by Iris Murdoch
“Elizabeth must be very beautiful now,” said Marcus, helping himself to a piece of cherry cake. Although he had cravenly never asserted his rights over his ward, he still felt about her the curious excitement which had come to him when, after Julian’s death, he had apprehended himself as the quasi-father of a very pretty and clever child. Carel had soon stolen the little waif away. But she had had her place in Marcus’s most private dreams. While she was still a child he had corresponded with her regularly, and he had got used to connecting her with a certain vague warm sense of the future. Elizabeth was somehow in reserve, something still to come. He felt now in his bones the thrill of that old innocent possessiveness, mingled with an even more ancient fear of his elder brother.
“All that illness may have wrecked her looks,” said Norah. “Some inherited defect there. Shouldn’t be surprised if she died young like her father.” Norah, whose good sense sometimes issued in judgements of a surprising callousness, had never liked Elizabeth: a sly, little fairy thing, she called her. “Quite apart from anything else, you ought to know more about Elizabeth’s state of health.”
Some four years ago Elizabeth had developed a weakness in the back, the sort of thing which is usually called a “slipped disc” at first. Her ailment had resisted diagnoses and treatment. She now wore a surgical corset and was under permanent orders to “take things very easily”.
“You’re quite right,” said Marcus. He was beginning to feel a special pain which was the urgency of his desire to see Elizabeth again and to see her soon. She had been sleeping in him. Now she was waked. He felt guilt and puzzlement about his long defection.
“And then there’s her education,” Norah went on. “What do we know about that?”
“Well, Carel was teaching her Latin and Greek at one point, I know.”
“I’ve never approved of teaching inside the family. It’s far too emotional. Teaching should be done by professionals. Besides, a bit of ordinary school life would have done the girl good. I’m told she hardly ever goes out at all. So bad for her. With that sort of condition people simply must make an effort and help themselves. Giving in and lying back is the worst thing of all.”
Norah, a retired headmistress, believed in the universal efficacy of self-help.
“Yes, it must be very lonely for her,” said Marcus. “It’s just as well she’s always had Muriel for company.”
“I don’t like that either. Those girls are too much together. Cousinage, dangereux voisinage.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Oh, just that I think it’s an unhealthy friendship. They ought to see more young men.”
“It’s a change to hear you prescribing young men, my dear Norah! Actually, I’ve always had the impression those two girls didn’t get on too well together.”
“Well, Elizabeth is difficult and spoilt. And I’m afraid Muriel has changed a good deal for the worse. If only she’d gone to the university and got herself a worthwhile job.”
“Well, that wasn’t Carel’s fault,” said Marcus. He did not altogether like his elder niece. There was something a little sardonic about her which he mistrusted. He suspected her of mocking him. Muriel was however Norah’s favourite, and had even been for a while, as a result of Marcus’s good offices, a pupil in Norah’s school. Though an exceptionally able girl, she had nevertheless refused the university place which she could easily have had, and had become, of all things which Norah abhorred, a shorthand typist. Marcus thought that Norah had been a little too urgently ambitious for Muriel. Perhaps she had been a little too fond of Muriel.
Marcus, who was himself the headmaster of a small independent school in Hertfordshire, had made Norah’s acquaintance in the course of his professional duties. He liked and admired her. Only lately he had begun, imperceptibly and uneasily, to apprehend her as a problem. A woman of immense energies, Norah had been forced by ill health into an early retirement, and had installed herself in a decrepit eighteenth-century house in East London. Of course, she at once found herself other employments, far too many of them, according to her doctor. She did voluntary work for the local council, she was on library committees, housing committees, education committees, she busied herself with benefiting prisoners and old-age pensioners and juvenile delinquents. But she still gave the impression of someone restless and insufficiently absorbed. Emotions which had previously supplied the energy for her work now stalked and idled. Marcus noticed in her a new sentimentality which, ill-matched with her old persona of a brisk sensible pedagogue, produced an effect of awkwardness, of something almost pathetic or touching. She displayed a more patent affection for former pupils, a more patent affection, he nervously noticed, for himself. And just lately she had made the alarming and embarrassing suggestion that he should move into the vacant flat at the top of her house. Marcus had returned an evasive reply.
