by Iris Murdoch
She did not see Rozanov again until some time later when a slightly apologetic Linda visited Ennistone with her husband, and by then Alex was engaged to charming popular Alan McCaffrey and had recovered from her paranoiac episode. The Rozanovs went to America where Linda later died leaving a daughter with whom, rumour had it, Rozanov never got on. The daughter married an obscure American academic called Meynell; she died and he either died or vanished, leaving behind a child, the little neglected waif before mentioned, about whom, it appeared, Rozanov cared even less. Rozanov came back to England for a time and taught in London, where George McCaffrey became his pupil. Later the philosopher went back to America whither, on the occasion described by Brian as unsuccessful, George followed him. Alex did not see Rozanov during his London period. She had troubles of her own and wanted to hide her unhappiness. (Like George, she hated to ‘lose face’.) Alan had left her and was living in Ennistone with Fiona Gates. Then when Fiona became ill Alex developed her obsession about getting hold of Tom, whom she had always coveted. All this while the John Robert whom Alex, during the brief time of her insane remorse, had so intensely imagined, lay dormant within her: an imprint, a little live ghost, an abiding private double of a man who no longer concerned her. This double now stirred and grew in her imagination with the news that John Robert Rozanov was returning to Ennistone. Why was he returning? Was it possible he was returning for her?
‘What a bloody mess,’ said George. He used to chide Diane for her untidiness. Now he viewed the signs of increasing disorder with a certain satisfaction.
‘Have you seen Stella?’ asked Diane.
‘No. I meant to go again. I felt I ought to go. You charmingly told me to go. I didn’t go. Then it became difficult to go. Then it became impossible to go. Then it became essential not to go. It became a duty not to go, it became a sexual urge. Do you understand?’
‘No. I’m sorry about the mess, I’d have tidied it up if I’d known you were coming, I never know when you’re coming, I wish I did.’
‘So do I. Like the Messiah I am eternally expected. I expect myself.’
‘I miss you. I am starved of love.’
‘If that is so then derry down derry it’s evident very our tastes are one.’
‘I wonder if you’ll ever marry me.’
‘If I married you I’d murder you.’
‘Better dead than unwed.’
‘You yearn for respectability.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Most respectable people yearn to shed their respectability but they don’t know how; they cannot get out, said the starling. Think how lucky you are. You are out.’
‘You mean I have no further to fall.’
‘Change the metaphor. You are free.’
‘Is that a metaphor?’
‘Almost everything we say is a metaphor, that’s why nothing is really serious.’
‘You are never really serious. I think it’s how you try to escape being awful.’
‘It’s how I escape being awful.’
‘Was I free before I met you?’
‘No, you had illusions.’
‘I’m disillusioned now all right.’
‘Unillusioned. I liberated your intelligence.’
‘I’m not free now. I’m a slave.’
‘You love it. You kiss the rod. Don’t you?’
‘Don’t be coarse. I do what you want.’
‘Whores are so fastidious.’
‘Please don’t — ’
‘A verbal point. My service is perfect freedom.’
‘I think I’ve never been free. Who’s free anyway? Is Stella free?’
‘No.’
‘Then is Stella —;?’
‘Shut up about Stella. I don’t like her name in your mouth.’
‘Her pure name in — ’
‘Shut up.’
‘Who’s free?’
‘I know only one person who is free.’
‘Who?’
‘In the end you’ll be my nurse, that’s what you’re waiting for, the smash. You think you’ll pick up the pieces.’
‘I don’t want you smashed. I love you.’
‘It thrills you to tell me my duty. You’d be sick if I did it.’
‘So you think I have no illusions now.’
‘How can you have? I tell you the truth. I am a fount of truth in this place.’
‘I think you do tell me the truth,’ said Diane, ‘and I suppose that’s something.’ She looked at George’s calm round face, his clean white shirt sleeves neatly rolled up, his pale arms covered with sleek silky strokable black hairs. She said, ‘You’re here.’
‘I’m here, kid. Look after me. I’m as full of rapiers as a doomed bull.’
‘You ought to ring up, I might have been out.’
‘Out? You mean you go out?’
‘I go as far as the Baths and the Church. I go to the Food Hall at Bowcocks.’
‘One day I’ll immure you.’
‘We are two people in despair.’
‘You flatter yourself.’
‘You mean you aren’t in despair?’
‘I mean you are not. Women are incapable of despair.’
‘How can you say that!’
‘Oh they can cry, that’s different. God, this room smells of cigarette smoke.’
‘I never smoke when you’re here.’
‘You’d better not.’
‘If you were here more I’d smoke less. Shall I open the window?’
