by Iris Murdoch
‘Sorry, you’re right, don’t cry, for God’s sake what are you crying about?’
Tears, the tears that came so easily, had risen into Gabriel’s eyes. Her happiness was so terribly haunted by fears, images of loss, terrible images, mad images. If Rufus had lived he would have been Adam’s age. She had developed a fantasy that George would kill Zed. Then that he would kill Adam.
Brian did not know what she was thinking (for of course she did not divulge such insane notions) but he knew the sort of things she was thinking. He patted her wet hand on which tears had fallen. ‘There now, there now. It isn’t Rufus, you know. George was a little horror when he was a boy.’
‘I expect you were too.’
‘He enjoyed drowning those kittens.’
‘Don’t tell me that story!’
‘Well, they had to be drowned. Don’t cry about it.’
‘I still think Professor Rozanov might help him,’ said Gabriel, drying her tears. ‘You didn’t really mean what you said about Rozanov to Father Bernard?’
‘No, of course not. I meant it for your creepy friend!’
‘I don’t think he came about George at all, he came about Rozanov.’
‘Makes a change.’
‘George respects Professor Rozanov, he’d pay attention to him. After all, he went all the way to America to see him that time.’
‘Whatever happened on that occasion,’ said Brian, ‘it was certainly not a success. George may have admired Rozanov at one time, but I doubt if he cares a fig for him now. The trouble with George is he gets away with things. He’s popular because people like horrible men. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. Who’s our most loved king? Henry the Eighth. If only George could get into really serious trouble it might sober him up. Or if everyone ganged up against him and did something, not just gratifying their malice by talking, I think George ought to be lynched. And he will be lynched one day if he goes on. There’s collective responsibility for you.’
‘No,’ said Gabriel, ‘no.’ And ‘Oh dear — ’ She often said that. One of these awful fantasies had taken hold of her. How could George bear to see Adam growing up? To banish it she breathed deeply, breathing in some absolutely quiet air which she knew was really everywhere, but which she only experienced at these moments of refuge. But fear too was in the quiet air. She hoped Adam could not read her mind. He had said to her once, ‘You mustn’t protect me against the sad things.’
She said now, ‘Do you think Adam might be a vet when he grows up, or a naturalist? He cares so much about animals.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Brian. ‘He’s not interested in details, he would never do a botanical or anatomical drawing. This animal thing, it’s different - it’s part of something else - sort of sentimental - well, no, symbolic rather - like a sort of funny little religion — ’ He could not explain, though he felt and saw what he meant. It was all somehow part of Adam’s changeling quality, his strangeness and absoluteness as a boy; and Brian could not imagine Adam grown up and did not want to picture him as a deep-voiced youth with a hairy chest and a sex life. Perhaps he could not imagine the future because the future did not exist. And Adam was not growing. Would his son live on as a dwarf with a child’s mind? And here his deep confused thoughts were perhaps reaching out and touching the deep confused thoughts of his wife.
‘It’ll be good to see Tom again,’ said Gabriel. ‘He hardly ever comes now. Do you think he’s avoiding George - or Alex?’
‘Young chaps avoid possessive mothers.’
‘I think he sheered off because George was jealous.’
‘Because Alex is so attached to Tom? Poor deprived old George. Here we go again. Let’s go to bed.’ Brian stood up. He said, ‘Tom - yes - Tom - he’s happy.’
And you are not, thought Gabriel sadly.
They went to bed.
Brian and Gabriel McCaffrey had known each other forever; they went to the same Friends’ Meeting House, to the same children’s parties, then to the same dances. Brian, growing up, was handsome, a young Viking. Gabriel fell in love. Later Brian did too. He disliked forward sexy girls. Gabriel was pretty, quiet, shy, hiding behind her floppy hair. She peered admiringly at Brian. Brian was a sober and serious-minded young man. He wanted a loyal truthful gentle wife and an open peaceful simple mode of existence. Time proved he had chosen well. Gabriel and Brian continued to love each other although in many ways they belonged to different human tribes.
Brian, unlike his father and grandfather whose relation to Quakerism had been merely sentimental, took religion seriously. He may have been influenced in this by his ‘godfather’, William Eastcote (popularly known as ‘Bill the Lizard’), a very devout person and pillar of the Meeting, and a cousin of the well-known philanthropist Milton Eastcote. The Eastcotes were a wealthy family (also originally ‘in trade’) and William retired early from a career at the bar to devote himself, like his cousin, to good works. Brian, with Gabriel and Adam, went to Meeting every Sunday. He did not believe in God, but the Ennistone Friends were not anxious about this matter. The Mystery of God was one with the Inner Light of the Soul, and the illumined Way was the Good Life, where truthful vision spontaneously prompted virtuous desire. Herein lay the perfect simplicity of duty. Brian pictured himself as austere and pure in heart. He wanted to live the Good Life with his wife and his son, but he found this difficult. He also wanted to do some great thing in the world. (Gabriel had believed in Brian’s great thing.) But now it was clear he would not. He worked on the Ennistone Town Council in the education department.
