Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  Gertrude, as if she could hear the same silent music, came down the steps and joined in the dance. Instinctively, hands on hips, they danced with the zigzag snake-like motion of a hay. It was as if other dancers were present to whom, as they passed, they turned their backs until, in the middle of the meadow, solemnly, unsmilingly, they passed each other, reached the extremities of the space and came weaving back. Gertrude’s small bare feet flashed among the blue flowers and it was towards her swift feet that Tim looked each time as he approached her. At last the music ceased, the dance was done, they slowed down and in the centre of the meadow took hands and smiled.

  They had had no lunch. Lunch too had proved impossible. But dinner now proposed itself as a feast. They drank white wine upon the terrace and considered what there was to eat. The bread was stale, but there was minced beef in the fridge, and tomatoes and onions. They were both hungry but there was no hurry. They watched the moon begin to glow, huge and yellow in the still-blue sky. There was a faint gulping of frogs in the bottom of the valley. At this time Tim and Gertrude said almost nothing to each other. They touched each other shyly and looked at each other with great eyes. They spoke of the moon and of the strange illumination of the rocks and how close they seemed at this time of day. They held their breaths and sipped the honey-joy which had been allotted to them in the magic circle of that day.

  Then at a certain moment of darkness and coolness they went inside and Gertrude began to cook, and then, as they sat down hungrily to eat, the conference, as they both knew, had to begin all over again.

  ‘You’re a sweet lover, Tim.’

  ‘So are you. Isn’t it amazing, isn’t it just incredible that this should have happened to us?’

  ‘Yes -’

  ‘I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s much more extreme - it’s - it’s mythological -’

  Gertrude was silent.

  Tim thought, but how can she? He felt almost shocked. He wondered, what is she thinking? When will she suddenly feel ashamed?

  He said, answering his thought, ‘All right, we’ll wait and see. I won’t be “destructive” like you said. Let’s drink. Let’s just let it go on for as long as it will, like the dance. I loved that dance.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘Perhaps we shall never dance again, but at least we have danced that dance among those blue flowers. And now the sky is dark and the moon is shining and I love you. Oh I’m so happy, even if I die tomorrow.’

  Gertrude had taken off the white dress, perhaps it had been a nightdress after all, she had certainly had nothing on underneath it, as Tim had noticed in the meadow, and she had put on a dress which he had not seen before, a flimsy flowing yellow robe with a brown willow-leaf pattern. She had combed her many-patterned hair and patted it into shape. She looked handsome and remote and grave. In the flush of his sense of possession of her, Tim loved and worshipped that remoteness which reminded him now so incongruously of the dignified lady of Ebury Street.

  ‘I don’t want you to die tomorrow, Tim. I don’t want to die tomorrow myself.’

  ‘Well, who cares about tomorrow. Yes, it’s amazing! Wouldn’t they be surprised, the Ebury Street mob, if they knew you’d taken a lover and that the lover was me!’

  Gertrude frowned.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tim. It was a wrong tone, a wrong move. He saw now suddenly before him the face of Guy, puzzled, friendly, as it had so often been when turned upon Tim. He had not wanted to think of Guy, but somehow it had not been necessary to exclude him. Today Guy had simply been absent. But Guy still existed, representing, even in death, another place, an aspect of that impossibility concerning which Tim had cried out earlier. He did not wonder what Gertrude thought about this matter, Gertrude the widow. The weight of her widowhood would all too soon destroy the honey-magic.

  ‘I haven’t taken a lover,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘You mean we won’t make love again. OK. I’ll leave tomorrow. OK.’

  ‘Oh Tim, be serious -’

  ‘I am being serious. Deadly wretchedly serious. I don’t understand you.’

  ‘You must see, a love affair is impossible.’

  ‘Yes, of course, all right, I see, that’s what I’m saying. It’s been magic, it’s lasted a day, an eternal crystal-perfect day that I’ll carry with me forever. And I’ll be grateful to you for ever and ever and ever. But - Gertrude, I can’t be less than I’ve been. I mean, things can’t just suddenly be as they were. I wouldn’t want to be here with you like that. I wouldn’t want to be here at all any more. And of course we couldn’t travel together, I mean I’ve only, I suppose ... really understood it ... this very moment. Oh my God, if we must stop, and we must, I’ll go away tonight.’

