by Iris Murdoch
It’s being alone together at last, thought Alex; we get on each other’s nerves. Ruby had been nurse to the three boys, she had seen them grow up and go. Tom, now a student, had gone last. Ruby had never got on with Brian, but she had been close to George and to Tom. Alex had not felt jealous of Ruby in the past; the idea of jealousy would have seemed absurd. But a little while ago when she had seen Ruby talking to George she had felt her servant as an alien power. And only yesterday she had come into the drawing-room and found Ruby sitting there. Ruby had risen and departed silently. No doubt she had just been dusting and had felt tired. But Alex felt menaced as if she were suddenly diminishing in Ruby’s eyes. Alex’s mother had worked with the servants; she had been at ease with them because the distance between them was absolute. She could never have been where Alex was now and feared what Alex now feared. Was there then a power with which Alex would have to treat? Was she supposed to make some significant move, some concession? If so, the old order was falling and a new law was coming to be. Could there be a sudden failure of obedience, a failure of respect which would bring them face to face in some unimaginably crude and painful encounter? The sulky house echoed and Alex could hear Ruby locking and chaining the doors each night. Did she imagine that Ruby was noisier and rougher and clattered more and banged? Alex told nobody about these irrational insubstantial fears which were perhaps nothing more, though indeed nothing less, than the general shadow of her death.
Leaning at the mantelpiece, her bowed head reflected in the big arched gilt-framed mirror, she gently touched the little encampment of bronze figures which had been there so long, since Alan’s day. The fire licked its wood hungrily and subsided, image of her thought. How sweet and clean the grey ash was which Ruby scooped out into her pan and mingled with the dust: light and sweet and clean as death. The bird was still singing its wild skirling lyrical song, the missel-thrush, ‘the stormcock’ Alan used to call it, and ‘Northwest Jack’. He had liked birds.
Alex moved to the window and looked out. There was a slight rain like pelting silver in the cool light. The green tiled roof of the Slipper House gleamed wet through the reddish haze of the budding copper beech tree. The curving lawn was luridly bright. Something brown moved across it. A fox. Alex never admitted to anyone that she saw foxes. Ruby was afraid of them. Alex loved them.
She looked at her watch. At six o’clock Brian and Gabriel were coming. They would want to talk about George.
‘How was Stella when you saw her?’ said Gabriel to Alex.
‘Less tragical.’
Gabriel was silent.
Three days had passed since George’s exploit. Stella was still in hospital.
For drinks with Alex, they stood. There was a definite time scheme, a symphonic pattern or temporal parabola, definite places; such things calmed the mind. The bow-windowed drawing-room, on the first floor, looked out on the garden. The lamps were on but the curtains were not drawn.
Brian held his glass of apple juice with both hands, like someone holding a candle in a procession. He sometimes drank alcohol, but more and more rarely. He had many things to worry about; money, his job, his son, his brother George. Just now he was worrying about Ruby. He hated the off-hand way in which Alex behaved to Ruby. Yet when he was markedly polite to her (as had happened this evening) Ruby smiled a quick zany mocking smile as if to indicate that she knew he was being condescending.
Brian was not good-looking, but he had an impressive head. Someone had remarked that George and Brian ought to exchange heads. The hearers understood. Brian was pock-marked. He was red-lipped, with sharp wolfish teeth. When younger, with a blond beard, he had looked piratical. Now he was clean-shaven, with very short greyish hair growing in a neat swirl from his crown. He was not very tall, with an assertive face and long blue eyes. He looked anxious and melancholy, and was often irritable. Of course compared with George he was ‘nice’, but he was not all that nice.
Gabriel was taller, anxious too, with restless moist brown eyes. She had a rather long nose and floppy fairish limply curling hair which she tossed from in front of her face, where it often found itself, with a quick pretty jerk which annoyed Alex. She had an air of fatigue, read by some as gentleness and repose. She always dressed up for visits to her mother- In-law.
