The Italian Girl

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Here they are, here they all are!’ cried Flora. She thrust Elsa forward.

  Maggie had leapt up and moved nearer to me. Isabel retreated stumbling into the pile of underclothes. Otto was bent, covering his face, suddenly shrunk, curled up with pain and shock. Elsa moved to the centre of the room. Her metallic hair fell in long flat strips to her shoulders like the hair of a statue, and she wore a long shapeless dress which seemed to belong to some other epoch. She looked now as if she were completely mad, the pale wide-nostrilled face twisted and grinning. The wide brow and high cheek bones shone as if they were oiled. She was both alarming and infinitely pathetic, like something frail and moribund escaped from a hospital.

  She seemed to see no one but Otto. She said in a soft whining voice, ‘No, no, you cannot – Come with me now. Come with me – Please, please – ’ It was like the plaint of an animal.

  Otto groaned and then fell heavily forward on to his knees. He spread his hands out in front of him, dropping his head, and grovelled.

  ‘Go away, go away from here –’ Isabel half stumbled over Otto, and then dealt him a savage kick in the side which tumbled him over on to the floor. She advanced to Elsa and tried to lead her out of the room. Elsa resisted.

  Flora had started to utter a high-pitched hysterical ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Isabel was still gabbling, half angry half frightened, telling Elsa to go. Elsa pushed Isabel violently and then retreated until her feet were almost in the fire. She began to kick the red-hot embers out onto the rug. Isabel screamed. There was a smell of burning and little tongues of flame sprang up at Elsa’s capering feet. Otto was sitting on the floor with his hand over his mouth, he seemed unable to move. Elsa was trying to pull a log out of the fire. The heat in the room seemed redoubled, as if we were inside a furnace, and the golden light was everywhere. I cannoned into Isabel who was retreating, still crying out, as a burning log rolled across the floor. I stamped hard on the smouldering carpet. Flora was shouting ‘I hate you, I hate you all’ – She turned and ran through the door. Maggie called to me, ‘Go with her, she might –’ And I ran out of the room after the girl.

  17. Edmund in the Enchanted Wood

  Flora ran straight down the stairs and out of the house. As I reached the door I saw her receding across the lawn in the wet yellow light. A steady rain was falling. She was making for the stream. I called after her, but the thick oppressive air muffled my voice. I began to run.

  The wood was very dark as if the evening and the night were already installed there, and I ran into a baffle of warm air which seemed full of the beating of birds’ wings. The rain inhabited the wood, drumming above and creeping and dripping below. Flora’s running steps ahead were heavy yet soft. The race across the lawn had already soaked me, and as I slithered and blundered along the path where I had sauntered so lately with what now seemed an infinitely younger Flora, I wondered what I was pursuing. Was I indeed pursuing or was I fleeing? I called to her again, burst through a screen of bamboos and ducked breathlessly under the first arch of the camellias.

  I wanted in that headlong rush to escape from the brutal chaos of the scene that I had left. It would not indeed be the first time that I had run out of that house in sheer horror of what I had seen within. But I ran too out of some primitive need to catch Flora and extort from her an absolution which only she could give: and it was as if in the giving of it she herself would be somehow replenished and restored. I wanted to capture her and to retrieve some innocence for us both, to find in her again the child that I had known. And I was more rationally afraid that she might indeed, in the hysterical state that she was now in, hurl herself into the black pool.

  A branch of camellia gave me a sharp rap on the brow just above my bad eye and the pain was so violent for a moment that I had to kneel on the ground. The steps receded, echoing a little in the vaults of the wood. I got up after a moment and went on more cautiously. The earth was scarcely wet, and hard and bare as if it had been beaten by the feet of many dancers. The raindrops clattered on the canopy, and here and there a pattern of pointed leaves showed in a dim oval of light. I emerged into the space by the waterfall.

  The dense rain blotted the air, making a dome of yellowish green over the pool. I dashed the water from my eyes. The dark surface was fretted and trembling. The sound of the cascade was merged in the downpour. I could see no one. Then a pale movement caught my eye and I discerned a form halfway up the high bank on the other side of the pool.

