Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  How acute she is, thought Anne. I am acting a part. Oh such a dry desolate part. She said, ‘I’m sorry, darling -’

  ‘I’m not generous. I’m destructive and spiteful. I want to get out of the mess I’ve made. I want to see Tim as impossible, to know he’s had a chance and rejected it. I can’t explain. Sometimes we need a scapegoat. I want to save myself. It isn’t generosity, and you don’t think so. You can see what a miserable muddle I’m in.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Anne. ‘I can’t find the right words. I am trying. ’ She looked at Gertrude’s dusky warm cheeks and handsome strong profile in the dressing-table mirror. Gertrude had dressed carefully, chosen a bracelet, a necklace.

  Gertrude came and sat beside her on the bed. She took Anne’s hands and looked into her eyes. ‘Your hands are cold. And look, that burn hasn’t healed. You ought to let Victor look at it.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How lovely you look in your blue dressing-gown, it’s like an evening dress. Blue suits you. Wasn’t I clever to choose it for you?’

  ‘Yes, very -’

  ‘Anne, happiness has gone away. You first made me feel it was possible again. But I grasped a fake happiness, a wrong happiness -’

  ‘You will find the possibility, the reality.’

  ‘Guy said he wanted me to be happy -’

  ‘Yes, yes -’

  ‘Now I feel it would be a crime - Oh Anne, I know you have your troubles, I know you haven’t been able to get a job, but don’t worry about that. I want all your attention. I’m selfish enough and ruthless enough for that. We’ll get you a job later, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’m not worrying about jobs.’

  ‘It is all right, isn’t it, darling Anne?’

  ‘Yes, whatever it is!’

  ‘I mean you and me, forever, the old alliance?’

  ‘Yes, of course!’

  ‘You’ll stay with me always won’t you, I can’t exist without you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, you’ll stay?’

  ‘Yes - Gertrude, I’m sorry, I wish I were better -’ Tears sprang into Anne’s eyes.

  ‘Better! You’re perfect. It’s me that’s all wrong. That terrible terrible mistake, upsetting everything and everybody. I feel I shall never get over it. Don’t cry, my heart.’

  ‘You’ll recover,’ said Anne, dashing away the tears. ‘We all love you.’

  ‘Yes, I’m very lucky. Everyone has rallied round, of course, they’re proved right, but they’re so affectionate, so kind. I’ve been such a nuisance to you, to Manfred, to the Count.’

  ‘Nonsense. Did you have a nice evening with Stanley and Janet?’

  ‘Yes. The Count was there. He’s a wonderful being. You know, there’s a lot to discover in that man.’

  ‘Yes.’ Anne released her hands. For a moment she stroked her friend’s shining brown hair. ‘Did you talk to him at all about what you’ve been saying to me, about settling down and being sure that Tim has had a chance - ?’

  ‘Yes. We talked when he came here that day -’

  ‘Oh yes, when I had to go out.’

  ‘The Count is so scrupulous. He was positively arguing on Tim’s side. In fact he made me feel it all the more my duty.’

  He would! thought Anne. ‘Then you must do it.’

  ‘Yes, but how? Anne, dear, would you - would you mind going back to that place, to that flat?’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ said Anne. ‘Can’t you write?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Gertrude. She moved back onto her chair and started fingering her bracelet, turning it round and round. ‘I suppose I could write. But I would want to be sure that he got the letter - he, and not someone else - Oh how awful everything is -’

  ‘All right,’ said Anne. ‘I’ll, if you like, deliver a letter and be sure he gets it.’

  ‘Put it into his hands?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh Anne, I’m so wretched, so stupid, so blind, so selfish, so miserable -’

  Anne drew her friend back onto the bed and put her arms round her. She locked her hands behind Gertrude’s silky back, where the long zip was already a little undone. She pressed her cheek against Gertrude’s, suddenly seeing their two heads in the mirror, the silver-gold head and the chestnut brown one, their hair mingling. ‘Darling, I do want you to be happy, I do want to make you happy.’

  ‘Do you think you can do it by will-power?’

  ‘I’ll try my damnedest!’

  ‘You’ll have to put some sense into my head then. Oh what a mess, what a vile horrid idiotic mess!’

