An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  Yours truly

  M. Ricardo

  Dear Ralph,

  OK, have it your way.

  Goodbye.

  Patrick

  Dear Mr Gibson Grey,

  you got off easy. Driving under the influence and not used to the car. I saw you were under the influence at once, and if that policeman hadn’t been a clot he’d have had you for it, and if my wife had kept her trap shut. We could have had a lot of damages out of you and you could have been in a lot of trouble. You took our little girl away from us. You were only thinking of your own skin, weren’t you, when you were talking to the police, I could see that your knees were knocking together and when you saw you’d got off scot bloody free you looked that pleased, I wanted to wipe the look off your kisser. Well, maybe you’ve noticed that a letter from Sir Matthew has been lifted from your table. By me. I went round to your place and your big girl friend obligingly showed me into your room and there was the letter lying open, which I took the liberty of pocketing! How’s that for evidence? You could face a stretch, you know, and your brother would have to give evidence against you, he’d have to, if the police had that letter, so he’d be for it too, he said nothing like that when they asked him questions, he’d be up for perjury. Think of yourself doing bird and your grand brother with the title in the next cell! Well, I don’t want to put you in quod or make trouble, all I need is money, and I’m reasonable too. See? I’ll call on you about it. That letter’s in the bank, so it’s no good running round here. My wife knows nothing about this, and if you know what’s good for you you’ll leave her out of it. She’s got enough trouble, after your drunken driving. You got off easy, and if you’ve got any sense you’ll see it stays that way. I’ll call about terms. You’re lucky I’m reasonable, someone else might have been vindictive.

  Yours truly

  Norman Monkley

  The waste land where the caravan stood was covered with thin grasses which had grown quite tall and been dried by the sun into a wispy patchy yellow. Their blanched dryness expressed desolation to Mavis as she sat on one of the divans and looked out of the window. She expected to see scattered bones. The humpy shadow of the caravan fell across the pallid parched expanse. Traffic rumbled and the air was hazy with dust and the terrible ennui of a hot London afternoon.

  Mrs Monkley had set out tea, with her best matching cups and enamelled souvenir spoons. The caravan was tiny and depressingly neat. There were two divans and a fitted table and a television set and a little sideboard with a lace cloth and a budgerigar in a very small cage. Mr and Mrs Monkley seemed small too, as if they had been made with the fittings. Perhaps they were simply used to moving their bodies in this space. Matthew, sitting on the opposite divan, seemed huge and had already knocked over a brass ornament and a sugar bowl without seeming to notice. Mavis shrank into herself, feeling wizened by a stale misery which had little to do with Mr and Mrs Monkley’s bereavement.

  Matthew had just handed to Mrs Monkley an envelope which Mavis assumed contained money. Mrs Monkley handed it quickly to her husband, who put it away with a reverent air as if it were a holy relic. What sum of money did the envelope contain and how had Matthew decided on the figure? Matthew had adopted a soft and fluent way of speaking which was quite unlike his usual utterance. He seemed to her like an elderly snake charmer whom she had seen once on a visit to the pyramids. He and Mrs Monkley did most of the talking. They understood each other, responding in a sort of quiet litany. Matthew was charming Mrs Monkley. He had taken charge of the scene. After all Mavis was unnecessary, worse than useless. Mavis looked Out of the window at the blanched grass and knew that she was soon going to start to cry and would not be able to stop. She would cry for herself and for her wasted life, and for all wasted and desolate lives. The child’s death in itself seemed to have little meaning. It was a tiny kernel in the midst of all this misery, tiny and almost pretty like the ridiculous enamelled spoons.

  Mrs Monkley kept blaming herself, even blaming the child. Sometimes it sounded as if she were asking Matthew’s pardon. And Matthew spoke as if it was he who had occasioned the whole thing. Austin was not mentioned, not out of delicacy but as if he had been forgotten. Mavis kept seeing the running child in her mind’s eye. Mrs Monkley had been showing the family photograph album. Mavis had dreamed about a child being run over, only the child in her dream had been Dorina. At the funeral Mavis had walked beside Matthew, silently, with the quiet possessiveness of a blood relation. But they had not spoken to each other, only smiled at parting, their smiles flowering sadly. Austin had not been present. Nor of course had Dorina.

