The Italian Girl

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘Out of the blue. He arrived the day Lydia had her last stroke. He has a sister or something with him. He hasn’t done anything outrageous so far.’ She laughed her little laugh. Isabel had a tiny musical laugh which came out of her little mouth like a peardrop. She got up from her chair and minced, threading the furniture, to the windows. ‘You make me restless. I do wish you’d sit down.’

  ‘Sorry, Isabel. I’m afraid of breaking a chair like I did last time. Isabel, do turn that music off, would you? I can’t stand music in the background.’

  She leaned to switch off the gramophone. ‘I need music so much. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Sometimes I wrap it round me like a wild cloak. Oh Edmund, I’ve been so lonely –’

  I was a little nervous of the note of appeal in her voice. I did not want any display of Isabel’s emotions. I had no wish to hear her confessions and complaints. In any case I knew it all but too well. I said briskly, ‘Come, come, there’s always –’ I was about to say ‘Flora’, but felt suddenly that this might cause pain. I said ‘– the Italian girl. ’

  ‘Maggie and I are like the people in Dostoevsky who starved together in the hut for too long. We can do nothing for each other. Anyway, Lydia took over Maggie as she took over Flora. She took everything.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine she would have swallowed down poor little Maggie quite easily.’

  ‘There’s a lot of Maggie left.’

  ‘There’s a lot of you left. I’m surprised you don’t get out more, do things in the town.’

  ‘Like she does. Maggie’s quite a do-gooder. She knows all the Italian community. But I don’t quite see myself as a baby-sitter.’

  ‘Surely it would help you to try to think about people other than yourself, other people’s troubles –’

  ‘You think I lead an idiotic self-centred life?’

  I hesitated. There was an eagerness in her question. I did not really want to have this sort of conversation with my sister-in-law. Anything from me which savoured of rebuke would release some greater warmth into the atmosphere between us, and I shrank instinctively from this. I was, after all, only a passer-by. Yet I had to answer truthfully. ‘Frankly, yes.’

  My frankness gave her immediate pleasure and she almost blushed with gratification. ‘You’re quite right. My life is a divertissement.’ She moved from the window to the mantelpiece and began to drop dry shaggy bits of wood onto the fire. I backed away, edging my feet along the crowded floor.

  ‘And you –’ said Isabel. ‘Yes, you lead a simple good life. You help people. Oh, I know about it. I wonder if you think it’s easy to be like that?’

  ‘I’m selfish too,’ I said. ‘It just suits me that way. I have unworldly tastes.’ I added, ‘And of course I had such an example before me in my father.’ I was beginning to hate the conversation.

  ‘If only your father hadn’t met Lydia! He ought to have been a monk. But in a way you’re living his life for him.’

  ‘No one could live his life for him. He lived his own life. He was a much much finer person than I could ever be.’ Besides, I added to myself, I met Lydia too and at a rather earlier age. I looked surreptitiously at my watch and wondered if my brother was sober yet.

  ‘Yes, but you’re a free man,’ said Isabel. ‘We are all prisoners here. We are like people in an engraving. God, how I hate engravings! Sorry, Edmund, but there’s something about those black cramped things – it’s a Gothic art, a northern art. And why do engravers always choose such gloomy subjects? Hanged men, wailing women. You can’t be gay in an engraving. No colour. God, how I hate the north!’ She tapped her wedding ring with exasperation on the mantelpiece.

  I knew I was not a free man, but I was certainly not going to discuss this with Isabel. ‘There were plenty of Italian engravers. It wasn’t all invented by Dürer. Mantegna, for instance –’

  ‘Otto’s Gothic, you know,’ said Isabel. ‘He is the north. He’s primitive, gross. Otto’s the sort of man who’ll pee into a washbasin even if there’s a lavatory beside him.’

