Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  The Count greeted Anne and the three of them began to chat.

  Tim Reede was mooching around in his studio over the garage off the Chiswick High Road. Below, as always during the day, there were sounds of voices, of engines. Smells of petrol and oil rose to Tim’s sensitive nostrils and mingled with those of turps and paint. He liked all these smells. He looked at himself in his shaving mirror, over the sink, beside the electric ring. He was wearing a blue paint-stained overall, the uniform which he had worn ever since he had dreamed of saying to himself: I too am a painter. His eyes were as blue as ever but he had a little less hair, and his newly-shaven chin, which had once, with its myriad points of brilliant red, glowed like a barley field, now looked dark, even dirty. He wiped his face with a damp towel. Someone at the Prince of Denmark (that idiot Piglet, Jimmy Roland’s friend) had said to him: You ought to worry more about Daisy. Tim had reflected on this cryptic remark. Well, perhaps it was not so cryptic. There were so many obvious worries in the Daisy area. But was Tim worrying enough? Sometimes he tried to worry more, but it was tempera-mentally difficult. Anyway, where would worrying get them? Daisy didn’t worry. She complained ceaselessly, but she didn’t worry. This was a part of her marvellous magnanimous strength, the strength upon which, Tim knew, he rested. He rested upon her strength, not she on his. She had a kind of deep electric energy which Tim absolutely lacked. He lived upon her energy. If people thought him irresponsible about her, they did not see that she was the strong one. Tim often let Daisy decide things, even if the decision seemed dotty, because he trusted her instincts and because if he decided anything and it went wrong she never stopped blaming him, even if she had agreed with the original idea.

  Just now there were no very clear ideas. Daisy was behind with the rent. Tim could not yet face the prospect of having her with him at the garage. There would be one long row, the usual one-sided row with Tim saying nothing, but feeling bitter and sad. Once Daisy, in a rage, had thrust a rose which he had given her, long thorny stem and all, down the back of his shirt, and that sharp pricking pain all the way down his spine came back to him during those vituperative monologues. Besides, he could not have Daisy here. Brian the garage man vaguely knew that Tim lived in the loft and did not just use it as a studio. Daisy came to lunch there often enough, indeed she was coming today, and she had once stayed with him briefly when she let her room, but if she came permanently and started hanging her underwear out of the window or something (she was incapable of being inconspicuous) Brian might get fed up and point out that the loft was not residential accommodation. Then the ‘local authority’ would become involved (Tim hated authorities), and he would be questioned, fined, ejected, his name mentioned in the paper. All his horrors would descend on him. He would lose his last refuge. Lanthano, he thought, oh lanthano! So it was impossible to have Daisy living here, and indeed neither of them had yet suggested it, though both of them had thought of it.

  Something, however, would have to be done. Tim smiled to himself as he reflected how many times it had come to that; and, well, something always had been done and would doubtless be done now. He had had no teaching this past term and would probably have none next term, though there was the possibility of a two days a week job in September. That was certainly a light on the horizon. Daisy refused to look for a job. She was writing her novel. Tim had nearly had a commission to illustrate a comic cookery book, only then the firm decided not to publish it after all. He had a brief temporary job looking after someone’s little art gallery, sitting at a table while a very occasional visitor dropped in to walk gloomily round the show. But the gallery, which was going bankrupt, could pay him very little and he had to find his fares to Hampstead.

