by Iris Murdoch
The basin, probably, on the evidence of the newly-planted beech hedge, only quite lately devoted to the sport of other than purely limestone nymphs, was not very deep and would not have admitted of diving. It was, however, both long and broad and contained the (David’s memory now told him exactly) seven naked girls without overcrowding. The girls, all showy swimmers, were able at any rate to exhibit to each other their splashy crawls, with a great deal of spray and shouting, and some less than dignified clambering in and out, long legs scraping limestones, without too many actual collisions. A slimy sluice down which water had once flowed from the more elevated level of the fountain, well lubricated by the swimmers’ splashes, even served the girl who seemed smallest and youngest among them as a slide, down which with shrieks she constantly descended, scattering her more pretentiously crawling companions.
David became aware that something hot and slug-like was lying on top of him. Pinn, to see the show, had insinuated herself into the burrow beside him, lying half above him, her arm across his shoulder. She began to speak to him in a whisper, though indeed the laughing and shrieking of the bathers would effectively have drowned a much more resonant tone. ‘Aren’t they lovely? Do you see that one over there, just climbing out, that’s my special crony, Kiki St Loy, isn’t she a peach? She wants me to find her a boy friend, would you like to be it? She’s only seventeen, though she pretended to be eighteen to get a car licence. Isn’t she just the prettiest thing? And believe it or not she’s still a virgin. Most of them aren’t, but she was never sure till now that she wanted a man at all. Just look at her, the way she’s standing, admiring herself -’ Kiki had climbed up on to the rim of the basin and was standing rather awkwardly, with salient stomach, one leg firmly planted, the other dabbing a prehensile foot on to the wet curving intermittently broken edging. One arm was a little histrionically outstretched for balance, while with a quick busy hand she was gathering the long strings of her wet hair, squeezing them out and stowing them all neatly together, cast back over one shoulder. As she did this she contemplated her breasts with interested appreciation. Her body was slightly darker than could be explained even by a rich girl’s sunburn, her breasts were brown. (‘Touch of the tarbrush there,’ murmured Pinn.) Her brooding face, quiet and clear in the bright sunlight, was a lucid milky brown, uniform in hue, long-nosed, large-eyed, with the striking appearance which Homer, meaning thereby to compliment Hera, qualifies as ‘ox-eyed’. Her hair, drying a little in the sun, had now declared itself to be a radiant brown, somewhat fairer than might have been expected, when the expressive eyes, so singularly dark and large, turned suddenly in the direction of the rose hedge and seemed to dart their fire right in through the leafy aperture.
David at the same moment raising his gaze as far as her face felt himself, doubtless erroneously, to be observed. He felt the intolerable hot confining weight of Pinn, lying beside, half on, him and constricting his movements. Regardless now of disturbance or possible detection he began to struggle, half sitting up, pushing the obstruction away, and jerking himself out of the thorny tunnel into the middle of the hedge. A moment later he had rolled over and taking the other side of the hedge in a quick rush had burst forth at a run on to the sunlit grass. He ran fleetingly, desperately, the tips of his toes scarcely touching the ground, through the yew archway, across the yew-encircled quadrangle, over the gravel driveway, along the elder path, past the cedar trees, through the door m the wall, between the lettuces, and out through the second and blessedly unlocked door, on to the friendly safe expanse of the public street, where he slowed down to a fast walk. He realized from the strange looks given him by the passers-by, that not only his arm but also his face was liberally smeared with blood. He also realized that he had left his jacket behind, underneath the rose hedge. His flesh was blazing hot. He felt confused violent emotion. Shame. Terror. Wild joy.
‘Didn’t I tell you you’d have to descend to the underworld to find me and make me alive again?’ said Emily.
Everything between them was as it had once been, only with the passage of the years, with the suffering which they had caused each other, with the shock of exposure and the fear of loss, deeper and steadier, more complex, more profoundly felt.
‘Yes,’ said Blaise, kneeling at her feet.
‘Didn’t I tell you that your real self lived with me?’
‘Yes.’ He stretched himself out slowly, luxuriously, like an animal, laying his cheek upon her bare foot.
‘God, how you’ve made me suffer. How you’ve made us both suffer.’
‘Yes.’
‘You do look battered. It’s not just the eye. You look a proper wreck. Well, you know it now, what you were saying yourself. You can’t go through the looking-glass without getting cut. You know that now, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
In the three days that had passed a certain violence had run its course. The fury had passed into them and become part of their knowledge and their strength and they had at last become quieter together. Blaise had listened to Emily speaking to him over hours and hours. ‘It’s her turn to suffer now. I suddenly felt sure what to do. I was prepared to be kind to her, but not to be bloody taken over. She assumed she was top wife, didn’t she. She was bloody forgiving me, and I was taking it as if I were really some sort of blasted criminal. I was like a bloody culprit before her. She was running us both. She was running you, that was what I couldn’t bear. You should just have seen yourself in a mirror, you should just have seen the expression on your silly face, like a Utile boy who’s been let off his caning. I couldn’t bear to see you so bloody meek and submissive before her, it drove me hopping mad. And her saying she regarded me as a wronged woman and an object of pity, and saying how badly you’d treated me and how she’d make you treat me better, as if this was going to stop me feeling bad in front of her, and at first she just had me mesmerized, but then my God I could see it wouldn’t do, I wasn’t going to put up with a Christ-awful arrangement like that. I’m not vindictive, I don’t want to watch her weeping, but it’s just bloody time for me to have my rights and let her put up with the rotten end for a change.’