  Flora had scrambled up the bank, which was steep but not precipitous, towards the high gulley down which the stream descended to the fall. Balanced on a rock, one hand grasping a branch above her, she had paused to look back. Her slight dress clung to her figure and she seemed like a naked girl, blurred by the uncertain air, shining and dripping like the rocks about her, a sprite composed of light and water.

  I called out to her and she answered something which I could not hear and began climbing again.

  I made my way round as far as I could. On one side the rocks fell sheer into the pool, and to reach the place where she was Flora must have passed under the fall. I remembered the slippery ledge of rock behind the plunge of the cascade. The figure of the clambering girl disappeared from view among the precarious saplings above. I dodged into the deafening hollow behind the fall and slithered with squelching shoes in a darkness of spongy moss and ferns. It was very cold. The falling water struck me a violent blow on one shoulder and I splashed out on the other side.

  I could see Flora now directly above me, her legs straddling a tree, her white skirt spread tight. A long leg dangled and then she scrambled farther up. A shaft of light, penetrating the rain, cast a haze over the rocks so that the girl seemed to be contained in a golden cylinder. I stood looking up at the floating figure, suddenly dazed by the madness of the pursuit, deafened by the waterfall, frozen and exhausted. I called again. Then it occurred to me that she might be ascending to the road above where someone could be waiting for her. She might be going to some last unspeakable rendezvous with Levkin, I began to climb.

  A stone came flying down with considerable force and just missed my head. Another followed. I flattened myself against the rock. Then something struck me sharply and painfully above the ear. I descended a step or two and received a missile full in the chest. Protecting my face I slithered back to the platform beside the fall. Quite clearly now above me I could hear Flora’s voice crying out ‘Rhino! Rhino!’ I dodged another stone. Then I glimpsed her through the glittering foliage as with a final kick she reached the level path at the top of the gulley. It seemed fruitless to pursue her now. The stones had defeated me. And somehow with that cry of ‘Rhino!’ I grasped her as safe and free and myself as utterly unnecessary. There was nothing I could do for her and nothing she would do for me.

  As I turned about I saw across the pool, upon the path which I had just left, the figure of another girl. The rain was stopping and the sunny hazy light was increasing. The rain abated as I watched, like a curtain drawn steadily back, and the black pool composed the reflection of Maggie. I plunged into the cavern of the fall and received the force of the water upon my other shoulder.

  I felt a sudden blank relief at the sight of Maggie, and at the same time became conscious of such an extremity of exhaustion that I could almost have fallen on my hands and knees. I was soaked and shivering with a most violent pain in my head. I felt sick and giddy. I was about to sit down at the side of the pool, but Maggie had already started to walk back and had entered the camellias. Staggering a little I followed her into the wood.

  The branches dripped with a hollow sound. ‘I couldn’t catch her. Do you think she’ll be all right?’

  ‘Yes, I think so now. I was afraid about the pool.’

  ‘So was I. But I think it was just that she couldn’t stand it in there. How are things now?’

  ‘I don’t know, I couldn’t stand it either. I came straight after you.’

  Maggie moved on just ahead of me, seeming to float over the dark
bare ground. I could see her white shoes, scarcely splashed, flicker in the woody twilight. It must be near evening. It had been a long day. We left the camellias and came to the overgrown path beside the stream. Brambles and heavy soaking grass so encumbered my legs that I could scarcely make headway and almost fell down with weariness and exasperation. The pain in my head was blinding and I was chattering with cold.

  ‘I’ve lost my shoes.’ Maggie, who had just tripped over a concealed log, was standing helplessly beside the path, her stockinged feet black with mud.

  It was dark in the undergrowth. We beat around ineffectually, poking and pulling and being ferociously torn by brambles and wild roses. Lights seemed to flash every time I bent down and I saw my questing bloodstained hand as if it belonged to someone else. There was absolutely no sign of Maggie’s shoes. They must have become lodged in some thick grassy chamber or fallen into some creature’s hole in the river bank. After much scrabbling and scuffling we straightened up and faced each other in the half dark under the tall birch trees. I reeled with tiredness and sickness.

