An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Has she met Ludwig?’

  ‘No. I somehow don’t think she’ll care now. When she got really ill she stopped being interested in the children. They are so bumptiously young.’

  ‘The terrible solipsism of youth can offend the old. Patrick has been quite good with her lately.’

  ‘Yes, Patrick is a bit quieter and more gentlemanly. I suspect it’s the influence of Ralph Odmore.’

  ‘Charles says Ralph has stopped being a dandy and has become a hippie.’

  ‘Oh dear. Still, Patrick will look adorable with long hair.’

  ‘Gracie must take Ludwig to see Alison all the same. Gracie hasn’t been near her for ages.’

  ‘I know. I have chid her, or does one say chided. She just says, “Shut up, Ma.” I do wish she wouldn’t call me “Ma”, she does it on purpose.’

  ‘I remember Gracie saying that Alison’s awful energy wore her out!’

  ‘I know what she means. Well, of course she must take Ludwig. A September wedding, don’t you think? I wonder if we shall have the Villa by then. I wish Ludwig wasn’t lodging with that ghastly gin-swilling Amazon.’

  ‘You mean what’s-her-name, Mitzi Ricardo?’

  ‘Austin says she ought to have been a boxer. I wonder if she ever gave him a straight left? He’d like that.’

  ‘One does feel sorry for her.’

  ‘I think I’m going to give up being sorry for people, Pinkie, it does no good. What with poor Charlotte and poor Mitzi and poor Penny and poor Austin and poor Dorina —’

  ‘Oh Clara, I quite forgot a bit of news that I heard this morning. Austin has just lost his job.’

  ‘You mean got the sack?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Il ne manquait que ça. Of course it was sure to happen. Like when he was in the army and just gassed himself as quickly as possible. What was he doing there?’

  ‘Clerical work.’

  ‘Poor Austin is no genius, but we must rally round. You can find him something, Pinkie. He must get a job before Garth comes home. Think of the loss of face.’

  ‘Garth would be censorious?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t stand children who judge their parents. Thank God ours don’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, they keep quiet about it. Garth used to be a little monster.’

  ‘It’s not so easy to help Austin, he’s so damn touchy.’

  ‘Let’s ask him for a drink.’

  ‘He won’t come.’

  ‘He’s as bad as Char. I wonder what poor little Dorina will think of her husband’s latest.’

  ‘I suspect Austin won’t tell her. And, Clara darling, we mustn’t tell her.’

  ‘You still think we should keep clear of the Valmorana set-up? I must say I’m suffering agonies of curiosity. Of course it serves Austin right for marrying into that sort of arty Catholic family. It’s an alien tribe. Do you understand what’s going on?’

  ‘No. I think we can’t understand and we’re better at a distance. Mavis doesn’t want us round there sightseeing. And Austin would hardly welcome our advice!’

  ‘I remember he went for you once when you said something helpful. You were quite white!’

  ‘He suddenly became ferocious.’

  ‘He’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, our Austin. I think Dorina is afraid of him. You know, I suspect Austin originally thought that Dorina had money. She’s the sort of girl who ought to have money, only it happens she hasn’t. Of course she’s socially one up from Betty, but just as poor. So Austin was unlucky again. Aren’t I cynical?’

  ‘Any man could marry Dorina for love. She’s enchanting.’

  ‘I am jealous. Yes, I know she is. She’s one of those fey charmers. But what has happened to that marriage? Austin can’t bear anyone to go near Dorina, yet he doesn’t go himself.’

  ‘Well, don’t you go. Let them sort it out.’

  ‘Not that I can take Valmorana really. You know the place is empty?’

  ‘Empty?’

  ‘Mavis has cleared out all her naughty girls and is having it redecorated.’

  ‘Is she going to chuck the hostel? I can’t think how she stood it.’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s some change. Anyway she and Dorina are alone in that huge house, like a couple of Burne-Jones saints in a stained glass window. Mavis makes everything so fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden, you know what I mean. And she’s so peculiar about Dorina, half possessive and half pleased it’s all turned out a mess.’

  ‘There’s no contradiction there!’