‘No, stay put, Miss Nightwork. I like the cosy stench of face powder and cigarette smoke and alcohol. Only I wish you wouldn’t put those potted plants in the bath. Potted plants in the bath are an image of hell. Chaos and Old Night. Not like your corset on the floor, which I rather like.’
‘It’s not a corset.’
‘Whatever it is. Chaos and Old Night.’
‘Would you like another drink?’
‘Hey nonny nonny - no. You have one, dear daughter of the game. I’ll walk about.’ George rose and began to walk, across the room, out into the hall, into the kitchen, back again to the window. He often did this. Reclining on the sofa with her shoes off, Diane watched him.
Diane Sedleigh was the most genteel prostitute in Ennistone. (The man she had imprudently married once upon a time was called Sedley, but Diane thought that Sedleigh was more elegant.) She was a small slim woman with almost black straight hair which was cut short and clung to her small head, sweeping in a little neat pointed curve round her face on either side. Her dark brown eyes were not large but were ardent and eager, not unlike the eyes of Zed, Adam McCaffrey’s dog. She liked to hint that she had gipsy blood. No one believed this romantic hint but it was none the less true. She was a cousin, possibly a half-sister, of Ruby Doyle. (She had been christened, at St Olaf’s, her mother being Church of England, ‘Diamond’, but early decided that she had enough troubles without owning such a bizarre name. The familiar ‘Di’ easily became the elegant ‘Diane’.) There was a third girl too, sister or cousin. The gipsy father or fathers were legendary beings from another era and there had never been any family life. Diane had very small feet and small nicotine-stained hands. She sometimes wore black silky dresses, very short, with black stockings, and thought of herself as a ‘flapper’. She was dressed like that today, with a barbarous metal necklace which George had given her. His only gifts, apart from money, were cheap exotic jewellery. Sometimes when she wore trousers she posed differently, legs wide apart and shirt coming loose, showing her small breasts, a tiny defiant female pirate. Of course she pronounced her name Dee-ahn, not Die-ann.
Diane had been beautiful when she was young, and had experienced the claims upon the world which beautiful women feel, especially if they are poor. She was now nearly forty. She came from a poor home in the Burkestown area of Ennistone. Her father left her mother, her mother went away with another man. Diane lived unhappily with a series of vague ‘aunties’, whose relationship to her and to each other remained conjectural. W
hen she left school she worked as a waitress, then as a shop assistant in Bowcocks, then as a clerk in a betting office. One day she let her boss take some photographs of her in the nude. Was that the beginning of it all, was it fated, could it have been otherwise? It was a long story, the old story, Diane preferred not to remember how it went. She became pregnant twice, each time abandoned, and had to look after her expensive secret abortion herself. She was briefly married to that Sedley somewhere along the way. Men were beasts. She took to prostitution as a temporary, she thought, expedient in a moment of misery, not really for the money but as a kind of suicide because she didn’t care. A Mrs Belton whom she met at the Baths told her there was a ‘vacancy’ in a ‘nice house’. She offered it as a kind of privilege. Diane did not stay long in the house, but already she felt it impossible to ‘go back’. What was there to go back to? She was by now not indifferent to earning money easily. She saved herself from real suicide by acquiring a more positive image of her trade. She picked up and treasured the word ‘courtesan’. Some of her clients told her tales of whores in other lands, exotic women in cages in Calcutta, motherly women knitting in lighted windows in Amsterdam. She set herself up in a flat and affected to be ‘merry’. She decorated her flat ‘tastefully’ and became more ‘exclusive’. Respectable men arrived and endowed her with a kind of odd derived respectability. Older men came and discussed their wives, not always unkindly. Young men and adolescents came for initiations and to talk about ‘life’. Diane began to feel that she was a wise woman performing an important public service. Her earliest clients had been rough fellows. Then men with fast cars took her out to road houses. Later these were joined by professional men. She had a fantasy about a rich bachelor, no longer young, and despairing of finding a woman to understand him, who would suddenly carry her away into a secure and cherished married life. For a time she even kept a suitcase packed for the advent of this impetuous admirer. But then Diane’s respectability had taken a new and strange turn.