  But it was impossible to let her walk barefoot in that thorny jungle. ‘I suppose, if you don’t mind, I’ll have to carry you.’ It sounded ungracious enough.

  She said in a subdued way, ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ and we faced each other so in a staring awkwardness.

  At the moment of picking her up I felt real doubt about whether I could support her at all. I had scarcely, the moment before, been able to drag myself along. To have to carry her on through that weedy dripping thicket seemed almost too hard, a final idiotic trial, a stupid blundering end to the madness of the day. I felt I should simply stagger forward and fall with her into the thick briar bush.

  I stooped a little towards her and lifted her clear of the ground. She gave a little pressure upon my neck and seemed to fly upwards. She smelt of the rain.

  It was not really so difficult to carry her. She was almost miraculously light. The pain seemed gone from my head and my knees pressed sturdily forward through the yielding green. It was lighter overhead. A great warmth seemed to be flowing from her body into mine. And in a moment or two I was conscious of nothing but the pressure of her slight body against my chest, the firmness of her arm about my neck, and the warm place where my hand passed under her knees. We came out into the open just before reaching the lawn.

  I rather slowly set her down. There was something or other I wanted to say. I began, ‘Maggie –’

  She interrupted me with a word which I scarcely heard. I only much later realized what the word was that she had uttered. For at that moment we both saw that a great tongue of yellow flame was issuing from the window of Isabel’s room. The house was on fire.

  Part Three

  18. Elsa’s Rings

  ‘Is he still in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Otto opened another bottle of champagne. We had been for some very long time shut in that little white hospital waiting-room. The cork struck the ceiling and joined other corks on the floor. Otto hit the rim of the glass unsteadily with the neck of the bottle. The white smoky foam rolled over his bandaged hand. He drank hastily and then began to pace again, turning and returning in the confined space. There was a mark upon the wall where he brushed it each time with the swing of his shoulder. Elsa was dead.

  ‘Her dress burned so fast,’ said Otto. ‘I grabbed her at once of course and tried to put it out. But she was like a burning torch.’ He had said this to me ten times, twenty times.

  ‘If only I had not gone away – ’ I had said this to him ten times, twenty times.

  ‘She whirled like a dervish in that room. It would have made no difference.’

  Who knows? Why had Flora, at that moment of all moments, lured me away like a demoness? If I had behaved differently to Flora, perhaps Elsa would not be dead. I felt that I had killed her, that we had all killed her, and I knew that Otto felt the same.

  ‘She can’t have suffered much, can she? Not after the first moment. Surely she can’t have suffered. She hardly knew.’ This also he had said.

  ‘She hardly knew. She was unconscious when I got back. She wasn’t conscious again. The doctor said –’ We were intoning the same things again and again.

  ‘Yet it took so long,’ said Otto. He spoke in a soft whine of misery quite unlike his usual voice. ‘She might have known. When they thought she was unconscious she might have been thinking. She might have been thinking of me, how I’d treated her –’

  ‘Stop it Otto. And do stop drinking.’ Otto had been drinking the champagne continuously. He had been grotesquely theoretical in his insistence that it was the only drink one could go on and on with. I could scarcely bear the sight of the bottles.

  ‘It’s incredible to me now that I could have done it,’ he said, ‘abandon her like that. I should have managed somehow. I should simply have loved her and found a way to go on loving her.’ Her death had made his love perfect. He saw now only the infinite requirement that one person can make upon another. He saw now that he could have attempted far more perfectly to meet all his obligations. And with the fearful strength which her death had given him it seemed to him now that he could have succeeded.

  I sat on the table. We were like two men in a prison. There was that sense of there being no more possibilities, of there being only the here and the now and the this. We had inhabited the little room during the long terrible time of her unconsciousness. Now it was the hour of departure but we could not depart. I could see that Otto could no longer conceive of himself. I dreaded the task of taking him away.

  ‘Are you sure he’s still in there?’

