An Unofficial rose

by Iris Murdoch

  'It's no use without the text: said Miranda, retrieving the book and pushing it under her pillow. 'The words are the point. They're so witty.

  'Text' and 'witty' rather disconcerted Penn and he got up again and began to pace about, squaring his shoulders. Then some of the ebullience of his body gave him strength and he felt a sort of almost impersonal exhilaration, as if he had leapt at a bound into an adult world where the tempo of life was altogether slower and more confident, where glances could be significantly held and relinquished and where words had a new weight and splendour.

  'Everyone thinks you're being awfully rude to Humphrey', said the pale curled Miranda.

  'But I don't want to go to London.

  'Why not?

  'I think you know why not. He sat down abruptly on the end of her bed. She drew her feet away and half sat up, bracing herself against the pillows. He sensed with ecstasy that she was a little frightened. He felt like a god, like a man in a film. The warm silence was full of the smell of roses.

  Miranda stared at him and he stared back, she held his gaze as never before, and he rocked in it like a light plane in a gale. 'I haven't the faintest idea', she said, her voice slightly high.

  'I love you, Miranda.

  'Oh that. I thought you meant something about Humphrey. Could you get off my bed please? You're crumpling the counterpane.

  Penn leapt up. Now that he had uttered the words he felt frenzied.

  The bright room rotated about him like a whirlpool whose vortex was Miranda. Only somehow he must keep himself from sinking, from whirling, into the centre. He receded to the book shelves and luing on to them for support. He saw, fragmentarily, the black square of glass and the red eyes of the beating moths.

  She had spoken with a raised note of excitement. She was, as he looked down at her, tense, moist-lipped, her face, as it seemed to him, radiant with a delighted dread. He whirled to the door and held on to the handle. 'Oh, Miranda, Miranda, I love you so dreadfully!

  'Don't be so silly: she said. But she stared steadily at him and her hand grasped the neck of her pyjamas in an expectant way.

  Penn clutched at the table. His need to touch her was agonizing. He reeled with it. They were silent a moment, and as he gasped for breath he saw her hand rising and falling at her breast. He could think of no words with which to express: may I touch you. He lurched forward.

  'Go away', said Miranda.

  'No,’ he said, standing over her.

  He was at the innermost circle, slipping, slipping into the very centre. He sank one knee on to her bed. The silence of the house surrounded them attentively, fascinated, coldly.

  'Horrible! said Miranda. She uttered the word softly yet with a force of venom which for a moment held him. Then almost like a blind man, spreading his hands, he began to descend upon her.

  What happened next happened very quickly. Miranda reached behind her to the window sill, took one of the glass paper-weights, and brought it down with violence across the knuckles of Penn's hand as it travelled across the sheet. The paper-weight, flying from her grasp, shot across the room and shattered into a hundred pieces. Penn recoiled with a cry of pain, clasped his wounded hand with the other, half fell from the bed and lay collapsed beside it on the floor. The German dagger, emerging from his pocket, slid across the rug and came to rest against the leg of the table. Miranda shot out of bed, put on her dressing-gown and slippers and retired to the door. There was silence again. The cold watchful house had relished the little scene.

  Penn lay with his face down, clasping his hand against his chest. He saw under the bed three pairs of Miranda's sandals, a wooden box, and small pieces of the paper-weight scattered like gleaming eyes or tiny coloured flowers. He rolled over and sat up, leaning against the side of the bed. He looked at his hand. The skin was slightly broken on the knuckles. Then he looked at Miranda.

  Her face was quite transformed. The nervous excited look had gone and it was as if a white light from within had composed her countenance into an indistinct yet authoritative form. So it might be to see an angel. She glowed upon him, her head poised above him, and a warm bright ray fell upon him and held him breathless. With astonishment and abject gratitude he realized that he had not displeased her.

  'Ah, you fool, said Miranda. Her voice was deep now. She leaned back against the door, regarding him with a sort of gentle triumph, and he felt as if she were, for the first time, really seeing him.