  ‘I don’t like the thought of you going there,’ said the Count. ‘That woman might attack you.’

  ‘Oh she’d be quite capable of it!’ said Anne. ‘She might attack you!’

  The Count looked worried. He said, ‘I quite understand Gertrude wanting to be sure he gets the letter. After all the woman might destroy it, mightn’t she?’

  ‘She might.’

  ‘One would have to try to see Tim alone.’

  ‘One would.’

  ‘You think she’s an alcoholic?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a bad scene.’

  ‘Gertrude said you liked her.’

  ‘I feel sorry for her. I think she lives in some awful rotten sort of twilight world full of illusions and half-truths and beastly muddle. I could smell it all in that room.’

  ‘I’ll take the letter,’ said the Count.

  ‘Oh all right,’ said Anne. She was tired of the discussion. She thought, we’re caught. Peter can’t fight against Tim, and I can’t fight for him. So I suppose in a way it cancels out. Except that I’ve got so much more sense and cunning than Peter has!

  ‘I think Gertrude ought to see Manfred and talk it over,’ said the Count.

  Anne knew that Gertrude was having dinner with Manfred that very evening. Evidently she had not mentioned this to the Count. She wondered how much he worried about Manfred.

  ‘After all, he is the head of the family, I suppose, now that Guy is gone.’ The Count said this with an air of lunatic solemnity which made Anne want to shake him.

  ‘Oh the family!’ she said with exasperation. ‘There is no family, it’s an invention.’

  ‘An invention?’

  ‘It’s a trick, it’s a game they play. They don’t care about Gertrude. They enjoy her unhappiness.’

  ‘Anne, that’s unjust.’

  ‘All right, Peter, it’s unjust, yes, it is. They are good strong decent people. But it’s not like a real close family all the same. I know some of them care for her. But she doesn’t belong all that much. She married Tim to get away from them.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ The Count looked worried again. The lines reappeared upon his white brow, brushed by the pallid wispy strawy hair. His pale blue snake eyes gazed far away.

  He is wondering, and how does that affect my chances, thought Anne. They were in Anne’s flat. It was evening. The tired late August sun already showed crisp brown autumnal borders upon the plane tree leaves outside the window. Gertrude had said perhaps Anne would not mind discussing the matter with the Count. Anne had boldly telephoned the Count’s office and suggested a meeting at his flat. He had replied no, he would call on her. Anne still visited her own flat on various pretexts. She wanted to keep her connection with it open and public. She did not know when she might not suddenly have to fly from Ebury Street. It seemed that the Count had not yet invited Gertrude to his flat, Gertrude would surely have mentioned it. He was playing a game as meticulous as Anne’s.

  ‘No, I don’t really think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I think.’

  Peter was silent for a while, and then said suddenly and with feeling, ‘Poor Tim.’

  Anne felt such a rush of love, she even made a slight movement as if to grasp his hand. She said, ‘Won’t you have a drink?’

  ‘No thanks. Everyone’s against him.’

  ‘He’s against himself. But, yes. We like to have a sinner whom w
e can cast out and drive away into the wilderness. We pass on our pain by thinking of other people as evil.’

  ‘Yes, it’s like that, isn’t, it. People enjoy the misfortunes and sins of others. He has carried all the blame.’

  Anne wondered if they should now go on to assess Gertrude’s share. They both decided not to.

  ‘Of course he needs help too,’ said Anne. ‘I dare say he ought to leave that woman. If he stays with her he’ll just drift into a haze of idleness and drink. He’ll probably become an alcoholic himself. ’

  The Count had not taken his jacket off this time. He was sitting on an upright chair beside the open window with his long thin hands on his knees. His thin bony wrists protruded from his clean stiff shirt cuffs. His hands were blanched, almond colour. The continued sunshine had made no difference to Peter, except for bringing out a very faint pinkish glow in his smooth cheeks. He kept hunching and twisting his shoulders as if his jacket irked him, and little transient frowns made pockets in his brow above his eyes. Oh Peter, Peter, I love you, I adore you, I want you, thought Anne. God, how people can deceive each other!

  ‘Peter, do take your jacket off.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine.’

