by Iris Murdoch
Lucius sidled round her. ‘I’m sorry, my dear, I’m sorry—’
‘I will not be shouted at in my own house!’
‘I’m sorry, but I thought you might at least have remembered—’
‘Why should I remember?’
‘I did mention it at breakfast—’
‘Well, I wasn’t listening. I have more important things to worry about than your timetable.’
‘I know, it only matters to me, everything about me only matters to me.’
‘Oh, stop whining.’
‘If I don’t telephone I’ll miss the train.’
‘Look, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want you to go.’
‘What?’
‘It’s just as well I caught you, otherwise you might have slunk off.’
‘You might have told me before I packed, I feel quite—’
‘Look, sit down, no, put some more wood on the fire first, will you.’
‘Do you want me not to go today or not to go at all? It would be a great relief to me if—’
‘Oh stop bothering me. Sit down.’
‘I’ll have to telephone Audrey.’
‘Lucius, stop fluttering and chattering, will you. Now listen—’
‘Why don’t you want me to go now?’
‘I want you to go and see John Forbes.’
‘What?’
‘You have been seeing him occasionally, haven’t you? I mean you are on speaking terms?’
‘Well,’ said Lucius. They were both sitting by the fire. ‘I meet him now and then in the village. I haven’t been to his house for ages.’ Gerda, who had encouraged him to neglect Forbes, now seemed to be blaming him for having done so.
Bird-headed Rhoda entered soft-footed with the tea things and laid them out with deft gloved hands upon a little frail tea table close to Gerda’s chair.
When she had gone Gerda said, ‘I want you to call on him.’
‘Just like that? Won’t it look odd?’
‘You can find a pretext, anything will do, take him a book or something.’
‘A book?’
‘Don’t keep repeating what I say. Here’s your tea.’
‘Oh, Gerda, I’m so pleased not to be going away. I’m so sorry I was rude just now—’
‘You could go and see him tomorrow.’
‘But why—why do you suddenly want me to visit John Forbes?’
‘I want us to be friends with the Forbeses again. I want there to be coming and going between their house and ours.’
‘I don’t understand—’ said Lucius. ‘Oh, good heavens, you’re not match-making between Henry and Colette Forbes?’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Gerda. ‘Of course it may come to nothing, but it’s not a mad idea and it is an idea. I want Henry to stay here, I don’t want him to go back to America, I don’t want him to marry an American. Colette is young and silly and she’s not exactly what I would have chosen as a daughter-in-law, but she’s a decent girl, of reasonably good family, capable of loyalty and capable of learning sense, and she’s used to living in the country. I talked to her a little the other night and I got quite a good impression. At the very least I’d like to see more of her. And Henry seems to like her, in fact she’s the first thing he seems to have liked since he came back to England. You remember how cheerful he was that evening after he had taken her home. And altogether he’s been much more lively and talkative since then. Even if nothing develops, the girl will be young company for him and he may get into the habit of staying. I want to feel he lives here and isn’t just visiting. So all this is why you’ve got to go and see John Forbes.’
‘But supposing John Forbes won’t be friends?’
‘He will be. He must have thought of this. And I’m sure the girl would jump at it.’
‘I wonder. Perhaps she’s already got some chap.’
‘I don’t think so. Anyway you must find that out.’
‘Well, well,’ said Lucius. He added, ‘Of course if Henry married Colette we’d get the Oak Meadow back, and John owns all the land on the other side as far as the river.’
Gerda said nothing, but frowned slightly. She was thinking how little, in a way, she wanted Henry to marry, but since it was necessary to have an heir he could certainly do worse than marry this girl whom Gerda could so easily control and mould. She had been worrying in case Henry had become a homosexual in America.
