The Italian Girl

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like, you men,’ she said softly, staring at the floating flowers. ‘I have this thing inside me, like a monster growing, growing. I hate it, I hate it. If it was born I should kill it. Why should I ruin my whole life at its very start? Who would want me, trailing round a beastly illegitimate child? I’m young. I want to have my youth and my freedom. I don’t want a child now and I certainly don’t want this horrible, horrible thing. Ah – you don’t understand.’ She covered her face.

  I said patiently, ‘It’s not the child’s fault, Flora. It is innocent. It might be a wonderful child and you’d love it. Remember, though it’s such a tiny thing now it’s a human individual with a whole heredity, a whole destiny of its own. You would be destroying a whole human life. And think, if you had other children later, wouldn’t you mourn then for this one, and wonder what it would have been like?’ I felt a fierce passionate desire to save the defenceless thing: all the innocence and purity which Otto and I had seen surrounding Flora like a halo was shrunk into that pinpoint of being.

  ‘Don’t soften me,’ she said violently. ‘If you won’t help me, go away. Go and catch your beastly train.’ She began to get up wearily, heavily, as if the child were already weighing upon her.

  ‘How long a time?’

  ‘Nine weeks. And I’m quite sure. I had a test. Well, goodbye, Uncle Edmund. Have a good journey. I’m sorry I bothered you.’ She brushed down her dress. ‘You won’t tell them, will you?’

  ‘Oh, Flora, Flora –’ The first shock seemed now to have worn off, the horror was dulled, and I felt just an agonizing desire to help the child, to look after her. It was quite clear that I could not catch that train now. I would have to stay. ‘Flora, we must talk ag in about this when I’ve had time to think. I do want to help you. Of course I’ll stay. And of course I won’t tell them.’

  She looked at me more hopefully. We began to move back toward the glossy arches of the camellias. ‘Thank you, Edmund. I think I’ll go and lie down now. I’m glad I told you. I won’t see you till tomorrow and I’ll try and think about it all. Come and see me early in the morning will you? Come and have breakfast in my room. Eight o’clock. I always have breakfast there. What do you eat for breakfast?’

  ‘Anything, Flora, Fruit. Anything. Yes, we’ll meet tomorrow. And promise me you won’t do anything foolish.’

  ‘I expect I’ll do whatever you say,’ she said. ‘Only for God’s sake look after me.’ She looked full at me with her streaked, tear-stained child’s face and then stooped under the leaves.

  I followed slowly, clawing my way along under the low branches. As the sound of the cascade sank to a murmur it seemed as if I had just come in out of a storm. I followed, with my head bent low, the flutter of Flora’s pale blue dress, and I felt like a man under a yoke. Perhaps after all I should have to play the role which Isabel had designed for me. I wondered if I should prove worthy of it.

  6. The Magic Brothel

  A large dusky woman was holding a girl upon her knee. The figures were mysteriously intertwined, the wide draped knees seeming to belong now to one, now to the other. Powerful arms reached out towards me and I shrank away.

  I woke abruptly from sleep and sat up listening. Something quite definite had awakened me. There was a very faint hint of light in the room, the first light of morning. I sat stiffly like an awakened corpse staring at the unfamiliar window, while my heart raced, perhaps from the dream or perhaps from whatever it was that had disturbed me. Then as the room made itself known to me through the faintly grey darkness and I recalled where I was and why I felt disgust, almost horror, at finding myself still in that house. I pushed off the bedclothes and sat on the side of the bed.

  I was about to turn the light on, but changed my mind. There had been some sound which I tried to remember, but my sleeping consciousness would return no answer. Perhaps some animal had got into the room, perhaps someone close by had spoken or called. It seemed foolish not to switch on the light, the dim scene was the very image of my alarm; but some instinct told me to hide, as if whatever it was were not yet aware of me. I rose quietly to my feet and listened again. The house was very still about me and yet alive as if it breathed softly with the breath of sleeping women. I shivered, and crept to the wide-open window. The faint dawn light, scarcely less than darkness, showed only the silhouette of the birch trees. The moon was down. The garden was totally indistinct. I leaned out a little and looked down into a grey obscurity of chill damp misty air which baffled my eyes.