  I detest coarse talk in women and anyway would have thought it most improper to bandy words about my brother with his wife. I said in a cheerful leave-taking tone, ‘Ah well, Isabel, I think you are exaggerating. Even if you were imprisoned you are much more free now. And you can be free at any time if you choose to be. And now if you don’t mind –’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Edmund,’ said Isabel. She was pouring more whisky into her glass and I realized with distaste that she was slightly intoxicated. ‘You know as well as I do that one can be imprisoned in one’s mind. Here we’ve all been destroying ourselves and each other to spite Lydia. We’ve become monkey men and spider women. Otto and I are specialized destroyers of each other. Lydia’s departure makes no difference to that.’

  The vehemence of her tone both touched and alarmed me. This was everything that I wanted to get away from. I felt compassion and yet knew that to be really moved by Isabel’s plight would do neither her nor me any good. ‘Try and brace up, Isabel. Let cheerfulness break in occasionally! You can lead a happy, useful, independent life –’

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Isabel, ‘how Saint Teresa describes a vision of a place reserved for her in hell? It’s like a dark cupboard. Well, I live in that dark cupboard all the time. I am separated by my whole being from the good life you speak of The only thing that consoles me now is sleep. Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.’

  She was tapping her wedding ring again, fiercely, her moist lips apart, her eyes wrinkled against the glow of the bright fire. She seemed dishevelled now, the flowery dressing-gown pulled wide at the neck where she kept darting a nervous hand to rub her breast and shoulders.

  In acute distress I turned to the window. Then, out in the garden, slowly crossing the lawn in the bright sunshine, I saw Flora. She had changed into a white summer dress and carried a big sun hat which she swung idly in one hand from a blue ribbon. Her hair was still undone. It was indeed not an engraver’s task. It was a subject for Manet.

  I exclaimed. ‘Why, there’s Flora. How very pretty she is.’

  I could hear Isabel move behind me and in a moment her sleeve was touching mine. We both watched the child as she strolled, head thrown back, as if she were aware of nothing but the brilliant trees and the bright light blue summer air.

  ‘Alice in Wonderland! She must be a joy to you, Isabel.’

  ‘Yes and no.’ She added half under her breath, ‘I wish I had other children.’

  Flora disappeared among the trees. I sighed.

  ‘Still all alone, Edmund?’

  ‘Yes.’ I moved away from her. My exasperated distress had gone, and in feeling sorry for myself I felt more sorry for her.

  ‘How long are you planning to stay with us?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, looking at my watch again, ‘if you’ll excuse me, and if I can get hold of Otto now, I’ll catch the five o’clock train.’

  ‘What?’

  Already half-way to the door, I turned to her. Her plump hands were crossed at her throat in an attitude of horror and supplication. ‘No, no, no –’ she said. Then with an air rather of authority than entreaty she stretched out an arm in my direction. She seemed, in her golden fiery shrine, like a little prophetess. ‘You can’t go, Edmund.’

  ‘Well, really I –’

  ‘You must stay. Something will hold you here. You must stay on now and help us. Otto needs you. We all need you. Who else could I have talked to like this? I was so much looking forward to your coming. You are the only person who can heal us.’

  ‘I am no healer,’ I said. I could not add: ‘I cannot heal you. Perhaps no one can.’

  ‘Yes, you are. You are many things. You are a good man. You are a sort of doctor. You are the assessor, the judge, the inspector, the liberator. You will clear us all up. You will set us in order. You will set us free.’

  I was thoroughly alarme
d by this speech. My intense desire was to return to my own simple unencumbered place. I did not want to dally in the mess of Isabel’s world, let alone to be assigned a role in it. I said firmly, ‘I’m sorry, Isabel. I don’t exactly have to go, but I intend to go. I couldn’t do anything for you and Otto. Now please forgive me and excuse me.’

  The tense prophetic little figure drooped, and she shambled back to the fire, knocking over a small table. One of the fluffy slippers had come off. She poured out some more whisky and said without looking at me, ‘Perhaps you’re right, Edmund. You’d better get back to your good life. I shouldn’t have bothered you like this. It’s just that I’m caged, bored. I want emotion and pistol shots.’

  Emotion and pistol shots: Lydia had wanted these things too. They were just what I feared and hated. I fled from the room.

