An Unofficial rose

by Iris Murdoch

  Ann began to be tormented by a terrible sense of urgency. She tried to think clearly, especially about the matter of Christian marriage. But whenever she tried to order her thoughts there rose huge and scarlet before her the Randall-demon, her new and terrible relation to her husband: and she knew that before she could move towards a decision that ghost must be somehow laid. She wondered at moments if she should not talk to Felix about the whole thing; but she realized that to do this would be to prejudge an issue about which she would wish to have decided coolly and rationally. As the situation was at the moment balanced, any move she made would be likely to have decisive weight. If she took another step now in the direction of Felix she was lost. Ann decided to talk to Douglas Swann.

  Douglas was really the — only person she could talk to. He was not impecably wise, but he was discreet and the scrupulousness of his attachment to her could serve instead of, could even induce, wisdom. So she had summoned him. And as she now emerged from the nursery and crossed the road she caught sight of him further down the hill entering the main gate of Grayhallock. When she arrived he was already waiting in the drawing-room.

  'My dear Ann, said Douglas Swann, bowing and swaying over her hand, 'how are you, my dear? You wanted to see me? I was coming anyway, you know.

  Ann had not at all thought out what she wanted to say to him, but she felt relief as at an imminent confession. He was, after all, a priest.

  She said, 'Douglas, I want an exorcism.

  'An exorcism?

  'I think I'm going mad.

  Swann looked at her anxiously, not sure how to take her words, and smoothed his black bird's plume of hair. 'You couldn't go mad if you tried, my dear. Now do let's sit down and smoke a cigarette. Shall I make you some coffee?

  'No thanks, said Ann. She sat down heavily in one of the armchairs and Swann pulled his chair up beside her. She said, 'It's just that I'm somehow obsessed with Randall. He stops me from thinking. I feel that he's got inside me. I feel that he'll be with me, like a cancer inside me, for the rest of my life. The violence of her own words startled her., 'That is just the reverse side of your love for him, said Swann. 'You must purify that love. You will purify it.

  'I'm not sure that it is love any more, said Ann. 'Not proper love. She stared at the dead electric fire. Was her long love for Randall over? It was possible.

  'Oh yes it is, said Swann. 'One doesn't stop loving a person just like that, whatever they do. We spoke of this once before. Marriage is a sacrament. Here especially God's grace can lift and enlighten our poor human loves.

  'Marriage, said Ann. 'Do you really think Randall will come back? It seemed a hundred years since she had talked of married love with Douglas and he had advised her to hold Randall in her loving net.

  'I don't know, said Swann. 'But whether he does or not it will matter how you love him. And whether he does or not you will still be married to him.

  There was a hardness in the words which bruised Ann. 'You think that I should keep a light burning for Randall?

  'Yes, of course, said Swann. 'And humanly speaking, as it were, as well as ecclesiastically speaking. But surely you think this too?

  Ann got up and stared out of the window. Out of a dirty golden sky a few drops of rain were falling. Penn in mackintosh and wellingtons was tramping across the lawn. He waved to her and she waved back. She said, 'I shall give Randall a divorce if he wants one.

  'I don't think you should be in any hurry to do so, said Swann. 'But in any case that won't alter your own position. We know, don't we, what we think about the permanence of marriage.

  'So I should devote the rest of my life to purifying my image of the absent Randall?

  'This isn't like you, Ann.

  'I don't know what I'm like any more. I feel how I've lived all the time in unconsciousness.

  'Being good is a state of unconsciousness.

  'Then perhaps I shall stop being good. It looks as if it's going to be too difficult from now on anyway. She sat down again and pushed her hair back.

  'You're tired out. Can't you manage a holiday?

  'Someone offered to drive me to Greece.

  'Well, why don't you go? Do go. Clare and I can keep an eye on things here.

  She felt again that unfamiliar sensation and she saw herself on the road south in the very dark blue Mercedes. 'Ah, I've been dead all these years.

  'You are precisely mistaken, said Swann, 'You have been alive all these years. You are momentarily dead now.

  Ann was silent. What did she want from Douglas? She wanted him to support her own view of the matter. And since he was not doing so she might as well end the conversation. So she had a view of her own which was different from Douglas's?

  'You're doing me a lot of good, she said.

  Swann smiled and patted her knee. 'Is the exorcism working? Was it? She lifted her head and it was as if the great scarlet cloud were gone, the whirling images were gone, and there was only a great space and a great light. 'Yes, it's working.

  'I'm so glad, he said. 'I know we think alike really. Prayer, if I may say' so, is so important here. I have known constant prayer to remove the most rooted resentment.

  'Ah, but I don't feel resentment, said Ann. 'I don't, I don't. It was true.

  'If you can love him now and keep him in your heart that will be a joy that is better than happiness.

  'Better than happiness. She rose to her feet. She wanted to be alone now.

  'The marriage bond is an indissoluble mystical union of souls.

  Who knows what good your love may not do him, even if you never meet again.

  'How true, said Ann. 'You know, I think I'll take that Greek holiday after all.

