An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  Dorina did not like to linger at the flat upon the stairs in case some neighbour saw her or in case Austin should come. The thought of Austin had hovered over her like a contraption of black gauze ever since Garth had terrified her by his warning. During the spellbound days with Matthew she had of course thought about Austin all the time, but Matthew’s presence had so completely banished fear that she had seemed to see her husband conjured up as a heavenly apparition, bathed in a radiance of compassion and understanding. She could really think about Austin at last, and realized that she had never, since the days of courtship, really been able to think about him at all. Rather he had thought her, had possessed her with fear and love, had raced through her being like blood. Now there was distance and clarity and sense. She could, with Matthew’s help, experience love without suffocating in it.

  Only now that bright atmosphere had vanished utterly, blotted with darkness and fear and crime. She stood on the stairs outside the closed door of the flat and trembled with the old terror, only now it was worse and she felt guiltier, for Austin would find out, or else she would tell him, she would have to. She ran down the stairs and at first simply wanted somewhere to hide. She had a little money with her. She also had her cheque book. Some tiny mean instinct of self-preservation had once led her to conceal from Austin that she had some money of her own, though not much, in a bank account of which he knew nothing. He had taken all her other money. This was just a remnant, representing perhaps the little grain of selfish mistrust which still remained in Dorina’s poor shuddering soul after its exposure to Austin. She deceived him about it and then forgot it. It came back to memory now, not with any special significance except that she could, at this moment, afford to go to a hotel.

  She went to one at random, was greatly stared at by the clerk, but was given a room and treated as if she were an ordinary person. When signing the register she wrote her name as Dora Friedlander, and gave as her address the address of an old school friend in Manchester. To invent an address seemed to her criminal, while it was no crime to invent a name for this jelly of being which had never really had much identity even before its troubles. She was given a key, went upstairs and lay on the bed and cried. She took no supper and fell into sleep as into the arms of some vague all-healing illness.

  The next morning, awakening and not knowing at first where she was, she was overwhelmed with misery and fear as she remembered herself and her situation. She drank some coffee, said she would stay another night, and retired to her room to think. Only thinking had already become impossible. She felt, as one who tentatively explores the first symptoms of a grave ailment, the gathering of spirits about her. She stared at her handbag and it immediately fell off the dressing-table on to the floor. She experienced a frightening sense of connection with her environment which she had not had since she was eighteen. Then a picture fell down. Dorina put on her coat and hurried out. She went to Hyde Park and wandered about. It was a sunny day. She felt in an urgent way that she ought to hand herself over to somebody. But whom?

  She went to a telephone box and tried to telephone Charlotte, but there was no answer. She bought a sandwich and went back into the park. She thought of old friends, she even thought of going to Manchester, but since her marriage she had cut all ties, and who could be expected to receive the stranger and the ghost that she had become? At some more lucid moments she told herself that there were only two possibilities. Either she must return to Valmorana or she must go straight to Austin. It was then that she remembered, what she had since leaving the Villa entirely forgotten, the scene which she had witnessed between Austin and Mitzi. This memory came to her with a shock of gratuitous extra horror. After thinking about it for a while however this thought resolved itself into pure pain and puzzled her no more. If she was now to go back to Austin it must be as a slave without will, and if Austin loved Mitzi too then this also must be endured. Austin’s love for herself she never doubted.

  She could go to Valmorana, she could go to Mitzi’s house and seek Austin. And yet could she really, after what had happened, do either of these things? She had given herself to Matthew just as surely as if they had lain in bed together. He had spoken to her with the voice of truth, he had exorcised her fears, he had helped her to love her husband better, so it had seemed. Or had he merely enchanted her with a particular and strange love for himself? The idea of returning now to Matthew did not occur to Dorina for a second. Already he belonged to the past, to a time outside time, to a place she had visited in a dream. What remained were the blackness, the crime, the impossibility.

  She went back to the hotel. The room looked odd, as a room might look to someone terrified or mad. She took tablets and fell into fiery dreams. The next day she hurried out and wandered again. She walked in St James’s Park. She went to the National Gallery. In the afternoon she went to the cinema and cried for two hours in the dark. Austin’s intuitions were good, but temporally confused. He was often upon her track or in places which she visited on the next day. He too walked along the Serpentine, but too late. He went to the Tate Gallery, but too early. Once they were both in the same cinema at the same time, but arrived and left at different moments. A day and another day and another day passed. She changed her hotel. Garth had been right. The certainty grew upon her that she must tell Austin, and not tell him after a while, compelled by nervous terror, but tell him at once and ride the consequences into whatever smash or chaos might ensue. She started to write a letter but the sight of the words upon the page made her faint with terror. Must he know that? Her vision became troubled. Whenever she looked away a little child appeared in the chamber pot. Lurid dreams like waking visions crowded all her sleep.