  ‘Tim, don’t be a fool.’

  ‘All right, I won’t be tedious or dramatic. I’ll go away tomorrow. And I’ll go with - oh so much gratitude.’

  ‘Oh stop. When I said a love affair was impossible I meant ... if we are to love each other ... we must get married.’

  Time gazed into the solemn brown eyes. Then he did up all the front buttons of his shirt. He pulled down his sleeves and buttoned his cuffs and put both hands on the table and stared at his wrists. He was trying to work something out. ‘But we can’t get married, so we can’t love each other or have an affair.’

  ‘Of course we can get married, it’s possible,’ said Gertrude impatiently. ‘That’s what we’ve got to wait and see about. I mean, we can go on, but only on that assumption, only with that idea, only with that in view. Otherwise it must be, with something as extreme as this, nothing.’

  ‘You mean you would consider marrying me?’

  ‘Yes! You dolt!’ Gertrude got up and noisily piled some plates, then sat down again.

  Tim continued to inspect his wrists. He unbuttoned his cuffs. Then he raised his eyes. ‘Gertrude, will you marry me?’

  ‘Oh Tim, Tim, dear-I love you - but we can’t tell. It may be you’re right that it’s a momentary magic, a delusion we’ve both got. But if we go on together we can only do it if we hope to marry. We can’t play with this thing, it would be horrible to do so, it would be a betrayal, it would be a crime. Are you willing to go on, for a time, and chance it, to stick with the hope?’

  ‘And the risk,’ said Tim. ‘Yes. But, oh Gertrude, the risk - it’s so terrible - if we lose now.’

  ‘The risk - think what I risk - think of the moral risk.’ Tears started into Gertrude’s eyes and she slowly wiped them away with one hand, still looking at him, now almost glaring.

  Tim did not move. He was not quite sure what she meant. He said, ‘My darling, if we go on - well there isn’t any if, we must and will go on. As we go on, what do we do - about them?’

  ‘I’ve thought,’ said Gertrude, and now she sounded almost weary. ‘We won’t say anything yet, perhaps for some time.’

  ‘You mean, keep it a secret?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t like secrets, but it’s better so.’

  ‘While we’re waiting and seeing we won’t want any spectators, will we.’

  ‘No.’ They looked at each other in silence.

  Gertrude was sitting by the roadside. Her bicycle was propped against a steep brambly bank. The sun was hot. In her bicycle basket there was milk, eggs, coffee, tomatoes, cheese, olives, the day’s bread.

  She was sitting on a tuffet of grass, with her back against the bank, in the shade of an apricot tree. She was about half a mile from the house, upon the deserted silent road, and she was thinking. At this time of the morning Tim would be out painting, so she could have had solitude to think back at home, but she preferred to sit beside her bicycle in the road.

  It was now three days since the day of the conferences and the dance and the love-making. There had been more love-making. It was indeed, as Tim had said, extreme. And as Tim had said, mythological, amazing.

  Sometimes she said to herself, ‘What a pickle I’m in,’ as if by using such language she could somehow simplify the situation and make i
t more ordinary. Was she bewitched? The honey-magic had lasted, had grown even more intense and wonderful. She had looked at herself in the mirror and seen a different woman. She remembered something that Guy used to say, perhaps it was a quotation, about one’s will changing the limits of the world, and how the world ‘waxes and wanes as a whole’. Gertrude had changed her world and everything in it was different, not only shown in a different light, but different in its cells, in its atoms, in its deep core.

  There was no doubt about the fact of her being in love with Tim, and Tim being in love with her. This was the real, the indubitable and authoritative Eros: that unmistakable seismic shock, that total concentration of everything into one necessary being, mysterious, uncanny, unique, one of the strangest phenomena in the world. This happening itself was something like a vow, and to this reality she was bound as to a new innocence. She was as if shriven. She had a new consciousness, her whole being hummed with a sacred love-awareness. She loved Tim with passion, with tenderness, with laughter and tears, with all the accumulated intelligent forces of her being; although there were times when she was rational enough to ask herself, well, and what follows from that?

