An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘You’re going to the seaside at midnight?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  ‘Well, can I stay here while you’re away?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Goodbye then. Forgive me, father, I really cannot talk. I’ll carry your cases down.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Austin. ‘I’m not going on holiday. Dorina’s left me. I’ve lost my job. I’m going to let the flat. I’m going to take a room at Mitzi Ricardo’s. It’s all temporary of course. I’m terribly sorry. I mean Dorina hasn’t really left me. It’s all a mess. But it’ll be all right, you see. I’m so sorry —’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Garth. ‘Don’t.’

  There was silence. Austin panted.

  ‘Must you go, father? It’s so late.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll talk later then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Austin, near to tears.

  ‘Oh by the way,’ said Garth, ‘there was a letter for you downstairs. I put it in my pocket.’

  Garth handed over a type-written envelope. Austin looked at the stamp and started to tremble. He hastily tore it open. It read as follows.

  My dear Austin,

  Please forgive me for not having written to you for such a long time. You have been nevertheless much in my thoughts, and this particularly of late, since I have decided, for a number of reasons of which I shall tell you at leisure, to retire early from my employment. As you know, I had intended to settle in the east. But I have found the ideas of home and of family more magnetic with the advancing years than I should have supposed possible. In short, I have decided to come back and to make my home in London. In the meantime we have both grown older and I hope wiser. I will say no more. But believe me when I tell you how warmly and eagerly I look forward to our reunion after these many years apart. God bless you. In the cordial expectation of seeing you later this month, I remain, ever your affectionate brother

  Matthew

  ‘I haven’t an idea what to do, it’s worrying me out of my mind,’ said Mrs Carberry to Mavis Argyll. Mrs Carberry was talking about her retarded son, Ronald. Ronald was ten. Mrs Carberry had four other children. Mr Carberry drank. ‘Of course I pray about it all the time, I pray when I’m working and all. But it doesn’t seem to make it any easier to see what to do. Walter wants me to put him into that home, you know, the institution place, the child irritates Walter so, and sometimes I’m near agreeing just for peace sake. Walter was on at me again last night, he says it isn’t fair to the other little ones to have a sort of loony in the house, not that Ronald’s like that really, but he’s disgusting, you know, and the others can’t help being nasty and that makes him worse, and he’s a real little hobgoblin sometimes, and with the eldest in trouble it’s enough to do, but I can’t let him go away, I just can’t, I sometimes think it would break my heart, when I see his little simple face, it’s not his fault he’s so wearying. If he goes into that place he’ll have no one to love him and he could die of that, and I’d be thinking of him every night, poor little boy, wetting his pillow with tears and wanting his mummy.’

  The painters had just gone. Mrs Carberry, who helped out, was loading the washing-up machine. Her eldest son was in trouble with the police. Her husband was a tyrannical brute. Mavis thought, this woman has real troubles, not like my nervous evanescent woes. Yet Mavis’s woes were real to Mavis and though she was sorry for Mrs Carberry she could not quite conceive as three-dimensional that awful world where children whined and a man shouted.

  ‘If only he could come here, Miss Argyll,’ said Mrs Carberry, ‘just for a time. He’d be no trouble, the poor little mite. The welfare people would pay and he’d go to his special school like he does now and I’d see to him.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Mavis. Mrs Carberry had suggested this before. Mavis hardened her heart. Mrs Carberry was offering her this waif. If once Ronald came to Valmorana he would never leave.

  Mrs Carberry did not argue. She looked tired, vague, old, older than Mavis although she was probably fifteen years younger. Mavis was putting on weight, but she had kept her looks in an almost uncanny way. Mavis was fifty, but could look twenty-five. Dorina eternally looked eighteen.

