An Unofficial rose

by Iris Murdoch

  Chapter Thirty-two

  MIRANDA, curled upon the window-sill, watched the lights of the very dark blue Mercedes disappearing down the drive. She watched the bright illumination move, with sudden glimpses of green trees, at an increasing pace down the hill until it vanished. The sound of the engine remained with her, at first growing louder as the car gathered speed, and then quickly diminishing. At last there was complete silence. Miranda listened to the silence. Then she moved with a kind of lassitude back into the bedroom. A world had ended. An enterprise was complete.

  She knew what had happened in the drawing-room. She had listened long enough at the door. She stood now as if at a loss, without employment, not knowing what to do. Then she pulled the curtains, locked her door and knelt down to rummage under her bed. She dragged out a large wooden box, a box designed for books with a strong lock on it. She searched the table drawer for the key and opened the box. She tilted it over until its contents streamed on to the rug. She began listlessly to sort them.

  There were a few letters and a lot of cuttings and photographs.

  There was that photo of Felix in tennis kit as a boy of fifteen which she had stolen from Mildred's album. There were several photos of Felix at Grayhallock, pictures taken years ago at some party: Felix talking to Ann and Clare Swann, Felix talking to Ann and Nancy Bowshott, Felix talking to Ann. There was an old picture of Felix with Hugh, with herself, a little white-frilled and bowed creature in the foreground. There were pictures too of Felix and Mildred which Ann had acquired sometime and which Miranda had filched from her desk; and one or two treasured pictures, similarly acquired, of Felix in dress uniform. But the ones she liked best were the ones of Felix in ordinary uniform, Felix during the War, Felix shaggy, Felix armed, Felix in the desert, Felix examining a map in some desolate unknown piece of country. Then there were the wartime cuttings, including the account of how Felix won his M. C. at Anzio. And the peacetime cuttings, including the ones from the Tatler with pictures of Felix dancing with Lady Mary Hunwicke and drinking champagne with Miss Penelope Fanshawe. And 'Colonel Felix (Yoyo) Meecham and friend at Ascot. More precious even than these were the letters, the letter he wrote to her when she had mumps, the letter he wrote to her when she had chicken pox, a postcard he once sent her from New York. Alas, their correspondence had come to an end when she was seven.

  Miranda had loved Felix Meecham with all her heart ever since she could remember. She could not trace the moment at which her childish adoration of that tall gentle-spoken demi-god had changed into the possessive jealous agony with which she now lived day and night. It sometimes seemed that her love had always been the same, always equally great in sum, only at a certain time it had been set on fire. And in those flames she writhed. It was not, as a child, that she had not suffered, that she had not missed him, yearned for him, and felt wild joy on his occasions of return. She had suffered bitterly because of his interest in Steven, who also idolized him, and his comparative lack of interest in herself. But at least as a child she had not conceived of possessing him. The terrible pain began when, at some half-noticed turning of the way, she found herself in the same world as Felix. For now that nothing separated them everything separated them.

  Miranda was of course aware of a certain something, a trembling of interest and sympathy, between Felix and her mother. This too, she felt, she had always known about; but when her love burst into flames she was driven to a sharper curiosity and a more exact observation. There was in truth little to observe, nor did Miranda conjecture more than she saw. But what she saw was enough, and she watched and suffered.

  Miranda was sure that no one knew about her condition. Asked at the age of five whom she wanted to marry, she had answered without hesitation 'Felix'. Everyone had laughed, but no one had remembered. That her love was in secret became the more important as she observed, sharp-eyed and prophetic, the breakdown of her parents' marriage; and as she saw the pattern of events develop in an ever more menacing way her hopeless will to have Felix produced, as a secondary growth, a more viable will at least to prevent her mother from having him. Miranda had been fond of her mother, she supposed, in earlier years; but the mother of her childhood was an anonymous faceless figure. All the colour of that early world had belonged to her father. Her mother first gained individuality and personality as her rival; and to the prosecution of that rivalry Miranda dedicated herself with ferocious efficiency.