Alex was tallest, still handsome everyone said, though as the years went by this saying had become traditional and worn away a little. She had an oval face and a pretty nose, and she had remained slim. She had long eyes like Brian’s, of a darker blue, which narrowed by thought or emotion in a fleeting cat-look. (Whereas Brian used to open his eyes wide and stare.) She painted her eyelids discreetly but never used lipstick. She had a long strong consciously mobile mouth. Her sleek well-cut copious hair was a light greyish blond, still managing to glow and gleam, certainly not dyed. She never bothered much with her clothes for these meetings with the Brian McCaffreys. This evening she was wearing a shabby smart rig, an old well-tailored dark coat and skirt, a careless white blouse.
Adam McCaffrey was in the garden with his dog.
‘Did the matron say when she was coming out?’ said Brian.
‘Soon.’
Alex and Gabriel were drinking gin and tonic. Gabriel was smoking.
‘Where do you think she should go then?’ said Gabriel, tossing back her hair.
‘Where do you think?’ said Alex. ‘Home.’
Gabriel looked at Brian who would not catch her eye. Gabriel thought Stella should come and stay with them when she came out of hospital. Not uttering this thought, she said vaguely to Alex, ‘Oughtn’t she to rest, to convalesce?’
‘Go to the sea,’ said Brian, deliberately confusing matters.
‘That makes no sense,’ said Alex. ‘There isn’t anywhere to go to at the sea.’ The seaside house had been sold; Alex had sold it without consulting the children.
‘I suppose we’ll go on our excursion as usual,’ said Brian. The annual seaside family picnic was an old custom. They had observed it last year, even though the house was sold, going to the same place, only a little farther along the coast. Brian and Gabriel had loved that house, that place, that precious access to the sea.
‘That’s the future,’ said Alex, narrowing her eyes. ‘I never know the future.’
‘The doctor says we mustn’t swim in the Enn any more,’ said Gabriel, ‘because of the rat-borne jaundice.’
‘I never understood why you bothered with that muddy river when you have the Baths,’ said Alex.
‘Oh well, Adam likes the river - it’s more natural and - sort of private and secret - and there are animals and birds and plants and - things — ’
‘Did he bring Zed today?’ said Alex. Zed was Adam’s dog. Adam and Zed had run straight out into the garden.
‘Yes. I do hope he won’t root anything up like when — ’ I always wonder why Adam wanted such a little pretty-pretty dog,’ said Alex. ‘Most boys like a big dog.’
‘We wonder too,’ said Brian, aware that Gabriel was hurt and would be deliberately silent. Gabriel knew Brian knew she was hurt, and tried to think of something to say. Alex understood them both and was sorry for her remark but annoyed with them for being so absurdly sensitive.
Adam’s dog was a papillon, one of the smallest of all dogs, a little dainty long-haired black and white thing with floppy plumy ears and a jaunty plumy tail, and the very darkest of blue-brown shining amused clever eyes. Adam had named him. Asked why, he had replied, ‘Because we are Alpha and Omega.’
Gabriel had thought of something to say, not very felicitous perhaps, but she had determined against Brian’s advice to say it this time. ‘I wonder if you’ve thought again about letting Brian and me have the Slipper House? It needs living in, and we’d look after it very carefully.’
Alex said at once with a casual air, ‘Oh no, I don’t think so, it’s too small and not a place for children and dogs, and I do use it, you know, it’s my studio.’
Alex had used to mess around with paints and clay and pa
pier mâché. Brian and Gabriel doubted whether she still did. It was an excuse.
The Slipper House was a sort of folly in the form of a house built at the farther end of the garden in the nineteen-twenties by Alex’s father, Geoffrey Stillowen. It was not all that small.
Alex added, ‘You can live there when I’m underground, which will be any day now, I daresay.’
‘Nonsense, Alex!’ Brian said, and he thought: with George in Belmont? Not bloody likely! The unknown and unmentionable provisions of Alex’s will were of course of interest to the brothers.
Gabriel said, ‘When’s Tom coming?’
‘In April.’
‘Will he be in the Slipper House?’
‘No, here of course.’
‘He did stay there once.’
‘That was in summer, it’s far too cold now and I couldn’t afford the heating.’
‘Is he bringing a friend?’ asked Brian.
‘He mumbled something on the phone about “bringing Emma,” but you know how vague Tom is.’
‘Who’s this Emma?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Anyway a girl, that’s good.’