“I’m afraid Muriel is rather typical of the modern young,” Norah was going on. “At least she’s typical of the brighter ones. She’s naturally a strong-willed high-principled person. She ought to make a decent citizen. But somehow it’s all gone wrong. She has no social place. It’s as if her sheer energy had taken her straight over the edge of morality. That’s the sort of thing you ought to discuss in your book.”
Marcus had taken two terms’ leave from his school in order to write a book about which he had been reflecting for a long time, a philosophical treatise upon morality in a secular age. It would, he hoped, create a certain impression. It was to be a fairly brief but very lucid and dogmatic work, designed to resemble Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in its streamlined rhetoric and epigrammatic energy.
“I know what you mean about Muriel,” he said. “I’ve seen it in other clever young people. As soon as they start to reflect about morals at all they develop a sort of sophisticated immoralism.”
“Of course that doesn’t necessarily make them delinquent. Deliquency has other causes, usually in the home. That Peshkov boy, for instance, seems to me a natural delinquent, if you don’t mind my being rude about one of your former pupils! In his case—”
Marcus groaned to himself while Norah went on explaining her views of the causes of delinquency. It was not that Marcus was bored by this, but he did not like being reminded of Leo Peshkov. Leo was one of Marcus’s failures. Norah in the course of her work on local housing problems had discovered the Peshkovs, father and son, in an unhygienic den from which she had moved them, first to a church hostel, and later, with the connivance of the Bishop, to their present quarters at the Rectory, just before the arrival of the odd-looking crippled priest beforementioned. Leo, then a schoolboy, had been attending a rather unsatisfactory local institution, and Norah had asked Marcus to make a vacancy for him at his own school. In fact, Marcus and Norah had paid for Leo’s education, but this was not known to the Peshkovs.
Once at the school, Leo had played the clever wayward boy in a style which somehow got through Marcus’s professional defences. Marcus was not deficient in self-knowledge and he was not ignorant of the more sophisticated hypotheses of modern psychology. Tolerant of himself, he was well aware of the subtle and important part which is played in the make-up of the successful teacher by a certain natural sadism. Marcus had taken his own measure as a sadist, he understood the machinery, and he had perfect confidence in his expertise. He was a good teacher and a good headmaster. But a sadism which in the ordinary hurly-burly of human relations remains within rational limits may surprise its proprietor as soon as the perfect partner appears on the scene.
Leo was the perfect partner. His particular brand of cunningly defiant masochism fitted but too well the peculiarities of Marcus’s temperament. Marcus punished him and he came back for more. Marcus appealed to his better feelings and attempted to treat him as an adult. Too much emotion was generated between them. Marcus was confiding and affectionate, Leo was rude, Marcus was blindingly angry. Leo stayed out his time, a troublemaker of genius. Marcus had destined him for the university, to read French an
d Russian. At the last moment, and with the connivance of the mathematics master whom Marcus, exasperated with himself, fell to treating as a rival, Leo went to a technical college in Leicestershire to study engineering. He was rumoured not to be doing well.
“It’s all part of the breakdown of Christianity,” Norah was concluding. “Not that I mind its disappearing from the scene. But it hasn’t turned out as we thought when I was young. This sort of twilight-of-the-gods atmosphere will drive enough people mad before we get all that stuff out of our system.”