  The odd thing was how pure and clear all that joy had remained in the midst of Gertrude’s dark accompanying preoccupying consciousness of herself as bereaved, as widowed, as in mourning. How did these two things connect? Did they connect? Were they simply, accidentally juxtaposed? Or had one somehow caused the other? And if so, had it caused it in a good way or in a bad way? Tim had spoken of ‘illusions’ which arose out of ‘shock’ or ‘stress’. Had she gone out of her mind with grief and rushed for solace to a wild fantasy? Had her grief changed? She was not sure. Or else, so accustomed to love somebody, had she fallen in love with the first man with whom, after Guy’s death, she had been really alone? How quickly can the past lose its authority, what is its authority? What did it mean to count the weeks, the months, how did time enter here? The magic of the place, the heat, the rocks, presented perhaps a lesser enigma. Tim kept saying that it could not have happened in London S W 1, and that no doubt was true. But any love may be prompted by some chance felicity. It was the connection with Guy that troubled Gertrude, and troubled her deeply, and not only because of something dark and awful which was a grief contaminated now by guilt.

  She had come to France to mourn for Guy, to confront his shade, to sort out the poor sad remnants of his things, pieces of paper with his writing on which she had burnt in the fireplace one morning when Tim was absent, in what they now spoke of as ‘prehistory’. She had burnt those remnants. Had she come then to mourn, but also in a sense to clear Guy away, not to have to fear these further confrontations with his relics? Had she, because the pain was too great, attempted to blot Guy out, and had she thus made a vacancy in her soul into which Tim had come? There were rat-runs of thought here into which Gertrude did not want to enter. She feared some terrible imprisonment of guilt and obsession which she knew would be bad. Guy was dead. Tim was alive. She must not, out of some sentimental self-destructive madness, make of this a machine to honour the dead simply by hurting the living. There was such a thing as just mourning. Guy would have understood these problems very well indeed.

  He had said, ‘I so intensely want you to be happy when I’m gone ... You will pass out of these shadows, I see a light beyond ... They say “he would have wished” has no sense, but it has ... Have the will now to please me in the future when I won’t exist any more.’ And Gertrude had said, ‘I shall never be happy again ... I shall be dead too, walking and talking and dead.’ And he had said, ‘I would very much like you to marry again.’ Guy, her husband, rational, strong, good, the man she had loved and worshipped. Tears came into her eyes, quiet deep tears out of deep wells. She had felt it impossible to live without him. Yet she was living. She had fallen in love with another man, a man as different from Guy as it was possible for one man to be from another.

  Was there any sense in asking, what would Guy think? Gertrude had thought again about Guy and Manfred. She felt less sure now about her theory that Guy had put forward the Count as someone she might marry in order to divert her thoughts from Manfred. It was plausible. Yet would it not be out of character? Gertrude felt giddy for a moment. It was as if she didn’t really know him, enough, any more. All Guy’s wise good words were also compatible with his really not wanting her to marry anybody. There could be little doubt that he had reflected about ‘the suitors’ as he lay dying and reading The Odyssey. He must have passed them in review. Had Tim appeared upon that fateful list? No, Guy would never have thought of Tim. Would he, if he knew now, laugh and wish them luck? What would a shade do, and how can one imagine it as other than a mournful spectator?

  One thing Guy would certainly have disapproved of was the secrecy, the (for that is what it would come to) lies. What would they think? What will they think? This was something which Tim almost maddeningly kept repeating and the reiteration distressed Gertrude because she had to admit that she was worried too. Both of them feared the emergence of their love into the public gaze. A sense of secrecy and conspiracy had grown up between them and influenced them both. They wanted to hide. That was not good. They had decided to stay on at Les Grands Saules, at any rate they had made no plans for leaving. This seemed, for the present, sensible. They must be together, they must be alone, testing a reality which was already for both of them firmly established. There was no shadow of doubt in the clear looks which they gave each other. But other tests would come, and there would be strains and changes. Viewed in a certain light their situation was obscene - and was not that light the general light? Yes, their love would change. Ebury Street would change it. Marriage, if it came, would change it, Gertrude was blessed (and she was thankful for it) with a clear head on the main point. She could not ‘play’ with Tim. If she took him on at all it must be eternally and absolutely. ‘I can’t imagine marriage,’ said Tim. ‘Marriage is unimaginable,’ said Gertrude. This marriage was indeed unimaginable.

