by Iris Murdoch
‘I always do the washing-up,’ said Ilona.
‘I’ll always help you,’ said Edward. ‘I’ll dry.’
‘We never dry, we just stack. There’s so much to do here, we save every possible trouble. For instance, there’s Carrying About.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You know, in every house there’s always things to be moved from one place to another, upstairs and downstairs and so on, like washing and plates and books and things. Well, we have carrying places where things which are on the move are always left, and anyone passing by carries them on to the next place. It makes sense, doesn’t it. These plates, for example, in this big rack. Some are dry, some are not. Someone passing will pick up the dry ones for lunch and put them on the table in the Atrium.’
‘The Atrium?’
‘In the hall, that’s what Jesse calls it — what we call it — it’s the Latin for a sort of main living place. And over there you see dry sheets waiting to go upstairs when someone’s going upstairs anyway. You’ll soon get the hang and know where things live. I mean, it’s pointless to keep running up and down stairs all day.’
‘I see. Time and motion study.’
‘Bettina always says, carry enough, but never too much, otherwise you drop things, anyway I do.’
They were in Transition, the area lying behind the high plain wall which Edward had seen from the outside as joining the hall to ‘Selden’. This had originally been a set of fine stone-built byres lying between the house and the barn, which Jesse had started, retaining a lot of the previous structure, to turn into a cloister, open on the east side. Other plans however, concerning the conversion of the stables, had made him decide to make this the kitchen area, leaving the arches and alcoves of the original project still attractively visible. There was a large handsome kitchen, with a long cast-iron cooking stove, the scullery where Edward had been watching Ilona wash up, the wash room with a washing machine and trapeze-like wooden drying frames, and the ‘brushing room’ full of dustpans and brooms and boots and shoes, which also housed the enormous deep freeze. There was even an ‘electricity room’, like the engine room of a submarine, dotted with dials and fuse boxes and dangerous-looking stray wires.
‘The place needs to be rewired, one thing is always fusing another, only I don’t think any electrician would ever understand that mess. We go easy with the electricity. We’ve been here a long time and many things have changed. We used to entertain a lot, lots of people used to come to see Jesse, but now they don’t since the railway stopped. Come on, I’ve done here, I’ll show you Selden. Here, carry some of these sheets. We never iron things, ironing is a waste of time.’
Edward picked up an armful of sheets from a shelf in a little arched ‘shrine’, and followed Ilona along the corridor and up the stone steps toward his own room. At the top of the steps there was a cupboard into which, as bidden, he unloaded the sheets. Ilona had opened a door next to his room, revealing a small pretty room with a settee, a writing desk, a chinoiserie screen, and a greenish picture representing a child as a drowned mouse.
‘This is your sitting room, at least not really yours, it’s for grand guests. We don’t heat it now. The big bedroom is beyond yours.’
The big bedroom was a corner room, even larger than Edward’s, with an even handsomer bathroom, and a view two ways, towards the trees of the avenue and, at the side, towards the wood on the rising ground which Edward had seen as he approached.
‘Where’s the sea?’
‘On the other side of the house, but it’s a good way off.’
‘This is an old house, eighteenth-century — ’
‘Yes, called Selden House, but it was just a shell when Jesse bought it.’
Edward followed her down and out into the courtyard which he had looked at last night.
‘All this part, the other three sides, was built by Jesse. It’s a fake really, but it looks nice. These two sides are quite thin, just passageways. The bit opposite you is a real house, smaller really only it doesn’t look from here. We live over there, those are our bedrooms, like yours.’
‘I bet yours is the smallest one.’
‘Yes, we call ours East Selden and yours is West Selden.’
The ‘fake’ courtyard did indeed look nice, with its four eighteenth-century facades, with walls of creamy stone, tall windows below, square ones above, and shallow stone-tiled roofs. The square was cobbled with sea pebbles, and there was an Italian well-head in the middle. Edward looked down and saw a distant gleam of water and the dark form of his reflected head.
‘This must have cost a fantastic amount of money.’
‘Jesse was rich then. It’s all gone now.’
Edward heard the familiar sound of a typewriter. ‘Who’s typing?’
‘Mother May. She’s making a catalogue of all Jesse’s work, it’s a big job. Sometimes she writes about the past, things she remembers.’
‘So she’s a writer.’
‘Good heavens, no, it’s just for us! The ground-floor rooms on our side are workrooms. On your side they’re just store-rooms. Come back this way through Transition. That corridor on the right leads to our place. Just pick up those plates, would you. We’ll go through the Atrium and I’ll show you the rest.’
