Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  And throughout this period he was at the same time, in the deeper part of his mind, very miserable indeed. He scarcely for a moment ceased thinking about Daisy and Gertrude. Every evening he imagined Daisy sitting in the Prince of Denmark, wearing her blue eye make-up, with Perkins on her knee. He thought that she had probably returned to her flat in Shepherd’s Bush. He pictured her there, lying in bed till noon with no one to pick her clothes up off the floor. Or else he wondered whether she had actually left London, as she said she would. Perhaps she was already living with someone else. Her mysterious friends were, Tim conjectured, probably women. He really knew very little about Daisy. As he thought these various thoughts, he watched himself, watched for signs of frenzy and desperate need, desires, doubts, indecisions, intentions and hopes. There were none. There was a steady mourning and a bitter grief as for one dead. But there was no real wish to turn the clock back. Instead there was, together with sorrow, a melancholy sense of solitude and freedom. He awoke every day to a blank quiet relief that he had laid down the burden of Daisy forever, and done it cleanly and decently and honourably and with her consent. He recalled her words, her voice, begging him, for her sake, never to repent of their parting or try to undo it. He treasured his admiration for her and could think wistfully of her many qualities and sadly of the duration and the failure of their life together.

  His thoughts about Gertrude were darker and more agonizingly and tightly knotted and more deeply and awfully frightening. He did and did not want to think about Gertrude, he often tried not to, dodging the terrible thoughts like blows. He dreaded the letter that he would one day receive from Moses Greenberg. He had sent Moses his address on a postcard. Remorse and guilt remained with him, lived in him, grew in him he sometimes felt, increasing without rational proportion. And he could not stop himself from thinking about Gertrude sometimes in a live way which had constantly to be prevented from becoming mindlessly hopeful, as if he momentarily forgot all that had so irrevocably happened. He noticed, almost in passing, how he had always got on with Gertrude, and never with Daisy. He did his best with himself in his new life, at least he sometimes noticed himself trying to be sensible. He was able to be busy, with his old rather useless impecunious practicality. He cooked and tidied. He did not go mad. He produced no ‘real art’ but he made some little pleasing oddments. He had a tiny job until November. He could see the autumn leaves, though he was still afraid to go back to the National Gallery. But underneath it all the old dark stream went swirling on and when he woke in the night he remembered his last conversation with Gertrude and ran through it over and over and over again. It will pass, he thought, it will all pass, it must pass. I am alone and I am now hurting no one, and that is the essential thing. Oh if only Moses Greenberg would write that letter and the last grisly necessities could be done with.

  A letter did come one morning, but it was not from Moses. Tim, who usually received only bills through the post, looked at the envelope with surprise, shock. He had been unable to cure himself of an idea, which he constantly suppressed, that Gertrude might one day write to him. This was not Gertrude’s writing. It was an unfamiliar educated hand. He quickly opened it. It ran as follows.

  Dear Tim,

  Please forgive me for writing to you, but I feel I ought to. I really know so little about you and about what you may be feeling now that it is perhaps an impertinence. But I must tell you my impression that Gertrude still loves you, needs you, and wants you to come back. She has not said this, but I believe it to be so. She is at present at the house in France, alone as far as I know. You may however by now be developing quite other plans. Excuse this letter, the fruit of a well-wishing affection for you both.

  Yours sincerely,

  Veronica Mount.

  Tim received this letter on the morning of Tuesday, his teaching day at the art school. He put it in his pocket and went to teach as usual. The next day he went to France.

  ‘Marie, Marie, c’est le peintre!’

  Tim’s inconvenient popularity had caused him to be recognized on the bus before he even arrived at the village. Now he had been unable to avoid being hustled into the café to prendre un verre and be effusively welcomed by the patron and his wife. Several people were anxious to give him information, most of which he was unable to understand. He gathered that there had been a wicked mistral last week. But now all was quiet. The evening sun shone with benign calm upon the warm stones of the square and the motionless leaves of the pollarded plane trees in the little street.