Brian found the Good Life difficult for simple but deep reasons. He was selfish. He did what he wanted and Gabriel did what he wanted too. This had gone on so long that Brian imagined (wrongly, as it happened) that Gabriel had ceased to notice it. Gabriel wanted to travel. Brian hated travel, he wanted to stay at home and read. They stayed at home and read. Gabriel wanted to entertain. Brian thought social life was insincere. They did not entertain. Brian ate fast, Gabriel ate slow. Meals ended when Brian had finished. Brian was often irritable, sometimes angry, and (but this more rarely) if he was very displeased he withdrew himself from Gabriel. This sulky withdrawal, the result simply of his own ill-temper, he felt as a black iron pain, an experience of hell, yet he could not inhibit this form of violence. He did not display anger to Adam, but felt in his relation to his son a terrible vague inadequacy, a sheer awkward embarrassed clumsiness which distorted communication. Sometimes it seemed to him that Adam understood this and came to him with deliberate olive branches, little touching reassuring gestures of affection, which Brian found himself accepting gracelessly as if he were being condescended to. Brian lusted after other women to an extent which would have amazed Gabriel had she known about it, but this aspect of his frailty he was able to keep strictly under control. Some said there was a George inside Brian waiting to be let out, but so far there had been no manifestation of this hypothetical presence.
Gabriel was aware of her grievances without being obsessed by them. Her chief grievance, apart from Brian’s selfishness to which she quietly gave in, forgiving though not forgetting, was that she had never studied anything and at the age of thirty-four knew nothing. Brian had studied sociology at the University of Essex. Gabriel, after a year at secretarial college, had begun to think she might after all go to a university when she was overtaken by marriage. Now who and what was she? Brian’s wife, Adam’s mother. When she compared herself with Stella or Alex she felt unreal. She was a ‘poor Bowcock’, one of the muddled ones who had no grasp on life. Her father, a municipal engineer in South London, was dead. She had got on well with her mother and her brother but they had gone painlessly to Canada when her brother married and it did not even matter to her now that they detested Brian. Gabriel knew that a certain kind of self-satisfaction was essential to her and she was determined not to become a discontented woman. She made her home her fortress where she was secure and content to be invisible. She was not out in the open, battle-scarred and unhoused l
ike Stella and George whose adventures appalled and fascinated her. She was not like them. When in the early morning she let the cold clear water run and filled the kettle to make tea, she felt innocent and fresh. One of the qualities of her interior castle she had acquired from Adam - a sort of animism whereby everything, not only the flies which had to be caught and let out of windows, the wood lice which had to be tenderly liberated into the garden, the spiders which were to be respected in their corners, but also the knives and forks and spoons and cups and plates and jugs, and shoes, and poor socks that had no partners, and buttons which might become uncherished and lost, had all a life and being of their own, and friendliness and rights. All these became an extension of her existence as they were an extension of his and in this common being, as in a vulnerable extended body, she secretly mingled with her son.
The family at large, though accepted as ‘hers’, meant less to her. She admired and envied and pitied Stella. She liked and was interested in and annoyed by Alex. She was fond of Tom about whom Brian had such mixed up feelings, but she bridled her fondness in case Adam should sustain any tiniest jealous hurt. On the whole she regarded Tom as a simple fellow, blessedly harmless. Like Brian, she envied Tom’s cheerfulness, but on Adam’s behalf not her own. When Adam was twenty would he be cheerful? She doubted it. Would Adam ever be twenty? George was another matter. Gabriel had strange thoughts about George. These thoughts had gained a definition for her from an incident which occurred a few years ago. Gabriel had been sitting in Diana’s Garden at the Baths with some acquaintances and the talk had turned to George and several people (Mrs Robin Osmore was one, and Anthea Eastcote, then a school girl) had said some mildly disobliging things about her brother- In-law. They fell silent when George appeared nearby, having undoubtedly overheard. As he went away Gabriel felt constrained to leap up and run after him. She caught him up as he was coming out of the Institute building into the street. She touched his arm and said blushing, ‘I didn’t say anything against you, I don’t think anything bad about you.’ George smiled, bowed slightly and went on. When she next met him in company, his eyes showed consciousness of the significant occasion. Gabriel was already regretting what now seemed her imprudent impulse, which she had not mentioned to Brian. What she had said was not even true. She did think bad things about him. And now she had made a secret link between them, an invisible bond like a rope the other end of which she could occasionally feel George sardonically, maliciously, ever so gently, twitching. There was some little, very small, piece of Gabriel’s heart which harboured the belief, allegedly so common among Ennistonian women, that she and she alone could save George from himself.