  Valmorana was Mavis’s mother’s old family home, a white, Italianate Victorian house in a quiet tree-hazy corner of Kensington. In her days of Catholic piety Mavis had wanted to give it to the nuns of the Sacred Heart. She was to have been a nun herself and Valmorana was to have been her dowry. But a valuable London property cannot with an impulsive gesture be pressed into somebody’s hand. The nuns were canny, worried about the cost of maintenance, worried about possible litigation with the local authority, worried about Mavis’s cousins who had written them a nasty letter. While negotiations were still going forward Mavis changed her mind about everything. She decided not to become a nun, she decided there was no God, she decided to have as many love affairs as possible, and did. Later still, appalling misery brought her back to the Sacred Heart door, godless but desperate. Her childhood Catholicism, distilled by utter loss of faith and now sweetened by disillusion with the world, awaited her in those musty dusky rooms where long black skirts rustled and distant doors closed quietly. Then again she would have given them the house. But the Sacred Heart nuns were shrewd and thrifty. Of course they wanted Valmorana. But they wanted it on their terms. They also wanted Mavis. After some months it somehow turned out that the house had become a girls’ hostel of which she was the warden. The money came from the nuns, the local authority and rich Catholic friends. Mavis took the responsibility and the risks.

  She did not regain her faith and she sometimes hated the religion of her childhood with a spitting passion. But she led perforce, and with every wry reservation, a sort of dedicated life. The enterprise was a modest one, she never accommodated more than two or three girls at a time, and though always busy she was never overworked. Her clients, muddled, illiterate, often delinquent, always pious, interested her but usually did not touch her deeply. She was efficient, and smiled covertly when the good nuns spoke of ‘grace’. She enjoyed her efficiency and enjoyed, like a voluptuary, her regained innocence. During the wild years she had woken every morning to some guilty problem. Above any pain except that of guilt one can hope to climb by seeing what is above, by seeing that there is something above. Guilt and remorse had trapped her during those years. Now she woke to clarity, to an emptiness full of the urgent needs of others. She had achieved, by accident and in a second-rate way, what she had once desired as a high spiritual prize, a life that was like water, a sort of colourless see-through blow-through existence, full of tasks and without ties.

  Well, there was one tie of course and that was Dorina. Valmorana was Mavis’s by entail under the will of her mother who had died long ago. Mavis’s father had married a second time, again a Catholic woman, and again one who died young. In fact Dorina’s mother perished in childbirth and Mavis had to act the little mother. Dorina was a good deal younger and had been still at school during the wild years. She had been a funny little girl, prim and secretive and taciturnly self-sufficient. After their father’s death she had had somehow, only Mavis could never fully attend to it at the time, a rather miserable adolescence at several uninspiring schools, handed around in the holidays. There had been strange incidents. ‘I am afraid your sister attracts poltergeists,’ one headmistress had complained severely to Mavis, who had her own ghosts to contend with. In fact Dorina’s presence at Valmorana provoked incomprehensible electrical storms. Pictures fell. Windows cracked. A noise like a grand piano falling down the stairs occurred once without visible cause. However when Dorina was eighteen these phenomena ceased.

  Dorina left school and came to live permanently at Valmorana in the early days of the hostel. Though intelligent she had never managed to pass any exams. She was often vaguely ill and was regularly suspected of tubercular tendencies. She helped a little in the house, she took a typing course, she worked part-time in a library. On the whole she did nothing much,
managing to create in the midst of hurlyburly a quietness of her own. She was the spirit of the garden, the spirit of the stairway, always somehow passing by with flowers in her hand. The tough inmates laughed at her, but treated her as a mascot.

  Often she exasperated Mavis, often she touched her. Mavis knew that her sister was not happy. Sometimes looking at those secretive eyes she wondered if all Dorina’s ghosts had not somehow been simply drawn inside her. There were strange things still. What went on inside? Did Dorina regard Mavis’s girls as interlopers and false children? Was Mavis mother even now? Mavis had never made a proper home for her. Was it even possible that Dorina felt resentment about money because she herself had been left penniless? Of course the sisters loved each other and Dorina’s art could sometimes make things seem idyllic. The nuns, who on the whole kept out of the way, made little sorties to try to get hold of her, but she vaguely eluded them. She seemed even more calmly godless than Mavis. She never worshipped or seemed to feel either the need of it or the guilt of abandoning it. Her spiritual world was other.

