The Italian Girl

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Isabel, you make me speechless. How can I judge? I just want you both to be happy, and you obviously weren’t before. I suppose it’s – inevitable, is it, this parting?’

  She turned towards me and I saw how different she looked now. Her little intent round face seemed plumper and more youthful, assembled and harmonious, purged of anxiety. A warm radiance shone through like light through alabaster, and her eyes had something of that strange almost joyful vacancy that I had seen in Otto’s. Only the new Isabel seemed not fallen apart but more centred, more human, more complete. It was not in her to become scattered and crazy.

  She said, ‘Yes. I suppose I knew a long time ago that I was through with Otto. I was through with him ever since he started hitting me. Violence has a terrible effect and in the end one can only go away from it. But I wouldn’t see this. I kept being sorry for him in a bad way.’

  ‘A bad way?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t really compassion, it was just an obsessive sense of connexion with him, so that being sorry for him was being sorry for myself.’

  ‘Are you sorry for him now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t think about him now. I’ll think later and it will be better then. I’m glad Flora turned up. He’ll be all right with Flora. He was all right with Lydia until I came along. Flora will keep him in order.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see her before you go?’

  ‘No. There are moments for just letting things drop in a blank sort of way. We would only hurt each other if I saw her now. Have an apple, Edmund. I got some Cox’s Orange specially for you.’

  ‘No thanks.’ I settled back on the bed and looked at her with puzzlement. She was mysteriously, overwhelmingly, full of herself. I realized she had been, in the past, only half present. Now she was filled out into the complete Isabel. The sun, shining in a luminous blue sky, sent a long beam through the window and kindled her bright face and her hair as she bent over the suitcase. Millions of golden points moved about her in the sunny haze.

  ‘You seem happy,’ I said almost accusingly.

  ‘No, just real. I can see. That is why you can see me.’

  ‘Couldn’t you see before?’

  ‘No. I was living with a black veil tied round my head. Look here, look out of the window.’

  I went to her and together we looked out at a yard of black coal-like earth with a few patches of very green weeds. Two cars were parked. A tabby cat emerged from under one of the cars and lounged to rub itself against a corner of red brick.

  ‘Can you see that cat?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, until lately I couldn’t have seen it at all. Now it exists, it’s there, and while it’s there I’m not, I just see it and let it be. Do you remember that bit in the Ancient Mariner where he sees the water snakes? “Oh happy living things, no tongue their beauty might declare!” That’s what it’s like, suddenly to be able to see the world and to love it, to be let out of oneself –’

  I understood her. ‘Yes. I’m glad about the cat. But where are you going to now, Isabel?’

  ‘Back home to Scotland, to my father. He’s very much alive and he always detested Otto, so someone will be pleased. I think I shall resume my maiden name.’

  ‘What is your maiden name?’

  ‘Learmont.’

  ‘That’s a good name. Did you know that it was the family name of the Russian poet Lermontov? His ancestors were Scottish –’

  ‘I know, and he was killed in a duel when he was twenty-eight. You said all that to me, Edmund, in exactly those words when we very first met, before I married Otto. Can’t you remember?’

  I could not remember. I could not out of the pit of time call up that memory of my exchange with the young distant Isabel. I looked at her, sad and baffled. ‘No. Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.’

  ‘I’ve never felt less like a machine. I recall that occasion very well. I’ve thought about it quite a lot just lately. Help me with the case, will you?’

  I pressed my hands down on the suitcase and my sleeve caressed her bare arm. She smelt of a fragrant cosmetic animal warmth. The case clicked shut. The little brown room was bare now, impersonal, waiting for us to go.

  ‘What will you do up there in Scotland? Will you get a job?’

  ‘Well – Sit down, Edmund, will you, you block all the light when you stand up. How hot it is in here – quite Mediterranean weather. And do tuck your long legs out of the way. I’ve got something to tell you, actually, something rather wonderful.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  She moved into the beam of sunlight and the golden dust seemed to settle on her face and her hair. She smiled at me through a gilded haze. I stared in confused amazement, not yet sure what to feel. ‘David?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Isn’t it splendid?’ She laughed with a laugh of sheer joy.

