by Iris Murdoch
Edgar and Harriet began to walk slowly off together in the direction of Hood House.
Monty went back into the dressing-room, wrapped up the milk chocolate fish in a copy of The Times, and took it out to the bin in the kitchen. Then he went out into the garden. The light had its velvety dramatic evening quality, a portentous vividness conscious of the dark. In the still absurdly light green greenery of the privet hedge a wren was singing with piercing accuracy, and two blackbirds and a thrush were having a musical contest in the orchard. Less coherent birds, ostentatiously unimpressed, were contributing chaotic background noise, like an orchestra tuning up. Monty felt frenzy, anger, despair and a stupid bitter resentment against everything. He had been very irritated at being asked to sell the orchard. That was not Harriet, that was Blaise. Typical Blaise, clumsy, greedy egoist, wanting to have everything at once, however incompatible. A large black animal emerged strolling from the orchard. Ajax. Monty did not entirely trust Ajax and never patted him. ‘Clear off!’ he said to the dog in passing. There was a faint growl. Monty thrust on into the orchard, his shoes and trousers soaked by the long grass which, already heavy with dew, was hanging in arches over the clipped path. He reached the fence of the Hood House garden. Was it conceivable that Harriet would invite Edgar in?
Someone was standing in the garden, on the lawn, underneath the acacia tree, a boy. It was David. Monty watched him in silence. David stood a while with head thrown back, arms limply hanging, gazing up into the tree. Then he turned slowly towards the house, trailing his feet and making long slithering tracks in the dew. His attitude and his movement expressed the self-conscious histrionic dejection of youth. Poor David, thought Monty, poor poor David. A dog barked, rather hysterically. Another answered. Hood House remained enigmatic.
Monty turned back. Sophie had wanted him to build a wooden platform in one of the orchard trees so that they could have their evening drinks sitting on the platform. Monty had told her it was a stupid idea. He threw himself face downward in the long wet grass.
Emily McHugh now very much regretted having taken Constance Pinn into her confidence. And why had she now let her into the house? Pinn must have mesmerized her. Pinn, who had once been her charwoman, and was now her lodger. In fact it had for a long time been impossible to conceal anything from Pinn. Pinn’s coping with Luca had made possible Emily’s job, now defunct. The job was gone and Pinn was installed. How Emily lost the job was as follows.
Emily had been employed part-time to teach French at an expensive progressive girls’ boarding school in the vicinity. The academic standards were not high. The children, doubtless like their parents before them, were being groomed for life’s lower pleasures. The young ladies rode, swam, danced, fenced, played bridge and read a little sociology. There were no examinations. Languages were regarded as a hard option, and Emily, who had now no taste for study and was no star at French, had survived because her pupils were lazy, untested and easy to connive with. An unspoken pact kept the ineffectual lessons rolling along somehow. Then one day what Emily had long dreaded occurred. A French girl turned up in the class.
Kiki St Loy was in fact a mixture. Her father, a diplomat, was half French, half Cornish. Her mother came from Andalusia. Kiki spoke English, French and Spanish, all fluently and all not quite perfectly. She was every school-teacher’s nightmare: a beautiful precocious popular bossy over-sexed rebellious intelligent pupil. Emily, who saw the danger signals at once, could not help liking Kiki. In fact to begin with she almost ‘fell for’ the girl, and imagined that she could recruit her as an ally. This proved vain. As soon as Kiki realized her power she began to use it. She went into long infectious fits of laughter over Emily’s accent, which she amusingly mimicked. She gravely corrected Emily’s now even more frequent mistakes, pretending that she was the teacher and Emily the pupil. The class adored it. Emily began to be not just upset but frightened. She tried to ‘buy them off’ by yet more connivance, yet more concessions to rebellion and disorder. All pretence at serious work was given up. Her lessons became ‘shows’ directed by Kiki. Other teachers complained of the ceaseless uproar. At last after warning Emily several times, the headmistress, who had never understood the situation, since Emily could not bring herself to explain it, asked her to leave. Humiliated, and yet also with a sort of despairing end-of-the-world relief, Emily left.