  4. Otto and Innocence

  ‘I dreamt last night,’ said Otto, ‘that there was a huge tiger in the house. It kept prowling from room to room and I kept trying to get to the telephone to ring for help. Then when I did get to the phone I found I couldn’t dial properly because the dial was all made of marzipan. And then this tiger –’

  ‘Do you mind,’ I said. ‘I do want to catch the train. And there are still various things to be settled.’

  We were in the workshop and Otto was eating his lunch. The workshop, with large pieces of worked and unworked stone rising and receding about the central space, had a megalithic solemnity, like a meeting-place of Druids. The stone seemed to give back a peculiar marmoreal quality of sound, melancholy and a little hollow, and to exude coldness. Otto now mainly produced gravestones and memorials. Sober plain surfaces of slate or marble recorded here and there in confident impeccable Blado or Baskerville the names of the deceased who could have no fears for their identity with their arrival in another world announced in lettering by Otto. A bright clear light from above showed the irregular whitewashed walls, now gauzy with innumerable cobwebs. A beautifully executed memorial tablet of dark green Cornish slate lay upon the work bench, where I had already noted with approval the neat clean array of tools. Otto might be a mess in every other way, but he was still a meticulous craftsman. Our father had given us, in this respect, a training which could not be undone.

  Otto was seated on top of his folded overcoat upon a long low marble tomb with his plate balanced on his knee. His lunch consisted of water biscuits, butter and cheese in great quantity, and, in a cardboard box beside him, a mound of herbs which he had plucked in handfuls from the overgrown herb garden. I remembered these tastes of his. Feeding Otto was like feeding an elephant or a gorilla. His great size required an immense bulk of green stuff per day. At this moment, with a pocket-knife clasped in red bulging fingers, he was plastering on to a biscuit a piece of butter the size of a ping pong ball; upon this buttery sphere a cone of cheese of equivalent mass was then balanced, and to the cone were made to adhere bushy sprigs of mint and marjoram which Otto seized from the pile of green fodder beside him, skilfully eschewing the pieces of grass, groundsel, ground elder and other foreign greenery which the hastily gathered herbage was sure to contain. His gaping mouth remained open, revealing a green biscuity mess within, while he conveyed the greasy structure to it. Most of it got inside.

  ‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he mumbled, spewing out biscuit crumbs as he chewed, ‘that we are both practically vegetarians. I’m a vegetable man and you’re a fruit man. I expect it’s something to do with Lydia. Most things about us are!’

  I was in fact a vegetarian, though by preference and on instinct rather than on any clear principle. I seated myself now upon the work bench, checking my usual tendency to pace about as I did not want to stir up the multi-coloured stone dust upon the floor. I have a very sensitive nose. ‘Otto –’

  ‘Gosh, I believe I’ve just swallowed a furry caterpillar! Poor little blighter. Will he poison me do you think? I wonder what it’s like to be eaten? Well we should know. Oh, my God!’

  ‘Otto –’

  ‘All right, all right. Things to be decided. Such as Lydia’s tombstone, problem of. Christ.’

  ‘I leave that to you,’ I said. ‘Put on anything you like. I don’t mind. And she won’t mind now.’ We had had a discussion a little earlier about whether there should be any special inscription, and whether it should contain the words ‘wife’ and ‘mother’. They were words Lydia had detested. ‘Why not just her name, anyway.’

  ‘Lydia. It sounds like a little dog.’

  ‘I mean her full name, you ass. Anyway, you decide.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ said Otto, now cramming a leafy handful in, grass and all, ‘that I’m always so constipated in spite of all the green stuff. Green seems the natural colour of food, doesn’t it? Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’

  ‘Otto –’

  ‘Have some whisky, Ed, or are you still on the waggon?’

  ‘I’m not on the waggon. I just don’t like the stuff. Haven’t you had. enough for today?’

  Otto shook his head sadly, and when he could speak, ‘You just don’t understand about addictions. One always wants more. The more one has the more one wants and the more frantically one wants it. Ah, if only I could give up the drink now. And just live blankly. Then one would really feel the hell one was in. It would enter the body.’ He paused, his mouth, full of green mash, wide open, and gazed immobile at the cobwebby wall.

