An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  Austin was better. Matthew would be back soon. Mavis longed for Matthew but she could not yet properly run to him, could not yet hurt Austin or lie to him or ask him to leave. Matthew, moving quietly in the background, understood it all, controlled it all. She felt in him already the security of a husband. Whatever happened Matthew would be there. And soon they would be together in that way again. Of course there had been imperfections. He had been so sweet and droll about them. She loved him more for that. They would soon get used to each other and then all would be complete. Matthew was leaving the Villa, he was finding a flat, he would come at the right time and carry her away from all worries and all problems to his secret privacy. When and how he should decide it, she would slip her burden at last.

  Of course Austin’s sojourn at Valmorana was causing comment, mainly, Mavis imagined, of the kind purveyed by Clara Tisbourne, who constantly adjured her not to be victimized. ‘Mavis, stop being saintly, that man is a vampire!’ Clara cried. ‘I know,’ said Mavis, and her eyes became huge and hollow with consciousness. ‘Clara dear, I can’t just kick him out, he’s so unhappy.’ ‘He knows when he’s well off,’ said Clara, ‘I never saw a man with a clearer idea of which side his bread was buttered.’ ‘You don’t realize he’s a wreck, he lives with terrors.’ ‘He appears to thrive on them! Oh well, I expect Matthew will arrange something soon, won’t he.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mavis. ‘Matthew will deal.’

  Mavis, limp and relaxed upon her sofa, found that she was smiling a little and wondered how on earth she could find anything to smile at in a situation which was potentially so awful. Suppose Austin just wouldn’t go? Would Matthew have to induce some sort of showdown? Austin would be defeated again, on the run again. Mavis had been by now thoroughly initiated into Austin’s view of himself as a victim. ‘I am an accidental man,’ Austin had once said to her. ‘What do you mean, Austin?’ Aren’t we all accidental? Isn’t conception accidental?’ ‘With me it’s gone on and on.’ ‘We are all like you.’ Yet he has been unlucky, she thought. If only it could all come right and be peaceful now, if only what had been so precariously healed could be kept safe and whole. Austin and Matthew had chatted amicably. Need there be any more drama?

  Of course he is a vampire, she thought. And this, she realized, had been somehow why she had smiled. And he knows it and he knows we know it. She pictured Austin’s handsome cunning face, radiant with complicity. After all he had accepted his accidents and if he always tried to turn them to account who could altogether blame him? Didn’t we all do this? In a way, she thought, he is without vanity and he doesn’t even try to deceive. He has got his own kind of truth. What will happen to him, I wonder? Must he be crushed again?

  Mavis, almost slumbering now, was roused by a sudden loud report. Something near to her had crashed or exploded with a loud crack and a shattering clang. She sat up in horror. Then she saw that one of the pictures had fallen off the wall. Nothing but that. Nothing to be alarmed about. Nothing to worry about at all. Mavis rose and picked up the shattered picture, a little seascape by Dorina, and turned its face to the wainscot. She was trembling with shock and memory. What strange and terrible things lay ahead?

  Ludwig leaned on the rail of the ship and looked at the sea. The immense undulating grey faintly luminous expanse was soothed and pitted with a light rain whose glittering curtain faded into a still translucent haze through which the horizon cut a hard iron-dark line. Just below the line the clouded sun had laid a streak of icy silver upon the water. Above the line huge bundles of coffee-brown cloudlets marched in fast disorder.

  Ludwig’s mackintosh was glistening with wet and his head was bare, his short hair rain-darkened and plastered to his head like a cap. Water drops stood and ran upon his face unhindered as upon a rock as he gazed steadily out upon the water. He was going home.

  He felt very miserable, very frightened, and very elated. During the days and days of talk with Matthew at Oxford he had taken his world of beliefs and principles entirely to pieces. It had seemed doubtful to him, it still seemed doubtful, whether it could ever be reassembled. All the machinery which provided important reasons for doing anything seemed to have been, in these discussions, dismantled. This was something which had apparently happened before when talking to Matthew. Only this time it had really happened. Yet why were the cases different? Or was it only that they had led to different conclusions?