  ‘It was a beautiful funeral,’ Mrs Monkley was saying, ‘a beautiful service. Her coffin looked so tiny, didn’t it, I wouldn’t have believed she was in it if I hadn’t seen her with my own eyes lying there before, you know. The men wanted me to go outside but I wouldn’t. Going away and leaving her there in the cemetery was so strange, as if it were wrong to leave her all alone at last, that was what somehow made me feel most of all that she’d gone, when we all went away together and left her there alone. And there’ll be days and months and years that will pass by now and she’ll be there in the one place always. And at night I’ll think of her, when it rains and the wind blows, and think how she’s there all alone at last.’

  Mrs Monkley was possessed, as all truly bereaved people are possessed, by the soul of the departed. She could speak of nothing else and could ease her pain in no other way. She and Matthew had been talking for an hour. She had shown him the photographs, the school reports, the toys. Mrs Monkley spoke in a tearful voice, but had control of herself. Mavis felt like screaming, seeing the scene with a strange precision, and yet it was full of gaps, of whitenesses. Perhaps I am going to faint, thought Mavis, it is so hot and airless here. She saw Mrs Monkley’s blue eyes staring with the effort of remaining tearless. She saw Mr Monkley’s brown moustache and the many soft rubbery wrinkles on his brow. She saw Matthew’s round brown eyes and the frown of concentration and solicitude which he wore all the time, his face puckered with the anxiety of letting Mrs Monkley talk and of interrupting her at exactly the right moment with exactly the right words.

  ‘It was sad too to see the flowers lying there,’ said Mrs Monkley, ‘she wouldn’t have liked that, to see the flowers lying there dying, not in water like, it would have been distasteful. Yet I couldn’t really take them away, could I. When we’d buy flowers sometimes she’d want to hurry home to give them a drink. Perhaps it was some kind of prophecy like, she always knew about death somehow and would ask about it, so unlike a child. She’d ask about Arthur, that’s our budgie, when he’d die and how old budgies lived to, and I’d never tell her and then Norman told her one day and she cried because she thought poor Arthur would die before she did, and now she’s in her grave and Arthur’s still alive. She loved that bird, she used to dream we’d gone away and forgotten and left him to die, and then she’d be crying again, how that child could cry, she’d cry just for the pity of things, she was that tender. She never let us kill an insect but she’d catch it in a jam jar and let it free outside. She was always on about death, she asked and asked about it when her grandma died, we didn’t let her see the body of course. I said it was just falling asleep and waking up with God. But I can’t find it in my heart now to believe she is with God. I can’t think she’s anywhere, any more, that’s what’s so funny. It leaves such a gap in your heart. And the worst is I keep forgetting she’s gone, every morning when I wake up I have to remember it all over again, and all through our lives she’ll be somehow not there, and we’ll think now she might be leaving school, now she might be getting married, now she might be having little children of her own. And she won’t be there at all. I suppose life is a matter of getting used to more and more awful things, but I can’t think I’ll ever get used to this. Every morning when I wake up I think she’s still alive. I can’t think she’s with God. She doesn’t exist any more anywhere. That’s what’s so funny, isn’t it.’

&
nbsp; ‘All human lives are short,’ said Matthew. ‘We all look forward into a mystery and we die soon. She had a happy life and never suffered even at the end. Remember her happiness.’

  He is putting words together, thought Mavis. What she says is true, what he says is false. It is not his fault. A real experience of death isolates one absolutely. The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved. Only one is not bereaved for long.

  She recalled her own mother’s death, the long tangles of golden hair, the pillow wet with tears. Her mother had cried herself to sleep. Mavis, a child, had felt engulfed in a blackness which it seemed could never end. Yet soon she had felt trivial worries, trivial joys. We are soon faithless to the dead. About her father’s death she had been stoical for Dorina’s sake.