Passing into the hall Edward put the plates on the long table and Ilona added a pile of cutlery. He looked up at the tapestry, now clearly visible. Watched by a large stern cat, a smiling girl with a butterfly net was pursuing through a flowery meadow a flying fish which had emerged from a dark round tree.
‘We wove it from Jesse’s design,’ said Ilona. ‘We did four different designs. Some Americans bought the other three.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Edward. But he found it, like the painting in his own room, rather distressing.
Crossing the hall, her sandals tapping on the slates, Ilona opened another door. ‘This was the eighteenth-century stable block, it juts out at the back at right angles to the barn, it’s awfully pretty outside. Jesse made a Gothic window at the end.’
‘There’s another courtyard!’ said Edward, looking out of a window.
‘Yes, we’re parallel to the piece that joins East and West Selden. The wall is plain on this side as you see, Jesse intended to paint a mural on it. It’s a nice old paved yard. Jesse was going to close it in with another pastiche, but it’s nicer like this, you can see the fen, except that you can’t because it’s misty. This used to be our dining room before the kitchens moved to Transition, now it’s our sitting room, we call it the Interfectory.’
‘That’s an odd word. Don’t you mean Refectory?’
‘Well, that’s what Jesse calls it. It’s our leisure room.’
‘What a nice room.’ Edward surveyed the large long rather untidy room with bookshelves, and numerous much trodden rugs upon the wooden floor, and low slung armchairs of worn red leather, faded and slippery, with long seats and sloping backs, made for long-legged men to lounge in at their ease. There were two old sagging sofas with ragged covers and an open fireplace with the remains of a wood fire and a dark tall many-shelved wooden chimneypiece. On top of the chimneypiece was balanced a long piece of carved wood on which, between interwoven leaves and fruits, was written, I am here. Do not forget me. It was a shabby and unpretentious room with brown varnished woodwork, like an old-fashioned snug or smoking room pr the study of an elderly don. It might have represented some idea of a room which Jesse had had when he was a schoolboy. It seemed in some way to belong to the past; perhaps the all-powerful Jesse had decreed it as a place of escape from his fretful and peculiar genius. ‘It looks comfortable and real,’ Edward added. Then, as this seemed to impugn the reality of the rest of the house, ‘It’s all marvellous — and extraordinary.’
‘It’s a bit of a mess and it needs dusting, Jesse had so many ideas, but we like it.’
A picture in a dark frame slightly askew hung against the faded leafy wallpaper, representing two adolescent girls with staring pleased eyes and bare
small breasts kneeling in a stone recess grown over with damp green plants discovered by a terrified boy. Edward did not need to scrutinise the signature.
‘I’ve never seen any of Jesse’s pictures, except one which I can’t remember reproduced in a paper. I think I didn’t want to look at it. Are they fairies?’
‘What?’
‘Are they fairies?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ilona said this in the neutral self-satisfied tone used by scientists when scrupulously refusing to answer a layman’s silly question. She straightened the picture, dusting the top of it with her finger.
‘What’s the photo beside the fire?’
Ilona took the photograph off a nail where it hung low down and handed it to him. ‘Jesse, of course.’
‘Good heavens!’ A tall thin hawkish young man with a loop of dark straight hair curving over his brow was leaning against a tree and staring at Edward with an intense sardonic expression. Edward almost dropped the photo, and hastily handed it back.
‘Looks like you,’ said Ilona, ‘except he’s got larger eyes.’ She hung it up again. ‘The old kitchen is Bettina’s workroom. She’s a carpenter, we’ll just peep in. All those rooms connect, there’s no corridor, if she’s not there we can go through, there’s rooms beyond.’
Ilona tapped gently on a door on the far side of the room, then opened it cautiously. Edward, behind her, caught a glimpse of Bettina with one knee on a chair leaning forward intently over something on a large wooden table. She did not look up. Ilona closed the door softly. ‘She hates to be disturbed. That door over there leads to the tower.’
Edward moved towards the door.
‘Oh not now. We don’t go there when Jesse’s away. Anyhow I expect he’d like to show you the tower himself. And that door leads out into the courtyard. It’s an awfully draughty room.’
Edward followed Ilona back into the hall.
‘There are your shoes, by the way.’ She indicated a box by the door where Edward found his shoes, no longer muddy, beautifully cleaned.
‘They’re clean!’
