Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  They had walked, got drunk, made love. It had all the marks of a secret affair. Indeed it was a secret affair. The strange passion which had come to them in France with such sudden urgent wing-beats was still there, that intense inexplicable mutual attraction of carnal beings. The indubitable Eros had not failed or fled. They made love more frenziedly, with closed eyes, groaning against each other. Then leaping apart almost with suspicion and dressing hastily as if to make an escape. Tim was now surprised by Gertrude’s passion, which in France he had somehow, under the sign of that amazing change, taken for granted. In Ebury Street it was something very odd, and he felt that she must feel it so. Besides, the flat at Ebury Street was terrible to Tim, full of accusing memories, and must be far more so to her. Neither of them spoke of this.

  In spite of his policy of lanthano and his cheerful ability to say what was not the case, Tim had never before concealed his relationship with a woman. He could not cope with the secrecy, which they did not discuss or make a jest of. It filled him with terrible doubts. Yes, one day, sometime, gradually, he would be introduced into the circle of Gertrude’s acquaintance as a friend, then as a special friend, then as a fiancé. They had agreed that they could not love except in the prospect of marriage, only that vista would save their great love from despair and corruption. But he had felt the vista closing. They had begun to live in the present, as doomed lovers do. Unhappiness rose steadily about them like a sea.

  In all this, Tim never said to himself that they had made a commonplace mistake, that of taking a trivial lustful fancy for a great love. He still believed in the great love. It was just that not every great love can make itself a place and a way in the world. He often thought, in this connection, of the rocks near Les Grands Saules and of the crystal pool and the Great Face. Somehow it had all started there; and herein he made a distinction. The Great Face had lasted in his mind as a reality, he connected it with his work, with his being as an artist. He recalled its strange configuration, the pale round rock with its wet pitted surface, the mossy ‘pencil lines’ rising up like pillars, the dark cleft above with hanging ferns and creepers blurring the further ascent of the cliff into places unknown. The numinous power of the rock shook him, even now in memory (he could see it with the utmost distinctness in his mind’s eye), with a reverence which was a kind of love. There had been as it were an announcement of truth, and he felt still a magnetic tension as of a persisting bond between himself and the rock. He could believe that the rock existed now, continued to be, quiet and alone, shadowed and gleaming in the sun, darkened in the warm night. About the crystal pool he felt differently. His fear of the Great Face was an awe inseparable from reverence. His fear of the pool, for he feared it, was different, sharper, a fear of what was magical, dangerous. He found it hard to imagine that the pool was there at this moment, and that perhaps a bird was drinking from it, a snake swimming in it.

  Trying to make sense of what had happened in the later days of his despair he had sometimes thought: we were simply bewitched, after Gertrude swam in that pool. It was like a drug, a love-elixir. Something that was there bewitched us, perhaps quite casually, we have been temporarily deranged, and now the effects are wearing off. This would have been one way of looking at the matter. But in his deepest heart Tim rejected it. That danger had not touched them. It had not been like magic, it was not magic, although it was in the ordinary sense magical, enchanting. There was absolute truth in the thing, something of wholeness and goodness which called to him from outside the dark tangle of himself. He loved Gertrude with a love that was better than himself. There was a self-authenticating ring about it all, a certainty which he had not felt before. This expressed itself in him as joy; and he felt it even as late as the time when he and Gertrude were getting drunk together in the Harrow Road.

  But what is true and good can be bodily destroyed, leaving its truth and its goodness as a pure fine aura in the world of concepts. He and Gertrude could not support their love, could not live it out. She wavered, he despaired. If only, he kept thinking, it were a little longer after Guy’s death, another few months and I might have been saved. Yet, another few months and Gertrude would have been a different woman, her shaken soul not tuned to that precise key wherein it vibrated with Tim’s. That it should have been accidental did not dismay him. He was wise enough to know that mutual love depends on accidents, and this fact alone does not make it fragile. But he felt sad, almost bitter, to think that perhaps the sheer proximity of Guy, that strange commanding absence, had exercised the fatal power.

  They had both, in their feverish ‘holiday’, foreseen the end. They had their lines ready. Tim could not have begun that conversation. Gertrude began it. But once she did so he knew what he had to say. Looking back it seemed to Tim that he had displayed courage. Yet what was the alternative? He could have wept and begged. That would have put the end off for a while, but only for a while. He had seen irritation and annoyance in Gertrude’s eyes. He dreaded like the pains of hell the sight of hatred there. He saw how Gertrude was caught. She could take him as a lover but not as a husband. She wanted now to return to her old pattern of life, to her old and dear friends, to what was after all her family. If he overstayed his welcome he would become a hated encumbrance. And he had been told, as clearly as Gertrude could bear to tell him, to go.

  He thought, I shall never now be as I once was, simply happy, like a dog. I never really believed she would endure, he thought. And he believed two incompatible things, that Gertrude had loved him wholly and perfectly, and that she had not loved him enough.

  Lying naked in Daisy’s arms in a warmth of sweat upon which the cool airs played from the evening window Tim said to himself, if we could die now we could be conveyed to hell just as we are, packaged and ready. Oh how I wish we could die now.