  It did not seem to him that Matthew had influenced him. Matthew had simply provided the firm surface against which to place the destructive lever. Yes, it had seemed a work of unmitigated destruction. And Matthew’s face, especially late at night, for they had talked every night away, had glowed like that of a saint with something too pure to be called cynicism or even nihilism: something which was perhaps more dreadful than either. Yet Matthew himself had seemed untouched, like a holy man whose form is seen to burn but is not consumed.

  ‘Of course,’ said Matthew, wearily, rather near the end, ‘if you decide to go back you will at least satisfy a nervous urge not to have missed anything.’ ‘But I will have missed something,’ said Ludwig. ‘I shall have missed Oxford.’ ‘Oh well, you may get that later on. This you can only have now.’ ‘But I’m not just collecting experiences,’ Ludwig shouted. ‘Of course not. I am,’ said Matthew, yawning and looking at his watch.

  At one stage it had seemed easiest simply to decide what he most wanted to do and do it, since duty and history and love had all turned out to be hollow contraptions through which one looked into some awful white space. But the examination of this problem only gave an even more primitive form of life to the questions it had seemed to dispose of. What did he want to do? He was far too contaminated by those old ideas of which he could make so little sense even to pose the question in a pure way. Sometimes this purity itself seemed the most desirable thing of all. ‘Oh, toss a coin!’ said Matthew, departing to bed.

  ‘If you just want to get away from Gracie,’ said Matthew, ‘that’s one way of solving it by making it into a simpler problem. On the other hand, if you are dreaming of a reconciliation with Gracie then you will at least in that sense want to stay. It could need courage to stay if you aren’t.’ Ludwig clutched his head. Was that it? Was he just running away from the shame of staying on after breaking Gracie’s heart? ‘Do you conceive of yourself as having behaved like a cad?’ asked Matthew. Ludwig had never put the question. He did now. It opened vistas. And did he dream of reconciliation with Gracie? Yes. Sometimes he dreamed of nothing else. ‘Try to find a few small things which are clear,’ said Matthew.

  Of course he had in some superficial sense ‘decided’ to go home before Matthew’s arrival in Oxford. But he had, after sending the cable to stop his parents’ journey, told nobody else, and almost felt that he had merely established a further interim for reflection. He dreaded the return of Andrew Hilton, who would bring with him such a breath of the reality and dearness of what, here, he would be losing. And Ludwig weighed that loss very fully, to the point of anguish. Then the more he thought of it, the more it seemed that the two great halves of his former decision remained solid. He was not to fight in the war and he was not to waste his talents and that added up to staying put. What had changed? Perhaps only his relations with Gracie.

  ‘Get Gracie out of the way if you can,’ said Matthew patiently. Ludwig struggled. And it did seem to him at last that his decision about Gracie was something separate, and probably more certain than the other matters with which it had come to seem so mixed up. ‘Be ruthless,’ said Matthew. Ludwig tried. He had rejected Gracie, and that was indeed the word, for reasons which were, if any reasons were good, good reasons. He loved Gracie and he wanted her and she could make him very happy but he knew too that in tying himself now to this young girl he would lessen himself and diminish his possibilities in a way for which this love could not compensate. There was, after all, an ineradicable doubt. They could not really be of one mind and he would grow away from her. She would be just a part of his world. He had no clear i
deal of marriage but he could now see this as less than perfect. And it was too early to accept a compromise. These things, when he could force himself to eschew the language of love, became clear. His daemon said ‘no’, and when he had yielded to it he had felt, amid his wretchedness, a tiny grain of relief which was made of the deepest stuff of his being.

  So he came to see this at least plainly. Nor was he in any doubt about his parents. ‘Do they come in?’ said Matthew. ‘No,’ said Ludwig. ‘I mean I love and I care, but I can’t take them as a measure.’ ‘Has your father influenced you?’ ‘No — or only in so far as he is myself.’ ‘And you aren’t afraid of being thought a coward?’ ‘No. That least of all.’ Why then was he here on this ship moving hourly closer to the United States of America? He knew he was not just solving the problem of Gracie by running away from it. That problem, however agonizingly it still remained with him staining the tissues of his imagination and his thought, was solved. He did not even trouble now to probe and doubt his feelings. This was a great love, but a great love is not the measure of all things. Of course he suffered, of course Gracie suffered. It did not matter absolutely. He could sustain the parting from Gracie in the end, either in America or in Europe, since sustained it had to be. Oh God, she was sweet, sweet he felt at every hour and his body mourned for her. The pain was pure and devoid of dubiety. But then, with that at least made clear and set aside the solid diptych of his former decision faced him still. Was he after all returning, as Matthew had at one point hinted, just out of a nervous desire to have the experience of martyrdom merely because it proposed itself? And even if that was so did it matter? And if it did not matter why did it not matter?