All this too it had been impossible to conceal from Pinn who, through Emily’s own good offices, now also worked part-time at the school, as a clerk. She was said to be doing well. Emily watched her friend’s success story with mixed feelings. She had accepted Pinn as a lodger partly for financial reasons after the demise of the teaching job. Pinn was useful. She was better at dealing with Luca than Emily was. She was also much better at cooking and professed to enjoy it. Pinn, who knew all about Emily’s curious way of life, was the only person with whom it could be discussed. And of course Emily was fond of her. Only Emily had somehow not foreseen how irritating Pinn’s sheer knowledge would prove to be at close quarters, although Pinn, who was very shrewd, was also very tactful. Of course Pinn was fascinated; she could not conceal that. Since Pinn had become what she called a ‘secretary bird’ she had become much smarter. Her short auburn hair was stylishly cut. Her long narrow spectacles were of the latest fashion. Her clothes contrived to look expensive. She hummed and buzzed with vitality. Emily, since she had lost her job, wore the same old slacks and cotton sweater every day. With less to do, she felt far more tired. She had been unemployed for nearly a month.
Luca was now eight. The bed-wetting phase was over at last, thank God. He had been named (he was never christened) Luke, but the name had somehow become Italianized. Luca lived in Emily’s consciousness as a ceaseless mysterious dark pain. When he was a small child she had loved him with an obsessive violence, hardly able to stop touching him, holding him, hugging him. They had lived like animals nestled together in a hole. She loved him in this way still, perhaps even more; but at some strange and awful moment, perhaps two, perhaps even three, years ago, as dawning consciousness filled his eyes with puzzlement, he had begun to withdraw from her. He pulled himself away from her embraces. His chattering ceased. He also cried more rarely. Now, and Emily simply dared not think about this, it was so appalling, he hardly spoke to her at all. Sometimes it was as if he had actually become dumb. If she asked him a question he would reply, if he replied, with a gesture. Now and then however she overheard him talking to Pinn. And although he was always at the bottom of his form at school, no one had yet suggested to her that he was handicapped or mentally deficient.
He could not read, but that was true of a lot of children at the rotten school he attended. He watched television a lot, as Emily did too. Sometimes as they sat silently together in front of the screen she would turn her head surreptitiously to look at him, and find that he was gazing quietly at her. ‘What is it, Luca?’ No answer. He would turn away again. How much he understood of the indiscriminately miscellaneous programmes they watched together, she did not know. He never spoke about them, and rarely laughed or smiled, even at the children’s programmes. He did not seem to want to play with other children out of school hours. Emily suspected that he was afraid of them. When she asked if he would like to invite a friend to tea he simply shook his head. He had no difficulty in occupying himself, however, and was in this respect at least an ‘easy’ child. What he did was not always clear to Emily, but when not watching television he seemed to be constantly up to something. He played outside by himself, and sometimes simply vanished for long periods. When at home he spent a lot of time quietly in his room with the door shut. He communed at length with the two cats, Richardson and Little Bilham. Richardson was an elegant peach and grey cat, Little Bilham was a dwarfish tabby with white patches. Both were neutered males and running somewhat to fat. He would carry one of the cats about with him for an hour on end. He was extremely interested in insects, and kept a sort of insect zoo in his room, where spiders, woodlice, beetles and other creepie
-crawlies were periodically kept in boxes. He was not a violent child.
For some time now Emily had been trying to persuade Blaise to go to see Luca’s form master to get some sort of proper report on him. "They’ll attend to a man,‘’ she told him. ‘It’s no good my going. They’ll pull their socks up if they see the child’s got a real father who wears a tie and can speak English.’ However Blaise kept putting this off. He said, ‘Luca’s all right, we’d be told if he wasn’t.’ Of course Blaise was always nervous about what he called ‘security’. But Emily felt that really he was frightened of finding out that Luca was in some way abnormal. ‘He may need treatment,’ said Emily. Treatment for what?’ said Blaise. In fact the school was so chaotic that it was doubtless very difficult to identify a retarded child. Of course Luca looked all right. He was even quite a presentable boy, with Blaise’s square face, and Emily’s almost black hair and blue eyes. He enjoyed perfect physical health, and when he was intently watching a wood-louse or a house-fly he appeared to be quite intelligent.