  'I'm sorry, he said, rubbing his hand and stretching out his legs as he leaned back against the bed. The sharpness of desire had gone, or had spread rather into a haze of enslaved delight, a luminous Atmosphere in which he floated, held and guided in the beam of Miranda's gaze.

  'You surprised me, she said. 'But I like to be surprised.

  'I'm afraid it wasn't a pleasant surprise, said Penn. He felt an agonizing lack of proper words, but the great light supported him. He began to rise slowly.

  'Did I hurt you much? The sheer rich satisfaction of her tone, so unlike her old petulant teasing, nearly brought him again to the floor.

  He said humbly, 'No. Anyway I deserved to be hurt.

  'You deserved it, yes. But let me see.

  He advanced to her, and his body as he came felt limp and broken as if his flesh were beaten into rags. He lifted his hand before her as if presenting it for a severance. She took it at the wrist and held it, examining it. Then she took a handkerchief from her pocket and with her other hand clasped it gently over his knuckles. Penn groaned and fell on his knees before her. She released his hand and he knelt before her swaying, not touching her.

  'Penn, she said softly. The silence that followed began to coil and accumulate into a great white shell of eloquence and understanding. Penn lifted his eyes at last to her face.

  But all was changed again. She was looking over his shoulder at something with fascination, with twisted anxiety, almost with fear. As Penn moved and rose to his feet, towering over her now again, turning to see what she saw, she said sharply 'What's that?

  Penn followed her gaze to the German dagger. He stepped quickly back and picked it up. 'I brought this for you. I found it. I hope you don't mind. I think you wanted it and I brought it. He held out the hilt with the enamelled swastika towards her.

  Miranda took it. 'But that's Steve's dagger. His special dagger. The one that Felix Meecham gave him.

  'Yes. I brought it to you. I hope you don't mind.

  'But where did you get it? Why did you have it? She moved away from the door, putting the table between them, glaring at him and clasping the dagger to her breast. Its bright point pierced the blue woollen stuff of the dressing-gown.

  'I found it in Steve's room. I'm sorry. I hope you don't mind. I brought it —

  'Oh, shut up! said Miranda. She gave a little cry and her face grew suddenly red and her eyes filled with tears. She stamped her foot and gave a wailing cry. 'Go away! Get out of here!

  'I'm terribly sorry, said Penn. 'I just wanted to please you by bringing it because Ann said you liked it.

  'You stupid, horrible fool, said Miranda, and the tears were coming so fast now she could hardly speak, 'I hate you. I'd like to kill you. Putting your horrible hands on me. Stupid Australian fool. Everyone knows you're stupid, with your beastly common accent. Nobody likes you here, they just put up with you because they have to. You're boring and ugly and stupid and we all want you to go away. Go back to beastly boring Australia. Go back to your low common father and your vulgar home. Go away. Get out of my room. Steve would have killed you with one hand. Go away, you horrible thing, go away, go away! Her voice rose and she drew the dagger back in her hand as if she would have flown at him.

  Penn had a last vision of her, the dagger raised, her face crimson and wet with tears and saliva and twisted with spitting fury. He got himself out of the door and half fell down the spiral staircase. He heard the door bang behind him. He ran along the black gallery and gained his own staircase where the light from his room showed him the white metal s
teps. He got into his room and shut himself in.

  He leaned back against the door panting. Pain and fear made his breath come in long shrieking gasps for several minutes. He felt ready to be overwhelmed by a storm of hysteria. He braced himself back against the door, digging in his heels, trying to quiet himself The room heaved before him.

  A little while later his breathing became less violent and his body went limp and he sank on to the bed. He looked about. All was quiet, orderly, waiting for him. All was as it had been — how long ago? — before he went to see Miranda. The Swedish knife, the veteran car book, his battered copy of Such is Life, said to him: hello. But it was like the voices of thoughtless children to a ruined man. Between imagined violence and real violence there is a dimension of difference. Some innocent thing was broken forever, frightened and killed. A blackness in the heart of his world was even now spreading outward. He fell on his knees beside the bed with a groan.