  All sorts of plans were made for her but she soon rendered them all hazy and inconclusive. Dorina’s attention to it could make any plan seem incoherent. It was in any case obvious that marriage was her lot and Mavis devoted time and thought to a selection of suitors. Dorina was passive. Mavis invited young men. The idea of Dorina married caused her various kinds of pain. She sometimes invited Austin too, and he sometimes came, not of course as a suitor, that idea never entered her head, he was much too old and generally hopeless, but because he was Matthew’s brother and she was sorry for him. Dorina was sorry for him too. Being sorry for Austin was a sort of occupation for both of them. Austin, who had a general talent for inspiring pity, had officially ‘gone to pieces’ after Betty’s death. Unfortunately this was just the sort of thing likely to interest a young girl.

  Of course Dorina had, because of Matthew, another source of interest in Austin. Matthew had been one of Mavis’s earliest admirers and something had happened between them. Mavis had chosen the nunnery. Matthew had left the country. What exactly had happened was now utterly shadowy even in Mavis’s own mind. It had been a muddle. Matthew had vanished forever and communication had ceased. Mavis never spoke of it or even thought of it except when she occasionally realized with irritation how fascinating it had all been to Dorina. Of course it was never discussed. And now here was the nemesis.

  Later on it seemed inevitable that Austin and Dorina should want each other. Mavis accepted the situation with a smile but she could not like Austin and this sort of false relation with Matthew was distasteful to her although the marriage occasioned no communication between them. There was something for which she could not forgive Matthew and of which she did not wish to be reminded: perhaps his ineffectual suit, perhaps the fruitlessness of her own choice. Sometimes she thought that her own failure to marry Matthew was actually the cause of Austin’s marrying Dorina. It was not just that Austin was an object of interest because of the Matthew legend. Austin’s relations with his brother were obscure and intense. Might not this repetition be a highly determined event in some fraternal drama? If so, so much the worse for Dorina. Mavis was not surprised when there were difficulties, though she could not quite see what they were. They never quarrelled, it seemed. Mavis was pleased when things broke down. She would not ever have been wholly pleased if Dorina had married happily. What could she have been to a fulfilled Dorina except an ageing maiden aunt? She had never seen herself in that light in relation to her younger sister. As it was she could now be useful to Dorina with a full heart. These unmagnanimous frailties in herself Mavis saw with a cool eye. And in general she welcomed the possibility of perhaps getting rid of Austin altogether.

  Not that it was at all clear that this was what was envisaged. Dorina used to come and stay fairly often, relapsing when she came into her old dependence on Mavis. She kept her little room still unchanged at the top of the house. Once she came and said to her sister, ‘I think I’m not going back to Austin, at present at any rate. We are better apart for a while. We both have to sort things out. We need a little holiday from each other.’ She added, ‘He’s glad I’m here.’ Mavis could understand that. Austin was an intensely jealous and possessive man. He probably felt that his young wife was, at Valmorana, almost literally cloistered. Further, Mavis did not ask and Dorina did not tell.

  Mavis was at this time distracted by an outburst of problems about the future of her enterprise. The house was still her property. The convent suddenly wished to transfer the whole thing to the local authority. The rich Catholic families objected. The local authority offered to buy the house at a figure Mavis would not consider. Meanwhile the roof needed repairing, the whole house needed rewiring, everything wanted painting. The local authority now offered a grant in return for a short lease. The convent agreed to carry on the old régime pending negotiations. A Catholic businessman said he would pay for repairs. These were now almost finished. The place was empty, the old smell was gone, the welfare people were offering new furniture. Valmorana looked like an ordinary house again and brought to Mavis, suddenly on stairs and landings, memories of her father.