  ‘Perhaps Austin married Dorina because Matthew failed to marry Mavis.’

  ‘The Matthew-Mavis thing is a figment of your imagination, my dear, like the Matthew-Betty thing.’

  ‘By the way, Hester Odmore phoned this morning. She’s still down with Mollie at the Mill House. They’ve got poor Penny staying. They want to change the date again. I suspect they’ve had a grander invitation! She said Charles had met Matthew at that Conference in Tokyo.’

  ‘News of Matthew is rare. What of him?’

  ‘Charles says he’s all right except that he’s got terribly fat and lost his looks.’

  ‘Did he ever have any?’

  ‘Yes, in a Henry Jamesy sort of way. But he looks quite old now. Whereas Austin seems to get younger and younger in spite of his misfortunes.’

  ‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot says Matthew has made a packet speculating in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Good old Matthew. Socialism and mysticism have not precluded capitalism.’

  ‘He’s not due to retire yet, is he? I suppose he’ll settle in the east. I’m sorry we’ve lost Matthew.’

  ‘So am I, Pinkie. Somehow Matthew is fun. Like Austin.’

  ‘Good God, is Austin fun?’

  ‘Well, you know. You think Matthew won’t come home?’

  ‘No. After all that power. Here he’d just be an elderly diplomat writing his memoirs. In the east he can keep some mystery in his life. Matthew needs mystery.’

  ‘In the east he can keep some servants in his life. Matthew needs comfort. He is a bit of a hedonist.’

  ‘But only a bit.’

  ‘You’re envious, Pinkie. Possibly even jealous. You remember how awfully keen Gracie was on Matthew when she was a child?’

  ‘I say, did you tell Hester Odmore about Ludwig and Gracie?’

  ‘No. I hadn’t heard the great news when she rang. Oh dear, oh dear. You know I am the tiniest bit sad about Sebastian. He would have been the perfect son-in-law.’

  Mitzi Ricardo laid down her magazine and lifted the telephone. ‘Secombe-Hughes photographic studio, good afternoon.’

  ‘I say, Mitzi, it’s me, Austin.’

  ‘Austin! How lovely. Long time no see.’ Mitzi was blushing. She was very pale skinned and given to blushes and freckles.

  ‘Can I come round and see you?’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘Yes. Is old Secombe-Hughes there?’

  ‘No. He’s out at the — He’s out on a job.’ Loyalty forbade her to disclose that her employer was at the betting shop. Business was not good.

  ‘Hooray. I’ll come round in a taxi.’

  The Secombe-Hughes photographic studio was a semi-basement in Hammersmith, with a damp wooden stair down to it from the street, and a well of bricked-in garden at the back full of docks and nettles and suckering elder bushes. Lurid green moss grew upon the brick walls and wafted its spores into the house where little lines of greenery appeared around windows and along wainscots. The studio was not designed for dwelling, having no kitchen or bathroom and only an outdoor lavatory shed whose arrangements had long since ceased to function. However, since the latest decay of business Mr Secombe-Hughes had been living at the studio, though he still feebly affected to conceal this from Mitzi by covering the camp bed with newspapers and pretending to arrive in the mornings. For a longer time he had been using the garden as a lavatory and had indeed almost entirely used it up, creating a special lingering foxy ste
nch which even the summer rain, now liberally falling out of what appeared to be a blue sky, could never, with its pure celestial freshness, quite defeat.

  Mr O. Secombe-Hughes — the O. stood for Owen, a name which he had vainly and without optimism implored Mitzi to employ — was a Welshman suffering in exile. His age was uncertain. He wore a bowed Druidic persona, would like to have had a beard only it would not grow, and had once won a small prize at an eisteddfod. He had been a fairly successful photographer. Photos of younger versions of some well-known faces adorned the albums. But drink and ill-luck and betting and Mr Secombe-Hughes’s own special Welsh devil and, he occasionally hinted, women had done for him somehow. He had a few faithful clients. But there was no denying business was rotten. Mitzi rang the betting shop or the pub if anyone turned up.