There was some anxiety in the family about whether Tom mightn’t be homosexual. Tom, now a student of London University, was living in digs near King’s Cross.
‘Have you seen George?’ said Brian, coming at last to the topic of the evening.
‘No,’ said Alex. She awaited George. George would come in his own time.
‘Have you —?’
‘Heard from him, communicated with him? No,’ she added. ‘Of course not.’
Brian nodded. He understood Alex’s feelings. He had tried to telephone George; no answer. And though urged to by Gabriel, he had not written, or again attempted to call.
‘I feel we ought to do something,’ said Gabriel.
‘What on earth can we do?’ said Alex. George was an emotional subject for all of them.
‘People talk so,’ said Brian.
‘I don’t care a damn about people talking,’ said Alex, ‘and I’m surprised to hear that you do!’
‘It isn’t — ’ said Gabriel.
‘Of course,’ said Brian, ‘I care about him, I care if he’s hurt or damaged, by what people — ’
‘I believe you’re thinking of yourself,’ said Alex.
‘I’m thinking of myself too,’ said Brian, staring.
‘Some people say he was heroic,’ said Gabriel, ‘rescuing Stella from — ’
‘You know that’s not what they’re saying,’ said Brian.
‘It’s not what they’re enjoying saying,’ said Alex. She had received sympathetic remarks from people at the Institute, but she had seen the gleam in their eyes. At the frivolous level at which such agreements were reached, it seemed now to be generally agreed that George McCaffrey had indeed tried to kill his wife.
‘I think George should have himself seen to,’ said Brian.
‘What a perfectly horrible phrase,’ said Alex. ‘Why don’t you have yourself seen to?’
‘Maybe I should,’ said Brian, ‘but George - I sometimes feel now that he might do - almost anything — ’
‘What rubbish you talk,’ said Alex, ‘it’s just spite.’
‘I don’t feel like that about him,’ said Gabriel.
‘What do you want him to do about himself anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Brian, ‘see a doctor — ’
‘You mean Dr Roach? Don’t be silly. George drinks too much, that’s all. So does Gabriel.’
‘She doesn’t,’ said Brian.
‘All George needs — ’
‘It’s more than that,’ said Brian. ‘It’s more than just drink, of course it is. Call it a chemical imbalance if you like!’
‘George is like everyone else, only in his case it shows.’
‘Because he’s more honest!’
‘Because he’s a fool.’
‘You know perfectly well that George isn’t like everyone else, it’s gone on too long, he’s violent to Stella — ’
‘Is he? Who says so?’
‘Well, not Stella, naturally. You know he gets into rages and hits people and he lost his job because — ’
‘All right, but — ’
‘It’s more, it’s something deep, it’s not just being tipsy and stupid, it’s — ’
‘You mean it’s something evil, is that what you mean?’
‘No, who am I to judge — ’
‘You seem to be doing nothing but judge.’
‘I think we should try to help him as a family,’ said Gabriel. ‘I think he feels very isolated.’
‘I don’t mean evil,’ said Brian, ‘I mean psychologically deep.’
‘George doesn’t hate anyone,’ said Alex, ‘except himself.’
‘He might talk to Robin Osmore,’ said Gabriel. Robin Osmore was the family solicitor.
‘If he hates himself,’ said Brian, ‘let him act accordingly.’
‘Do you want your brother to commit suicide?’
‘No, I just mean swallow his own bile, not involve other people.’
‘I think — ’ said Gabriel.
‘Get himself some electric shocks.’
‘Don’t drivel,’ said Alex.
Gabriel said, ‘Oh no.’
‘All right then, what about our great psychiatrist, Ivor Sefton?’
‘Sefton is a booby,’ said Alex. ‘He never cured anyone, they come out dafter than they go in. And he charges the earth.’
‘He can have it free on the National Health.’
‘Only in a group, imagine George in a group!’
‘No one would join his group anyway,’ said Brian. ‘At least George has got a good pension, I can’t think why. His pension is about the same as my salary!’
‘George isn’t mad.’
‘I didn’t say he was.’
‘Leave him alone. You know we’ve got to leave him alone.’
‘I wonder if Professor Rozanov could help him,’ said Gabriel.