  ‘I can’t quite believe it somehow,’ said Mrs Monkley, ‘it’s all so recent as if we could still put the clock back and make it not to be. It hasn’t had time to become real yet like real things in the past. There’s the little dress I was making for her, there’s the picture she painted at school and brought home to show us. I wish I could believe in a life beyond the grave. It would comfort me to feel that she was with her father and that he’d meet her there when she felt all strange and new and take her by the hand and lead her to Our Lord like I thought it might be once when we died and met our dear ones beyond the grave.’

  ‘Her — father?’ said Matthew, glancing at Mr Monkley.

  ‘Oh yes, she’s not his child,’ said Mrs Monkley. ‘Her poor father died and Mr Monkley is my second husband.’

  ‘I am her father in the spirit, you know,’ said Mr Monkley, and patted his eyes.

  ‘Quite,’ said Matthew.

  ‘I think we must go,’ said Mavis. ‘It’s been very good of you to see us and give us tea. And I hope you’ll think of us as friends, and if we can ever help in any way —’

  ‘We appreciate that,’ said Mr Monkley, ‘and we’ll do just that, won’t we, Mother?’

  ‘But I’m not a mother any more,’ said Mrs Monkley.

  ‘You may have another child,’ said Mavis.

  ‘I’ve had my womb removed,’ said Mrs Monkley, ‘it got diseased, you see.’

  ‘We must go,’ said Mavis.

  Matthew got off the divan, toppling a plate of cakes on to the floor. Mrs Monkley had felt it necessary to set out a massive high tea, which had remained almost entirely untouched. Mavis had destroyed two sandwiches, mainly with her fingers. She and Mr Monkley now picked up the cakes. Matthew and Mrs Monkley seemed not to have noticed. Mr Monkley’s moustache somehow edged them to the door and escorted them out. A hot dry wind was blowing outside. Three steep steps led them down into the dusty prickly dry grass which poked Mavis’s ankles and tickled her knees. A long ‘oooh’ came from within the caravan. Mrs Monkley had started to cry, at last.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘You’ll be good friends to us, I know,’ said Mr Monkley, ‘to me and to Mother, we appreciate it, we appreciate your visit and your kind recognition of our loss.’

  Mavis and Matthew walked across the bumpy ground to the road, hurrying discreetly so as to get out of sight. A taxi appeared and without a word Matthew hustled Mavis into it. He gave the address of the Villa. They sank back into the soft gloom of the interior.

  Mavis felt that her face had suddenly become all hot and wet, dissolved into tears. With a kind of frantic haste she and Matthew began to embrace each other, lips seeking lips in a frenzy of sudden need. She struggled to adjust herself against his bulk, dropping her handbag, a shoe coming off, as he clumsily clutched her and kissed her again and again. And now as her tears flowed she felt, mingled with the liveness of her body, a pure sensation which she had not in many many years experienced, the sensation of intense fierce undiluted happiness.

  Norman Monkley and Austin were sitting in Austin’s bedroom. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Norman sat on the bed. Austin sat on the chair. They conversed in low voices.

  ‘I’ve told you I haven’t any money,’ said Austin. ‘What’s the use of going on at me in this way? I’m very sorry for what happened. But it wasn’t my fault, your wife said so. And I wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘You was, you know,’ said Norman. ‘Got any cigs here? Well, mind if I roll my own? Have one, they’re not bad.’

  ‘No, thanks. And anyway as the police didn’t test me then the thing is closed. You don’t understand the law. That letter of my brother’s which you stole isn’t evidence of anything except that you’re a bloody thief. I deny that I was drunk and no one could prove the contrary, the whole thing’s closed, finished, over.’

  ‘My little girl is closed and finished and over,’ said Norman, ‘but not this business, It’s only just beginning. There’s no great hurry. But money I’ll have, and regular, otherwise trouble.’

  ‘Mr Monkley —’

  ‘Call me Norman. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other.’