  When Tim had gone to his teaching on the day before he had been determined to ignore the baneful letter. He read it again during his short lunch hour and then tore it up. He felt that it must be untrue, and that in any case he ought to think it untrue. It was a bad letter because it disturbed, and if he was not careful could destroy something that was good, his ability to function in a fairly ordinary way. He did not want to be mad again, he did not want to suffer horribly again. He wanted to preserve the rational self-regard which would help him to survive, ultimately to recover. He tried to crush down savagely in his heart what was so terribly rising there. He said to himself, you are alone, you are in luck, you have at last made conditions for peace in your life. You may not be happy, but at least you can quietly hide. Lanthano. Do not go where you will simply be slaughtered, more terribly, a second time. Consider how, in all these horrors, you have got off more easily than you might have done. He did not trust Mrs Mount’s judgement, he regarded her as a gossipy busybody, though it was true that she had been very kind to him and Gertrude, and he could not work out any motive she might have for lying now. Perhaps she actually did wish him well, perhaps she actually liked him, some people did. But could she be right? She admitted it was a conjecture. Her letter was probably a whim, born of an idle, though possibly well-intentioned, desire to meddle. The risk was too great. How could he approach Gertrude again? A failure now would really drive him mad.

  But in the afternoon, during the drawing class, as he brooded wretchedly upon these things, he knew that he was done for. The image of the house and of Gertrude alone in it was honey-sweet. He had to go where that sweetness was even if he died of it. He had at least to go and look, and let the gods decide. He did not, he told himself, yet really intend to see Gertrude. He only intended to go to France. After all, Gertrude might not be there at all. But he had to go to that place to which every path and every thought now led. His precious solitude, his simple life, was now completely ruined. It had not lasted long. Perhaps really it had been a fiction, an illusion. It was spoilt by Mrs Mount’s careless whim, and by the demons in his mind which had simply been waiting for a cue; and really, many chance events might have provided that cue. Moses Greenberg’s letter might have done it. Why did he for a second imagine he had ‘escaped’? Perhaps the real torment was only starting. He could not now inhibit or deny the desires and cravings which twisted so deep, the mindless hopes, the sweet hopes which were worst of all. He had achieved nothing. Well, he had achieved one thing. He knew that if he were still living with Daisy he would not have decided to go to France.

  Sick with urgent terror he excused himself from the café. Absolute fear in the form of sexual desire made him almost faint. He went into the hotel next door to avoid his well-wishers. He left his mac and his jacket and his small bag, and vaguely indicating that he would return, left by the back door and set off walking along the road towards Les Grands Saules.

  It was now well into the evening. He had hoped to arrive earlier, but the aeroplane had been delayed. The sun was still over the horizon and the air was very warm and still. The little road was darkened by the strong shadow of the hedge of brambles and scrub oak. Blackberry bushes which he had seen in shrivelled flower now displayed the shrivelled remnant of their fruit. Below them, exulting in dryness, grew in long lines the ochre-coloured sage. Here and there some spiky broom, invisible earlier, still carried flowers of purest yellow. The air was warm and heavy and smelt of pines. After a while he left the
road and walked through apricot orchards along a track, a short cut which he had discovered during his painting rambles. The track led to a farm. After that a path fringed with fennel and wild lavender led to some beehives. After that the rocks began. Tim stepped onto the familiar rocks and his hands touching them now and then as he climbed, remembered so much. He mounted slowly, carefully, for about five minutes. The light though still bright was uncertain, distances hard to judge, the rocks seeming to jump and shift before him. He had to keep pausing and blinking his eyes as if to expel some foreign matter. The rocks were yellow now, a hard brilliant whitish yellow in the last of the sunlight, with darkening blue-grey shadows marking their folds and lines of ascent, and all hazed over with a vision-defeating fuzziness as if millions of tiny bees were flying over them, or as if their own spots had risen up in an undulating swarm. They were warm and hard, dense, the densest stuff that Tim had ever touched.