  ‘What are you thinking, Blue Eyes?’

  ‘About death and hell.’

  ‘You’re a merry fellow.’

  ‘You remember about Papagena and Papageno?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think we’ve had our ordeal.’

  ‘Sez you. You’ll be off again at the next flicker of skirt. Gertie just got you started.’

  ‘You’ve been very kind, very sweet.’

  ‘Ha, ha. I’m just so fed up with men I don’t care.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Let’s go to the Prince of Denmark.’

  ‘Yes, let’s. The old Prince is lovely on a summer evening like this.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS DONE. Gertrude McCluskie, who had become Gertrude Openshaw, was now Gertrude Reede. Tim and his wife stared at each other in amazement, dismay, joy, embarrassment, terror. The marriage took place at a registry office. The witnesses were Anne, Gerald, the Count, Mrs Mount, Janet and Stanley, and Moses Greenberg. They asked Manfred, but he had to be in Brussels on business.

  The marriage was in July. It was now early August. The resolution taken by Tim and Gertrude to make an end of their love had proved a weak one. As they a hundred times said later, they came together again because they could not keep away from each other, could not do without each other. The illness was too extreme, the affinity too deep, the need too violent, the destiny too relentless: they employed many such words smiling at each other and holding hands. Tim had only managed to depart on that night, and Gertrude to tolerate, to survive his departure, because a secret voice in each of them said: this is not the end. The parting was a drama which they ‘had’ to enact. It was a necessary strategy of the Eros who held them in bond and to which they knew in secret from themselves that they had to be true. They had to prove how essential each one was to the other, had to try to do without and to find it impossible. It was an ordeal, they said, through which they had passed with flying colours, and the idea of banners held aloft appealed here to both of them. Tim drew for her many pictures of himself and Gertrude meeting each other with flags as upon a battlefield, or dancing together among the blue flowers.r />
  The operation had of course taken some time. Neither of them could resist behaving like a lovelorn swain. Tim walked along Ebury Street late at night and looked up at the lighted windows. He did not intend to call or even to meet Gertrude by accident. He just had to torment his pained heart in this way. He had said heroically that he would ‘do it’, he would perform the act of departure so as to take the moral burden of it away from her. Later he terribly regretted this and saw his rash action as a sort of inexplicable conceited initiative. If only he had waited everything would have been quite different on the next day. Gertrude was only testing him, prompting him to tell her firmly that everything was perfectly all right. He ought to have taken charge of her faith and her hope. Gertrude too thought, why did I say all those things, I didn’t even think them, it was a sort of mechanical tirade. I drove him away and now I’ve lost him and the light and joy of life, an innocent good happiness which I might have achieved, has gone away with him forever. And she said in her heart to Guy, you told me to be happy, but you see I can’t be. And this thought was sometimes a sort of consolation.

  Anne did not come back to the flat, though they met there and Gertrude told Anne that Tim had gone and it was over. They did not discuss the matter. Though Gertrude begged her to return, Anne stayed on in her hotel. She was negotiating for a little two-room flat in St John’s Wood. Moses Greenberg dealt with the contract. Gertrude inspected the flat. She saw Anne each day. They discussed furniture, curtains. Their friendship was in a sort of ‘air pocket’ which they knew would soon pass. The Count was another matter. Gertrude had, as she had intended to, seen him on the day after Tim’s flight. She had rung him up at the office and they had lunch together. The Count knew from her voice what had happened. And when they were together it was plain to Gertrude that the Count must have known about Tim. And the Count knew that she knew of this knowledge: of course neither of them mentioned Tim’s name, and the only cloud in the Count’s smiling eyes was (Gertrude guessed) the shadow of a guilt he felt for not having accepted her precious invitation. He blamed himself for having acted less than perfectly, for not having done what a Polish gentleman ought to have done: to have obeyed his lady’s call, even though it be to view his rival. The Count, as it turned out, had ample chances later on to display his qualities as a Polish gentleman, but at this stage neither he nor Gertrude knew what a reversal the future held. Gertrude felt a little glad that she could so easily make him be happy. They went to a small Italian restaurant off Wardour Street, drank a good deal (neither could eat much) and talked about politics, Poland, London, their childhoods, the Count’s work, Gerald’s theories, Anne’s flat. The Count told Gertrude the story of his brother’s death in the war. He had never told this as a story to anybody. It was the first time he had been alone with Gertrude, other than briefly, since Guy died. It was indeed the first time that they had talked to each other for so long, so easily and openly and with so frank a warmth of affection. The Count went back late to the office in a daze of joy.