  'Well done! said Swann. He was being led towards the door. 'On no account miss Delphi. Clare and I were in Greece ten years ago. I think we've still got all our guide-books. We'll lend them to you.

  'You are very kind. Thank Clare for the bottled apricots, will you?

  The door shut behind him at last. Ann returned to the drawing room. She lay down on the floor and buried her face in the hearth rug. She felt exhausted, purged. Yet it was a strange purging. Perhaps Douglas had been right to say that goodness was a state of unconsciousness. But what she had to do with now was consciousness, and she was profoundly and terribly aware of a change in the structure of her world, as if the crystals were forming with a difference. It was not that her image of Douglas himself as good had in any way altered. It was that he could no longer, in the mirror of her being now so alarmingly brightened, properly reflect himself. His words, which in him were good words, were at her side of the picture temptation, almost corruption. Whatever she could do for Randall she could not do that. A saint might do it, but she could not. She could not thus hold him; and as she imagined this 'holding' she saw it almost as vindictive, revengeful, something to do with death. No, she must let Randall go, she must let him go properly, she must cut the painter. This idea of cutting him free shed for her a certain light, wherein she glimpsed for a moment, like a figure seen in a flash of lightning, what she herself must look like to Randall, what she must, in these last years, have looked like, have been. She saw the deadness of it; and Randall's words came back with a force which she could almost echo: 'You weigh upon me. You imprison me. She must set Randall free.

  But was that not also setting herself free? She had never thought about freedom, it had never been a value to her. Now suddenly, as she felt it to be so vividly desirable, she looked back over her thoughts, trying to doubt them. Where did the corruption lie? Yet, as she reflected, this question seemed less important, consumed, dimmed by a sort of realism, which she still hesitated to dignify with the name of truth. The world had changed and there was no going back. She must live as best she could in the new world. She rolled over on her back and looked at the high white ceiling of the drawing-room, now dusky and yellowish in the rainy afternoon light, and it seemed to her like a lofty Southern sky, infinitely far and blue and hazy with brilliance. She lay there st
unned and dazzled.

  The telephone rang and she pulled herself to her feet at last. It was Mildred ringing up from Seton Blaise to say that she and Felix would be bringing Miranda tomorrow morning. Miranda.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  MIRANDA was back at Grayhallock and Penn was in torment. He had been, at the idea of her staying on at Seton Blaise, very cast down at first: but in fact her absence had been for him a time of welcome respite wherein he could spend the day dreaming of her without those sharp and painful disturbances of his private image which the actual presence of his darling so often occasioned. He had also enjoyed looking forward to her return. But the return itself had had a terrible quality.

  It was as if the house feared Miranda. The darkness, the coldness, the dampness of the still rainy weather seemed to gain, from her return, an extra shadow. The house groaned and huddled. Miranda herself was in an evident state of extreme depression and was very short with anyone who came near her. Ann was jumpy and nervous and more than usually awkward with her daughter, though she was also at times merry in a way which unnerved Penn more than her accustomed soberness. One morning he heard what he had never heard before, Ann singing: and this sound, echoing through the darkened arches of the brooding and prophetic house, made Penn shiver with a sense of ills to come.

  He was now tossing on his bed. He had already got up several times, and looked across at the light which was still burning in Miranda's bedroom in the opposite tower. It was not in fact very late. After Miranda retired Penn had gone to bed in a mood of mingled boredom and desperation, and had been trying to cheer himself up by reading Such is Life. But even Tom Collins could not speak to his condition. For the time the myth of his past seemed dead, the great image of the new free man in the appallingly ancient land. They were far off now, the drooping myalls and the lordly kurrajongs and the crimson quondongs and the spotted leopard trees.

  The huge coloured country might have been a dream; and Penn apprehended with alarm a sort of failure within him for the first time of his sense of nationality. It was no use, in the crisis which faced him, being even, an Australian.

  He could not get comfortable. His body ached through and through with desire, producing a sort of perpetual tiredness which was half pleasurable and half painful. He got up again and went to the window. The light was still on in Miranda's room. He put on his dressing-gown and began to wander about his own room. He looked gloomily at the wrecked bed, and at his few books on the white shelf. On the table in a blue vase were roses Ann had brought up that morning. Beside them lay the Swedish knife which Humphrey had given him. He snapped it open and tried the blade. Humphrey was kind to him. He was the only person who had really wanted to be told about Australia. And now he had asked Penn to London again and Penn had again said no. It was a good knife: but of course it was nothing like the German dagger.

  Penn opened the drawer and took out the dagger. He drew it silkily out of its sheath and balanced it in his hand. It made him feel dangerous. He was very sorry to think that he would have to part with it. He had put off telling Miranda about it; and in any case, since the occasion in the churchyard when he had nearly given it to her he had had other matters on his mind. He went to the window again and gazed at her light, scratching the palm of his left hand gently with the point of the dagger.

  Penn felt sorry at the thought of losing it, but he also felt pleased to be able to delight Miranda and to make, for her, some evident little sacrifice. He did not want to waste the scene of returning the dagger, and he began to wonder, when shall I give it to her? He opened his window a little wider. The night was very dark but warmer and there was a flowery smell, the smell of thousands of roses. The idea came up when out of the darkness, I shall give it to her now.