This outcry, hours and hours of it, which Blaise endured with dazed blissful pain, began to subside at last. Between them now Harriet’s name was scarcely mentioned any more, except in so far as it entered into certain practical arrangements upon which Emily now dilated with a childish pleasure which stung Blaise’s heart with humility and tenderness.
‘We won’t put off long your starting to be a doctor, will we? I want you to be a doctor. I don’t want you to lose anything, anything because of me.’
‘We’ll have to put it off a bit,’ said Blaise now fully dressed, holding the hem of her petticoat which he kissed at intervals, ‘until we see where we are financially.’
‘Here, let me sit down and you put your head here. I do think we should move out of this dump. I think it’s important. It’s not a silly extravagance is it, getting that other flat?’
‘No,’ said Blaise. ‘We must have a new beginning in a new place.’
‘It is psychologically important, like you said. You know, when I saw you signing the lease for the flat I felt as if we were getting married at last – like in my dreams – I’ve so often dreamt I was young again, getting married to you. Oh my dear sweetikin, you don’t know how much I’ve suffered all these years from simply not being what I ought to have been, from simply not being your proper wedded wife.’
‘I do know, kid,’ said Blaise. ‘I can’t take that suffering from you. But for any future suffering, I’ll be around, we’ll do it together.’
‘Together. Now and always?’
‘Now and always.’
‘We won’t need new curtains. These ones will fit. Well, we’ll need one lot of long curtains for the big room. Oh my sweet one, do you think I’m silly, when so many great big things are happening, to be so pleased about curtains and about having a balcony and a bathroom with a carpet in it?’
�
��No. That’s a sign of love too.’
‘Everything’s a sign of love. Dear heart, I don’t mind any suffering, you know, so long as you truly love me and so long as it’s me you live with. And we’ll have friends, won’t we, friends of us both who come to the house, like married people have?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘But not Monty Small or that fat man.’
‘Not them, no.’
‘You know, I think Luca went over to her again yesterday. That’ll have to stop.’
‘Of course.’
‘I think after all a boarding school would be a good idea. I’ll take a job. I feel I could work till I dropped now for us, for you and Luca. I just got so empty and idle and lazy because there seemed nothing to work for. I felt I’d lost you.’
‘You never lost me,’ said Blaise. ‘Surely you knew that.’
‘I’m not sure. I feel now so much more connected to our beginnings, to our very first deep true love. I feel that never ceased at all, it just waited, and if there were bad patches I’ve simply forgotten them.’
‘Me too.’
‘And you’ll see her now and then and David of course. They’ll get used to it. They’ll see you haven’t vanished into thin air. I don’t want them to suffer much. I mean I don’t want them to suffer at all, but somebody’s got to, thanks to clever you!’
‘I know, kid —’
‘You’ll keep faith now?’
‘Yes, Em darling —’
‘I’d better keep my foot on your neck all the same.’
‘Your foot is always on my neck. I love it there.’
‘And you’ll really write to her tonight and show me the letter?’
‘And we’ll walk together to the post and post it.’
‘That’s my sweet prince.’
Blaise drew her over sideways and down towards him and studied that bright pert small very blue-eyed face, which happiness had illumined with even more than its former youthful loveliness. The old seductive vitality had returned, everything was back in place which had made her once so utterly irresistible to him. He kissed her, tasting the kiss with closed eyes.
How amazingly practical he had been in these three days. He had sorted out all his papers and business documents at Hood House. He had signed the lease of a flat in Fulham. He had put off his patients and told them he was moving his consulting rooms into town. He had done everything – except tell Harriet that he was going. Of course I’m not really going, he told himself at intervals, when the whole thing began to seem too dizzily dreadful. It’s simply a matter of justice, it’s like I used to envisage it when I was more clear-headed, nearer the start. There are two women, neither of whom I can leave. They must take their turns. I have to put this burden on to Harriet. She is strong enough to bear it, I can pay her that compliment. And her peace was shattered anyway. She’ll live at Hood House with David and I’ll visit her there like I used to visit Emily here, only oftener of course, as it’ll be open and above board and so that much better. The whole situation will be better, and isn’t that what’s most important? One will simply have redistributed the pain. And that is just, after all. I tried for so wickedly long to overlook Emily’s misery, simply not to see it. It’s right that now I should have to gauge it and to try to make her some amends. Of course it’s a terrible business but after all I’ve always known it was a terrible business. Anything I do is going to be somehow wrong. This solution is objectively the least wrong, and hang my motives. Anyhow, without those motives how could I make Emily so happy? And to make someone so happy is surely a good thing.
What am I supposed to do? What can I do for the best? Blaise inquired of some enigmatic power which still seemed, after all this, to be discontented with him and still to accuse him of something. Of what? Of a sort of awful vulgarity? Was that his sin, that too its punishment, that he was irredeemably vulgar?