  The strength of the ‘mob’ had been shown by the fact that she and Tim, sitting over their wine (they were drinking a good deal), had discussed the whole lot of them one by one even down to the remoter figures such as Peggy Schultz, Rachel Lebowitz, the Ginzburg twins (one was the well-known actor, the nicer one was a lawyer, they were related to Mrs Mount). Of course Tim was afraid of them. What would Moses say? What would the Stanley Openshaws say? What would Manfred say? Gertrude was interested to learn that Gerald Pavitt had been kind to Tim and that Tim was fond of him in a respectful way. She was not surprised to learn that Tim was frightened of Manfred, and that the two he liked best were Balintoy and the Count. Especially the Count.

  The pale thin tall snake-eyed heel-clicking figure of the Count now rose accusingly before Gertrude. His love had touched her, had pleased her, lately had comforted her. She had, before what had now happened, looked forward to seeing him again on her return home. Gertrude had said to Tim, ‘we must keep this a secret,’ and she had added afterwards, ‘till Christmas.’ She did not say, but of course Tim knew, that this was the anniversary. Piety, reason, shame, their private testing of each other seemed to suggest some such delay. To speak out now would be ‘too soon’. And yet - at the end of the year, the Count would propose. Gertrude had already worked this out for herself. He too would be waiting, waiting and watching and hoping. Could she deceive the Count, let him hope vainly, building up dreams, which every smile of hers would add to? If there had been no Tim, would she have loved the Count? Gertrude thrust this useless question from her. Suppose she were to tell the Count about Tim and swear him to secrecy! No, that would be impossible. Or spend the whole of the waiting time with Tim here, or somewhere else, seeing no one? That would be impossible too.

  And then there was Anne. Would she dare to lie to Anne? Tim had rather avoided the subject of Anne and Gertrude guessed that he was frightened of her as well. He could not but see her as an alien power in Gertrude’s life. What would Anne think? Would s
he, Gertrude wondered, be dismayed, be jealous? That was possible. Had Gertrude encouraged Anne to envisage a shared life, herself and Gertrude living together, growing old together? Yes; and Gertrude had wanted this too, and ardently. She recalled their talks in Cumbria, their walks beside the sea, the rescue from the waves. Was she not bound to Anne? Surely there could be no question of her losing Anne? This idea was suddenly acutely painful and Gertrude put it away. Anne had come to her in a time of dereliction for them both. Anne had lost her convent ‘family’, had lost her God. Perhaps even now, led on by Gertrude, Anne was thinking how she and her old college friend would henceforth be inseparable. These speculations troubled Gertrude very much. But herein too she drew comfort from Anne herself. Anne Cavidge was rational and strong. She would do all things well. She would live her own life. She would stay near Gertrude forever. And she would learn to know Tim and to love him because he was Gertrude’s husband.

  ‘Husband’: a great word, a dream word. Would she stay the course, would Tim? Was it not foolish to worry so intensely about the motives and results of what might after all never happen? How would it be? Gertrude had preached to him enough about how they could both work, he at his painting, she at her teaching. She might even now, she felt, go back to teaching in a school. ‘We’ll work.’ ‘I’ll always be a bad painter.’ ‘I want you to become a good painter.’ ‘If you want that you mustn’t marry me.’ ‘All right, you shall work as a bad painter!’ They had already been practising this regime. Tim went out every day to paint, Gertrude did the housekeeping and looked at her Urdu grammar. She made no progress however, it was too difficult without a teacher. She lived with the event, the fact, the new being. She loved Tim, his childishness, his gaiety, his wry humility, his animal playfulness, his love for her, his talent (for she believed in this), his lack of pretension, or ambition, or affectation, or dignity. It was not (and she had asked herself this question too) just a profane love, the sudden lust of a lonely older woman for a younger man. It was a deep true love which could only envisage permanence as its outcome. Of course she could have a casual affair with Tim. Indeed Tim had expected it. But that was only out of his modesty, out of a feckless future-less aspect of him which she could not help loving too. Somehow life was easy with Tim.