  One thing which was evident was that Ludwig’s certainty that he must return grew somehow with the days. If this was simply the clarification of the desire to return, the ‘do what you want’ which he had yearned for earlier, that would indeed be something. The particular comfort of Oxford filled him at times with a sort of aesthetic distaste, but that was partly a nervous defensive affectation, in so far as it was not a product of deeper movements of a different kind. Oxford was solid enough, and what he was abandoning was a reality of wonderful value in a world in which few values were anything like as pure and clear. That much he knew, as he struggled to understand why he was doing what he now seemed to have no doubt that he had to do. ‘It is important to understand it now,’ he said to Matthew. ‘Later it will be blurred, I shall have forgotten.’

  ‘Try stopping looking at yourself and look at the issue,’ said Matthew, exhausted. ‘Stop worrying about your motives. All right, you’ll have to come back to your motives, being you, but give them a rest, for Christ’s sake.’ Ludwig looked. It occurred to him then with some shame that in the hot hurlyburly of his own motivation he had almost forgotten the cause. He thought about the war. He recited the facts, the history of it, like a litany, to Matthew, who remained silent. He thought about justice and about man’s inhumanity to man and about how there are things one cannot be a party to. Here it stood outside him and before him with a plainness which made even the desire for virtue seem like a frivolous personal whim. ‘Does that work?’ said Matthew. ‘Not quite,’ said Ludwig. ‘I can’t quite do it that way. That’s not all.’ ‘What remains then?’

  Ludwig felt that, for him, what remained was a small pure undoctrined need to bear witness. Not even perhaps to do battle for a view, except in the sense that bearing witness was doing battle. And since there was this need the thing itself demanded that it be done unambiguously and fully. The requirement was, when it came to it, wonderfully impersonal in quality and seemed to come cleanly away from the mess of his motives like a fossil coming out of the cliff. This was how the world was, so this was what a man must do. ‘That’s it!’ he said to Matthew, explaining it at last. ‘What does “so” mean?’ said Matthew. “What do you mean, what does “so” mean?’ ‘What does “so” mean in “This is how the world is, so this is what a man must do”?’ Ludwig thought, and said, ‘Am I back at the beginning again?’ ‘Not necessarily.’ ‘Perhaps I am thinking about myself after all,’ said Ludwig. ‘Perhaps I am thinking about myself in the future and how much less complete a person I’ll be if I pass this up. But if this is my thought how does it differ from just wanting an experience?’ ‘I think it differs.’ ‘It’s hard to see just now, my eyes are blurring.’ ‘One’s eyes always blur,’ said Matthew.

  It didn’t seem to come from myself, thought Ludwig, it seemed to come out of the issue, and that’s what made it so clean. But Matthew is right. Why should it come out of the issue and attach itself to me? What’s the link? He put the question thus to Matthew and Matthew did not answer for a long time. Then he said, ‘Well, one could generate the whole argument again out of that question.’ ‘So we are back at the beginning?’ ‘No, or if we are it’s with a difference.’ ‘What difference?’ ‘We’ve got two very pure items here.’ ‘You mean — to be joined? I feel that too. But perhaps it’s all just psychology.’ ‘If anything isn’t just psychology this isn’t.’ ‘Well, or refined self-interest or —’ ‘God would live here if God existed.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Inside your link.’ ‘And if He doesn’t exist there’s no link?’ ‘He doesn’t exist but your argument is not faulty.’ ‘So there is a link?’ ‘There are two pure things juxtaposed.’ ‘Simply juxtaposed?’ ‘Simply pure.’ After that, since it was four o’clock in the morning, they went to bed. The following day Matthew returned to London.