  He looked dully at his hand. It was aching and some blood was congealed on the knuckles. His dressing-gown was covered with little bits of coloured glass. As he shook it out he touched something under the bed. He turned to look and saw that it was Steve's box of soldiers. He stared at it and then pulled it close to him. After a moment he opened it and looked at the red and blue jumble of innumerable lead figures. Scarcely able to focus his eyes, he took one out and stood it upon the floor. Then he took out another and another. As the file lengthened his wild tears came at last.

  Chapter Thirty

  'BE nicer to poor Penny when he comes back, said Ann.

  Penn had now been in London with Humphrey for nearly a week. 'He won't come back, said Miranda. She was sitting up in bed.

  The uncurtained window was wide open to the hot summer night. Miranda had been unwell for two days and had retired to her room. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with her, but Ann was sure it was the German measles coming on at last.

  'Why ever not? said Ann.

  'He won't come back, said Miranda. 'He'll stay in London till the last moment and then ask you to send his things.

  'But he said he'd come back. He must come back to say a proper good-bye.

  Miranda shrugged her shoulders. 'He's a rude boy, she said. 'What can you expect, considering what his father is?

  'Miranda!

  Ann frowned at her daughter across the table littered with dolls, comics, Tintins, women's magazines, chocolate, newspapers, tins of orange juice, and the remains of a cherry cake. Then she resumed her restless pacing. She was very sorry that Penn had gone. She had not, till his departure, realized the extent to which he had, as it were, blessedly kept Miranda off her. She was frightened and a little shocked to find herself thinking in this way. But since she had been alone in the house with Miranda there had been a tension, an excessive mutual consciousness, a hostile magnetism. They were continually watching each other and seeking each other out, and making each other's activities' seem pointless. The situation had been only partially resolved by Miranda's becoming ill.

  Ann was still undecided about Felix. At least she told herself that she was undecided, although the comparative steadiness with which she endured the interval which she had imposed upon them both sometimes suggested to her that she must have decided in his favour, that she must by now, without noticing it, have crossed the line. Yet she went on from moment to moment without doing or saying anything decisive. The great dazzling void which had, at the end of her talk with Douglas Swann, so authoritatively contained her, was shrunken now and darkened and crossed with the old cares. She felt, about Randall, a little less mad. But she did not really feel free or like a person who decides things. She was, after all, the same timid conscientious worrying Ann. She had not achieved, after all, a new personality.

  Ann had never really had the conception of doing what she wanted.

  The idea of doing what she ought, early and deeply implanted in her soul, and sedulously ever since cultivated, had by now almost removed from her the possibility, even as something prima jacie, of a pure self-regarding movement of will. She felt, at the moment, the lack of this strong uncomplicated machinery. The clamorous needs which devoured her were hideously unpractical, and she envied those for whom the want and the grasping movement were one and the same thing. She was prepared, moreover, and especially when she considered the wreck of her: marriage with Randall and what she had somehow done to Randall, to see in her absence of straightforward operative desires something corrupting, something deadening. There was, in her open formless life, some dreadful lack of vigour, some lack of any hard surface to grasp or to brace oneself against; and as she thus accused herself, ready almost to call her good and evil, she found herself again echoing some of Randall's words. She had not got a new personality. But the old one was certainly cracked.

  She had not succeeded, either, with Miranda; and it sometimes seemed to her that both Randall and Miranda shrank away from her for the same reason. They needed about them the invigorating presence of shapely human wills; and they could not but see Ann's absence, in this sense, of personality as something mean and spiritless and almost insincere. The idea had sometimes occurred to Ann, and she hated it, that quite involuntarily and unreasonably she made them both feel guilty. But now it seemed to her more likely that their reaction to her was a sort of aesthetic one. They found something messy, something depressing, in her mode of existence. And now it was she who felt the guilt.