‘I cleaned them. Cleaning shoes is one of my jobs.’
‘You seem to have all the dirty jobs!’
‘Not at all, there are plenty of dirty jobs.’
‘You’re all so industrious and so skilled, I shall feel useless. Would writing poetry count as work?’
‘I don’t think so! Are those your only outdoor shoes?’
‘Yes, silly of me.’
‘You can wear some of Jesse’s boots, I’ll find some, your feet seem about the same size.’
‘Please don’t bother!’ Edward quickly put on his shoes, leaving his slippers. ‘Let’s go outside, look the sun has come out!’
They went out of the main door onto the pavement outside. The damp stones were becoming overgrown with creeping thyme.
In the bright light Edward gazed at his sister. She looked even prettier now in her brown dress. Her hair, revealed as a mixture of red and gold, was rather vaguely gathered with many visible pins into a thick flat mass which had slid down the back of her neck almost to her shoulders. Her small up-tilted nose was faintly freckled, her chin was small and round. Her complexion was childishly translucent with rounded reddened cheeks. The eyes, with lighter lashes, were dark grey. Meeting Edward’s gaze she looked away and a flush ran down onto the thin hair-encumbered neck. She vaguely and ineffectually patted her hair, dislodging a pin onto the ground. Edward picked it up and handed it back to her, and she laughed breathily, covering her mouth.
He said suddenly, ‘Did you ever see my mother?’
Not seeming startled by the question Ilona said, ‘No, she was just a legend when I was a child. Mother May was talking about her last night.’
‘Oh!’ Edward pictured that conversation, the three of them at the table finishing the elderberry wine. He said, to close off the subject, ‘What can I do that’s useful?’
‘Nothing. Mother May said you were to have the morning off.’
‘Then I think I’ll go for a walk. Will you come?’
‘No, I must work.’
‘I’ll walk down to the sea. It’s over there, isn’t it?’
‘The fen’s flooded, there’s no way.’
‘I could walk up to that wood.’
‘It’s very messy and marshy. I’m afraid there aren’t any good walks at this time of year. You could walk up the track and along the road, that’s quite nice. Lunch is at two, don’t be late, we work a long morning. Did you sleep well last night?’
‘Yes, fine. No owls or foxes, no poltergeists!’
Ilona, who was turning toward the door, paused. ‘You know there are poltergeists, it’s not a joke.’
‘Oh — come — ’
‘They’re just a sort of phenomenon, sort of chemical, not ghosts.’
‘I’ve heard stories. Perhaps it’s not all imagination or fakes. Aren’t they supposed to happen where there are adolescent girls?’ Edward was instantly acutely embarrassed by this remark.
Ilona however replied calmly, ‘Yes, Bettina says I attract them, they come to adolescent girls and virgins. Anyway, Bettina’s a virgin too, so no wonder they come here. They’re quite harmless, just a nuisance.’
‘Somehow I don’t like the idea!’
She opened the door to go in. ‘Of course if you get one in your bed you’re really in trouble!’
When Ilona had closed the door Edward waited a minute or two, listening to the silence, or rather to a vague soft bird and ‘river sound, and establishing some quite new sense of being alone. It had taken him about a second to grasp that this was a new aloneness, but he could not for some time work out what was new about it. It might just be that he was unused to being in the country, and even more unused to being there by himself. He walked a few steps and looked down the avenue at the way he had come yesterday. He had already decided that he was not going to follow his sister’s uninspiring advice about walking back to the road. The pavement, broad in front of the house, narrowed between the trees where it ran on, edged by big white flinty stones, for two hundred yards or so to meet the track. The trees were disorderly, irregularly spaced out and of various shapes and sizes, some enormous yews, three elegant elongated conifers, unawakened oaks and ash trees bleakly in bud, and numerous ash saplings. Some clean stumps declared where, no doubt, elms had once stood. Between the trees was grass which looked as if it had been cut, but not lately. Further back, on either side, were ragged lines of veronica, interspersed with tamarisk. Everything was wet and there was a moist spicy smell.