  ‘Oh, Isabel – if you’re glad I’m glad, very glad. Does David know – or Otto –?’

  ‘No. I shan’t tell anyone but you. This is really my business.’

  ‘Are you sure –?’

  ‘Yes. Now at last I have a future, I possess a future, it’s here. I’ve never really owned my life. I shall be independent, we shall be independent, now.’

  ‘A child,’ I said. ‘How strange. It makes everything seem different. A half-Jewish child.’

  ‘A half-Scottish child.’

  ‘A half-Russian child. A Lermontov. Oh, Isabel, I’m so glad.’

  ‘My child. As Flora never was. He will be mine, absolutely mine.’

  Something worried me here. ‘Well, he’ll need, you know – especially if he’s a boy –’

  ‘A man around? Yes, I know. Edmund, you wouldn’t think of marrying me, would you? I’ve always liked you so much. Ever since the Learmont conversation.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I can’t – really I’m most touched, most grateful – but – well, you see there’s someone else.’

  ‘Someone else. You are a rum, mysterious fellow, Edmund. All right, all right, don’t blush so, though I must say it makes you look most attractive with the remains of that black eye, a sort of wine-stained effect. And, don’t worry about me and for heavens sake don’t start apologizing!’

  ‘I am so sorry, Isabel. But you know I’ll always be there if you need me, you and young Lermontov.’

  ‘I know. Uncle Edmund – In loco parentis. All that.’

  ‘All that. Good-bye, darling Isabel.’

  21. Rome

  The kitchen was empty with a disconcertingly final sort of emptiness. The clock had stopped. The fire was out. The dresser was bare. Everything was put away and the cupboards closed and locked. The hot sun blazed through the William Morris curtains, which were half drawn, making them glow like stained glass. The place was scrubbed, naked, abandoned, like a room awaiting a new tenant. The emptiness frightened me. I went softly and quickly through to the stairs. The sunshine did not penetrate here and the shaft of the house went up, dark and sullen, still smelling of fire. I listened to the silence of it.

  I ran up the stairs. The landing was littered with charred remains of furniture out of Isabel’s room. I hesitated. I was a man pursued with only one place to go. I ran up the second flight of stairs to the attic floor where the Italian girl had always lived. I knocked on a door and entered into the dazzling sun.

  My relief at finding her still there was so intense it was like the cutting of a cord in me and I almost stumbled, A closed suitcase lay on top of a well-roped trunk. The little white room with its rose-spotted wallpaper had been stripped and tidied. There only remained upon the wall the big familiar map of Italy that Carlotta had pinned up there very many years ago. I entered slowly.

  She was standing by the window lost in the sunlight. ‘I’m sorry to rush in. I thought for a moment you’d gone.’

  She said nothing, but moved a little. The dusty gauzy beam of light made a
barrier between us. I began again incoherently. ‘I’m sorry –’

  ‘You came to say good-bye? That was kind of you.’ Her voice was dry, slightly rusty, accentless, a homeless disturbing voice.

  I wanted to see her properly and edged round away from the sun. The beam of light fell across her breast and above it I saw the pale bony large-eyed face and the cap of dry glossy black hair. It was an old face, a new face, a boy by Titian, the maid of my childhood.

  ‘Well, yes, I –’ I felt like a man under a dreadful judgement in a foreign land. I could only stare and supplicate.

  ‘As you see, I am going too, though not just yet. You are catching the afternoon train? There is not much time.’ The voice was level, almost cruel, but the eyes seemed to get larger and larger.

  ‘No, I mean I don’t know – May I –?’ I looked desperately about. There was a dish of apples on the window-sill. ‘May I have one of these?’

  She handed the dish in silence. I took the apple, but could not have eaten it. I would have choked. I fumbled it awkwardly against my waistcoat.

  ‘You are going – home?’

