by Iris Murdoch
‘It’s Mrs Carberry. Her husband beats her.’
‘Men. They really are worse than us, aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
Dorina walked across the grass. She held her plait of hair in her hand and hauled on it a little. She was barefoot. It was impossible not to step on the daisies. If only she were feathery-light and could float along with the soles of her feet just touching the little humpy centres of the daisies. They would tickle a bit, and her feet would be stained yellow with pollen.
‘Dorina.’
Someone had spoken her name very close by. Was it Austin? Alarm made her heart rise and race.
‘Dorina. Here.’
A voice was speaking to her from the outer side of the privet hedge. Dorina looked quickly round, then she sped through the gap in the hedge.
On the other side was a smaller lawn, hidden from the house, an old brick wall where the garden ended, a stripy clematis, a white broom in flower.
On the lawn, stark, like a man on a stage, in a picture, someone was standing. He was tall, dark, lanky, sallow, shabby, familiar.
‘Garth!’
Dorina put her hand to neck and sank down on the grass. Garth knelt down beside her grinning.
‘Hello, Dorina, I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me.’
‘Garth — how — oh you have changed — you’ve grown up.’
‘Well, of course I’ve changed, it’s ages since we met. I just came in over the wall. I wanted to look at you.’
‘To look at me?’
‘Yes. I was beginning to be unsure whether you really existed or not.’
‘I’m sometimes unsure myself.’
‘I say, what are you going to do about it all?’
‘About Austin?’ She looked past his dark head at the big stripy mauve faces of the clematis flowers. Suddenly talking to him like this was odd but somehow not difficult. ‘You tell me what to do.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing. You must stop being so afraid of him.’
Dorina considered several answers and then just said, ‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Your fear sets him off. It excites him. Like a tiger smelling blood. Stop being so quiet. Stop doing everything in slow motion. You must feel like a prisoner. Break out. Go somewhere. See people. Above all, see him, and if he’s tiresome, shout at him.’
Dorina just shook her head. ‘If I leave here anything I do will hurt him and, as he thinks, expose him to ridicule.’
‘Well then hurt him, expose him to ridicule, wake him bloody up.’
‘Garth, how can you —’
Garth rose to his feet and Dorina rose too. They stood intently facing each other with hands hanging. In the heat of the evening Garth’s face was marked with trails of sweat.
‘Oh well, I’m glad I’ve looked at you, that might help somehow.’
‘Garth, don’t go for a moment. Better not tell him you’ve been here.’
‘Oh hang him!’
‘Please. And Garth — Have you seen Matthew?’
‘No but I will. I shall have to. What is more my father will have to.’
‘Why “have to”?’
‘Because he’s fascinated by him, because he needs him, because in the end he probably loves him.’
‘If I really thought,’ said Dorina, ‘that Austin loved Matthew —’
‘What?’
‘It would all go away, the nightmare would go away, it could —’
‘Who knows? Maybe. But there are strange loves in the world. Goodbye. I say, Dorina, may I kiss you?’
Dorina stood quiet, arms pendant, while Garth put his hands gently on her shoulders and carefully and deliberately kissed her first on the cheek and then without haste upon the lips. Then he glided away, waved a hand, hauled himself up on to the wall, waved again and was gone. The bright vision of him remained for a moment only silhouetted against blue sky.
Dorina looked quickly round. The garden, which had been for a while so real, had become itself again, empty and still under a grey sun, a thought-place. She touched her face which was moist with his salty sweat as if with tears.
Austin had been crying last night. Mitzi had heard him sobbing and had opened the door. His room was obscure. She said, ‘Austin, darling.’ He made a sort of animal retching noise. Then he turned on the light by the bed and made an awful face at her. It was a dreadful squashed-up face of violence and loathing. It haunted her sleepless bed, huge and hostile, like the owl which had rushed at her out of the dark. Or had she imagined that owl? Then he turned the light out again. Mitzi fled.