  However Gertrude’s feeling of return to the natural world of her dear friends did not last her long. Tim had sown within her some special seed of discontent. She could not be as she once was. Tim had opened a vista of a kind of pleasure, a vista of youth, which was new to her. He had been a wonderful foreigner in her life. And passion tormented her, she could not have expected or imagined such a violent revival of physical passion. She did the sensible things which she had planned, she restored her existence to its old rational patterns. She invited les cousins et les tantes and they seemed as usual, throning her in their esteem, loving, merry, unsurprised and blessedly familiar. Yet the things which she had told herself she so much needed were not enough for her and soon seemed empty. She had felt unable to go on without the approval of the Count and Anne. The Count’s approval, now that she had it back, seemed less than totally essential. And about Anne she had, especially after Anne had refused to return to the flat, larger views. She and Anne would always be riding together in that indestructible chariot. Only since it was so indestructible there was perhaps no need to let it run over her dreams. The fact was that she still wanted, and went on wanting, that slim young blue-eyed redhead, and nothing else in the world would do.

  The pattern of Tim’s adventures was similar but different. He stayed two days with Daisy, during which time they were continually drunk. Then they began to quarrel as usual. Daisy’s room became intolerable to him. It was desperately hot and stuffy (the hot weather was continuing) and smelt of sweaty clothes and cheap wine. Tim had not the heart to clean or tidy. Finally he left saying he was returning to the studio (which he didn’t have to leave after all) and that he would see Daisy in the Prince of Denmark. He did not go back to the studio. He went to stay in a cheap hotel in Praed Street (not very far in fact from where Anne was staying, only they never met). Staying in the hotel, he had money for once, gave him a crazy detached anonymous feeling which seemed at first to soothe his grief. But soon the idleness and homelessness began to make him feel blackly miserable and mad. He wandered about London and drank in pubs. In the evenings he went to the Prince of Denmark and sat with Daisy and got drunk. Daisy made jokes and cursed the world. She seemed to be talking to herself, uninterested in whether Tim was there or not. Jimmy Roland joined them on two evenings. On the second evening Tim’s old flame Nancy, Jimmy’s sister, turned up and was insulted by Daisy. Then Jimmy disappeared to Paris on art business taking Nancy and Piglet with him.

  Both Tim and Gertrude were now looking for each other, only neither could quite acknowledge that this was what was happening. Gertrude was almost ready to say to herself: I have tested the craving and it has survived so why not have what I want? As they both kept returning compulsively to places where they had been together they were likely to meet. Once they visited the same pub in Chiswick on the same day but at different times. Chance could have ordained a prolonged separation however. What they would then have done, they often discussed later, always concluding that they would soon have broken down and communicated by the letters or telephone calls or abject knockings on doors which they were always rehearsing in their minds. As it was their search did not last unendurably long. They met finally in the British Museum, when Tim found Gertrude one morning sitting on a seat near the Rosetta Stone.

  The joy of that meeting was, for both, a final proof. In a second all the black misery, the anxiety, the fear vanished as at a celestial trumpet call. The sad old world was folded up, a golden heaven unrolled spotty with suns and stars. There was no need of words. They took each other’s hands, unaware of people passing, and were indeed perhaps invisible in the curious and majestic darkness which pervades this part of the museum and perhaps emanates from the Egyptian antiquities. They caressed each other’s hands and wrists, and looked into each other’s eyes.

  Gertrude’s final difficulty, as she put it to herself, had now nothing to do with Anne or the Count or with what would be thought by les cousins et les tantes. It had to do with Guy. She found that her relation with Guy so far from having ceased or been frozen or consigned to memory was alive and changing. Her feelings now about the trio, Tim, Guy and herself, were quite different from what they had been in France and different from what they had been on her return to Ebury Street and different again from what they had been when she told Tim that it was all ‘impossible’. On the last occasion she had felt quite simply accused by Guy’s bitter shade. Guy himself had said, though he had said it to comfort her, that ‘what he would have wished her to do’ would still make sense after he was dead. He had said he wanted her to be happy, and had spoken of marriage and the Count. Gertrude had worked it out that whether or not Guy had commended the Count so as to protect her from Manfred, and whether or not he had really wanted her to marry the Count or to marry at all, he certainly ‘would not have wished’ her to marry Tim! This thought was not a direct cause of her rejection of Tim, it appeared rather as a strong spontaneous element in the state of mind which pictured Tim as ‘impos
sible’, and was part of her sense that she was falling in love with Guy all over again.

  Now with Tim lost and found Gertrude had changed again. She felt that she had reached a position whence she could judge the previous changes and understand them. Her strange love for absent Guy had not diminished, it had even perhaps increased, but it was purged of much of the painful anxiety and bitter speculation which had made it earlier almost like a hostile calculating love, a love relation in which he was angry and she resentfully compliant. There had been, she felt, a kind of madness in that relation, it was almost like a haunting. Now she felt more gently and naturally separated from Guy, more able to look towards him quietly and tenderly; and she rested in the certainty that her connection with him would remain alive and subject to change as all living things are, as long as she herself existed. It was not that she felt that she now carried Guy in her or with her or ‘lived’ him. They were separated. But it was now as if she said to him across that space: I love you, put up with me, it’s just me, I have to go on living and making decisions without you, and I expect I shall do all sorts of things which you think are stupid, but that’s how it is. And Gertrude felt the pain of her loss now as a purer cleaner pain, like a cleaned and disinfected wound.