Lucius, who had been moved by Colette’s young beauty on the evening of the lake incident, was thinking how sad it was to be old and to have no exciting plans any more, and was feeling bitter envy of Henry who could go up flights of stairs like a bird and for whose benefit attractive girls were being schemed for. And he did not particularly look forward to going to see John Forbes. What pretext could he possibly invent? But he felt extreme relief at not having to go to Audrey’s. He surreptitiously helped himself to a second piece of cake.
Meanwhile upstairs harlequin Henry was looking at himself in the mirror. He was wearing a grey top hat, his own from long ago, which he had found on the floor of the wardrobe. He adjusted the hat, tilted it just that millimetre backwards, enlarged his eyes, tucked his dark curly hair away, and glared luminously at himself. Although it was still daylight he had turned on a lamp. The yellow lamplight made his face look haggard but noble, aristocratic. He took off the topper and put on a black beret, also a relic. He narrowed his eyes and let the corners of his mouth droop cynically. Neurotic, dangerous, louche. He took off the beret and put on a bowler and smiled with secretive powerful ironic amusement.
He put the hats aside and lay down on the bed, drawing up his knees and clasping his hands behind his head. His gaze was far away. Beside him Calypso, wearing a blue necklace, crouched with plump limbs and gently caressed his body, leaning her lovely bright face towards him. But much-travelled Henry heeded her not. His grave frowning gaze betokened weighty thoughts: desperate plans, destruction and escape.
Henry saw before him now a full-lipped mouth all moist with red sticky lipstick and tears. He saw pink shiny fingernails all lined and cracking. He saw timid pleading round dark blue eyes, gentle eyes. Sandy had behaved like a cad to that girl. Yet in reflecting upon his brother in this new and unexpected role he came nearer than he had ever been since his return to feeling compassion, something which might make a man weep. Sandy was gone. Stephanie Whitehouse remained. He could not let her drift away and vanish, he must control and keep somehow safe and uncontaminated and pure, in a mingled élan of piety and revenge, this secret of Sandy’s past. Stephanie Whitehouse was his captive, his legitimate booty from this expedition into his brother’s life. Money had made her Sandy’s prisoner, and would, if he wished it, make her his. He looked forward intensely to seeing her again.
Constant employment was the rule at Pennwood. John Forbes was quietly glad to see that his daughter was never idle. He wondered if this industry was spontaneous or whether Colette was trying to please him? She had cleaned the house from end to end, weeded the garden, washed and mended his clothes. In the evening she watched television or read. She left the book she was reading (purposely?) on the table. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Her cooking had improved. John could not help being pleased at the improvement in his standard of living.
Where the mind and spirit were concerned matters were a good deal less clear. John was still feeling puzzled and shaken by Colette’s unusual outburst on the evening of her arrival. Was it conceivable that he had been a tyrannical father? He could not believe it. He was sure he had never ridiculed his children or made them fear him. He had always treated them as if they were adults, mature free people. He had not pampered them or regarded them as sensitive plants, but that had surely been right. They had been so robust and sensible, his open frank way with them had seemed to be absolutely right from the start. He had always told them the truth, however unpleasant, and they had never cringed. They were a strong pair and when they were young he could have sworn there was not an ounce of silliness in them. Cato’s def
ection still remained to John a totally incomprehensible horror. It had all started with that fashionable sherry drinking with public school boys from ‘old Catholic familes’. And now Colette. John could not conclude that he had been at fault. He certainly could not see himself as a tyrant. Colette had been very tired and nervy on that first evening. They had not reverted to the subject or indeed discussed anything serious since her return.