  I must see a doctor, thought Dorina. She thought this not so much because of what she saw as because of her bodily state. She felt hungry but could not eat, weary but could not rest. She had a dull pain in her back and a throbbing pain in her knee. She was running short of sleeping pills. Yet in order to consult a doctor she would have to have an identity which she had not got. She thought of Mavis, kindly gentle Mavis, her motherland, forgiving all. Mavis would put her to bed, as she had done so often in the past, and sit beside her until she fell asleep. Perhaps that could be. But if she crawled back to Valmorana now she would surely die there like an old dog upon the doorstep. There could be no peace there for her now. Austin would enter like a black bolt and shiver the house to pieces. There was only one place for her to go now, and it drew her more and more like an awful doom-laden magnet, and that was back to her husband. This she increasingly felt, and with it, at a particular time, was joined the certainty that Austin already knew about the secret crime of the three days.

  But there was no moment when it was possible to return to Austin or to ring him up or to write to him, the barrier of real action was too difficult. So she passed her days in wandering about London and waiting for a sign. She felt that if she wandered for long enough she would simply meet Austin somewhere. She walked and stood and sat and the sun shone upon her and the rain rained upon her and she grew weary and thin and cold. When she returned to her hotel at night her bedroom was like a waxwork show. Sometimes the apparitions were so palpable that she tried to touch their dead surfaces.

  Then on the morning in Great Russell Street she saw Ludwig. When she recognized him she felt a great shock and a flood of relief. She had thought about him, but without purpose. And here was her sign. Here at least was the thing that would change the awful succession of these powerless dream days. But Ludwig saw her, paused, and then walked on. He did not even look back. I must be changed, thought Dorina, into some awful effigy of myself, something like the things which I spawn here in my bedroom. So they had all rejected her, condemned her, forgotten her. Perhaps they all knew about the three days. Perhaps in what seemed to her like a short time years and years had passed. Austin thought she was dead. Austin thought her dead and his thought had made her invisible to Ludwig. Austin had always meant death to her, he was her death and it was th
at in him which she loved. This was perhaps a reason why, even in this extremity, it never occurred to her to take her own life. Her life was Austin’s and he would take it from her in his own ripening of time.

  Tears were in Dorina’s eyes. In these days tears lived there, like hot slimy creatures in a hole. She got up heavily and put a coin into the electric meter. The room was gaunt and cold. Automatically she took off her dress and then remembered that it was morning not evening. The rain had made everything so dark. She was really ill now. Tomorrow there might be fever, delirium, ordinary sickness, doctors. She decided to warm herself with a hot bath and to get into bed. Shivering she went into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. Then she took two sleeping pills. The bathroom filled with steam. Yet still she felt so cold, only her face was warmed a little by her crying.

  She thought, if only there were some recourse, somewhere I could go to out of the mess and nightmare of my failed life, somewhere where I could rest and drop the burden of my sin, as I used to imagine when I prayed when I was a child. Is there any prayer or place of gaze still left which is not a mere enchantment? There should be such, even now, even without God, some gesture which would bring automatic world-changing wisdom and peace. Pliez les genoux, pliez les genoux, c’est impossible de trop plier les genoux. Who had said those beautiful words to her and what did they mean? Then suddenly she remembered. It had been her skiing instructor at Davos. Not a holy man after all. So that was all that was, another senseless fragment of ownerless memory drifting about like a dead leaf.

  She took off her clothes and stood trembling with cold in front of the little electric fire. Then she picked up the fire and moved it into the bathroom. In spite of the steamy bath the room was murky and chill. She balanced the electric fire on top of the lavatory, turning it so that its ray was towards her as she stepped gingerly into the bath. As she did so a vibration from the traffic outside made the electric fire shift and quiver. In a moment it was sliding towards her. It fell into the bath with a loud splash which mingled with Dorina’s shriek. She shrieked and the surging water closed over her head.

  ‘Oh do stop crying, Clara,’ said George Tisbourne wearily.

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning and they had finished the bottle of whisky.

  ‘Clara, let’s go to bed. Enough, enough.’

  Outside in the night it was raining quietly. They were in their little cramped drawing-room, Clara sprawled on the tiny settee, George restless, moving from upright chair to upright chair, examining the bottle. The uncurtained night windows contained their distracted elongated reflections.

  ‘It’s not your fault about Dorina,’ said George.

  Dorina had at last sufficiently identified herself by her death. Dead, she was soon found.

  ‘I know,’ said Clara, sitting up a bit and controlling her voice. ‘I even know that. It’s the pure pity of it. It suddenly lets in on you — you know — all the awful things, all of them, that one’s usually unconscious of.’

  ‘I know,’ said George. He thought, I am growing old. I love Clara, but we don’t talk any more, we know each other too well, there are no surprises, we have grown together into some sort of single ageing bundle. And everything one strove for and which seemed an achievement is touched already by mortality and seen to be dust. The children despise us. I have had my final promotion.

  ‘Oh if only we’d found her —’

  ‘She was a doomed girl.’

  ‘So we say now.’

  ‘I can’t understand,’ said George, ‘why she ran off in the first place. What was it all about?’