Now it was the next morning and she was sitting in front of her typewriter in the office. Her ankle ached and the scar upon her face itched and pulled the skin in towards it, so that she felt grotesque. She kept scratching, drawing blood, dabbing with her handkerchief, looking at herself in the mirror. She loved Austin. Of course she had always loved him, but now it had blazed up. Great gusts of fiery emotion blew upon Mitzi as if she had opened the door of a furnace. She had not known how much difference it would make to have him with her in the house tucked up safe and snug every night. It gave her a feeling she had not had since she had been a little child with her mother. I love him and I’ll keep him, she thought. He came to me. He said we were on an island. I love him and I’m not complicated like the others. I don’t drive him mad and make demands. He can be bad to me and it makes no difference, he knows that. His dreadful face floated before her glorified, the mask of a lion, terrible and noble.
‘Miss Mitzi, may I ask you something?’ said Mr Secombe-Hughes behind her. He often called her that, perhaps facetiously.
Mitzi, who had been absently scratching her breasts, quickly buttoned up her blouse. ‘Yes, Mr Secombe-Hughes?’
‘May I take a photograph of you?’
‘Well —’
‘As a little gift, a token.’
He was smiling his most bardic smile and had combed his grey hair which stuck wetly and greasily to his head, curling up a little at the ends.
‘Yes.’
‘Come.’
Mr Secombe-Hughes held out his hand and Mitzi, rather surprised, took it. Their relationship seemed suddenly to have altered now that she was to be photographed. Mr Secombe-Hughes led her, or rather pulled her, out of her office and into the studio. At the far end, a relic of a by-gone day, there was a backcloth representing the terrace of some great house and beyond it a lake and some mountains. A white painted cast iron seat stood in front of it.
Mitzi sat down. ‘I’ve got this scar.’
‘I have received a good offer for the business. I am thinking of going back to Wales. Back to my village.’
Well, I hope to God you’ll pay me first, thought Mitzi. ‘I’ve got this scar.’
‘Don’t worry. I will arrange you. May I?’ Mr Secombe-Hughes’s hands were gently moulding her, soothing her. He had turned her head to hide the scar, caressed her hair, drawn his fingers across her cheek, pressed persuasively upon her collarbone. He had lifted her arm so that it trailed negligently over the back of the seat. Now his hand had somehow got into the crook of her knee. ‘And may I dress you in this? It belonged to my mother.’ He was holding a huge white shawl embroidered with white flying birds. He had drawn it round her neck and was tucking it down across her breasts. Mitzi relaxed, laughing.
‘There are seals there,’ said Mr Secombe-Hughes, who had withdrawn now. He was using the oldest camera, which he still said was the best one, and he had covered his head with a black cloth and his voice was muffled. ‘There are seals there and big crabs and wet rocks as pink as the dawn and little secret inlets where the sea is like cream and there is light yellow seaweed like light tossed hair. And the cormorant flits like a ghost low over the waves. And there is solitude and the wild pained cry of the seagull.’
‘Where?’ said Mitzi.
‘In Wales. At my village.’
I feel so relaxed, thought Mitzi. Mr Secombe-Hughes ought to have been a masseur. The great white silky
shawl caressed her, smelling of an old old perfume, a sweet powder from a powder puff of long ago. Mitzi’s ankle had ceased to ache. With dazed wild joy she realized that it had become better. She bounded up the rocks, away from the sea, towards the castle, where Austin was waiting for her on the terrace, where she had chained him to the castle wall with a silver chain, and between every link of the chain there was a pearl, and when the sun was low in the sky they sat and kissed each other upon the terrace and listened to the wild pained cry of the sea-gull and watched the cormorant flit like a ghost over the waves until the great moon arose and the moonlit sea was like cream in the little inlets.
The great square eye gazes at her and Mr Secombe-Hughes’s muffled voice rises and falls and fades like the sound of the waves.
‘Miss Mitzi, I love you, will you marry me?’ Mr Secombe-Hughes is kneeling beside her and the white shawl is disordered.
‘I must have fallen asleep for a moment.’
‘Will you marry me?’
‘The sea, I dreamed of the sea. A castle on an island.’
