An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I wish we had a place of our own right now,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could find other digs where you wouldn’t mind coming. You know, Gracie, I’m a man after all and, well, we are engaged, aren’t we, and —’

  ‘It’s an exceptionally hot summer.’

  ‘Honey, don’t tease.’

  ‘“Time on my hands and you in my arms”.’

  ‘Gracie, stop it. Do you want me to insist, do you want me to get tough and bully you?’ Was she capable of making him wait until the wedding day? Oh Christ.

  ‘No, Ludwig. Darling. My parents are going away next weekend, they’re going to stay in the country with the Odmores.’

  ‘Oh that’s great! That’s —’

  ‘Ludwig —’

  ‘Dovikins —’

  ‘You wouldn’t ever talk to Garth — about that — would you?’

  ‘Sweetie puss, of course not, cross my heart.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t talk to him too much, he’s a wrecker, a hater.’

  ‘OK, honey bun.’

  A few minutes later they were holding hands on top of a bus. Ludwig remembered he had meant to tell Gracie that after all he felt that he ought to go and see Dorina. But as he hadn’t argued about Charlotte or even about Garth it would sound rather artificial to raise Dorina now. Let them all go. It was only three days to the weekend. Whoopee!

  ‘It must be wonderful to have so many wonderful memories,’ said Clara. ‘You’ve achieved so much, it must be marvellous to look back on it all.’

  ‘I hope you’re going to write your memoirs for us,’ said George.

  ‘And to have visited so many famous places, to have been everywhere, I do envy you, you must have the most super photograph album.’

  ‘I’m afraid I never took any photographs,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Charles is very disappointed you won’t come on the commission,’ said George. ‘But I don’t blame you. Those things are so boring. I expect you feel you’ve earned a rest.’

  ‘How will you employ your time?’ said Clara. ‘Will you buy a house and fill it with that wonderful collection of china we’ve heard so much about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Whatever you’re planning, we must help,’ said Clara. ‘More gin?’

  ‘No, thanks, I must go. Let me know when you get some news of Charlotte.’

  ‘We’re not really worried about Charlotte,’ said George. ‘It’s typical of her, really, to clear off into the blue with an enigmatic farewell note. She just does it to annoy. She’s probably staying at a hotel round the corner.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have expected her to be so unkind,’ said Clara.

  ‘Naturally she’s sensitive,’ said George.

  ‘Yes, but a little magnanimity —’

  ‘On Gracie’s part?’

  ‘No, on Char’s —’

  ‘I suppose pressing her to stay on at the Villa just did no good,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Well — er —’ said George, exchanging a glance with his wife, ‘I don’t know that she was pressed. And after that crazy will, Charlotte would probably have cleared out anyway. She has a little annuity, she’s not destitute.’

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking,’ said Clara to her husband. ‘Mama asking for Treece like that at the very end — Treece is our family lawyer, you know — perhaps she wanted to change the will back again. I’m sure she did. Poor mama.’

  ‘Poor us,’ said George. ‘Treece was so embarrassed, wasn’t he, when he had to tell us we’d been disinherited.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Bad mama!’

  ‘Ingratitude is the last privilege of the dying.’

  ‘But its all going to Gracie is quite nominal, isn’t it?’ said Matthew. ‘She’ll distribute it, surely?’

  The husband and wife again exchanged glances. ‘I’m not sure that you know our Gracie,’ said Clara. ‘We often feel we don’t. Of course Gracie would scoop the pool without lifting a finger. Things have always been like that for her. The gods love her.’

  ‘I really must go,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Gracie will be so sorry to miss you, she’s so full of you these days, she’s making Ludwig quite jealous!’

  ‘I look forward to meeting Ludwig,’ said Matthew.

  ‘He’s sweet. You’ll meet him at our party. You will come, won’t you?’

  ‘Shall we call you a taxi?’ said George.

  ‘No, it’s such a lovely day, I think I’ll walk back across the park.’

