An Unofficial rose

by Iris Murdoch

  He had tried not to think about Emma Sands, but of course it was impossible not to. The figure he had momentarily seen at the funeral had certainly been Emma; and he only rescued himself by the reflection that her presence was in bad taste from the reflection that her presence was almost sinister. But Emma had never been afraid of bad taste. She was a person who did whatever she wanted. It was a little later that Hugh reflected that Emma and Fanny had been great friends in childhood, and why should not, at such a distance in time from either object, that childhood friendship be as real to her now as the venomous jealousy with which Fanny had later inspired her. Yet this thought was disagreeable too.

  His mind returned in an obsessive way to Randall's mysterious salute. Something in that gesture suggested to Hugh, that Randall was not surprised at seeing Emma. Randall was not surprised, Randall was in Emma's confidence. There was something here which if he attended to it would be perhaps intolerable. He tried not to attend to it; and his grief for Fanny, returning to him now in the house where she had suffered so long, came to him with a kind of healing intensity. He burned himself with that pure pain. But he knew too that he had been touched by something, some leper touch, which would work out its own relentless chemistry, ignore it as he might.

  It was odd the way he had kept seeing Emma through those years: seeing her, but never speaking to her. It was as if some god designed that he should not forget. Yet, in a way, he had forgotten. The wound had healed, the anguish had gone, in the end, as he could never have imagined it would. It had never crossed his mind, once the first terrible time was over, to try to see Emma again; and this not because of any sense of duty, but because of a steady failure of inclination, a steady diminishing of appetite. When, at the regular intervals appointed by the god, he had espied her from the top of a bus, glimpsed her, always in the next room, at a picture exhibition, seen her back disappearing into a shop, and once passed her unobserved on an ascending escalator while she descended on the other side, he had felt an extreme but quite momentary sh6ck. He had thought of her as belonging to the past.

  For nearly two days now he had known that he would have to talk to Randall about her. What he had seen made it imperative. But it was an unpleasant, even distinctly alarming, prospect and he had put off doing so. Randall had been seventeen at the time of the affair with Emma. He had certainly known a little about it at the time. He had doubtless learnt more since. But the name of Emma had never come up between them, and it was only indirectly that Hugh had learnt, and had tried to forget it at once, that Randall was sometimes to be seen at Emma's house.

  What Randall did in London was a mystery to all. In the last few years, and especially since Steve died, he had taken to spending more and more time in London, where he kept a little flat in Chelsea. Ann had increasingly taken over the management of the nursery, so that by now Randall, who even dared to complain about it, seemed more like a privileged lodger than like the master of the house. At some point in this process Randall had given it out that he had decided to become a writer; and shut up in his tower room he had in fact written four plays, none of which Ann or Hugh had been allowed to see. Part of his time in London had doubtless been devoted, unsuccessfully, to getting one of these plays put on. But it had gradually and imperceptibly become fairly evident to Hugh that Randall must have a London mistress. He wondered how evident it was by now to Ann.

  During Fanny's illness Randall had spent much more time at home and had behaved in a fairly orderly way, and it had seemed possible to Hugh that the bad patch was now over and that his son might settle down again with his wife and child. Randall's behaviour since their return to Grayhallock had not been exactly reassuring; but it was too early to tell, and what Randall would do next was anybody's guess. Hugh had avoided 'speaking seriously' to his son about his treatment of Ann or indeed about anything else; and he occasionally wondered if this were not, on, his part, a grave failure. He certainly ought to speak to Randall sometime about the drink. That the other things were bad might liberally be thought a matter of opinion, but it was no mere matter of opinion that the drink was bad. These were unpleasant thoughts. And Hugh knew, which was another unpleasant thought, that only the spur of a quite personal and selfish obsession, would ever make him overcome his reluctance to be frank and direct with his boy. Under the pressure of such a spur he now writhed in the direction of a decision.

  'And this afternoon perhaps you'd make another search for Hatfield, Ann was saying. She did not like people to be idle. Hatfield, Fanny's cat, had run wild since her death and disappeared into the fields.