  Mitzi had come to typing late in life. She had never managed to master shorthand, she was a poor typist and she could not spell. She and Mr Secombe-Hughes seemed made for each other. He paid her modestly for her modest services and, as she guessed, liked her because he saw her as another piece of wreckage and in no position to judge him. Her mediocrity calmed his nerves. Later she noticed with some anxiety a tendency towards the sentimental. Mr Secombe-Hughes might have been good looking once. His eyes were still as grey and glittering as a slate quarry in the rain. But his face was podgy and crawled over by tiny scarlet veins and his longish greasy hair looked soaking wet. He had always been given to tossing his hair and peering, and it took Mitzi some time to realize that he was ogling her.

  She found him physically horrible but she liked him and could not be cold. Some muddle might soon have developed had it not providentially come about that Mr Secombe-Hughes began to owe Mitzi money. With much hair-tossing he explained one day that he was not in a position to pay all her wages and would she accept half and an IOU? She now had several IOUs. A time would come, Mr Secombe-Hughes mysteriously asseverated, when all would be well and she would get her money. How this time was to come, unless perhaps borne by a swift horse, was unclear to Mitzi, and she kept intending to leave and then deciding not to, because of pity, because she doubted whether she would find another job, and because she thought that if she hung on she would get some money whereas if she went away she would get none. Meanwhile Welsh honour forbade the continuation of attentions to a lady to whom money was owed, and ogling ceased.

  Mitzi had saved a little money from the time when she had been a successful athlete, and she had a house, also in Hammersmith, in a melancholy road off Brook Green, of which she owned the freehold and where she usually took in one or two lodgers. Mitzi Ricardo was thirty-five. It was now ten years since the unspeakable accident which had changed her from a goddess into a wreck who could not frighten even Mr Secombe-Hughes. Her parents, now dead, had been in a poor way in the clothing trade. They were Christianized Jews and they had but one child, a strong radiant little sprite whom they christened Margaret. Mitzi was her father’s nickname for her. This child had wings. A perceptive school teacher paid for her to have ballet lessons. She won a scholarship. She began to be a little success, then at the age of fourteen a six-foot high success, as supple as Proteus and as lithe as an Etruscan Aphrodite. She was a phenomenon. Why she had ever left the world of ballet for the world of sport she later wondered. Any other path would not have led through a million entwining contingencies to that hideous tennis court moment when she sprang over the net, tripped, fell, and through some utterly improbable complex of injuries destroyed her ankle for ever. She had had bad advisers. She was too tall. There were so many temptations. She wanted to play at Wimbledon. She had not the nerve or the courage to give her life over to the austere disciplines of art. She wanted money. She wanted fun.

  She achieved her ambitions. She played several times at Wimbledon. Innumerable tennis balls rose before her, dazzling cubes of which with terrific force she hit the upper surface. She competed in the Pentathlon at the Olympic Games. She was a good skier, coming up to championship standard. She wrote regularly for the sporting pages of the papers, at least she signed her name under things which other people wrote. She drank champagne on jet aeroplanes. Southern suns bleached her hair and gave her freckles. She declined charming proposals of marriage. She no longer minded being six foot one. Then suddenly in a clap of thunder it was all over.

  At the end of a diminishing vista of hope, after consultations, operations, therapy, doctors, quack doctors, even prayer, she limped away alone. A newspaper offered her a job as a sports journalist, but she refused it. Tears would have prevented her from seeing the Centre Court now. Why should she suffer the endless consequences of a single moment? Her life had been wrecked by a momentory absurdity which it should be possible to delete. She raged only briefly against fate. She was glad that people quickly forgot her. Sympathy was the last thing she wanted. She had to become another person so as not to die of grief. She took a secretarial training. She tried to take up religion. She tried to become resigned. She lived quietly and squalidly in the mess of her emotions. The person who helped her most, though he was far too self-absorbed even to notice it, was Austin.