  The park was in meadowy early summer glory, with long plumes of uncut grass making a luscious light yellowy green between the splashed shadows. The air was thick with soft polleny smells which made breathing a luxury. Trees hazed the Albert Memorial and smudged the rosy front of Kensington Palace and long golden vistas showed multi-coloured strollers with their dogs. Nearer to the water pink-footed geese and white-faced coots paraded in the groves of rhus and bamboo. A jay called in the bushes and signalled with its blue wing.

  Matthew wondered in what modest hotel room, made hot and hideous by the sunshine, Charlotte was sitting tensely beside her suitcase, so determined to hurt and to be hurt. He wondered about Austin. He wondered about himself.

  Talking to Kaoru in Kyoto it had all seemed to become clear. Kaoru was sad, but he had helped Matthew to his decision all the same. In matters of the spirit the difference between false and true can be as narrow as a needle, but only for the very great does it disappear altogether. Matthew had so long dreamed of the place which awaited him at that tiny monastery, a seat kept there for him, not quite so glorious as the empty thrones which Giotto imagined in paradise, but just as certainly reserved. Almost like an economist he had reckoned it out, how his future would pay for his present. He had advanced the day of his retirement with the impatience of a man awaiting his beloved. The anticipated savour of that time was as honey to him. Then he would be at peace and his life would begin.

  But, as in almost every human life, something had gone wrong somewhere and the malin génie had got in and twisted something, ever so slightly, with huge huge results. Shifting his bulk about restlessly, Matthew had sat upon the floor of Kaoru’s little paper-screened room, while Kaoru sat motionless cross-legged, and they talked the thing to a conclusion. Outside the snow fell, then sun yellowed the shoulders of the mountains against a pale blue sky. A single branch of evergreen curled agonizingly against the wall behind Kaoru’s shaven head. Matthew’s feet were leaden with cold, his legs aching with hours of sitting on the floor. Wind rattled the screens. A bell rang. Kaoru sighed. It was no good. A human being has only one life. And Matthew had had his.

  Yet what had that life amounted to, he wondered. How could a successful career vanish and seem to leave so little behind? There were his youthful hopes and vanities, his happy sense of himself as exceptional, and here was this — heap. While others had employed these twenty, thirty, years in art, in marriage, in raising a family, he seemed to have done nothing that had achieved any permanent form at all. There were no jewelled external things: works of art, acts. There were not even any people who had really stood the test: loves, but no love. Of course he had made a great deal of money. Could something as vulgar as that matter? ‘He had great possessions,’ he quoted gloomily once to Kaoru, who picked up the reference and laughed. Kaoru often laughed at inappropriate moments. Matthew could not see the joke.

  Not that he had been bored ever. But it appeared that a life could be interesting, amusing, full of the urgencies of state and ultimately trivial. He had seen important things, he had seen terrible things. He had seen poverty and war, violence, oppression, cruelty, injustice and hunger. He had seen decisive moments in men’s lives. He had witnessed a scene in the Red Square when demonstrators were arrested, and when an ordinary citizen, an accidental passerby, had suddenly gone across to join them and had been arrested too. Matthew knew about some of the men involved. They were still in labour camps. Some were in ‘hospitals’. Their lives were ruined. Oh he had seen these th
ings, but always as an outsider, as a tourist with diplomatic immunity from the misery of the world, returning to evening drinks in a carpeted embassy hung with minor masterpieces by Gainsborough and Lawrence. He had never truly lived in places where duties were terrible and their consequences life-destroying and long.

  Thus he had been cheated by the malin génie. A life which had seemed an interval, and which now was seen to have been filled with trash, had made him what he was, a person profitlessly spoiled. To have settled down now in Kyoto, to have lived in that strange world with the idea of which he had so long ago fallen in love, would be a falsity. He could only have played at the contemplative life, only enacted it, producing something which might be very like the real thing but could not be the real thing. Could not be, because a human being has only one lifetime and cannot but be fashioned by it. There are no intervals and one is what one has thought and done. For Matthew, it was too late. He had made his beloved wait too long. This was the bitter truth which Kaoru made him at last clearly see as he twisted and turned his fat bulk restlessly upon the tatami.