‘We would have a little office in Aberystwyth.’
‘Oh please, no, Mr Secombe-Hughes, I cannot love you.’
Mitzi struggled away and rose to her feet. He remained kneeling.
‘Miss Mitzi, please now, you must have known of my love, you seemed to accept it, only in my difficulties, one is a gentleman, I could see you understood. I have written a poem about you in Welsh in five hundred lines. We could have an office in Aberystwyth and a cabin by the sea, you dreamed of the sea.’
‘Please, Mr Secombe-Hughes, I never accepted your love, I do not want to marry you, please get up.’
He got up. ‘Miss Mitzi, let me at least love you. It is something if a man can at least love a woman. There is so little in my life. It would give me something to dream of, something to write about. A man must have something to dream of. I could send letters to you and poems and little flowers from the rocks. I understand. How could I hope? But just let me — go on loving you — and perhaps — sometimes — you might come to Wales to see me — and I would dream of you and think about you in the night time.’
‘I don’t want you to think about me in the night time,’ said Mitzi. ‘Your love makes me feel unclean, I don’t want it. I want the money you owe me, all of it, and then not to see or hear of you again. Don’t touch me, please, I’m in love with somebody else.’
There was silence. Mr Secombe-Hughes picked up the shawl from where it had fallen to the ground. Mitzi rushed to the office for her coat and bag. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as she ran out of the door. She felt unclean. She needed Austin.
Later on she started to cry and wondered what Mr Secombe-Hughes had done after she had gone away. She felt very sorry for him. But he sickened her all the same.
The privet hedge glimmered in what seemed to be starlight. Do stars really give light? Stars which no longer exist still shine upon us, they say. Only in London there are no stars and the night sky is a fiery purple. Austin’s hand quested over dry earth between stems. His glasses had fallen off as he leapt from the wall. Then he saw them lying upon the lawn like wicked lost eyes reflecting a little light.
Something touched his cheek. It was a spider’s web which he had just broken. He felt or saw the spider running darkly upon his coat and shuddered it away. The grass was dewy and he slithered his feet over it snakelike. A tall pale thing stood near, a statue which he had forgotten.
He had been out all day wandering, getting through the hours. People gave him strange looks. He visited museums but could see nothing. He sat in the National Gallery reading the evening papers. Sometimes in the afternoon he slept in the park. He had dreamed again that Betty was still alive, a drugged captive in a castle. His clothes were covered in dry grass and his nose itched. He usually returned home late to avoid Mitzi, who was becoming amorous.
There was a light in the drawing-room, a gap in the curtains. Would he see Dorina? Would she see him and scream? Would she faint, keeling over from her chair on to the floor? He had seen her faint so once. How he loved and feared her frightened face. Her tender vulnerable person filled him with sweet anguish, as if he should have found a little wounded animal, and then not know how to cherish it.
Such feelings in their married life together had made up a trembling and precarious happiness. He had always loved her with tears in his eyes. She had played at helplessness to please him. They had played together and this had seemed to bring back his innocence. But her laughter had always sounded of mortality and her uplifted hand had always seemed involuntarily to point at terrible veiled things.
Austin reached out his left hand and gripped the window sill, resting one cautious silent foot upon the gravel. He saw Dorina seated in the midst of gold like a Madonna in glory. He fell against the wall of the house. Only it was not Dorina, it was Mavis, sitting opposite to him at a table and writing a letter. She looked a tired sad angel. She looked up dreamily and murmured something, a name.
Austin retreated. He desired to call out, to break the spell, but he feared the irrevocable. With everybody against him was it indeed conceivable that he might lose Dorina? He was in an unlucky inauspicious time when any move would be a wrong one. Was it simply that his wife had left him and was afraid to say so? No, she would not murder him by going elsewhere and being with others, she would never betray him.
Any violence there had been before had seemed like play. But now he could not raise his voice even to say, ‘Come back, that is enough.’ Some mechanism geared his lightest movement so that if he touched her he would break a bone. He must let her wander and return of her own accord, even if fear drove her screaming to him. In the end her own ghosts would send her back. He must wait, he could afford to, she was tethered to him by an unbreakable cord. She was, however far she might roam, forever his prisoner.