  The Count, after his first outburst of confidence, perhaps ashamed of it, had ceased to talk to Anne of his love, though she knew that his pensive silence assumed her constant knowledge and sympathy. Oh suppose and suppose - suppose she were now to take his hand. But Peter was receding, changed, stiffened, alienated by hope. And the distance between them seemed to grow as he fed his hope and, for all her resolves, she could not stifle hers. Perhaps Tim would return and Gertrude would forgive him. Perhaps Gertrude would simply not want Peter after all. Perhaps she would marry Manfred. Or Moses or Gerald or somebody quite else whom she had once secretly loved. All these thoughts were so familiar to Anne from sleepless nights that they were before her like a physical place, a labyrinth with paths, a city with streets.

  As time passed, as it was endured, and Anne went on with her patient efforts to see to it that Gertrude had every chance to recover from her infatuation with the redhead, Anne had also begun to reflect upon the restoration of her own sanity. She too wanted to ‘settle down’, to have some final proof that Tim was gone forever. Gradually, as hope faded, would not peace come? The peace even of a permanent commitment to the conjoined happiness of Gertrude and Peter. It was not easy. She was terribly alone. She saw only, precisely, Gertrude and Peter. The desire for other company was gone from her, though sometimes she felt she ought to seek it, as a sick person might attempt reluctantly to eat. She could see the learned Jesuit (he had asked her to lunch), she could go to one of Manfred’s ‘evenings’, Janet Openshaw had asked her to coffee, an ecumenical group (how did they know she existed?) had asked her to give a lecture. But it was impossible for her to face the world. She wanted to stay in her corner with her demons.

  She had attempted to turn her thoughts to her other visitor and to feed somehow upon his reality. Since his visit she had regained an occasional capacity for quietness, a stillness of the body which banished the restless aching in her bones. She felt something flow inside her head, as if a blank peace like white fog were flowing silently in. Sometimes she tried to speak to her visitor wordlessly. He still seemed to her at times like a sprite, a fairy thing, a lost vagrant spiritual being. Perhaps he was in some sense local, a little god left behind by a lost cult which even he had forgotten. Or was not his ‘locality’ determined rather by the whole universe beaming its radiance in upon the monad soul? She remained persuaded that he was her Christ, hers alone. He’s all I’ve got, she thought. Somehow it was a true showing. Looking now at Peter’s hands, she thought of his hands, his unscarred hands. ‘I have no wounds.’

  As Anne puzzled about the identity of her visitor she had, of course, not failed to recall a departed friend, the old traditional public Christ, the religious figure whom she had known so well ever since her childhood. She was amazed to find her imagination flinching from his sufferings upon the cross as from an abominable hardly conceivable torture. It was now like something she had read about in the newspapers, terrible things which gangsters or terrorists did to their victims. Many dedicated religious people accepted the traditional practice of deep continued meditation upon the passion of Christ. Her own order had not encouraged this (an enthusiastic nun who developed the stigmata was treated as a medical case), and Anne herself had felt it unnecessary, even during a long time when the image of the crucified one almost never left her waking thoughts. She knew of the sufferings but she saw beyond them, as in familiar pictures where the suffering Christ is seen upon the cross attended by angels or gazed upon from above by God the Father. Now there were no angels, no Father, only a man hanging up in an unspeakable bleeding anguish, of which for the first time she was able to grasp the details. She felt appalled and sick; and with the loss of that old safety, morally tainted and astray. Innocence and clarity had left her. She had gained pleasure from thinking of Tim and Daisy as corrupt and evil, Peter, not she, had thought to pity Tim. It was from here that she returned to her own Christ, to gain the respite of his blank white foggy calm. Surely he had suffered. ‘They drove the nails through my wrists.’ But he spoke not of suffering but of death. Suffering is a task. Death is a showing. Sitting with Peter so close to her in the room, and looking at his hands, Anne was suddenly so persuaded of another, a supernatural presence, that she actually stood up with the intention of going into the kitchen to see if he were there again. At the same time, she uttered, half aloud, the word ‘death’.

  Peter looked at her. For a moment his thin hard clever face concentrated upon her, as if it had become pointed like the face of a fox. ‘Anne?’

  ‘Sorry -’

  ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’

  ‘Oh nothing - Peter, if you see Tim will you talk to him, or just give him the letter?’