  Of course there were various second bests, but Matthew was in no mood for second bests. He could rent a little flat in Kyoto, and live there quietly, hanging around the monasteries, talking Buddhism with the masters, writing a book about it all. He could take up an art or craft, painting perhaps, or pottery. Wisdom was to be had so. Or something humbler. ‘You might work in the garden here,’ Kaoru said to him, immobile with calm eyes. But if one were never to have the pearl of great price? No.

  Then there was Austin. Matthew sometimes felt that Austin would be amazed if he knew how much, on the other side of the world, he had been thought about. In a way it was a consolation to Matthew to know that his preoccupation with Austin was not, though it might have been, the only barrier to his vocation. Could one have taken such an unresolved personal anguish into that great silence? To have had his life, at this stage, wrecked simply by Austin would have been — ridiculous. But now, since what he had so greatly desired was not to be, there were older and in some ways more natural duties which asked to be heard. Matthew knew that if he had always carried Austin within him as a poisonous and unassimilable alien body, the Matthew which Austin carried must be that much greater and more venomous.

  In a way, Matthew thought, it all rests on nothing, it’s all in Austin’s imagination. In reality he had done nothing to Austin. Or had he? Even at the quarry, Austin said that Matthew had thrown stones, but this was not true. Or had he perhaps shuffled his feet a little to make the stones run down the gulley? He remembered seeing those stones cascading down and feeling pleased, before he heard Austin cry out. He had certainly, at the beginning, laughed. Could a man receive a life sentence for laughing? Yes. The rest had seemed like that, based on nothing, or practically nothing, or perhaps everything. Would he ever be able to talk about it with his brother, gently and with good will?

  Running straight to Austin on that first night, with that almost uncannily grotesque outcome, had been a silly nervous thing to do. The sense of inevitable blunder, inevitable resentment, was unnervingly familiar. Someone who was always contriving things like that deserved to be hated. Since then, politely, Austin had evaded him, never at home, never free, courteously, on picture postcards, refusing, for excellently plausible reasons, all Matthew’s invitations. I shall have to change my tactics, Matthew thought. The thing had already begun to seem like a quest. It was ironic that the great task of his retirement seemed to be simply to cure his younger brother of a crippling hatred. Yet if it could be done was this not a great thing? For him, yes, thought Matthew. But for me, emptiness. Thus duty often is, he told himself, for the doer, emptiness.

  The thought of Mavis Argyll sometimes flitted through Matthew’s mind. It flitted now, against the summery trees, the shade of a young girl. How he had changed, how she must have changed, since those days. He had not seen or communicated with her for twenty years. He supposed that, in the roulette of London social life, he would probably meet her somewhere or other eventually. Various people, some of whom did not know of his old connection with her, had spoken to him of her and of Valmorana. Matthew felt no emotion in his memories, in fact he scarcely formulated any memories. His life had long ago blotted out Mavis and all his purer romantic love had become centred on something very different from a woman. He felt a certain curiosity sometimes now about the past. What exactly had happened, who had given up whom and why? Had Mavis felt resentment at not being more ardently pressed, at being perhaps too readily surrendered? She was a Catholic and he was a Quaker. She had had a religious vocation and he had respected it. Had they really loved each other so much, and if they had could they ever have parted? He remembered that he had been unhappy but he could not recall the unhappiness. If he met Mavis would they be embarrassed? Only for a moment surely. He would not write to her. It was indeed essential that he should leave her alone since he must not, whatever else he did, go anywhere near Dorina. His friendship with Betty had had such stupid wretched consequences.