Turning away from the avenue, Edward walked along the front of the hall and the plain wall which masked Transition and then along the front of West Selden, passing a door in the middle of the façade. Ahead of him he could see a group of dark ilex trees where a path meandered, and on the right a plot with vegetables, two greenhouses, and a curious overgrown rectangle which was probably an abandoned tennis court. On the left were outhouses, a big open wood store, and a yellow tractor. Further on ahead, beyond the ilexes, was an orchard and a grove of tall leafless poplars. Walking upon wet irregular stones, between which sturdy dandelions were thrusting up their green spears, and meeting now the full force of the east wind, he walked round to the back of Selden, and then on to the stables courtyard. The stables, ‘very pretty’ as Ilona had said, their stone walls decorated with lines of flints which looked like little faces, made another handsome house, long and broad, with a turret and a golden weathercock in the form of a fox. Edward did not dally here for fear of meeting Mother May or Bettina, feeling shy of the former and in awe of the latter. Moving out of sight of the near windows he stood back and looked up at the tower. Any tower has charm, and this one was indeed impressive, but Edward was not sure that he liked it much. The hexagonal walls were of concrete, and covered by erratic stains, certainly accidental, which might be imagined to look attractive. On one face a shaft of small-leaved ivy had been allowed to climb almost to the top. The windows formed a more striking
form of decoration, dotted about apparently aimlessly over the surfaces, some being mere slits, the others mostly squares, some large, some small. Each window was framed by a black metal lattice, whose rusting was no doubt the source of the erratic stains. Edward had been disappointed and a little hurt at not being allowed into the tower. Perhaps Jesse had indeed wanted to ‘show it off’ himself. Or had just not wanted Edward poking around in his work places.
Hoping he had not been noticed, he turned away from the house. Among a few swift clouds the sun was shining. A path at his feet led away eastward between gorse bushes. The sea must be there and not far off. He began to walk down a slight slope and entered at once into a meadow which was covered with small glittering yellow starry flowers. He looked with amazement at the flowers whose almost metallic brightness gave out a light which hung like a yellow powder above the lush grass. They were certainly not buttercups. He thought they might be celandine, and stooped to pick one. As his fingers snapped the frail stem he felt guilty. He stuffed the flower roughly into his pocket and walked hastily on toward a line of willow trees. It seemed to him that he had seen these flowers, this meadow, somewhere before. Perhaps it was in just such a meadow that the secretive girl with the butterfly net had been pursuing the flying fish. When he neared the willows he saw that they were rising out of water; while the path, now rather wet, turned a little to the left of them upon higher ground. Beyond, Edward now saw what he took to be the sea, but quickly realised was a dazzling sheet of flood water out of which trees and bushes were raising their heads. Upon the water here and there, their enamelled backs polished by the sun, water birds were sailing, ducks, geese, some birds quite strange to Edward, and a distant pair of swans. He walked on, thinking to skirt the flood, but was now increasingly surrounded by dark pools and clumps of reeds and humpy banks of mud. The path had now given up, or else he had lost it, and he was walking upon a black sinewy surface, springy underfoot and less muddy. Then as he looked, trying to see a way, the light changed, the sun was clouded and the water in front of him became dark, almost black. He stopped and looked back. Seegard, upon which the sun still shone, was already far away, now seen to be upon a slight eminence. As Edward turned about, straining his eyes, he was suddenly removed as if his surroundings had been quickly jerked upward. He did not sink, but fell abruptly, vertically, as the surface beneath his feet gave way and his legs descended into two watery holes. He stood for a moment ridiculously, then sat down, his arms and bottom creating similar holes in the treacherous elastic surface upon which he had been walking and which he now saw to be made of thick blackened mats of old reeds suspended above a base of cold watery mud. He struggled up cursing and was relieved to find that he was able to stand, in water not up to the knee, and laboriously lifting one foot after another out of the black sticky compound, to retrace his steps until he was on firmer ground. He was soaked to the waist, but at least the sun had come out again. Then, where the path ought to have been but was not, he was confronted by an expanse of flooded grass, the green tips just above the surface, and, at a distance, a curious semicircle of stone, which he made out to be a partly submerged bridge. Seegard had changed its position too, lying farther off on his right, and some trees seemed to have sprung up to conceal some of Selden. The wood however, upon its low but presumably dry hillock, was now nearer, appearing indeed as the nearest available solid ground. Edward stepped out into the meadow, with water to his ankles but fairly sound going underfoot, and soon crossed the half-drowned bridge over what was evidently a flooded river. Here he was presented with a small dryish slope and indeed a path. The sun was warming and he hoped drying his wet muddy clothes. He turned, shading his eyes, but could not see anything behind him except muddy watery fen. He thought, suppose Jesse has come home while I’m away, suppose I arrive back covered with mud and late as well? He looked to his watch but remembered he had left it in the bathroom. He decided to follow the path a little bit up the hill, and was soon among trees.