  Then something appeared on the lawn. Something bright and coloured appeared in the middle of the greyness. I stared at the apparition with fascination and cold fright. I could not make out what it was or even where it was. It might have been on the ground or in mid air. It moved a little, seemed to recede, and disappeared. Then a sound came, the sound, very low, a kind of moan or sigh, ‘Aaaah –’, the sort of sound which someone might make when alone. The coloured thing reappeared and I realized now that it was the light of an electric torch shining upon the grass. Beside it I gradually discerned the shadowy figure of a woman.

  My first mad thought was that it was Lydia coming back to the house. Then I thought it might be Flora, Flora despairing, Flora running mad. But hazy as the form was, scarcely assembled in the dawn light, I knew that it was not Flora. It was someone else, someone unknown. I heard the sigh again, born clearly on the damp, silent air, a little higher, a little louder, ‘Aaah.’ … Who was standing there alone and lamenting in front of the dark house like a little figure in a dreadful picture?

  As I looked I felt an alarming certainty that I was the only one who was wakeful. I was the only witness. I was the one who was summoned. Like a harbinger visible only to the victim, the woman had come for me. I donned trousers and jacket over my pyjamas and put on my shoes. I descended the stairs in darkness and fumbled with the chain on the front door. As I quietly opened the door I felt both hunter and hunted. To my alarmed relief the figure was still there. I could yet have been persuaded that I had imagined it all; and it could have been, if it had disappeared for ever, something much more frightening. I stood still in the shadow of the porch. There was more light in the sky.

  She must have heard the chink of the chain as I opened the door. At some hundred yards distance from me she seemed more still, aware of me. I could not see her face except as a blur. I began to move forward with careful footfalls on to the soft weedy gravel and then on to the grass. I was compulsively quiet, frightened of another sound, frightened perhaps of a scream which should bring the house to life behind me with lights and faces. The woman did not stir though I could see her looking at me. The silence continued.

  When I was about ten yards from her I stopped again. I still could not see her face clearly, but she seemed to be young. She was wearing a long dress. A strange tension connected our two bodies. With a strange excitement I apprehended her fear, I awaited her cry, her flight. I wanted to reassure her, but the silence was a spell too great to break, and there was a weird shameful pleasure in standing there before her, as if we were both of us naked. Then she shone the electric torch straight into my face.

  I exclaimed, stepped to avoid it, and found myself very close to her. The torch went out and I saw that she had still not moved, indistinct, impersonal and beautiful as a veiled girl. I had to speak now. ‘What are you doing here?’

  I spoke softly, but the words seemed like thunder. She waited as if for echoes. Then she said slowly, ‘I have come to see the worms’ dance.’

  Her stillness and now her strange words made me feel as if I were still dreaming. She spoke with a foreign accent. I realized that the long dress was a nightgown.

  As I stood beside her dazed, my arms hanging, she said in an explanatory tone, ‘You see, here they are, so many of them.’

  She shone the torch on the ground. The lawn was covered, strewn, with innumerable long glistening worms. They lay one close by the other criss-crossing the green dewy grass with their reddish wet b
odies. The lawn was thick with them. They lay extended, long, thin, translucent, their tails in their holes; and as the torch came down, approaching nearer to them, they drew in their length and then whisked back into the earth with the quickness of a snake. I recalled this phenomenon now, which had greatly excited Otto in the days of our youth. The light was extinguished.

  I said, ‘I hope I didn’t frighten you. I am Edmund Narraway. And you – ah, yes, you must be –’

  Then I saw that she was gone. She had vanished as if she had wrapped herself in the layers of morning light and become as gauzy as they. I thought I could hear her feet running. In a frenzy of anxiety I began to run after her.

  As I came among the faintly glowing birches and heard the crunching sound of my steps in the dry leaves I seemed to see the fleeing figure somewhere in front of me. The form of the summer-house materialized among the trees with uncanny swiftness and I had reached the door of it almost before I realized that she must have entered, recalled seeing or seeming to see her entering. I came up against the door in a rush. I was excited, startled by her sudden flight.