George had come her way many years before, but casually. They met at the Baths. He had come to her once or twice unmarried, then once or twice married, aloof and sardonic, as if carrying out some private wager. The polite precise way in which he treated her as an instrument maintained a distance between them, which was also an easy bond. Then he fell in love with her. Well, surely he did fall in love? George was rewriting history so fast, it was hard to remember what had really happened. What was now taken for granted between them was that she was in love with him. George had certainly become extremely possessive. He announced that she was to have no other clients. He moved her from her tasteful flat to a smaller flat in Westwold of which he paid the rent. George gave her money and visited her, though he never spent the night. (‘If I did I would detest you in the morning.’) Diane tried to think that she was no longer a common prostitute, she was George’s mistress. Even the phrase ‘kept woman’ could console her a bit. But she knew in her heart that she was not George’s mistress. That was not how it was between them. She was just a reserved prostitute, like a reserved table.
Diane knew that George was supposed to be ‘an awful man’, though equally she had the fascinated forgiving feeling about him which she shared with other Ennistone ladies. She felt nervous with him at first and awaited the sudden uncontrolled rages for which George was famous. They did not come. George and Diane, it appeared, simply got on well together. George was often moody and irritable and sarcastic, but never seriously angry. Diane, it must be admitted, knew how to keep her head down. She did not contradict. He spoke of how he could rest with her, find repose. They chattered easily. George disliked ordinary expressions of tenderness. Profound or sentimental topics were equally banned. There was a sort of lightness and hardness in their converse. Diane learnt a new language, a new kind of banter, which was their usual mode of communication, and it was in teaching her this that George might reasonably have claimed that he had ‘awakened her intelligence’. For a time, and although his visits were entirely irregular and whimsical, their ease together was such that Diane had dreams of a ‘real life’ somehow to be realized with George. Time would perhaps change their relationship, redeem it, and in doing so redeem him. If she had been a shrewder woman, and if she had been less afraid of him, for she remained afraid of him, even though he behaved so quietly with her, she might have tried to prompt the redemptive process and encourage him to leave his wife by threatening a withdrawal of her favours at a time when he was most addicted to them. However, Diane did not do this. Such blackmail would sort ill with the ideal role which she planned for herself in George’s life, and anyway she lacked the nerve and the wit. Meanwhile she was gratified to know that George, so outrageous elsewhere, was a lamb to her, and this gave her a comforting sense of superiority. In this she paused and rested. She knew that she was envied by women who would of course never have admitted it. (Though neither of them spoke of their relationship it had become common knowledge.) However, Diane also knew that George’s kindness to her depended on her good behaviour. At first she had embraced his monastic ‘rule’ as one in hopes of heavenly joy. Later the narrowness of her life irked her and although her love for George did not diminish, she had less hope of salvation. She lived in a world of idleness and waiting. She smoked and drank. She watched television. She had once hoped to gain some sort of education from George, but now if she got an ‘improving’ book from the library he just laughed at it. She experimented with cosmetics and altered her clothes. She went to Bowcocks and to Anne Lapwing’s Boutique and bought scarves and cheap ‘accessories’ to cheer herself up. She went to the Institute, then hurried back. George came less often now and it was some time since he had made love to her, though he remained as possessive as ever. Once, recently, he had said to her in a gentle tone, ‘If you ever have anything to do with either of my brothers, I will kill you.’ He smiled and Diane laughed.
Would George be able to ‘afford her’ now that he had lost his job? She was poorer, kept by George, than when she had plied her trade freely. Would she not, for him, face poverty, destitution? For him, with him, yes. But as it was? Would it not have to end, must it not end, yet how could it end? She had made loving George her sole occupation. She had no friends, no social life. There were a few women with whom she talked at the Baths, but these were not the women she would have chosen to talk to. Nun-like, she did not look at men, and they avoided her. She did not envisage running away, it was impossible to vanish, it was too dangerous and too expensive. Besides she did not want to, she had given her life to George, thoughtlessly, stupidly, but just as tenderly and devotedly as if he had been her dear husband. A Women’s Lib group in Burkestown had made themselves known and indicated that if ever she needed help they would ‘stick by her’, hide her, spirit her away, they appeared to suggest. They seemed kind and sincere but Diane did not pursue the acquaintance. They thoroughly disapproved of George and she was afraid he might think she was plotting with them. She began to be afraid of things he might imagine, lies people might tell him. She was aware that people eyed her in the street, stared at her at the Baths, but Diane pretended not to notice, not even caring to know whether the looks were friendly or hostile. In the past Gabriel McCaffrey had smiled at her. So had Tom McCaffrey. They certainly knew of her relation with George, yet they had smiled. Diane could not be glad since she could not respond and these mysterious tokens increased her sense of isolation. She did not from day to day imagine that George intended to leave her. Yet lately she had begun to feel that a time of crisis was at hand. Perhaps this was simply an expression of her own unconscious desire for a crash, a final solution. Did she not sometimes, darkly, fear that in spite of everything George would kill her in the end?