Milo Fane, tall, cold, expressionless, stared into the muzzle of the gun which his captor now pointed at him with a hand which trembled alarmingly.
‘Keep still, keep still,’ said de Sanctis.
Contemptuously Milo turned his back and sauntered away down the room. He moved without haste, feeling the trembling lethal steel behind him. He counted the paces: two more to reach the table. As he suddenly side-stepped de Sanctis fired. The bullet passed Milo and struck the pier glass at the end of the room, shattering it into a glittering spray of tiny fragments. At almost the same moment Milo’s hand closed on the heavy bronze: Neptune taming a sea-horse? his incurably literary mind suggested as, almost without turning, he hurled the object and then was after it with the speed of a panther. The bronze caught de Sanctis squarely on the side of the head and a moment later Milo had repossessed himself of his Mauser.
He looked down upon his fallen senseless foe. It was a moment for speed. A knife flashed in Milo’s hand. With fastidious distaste he drew down the sock above one of de Sanctis’s flashy Italian suede shoes and bared the ankle. With measured deliberation he severed the Achilles tendon. De Sanctis was screaming. Milo was wiping the blood off his hand with a clean handkerchief. He was walking down the stairs. He drew a bar of chocolate out of his pocket and began to undo the paper.
Monty stared fascinated at the television, which he had turned on intending to see the news. The long forgotten words of the book came shadowily back to him as he stared at Richard Nailsworth’s stiffly handsome face upon whose unmoved ruthlessness the cameras were now gloatingly concentrated. He switched off the set. His watch must have stopped before he wound it, he had evidently missed the news. No consolations tonight in the form of floods, earthquakes, massacres, hijackings, public executions, murders or wars. Nothing to laugh at at all in fact.
He wandered out of the little downstairs dressing-room where, together with a painted wall cupboard large enough to conceal several pre-Raphaelite princesses, he kept the television set. He passed along the hall where the tea chests full of unanswered letters were now overflowing on to the floor. He kicked one of them as he passed dislodging a little stream of missives: messages of sympathy, appeals for money, political manifestos, bills, letters from lunatics, letters from women. He went into his study and crossed to the open window. It was already almost dark outside and a number of bats were dancing a tango over the lawn, taking sudden swoops towards the house as if they had dared each other to dart right up to Monty and touch his face with a passing wing. He watched them for a while, then turned on a lamp and closed the shutters. The stained-glass cupboards glowed dully like metal. Mr Lockett had had lights fitted inside them, but the effect had seemed to Monty garish. Sophie had sometimes turned the lights on to annoy him. It had been a fairly warm afternoon but now it felt cool in the house, almost cold, as if some diffused spiritual condition were declaring itself clammily. As he often did on such summer evenings, Monty had lit a small wood fire in the mosaic fireplace. How much this little room had comforted him once. He shuddered and felt the fear which lived with him now, the fear of his own mind.
He saw a letter from his mother, which had arrived by the morning post, lying upon the table, and he reached for it and opened it. The usual love letter. Still announcements of a visit and no date fixed. His mother was poised like a kestrel, waiting, watching, wondering. She was obviously afraid of coming too soon. He felt her fear, he felt her will, not even in her written words, but deep in himself, in the part of him that was her. Underneath his mother’s letter was now revealed a letter from Richard Nailsworth once again urging him to come to Richard’s villa in Calabria. Monty pictured Richard’s face, so much more vulnerable and touching when he was not playing Milo. That, not He crumpled up Richard’s letter, then tore his mother’s up carefully into small pieces and dropped both letters into the fire.
Monty had been alone now for four days. No one had come near him during this time except for Harriet, who had called in briefly, evidently upset and unwilling to talk. The telephone bell was still silenced. He had expected Edgar to turn up again to do his Old Man of
the Sea act, but Edgar had not come and Monty was surprised to find himself disappointed. He looked in vain for Edgar’s Bentley, in this road and the next. Doubtless Edgar had been offended by Monty’s horrible remark. Monty felt a vague urge to apologize but decided it was pointless. Where was Edgar anyway? Back at his London Club, or at Mockingham supervising the destruction of his mother’s unsightly greenhouse? Monty had got as far as discovering the telephone number of Bankhurst School, but had not yet used it. He felt it as a sort of life-line however. He knew that he could force himself to pursue this job and that once he had put himself in a context where he had to behave normally he would probably find himself behaving normally. Writing was utterly and absolutely now out of the question. Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of ‘Help me!’ – but there was no one there.
Devotion to truth might save him somehow: austerity, honesty, discipline; yet he had in his desert place to invent these things. He made his regular attempts to meditate, but their very formality gave admission to horrors. The depths where he had seemed to find silence and emptiness and peace now writhed with forms. He resorted to elementary techniques such as counting his breaths, but the numbers themselves became huge in his mind and enigmatically significant as if they were printed upon immense cards. He wanted to he on the floor and weep but tears seemed eternally denied. No wonder he missed Edgar. Any human company was a relief. Yet there was no one whom he had the will positively to seek for.