“I wonder. Do we really want to get it all out of our system?” said Marcus, banishing the image of the disastrous boy. He found Norah’s brisk sensibleness of an old Fabian radical a bit bleak at times. The cleancut rational world for which she had campaigned had not materialized, and she had never come to terms with the more bewildering world that really existed. Marcus, who shared many of her judgements, could not help being a little fascinated by what she had called the twilight of the gods. Could it be that the great curtain of huge and misty shapes would be rolled away at last, and if it were so what would be revealed behind? Marcus was not a religious believer, but he was, as he sometimes wryly put it, an amateur of Christianity. His favourite reading was theology. And when he was younger he had felt a dark slightly guilty joy in having a priest for a brother.
“Yes we do,” said Norah. “The trouble with you is that you’re just a Christian fellow-traveller. It’s better not to tinker with a dying mythology. All those stories are simply false, and the oftener that is said in plain terms the better.”
They had differed about this before. Indolent, unwilling now to argue, Marcus realized sadly that his tea was over. He turned a little toward the fire, wiping his fingers on a stiff linen napkin.
He murmured, “Well, I shall go and see Carel tomorrow and I shall insist on seeing Elizabeth.”
“That’s right, and don’t take no for an answer. After all, you’ve called three times now. I might even come with you. I haven’t seen Muriel for some time and I’d like to have a straight talk with her. If there’s any trouble about Elizabeth I really think you should consider taking legal advice. I don’t say that your brother should be unfrocked or certified. But he must be made to behave a little more like a rational being. I think I’ll have a word with the Bishop about it, we often meet on the housing committee.”
Norah had risen and was gathering up the plates, now furred with golden cake-crumbs and greengage jam. Marcus was warming his hands and wrists at the fire. It was colder in the room.
“I wonder if you heard that odious rumour about Carel,” said Norah, “that he was having a love affair with that coloured servant.”
“Pattie? No. It’s impossible.”
“Why is it impossible, pray?”
Marcus giggled. “She’s too fat.”
“Don’t be frivolous, Marcus. I must say, I can’t get over her being called O’Driscoll when she’s as black as your hat.”
“Pattie’s not all that black. Not that it matters.”
Marcus had heard the rumour but had not believed it. Carel’s peculiarities were not of that kind. He was a chaste man, even puritanical. Here Marcus knew his brother because he knew himself. He rose to his feet.
“Oh, Marcus, you aren’t going are you? Why not stay the night? You don’t want to go all the way back to Earls Court in this frightful fog.”
“Must go, work to do,” he mumbled. And when, some ten minutes later, he was walking over pavements sticky with frost, his lonely steps resounding inside the heavy cloak of the fog, he had forgotten all about Norah and felt instead the warm seed of joy in his heart which was the prospect of seeing Elizabeth again.
CHAPTER THREE
“SO SORRY TO bother you. My name is Anthea Barlow. I’m from the pastorate. I wonder if I could see the Rector for a little minute?”
“I’m afraid the Rector is not seeing anybody at present.”
“Perhaps I could leave him a note then. You see I really—”
“I’m afraid he hasn’t got round to dealing with any letters yet. Perhaps you could try again later.”
Pattie closed the door firmly upon the faintly wailing, faintly fluttering figure in the fog. She was a hardened door-keeper. Used to this sort of scene, she had forgotten it the next moment. Upstairs she could hear the sound of the little tinkling hand-bell which Elizabeth used to summon Muriel. Retrieving the slipper which had come off as she crossed the hall, Pattie flip-flopped back towards the kitchen.
Pattie was nervous and uneasy. The constant noise of the underground railway jolted her by day and disturbed her dreams by night. Ever since their arrival the fog had enclosed them, and she still had very little conception of the exterior of the Rectory. It seemed rather to have no exterior and, like the unimaginable circular universes which she read about in the Sunday newspapers, to have absorbed all other space into its substance. Venturing out on the second day she had, to her surprise, been unable to discover any other buildings in the vicinity. The fog hummed intermittently with mysterious sounds, but there was nothing to see except the small circle of pavement on which she stood and the red brick facade of the Rectory, furred with frost. The side wall of the Rectory was of concrete, where it had been sliced off from another building during the war. Pattie’s gloved hand touched the corner where the concrete met the brick and she saw a shape to her right which she knew must be the tower built by Christopher Wren. She could just see a gaping door and a window in the dark yellow haze.