  The cats were going quite well. It was a matter of inventing strong attractive images. He had done several of, as it might be, Perkins sitting on a window ledge beside a vase of flowers (Tim liked painting flowers) with a landscape behind him. The flowers were Odilon Redon, the landscape Rowland Hilder, the cat (Tim hoped) Tim Reede. The result, he had to admit, was tame (not that that mattered from a commercial point of view). He was now developing a more interesting version of Perkins at his toilet, one leg raised vertically, staring impertinently at the spectator. The background was a problem, and somehow the cat’s body refused to inhabit the space (not that that mattered either from a commercial point of view). But there was also the problem of whether there was a commercial point of view. Tim was painting now on wood rescued from rubbish tips. (The cats were no good in water colour.) He used acrylic paint which was expensive. Moreover, his destined clients liked fussy gilt frames which made the mogs look like ‘real pictures’, but Tim could not make such frames himself, and good frames were now hard to find in junk shops. If he bought suitable frames new the finished product was no longer profitable. If he used cheap plain frames the cats looked less like pretty gifts and more like bad paintings. And then, how to market the stuff? He had quarrelled with two gift shops because they wanted a commission which left him almost no profit. Galleries were out of the question. He could not draw attention to himself by exhibiting at the studio. Jimmy Roland, who sometimes helped him, was (according to Piglet) in Paris. Tim tried sometimes to sell his wares in pubs (not the Prince, where he would have felt ashamed). He tried the Chiswick pubs from the Tabard to the Barley Mow, and also the Irish pubs in Kilburn where he put on an Irish accent which he had stowed away somewhere in his unconscious. By this method, he occasionally sold a picture by reducing the price to almost nothing, or more often was told by the publican to clear off. Tim was made utterly miserable by aggressive rudeness. He had not the temperament of a salesman. But what else to do?

  Ebury Street was no more. Gertrude had gone away to the north with her friend Anne Cavidge, so she had told him in a short note replying, after an interval of time, to his laboriously written letter of condolence, and although she might by now be back in London he felt that the links with Ebury Street were broken. Had he ever really thought of those people as his ‘family’? He could think of no method of re-establishing the contact which had once seemed so natural, no pretext on which he could now reenter that house. It had all depended on Guy. He was not needed or wanted there, and no one would henceforth give him a thought. He was not real like they were. Would Gertrude write to ask him how he was getting on? Inconceivable. He had once (in February) rather daringly rung up the Count at his office ‘to say hello’. The Count had asked him how he was getting on and Tim had said fine. He then hoped the Count, whom he liked, might invite him round, but no. Probably the Count never invited anybody, and Tim had not quite had the nerve to suggest meeting the Count in a pub. The Stanley Openshaws were of course too grand, and anyway Janet disapproved of Tim. (He wished now he had taken the opportunity to make friends with William Openshaw.) He thought of ringing up Gerald Pavitt, but his number was not in the book, and Tim had accidentally discovered from a newspaper that Gerald was a world-famous physicist. This fact staggered him. He had vaguely connected Gerald with telescopes, but had never conceived that the rather shaggy nice individual with whom he had had a drink or two at the Wheatsheaf was a great man, considered for a Nobel prize. (They occasionally met by accident in Soho since Gerald, a serious eater, frequented a gourmet restaurant not far from the Prince of Denmark.) Tim felt now that he could not possibly expect Gerald to notice him any more. Balintoy was still away, and anyway Tim felt funny about Balintoy. Tim had not been invited to Moira Greenberg’s wedding. He was well and truly out of the picture. He felt sad about it.

  It was April. Down below in the garage the motors hummed, eager to depart to country lanes. The sun gave a little warmth and Tim no longer wore woollen mittens for painting. The blue skylights revealed in utmost detail the grey lined pattern of the bare boards, the mattress upon which Tim slept and where he woke every morning to think: I’m free. (This meant no longer in Cardiff, a consolation which Tim would carry with him for the rest of his life.) The kitchen table was laid for lunch for two. In the ang
le made by the two sloping roofs and the floor were stores of wood and painting material, neatly stowed. Tim was a neat man. The two vertical end walls were whitewashed. A door painted green and blue by Tim led to outdoor steps and the lavatory below and the forecourt of the garage. There was a radio but no television, which Tim could not have afforded and which he despised anyway as a crime against the visual world. Next to the door was a wooden dresser with plates prettily arranged, and an old trunk for storing clothes. Upon the wall opposite the door he had fixed a big piece of plywood on which he pinned his favourite drawings. These were some of his real drawings, his crucifixion figures, old men feeding pigeons, young men drinking beer, painted girls waiting. These drawings too were waiting.