  Peter’s face lost its keenness and became again boyish and worried. ‘Should I talk to him?’

  ‘He needs help too. As you said, everyone blames him and he must feel driven out. Well, I know you’ll be kind to him. Perhaps he should be encouraged to leave that woman. It might even help both of them. He must feel so awfully guilty, and if he just drifts on -’ Peter’s ‘poor Tim’ had touched Anne with a finger of sympathy and remorse. She had said enough to Gertrude about Tim’s sins. Perhaps she had said too much.

  ‘Gertrude would certainly be pleased if she knew he had left the mistress.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Anne. Of course Peter immediately saw it in terms of easing Gertrude’s pain. His own jealous mind had perceived her jealousy.

  ‘If he left the mistress - would he try to come back to Gertrude? ’

  ‘I don’t know.’ What am I saying, thought Anne, am I suddenly trying to push it all back the other way, back my way, before it’s too late? She said, ‘No, Gertrude would never take him back.’

  Anne and the Count looked at each other. How muddled and strange emotion is, thought Anne. I love Peter, Peter pities Tim, I start imagining Tim - oh how I wish all the secrecy and muddle could be swept away and that all hearts could be opened and cleansed.

  ‘You’re right, he ought to leave her,’ said the Count.

  ‘There’s so much pain in the world, Peter, but one can love pain if nothing’s lost. It’s the endings that are so terrible. That one can lose someone forever. That one has to decide. There are eternal partings, Peter, nothing could be more important than that. We live with death. Oh with pain, yes - but really - with death.’

  For a second Anne saw a gentle beautiful prison face encased in white. Good-bye, God bless you.

  The Count looked distressed, embarrassed. He said, ‘Yes, poor Gertrude.’ And then, ‘I’ll take the letter.’

  Dear Tim,

  I have heard nothing from you and I am told that you are living with your mistress. These facts perhaps speak for themselves. I do not ask to see you, but I am willing to hear from you by letter. Our l
ast conversation was confused. You may wish to defend yourself on points where defence is possible, and I would wish to hear anything that you want to say. We have both made mistakes. I am sorry for mine. I will shortly be in touch with Moses Greenberg about the future of our unfortunate relationship. If I do not hear from you very soon I will assume you have nothing to say to me.

  Gertrude.

  With this letter in his pocket the Count had set off to search for Tim.

  The letter had cost Gertrude some trouble and much misery. It was, she realized, the first letter she had ever written to Tim. The first and the last. She wrote a number of drafts. In some she was angry and vindictive, in some gentle and accusing. Some were very long indeed. In none did she suggest a meeting or hint at a pardon. She eventually decided on a short business-like unemotional missive. She showed her final version to Anne and the Count, not to Manfred.

  It did not prove too easy to find the recipient. The Count, very nervous, arrived at the house in Shepherd’s Bush where Daisy lived, found the street door open, climbed the stairs and, after discreetly listening, knocked. He feared viragos. No answer. Another tenant then appeared from a room opposite and informed the Count that Daisy Barrett and her redheaded young man had gone away, no one knew where to. The Count, relieved, nonplussed, went out, and telephoned Anne from a telephone box. It was noon, a grey cool day, and he had taken leave from the office. Anne was at Ebury Street holding the fort (what else had she to do). Gertrude, now very upset about her project, had gone off to teach clever sari-clad women what to say in shops. Anne told the Count to go to the Prince of Denmark before it closed, then to Tim’s studio, whose address Gertrude had managed to recall. Tim had told Gertrude he had given up the studio, but this could be untrue.

  The Count went, very reluctantly, to the Prince of Denmark, and sat there until closing time. He ate a sandwich. A black and white cat jumped on his knee. He sat nervously watching the door, expecting Tim, or Daisy (whom Anne had described) or Jimmy Roland (whom Ed Roper had described). Attempts by Ed and Manfred to discover Jimmy Roland’s address, or anything further about him, had so far failed. At a suitably quiet moment, and with heavy nonchalance, the Count mentioned the three names to the barman, who gave him a suspicious look and no information. When the pub closed for the afternoon the Count emerged with relief and set off at once for the studio. He even took a taxi (it had started to rain), a thing which he rarely did.