  I have said that Otto was taller than me. He was also wider and bulkier, his once bull-like frame turning to masses of fat. He still retained, however, an exceptional physical strength, and he was, when he wished to be, tireless. His face was enormous and had now become red and flabby. He had an absurdly short straight nose, a high wrinkled sweaty brow, tracts of soft pendulous cheek, and a wet shapeless gash of a mouth which usually hung open. Like me, he needed to shave twice a day, and unlike me he failed to do so. His hair, more plentiful than my own and still a dark mousy brown, fell longish, wig-like, very slightly curly round the dome of his head, so that he had sometimes the air of a middle-aged operatic bass. When he drew breath one might expect an organ-like boom; and indeed his voice was as loud though not so musical. It was hard to believe we had resembled each other when young; possibly we still did in so far as a thin man can resemble a stout one. I had long stopped looking into mirrors, even when shaving. Neither of us had much of our father, another tall man but frail and elegant and pale as ivory, though I had been told many years ago that I was his image.

  ‘It’s just taken us in different ways, you and me,’ Otto was going on. I noticed that striped pyjamas were protruding from the ends of his trousers. This must have been his funeral garb. ‘You remember the thing Father used always to be quoting, about the two birds on the tree, how one eats the fruit and the other watches and does not eat? Some Hindu thing. Well, you’re the one that watches and I’m the one that eats. I eat and eat and drink and drink. I try to swallow the world. No wonder Isabel thinks I’m a sort of gluttonous buffoon. Was Isabel complaining to you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘of course not.’ I was troubled by the quotation about the birds. I recalled my father uttering it, but I could not recall what it meant.

  ‘Well, I expect she was, you know. God, if sarcasm and cool irony were grounds for divorce I could have escaped Isabel long ago! However, she has worse things to complain of. She finds me disgusting. I am disgusting!’

  I wanted to keep off this. ‘By the way, I found a lot of fine boxwood blocks in Father’s room. I wonder if I could have them if you don’t want them?’

  ‘Oh, take them, take them. You may find they’re a bit cracked, they’ve been there for ages. Isabel stopped me from engraving years ago. She said engravers made everything tiny, like looking through the wrong end of binoculars. Tinification, she called it. But that’s just what she does. How right you were not to marry!’ Everything led back to Isabel.

  ‘That has disadvantages too!’ I passed my hand over my lips. Otto is a wet-lipped man. I am a dry-lipped man
.

  ‘Only very carnal ones. The spiritual disadvantages of marriage are crippling. I could have been a good man if I hadn’t married. Sometimes I think women really are the source of all evil. They are such dreamers. Sin is a sort of unconsciousness, a not-knowing. Women are like that, like the bottle. Remember that dreaming Eve at Autun, that dreaming, swimming, dazed Eve of Gislebertus? Ah, if I could have ever carved anything like that – but I’m good for nothing but provincial tombstones.’ He detached, with a big dirty hand, a flowery sprig of thyme, and stuck it onto the cheese.

  ‘You’ve done some very fine things,’ I said, ‘and you will again.’

  ‘No, no, Ed. I’m done for. God if you only knew the mess my life is in! And it’s not Isabel’s fault, it’s my fault, all my fault. Mea maxima culpa. Nothing redeems that central failure. And I can’t even feel any proper regret about it. I’m caught in a machine. Evil is a sort of machinery. And part of it is that one can’t even suffer properly, one enjoys one’s suffering. Even the notion of punishment becomes corrupt. There are no penances because all that suffering is consolation. What one wants is not suffering but truth: and that would be a kind of suffering one can’t even imagine now. That was what I meant earlier about giving up drink. If I could look with absolute blankness and truthfulness at what I am, even if I went on doing the same things, I’d be an infinitely better man. But I can’t’.

  Otto was clearly still drunk. But a distant echo of my father in what he said touched my heart. My father had been a philosopher manqué. Otto too had his labyrinth, his metaphysical torture chamber. Indeed, I had my own. I understood Otto perfectly.

  I said, ‘Work is one simplicity which can’t be taken from us.’