  Tim had lived now for a long time with himself as a painter. He had been ambitious and ceased to be, he had been disappointed and ceased to be. He knew he was absolutely, and would always be, a painter. What else was he? He was Daisy’s lover, keeper, friend. That was enough for a life. He went on trying, though he never tried very hard. Any artist who is not a beginner faces the problem of enlarging into a working space the line that runs between ‘just begun’ and ‘too late’. The hard work lies in the middle, when preliminaries are done, and the end is not yet enclosing the form. This is the space which longs to collapse, which the artist’s strength must faithfully keep open. Tim was vaguely aware of this, but he was idle and lacked confidence. He was almost but not quite aware that he chose daily to remain mediocre. His efforts tended to be either ‘sketches’ or ‘spoilt’. Yet he kept on drawing and in this activity something purely good, often mislaid, tended to come back. He knew nothing, he read nothing, but he kept on looking. Tim possessed by nature a gift yearned for by sages, he was able simply to perceive! (He did not realize that this was exceptional, he thought everybody could do it.) This gift does not of course ensure that its owner can paint well or indeed at all. In Tim’s case it was almost a hindrance. He got so much pleasure from the external world, he thought sometimes why trouble to paint, it’s all there, there in front of me, unless one’s great, why bother, why not just live happily with Nature so long as one has eyes? Even Cézanne said he could not possibly create the wonderful colours that he saw.

  Tim knew nothing. One of his teachers at the Slade (the one who had said he would make a great faker) had urged him to learn some mathematics, but Tim was lazy and just knew he would find it too hard. However, as for the swallow which flies from Africa back to the English barn where it was born, dark knowings were effective in Tim’s mind. He picked up ideas about ‘form’ from his teachers and fellow students, yet it seemed that he never learnt anything which he had not always known. He had a ‘feeling’ about plants, how their parts connected. He instinctively understood how feathers had to grow to make a wing. His body told him about gravity, about weight, what falling was, what flowing was. He had shirked what might have been a valuable class on anatomy, but when he looked at Perkins or drew Daisy lying partly clothed upon the bed he knew what went on under the skin. He knew about light without looking into learned books. He painted a colour circle when he was five. Perhaps if he could have been persuaded to study geometry he would have learned much to profit and amaze him. Yet, untaught, it was as if in another life he had glimpsed some of the working drawings of God, and in this life had almost but not quite forgotten them.

  When his companions at the Slade had laughed him out of the life class, he took to abstract painting with an obsessive fanaticism. He lived in a sea of graph paper. His squares became dots, pin-pricks, then something invisible. It was (as someone said at the time) like a not very gifted savage trying to invent mathematics. It was as if he wanted to decode the world. His paintings looked like elaborate diagrams yet what were they diagrams of? If he could only cover everything with a fine enough mesh ... If he could only get it right. Sometimes in dreams he thought that he had done so. No one liked these ‘fanatical’ paintings, and in the end for Tim they became a sort of sterile torment. Then one day (he could never explain how) it was as if the mesh began to bend and bulge and ever so quietly other forms came through it. When he returned to organic being it was as to something which had been vastly feeding in captivity. Everything now was plump, enlaced, tropical. Live existence which had been nowhere was now everywhere. Everything curved and undulated and swelled and swayed. He drew human fishes, human fruits, deep seas full of knowing embryos and jigging jelly. No one liked these paintings much either, they said they were derivative which they were. Of course this too was only a phase.

  Someone (it was Jimmy Roland’s sister Nancy) had once said to Tim, ‘You painters must feel as if you are creating the world.’ Tim never felt like that. He felt at his best working moments a sense of total relaxation. Of course he was not creating the world, he was discovering it, not even that, he was just seeing it and letting it continue to manifest itself. He was not even sure, at these good moments, whether what he was doing was ‘reproducing’. He was just there, active as a part of the world, a transparent part. Daisy, who hated music, had once said to denigrate that art, ‘Music is like chess, it’s all there beforehand, all you do is find it.’ ‘Yes,’ said Tim. That was exactly what he felt about painting.