  She could not, of course, confide in anybody, not even, or especiaIly not, in her father, to whom she had always been so close. Her attachment to him was something warm and organic and formless and infinitely comforting, though at moments too it caused her a sort of shame, almost a sort of disgust. He was the sole recipient of her tenderness, the only one for whom she was still a soft and nestling creature; and with this softness she combined, as she grew older, a fierce loyalty and a desire to protect him whenever, as it increasingly seemed to occur, he was in any way 'in danger'. That her love for Felix was a sort of danger to him she early apprehended. He would be hurt by it if he knew. And from this knowledge also she protected him. She did not conceive her two loves as rivals. They were as different in nature as were their objects. Randall seemed to her infinitely frail compared with Felix, but through frailty infinitely dear.

  When it became abundantly clear, and it was clear very early to Miranda, not only because of her almost scientific observation, but also because of hints her father dropped, that her parents were going to be parted for good, she felt that she could scarcely endure what was to come. She felt it as very likely that Felix would court her mother, that her mother would hesitate and procrastinate, but that Felix would get her in the end. Miranda told herself that she would not survive that moment. If Felix married Ann she would kill herself; and indeed the terrible interim, the new situation, with its promise of such interesting developments, which had been initiated by her father's departure seemed equally likely to torture her into desperation. The indifference to life which she had expressed to Felix at Seton Blaise seemed to her genuine, and she had leapt from the tree with. She felt, a real preparedness for death, though also with the hope of impressing Felix and landing in his arms. The days that followed, during which she received a demonstration of what she more than half knew, that Felix saw her as a child and noticed her only because of Ann, brought her private anguish to a climax.

  In general, and from the point of view of her troubles, Miranda was in fact far from seeing her father s departure as an unmitigated disaster. In a curious way, even apart from Felix, she had often wanted him to go, wanted him to take off, like a bird sent from her hand to guide her into a better country. Miranda loved the violence latent in her father, she longed for an assertion of his strength, and the spectacle of his at last bursting out made her lick her lips and open her eyes.

  Randall would go ahead of her, her envoy, her ambassador, into the land of colour and shape, the country of her embezzled delights, and she would follow him there. It had the air of a rescue; and there was a place too for this romance in the economy of her nature. But as far as the matter of Randall's flight had repercussions on the matter of Felix, Miranda's feelings were at least mixed. Randall left a place for Felix and produced a state of affairs more immediately tormenting and menacing to her. But his disappearance, by making things more acute, brought them also, one way or another, nearer to their end; and Miranda told herself that anything was better than the indefinite, year after year, continuance of Felix’s mute passion. Now, he would have either to succeed or to fail, and if thus explicitly he failed he would have to go away altogether. Miranda made it her business to see that he would either succeed or fail soon.

  The strategy, when it came to it, was almost a consolation. There was her father to be seen off, to be encouraged not to hesitate to go. Now that she had at last decided to pull everything down, for better or worse, on top of her, Miranda felt a frantic impatience for his departure, and hoped indeed that she had not too evidently bundled him off. She
could not have borne, now, hesitations, heart-searchings partial reconciliations. She wanted Randall well cleared off the scene: about how to handle her mother she had had beforehand little idea. But when he began to try she was amazed at how easy it was. She felt, and this too was consolation, the beginning of a sense of her own strength. Her mother by comparison was a shapeless directionless mess, full of guilt and confused attachments, still hopelessly married. Miranda saw enough for her purposes and saw it with surprise and a little shuddering.

  She sat moodily turning over the photos. They had little effect on her now. She felt as if Felix were dead, and she felt in a way that was not totally disagreeable that she was, for the present, dead too. She felt dull and listless, like after an examination. She looked at the photographs with unfocused eyes. Then she began slowly to tear them up. She tore them as they came, not troubling to turn them over or notice them as she did so, and then she tore up the letters and cuttings without reading them. She reduced everything to small pieces. Then she put the fragments into a big envelope and sealed it. Then she sat there on the floor pursing her lips and scratching her ankle and humming a little tune.