  The door gave a little and then resisted me. I realized with a physical shock that she must be pushing against me from the other side. I paused and then said softly, ‘Please, please, please.’ The words, like words uttered in a fairy tale, seemed to change the scene and make everything resume its human shape. I stood back, and the pressure on the other side ceased. The door hung uncertainly between us, no more than a simple door that could be opened, the door of a human habitation. Then a light came on inside and the wood behind me was darkened as if night had returned to it. I went in through the door.

  The summer-house was originally a round building, a little green-domed Doric temple with merely a big empty space within. But later additions had given it an inner structure with two rooms up above and a kitchen annexe below. Wooden stairs ascended from the lower space inside the door. The woman was standing on the stairs in the bright electric light. I blinked. It was indeed the next scene, and the hunter and the hunted had changed their masks.

  ‘I’m sorry I ran after you –’

  The light, falling from just above her head, seemed now too bright to see her clearly. She was wearing a long yellow nightgown with frills about her neck and about her feet. I had the impression that her feet were bare, Her hands were on her bosom and she panted still from her flight. Hair of a metallic copper colour, perhaps a false colour, fell almost to her shoulder, lank and straight. Her face, blurred in the sudden glare, seemed a dead white. She was young.

  ‘You are David Levkin’s sister?’

  ‘Yes, I am Elsa.’

  I had almost completely forgotten Isabel’s casual reference to a sister. Now it seemed I must have known who was the sighing figure who had compelled me to pursue her.

  ‘Come upstairs.’ Her voice was dreamily expressionless.

  I hesitated, and then followed her up the wooden stairs which creaked woefully under my weight. I saw the wet prints of her bare feet on the steps.

  The first room upstairs had the air of a landing, with nothing in it except a huge oak chest and a ragged sagging sofa. There was a strong smell of dust and mould. I stifled a sneeze. The inner door was closed. I faced her uncertainly, feeling both alarmed and dangerous. Slowly, facing me, she drew on a green dressing-gown. The nightdress was not quite transparent.

  She was a strange figure, tall, taller perhaps than her brother, with the same wide nostrils and the same full heavy sensitive mouth. Her lips were a moist scarlet and her eyebrows two thick black triangles, but her face was not otherwise made up and the skin was pale and waxen as if it would be cold and not quite human to the touch. Her metallic hair looked almost greenish now. Her eyes, round which was drawn a turquoise-blue pencil line, were so exceedingly dark that it seemed her hair must be dyed. They gazed at me, large and oriental, the staring eyes of a sorceress or a prostitute, an artificial woman. I felt dazed, disturbed, confused.

  I said in a low voice. ‘You mustn’t let me intrude on you. I don’t want to waken your brother. I was just surprised at seeing you and wondered –’ I was going to say ‘why you were crying’. But there were no traces of tears in those brilliant eyes.

  ‘I often come,’ she said, ‘at night. You see, I am not allowed to go in the house. And it is this.’ Her voice was very foreign and I could make nothing of her words; I was not even sure I had heard them right.

  ‘Can I help you?’ I said, The flight through the darkness and now her half-clothed nocturnal proximity, her curious animal calmness, produced in me an immediate elation, a sort of excited protective devotion. It was long since I had had so direct and yet so oddly natural an encounter with a woman. I felt ready to talk to her for a long time. And a sense that I might dangerously have taken her in my arms was instantly changed into a desire to serve her. Her tearless lamentation upon the lawn and now her mysterious words seemed like a sacred appeal directed especially to me.

  She looked at me thoughtfully as if taking seriously what I had said. Then she said, ‘There is some coffee. But first I must show you something. After all you are the brother. And we have waited for you a long time.’

  She moved toward the closed door of the other room and threw it wide open. There was already a bright light within by which I saw, sprawled upon a low bed and lying half naked in the abandonment of deep sleep, my brother Otto.

