by Iris Murdoch
‘It has something wrong with it,’ said Nolan gloomily. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll live.’
Marian knelt down too. The bat, a little pipistrel, was pulling itself slowly along the rug with jerky movements of its crumpled leathery arms. It paused and looked up. Marian looked into its strange little doggy face and bright dark eyes. It had an almost uncanny degree of presence, of being. She met its look. Then it opened its little toothy mouth and uttered a high-pitched squawk. Marian laughed and then felt a sudden desire to cry. Without knowing why, she felt she could hardly bear Mrs Crean-Smith and the bat together, as if they were suddenly the same grotesque helpless thing.
‘Dear, dear little creature,’ said Mrs Crean-Smith. ‘Odd to think that it’s a mammal, like us. I can feel such a strange affinity with it, can’t you?’ She stroked its furry back with a finger and the bat huddled up. ‘Put it in its box again, Denis. You will look after it, wont you?’ In some way she could hardly bear the bat either.
‘There’s nothing I can do for it,’ said Nolan. He picked the bat up quickly with one hand, gently. His hands were small and very dirty. He put the creature in a box on the table.
‘Help yourself to some whiskey, Marian. Have you brought the books? Good. I hope you won’t mind waiting a few minutes. Denis is just going to cut my hair.’
This surprised Marian. She had connected Nolan, in so far as she had thought of him at all, with the out-of-doors. She had thought of him as something rather elusive and muddy to be associated with the mysterious horses which were kept somewhere at the far end of the rhododendron slope. She would have thought him ill enough fitted to the role of valet de chambre.
Nolan seemed rather embarrassed and surly at the prospect of a witness. Hannah Crean-Smith, however, had settled herself into a chair and drawn a towel round her shoulders and there was nothing for him to do but to begin. He picked up the comb and scissors and began to handle the plentiful mass of red-golden hair.
Marian felt embarrassed too, as if she were being forced to be present at too intimate a rite. Yet she noticed with a sort of admiration the feudal indifference with which her employer treated the odd little occasion.
Nolan was surprisingly competent. Once he had started, his face softened into a dignified intentness as he flicked the silky stuff this way and that and snipped at it busily. The bright golden clippings furred the towel and sifted quietly to the floor. Marian observed for the first time that he was quite a good-looking man. The dry shaggy locks of blue-black hair framed a firm, ruddy, small-featured face, wherein now the surly look could be seen as a look of cautious watchfulness. And then there were the very striking eyes. Marian met them now with a sudden shock as Nolan, aware of her scrutiny, took her gaze for a moment over the red-golden head. His glance was like the flash of a kingfisher. She shifted her attention hastily to Mrs Crean-Smith’s face. It wore a dreamy expression.
‘I really don’t know what I’d do without Denis.’ Mrs Crean-Smith, her head immobile under the still-active scissors, reached a hand back and took hold of Nolan’s tweed jacket. Her hand nuzzled into his pocket. Marian looked away. Her averted gaze took in the photograph upon the desk.
‘You’ve been singeing your hair with those cigarettes again.’
‘I am bad, aren’t I!’
Marian had noticed the curiously frizzled appearance of the front hair.
That’s done now.’ Nolan whisked away the towel and shook the cuttings into the fire, where they flamed up. He knelt and gathered the pieces from the floor. As he grovelled at her feet, Mrs Crean-Smith caressed his shoulder with a light almost shy touch.
Marian was troubled. Yet the scene had a great naturalness about it and she sensed that it had happened, somewhat like this, many times before.
‘Now my shoes and stockings. I may want to go out later.’
Nolan brought her stockings and watched expressionlessly while, with a hint of petticoats and suspenders, she put them on. Then he knelt again to put on her shoes.
Marian saw that the soles of the shoes were unworn. She said, in order to break the silence which distressed her, ‘What pretty new shoes.’
“They are not new,’ said Mrs Crean-Smith. They are seven years old.’
Nolan looked up at her.
Marian had again the rather uncanny feeling of puzzlement with which her employer often affected her. She could still not make out whether Mrs Crean-Smith were not somehow ill, or convalescing from some grave ailment. The way the people of the house treated her sometimes suggested this. The idea had also at one point come into her mind, put there by something scarcely definable in Gerald Scottow’s manner, that Mrs Crean-Smith might be not always, entirely, absolutely right in the head. She was certainly an eccentric lady.
To pass off the strangeness of the moment Marian said, ‘You’ve kept them very well !’
‘I don’t do much walking.’
It occurred to Marian that indeed Mrs Crean-Smith had not been outside the house since her own arrival here. She must be ill, thought Marian.