  She looked back over the country she had traversed, but already it seemed covered with mists and she could not see it as a whole. She was too tired to peer, and anyway it didn't matter any more. She speculated a little blankly about her mother and Felix. It didn't matter. She would never know, but she was indifferent to knowing and she would survive. People survive, and she would devote if necessary the whole of her life to a programme of survival. Coldly she surveyed its elements. In a year or two she would run away to her father. He would have left that other woman by then; or if he had not yet left her Miranda would soon persuade him to. He would be living in some gay Southern town. She saw him there, brown, exotic, vivacious, free, speaking foreign tongues. There she would arrive, thin, pale, mysterious and sad; and though greatly courted she would remain with her father. That is how it would be; and until then she would live as one dead.

  She got up stiffly and walked to the shelves. She looked dully at the German dagger on which was still impaled the doll which Felix had given her. She pulled the dagger out and threw the remains of the doll into the waste-paper basket. Tomorrow she would drown the dagger in the Marsh. She stared at the quiet rows of dolls and picked one up mechanically and held it to her breast. It was a thing she had done a thousand times. But now suddenly it felt as if she were hugging a dead puppy. It came to her eerily that the dolls were all dead. The life with which she had endowed them was withdrawn. They were nothing now. She looked at them with widened eyes and touched her lips with her tongue. They were rows of dead semblances, mocking her solitude. She held the doll dangling at arm's length; then she took hold of its head and body and pulled. The china head came off and she threw it on the floor and it broke. She took the next doll and hurled it by its legs against the wall. Gradually the room filled with sawdust and fragments of pink china. What she could not smash she slashed to pieces with the German dagger. Poussette was last. She looked into the inane familiar face, and tore Poussette's head and limbs off. Now they were all gone, the little princes.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  A BIRD was singing somewhere out in the beech trees, somewhere in the great still light of the summer morning. The Marsh would be pale green beneath the sun, mixing its own strange light with the gold, and stretching away to end in a blue haze. Already upon the slope the ten thousand roses would be opened, uncovering their exquisite hearts and making of the hillside a great unfolding fan. Up above him Miranda would be still asleep, but Ann would be up already, at work in the kitchen. Nancy Bowshott would be arriving with the milk. Lazily he listened for the sounds of the early morning household. Randall Peronett was waking up.

  He turned over and came into contact with something. He opened his eyes. With a rush which made him start up now on to his elbow it all came back to him. He was in Rome, in a hotel in the Piazza Minerva, in a big bed with Lindsay. The great summer light was there, but muted by Venetian blinds to a hot twilight, the singing bird was there, but it was a canary in a cage that bung outside a near-by house. And here was Lindsay lying beside him on her back fast asleep. The sheet was thrust down from her nakedness to make of her a sort of recumbent Aphrodite Anadyomene, an Aphrodite of the world of sleep. Her pale metallic golden hair, flattened into shining strips, spread over the pillow and down on to her breasts. Lifting himself a little, Randall detached some tresses from the side of his sweating body. It had been a hot night.

  He looked at his watch. It was not yet seven o'clock. He decided not to wake Lindsay yet. They had been late to bed. He studied her face. Her head was thrust back and her chin pointed at the ceiling in an attitude of decisiveness which she retained even in sleep. Her lips, so much more beautiful he thought in their untouched pallor, were a little parted and there was a gleam of teeth between. The thin veined eyelids were as smooth as the skin of some miraculous fruit. Her breathing could be heard in a soft repeated sigh, gentle, insistent, suggestive. The wide serene oval of the face, the big rounded forehead, slightly domed, pale and even for such a scrutiny quite unlined, lay before him like a lovely domain seen from a mountain. Here sleep seemed a miracle of beauty, warmth and life strangely arrested and made into a thing of contemplation. So in miraculous castles great princesses might slumber out the centuries. Randall gazed and worshipped and felt again the thrill of achievement and possession.