  ‘I am going back to Italy, yes. And you are going home too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish you a good journey.’

  I was silent, I could not look at her now, the sense of the cruelty was too great. In another moment I felt I should be saying ‘Well, good-bye’, and leaving her alone forever in the sunlight. I felt like the poor machine I had just accused myself of being. Some pattern too strong for me was taking me away, curving away back to the old lonely places. I put the apple in my pocket.

  Her cotton dress was blue with some kind of white design upon it, a straight simple dress. I looked at the bosom, I looked at the hem, I looked at the design stupefied. ‘ Well, I just wanted –’ I looked up at her face. It was vacant and merciless as an executioner’s. ‘Well, I just wanted to see if there was anything –’

  ‘Anything you could do for me? No, thank you.’

  ‘Oh, stop it, Maggie!’

  ‘Stop what?’

  The repetition of the words shot me through with a sort of dry anguish, a sense of my futility. I felt powerless, weightless, paralysed like a man in a dream.

  I said mumbling, ‘I’m sorry, I’m very stupid. I must be tired. I’ll leave you to pack. I suppose I must catch that train.’ The old pattern took hold of me, it herded me along like a brute, I started to shamble wretchedly towards the door.

  I trod awkwardly on something which was out in the middle of the floor. It was a pair of white shoes. Grunting apologies I stooped to set them upright again, and then rose slowly holding one of them in my hand. Like a man in a fairy tale who is given an obscure sign I held on to the shoe with a sudden blind attention, not yet sure what I was being told.

  I said slowly, ‘But these were the shoes you lost in the wood, weren’t they? So you found them again after all?’

  She darted at me and almost wrenched the shoe out of my hand and tossed it on to the bed. It was like an attack. ‘I didn’t find them, I never lost them.’

  The shock of her movement and her sudden proximity took the sense out of her words for a moment. ‘How do you mean, you never lost them?’

  ‘They were never lost. They were in my pocket. Now, good-bye Edmund. It is time for your train. Good-bye, good-bye –’

  I picked up the shoe again. I sat down heavily upon the bed. I said, ‘I’m not going.’

  There was a long but utterly different silence. The room moved like a kaleidoscope and settled down again, larger, enclosed, safe. I said, ‘Maria.’

  That was the word which the Italian girl had uttered as we came out of the wood together on that day which now seemed so long ago. It was a charm which had been given me for a later use. My tongue was freed to use it now.

  She came and sat at the other end of the bed and we gazed at each other. I could not remember that I had looked at anyone in quite that way before: when one is all vision and the other face enters into one’s own. I was aware too of a bodily feeling which was not exactly desire but was rather something to do with time, a sense of the present being infinitely large.

  She did not smile, but the severe mask was changed, softened into a sort of rueful relieved exhaustion. She looked suddenly relaxed and very tired like someone who has travelled a long way and arrived.

  She said, ‘I was not very clever with you, was I?’

  Her words stirred me and touched me so poignantly that I could have moaned over them. But I said calmly, ‘You were certainly very harsh with me just now. Would you really have let me go away?’

  She looked at me intently for a moment and then shook her head.

  I hid my face against the shoe. Gratitude came as a physical pain, and then I too felt a relaxed tiredness which was a pure joy.

  She went on, ‘I found I couldn’t talk to you and yet I knew that once I started it would be quite easy. Yet I couldn’t stop being awkward and hostile and making you awkward too.’ She spoke it with an air of simple explanation.

  I said in the same tone, ‘I know. I think I was very stupid. But I would not have gone away.’

  ‘You might have done. You may yet. I just wanted us to be present to each other for a moment.’

  ‘We are certainly that.’ I felt a calm blissful sense of power which was at the same time a frenzy of humility. I was released and armed. Now I could act humanly, think, wish, reflect, speak. I gripped the shoe in my hand. I wanted to kneel on the floor. But I said coolly, ‘Why did you decide to let us see the will?’

  ‘I had to make you notice me somehow!’