  'He's gone right away, Hatfield, said Miranda. 'He won't come back ever.

  'Yes he will, said Ann. 'Bowshott saw him last week quite close to the house. And the milk I left out got drunk up.

  'My hedgehogs drank that milk.

  'Anyway you try and find him, and take Penny with you. You're neglecting Penny.

  'He wouldn't come back with me, said Miranda. 'He doesn't like me. He's a one-woman cat.

  'Well, off you go to change, it's after ten-thirty. Which doll are you taking to church this time? Is Poussette the lucky one?

  'That's not Poussette! said Miranda scornfully. 'That's Nanette!

  You always mix them up. She uncurled herself and began to make for the door, trailing the doll in one hand.

  Half-way there she stopped and turned back to Hugh. 'So sad. I never remembered to ask Granny how that card trick was done, the one where you hit the pack on to the floor and the card you looked at first is left in your hand.

  The door banged behind her. Avoiding Ann's eye, Hugh settled down to read Sarah's letter.

  Chapter Three

  'I W O U LD N' T stand for it a moment if I was your missus!

  'Wouldn't you, Nancy? And what would you do about it, would you beat me? Why, I believe you would! Laughter followed.

  Pausing on the stairs of the tower, Hugh recognized with distaste Nancy Bowshott's voice issuing from the half-open door of Randall's room. He hated this familiarity with the servants, he hated everybody knowing that all was not well. Ann and Miranda were still preparing for church, and Hugh had nerved himself, before further «reflection should make him once more hesitate, to go to see his son, though he had not decided what he would say to him. The nervous urge to confront Randall had suddenly become strong.

  Hugh retired, coughed, and went noisily up the remaining stairs.

  He knocked and put his head round the door. Nancy Bowshott, a plump girl with a great deal of chestnut hair and a discontented face, who was credited with having a brute for a husband, hastily put down a glass upon the table. she picked up her dustpan, patted the neat tight handkerchief out of which her mane bulkily emerged at the back of her head, and looking a little red, slid past Hugh with a murmured 'Good morning'. Hugh entered and closed the door behind him.

  Looking a little like something by Hogarth, Randall lounged behind his table on which were to be seen a bottle of whisky, two glasses, three bowls of roses, a pile of notebooks, some scribbled sheets of paper, an overflowing ashtray, a banana, a half-eaten biscuit, a pair of secateurs, and an original volume of prints by Redoute which had cost Randall a very large sum of money at Christie's. Without a coat, displaying striped braces, his crumpled collarless shirt open at the neck, he surveyed his father with an air of benign and meditative encouragement, like an Abbot giving audience. The room smelt of alcohol and roses.

  'Well, Randall, said Hugh. 'Well, Father, said Randall.

  Hugh's relations with his son, uneasy in the latter's childhood, impossible during his adolescence, and embarrassed in the early days of his marriage, had unaccountably improved of late. Hugh was not sure whether this was due simply to an increasing need to replace Sarah, or whether it was not connected in some subterranean way with the deterioration of Randall's relations with his wife. This last suspicion caused Hugh some uneasiness; and there were moments when he detected, in his still shy and reserved dealings with his son, the merest touch of an
unpleasant complicity.

  'I was just wondering, said Hugh, 'whether I could persuade you to come over to Seton Blaise with the rest of us this evening.

  'Well, I don't think you can, said Randall, tilting his chair and till benign. 'I don't like those people and they don't like me, and I don't really see why I should expose myself to their blood disapproval.

  'All right, all right, said Hugh. Did they disapprove of Randall? He didn't know. Mildred, with her long tolerance of Humphrey and her skill in defending him, was surely not a censorious woman. Mildred: he thought of her for a moment. Yes, he remembered kissing her, but he could not recall the details, except that it was summer.