  She first met Austin when, after Betty died and while Garth was still at school, he took rooms in the same lodgings as herself in Holland Park. This was before she had decided to use her capital to buy a house. Austin had just sold his and was looking for a flat. He was in a state of black misery. His gloom cheered her up, as the gloom of others often quite automatically cheers. Here was someone who seemed even more miserable than herself. Then there was his stiff hand, she liked that. He promised to tell her how it happened, but never did. They met a lot in pubs. Mitzi was beginning to need alcohol and Austin had been needing it for some time. At home however they scarcely visited each other’s rooms. This was partly because Austin’s evident bereavement made him untouchable. It was also because Mitzi was going through a long crisis in her relationship to her body. She had so triumphantly been her body. Now it was no longer a soaring flame of weightless incarnate soul, but a stump of clay, a thick heavy object, separate from herself, which she had to trundle slowly about, sometimes with pain. And with lameness and obscurity there was also the loss of youth. Alcohol and lack of exercise did their part. Mitzi began to get fat. She felt gross. So it was that although she found Austin attractive she did not expect him to touch her.

  He took an intelligent interest in her which, though it was largely politeness, was a novelty to Mitzi. And he helped her not only by being more unfortunate than herself. He also, without noticing it, educated her. He talked to her occasionally about books, pictures, music. Dimly she learnt one of the most important of all lessons, how art can console. She read fewer magazines and more books. More even than this perhaps, and more unconsciously still, Austin helped Mitzi by a revelation of how it was possible to live simply by egoism. Austin, with nothing particular to boast of, never seemed to doubt his own absolute importance. Just because he was himself the world owed him everything, and even though the world paid him very little, he remained a sturdy and vociferous creditor. Misery could not crush Austin. Simply being Austin enabled him to carry on.

  When Mitzi bought the house off Brook Green she offered Austin the best rooms, but he declined having just found the little flat in Bayswater which he inhabited still. They continued to meet in pubs. Mitzi did not get any thinner. Soon she would have to go to the Outsize Shop. People turned and stared after her in the street. However, she was just beginning to inhabit herself again when Austin went off into a daze about Dorina. Austin had known Dorina for a long time. His brother and Dorina’s sister had been friends. Mitzi had met Dorina once or twice and thought her frail and affected and a bit unreal. She could see that Dorina was sorry for Austin, and Mitzi even resented this slightly on his behalf, though of course she was sorry for Austin too. Then Austin announced his second marriage. Mitzi was faint with jealousy and remorse. Why had she never really tried, why had she not conceived that he might be in the mood for marriage? But her own egoism was tougher now
. She had made dull quiet friends and expected little of life. She persuaded herself that her love for Austin had never been anything really personal, had never really filled her and become her love for Austin. It had been just a vague yearning, an ideal, something like what she felt when she came out of the cinema. Later, however, she was cheered by news of Austin’s troubles and woke every morning to a small glow which was the knowledge that Austin was unhappy. When she saw him very occasionally for a drink they behaved like old friends.

  ‘What a shame! After all those years!’

  ‘I could sue them I expect,’ said Austin. ‘But one can’t be small-minded. One has one’s dignity.’

  ‘Of course one has! Let them see that you reject them!’

  ‘That’s right. I reject them.’

  ‘What a shame! And you came straight round here. I’m so glad.’

  ‘You can help me, Mitzi,’ said Austin.

  ‘You know I’d help you any way I could!’

  Austin was drinking powdered coffee in Mitzi’s little office. Although it was so early in the summer he contrived to look sunburnt. He had a long doggy nose and longish hair the colour of milk chocolate which he tucked back behind his ears. He wore a serene majestic expression and his steel-rimmed spectacles gleamed with a fine consciousness.

  ‘Mitzi, I won’t beat about the bush. I’m broke.’

  Let me lend you something was on the tip of Mitzi’s tongue but she recalled that she was broke too. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I shall soon get another job, of course.’

  ‘Of course! A much better one.’

  ‘A much better one. But meanwhile I’m in a fix. I thought I could manage if I let my flat. You can get big rents now.’

  ‘Jolly good idea.’

  ‘But then I’d need to live somewhere else, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Come and live with me,’ said Mitzi.

  ‘Oh. Do you think I could? You did so kindly suggest it once before. I know you need to let the big rooms. But perhaps I could just sleep in the attic.’