  I bowed my head. ‘I am a crude object!’ It was true. The money had certainly attracted my attention. But of course I had known all along. Or had I?

  ‘Then I nearly gave up because of her.’

  ‘Lydia?’

  ‘Elsa.’

  The two names composed a shadowy presence, as if we had looked up to find ourselves close to some great tower. I said, ‘You mean when Elsa died it took away all purposes?’

  ‘Yes. But perhaps in the end it simply changed us into ourselves. We all died for a moment, but then what came after had a greater certainty.’

  It seemed odd to me that she should speak of dying with Elsa. We were indeed, like all human beings, brief mourners. But what about Lydia? I was about to speak of her, but checked myself. That would come later, much later. How was I so sure that there was so much future? I said, ‘I think Otto has died for more than a moment.’

  I recalled Otto’s crazy destroyed face. And then I suddenly apprehended myself at a parting of the ways. It was not yet too late. Flora had called my life a crippled life. Was that the truth of it? Ought I not now to jump up and run from the room before I should have meddled decisively, catastrophically, with myself? Some great force was poised, not yet released. This obscure allusive conversation could be terminated as abruptly as it had started. I could still go away down the stairs and out of the house. Ought I not to return to my solitude and my simplicities and study once more to gain by patience what had come, perhaps, to Otto in a moment of flame? Otto and I had in some sense changed places, passing each other on the way, and now it was I who had the fool’s part. What was the value, what had been the value, of my long meditation? I had had no power here to heal the ills of others, I had merely discovered my own. I had thought to have passed beyond life, but now it seemed to me that I had simply evaded it. I had not passed beyond anything; I was a false religious, a frightened man.

  It was only for a second that I saw her as a temptress. At the next moment her face was the face of happiness, something which I had scarcely ever seen and which I had long ago stopped seeking. And even as I apprehended her as my happiness I apprehended her too as my unhappiness. I recalled David’s words, that one must suffer in one’s own place. Whatever joy or sorrow might come to me from this would be real and my own, I would be living at my own level and suffering in my own place. There was only one person in the wo
rld for whom I could be complete and I had found her. And with that of course I thought of Lydia and of Lydia’s mystery which I was now in some sense inheriting, and I knew that at some time in the future the Italian girl would speak to me Lydia’s true epitaph.

  I rubbed my eyes. I did not want to have, yet, so many thoughts. I wanted to be, for a while, perhaps for the first time, diminished and simple, and to deal simply for better or worse with another person. I saw her now, a girl, a stranger, and yet the most familiar person in the world: my Italian girl, and yet also the first woman, as strange as Eve to the dazed awakening Adam. She was there, separately and authoritatively there, like the cat which Isabel had shown me from the window. The fleeing woman fled no longer, she had turned about.

  I said, ‘It’s odd, I scarcely know you. Yet I feel now for the first time that my past is really continuous with my future. Were you really there then, was it really you?’

  She smiled at last and patted back the short hair to which she had not yet got accustomed. ‘You were so very beautiful, Edmund, when you were seventeen.’

  I gave a sort of groan. ‘But now, what am I now?’ I scarcely knew what I looked like any more. I had no images of myself. That too I would have to learn.

  ‘Si vedra. Non aver paura.’

  The Italian words were like a transforming bell. I felt suddenly the heat of the room, the sweet presence of the sun: to live in the sun, to love in the open. I said, ‘You are going to Italy?’

  ‘Yes – to Rome.’

  I took a deep breath. I was suddenly trembling violently. ‘May I drive you there in my car?’

  Her answer was a nod, a sigh. At the same time she put her finger to her lips.

  I understood. I looked at her hands. They were still as distant as stars. I drew back. There was a time ahead.

  I took the apple from my pocket and began to eat it. I said, ‘I’ll go and pack. Then we can think about times and places. Why, it’s Italian weather already.’

  As I went to the door I paused beside the map of Italy. The route, yes, that too we would have to discuss. I drew my finger along the Via Aurelia. Genova, Pisa, Livorno, Grosseto, Civitavecchia, Roma.