  ‘Yes. I’d have seen him through the glass door. Do you want to talk to him?’

  ‘No,’ said Otto. His face still wore the grimace which I had seen upon it when I ran back from the wood. The mask had only loosened a little. He passed me lumbering to the wall. ‘You see him, Ed. Find out what he wants done with – Oh God.’

  We had all been removed to some other plane of being. Otto was living in torment now what seemed to him, what perhaps was, the reality of his relation with Elsa. Something extreme, some truth too appalling to contemplate and yet arrestingly evident had thrust itself through the surface of our lives like a monstrous hump. And one result of this was that we were all isolated from each other, as if we had been shut into separate cells. Since the catastrophe Otto and David had treated each other with a gentleness, a tenderness almost, which in the midst of such extreme grief on both sides seemed a miracle of attention. There was a respect which resembled love, but no communication. We had each our own Elsa. With a devoted deference Otto had acknowledged David’s rights, rights which had seemed pathetically, dreadfully, like property rights, to be the first with Elsa. There had been the arrangements, the vigil, and now –

  ‘I’ll speak to him then,’ I said. ‘Shall I ask him to come back – home?’ It sounded odd.

  ‘Yes,’ said Otto. ‘But he won’t come.’ He lifted his head and for a moment the mask of pain was curiously cleared and a new Otto looked out, blank, resigned, dispossessed.

  ‘We must look after him.’

  Otto shook his head. ‘We can’t. We can’t.’ The old grimace returned. He said, ‘Will we ever be the same again, Ed?’

  I knew what he meant. It was not just what we had seen and heard in those moments: the blazing room, the screaming women, the handling of that seared flesh. We had seen too much suddenly, too much about mortality and chance, too much about the consequences of our actions, too much about the real nature of the world. I answered, ‘Yes, unfortunately.’

  A figure passed quickly behind the glass panel of the door and I started up. ‘You’ll be all right, Otto? I’ll be back directly.’

  ‘Yes, go, go.’

  David had already disappeared. I ran along a white corridor and down some stone steps by a lift shaft. I could hear running feet ahead of me. I began to run too.

  I emerged in a long hallway with a vista towards a distant arch. T
he boy was far ahead, running like a deer. He turned towards the main entrance and was gone. I ran faster down the empty, clean, white hall. I passed between pillars and emerged into a busy street, a rainy summer evening. He was already crossing the road. I saw that he had a suitcase.

  After so much solitude, so much prison life, I was confused by such a close crowding of faces. A little mild rain was falling. It touched my brow and my hair with a gentle incredulous touch. A yellow sunny light showed buildings vivid and near against a leaden sky. I pursued David across the road.

  He was running again. Although he did not look back he seemed like a man pursued. I was checked by traffic at a side road and he receded. I could just see his head distant among many others, and the idea that he might now simply disappear and never be heard of any more filled me with a sudden anguish. I dodged across in front of a lorry and began to run along the edge of the pavement, springing into the road in the face of the slow, swarming, home-coming crowd.

  ‘David!’

  I had almost caught him up when he turned abruptly into a red-brick courtyard and I saw we were at the railway station. There were fewer people now. I sprinted and caught his arm.

  ‘Oh, it’s you. I thought it was Otto.’ For a second he looked disappointed. Then he turned and we walked more slowly together into the hall of the station.

  ‘You shouldn’t have run like that. You’re not going away?’

  ‘Yes.’ He consulted a timetable on the wall. Then he went to the ticket guichet. I stood helplessly, almost shyly, behind him. He too had a new face.

  He turned to me more gently now and seemed to expect me to accompany him. ‘Platform three. Twenty minutes to wait.’

  We walked over the bridge in silence. He had wept so much that his whole profile was altered, his cheeks and nose shining and swollen. The mask of his expression was different too. The lines of the face were dislocated and incoherent as if the inner spring were broken which had used to wreathe his narrowed eyes with beaming wrinkles. He did not look older, but like a miserable child. My heart was sore for him. But I felt, like Otto, his privileged separateness.