Austin went back, slithering over his trail in the dew. He trampled upon flowers, touching the warm crumbling surface of the brick wall. A thick plait of wistaria made a step for him and cracked under his weight as he pulled himself up. A moment later he was walking along the street, dusting himself down, his heart loaded with misery.
‘Oh Mr Gibson Grey, please.’
Two figures were standing on the edge of the pavement near a street lamp.
‘Mr Gibson Grey. You are Mr Gibson Grey, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you were one of our gentlemen.’
Austin recognized the charwoman, Mrs Carberry. A boy of about ten was holding her by the hand.
‘Good evening,’ said Austin.
‘I thought it was you,’ said Mrs Carberry, ‘though the lights aren’t very good, are they, and I haven’t any glasses on. I don’t think the lights are as bright as they used to be at night, since the new government. I wonder if you would be so kind as to help me?’
‘Yes, certainly,’ said Austin.
‘It’s Ronald here. This is Ronald, my boy, my third boy that is, and there’s two girls younger and much less trouble. Ronald, this is Mr Gibson Grey. You see, Ronald doesn’t want to cross the road. He’s not like other children, he’s difficult, though God knows it’s not his fault. Come on, now. See.’ Mrs Carberry was tugging Ronald who was hanging back. Austin caught a glimpse of the boy’s face, curiously plump and pale, creased up with fear and will.
‘There aren’t many motor-cars at this time, well, there’s one,’ said Mrs Carberry. ‘I don’t think it’s the cars he minds, I wouldn’t want to get him half over and have him dragging his feet like, he’s that strong you know, there’s just something about this road that gets at him in his mind, he’s so fanciful you see. I wonder if you’d just be so kind as to take his other hand and we’ll walk him over, I believe he feels better when there are two, when his father used to hold his hand he was always better with a smile on his little face, like he never smiles now, poor pet, perhaps a man would help, he won’t do a thing for me these days. Now take the nice gentleman’s hand, Ronald, and
we’ll all three go across as safe as safe. Would you mind, sir?’
‘Of course not.’ Austin moved round and took the boy’s other hand. The hand hung limply and when Austin had taken it it felt weak and small. He had to grip it firmly as there was no answering pressure. It was like holding a dead mouse. Could sickness of the mind deaden the body so?
‘You’ll have to pull a bit, sir.’ Austin pulled. Ronald walked. Ronald turned a face like a pudding plate up towards Austin and they walked across the road all three.
‘Oh thank you, sir, you are so kind, thank God you came along, I could have been there half an hour, and I didn’t want him half way across dragging his feet with the cars coming.’
‘Shall I see you home?’ said Austin. ‘Will you be all right?’
‘Oh yes, it’s only that road, and he likes the tube train, poor mite. You see, I get him out of the house when I can, his father shouts so, I used to take him to his auntie weekends, only she’s took against him. We’re quite all right now and I do thank you so much, sir.’
‘Goodnight.’
Austin returned to himself. For several whole minutes he had been thinking about something else. Now the old buzzing cloud swept blindingly about him once again. Matthew had said that he would not go to Valmorana, but Matthew could break his word. What was it that Mavis had said when she had looked up so dreamily from her letter? She had said ‘Matthew’. The universe said ‘Matthew’.
Austin walked blindly on. Could he still be rescued by Dorina’s love and was the miracle still possible and did Ithaca still exist? When the spirit deadens it takes place so slowly, but there are moments when a man can see himself becoming more callous because he has to survive. A false alarm on the night bell once answered, it cannot be put right again ever. What did Mrs Carberry think about him, he suddenly wondered. Had she seen him climbing over the wall? But then it did not really matter to him or to anybody else what Mrs Carberry thought. If God existed He too would be indifferent to the thoughts of Mrs Carberry.
‘Hong Kong must be a very interesting city. Yes, thank you, spinach, no potatoes.’