John observing his daughter, saw her now as more grown up, less childish. He of course accepted her statement that she was still a virgin, as he knew that she would never lie to him. Sexual adventure had not caused the change. After a while however he decided that what he saw in her was not exactly a new maturity, but some kind of absurd burgeoning of a young girl’s confidence. Perhaps it was simply that she had become more attractive and knew it. Colette was now about the age which Ruth had been when John first met her, when they were both studying modern history at Birmingham. Ruth had been stockier, less tall, her hair short and mousy, her face plumper and more like Cato’s, not pretty, but with a marvellous calm sage clever humorous expression which made John delight in her at first sight. Colette’s face was bonier, more like his own. John and Colette were thin types, John looking gaunter now that his pallid gingery hair was a little grey and getting thin on top. Cato would be stout later, as Ruth would have been. Colette had her mother’s limpid brown eyes, but whereas Ruth’s eyes had always been screwed up with thought or fun, Colette’s were always, as if rather deliberately, wide open, secretively staring, and shining with a sort of power or simply a young girl’s self-satisfaction.
John began indeed to conclude that his daughter’s air of confident maturity as she performed her simple household tasks was no more (and of course no less) than a perfectly irrational cheerfulness at being good-looking and healthy and young. And after all, why not, he rather grudgingly admitted. As she ran or pranced about the house, long-legged on light feet, deft, half-smiling, her long hair plaited now for ease of her work, he felt the power in her, as if some new strong centre of radiation had been placed near to him. It was not an intellectual power, but it was not purely sensuous either, it was a spiritual power, but spirit in a raw young almost fierce almost dangerous almost unconscious form. She is like a young knight, he thought, believing so strangely and so simply in the efficacy of innocence. She dreams perhaps of adventures, of just causes, where her purity will be transformed into courage and power. She thinks that she will be a pure influence, a saviour, that she will save some wretched man ‘from himself. With a touching insolence she values herself simply because she is an untouched young girl. Poor child. There she is, all ready and prepared to cause endless trouble to herself and to others. All the training he had put into her had issued not in the pursuit of learning but in this particular childish sort of spiritual pride. Yet in a way also he was impressed by her and pleased with his own awakened sensibility.
‘Daddy, Lucius Lamb is coming up the lane. I saw him from the landing window.’
‘Lucius? Is he coming here? Well, I suppose he must be.’
It was early evening and John had just switched the lamp on on his desk, where he was writing the first sketch of an article. A misty sky of a uniform darkening luminous grey-blue hung behind the garden, where the trees were all hazed and plumped with greenish and reddish buds. Some birds were singing carefully as if threading their songs together in garlands.
John threw down his pen with annoyance. A moment or two later there was a knock at the door and Colette ran down to open. John followed more slowly, seeing through the doorway, brightly illumined by the lamp which Colette had turned on in the porch, the smiling features of Lucius Lamb.
‘Hello, Colette, my dear. Hello, John. I was taking an evening stroll and I just thought that I’d call in and see how you were.’
‘How kind,’ said John.
Colette stood looking at Lucius with her bright inquisitive wide-open eyes, her hands hanging down in the graceful immobility of youth.
There was a moment of awkwardness which John deliberately prolonged before saying, ‘Won’t you come in?’
He went ahead to the sitting-room, noisily switching on the lights and dragging the curtains across the windows. He turned on an electric fire. He and Colette usually sat in the kitchen. Lucius, holding his cap in his hand, followed, still smiling.
Pennwood, originally called Rosebay Cottage and renamed by Ruth, who also came of Quaker stock, had been built soon after the first war. It was a solid small pretty house. The sitting-room, with its glossy cream-coloured paintwork and its bow window and low window-seat, was a simple pretty room, still unchanged from the days when it had been decorated by Ruth, soon after their marriage. The brown and yellow Leach bowls, the sky-blue pottery candle-sticks with the self-same black candles stood where they had always stood upon the painted shelves which framed the fireplace. The woollen rug was Ruth’s work. The photographs which she had taken of Greece and framed herself, still hung upon the walls. Ruth’s money had bought the little house. Her money, what remained of it, had bought the adjoining Oak Meadow, hastily sold because of the boat which Sandy never lived to purchase. An economist colleague had advised John Forbes to turn his savings into land.