  He came by a way that he knew to a point that he knew, and now he looked down into the valley and saw the house. The valley that had been so verdant was bleached now, only the vineyard and the course of the streamlet carried a darkening green in the fading light. Tim, gazing at the house, saw that the loggia which he had mended had fallen down and the vine was prostrate on the terrace. There was something in the olive grove which looked like one of the outdoor chairs lying on its side. The place had a derelict neglected air. He thought he could see where tiles had come off the roof. If he had approached by the road he would have seen the Rover, but from where he stood the car was invisible. He was beginning to wonder whether Gertrude was there at all when a light suddenly came on in the sitting-room.

  Tim had made no plan. He had simply come to ‘look’. He felt that he would be in the hands of the gods. Of course it was now impossible not to go on to the house. It was more absolutely familiar to him than Ebury Street; and the idea of Gertrude there alone was absolutely irresistible. Of course, as Tim really knew, in coming to France he had decided to see Gertrude. It was just that the decision was so awful that it had to be taken in two halves, one conscious, and one unconscious. He remembered how touching, how enchanting she had been on that first evening when she had stood upon the terrace and waited for him to come in the twilight through the vineyard and the poplars and across the stream and up through the olive grove, wondering a little if it was indeed he, so sweetly glad to see him when he came. He stood, wondering if she would again come out onto the terrace so that the scene could be magically re-enacted. But no one came out and he went on a little further and climbed down until he found the path at the foot of the rocks which joined the path across the vineyard.

  Here again he waited. Indeed he sat down on the grass, looking across the valley at the one lighted window. His desire for her presence was intense, it was burning up his whole body. But his fear was intense too, his cowardice which made him simply want now to wait, to breathe, to continue to live. He so feared Gertrude’s anger, her contempt, her terrible terrible rejection of him which he remembered with such intense and continued vividness. He felt that he had only sustained it last time because of sheer surprise and sheer stupidity. The parting had been fast and merciful. He had been like the victim of a catastrophic crippling accident whose pain is checked by a paralysis of the nerve centres. Now he was fully conscious, fully collected and prepared for torment. So much had happened, he had returned to Daisy, not least he had thought about the whole business, he had diligently, hopelessly, made himself into the intolerable guilty being whom she had rejected. Suppose now he were confronted with spitting anger, with hatred - he could do nothing, only run away, run into a mental desolation worse than any he had known before. That would be the final condemnation that would brand him forever as unpardonably guilty and lost. It was not the crime, it was the punishment that seared the mind, it was the shame. He had thought himself damaged, but he could be much worse hurt now. How could he face Gertrude, what could he say, what could he explain to her? Would she listen patiently while he rambled on telling how he hadn’t been with Daisy like she thought, except that of course he had been with Daisy, and that, yes, he had gone straight back to Daisy, only now he had left Daisy again, and - Would Gertrude be interested? Could he tell her about the harvest festival and the leaves? He had felt he must look at the house. Could he just go home now to the quiet life of aloneness which had been graciously vouchsafed him? He was tempting a fate that had not crushed him entirely. But now he was here; and he knew that of course he had to cross the valley. He got up and started to walk down the path through the vineyard.

  The poplar grove was full of fallen leaves, blanched yellow on one side and furry silvery white on the other. Motionless, appearing suddenly under foot, Tim could not at first think what they were, they seemed in the odd light like a pavement. When he got to the bridge he found it obstructed by a large willow branch. He was too impatient to pull it away. The stream was small, but too wide to jump, so he simply walked through it. It was very cold and deeper than he had expected. His trousers clung to his calves. He cursed, he felt frightened, he felt suddenly hungry, he felt ready to weep. Why on earth had he come here at night in this stupid way, he was a stupid man, doomed and ruined by stupidity.