Nolan stood back, preparing to be dismissed. He was a trifle shorter than either of the women, and seemed smaller still, almost dwarfish, frowning now and bunched up.
‘Stay, Denis, you shall read too.’
Marian was surprised. She said thoughtlessly, ‘Oh, can you read French?’
‘Yes.’ He gave her a hostile look.
Marian thought, he is a little jealous of me. He sees me as an intruder here.
‘Denis is very clever,’ said Mrs Crean-Smith. ‘You should hear him play the piano and sing. We must have a musical evening soon. Do stay.’
‘No. I must go and see to my fishes.’ He picked up the box with the bat in it. ‘Good night.’ He retired abruptly.
‘Look after my little bat,’ said Mrs Crean-Smith after him. She sighed. ‘Has he shown you the salmon pool?’
‘No,’ said Marian. ‘I’ve hardly talked to Mr Nolan. Are there salmon then? Mr Scottow said they’d gone.’
They’ve come back. Only don’t tell Mr Scottow.’
Ill - or deranged, thought Marian.
‘He will show you the salmon pool, I expect. Have you ever seen salmon leaping? It’s a most moving sight. They spring right out of the water and struggle up the rocks. Such fantastic bravery, to enter another element like that. Like souls approaching God.’
As Marian reflected upon the slightly unexpected simile, her employer rose and began to glide about the room. She was much given to looking at herself in mirrors. She moved now from glass to glass. ‘Listen to the wind. It can blow dreadfully here. In the winter it blows so that it would drive you mad. It blows day after day and one becomes so restless. What do you think of my page?’
‘Your - Mr Nolan? He seems very devoted.’
‘I think he would let me kill him slowly.’
There was a startling possessive savagery in the words which was oddly at variance with the accustomed douceur. Yet her manner, it struck Marian suddenly, was that of a sort of despair. Ill, or deranged, or in despair.
‘But everyone here is devoted to you, Mrs Crean-Smith.’
‘Please call me Hannah. Yes, I know, I’m lucky, Gerald Scottow is a tower of strength. Shall we read now? You shall start, you have such a lovely accent, and later we’ll see if I can translate it all.’
Transported immediately, forgetting all else, into a familiar world of delight Marian began to read.
Ce toit tranquille, ou marchent des colombes,
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
Midi le juste y compose de feux
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée….
Chapter Five
‘All the people round here are related to the fairies,’ said Jamesie Evercreech.
Marian laughed.
She was in a good humour. It was a bright sunny day and the sea was the colour of amethyst. The wind had dropped. The base of the black cliffs steamed gently in the hot sun. She and Jamesie were bowling along in the La
nd Rover in the direction of Blackport, where they were to pick up a crate of whiskey and some clothes which had come on approval for Hannah. Jamesie, who was a keen photographer, was also going to get supplies for his camera. He had used up his last roll of colour film taking a large number of pictures of Marian on the previous day. She was partly flattered and partly unreasoningly alarmed at this attention.
Today all seemed suddenly gay and normal and Marian was quite simply delighted at the thought of a visit to civilization. To see a paved street, to buy a newspaper, to enter a shop, see ordinary people passing, these things seemed positive treats; and although the pubs were taboo, there was apparently a little fishing hotel where she could see a row of bottles and order herself a drink: old rites, familiar and greatly missed.
The last few days at Gaze had been exceptionally somnolent. She had started reading La Princesse de Clèves with Hannah and they had almost fallen asleep over it at eleven o’clock in the morning. The wind had been blowing, producing the aching restlessness of which Hannah had spoken. Gerald Scottow had been unobtrusively absent, had unobtrusively returned, had continued to be polite, dignified, charming and totally unapproachable. Violet Evercreech had been intense and attentive but had not yet again proposed the ‘little talk’. Alice Lejour had been silent. Marian had reflected long and vainly about why the Lejours were never mentioned at Gaze. She had scanned Riders frequently through her glasses and had once or twice seen a youngish man and a dog on the terrace. Feeling today lively and more than usually liberated from shyness, she resolved to question Jamesie about a lot of things before the journey should be out.
‘You don’t come from around here, do you? I mean, have you got fairy blood?’
‘No. I’m one of the other lot.’
‘Of course - you’re related to Mrs Crean-Smith.’
‘Distantly.’ He gave his little weird cry of a laugh.
The car descended steeply into a ravine where the road, behind a low buttressed sea-wall, almost skirted the waves. Marian felt an unpleasant thrill, almost like a sense of guilt, at the sudden proximity of the sea. She had not tried to swim again. She looked hastily inland up a hazy tree-entangled gully. A bright line of trembling light was a distant waterfall.
‘A pretty place.”