Emily had just had her bath. Not a bath-addict, she always bathed on the days when Blaise came. He used once to like to come and discover her in her bath. That was one of the many discarded rituals. Now she was feeling warm and clean and faintly fragrant with bath essence. Her breath smelt nasty though, or so she, trying now to sniff it, suspected. Yesterday her dentist had told her that she ought to have three back teeth out and have all the front ones crowned. Extensive ‘bridge work’ would be necessary. The crowning and bridge work would cost more than a hundred pounds. She would have to tell that to Blaise. She would also have to tell him, which they had so far concealed, that Pinn had moved in. And that the rent of the flat was going up again in September. And she had not yet dared to break it to him that she had lost her job. She had decided to tell him that she had resigned it of her own accord. This sounded more dignified and could be made part of the campaign which Emily intermittently waged against her lover.
Emily, in a rather dirty quilted dressing-gown, was reposing in the sitting-room, nursing Little Bilham and sipping sweet sherry and absently watching the images upon the television screen. Pinn had turned the sound off. Pinn, in her petticoat, was intently engaged in painting her nails. Blaise, who liked Emily artificial, used to try to persuade her to paint hers, but she could scarcely ever bother, and now he did not bother either. Pinn, who worked afternoons, was usually home by five, and would then spend a long time flossying herself up. She often went out in the evenings. Emily was the one who stayed at home these days. Watching her friend doing her nails beside the flickering television set Emily thought, we are like a couple of prostitutes waiting for clients. Poor prostitutes, of course, not poules de luxe. Emily had once imagined herself as a poule de luxe. That seemed a laugh now. The sitting-room proclaimed something which was almost poverty which had crept over Emily like an illness, a symptom of the disorder of her life. Some people were doubtless just destined for poverty and muddle. Emily had probably inherited it. Earlier Pinn had been going on boringly about her rotten childhood. Emily had had a rotten childhood too, only she didn’t talk about it all the time. Bloody rotten. No wonder the place looked like a slum. The cats didn’t help. Richardson was sharpening his claws on the side of the greasy armchair. Tear, tear, said Emily to herself, that’s right, tear, tear, tear. Odd to think that she had once paid Pinn to clean the flat. Nobody cleaned it now.
Watching Richardson destroying the chair, Emily suddenly remembered a dream she had had last night. She had dreamt that she was skinning a cat. She was in a fishmonger’s shop and the fishmonger was her step-father. ‘Put it here,’ he said. Holding the skinned carcase by the tail, Emily carefully laid it down on the fishmonger’s slab. There was no blood. Then suddenly she saw the carcase moving a Utile. ‘It’s still alive,’ said the fishmonger. It can’t be, thought Emily. Oh, what it must be suffering! It can’t be still alive! The carcase continued to twitch and move. Emily woke up. She now drove away from her the memory of the horrible dream. There were so many thoughts which simply had to be sent away. She spoke to Pinn.
‘Who are you off with?’
‘What?’
‘Who are you off with tonight?’
Pinn had mysterious men friends.
‘Kiki.’
‘Kiki again?’ Pinn seemed to be developing a nasty little friendship with Kiki St Loy. ‘Since when have you started to adore Kiki?’
‘I don’t adore Kiki. I adore her car.’ Kiki had a very long yellow sports car.
‘Well, don’t bring Kiki here. I’ve had Kiki.’ Also Blaise might see her. Emily had lately begun to develop an agonizing fear that Blaise might abandon her for a younger woman. But of course that was a ridiculous idea. Ideas like that were an illness too.
‘Of course I won’t bring her here, don’t be a clot. We’re meeting at the pub.’
Thank God Kiki’s leaving at the end of the term, thought Emily. Kiki was seventeen, though she pretended to be eighteen.
‘Aren’t you going to cook for him?’
‘No.’ Emily used to cook elaborately for Blaise. Now they just drank for hours, opened a tin, and went to bed.
‘You should have let me do you that casserole.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She used to dress up for him too, once. Now she just put on a casual evening top over her old dirty trousers. ‘Won’t you have a drink, Pinn?’
‘No, thanks.’
Pinn used to be a drinking companion, in fact it was in this role that Emily had first got to know her so well. Pinn, arriving to char, had been offered a drink. Confidences followed. Alas. Now, however, while Emily was drinking more and more, Pinn was drinking less and less. Alas, alas. ‘I hate drinking alone,’ said Emily. But these days she often did it.