  Quiet in Randall's attention, Hugh crossed to the window and looked out. From the tower it was possible to see over the tops of the beech trees and over the nursery garden which looked from here like a set of embroidered squares with the roses showing against the bare earth, as it followed the plump arc of the sharply falling hillside. Near to the foot of the hill arose the short spiky spears of a sweet chestnut plantation, and beyond it a little patch of woodland, where the wild berry was but lately over, half veiled a group of conical oast houses in a blur of green. The village, hidden under the other spur of the hill, showed between luxuriant elms, golden-yellow now in the bright sun, only the slim upper part of the church spire. Beyond again was the far-receding level of the Marsh, its grassland, its willows, always a little paled and silvered. Hugh gazed at it, almost invisible to him in its familiarity, and heard up above his head Miranda bounding noisily about her room and singing in a tone that was meant to be heard 'Aprиs de ma blonde'. She had a pretty little voice.

  'I've had a letter from Sarah, he said. 'Would you like to see it?

  'No, thanks, said Randall. He added. 'Letters from Sarah give me a pain. She's treated me like a composite entity ever since I got married. She begins «Dearest Ann and Randall», and ends «With love to you both from us both, yours Sally». As if «love» could mean anything in a formula like that. And as if my dear brother-in-law had ever felt any emotions where I was concerned except amazement and contempt.

  'Which you reciprocate.

  'A meaningless man from a meaningless place. I suppose Sarah's all right?

  'She's pregnant again, said Hugh.

  'God, not again! said Randall. 'Anyone would think they were bloody Roman Catholics. There's Jimmie, and Sally, and Penny, and Jeanie, and Bobby, and Timmie, and now there'll be Baby too. Jesus Christ!

  'Ah, there's Penn, said Hugh looking down. He saw the boy emerge from the beech trees and drift across the wide space of lawn, his hands in his pockets. He seemed aimless and lost. The poor child was naturally a bit overwhelmed by England. Hugh hoped that he was not in too much of a daze to recall the drying up.

  'What a pity that boy's got that accent, said Randall.

  'I wish they'd sent him to a proper school, as I suggested, said Hugh. 'That might at least have civilized his voice, Hugh had pressed Sarah to send Penn to a boarding school in Australia and had offered to pay the fees. The offer had been refused, with confused explanations from Sarah behind which Hugh could hear Jimmie's voice exclaiming that he was not going to have his son made a bloody snob of.

  Randall, who disapproved of money spent on the Graham family, was silent for a moment, and then said, 'He wants to be a motor mechanic anyway, as if that removed the scandal of the accent.

  Miranda, dressed for church, erupted into the room, shot a quick glance at Hugh and ran to her father. Randall's face was illuminated. He swung his chair round and Miranda precipitated herself on to his knee, locking her Anns tightly about his neck. 'My little bird, he murmured, and his hand descended her back. Hugh turned away.

  Miranda, after hugging him in silence for another moment, drew herself off and bounded out of the door. Randall looked after her smiling.

  Hugh contemplated his son. Randall was certainly good-looking.

  He had a big imposing sensual face with a large nose and large brown eyes. His straight dry brown hair was copious and showed no traces of grey. His mouth pouted with sensitive humorous hesitation as if he were perpetually suspending judgement about a funny story that was being told. Only a slight moistness at eyes and mouth, a slight pale plumpness of cheek, aged him a little and touched his vitality with a faint shadow of indulgence and excess.

  Hugh absently picked one of the roses out of the nearest bowl. Randall preferred the Moss roses and the old roses of Provence to the metallic pink of his own creations. Hugh looked at the rose. The petals, fading through shades of soft lilac, and bending back at the edges so that the rose was almost spherical, were closely packed in a series of spirals about a central green eye. He said to Randall, 'Are you drinking too much?

  'Yes, said Randall. He got up and joined Hugh at the window.

  They both looked out.

  While Hugh was hesitating about whether and how to pursue the subject they saw, far below, Ann and Miranda emerge from the porch and set off along the wide band of gravel that lay in front of the house. The two, hatted and gloved, seemed to trot with a conscious demureness. 'The men watched them go. There was always for Hugh something a little weird in the sight of Miranda on her way to church.

  Hugh could smell Randall's breath now. He twirled the rose and tried to think of the right words. 'I suppose you're worried — about Ann and so on?

  Randall made a violent inarticulate exclamation. 'Worried? Christ!