John of course saw his old or former friend now and then upon the road or in the village, but they had not had an extended conversation for some considerable time. Since the breach between Pennwood and the Hall seemed to John so inevitable, almost natural, it had not occurred to him to regret the loss of Lucius, whose company he had certainly used to enjoy. Most of John’s social life took place at the university, where he usually spent four nights a week during term. At Laxlinden, unless he invited friends to stay, he had little company beyond Bellamy, the schoolmaster Eccles, now away on an ‘exchange’ and acquaintances such as the curate, and Gosling the architect whom he met in the Horse and Groom. Lucius never came to the pub, doubtless because Gerda forbade it. John was fond of solitude and always told his academic friends that constant human company would drive him mad. But he could have used the odd talk with Lucius, were it not for Gerda’s ‘grandness’, her old hostility to Ruth, the quarrel about the right of way, the coolness about the meadow, and the absurdity of Lucius’s own position about which John felt scarcely able to refrain from sarcasm. Lucius had his own touchiness and John his own pride, and so the schism had come to seem a permanent state of affairs.
Now, however, after his first irritation at being interrupted, John felt quite pleased to see Lucius. An old friend, that too after all is a permanent state of affairs. Preliminaries, posturing, fencing, these can be dispensed with. There is an absence of those barriers which as life goes on seem increasingly to divide human beings. Friends made at twenty and retained can keep for each other something of the naive openness of youth. Lucius in fact was older than John Forbes, already abandoning his thesis for the literary life when John appeared as a student, but they had become close friends, initially, it sometimes amazed John to remember, because John had admired Lucius’s poetry.
Colette, who might have sat and talked with them, had decided to be the female ministering angel, and had brought a sherry bottle and two glasses and then retired, still smiling her private smile of self-satisfaction. The scene was cosy. Even Lucius seemed to relax a little.
‘Well, Lucius, how’s the big book? How I envy you having time to write.’
‘Oh well, the book, yes. I’ve decided to shorten it, make it more sort of personal.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. We have enough personal books, I should think. I was looking forward to some deep analysis of Marxist concepts.’
‘You know John, it’s awful to say it, but I think I’m through with Marxism at last. I’ve got the virus right out of my blood. I’m writing poetry instead.’
‘You can’t be serious. Nothing is more important than how we stand with Marx. You’ve got the knowledge and you’ve got the time, unlike us working hacks who have to earn our living—’
‘I f
ind as I grow older it all seems less interesting. I’d rather think about myself.’
‘It sounds as if you’re ready for a geriatric ward.’
‘Capitalism, the Soviets, just two methods of government, equally muddled and clumsy, only ours is better because it isn’t a tyranny. Socialism is just an out-dated illusion. Ask anybody in eastern Europe.’
‘Lucius, for God’s sake! How did you vote in the last election?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t? How can you make sense of things or hope to improve them—’
‘I can’t, I don’t.’
‘Unless you hang onto Marx? I don’t mean Stalin’s Marx—’
‘I don’t know. You mean the real Marx, your Marx. Every idealist has one. It’s like religion.’
‘You used to be a historian. But I suppose country house life—’
‘Frankly, I gave the whole thing up. I think Marxism is just an awful mistake.’
‘All right, forget about Marx if you don’t like the name. What about the English tradition, what about—’
‘Oh the English tradition is fine, but it’s a way of life, not a pseudo-science.’
‘Lucius! You have become a Tory!’
‘Perhaps I am just realizing my limitations at last. Talking about religion, how’s Cato?’
‘Don’t!’
‘And Colette—how pretty she’s grown.’
‘She didn’t vote either, Christ!’
‘Gerda sends you her good wishes, by the way.’
‘Oh!’
‘And Henry sends his good wishes.’
‘How’s that young squirt?’
‘Oh he’s—he’s much improved— very much improved, I’d say—’
‘He could do with some improvement.’
‘He’s taking his responsibilities very seriously.’
‘What responsibilities? Oh, you mean being rich.’