  ‘Get out,’ said Austin softly. He gripped the edge of the flimsy counterpane, feeling cold fear. Behind the figure of Norman rolling his cigarette there opened a terrible landscape, a premonition of living death. He was not sure whether or not that letter could be used as evidence against him and there was no one he could ask. Matthew had done for him again.

  ‘I’ll go when I’m ready, don’t take on. As I said, I’m a reasonable chap. I’ve had a terrible loss and I want some compensation for it. That’s fair, isn’t it. Fair’s fair. You can’t give me and my wife our little girl back but you can give us money. Money’s not much but it’s something. And buying things always consoles a woman. Look at it in a human way. And don’t be so frightened, you look sick with fright, you’ll be vomiting in the basin in a minute. No need to be so frightened of poor old Norman. Norman’s a nice chap really.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ said Austin. ‘I’m angry.’

  ‘Yes, yes, your teeth are chattering with anger. Don’t let’s argue. Suppose you just give me twenty pound now on account and then when we’ve both thought it over we’ll fix a nice round sum to be paid every month, in memory of my little girl, think of it that way. I don’t want to be nasty. I won’t ask more than you can easily give, I’m not a fool. I know you’re not a big man. We could be friends, you know. You ought to want that after what you’ve done. Now what about twenty pounds?’

  ‘I haven’t got twenty pounds!’ said Austin.

  ‘You can get it,’ said Norman. ‘A chap like me couldn’t, but a chap like you always can. You could borrow it from your brother, he’s a sir and he’s stinking rich, I know that much.’

  ‘You’re dreaming,’ said Austin. ‘You have no power over me. That letter you stole proves nothing. Now please go away. Please.’

  ‘If you want to try it out in court of course, then it’s up to you,’ said Norman. ‘But if you think about it a bit you’ll decide not to. Your brother would tell the truth, in court, I know a bit about him, he’s religious. I’ve been studying your family since we sort of ran into each other. If it comes to it, he won’t protect you. He won’t disown his letter. He’ll tell the truth. And then you’ll be for the high jump. You could get a cool ten years for manslaughter. And the tough lads inside don’t like child-killers either.’

  ‘That’s not true, I couldn’t be sent to prison!’ said Austin. Could he be? Would Matthew testify against him?

  ‘Or may be I might drop round and talk it over with him.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘With your brother.’

  ‘You leave my brother alone! You wouldn’t get any change out of him, anyway.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? Not to help little Austin?’

  ‘Stop, you don’t understand —’

  ‘I do though,’ said Norman. ‘And what I don’t understand now I will soon. You’ve got a fellow traveller. You and your brother interest me. I’ll work it all out. I’m a bit of a psychologist really. I’ve written a psychological novel I’ll bring it round next time I come, you might like to
read it. And your brother might help me find a publisher. He’s a book-writer himself, isn’t he?’

  ‘I will not read your novel,’ said Austin. ‘I will not see you again. Get out.’

  ‘If you’d rather I dealt direct with your brother —’

  ‘I said get out.’

  ‘Don’t start screaming. I’m not going without some money. I’m in no hurry. I can wait while you go and get it.’ Norman turned lazily about and stretched himself out on the bed.

  Austin stared at Norman’s rather dirty suede shoes. Then he closed his eyes. He said to himself, don’t scream, think. Get rid of this swine somehow and then — ‘Listen,’ said Austin, ‘you said you were a reasonable man. If I give you five pounds now, will you go away? I’ll raise some more in the next few days. I’m broke and I can’t produce money just like that. Please accept a fiver and go and I promise I’ll raise some more.’

  ‘All right,’ said Norman, after a judicious silence. ‘You see how decent I am really. I’ll accept a fiver now and some more in a few days. I meant it about being friends, something like this is a real bond. You will read my novel, though, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Austin.

  ‘And discuss it with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Austin.

  ‘Good. Now where’s the fiver?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Austin. He went out of his bedroom and stood upon the dark landing. Run out of the house, and run and run and run? He walked slowly down the stairs. The stairs smelt of dust and despair and mice and old old cooking.