Alex put the key into the door of the Slipper House. It was eleven o’clock at night on the evening of Brian and Gabriel’s visit. As the door opened a damp woody smell emerged. Suddenly frightened, Alex fumbled for the light, went in and closed and locked the door behind her.
The Slipper House had been built by Alex’s eccentric father, Geoffrey Stillowen, in the nineteen-twenties, and was known to the few local persons interested in this matter as a ‘gem of art deco’. It dated from roughly the same period as the Ennistone Rooms. It was made of concrete, once white, now a stained blotchy grey, with curving corners and curving steel-framed windows and a shallow sloping green-tiled roof. There was a sort of Assyrian (or possibly Egyptian) superstructure, originally painted green and brown, over the front door. The door had an oval stained-glass panel depicting very upright stylized red tulips. There was more floral stained-glass on the upper landing and a large stained-glass screen in the drawing-room representing an aeroplane among clouds. The drawing-room also contained a very slippery window seat with carved ends and the original cushions with green and grey wavy designs, a fine large mirror with a fountain cut into the glass, and a table with a glass top supported on a metal arabesque. The flat fat oatmeal-coloured three-piece suite in the drawing-room was also original, and so was a set of tall mauve vases whose members were dotted here and there. The house was sparsely furnished, partly with oddments made of bamboo which Alex had put in during her ‘creative’ period. The floors were all of the most exquisite pale parquet, with designs made out of different woods. It was from this that the house had got its name, since Geoffrey Stillowen had insisted that no ordinary shoes, only soft slippers, be worn in the house, and there still stood beside the door a box of various-sized and coloured slippers which he had provided. Our townspeople made their own assessment of the odd name which sounded in their ears vaguely improper, as it might be of some oriental bower or seraglio, a discreet house of ill fame where exotic women pad.
Brian had not been far wrong in thinking that Alex used the Slipper House as a place of meditation. She liked the emptiness, the spaciness of the house, its lack of clutter after the mass of objects and trophies which filled the big house. Once, she had played at painting there, made figures out of clay and papier mâché and painted them like little gaudy Indian gods. She had done watercolours when she was young and had returned, after Alan left her, to what she thought of as her career as a failed painter. The little study room next to the kitchen was still strewn with paints and brushes which she had laid down a long time ago. She looked at them briefly as she went through the house turning on the lights. As she went she shuddered with a superstitious uncanny feeling which was also a kind of pleasure of aloneness.
Alex had long ago lost the Methodist religion of her childhood, but a religious sense subsisted in her, perverted into a kind of animistic obsession. Adam had some such odd sense of the world, only his pantheism was innocent, partook perhaps of that primal positive innocence which has made so many thinkers want to believe in metempsychosis. Alex’s quickening of the world about her was neurotic and corrupted, the final distortion of those artistic impulses with which she had so irresolutely played. It was as if things appeared and disappeared, dematerialized with malicious whimsy. Some things were like little animals; or rather, they were live things, with the clumsiness of objects, which fell about, shuffled, jolted and rolled. Perhaps Alex’s painted fetishes had been homeopathic attempts to placate these tiny malign deities. There were little thing-creatures that hid things, mouse-like movements in corners which ceased when Alex looked, substantial shadows which she flinched to avoid and which vanished as she moved. Alex had always collected things, but now it was as if they were gradually turning against her. In a way she knew that ‘all this was nonsense’, and although it frightened her, it did not frighten her very much because of a kind of complicit frisson which these experiences brought with them.
This leak of her unconscious mind into her surroundings, this theft of her vitality by malicious forces, was now becoming connected for Alex with the problem of Ruby, and this upset her much more. She did not really think that Ruby deliberately hid things and found them again, but it was as if Ruby had become the human ‘front’ of a revolt against Alex of her most familiar world. Alex could not imagine her life without Ruby, if Ruby were simply to go away. Herein Ruby appeared as a defence, not before recognized as such, against gathering forces. On the other hand, if what Ruby wanted was to be welcomed at last, by some revolutionary change, into an equal and quite different relationship with her employer, this Alex felt to be unthinkable, the final breakdown of sense and order. There were no ordinary gestures of affection and recognition between them which could possibly mediate such a change. It could not be done. Alex would resist it to her last breath.