  When he was just below the terrace he had to stop because he could hardly breathe for the fear and the longing that was in him. He stood like a helpless animal, with his mouth open and his feet apart, gasping. When he was able to control his breathing he climbed up the dry slippery parched grass to the terrace steps. He thought, I’ll simply look in, I’ll simply look, and then I’ll rest again. Nothing has happened yet, nothing need happen at all. He moved with caution, keeping away from the square of light that fell onto the stones. The valley behind him seemed dark already. He stepped carefully over the wreckage of the loggia. He reached the wall of the house and felt the warm squarely cut stones with his hand. Holding to the wall by the lines between the stones he edged towards the window. The first thing he saw was an amazing streak of brilliant green which he made out to be a long branch of the vine which had been laid out along the sideboard underneath the lamp. The second thing he saw was Gertrude and the Count, sitting opposite to each other and holding hands across the table.

  As Tim gazed at the unconscious pair within, whose voices he could now vaguely hear though he could not discern their words, someone else was watching Tim, or had been watching him until a moment earlier when he had passed out of sight by coming up to the house. Anne’s migraine was better, but now she pretended illness. Three nights she had left the other two together and listened to their voices murmuring down below as she endeavoured to fall asleep. She had thought the Count would wait. Now she thought he would not wait. She felt like somebody waiting for a loved one to die. Oh why can it not happen, she thought, twisting her head and her limbs as she had done when the migraine tormented her. The evenings were long. She drove Gertrude away. She lay on her bed or sat by one of the windows trying to read Scott, or looking out at the willow valley and the rocks, or at the cleft which showed the line of distant yellow hill upon which the sun rested longer. She gave herself up to a jealous pain which she knew was, in its present quality, temporary, but which she felt it pointless as well as impossible to evade.

  This evening she had sat long at the window, not turning on her light though it was now too dark to read, gazing across the valley and trying to interpret the tone of the voices below. Everything was so still outside. When the mistral was there it was impossible to imagine its absence. Now it was impossible to think there could be anything but this particular quiet against which the significant sound of the voices rose up like a distant chant. Then she saw a man upon the rocks. She was thinking how unusual this was when she realized with a violent shock who the man was. She stood up. She covered her mouth. She observed his slow approach with a fierce wild almost cruel joy. But steadfast Anne was silent. She did not move or cry out or run loudly down the stairs. She simply watched Tim to see what he would do. She saw him creep up to the te
rrace, step over the loggia, and move towards the window. A moment later she saw him step back, carefully make his way to the terrace steps and begin to walk and then to run away down the slope into the gathering dark. Anne could imagine what it was that he had seen through the window. The pair below were silent now. Anne sat down in her chair, still holding The Heart of Midlothian.

  Tim might as well have flown back across the valley for all he could afterwards remember of his escape. He must have run back instinctively the way he came, in order to return to the village. When he became conscious of where he was he was already lost.

  The mental pain was so great that he had to try deliberately not to think. As it was, a cramp in his stomach made him bow down as he ran, now climbed, away from that hateful scene. As the silent rocks had looked in at him and Gertrude holding hands, he had himself been doomed to look in and see the identical tender scene, with the Count now playing his part. Perhaps those two chairs were enchanted. If he could have heard of it all in some other way, heard some rumour - but to see it enacted like a tableau before his very eyes ... And he thought, she told Mrs Mount she would be alone, and secretly she was with him. Of course Tim had reckoned on the Count, even tried to think conventional generous thoughts about ‘the best man winning’ and so on. These were unreal figments, wisps, clouds, illusions, in the awful presence of the reality to which he was now condemned. I shall think of it forever, I shall see it forever, he said to himself as his fingers crooked over the ridges of the hard hard rocks. He recalled the wonderful miracle of his holding hands with Gertrude on that night in the spring. When their hands joined a shock wave passed out through all the galaxy. And yet it was so quiet, so tender, a matter for gentle tears and humble prostrated joyful gratitude. Now even the past was desecrated, blackened, burnt. He and Gertrude had sat in a black shell constructed by demons.