‘Who?’ said Alex.
‘John Robert Rozanov,’ said Brian. ‘Why should he? Anyway he’s old and pretty gaga by now.’
‘I wonder what happened to the little girl,’ said Gabriel.
‘What little girl?’
‘Wasn’t there a little grandchild, the one Ruby’s cousin or something was looking after once?’
‘I’ve no notion,’ said Brian. ‘I don’t think Rozanov ever saw the child at all, he wasn’t interested; he only cared about his philosophy.’
‘And that’s the man you imagine could help George!’
‘Well, wasn’t he his old teacher?’ said Gabriel.
‘I can’t see George bothering with him,’ said Brian.
‘Leave George alone,’ Alex repeated.
In the silence that followed Gabriel drifted over to the bow window, past chairs and sofas piled with cushions embroidered by Alex. This move was a part of the symphony, the sign that Brian and his mother could now take looks at each other and bring the conversation to a suitable close.
Gabriel saw the reflection of her cigarette grow brighter in the glass pane. Then she could see the familiar burly outline of the trees against a dull darkening sky. The self-contained stillness of that garden always troubled her with emotions - awe, envy, fear. She sighed, thinking of that future of which Alex could say nothing. She looked down. A little white thing sped across the lawn like a ball swiftly bowled, then a boy. They vanished under the dark trees. Such a frail little dog, the very image of her destructible son. Adam was not growing, he was already exceptionally small for his age. She had asked the doctor who told her not to worry.
When Adam arrived in the Belmont garden he went straight to the garage. The garage, which used to be known as the ‘motor house’, was a building with a little French-looking turret which was exactly like the big turret on the big house. There was a row of last year’s martins’ nests under the eaves, but this year’s martins had not yet
come. Inside the garage was the white Rolls-Royce which Alan McCaffrey had driven carefully in on some long ago evening, perhaps, as he pressed down the brake, not even knowing that he was about to leave his wife forever. He never came back for the car; and Alex had not touched it since. It was said to be very valuable. Adam climbed into the Rolls and sat holding the wheel and turning it cannily to and fro, while Zed (who always had to be helped up however earnestly he tried) sat complacently upon the soft old smelly leather seat beside him, looking in his white feathery fur like a plump roosting bird. Zed had one or two elegant black spots on his back, and long dark plumed black and brown ears which crowned his head like a wig or hat. He had a little domed head and a short slightly retrousse nose and beautiful dark brown eyes with hints of dark blue like shot silk. He could look magisterial and amused and sardonic, or sometimes flirtatious, hurling himself back in graceful abandoned attitudes; but then, suddenly romping and undignified, his entire concentrated person could express the purest of pure joy.
When Adam got tired of driving the Rolls he ran across the lawn to the Slipper House, which was locked of course, and peered in through the windows. He had been inside but not often. He liked being outside looking in, watching the quiet old-style furniture in the silent rooms which were now becoming so dark and lonely. With pleasant dread he imagined seeing some strange motionless person standing inside and looking out. After that he had to visit various trees, the copper beech and the birches and the fir tree whose noble reddish trunk twisted up so high, visible here and there amid its heavy piles of dark foliage. He especially loved the ginkgo, so odd and so old. He gently touched the lower parts of the tree where the little stalkless scrolls of green were just beginning to appear. He lay down under the tree and let Zed jump on his chest and sit with neat front paws resting on his collar-bone. However quickly he raised his head, he could not surprise Zed looking anywhere else than straight into his eyes with his provocative intent mocking stare. When they tired of this game, Adam crept away into the long grass trying to avoid hurting the snails whom the rain had tempted forth, and whose weight bent the blades into arches. He crawled under some brambles and under some ivy into the deepest part of the shrubbery beside the old tennis court overgrown with elder bushes, where the foxes lived. Adam, like his grandmother, knew but kept the fox secret. The great earth, under mounds of finely dug soil, had wide dark entrances into which Adam and Zed gazed with awe, only Adam kept a firm hold on Zed in case he should be tempted to go down. (In fact Zed had no intention of going down, not that he was not a brave dog, but he suffered from claustrophobia and the whole place smelt extremely dangerous.)