Walking along a little further she found herself in a waste land. There were no houses, only a completely flat surface of frozen mud, through which the roadway passed, with small humps here and there under stiff frozen tarpaulins. It seemed to be a huge building site, but an abandoned one. Straying from the pavement, Pattie’s feet crunched little cups of ice and frozen weeds which looked like Victorian ornaments under their icy domes. Frightened of the solitude and afraid of losing her way she trotted hastily back to the shelter of the Rectory. She passed nobody on the road.
The problem of shopping still remained unsolved. Shopping was for Pattie a natural activity, a fundamental form of her contact with the world. Never organized or systematized, it had been a daily ritual, and rushing out again for something forgotten a little busy pleasure. Without it she felt like a hen in a battery. Some instinctive bustling movement was denied her. It appeared that there were no shops anywhere near the Rectory, and she had not yet been able to discover anyone who delivered. She had still to rely upon Eugene Peshkov who strode out into the haze each morning bearing Pattie’s list and returned later with all her requirements. The sight of the big man, smiling for her approval, with the bulging shopping bags one in each hand, was very consoling, only now Pattie had to be more business-like and make sure she did not forget anything. The needs of the household were in fact simple, even Spartan. Carel was a vegetarian and lived on grated carrot and eggs and cheese and whole-meal biscuits. His meals were, at his own wish, of an unvarying monotony. Pattie herself lived on beans on toast and sausages. She did not know what Muriel and Elizabeth ate. Elizabeth did not like to have Pattie in her room, and the girls, following a long tradition, cooked their own meals over a gas ring. It was another sign of their tribal separateness.
Pattie had been born thirty years before in an attic room in a small house in an obscure industrial town in the centre of England. She had not been a welcome visitor to her mother, Miss O’Driscoll. Miss O’Driscoll, who had herself arrived in the world under similar auspices, knew at least that her own father had been a labourer in Liverpool and her maternal grandfather had been a peasant in County Tyrone. Miss O’Driscoll was a Protestant. The identity of Pattie’s father had been, during Miss O’Driscoll’s pregnancy (it was not her first), a matter for interesting speculation. The arrival of the coffee-coloured infant settled, up to a point, the question of paternity. Miss O’Driscoll distinctly remembered a Jamaican. As she could never, being much given to the drink, recall his surna
me the notion of Pattie’s bearing it had never arisen. In any case her father was a spectral entity who had, while Pattie was still a pinpoint of possibilities inside Miss O’Driscoll’s belly, departed to London with the intention of taking a job on the underground.
Pattie was soon “in need of care and protection”. Miss O’Driscoll was quite affectionate as a mother but far from single-minded. She shed her usual tears and heaved her usual sigh of relief when the little brown brat was taken away from her and put into an orphanage. She occasionally visited Pattie there to shed more tears and to exhort her to be a good girl. Miss O’Driscoll was given to being Saved, at intervals, and when these fits were on would discourse fervently about the Precious Blood at the orphanage gates, and even burst into pious song. After a while, being once more in the family way, her visits ceased and she died of a disease of the liver, together with Pattie’s unborn younger brother.
Throughout her childhood Pattie was sick with a misery so continual that she failed to recognize it as a sort of disease. No one was especially unkind to her. No one beat her or even shouted at her. Bright brisk smiling women dealt with her needs, buttoning and unbuttoning her clothes when she was little, issuing her with sanitary pads and highly simplified information about sex when she was older. Although she was very backward her teachers were patient with her. Classified as mentally retarded, she was moved to another school where her teachers were even more patient with her. Of course the other children teased her because she was “black", but they never actually bullied her. Usually they ignored her.