  Why not? His heart accelerated and he turned back from the window blushing with excitement. He had never entered Miranda's room. She had never asked him up there, and indeed the whole of the other tower had a perilous taboo quality. He was exceedingly frightened by the idea which he had just received. Could he mount the other tower? The notion that he might thereby frighten Miranda made him even more frightened himself. But it was also fearfully attractive; and the next moment he had a vision of himself running up the stairs and seizing Miranda in his arms.

  Things are getting out of hand, Penn said to himself. I'd better get back into bed. But he didn't, and stood there tense and frowning. Where had he, with Miranda, really gone? He felt convinced that she needed him and that she really liked him far more than she pretended to. Why otherwise did she so often, even though to tease him, seek his company? He was convinced too, though this more irrationally, that the leap from the tree had been aimed at impressing him. When he thought of his failure there he groaned aloud. If only he had got there first, and, preferably, broken a leg or something in the attempt! He was not managing to cut much of a figure. Perhaps he was being altogether too gentle with her?

  He could at least try. Anything was better than the torment of inactivity and helplessness. He would, for once, stretch his limbs. She herself was violent, wild, extreme; he would try to deserve her. He put the unsheathed dagger into one pocket and the sheath in the other and softly opened the door.

  He listened. The house was silent except for his own heart beats.

  He wondered if Ann was in bed. He did not want to meet her on the way. He began to descend the stairs barefoot in the dim light from his open door. He reached the gallery. Here it was dark, but it was as if he saw and he glided along it confidently until he reached the foot of the opposite spiral. Here he hesitated.

  He did not want to pass the door of Randall' s room, which seemed to him, far more than the room his grandmother had been dying in, inhabited by death. Perhaps it was very foolish to disturb Miranda now, perhaps she would simply hate him for it? Could he indeed prevent himself, finding her there warm, reclining, undressed, from crushing her like a nut? An image of her suddenly accessible, defenceless, near, rose before him and he nearly fell on his knees on the stairs. Then his yearning body decided the issue and he ran on up to her door.

  Breathless he knocked. There was a silence and then her voice. He entered.

  Miranda was lying opposite to him tucked up in her divan bed. She was propped on pillows and had been reading. She looked toward him now, raising a pale startled face. Her hair was tousled and the collar of her striped pyjamas stood on end about her neck.

  As soon as Penn found himself in Miranda's presence his violence was blunted and his purposes dimmed. Her small imperious being confronted him and he felt confusion. He said hastily, 'Hello, Miranda, I hope you don't mind my butting in. I saw your light was still on and I thought I'd just come and say hello.

  Miranda had recovered herself at once. She adjusted the pillows, sitting up a bit more, and buttoned up the neck of her pyjamas. She gave him a fastidious look which made him feel like Caliban. 'This is a bit unusual, isn't it? The remark had a little conventional grown-up sound. He took in her room a little. It was a replica of his own, but a deluxe replica. Here, after his monochrome, all was coloured. All was vivid, figured, flowered, spotted, striped. He had an impression of a clutter of small things, making of the room a little treasure trove, a miniature queen's boudoir. There were a lot of little square rugs end to end, several bowls of roses, and a shelled arched built-in bookcase, dotted with objects, «two shelves of which were occupied by dolls sitting in jumbled rows with their feet protruding. Their wide blue eyes stared out censoriously. Rich furry curtains were half drawn to reveal upon the long windowsill a row of round glass paper-weights. A single lamp cast an ivory light upon the white sheets and upon Miranda's multi-coloured head.

  Penn took a little chair, he swung it by the back like a small animal. He felt very large in the room, Gulliverian, both powerful and clumsy. He feared to hear the sound of something he was crushing with his feet. He felt he might crack anything in the room like an egg shell. He put the chair near Miranda's bed and sat down. Behind her, where the curtai
ns revealed the black window pane, he could see moths with pale bodies and red eyes hurling themselves against the glass. Miranda waited.

  Penn felt the silent empty night all round him, as vast and as sterile as if he and Miranda were afloat in a space ship. He began to feel the yearning, he rang with it like a filling vessel. He crossed his legs and said, 'Your room's nicer than mine.

  Miranda said nothing. She watched him, curled like a small cat, with a feline face almost vacant, yet with a vacancy that could precede some sort of spring; and Penn felt he could scarcely be surprised to see her suddenly run up the curtains He desired her.

  'What are you reading?», he said.

  Miranda frowned and tossed the big coloured book on to the counterpane. Penn picked it up and saw that it was a sort of comic strip; and as he looked back to Miranda he guessed that she was annoyed that he had not found her reading something more grown-up. Then he saw that it was in French. Les Aventures de Tintin. On a Marche sur La Lune. He glanced at a few of the pictures.

  'That looks good. Perhaps I could borrow it when you've finished? I don't think I'd understand much though. My French is hopeless. But I expect I could follow the pictures.