  It had stopped raining. The streak of silver light had closed up and the sea was more ponderously grey, choppier now that the calm rain had ceased to stroke it, throwing up little fragments of white foam which left the wave crests and were whipped up into the coldly driving air. Ludwig thought about Oxford and the pain brought tears into his eyes and the sudden tears warmed his cold damp face. He had no books with him on the ship, for the first time no books. He had sacrificed something of immense value, something very particularly his, and which he would now almost certainly never find again. Would he in later years detest the Ludwig who had made that sacrifice and would his life be soured by hatred for that feckless person? Perhaps that bitter disfiguring regret, and not the human completeness of which he had spoken to Matthew, would be his reward for this decision. Not wholeness, but to be devoured by obsessive remorse. Perhaps. Well, it was done. He had let the college down of course. They would be without an ancient history tutor for the Michaelmas term. He wondered if Andrew would cancel the Aristophanes class. Perhaps he would do it with MacMurraghue. At the thought of the Aristophanes class he closed his eyes. He had wanted that Aristophanes class more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, more than he had wanted Gracie.

  He fumbled in the pocket of his raincoat for something which he had brought with him for a purpose. He drew it out. Gracie’s engagement ring. She had sent it back to him for the second time with a sweet tragic note, which Ludwig had read through once and then destroyed, in case he should be tempted to read it again. He remembered it by heart nevertheless and he knew that it would remain with him for his torment. I am so unhappy I think I shall die of it. I want nothing in the world except what I can’t have, you, you . . . Ludwig looked at the ring and remembered the scene in the jeweller’s shop and how he had kissed Gracie in the taxi afterwards. He recalled the rather crinkly striped dress she was wearing and how he had smelt the fresh smell of the material mingled with the faint scent of her make-up and her sweat when he laid his head down on her breast and felt her heart beating against his cheek. How appallingly clear memory could be. Would these pictures ever mercifully fade? He looked at the ring. Then with a quick motion he threw it into the Atlantic. Eight hundred pounds’ worth of Bond Street diamond flashed away from him to vanish into the brightening air. He did not see it hit the water. And as he saw it go he thought, a greater man would have kept it.

  Matthew was doing his meditating in the upstairs passenger lounge. It was not yet time for him to meet Ludwig in the bar. They had talked so much at Oxf
ord, there was now a slight shyness and by tacit agreement they let each other alone during parts of the day. Then there were the regular rendezvous to be looked forward to. Matthew wished that the voyage might never end.

  While Matthew had been helping Ludwig to clarify his motives for leaving, he had hoped somehow at the same time to clarify his own; for he had realized, a day or two before he went to Oxford, that he would probably have to go. He had not of course discussed his own situation with Ludwig, and Ludwig with the sweet egoism of youth had not enquired or, Matthew believed, even wondered. When Matthew announced that, if Ludwig had no objection, he would accompany him, Ludwig had cried, ‘Gee, that’s great of you!’ and seemed to imagine that the pleasure of his company would be quite a good enough reason for Matthew to take the trip. And in a way, thought Matthew, he was right, even righter than he dreamed. But of course there were other things. And he had not told Ludwig that he was going away forever.

  His departure had come to seem to him inevitable. But what did that mean? Had Austin, with unerring instinct, made the one move which would render his brother powerless? Had he not only broken the spell but turned the tables? Matthew’s quaint sadness at having been unable to be the instrument of his brother’s salvation seemed something puny now when there was so much more to regret. Had he lived all these years with himself to find himself at the end still so unpredictable? Was he now just running away out of chagrin?

  Something or other had, in however ghastly a sense, done Austin ‘good’. Perhaps it was simply Dorina’s death. And perhaps the ‘good’ was temporary, a prelude to some new and different phase of obsession. If Austin now seemed ‘free’ without going through any of the procedures of spiritual reconciliation and liberation recognized by Matthew, could it still be that he was, in this respect at least, really free? Was it genuinely the case that Austin didn’t care any more? It almost seemed to Matthew at one point that Austin had simply forgotten, as if some banal almost impersonal relationship had been slipped into the place where the horror had been. The fear seemed to have gone and the hatred was changed. To say that the hatred was gone would be to say too much. But again, in some way quite outside Matthew’s calculations, it had changed.