street behind them was windswept and empty.
‘Come in,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think–Look, you’d better come through to my room.’
He led them through the dark hall and down into his bedroom, closing the communicating door. ‘He hears everything in the other part of the house. I’d rather he didn’t–It’s very kind of you to come.’
Diana pushed the scarf back revealing her brow and a strained-back strip of gleaming hair. ‘Miles is so upset about yesterday.’
‘Damn Miles, if I may say so.’
‘Yes, I know, I’m sure he was awful, tactless and so on. He says he just froze up. And Bruno was rather emotional and Miles hates emotion.’
‘It was hardly an unemotional situation. Miles ought to have tried.’
‘He really did intend to try, I know he did. He got the impression that Bruno was a bit–sort of unhinged.’
‘Bruno isn’t unhinged. Miles is criminally stupid.’
‘It all took him by surprise–’
‘He was in such a damn hurry. I wanted to brief him beforehand but he wouldn’t listen. I should have insisted.’
‘Well, may we see Bruno?’
‘Bruno isn’t very seeable today.’
‘He’s upset too?’
‘He’s not just upset, he’s thoroughly ill. A man who’s as sick as Bruno can’t be philosophical. He was completely knocked out by that idiotic scene with Miles. I’ll take the flowers up. But I’m afraid–’
‘Couldn’t we just go in and see him for a moment?’ Lisa spoke, her head still shrouded, leaning against the door, hands in pockets.
‘Well–’ Danby gave his attention to Lisa for the first time. She was much darker than her sister and very thin in the face. Wisps of dark brown hair, like thorns, emerged from under her tightly knotted damp yellow scarf. Her rather long nose was reddened by the east wind.
‘You see,’ Lisa went on, ‘I think it’s very important to do something quickly before they both settle down to thinking that they can’t communicate.’
‘I’m sure Lisa’s right,’ said Diana. ‘It was her idea to come round on this sort of embassy. I think perhaps Bruno–We’d tell him Miles is sorry–Two women–’
‘Two women!’ Danby laughed. ‘You girls think yourselves omnipotent. You’re dealing with a very sick person and a thoroughly cantankerous old man. Don’t imagine Bruno will eat out of your hand!’
‘We wouldn’t stay more than a moment,’ said Lisa, ‘just to give him the flowers and say a word. He could think about it afterwards. And it might give him something nicer to think about, it would make a break between that and now.’
Danby hesitated. ‘Well, I’ll go and tell him you’re here. But I very much doubt if he’ll see you. He’s worked himself up into a real state of angry misery, and I’m afraid he’s a bit confused too, it’s not one of his good days.’
‘Please–’
‘All right, I’ll see. You can come up and wait on the landing. Oh hello, Adelaide. This is Adelaide the Maid. Mrs. Greensleave. Miss Watkin.’
Danby went up the two flights of stairs and put his head round Bruno’s door. The unlit room was a tiny grey box suspended from the window, where racing luminous grey clouds were imparting a gliding motion to the black bar of the power station tower. Bruno was sitting bolt upright in bed in a position unusual to him: he lay usually well snuggled down into the blankets. His red and white striped flannel pyjamas
were buttoned up to the neck. His arms held stiffly by his sides descended into the blankets. His face was so contorted that it was difficult to discern the features or to see this prominent mass of crumpled flesh as part of a human being. Nigel, who said it was now ‘too difficult to get into the crevices,’ had not shaved him for two days and the lower face and neck were covered with a grey fungus. Danby averted his eyes. ‘Bruno, Miles’s wife and sister-in-law are here.’
Bruno’s head rolled slightly and Danby felt himself looked at.
‘Please, we’ll just–’ Danby felt a fluttering outside the door behind him and the pink and white mackintosh creaked, touched his coat.
Bruno said nothing.
Danby, turning and opening the door a little more, said, ‘Just put the flowers quickly on the bed and go.’ He felt upset and confused by the arrival of the women, as if he were suddenly frightened of Bruno on their behalf. He ought to have warned them about Bruno’s appearance.
Diana pushed past into the room and then stood rigid. He caught the faint gasp of her breath. Lisa had come up close behind her shoulder, pushing back her yellow scarf. He saw their two juxtaposed faces with wide eyes staring, the light brown eyes, the dark brown eyes. After a moment Diana leaned nervously forward and with an outstretched arm dropped the wrapped bundle of narcissus, like a very thin baby in swaddling clothes, on to the top of the bulging foot cage. It was like an official visit to a cenotaph. Only this tomb was not empty.
Still facing toward the bed, with unfocused eyes Diana was beginning to back toward the door, edging past Lisa who had stepped aside.
‘Who did you say these girls were?’ said Bruno. His unsteady voice had the hoarse gurgling note which belonged to the more confused days, but the strength and force of the question had a startling effect.
‘They’ve just brought you some flowers. They–’
‘Who are they?’
‘Miles’s wife and sister-in-law.’
‘Miles’s wife and sister–’
‘Sister-in-law. These two ladies are sisters.’