Frightened by the dark shiny windows of the Slipper House through which beings could look from the outside, she went round closing the shutters, on the inside of which in a faraway time the young Ennistonian painter Ned Larkin, a discovery of Geoffrey Stillowen, had painted powdery garden scenes in pastel shades. The pictures vaguely represented the Belmont garden, the ginkgo, the fir tree, the copper beech, the birch trees, now suitably modified into pastness, with distant views of Belmont and the Slipper House. In the drawing-room, members of the family were similarly represented, i
n period costume, in antique poses, in a faint golden long ago light. Geoffrey Stillowen in white flannels, blond and youthful, was seated, reading a book with a tennis racket leaning against his knee. His wife Rosemary, standing behind, was opening a white parasol. There was also a picture of Alex as a pretty little girl holding some flowers. And a slim beautiful golden-haired youth, Alex’s elder brother who had been killed in the war, a shadow now, a shade, scarcely ever entering Alex’s thoughts except when she saw his image in this place. She turned from it. The Slipper House lived in the past, Alex’s hall of meditation was a time machine; but the past for which she craved was a faintly scented atmosphere, untroubled by the staring ghosts of individual people.
Tonight, however, individual people pressed upon her, and she could not attain the detached nervous vagueness which her aloneness needed. As she walked, for she always prowled all over the house in these late secret visits, she began to think about George. She wondered if George would come to her and speak to her, as he sometimes used to. She felt every day the minute movement of something which separated him from her. Perhaps this was her sense of old age, so inconceivable yet so near. She had lost George and found him again. Would he come to her now? The woman, a prostitute, with whom George was said to be ‘involved’, was some sort of connection of Ruby’s. Ruby had many such connections, and Alex disliked this connecting up of things which ought to be separate; it had begun to fit in too well with her sense of an evil conspiracy. There was a bad network. Perhaps it was to escape that network that Tom had withdrawn from her. Alex loved Tom; not best, George was best. About Brian she felt little. The women were outsiders; Gabriel with her droopy hair and her paper handkerchiefs, Stella so intelligent, so hard, so bad for George. Adam was a disturbing object, kin to her yet inaccessible.
Another individual occupied Alex’s restless mind this evening: John Robert Rozanov. (Alex had only pretended not to pick up his name when it was mentioned by Gabriel.) Alex had got to know John Robert slightly when he was young, already a little famous (he was older than Alex) and no longer living in Ennistone but returning from his grand university world to visit his mother who still lived in the town. His parents (his grandfather was a Russian emigre) were not well off and lived in the poorer quarter, in an area called Burkestown, remote from leafy Victoria Park. However, the Rozanovs were Methodists (John Robert’s father had married a local girl) and attended the same church (in Druidsdale near the Common) as Alex’s family, hence a slight acquaintance. Geoffrey Stillowen, engaged as a church-goer in various charitable enterprises, met John Robert’s father. Alex vaguely remembered seeing John Robert as a boy, then as a youth. She had never felt any interest in him, partly (she was not snobbish) because she found him physically repulsive. Then when (after the publication of his first book, Logic and Consciousness) he turned out to be ‘brilliant’ and began to be well-known as one of the ‘young philosophers’, it became chic for people in Ennistone to boast about him, announcing casually that they had known him all their lives. Alex, then nineteen, indulging in this little falsehood, caught the attention of one of her friends, a girl called Linda Brent with whom she had been at boarding-school. Linda was now at the university and was thrilled to learn that Alex actually knew John Robert Rozanov. Alex, continuing to show off, asked Linda to come and stay, saying she would exhibit the prodigy. Alex’s stranger mother, another alien, had died not long before, and Geoffrey Stillowen was occupying Belmont. Linda came. A little party was arranged and John Robert was invited. (‘He won’t come,’ said Alex’s brother Desmond. ‘He will, he’ll be delighted,’ said Geoffrey, who had a high sense of his own importance.) He came, and Alex introduced him to Linda. Linda of course (ignoring handsome Desmond) at once fell in love with him. Alex laughed. She laughed less when she read in a newspaper a remarkably short time afterwards that fabulous young John Robert Rozanov, after whom so many clever young ladies were chasing, was about to marry Miss Linda Brent. Alex never forgave either of them. More than that, she became, as she saw it afterwards, temporarily insane. She fell madly in love with John Robert Rozanov herself. Why on earth had she introduced this wonderful person to Linda? It was sheer stupid vanity. Why had she ingeniously done herself this awful damage? Why had she not had the wit and the creative imagination to cultivate this very unusual man? Surely by rights he belonged to her. She ought to have married him!