  However by now the days of the ‘mesh’ and of the rediscovery of the world belonged to the far past, though he still occasionally did ink drawings of fat monsters smudged with water colour, or portrayed himself and Daisy as bulbs or sprouting seeds or fish. The ‘good times’ Tim had now were when he was drawing his crucifixion figures. Why did he, in order to care about them, have to think of them as uninvolved spectators of something frightful? He would never see or paint a crucifixion. The great drama and passion of the world had already passed him by; and it occurred to him that the ordeal by which he was to win his Papagena would turn out to be simply this, that there was no ordeal, one simply soldiered on becoming older and balder and less talented. His army service was to grow old in the ranks without glory. Meanwhile there were the great consolations, drawing and Daisy and drink, and going to the National Gallery. The great pictures were Tim’s heaven, where pain became beautiful and calm and wise. The dead Christ lies parchment-pale among the holy women, whose crystal tears shine like jewels upon the canvas.

  But sometimes at night he had a dream of hell. He was in the National Gallery and the pictures were all gone, or all darkened so that the forms could scarcely be discerned. Or else, and this was worst of all, he suddenly saw that they were trivial, valueless, inane.

  ‘Bloody baked beans again,’ said Daisy.

  Tim and Daisy were sitting down to their lunch. Lunch consisted of baked beans on toast, boiled cabbage, brown bread and golden syrup (a favourite of Daisy’s) and a bottle of white wine.

  ‘You said you were tired of spaghetti and potatoes and -’

  ‘Spuds and spadgers fill you up at least. Never mind, this looks delicious. Fill my glass, dear boy.’

  ‘Had a good morning?’ said Tim. Daisy’s arrival always gave him a feeling of festival. He dealt with her glass, then poured the beans onto the toast from a saucepan.

  ‘Fucking awful. How are the pussies getting on?’

  ‘OK. I’ve done four of these.’

  ‘Not bad. I can’t think how you manage to make them look all the same. Actually I like the sticks in-front attitude better.’ Daisy meant Perkins’s way of sitting upright with both back legs projecting rigidly forward along the ground.

  Daisy had decided to look sexy again today. She was wearing a long Indian cotton robe of an intense greenish blue, with a design of stylized brown trees upon it. She had surrounded her eyes with a thick powdery make-up of a matching blue, her Etruscan look. Her dark short hair looked glossy, almost as if it were wet. Her haggard handsome thin face beamed with energy and discontent.

  ‘Why don’t you do some dogs? You did some good sketches of Barkiss and that door-mat animal in the park. Have you lost them?’

  ‘I never lose anything.’

  ‘You’re a
s tidy as an old maid. Why don’t you work them up? There are dog lovers too, you know.’

  ‘Could do.’

  ‘I wonder where old Barkiss is now? The Prince isn’t the same without him. I bet that ghastly American actor took him away in his car. I don’t love any creature except Barkiss and maybe you. Where is he now, that noble animal?’

  ‘But it’s not much good piling up the pix if I can’t sell them.’

  ‘Oh do stop binding. Think of something. How will we eat, where will we sleep?’

  ‘Edward the Confessor slept underneath the dresser, when that began to pall he slept in the hall.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, and don’t stare so, I know I’m a messy eater, you eat like a cat, you’d bury your shit if you could.’

  ‘Don’t be so vulnerable and touchy.’

  ‘I’m not vulnerable and touchy, do you want me to break something? OK, I’m vulnerable and touchy. Well, God will provide. And don’t be so bloody mean with the wine, young Reede.’

  ‘I told you that cookery book fell through.’

  ‘Yes, twice. You’re good at funny drawings -’

  ‘So are you.’

  ‘Don’t start that, boy. You’re good at funny drawings, you could illustrate a language book, you know, English for foreigners or something. Why don’t you go round the publishers and show them some stuff? OK, you’re too frightened. Somebody might be nasty to you. I think you’re the most cowardly person I ever met. I may be a cow, but I’m not a coward.’

  ‘Well, we are poor but we are honest.’

  ‘Honest? You? You’re the biggest liar in North Soho, I can’t say stronger than that. I think you positively like lying, you do it selflessly for its own sake. God, to think that when I first saw those beautiful blue eyes I believed everything you said!’