‘A rather nasty place, really. It’s called the Devil’s Causeway. There are some very funny-looking rock forms, further up, you can’t see from here.’ He added, ‘Something dreadful happened there on the night of the flood.’
‘What?’
“That little river you saw, like our river at Gaze, came suddenly roaring down from the bog and carried away a car from the road and threw it into the sea and everyone was drowned.’
‘How awful. Were you here when the flood happened?’
‘No. But Mr Scottow was.’
‘How long has he been here?’
‘Seven years.’
‘I suppose there’s no danger of it happening again, something like that?’
‘Oh no. The lake had gone, you see. You must go up on the bog sometime, to the edge anyhow. It’s pretty up there in a funny way. The local people are frightened of it, of course. They only go there in broad daylight to cut turf. Then if the sky becomes at all overcast they run. The bog certainly turns very queer colours.’
T expect they think their relations live there!’
‘I expect they do live there. I wouldn’t go up there in the dark myself for any money. There are strange lights. Anyway, unless you know the paths you can sink into it. There are brushwood paths, but you can get sucked down. A man was sunk in the bog two years ago. They heard him calling all night, but no one could get near him and he sunk in and died.’
Marian shuddered not only at the tale but at some relish in Jamesie’s telling of it. The boy was not all sunshine.
‘I suppose Denis Nolan is a local man?’
‘Yes, he’s one of them. He’s not really here at all. He’s one of the invisible ones. We call him the invisible man. His father was a gillie at Riders.’
‘At Riders, really? I met Miss Lejour the other day. She said she’d invite me over to Riders when someone called Effingham Cooper arrived.’
‘That’ll be a treat! Was she very full of Effingham Cooper?’
‘Well, now that I come to think of it she did mention his name quite a number of times. Are they - engaged, or something?’
Jamesie laughed shrilly. ‘Not at all. Though I expect she wanted you to think sol She’s been making herself a fool about Effingham Cooper for years, everyone knows it. And he doesn’t care for her at all.’
Marian was interested. She wanted to keep the conversation on Riders. ‘Then why does he come here?’
‘For the old man. But mainly - oh, mainly for Mrs Crean-Smith.’ Jamesie cackled again.
Marian was very interested. She did not want to seem too curious or to want to gossip with Jamesie about Hannah, but she could not resist saying casually, T suppose Mrs Crean-Smith is a widow?’
‘No. Mr Crean-Smith lives in New York.’ Jamesie smiled his wide brilliant smile at the empty road and accelerated.
‘Are they - divorced?’
‘No, no.’ He went on smiling and darted a quick look at her.
Marian was disturbed by his provocative enjoyment of her curiosity. She said, to change the subject and because the information had seemed for some reason interesting, ‘You say Mr Scottow came to this region seven years ago?’
‘Oh no. He came to Gaze Castle seven years ago. He’s been in the region almost all his life. He’s a local man too. He was born in the village. His mother still lives there.’
‘Really!’ said Marian. She was very surprised and somehow disconcerted. Yet at the next moment the figure of Gerald Scottow appeared in her imagination more fascinating and mysterious than ever. So he too had fairy blood.
‘Yes. He’s quite the gent now, isn’t he?’ said Jamesie. ‘He likes to keep his old ma dark!’ He giggled, seeming to enjoy the revelation. Yet it had also seemed to Marian that he was very fond of Scottow.
Jamesie went on. ‘His da worked at Riders like Denis’s da. Only Denis stayed on there and Gerald went off to town and got grand.’
‘Oh, Denis worked at Riders?’ Any connexion with the other house was a matter of concern.
‘Yes. Till they chucked him out!’
‘What did they chuck him out for?’
‘Shall I tell you? Yes I will! He jumped on Miss Lejour one day.’ Jamesie laughed so much that the car swerved.
‘Jumped on her?’
‘Yes. Tried to mount her you know. He was with her up at the salmon pool. There used to be salmon up there. And suddenly he sprung on her. Not a thing I’d do, though I suppose she was prettier then. It’s not so very long ago though. After that they were afraid for the maids and everything and they asked him to leave.’
‘How very surprising,’ said Marian. It was surprising. She could not at all picture the subdued and gloomy Denis doing any such thing. He had not the look of a satyr. He was like a wild thing that hides, not a wild thing that pursues. Perhaps that explained the resentful yet penitential air which he carried about with him. It added a new interest to his image, however. She wondered if Mrs Crean-Smith was ever afraid of being ‘jumped on’.
‘This is the best view-place,’ said Jamesie. He slowed down abruptly and turned the car off the road. There was a sudden silence and they both got out into the warm sunshine. The cliff edge was near and they walked towards it.