  It was by this time desperately necessary for her to talk to Miranda about Felix. It was not that she expected Miranda to have much to say about this, and she did not really expect anything in the way of an argument. She would put the matter to her, she thought, rather vaguely. But it was necessary simply to have said these things, to have at least mentioned his name; and Ann was surprised to find how hard It was to bring herself to do so. The sudden growth of her relation with Felix might seem to any observer odd and even improper. Whatever would Miranda, who loved her father so much, make of these hints? With this reluctance to speak came a nervous anxiety which was now almost unbearable. There seemed a taboo on speaking of Felix to her daughter; and Ann knew that until she had broken this she would not be able to think further about what she was going to do. At moments she suspected that once she had spoken of the matter, however remotely, with Miranda she would be awakened to the fact that she had indeed crossed the line; and then she saw Miranda in a benevolent light, as a helper, as someone who would bring her to a bright new consciousness of herself.

  Meanwhile there was the task of deceiving Felix; for that was what it came to. Though she longed for his company, she was afraid to see too much of him in case there should be some revelation of her need which, if he were but to glimpse it, would whirl them blindly farther on. She did not want too much to enslave him when she was still not certain that she would keep him; and she did not want to be herself driven mad by his loss, if it should come to that. She wanted to see what she was doing; but this was what, with Miranda watchful, curious, morose, terribly present and officially unenlightened, she was not able to do. Her ideas remained separate and-refused to crystallize into a policy. She wondered if having failed in one marriage she should hastily contract another. She wondered if she would make a soldier's wife. She wondered if Randall would ever come back. She wondered about marriage, and Miranda, and Marie-Laure. She doubted everything except that she and Felix were in love. If only she could, quite simply, see that as the solution. She craved for that simplicity as for some unattainable degree of asceticism.

  'Do stop walking about the room, said Miranda. 'You make me quite tired. Do stop or sit down. If you're going to stay.

  'Sorry, dear, said Ann. She stopped again behind the table.

  Miranda must think she was behaving oddly. She was behaving oddly. But the great dark void of the house gaped behind her and she could not bring herself to leave her daughter's room. She must speak to her now.

  'What are you so nervous about? said Miranda. 'You're making me nervous.

 
; They stared at each other in the silence of the house, and it was as if they were listening for distant footsteps. If there were other listeners they were hostile ones. Ann shivered. A big white furry moth entered through the window and began to circle the lamp. Beneath them was Randall's empty room.

  'I'm sorry.

  'Don't keep saying you're sorry. Tell me what's the matter.

  'Nothing's the matter, said Ann. She started pacing again. The room about her seemed tattered, shabby, dusty, untidy, as if she and Miranda had been jumbled together in an old bag. Nancy Bowshott was supposed to clean it. Ann took some faded roses off the mantelpiece and dropped them into the waste-paper basket.

  'Miranda, she said, 'would you mind if I married again?»

  There was a silence in which the fluttering of the moth could be heard. It was beating on the inside of the lamp shade. Ann knew that these were the wrong words. Yet what ought she to have said? She turned towards her daughter.

  Miranda's face was a wooden mask. She plumped up her pillows and sat up straighter. 'But there's no question of that, is there?

  'Oh well, there might be, said Ann. She added, 'It's only a very vague possibility, you know, nothing immediate! She was sounding guilty already. A scroll of coloured glass, like a misshapen marble, was lying in the fireplace. She picked it up.

  The silence continued until she had to look back again, when Miranda said, 'But you are married. To Daddy.

  'Yes, but I suppose I won't go on being.

  'I thought marriages were for always, said Miranda. She was tense, pinning Ann with her gaze.

  Ann felt within herself the blissful stir of a selfish will. She welcomed it as a mother might welcome the first movement of her unborn child. She said, and then regretted it, 'Your father doesn't think so. Then she added, 'You know that he wants a divorce. He wants to marry someone else.

  Miranda said after a moment. 'That's what he says now.

  'Do you think he'll — stop wanting that?