  Yet these awakenings were always the same. He woke always thinking himself at Grayhallock, as if the fact of his new condition had not yet been broken to his unconscious mind. His unconscious mind had indeed, and luridly enough, other concerns. He had never dreamed so much in his life. Every night in dreams he saw Ann, a wild Ann running past and not hearing him call, an Ann passing strangely in a boat as he watched from a window, an Ann receding down an avenue of trees and becoming, by the time he had followed her, a glimmering statue. Once he saw her in a dream weeping and holding Joey in her arms; and the next night he was trying to reach her through a hedge of roses. He dreamt too, and disturbingly, of a youthful figure who was both Ann and Miranda, and who in one dream of hallucinatory power seemed to rise like a goddess, with her dazzling crown of hair, at the very foot of the bed. At other times he dreamt of Steve, simple realistic dreams: Steve playing, with his soldiers or his trains, Steve throwing the German dagger at the stable door. He dreamt a little of his mother. He dreamt twice of Emma Sands, but forgot the dream. He did not dream of Lindsay.

  Randall had never dreamed so much, and he had rarely eaten and drunk so much. They were drunk every afternoon and every night, and what with the drink and the dreams and the curious gaps in his memory and the dazed excitement and exhaustion induced by perpetual love-making Randall was at times at a loss to know where reality lay. For reality he made do with a vague shimmering apprehension of Lindsay's continual presence. She was indeed the Aphrodite of the world of sleep.

  They made love continually. Randall made of Rome a sort of map of love, a series of love-pilgrimages where places were identified by embraces and ecstasy as if they only came into existence when they rose into the heightened consciousness of the. lovers. He took Lindsay to the Appian Way and made love to her behind the Tomb of Caecilia Metella. He took her to the Palatine and made love to her in the Temple of Cybele. He took 'her to the Borghese Gardens and made love to her near the Fontana dei Cavalli Marini. He took her to Ostia Antica and made love to her in the back of a wine shop. He took her to the Catacombs. He took her to the English Cemetery and would have made love to her on Keats's grave only some American ladies arrived. And it was as if at these places the map had smouldered leaving a round hole, a blankness which was at the same time an opening into another world.

  What, through these openings, Randall saw, in so far as at this dazed time he either saw or expected to see anything, was another matter. He had not neglected to take Lindsay, in a more ordinary sense, on tour, and he had, in this city which he
knew and loved, shown her a great deal. Her ignorance of Italian art and indeed of anything pertaining to the past staggered him, and he was a little pained, not so much by the ignorance itself as by a tendency on Lindsay's part to conceal it where possible. What he had in England cheerfully and robustly thought of as her vulgarity appeared in this context as an uneasiness which detracted the tiniest bit from her grace. But these were details.

  Settled back on his raised-up pillows now above the sleeping girl, Randall lit a cigarette and contemplated the hot blurred rectangle of the window, the doors open to a balcony behind the long Venetian blind, the white curtains, soft and translucent as a dream, falling unstirred by any breath of air. The canary continued its song. There was something unfocused, something a little unnervingly fragmentary, in his present apprehension of Lindsay. A number of things, seemingly unrelated, contributed to there being, in his attempted pattern, significant gaps. Talking casually about her childhood Lindsay had given him a quite different account of certain matters from the one she had given at first. Yet what did it matter to him if she was a liar? He was a liar himself. One evening in a restaurant when he had tried to buy her some roses she had said absently that she did not really like roses, as if she had forgotten who she was talking to. But what did it matter to him if at moments she hardly knew who he was? There were moments, particularly late at night, when he hardly knew who she was. Then again she had said to him, only the previous day, 'It wasn't true what we said about Emma Sands; We did like her, didn't we? We did love her.

  Randall had figured his flight in the perfect image of freedom. To be alone with Lindsay in Rome and to be rich seemed to constitute the very peak and essence of unimpeded activity. He had a little reckoned without his mind; and although he told himself that he would change, that he would soon don a new personality, the personality which he had slipped on, as for a tailor's fitting, the day he lunched at Boulestin's and saw the waiters bowing to the ground, he had not yet, he had to admit, quite put off the bad old self. He worried. He could not help reflecting still about Lindsay and Emma, though he told himself it was ridiculous to speculate about that now. Even if his more bizarre images of their relationship, even if his more nightmarish suppositions concerning their collusion about him should have some part of truth, why should he trouble about that now, why should it matter now what Lindsay was then? He shrugged his shoulders but he could not get Emma out of his mind.