  'What's wrong, really?

  'What's wrong? Everything's wrong. He was silent for a moment and then said thickly, She just ruins me. She — destroys my footholds.

  Hugh became aware that his son was positively drunk. He said a little sarcastically, 'Footholds? So you're climbing up are you?

  'Up or down it makes no difference, said Randall, 'so long as it's away from her. He still stared at the place where his wife and daughter had disappeared. 'Or rather, he said, and his stare became vaguer and his voice softer, 'it is, for me, up. Up to where I can move About, up into a world which has some sort of structure. Ann is awfully bad for me, you know.

  'Bad for you —?

  'Yes. I ought to have people around me who have wills, people who take what they want. Ann has no will. She saps my energy. She makes me soft.

  'If you mean, said Hugh, 'that Ann is unselfish —’

  'I don't mean that, said Randall, speaking faster. 'I'm not interested in that. For someone else she may be a bloody little angel. But for me she's the destroyer, and the destroyer is the devil. She's got a kind of openness which makes whatever I do meaningless. Ah, I can't explain.

  'If you mean she discourages you from writing —

  'She doesn't directly discourage me from anything. It's what she is that does it. And it isn't just writing either. Can't you see me fading away before your eyes, can't everyone see it? «Poor Randall,» they say, «he's hardly there any more.» I need a different world, a formal world. I need form. Christ, how I fade! He laughed suddenly, turning to face Hugh, and took the rose out of his hand.

  'Form?

  'Yes, yes, form, structure, will, something to encounter, something to make me be. Form, as this rose has it. That's what Ann hasn't got. She's as messy and flabby and open as a bloody dogrose. That's what gets me down. That's what destroys all my imagination, all the bloody footholds. Ah well, you wouldn't understand. You managed all right without fading away. What's it matter. Would you like a drink?

  'No, thanks. What do you —?

  'I'm suffocating here, said Randall, pouring some whisky with a shaking hand into one of the glasses. 'And I can't stand the mess.

  'Well, why don't you —

  'Ann's a hysterical woman.

  'That's not true, as you perfectly well —

  'Never mind, said Randall. 'Sorry, my nerves are all shot to pieces. Do have some whisky, for Christ's sake.

  Hugh accepted some and sat down opposite Randall, who had sunk back into his chair looking blank and limp, the rose pendant from one ha
nd. Hugh took a good gulp of the whisky. Some of Randall's momentary wildness had communicated itself to him, and as he gazed across he felt a thrill of pleasurable vitality which seemed to have little to do with the slumped figure of his son or the violence foreboded by those recent words. He looked round Randall's room where a powdery sunshine mingled the strewn books, the faded chintz, the cushions, the coloured prints, the china, of this rather feminine apartment into a pastel-shaded potpourri. He braced himself. 'Was that Emma Sands I saw at the funeral?

  Randall jerked himself up. He thrust the rose back into the bowl.

  He smoothed his hair, looked away, looked back and said, 'Yes, she was there. You saw her?

  'I caught a glimpse of her, said Hugh. 'Who was the person with her?

  'A girl called Lindsay Rimmer, I think. Her secretary, companion person. A careful frown deadened Randall's face. Without losing Hugh's gaze he tilted his chair back against his divan bed, and reached out to where on the Welsh coverlet, geometrically figured in blue and white, Toby the toy dog and Joey the toy rabbit nestled shabbily together. He got hold of Toby and brought him on to his knee while he awaited Hugh's next remark.

  'You see Emma occasionally?

  'Now and then, you know.

  'Where does she live now?

  'In Notting Hill Gate, said Randall. He added, 'In the same place. A deep quietness had fallen between them during these exchanges, if other sounds in the room had been stilled.

  Hugh was silent while Randall stared at him with his deadened watchful face and fondled the toy dog. The silence lasted long, trembling hideously with what might be said. It was a subject which could be named but could not be pursued. Yet the very name set the echoes ringing.

  Hugh shivered and got up. 'Ah well, he said. 'I'm sorry you won't come to Seton. Now I'd better do that drying up if young Penn hasn't.

  Chapter Four