  ‘She was frightened of Austin.’

  ‘So you keep saying, but I can’t see it. Austin seems to me pathetic.’

  ‘Women are often frightened of men. It’s like cat and dog.’

  ‘Nonsense. You aren’t frightened of me, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Clara, after a moment of staring at the window, her mouth red and wet and slightly open. Prolonged crying had altered her face so that she was scarcely recognizable.

  ‘No, nobody would be frightened of me,’ George said aloud to himself.

  ‘Oh if only she’d come here. I did suggest we should go round with the car and sort of kidnap her, only you wouldn’t. Oh if only, if only —’

  If only I had had the courage to stick to mathematics, thought George. He pressed his forehead against the cool slightly sticky glass of the window. I could at least have tried. I could have lived in a world of pure thought and left something beautiful behind me. A life in administration is a diminishing wasting life. And now mine is nearly completed and what remains is just idling.

  ‘Is that Gracie moving about?’ said Clara. ‘Why isn’t she sleeping? I gave her some sleeping pills.’

  ‘She didn’t take them. She said she didn’t want to sleep. She said she’d sit and listen to the rain.’

  ‘She’s in such pain and she won’t talk. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘It’ll blow over —’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. Ludwig going off to Oxford like that, and Gracie suddenly turning into a deaf mute. She’s been going round like a zombie for the last two days.’

  ‘It’s just a tiff, Clara. They’ve got to find out what quarrelling is like some time.’

  ‘We’ve never found it out,’ said Clara.

  No, thought George. We might have been better off if we had. We’ve never fought each other for a principle, we’ve always preferred peace. We’ve each surrendered our soul to please the other. Perhaps this doesn’t matter. Perhaps this is what love is.

  ‘You don’t think it’s all going to break down between Ludwig and Gracie? His parents still haven’t answered my letter. And you know Gracie wouldn’t go for that fitting of the wedding dress yesterday.’

  ‘Gracie’s a petulant girl.’

  ‘I blame Ludwig. I’ve never really liked him.’

  ‘Clara, be careful.’

  ‘Oh, we’re always being careful. We don’t say what we think even to each other, though we know each other’s thoughts like an open book. Ludwig’s a prig. He’s too priggish to love genuinely and really give himself. He’s a cautious man. At Oxford he’ll be a dry old stick before he’s thirty-five, fussing about college business and his latest article.’

  ‘You don’t really think this, Clara.’

  ‘If they are going to break it off —’

  ‘They aren’t.’

  ‘I hope they do it in time for Gracie to get Sebastian after all. Do you think the Odmores would mind if we used the same wedding dress?’

  ‘I must look after Austin,’ said Mavis. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘He hates almost everybody,’ said Matthew.

  ‘He’s got used to me.’

  ‘He knows we meet?’

  ‘It’s not mentioned.’

  ‘And he shows no sign of moving out of Valmorana?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Austin knows when he’s on to a good thing,’ said Matthew.

  ‘It isn’t like that at all,’ said Mavis. ‘It’s not anything like that. He is terribly stricken, he is scarcely sane.’

  ‘When others take refuge in insanity it’s too bad for those of us who are incurably sane,’ said Matthew. ‘I am terribly stricken too.’

  ‘She was my sister.’

  ‘I’m not accusing you of taking it lightly.’

  ‘In a way, having Austin to deal with has helped, it has given me an immediate purpose, something compulsory.’

  ‘We must avoid guilt. You musn’t worry about his having found that fragment of letter —’

  ‘I feel far beyond guilt. Dorina and I — we were closer than I’ve ever made you understand — there’s a sort of timelessness in our relation — somehow while I live she can’t die — and now she is dead, I am dead.’

  ‘Don’t speak so,’ said Matthew. ‘After all this, perhaps a long way after, there will be a new time. You and I have a life to live, Mavis.’

  ‘I know. But at the
moment I am dead to it. I am possessed by Dorina. And because of her, Austin means something. In an odd way, I can see Austin now, it’s as if, just for this, I am God.’

  ‘What does he look like?’ said Matthew.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mavis. ‘I can’t respond, I can’t talk that language. I can hardly talk at all. Except perhaps I could talk about her, like a very long poem going on and on.’

  ‘You are in better case than I,’ said Matthew. ‘You live with her, you die with her. I am left with the tangled end of good intentions that went wrong. I shall never know the extent of my responsibility. I loved her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mavis. ‘And perhaps that will be between us always.’

  ‘Do you mean dividing us? Because you blame me?’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘Or because you’re jealous?’

  ‘No. The pain I’m in kills structures like jealousy. I was jealous. But not now.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘Her death is an absolute. One comes to places where one has to stay. Perhaps I shall have to stay here.’

  ‘So you think. But death is recovered from. All deaths are. This one will be. And this is right.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mavis. ‘I can’t really see the future. But I feel like a prophetess. I feel like Cassandra. I feel hollow. Silence is best or else a scream. I feel fatal and curiously eloquent.’