  The brightly lit scene revealed through the doorway had a crudely unreal quality, it was suddenly too large and too close, as if the girl had summoned up a gross simulacrum in a vision. Yet it was no psychological doll, it was indeed Otto who lay there displayed as on a stage, Otto open-mouthed and snoring, Otto huge, shaggy, deplorably and shamefully present and fast asleep. My first feeling was a curious dull sense of deprivation. Then I felt disgust and then a pang of guilt and fear. I feared my brother’s rage should he awake and find me.

  ‘He will not wake,’ she said, guessing my thought. ‘He has drunk. He sleeps like a pig. Come and see him.’ We went in together and she closed the door behind us. It was like entering an animal’s den.

  Most of the room was occupied by the divan on which my brother was sprawled, Heavy curtains were pulled closely across the windows and the atmosphere was stuffy and thick with a humid pungent smell. The floor was covered with a mass of clothes which encumbered my ankles like sticky seaweed. A half-empty whisky bottle was standing upright in one of Otto’s shoes. Otto, uncovered by the surge of the blankets, was wearing two very dirty round-necked vests rolled up in tubes about his chest and a pair of equally reprehensible long woollen pants pulled well down upon his hips. His thick soft waist was revealed, covered with a straggle of dark curly hairs, and below it the bare white protuberance of his stomach and the black cup of his navel, seemingly full of earth. His big bull-head was thrown back and his face seemed a crumpled mass of fleshy lines, his moist shapeless mouth ajar and gurgling, He seemed more like the debris of a human being than like a man.

  The girl was staring down at him intently. Then suddenly she prodded him violently in the ribs with her bare foot. Otto groaned and settled his head more deeply into what I now saw was a pile of female underwear. The girl looked at me as if for approval of her demonstration, and said ‘Elsa.’

  I found myself replying ‘Elsa.’ The magical repetition of her name seemed like a charm which was to stop me from going away. She sat down now upon the bed and gestured me to sit too. Very cautiously I lowered myself on to the end of the divan, the odorous bulk of Otto rising and falling between us. And as I did so I thought again, in a resigned way, that if Otto were to open his eyes now he would probably break me in two.

  I stared at the girl. She seemed solemn, cool, with a pathetic air of tawdry ceremony. The aroma of whisky and sweat and sex from Otto was overwhelming; and I began to notice that she herself was far from immaculate. The pale, waxy, greasy face was very dark about the nostils and smeared with blood and dirt about the chin. A downy moustache covered the deep
ly indented upper lip and long fine hairs drooped at the corners of the full painted mouth. Her hands, busy now at the neck of her nightgown, had long chipped nails, patchy with old varnish, and I saw she was wearing a number of what appeared to be diamond rings. The metallic hair fell wantonly forward to veil the big crudely outlined exotic eyes. I found her extremely attractive. I was filled with a repulsive excitement and shame and glanced down at Otto. He slept, his open mouth like a wet, red, sea anemone.

  ‘You are Edmund from the south. Will you have some whisky?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  She picked up the bottle from Otto’s shoe and tilted it to her lips, closing her eyes. ‘You know my brother David. Do you like my brother? We are Russian Jews.’

  ‘Yes, I like him. Where do you come from in England?’

  ‘We are not of England. We are of Leningrad.’

  This surprised me a little. I had seemed to gather from Isabel that the Levkins were only of distant Russian extraction. ‘Have you been over here long?’

  ‘Since six years.’

  ‘Why did you leave Russia?’

  ‘It was my father. We were young then, My mother is since long dead. My father was a piano player, he is very grand, very much known, but he cannot like Russia because it is not good for the Jews. He laughed at the Synagogue, but in his heart not. In his heart he is always very sad. Then one day he took us through a big dark forest and we walk and walk and then there are such big wooden towers and bright lights and we run and run and they are shooting at us –’

  ‘But you all got through –’

  ‘My father was hit in the hand with a bullet so that he cannot any more play the piano ever.’

  ‘Ah – I’m sorry – Where is he now?’

  ‘He is not anywhere. He is dead of what they say is a broken heart. So after that we are wandering people. You see these rings? Before my father die he give to us these diamonds so that we are not poor in whatever country we are. They are of very much value but we do not sell them because they are remembering of him.’