  Meanwhile how would he live? A sense almost of ennui came to him out of the trees which seemed now to be drooping and darkening before his eyes. London seemed a city not even wicked, but devoid of spirit, dusty, broken. God had died there since Matthew was young and Jesus Christ, who might have been waiting for him in England, was gone too, faded utterly, his old Friend and Master, gone. How abhorrent to him now was the image of the Crucified One, the personal local God-head of Christianity. In Singapore once a girl who knew that he collected porcelain had given him a nineteenth-century Chinese vase on which a Rubens crucifixion was represented. Matthew viewed this curiosity with fascinated horror. The intrusion of that theme was a vulgar outrage. And here in England, where it might have been forgiven, have been the bearer to him of something ancient and holy, he found it offensive too and shuddered away from its message of anxiety, suffering, personality and guilt. He thought, the west studies suffering, the east studies death. How utterly different these things are, as indeed the Greeks had always known, that deeply secretly oriental people. Greece, not Israel, had been his first real mentor.

  He had intended to make contact with the London Buddhists, but London itself had already made this project futile. He knew that these people would merely annoy him. He was spiritually disinherited, spoilt, left absolutely on his own. Sometimes it even seemed to him that Kaoru, in those last talks, had condemned him to death. And he wondered, as he walked down a vista of tired trees heavy with their leaves, whether just this particular emptiness were not the nearest he would ever come to enlightenment.

  ‘Matthew! I say, Matthew, wait for me!’

  It was Gracie Tisbourne, running, long-legged, brown-legged, as graceful and sinewy as a Spartan maiden. She ran up to Matthew and touched him lightly on the shoulder as if she were playing tig. She was wearing a short green-flowery dress and her silvery-golden hair had blown in a wispy network of glowing threads over her small eager face.

  Matthew smiled at her, feeling intense irritation. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He did not want to walk across the park with Gracie, he felt frenzy at the idea of half an hour’s compulsory conversation with this coy and spritely wench. Her curiosity, her archness, her air of flirtatious affection, her appalling youth, grated upon his mood. He thought, I cannot and will not talk with this girl all the way across the park.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gracie,’ said Matthew. ‘I’d love to talk to you, but I’m just nerving myself to do my daily stint of jogging.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Jogging. You know. It’s an American invention. It’s a kind of rather leisurely running designed for elderly people with heart conditions. I have to do half an hour a day. Doctor’s orders. So off I go and please forgive me, see you another time.’

  Matthew started to run, first quite fast and then more and more slowly. He ran away at random through the trees, puffing along, crossing paths at random, scuffing through grass, glimpsing distant water, running away
from Gracie, running away from himself, running away from the spoilt emptiness and the death of his gods.

  He reached the Serpentine beside the Peter Pan statue and sat down gasping and exhausted with an agonizing stitch in his side. This had been one of the sacred places of his childhood, but no child Matthew awaited him here and the statue, defying the universe upon its bronze pyramid of animals and dragon-fly-winged fairies, looked merely grotesque and quaint. Childhood was so far away and no whiff of freshness from there came to him mingled with the cool smell of the water. The pavilions and fountains at the end of the lake minded him of China, not of childhood. Gaily painted ducks sailed under tangles of green willows but for him the scene was grey and his heart beat within him like a resonant going in an empty hall.

  Gracie, running as fleetly and effortlessly as a young antelope, flew lightly towards him and plumped down on the seat beside him, smelling of flowers, not even out of breath.

  ‘You haven’t done half an hour yet. May I run with you?’

  ‘No, I’m not going to do any more.’

  ‘I love this place, don’t you? Aren’t the little rabbits sweet and the mice. See how they’re all shiny from being stroked by the children. Oh, Matthew, I do so want to talk to you. I haven’t seen you properly at all yet. You know, you could be such a help to me. You were so nice to me when I was a little girl, I’ve never forgotten, and you’re so wise and I do so trust you and admire you, you don’t mind my saying so, do you? It’s so wonderful if somebody young can be friends with somebody old, don’t you think, we have so much to learn from you, I don’t feel a gap at all, I feel you know me very well, maybe better than anyone, you can see right into me and right through me, you could help me to find myself. You aren’t cross with me, are you? We must talk together, mustn’t we, for ages and ages and ages. I do feel you could tell me the truth about myself, even if it meant being quite severe. Will you come to tea with me soon? When will you come to tea?’