  Her own future of course was equally at stake. If she leased the house to the local authority she would not stay on as warden. This was tactfully plain to everybody. A number of good people had approached her offering other posts, some of them very interesting. The last few years had been ruled by necessity. But had they been perhaps a little dreary? The idea was disconcerting. Mavis found herself curiously restored to ordinary life and ordinary choices. There was no reason why she should be ruled by her false reputation for holiness. She had not after all given up the world and a surprising number of things were still possible. Mavis felt that she had emerged again into the light, not really such a different person in the end.

  Mavis was now thinking, no, I will not give way about Ronald Carberry. The little boy had a touching face. But he was unmanageable, unworkable, would never be fully a human being. Mavis knew that if she was not careful she would have Ronald Carberry forever. She did not want that sort of responsibility, she did not want to re-enter the hot muddled personal unhappiness of the ordinary human lot. That at least her imitation dedicated life had enabled her to shun.

  Mavis had left the big kitchen and repaired to her drawing-room. To keep herself sane she had reserved, in a separate part of the house, her own rooms, full of furniture and pretty things from the old days. She watched now out of the front window as Mrs Carberry walked away slowly down the road carrying her old shopping bag and looking down at the pavement as she walked. Mrs Carberry believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in much the same way that she believed in Walter and Ronald and Mavis. The sun was shining, making a flowering cherry tree at the corner into a winged gallery of rosy light. The petals were falling slowly to the pavement through the still air like autumn leaves. Mrs Carberry walked into the slow rain of petals with her head down, hump-backed with anxiety. Mavis felt relief when she turned the corner. She moved to the side window which looked down on the garden and watched Dorina who was standing barefoot in the middle of the lawn.

  Dorina when alone, and Mavis had often thus watched her unseen, had the vague pottering ways of an animal, expressive not of boredom so much as of an absolute absorption in the moment to moment processes of life. Dorina was trying to pick up a twig with her toes. She tried to grip the twig by flexing her toes about it as if they were fingers. This failed, so she then manoeuvred it between the big toe and the second toe, lifted her foot a little and surveyed it. Then she tried to toss it away, failed, and had to lean down to extract it. She remained bent over and picked a daisy. She straightened up and examined the daisy and then pressed it rhythmically against her lips several times. Then she turned on her heel and, still holding the daisy, began to comb out her hair with her hands. She had light brown hair, not very copious but rather long, which made a little rill down between her shoulder blades. She wore it loose us
ually or in a plait. Beyond her was a yellow privet hedge, red tulips nearly over, a prunus tree, the high white wall. She looked like a young girl in a picture who had eternally nothing to do except wait for her lover. It was hard to believe that she was over thirty. Mavis watched her with annoyance, curiosity, pity, love and a kind of fear. If only she had married an ordinary public school boy with a job in the city, instead of a weirdie like Austin with a funny hand. She was enough of a weirdie herself.

  ‘Dorina!’

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘Come up. I want to talk to you.’

  Dorina was in the room. She was wearing a creamy and purple sprigged dress almost to her ankles. She had a long thin pale face and large grey eyes. A Victorian water colourist could have conveyed that frail yet bony look. She was taller than Mavis. Mavis was getting plump. Her hair was fuzzier and shorter than Dorina’s and always untidy, fading now into a peppery sandy colour which would one day quietly become grey. Her eyes were less big, her nose less aquiline. Mavis wore a flowery dress too with a frilled hem. Both sisters still dressed to please their father, who had been a lawyer with a spare time passion for painting. He had adored his pretty daughters. He could not have done with a boy. Dorina had done quite a lot of painting too when he was still alive. Neither of them had much talent.

  ‘Oh dear, I meant to help with the washing up.’

  ‘Mrs Carberry was here. It’s done.’

  ‘Did she bring Ronald?’

  ‘No. I’m discouraging visits. She wants to park him here for good.’

  ‘Well, why not?’

  ‘Think, child!’

  ‘He’s awfully touching.’

  ‘He’s awfully touching. But he’s somebody’s lifelong problem and not ours.’

  ‘I hoped Louis would come this morning.’ Louis was Dorina’s name for Ludwig.

  ‘Clara Tisbourne rang up,’ said Mavis.

  ‘Oh. Did she say anything?’