Enter Luca. His presence in the room altered everything down to the atoms and electrons. There was cosmic change. Luca had an awful condensed thereness, as if he had an exceptionally high specific gravity. As he spoke less, he seemed to have become more concentrated and opaque and dense. He was light-footed. The effect was mental. Pinn looked at him with detached curiosity, stopping her nail game. Pinn, like many childless women, rather disliked children and had never once, Emily noticed, referred to the boy with affection. However there seemed increasingly to be almost an understanding between them. Perhaps it was just the lack in Pinn of those awful black balls of emotion which so crammed Emily, which made Luca feel easier with her. ‘We rub along,’ Pinn had once said of her relations with the child.
Emily also stared at her son. He walked straight up to the television set and turned the sound up very loud, ‘DANGER OF SERIOUS LONG-TERM DAMAGE TO THE ECONOMY ...’
‘Luca! Don’t do that!’
It had been a dancing programme. Now it was evidently the news, yes, there was that man’s silly face. Slopping her drink, Emily leaned over and switched the set off altogether. The room was tiny. Even Little Bilham could not have been swung.
Luca, paying no attention to his mother, had retired to a corner and was carefully examining something he had in his hand.
‘What have you got there, Luca? What is it? Show Mummy.’
Luca went without haste to the door and departed again. The door of his room closed softly.
‘Oh God,’ said Emily.
‘He wants a snake,‘ said Pinn.
‘A snake?’
‘Yes. He wants a pet snake.’
‘Well, he can want.’
‘Do you mind if I pull back the curtains?’
‘Yes, I do mind. Put the light on.’
Emily kept the curtains pulled a lot of the time now. The flat had had to be on the ground floor because of the cats, because of Richardson anyway, since Little Bilham had not been born or thought of when Blaise first found the flat and moved Emily into it seven years ago. The windows looked out on to a square of shadowed weedy grass which it seemed to be nobody’s responsibility to turn into a garden. People sometimes stood there, as if transfixed with horror, but nev
er strolled, and even the children preferred to play elsewhere. The block of flats which surrounded this gloomy patch was situated in a now rather shabby backwater off the Upper Richmond Road where the undulating nervous sound of traffic (in no way resembling a river) did not cease by day or by night. Though still fairly new, the place already had a battered filthy knocked-to-pieces air about it. The concrete walls outside were covered with long multi-coloured stains, and the dark corridors inside were full of perambulators and bicycles and large broken toys and piles of old newspapers and mysterious horrible smells.
Pinn had turned on the light and was now tacking a newly laundered white lace collar on to her little black dress.
‘Isn’t it nearly time you went?’
‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’ Pinn jumped up and left the room, carrying the dress.
Emily sighed and gave herself some more sherry. She ran her tongue along her painful gums. No need to look for the aspirins, the drink was making her feel better. Time to put on her trousers and her brushed nylon evening top. What fun it had been dressing up for Blaise in the old days, when he watched her at it, boots first of course. He had put her into some pretty uncomfortable rigs in his time. And he usually brought some new gadget, sometimes she could not even guess what it was. How they had laughed, and then suddenly become silent. They had had fun. Did she feel excited now at the prospect of his visit? Yes, a bit. But the little element of fear was no longer delicious. Their conflicts were no longer held firm inside the fabric of their love. They smashed through it, revealing awful vistas of solitary suffering. There was always something to be confessed, an extravagance or some awful worry about Luca, and now the rent, her job, her lodger, her teeth, the increasing unmanageableness of her existence. Blaise’s eyes would go blank. There was always a row. His visits upset her so much, upset Luca so much. There were moments when she almost wished he would not come. Misery grew in her heart like a plant. Sometimes she was so unhappy she just wanted to be unconscious, not to die exactly but to sleep for months. Any unpleasant happening tapped a deep base of nightmare. She was so full of vain regrets. If only only only, she reflected for the thousandth time, she had forced him to leave his fat cow wife then, nine years ago, when he was utterly mad about her, when he was her slave. I could have made him bust things up then, thought Emily. He was crazy. If I had threatened to break with him, he would have done anything. I should have forced him. Instead, I was sorry for him. I was sympathetic and understanding and kind. He asked for time and I gave him time. And look what time has done for me.
