Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  Her aeroplane ticket to Chicago, dated tomorrow, was in her handbag. She had been deliberately vague, even mystifying, about her day of departure. Gertrude would probably reckon now that she had been gone over a week. She had seen, for her farewells, no one else; and she and Gertrude had tacitly avoided any ‘last scene’. ‘I expect you’ll be off soon.’ ‘Yes, haven’t quite fixed.’ They shunned each other’s eyes. Anne said she would ring, then did not ring. She sent a hasty note saying ‘Just leaving’. Gertrude would understand.

  She had left her flat and had moved into a hotel. No one knew where she was. No one had especially asked, since it was quickly assumed that she had left the country. Only Ned Openshaw made some vain attempts to find her, cheering his failure by a mystical certainty that they were bound to meet again. In fact, Anne was at the hotel where she had intended to stay when she arrived in London a year ago. She was wearing the blue and white dress which she had hastily bought in the village to put on when she took off her black robes forever. She touched the aeroplane ticket in her bag. She touched a grey stone which was in there too.

  Anne had, in her final quest, now visited ‘the old Prince’ several times. Tonight was her last night in London and she did not now think that she would find Daisy. She had got used to spending evenings in the Prince, it was an occupation. No one spoke to her. No one, she felt, saw her. She looked and listened. She could not now think how it had not been clear to her that she ought to have looked for Daisy as soon as she returned from France, as soon as it was plain that Tim had returned to his wife. She should have done so at once instead of fretting about her own fate. Her unbroken pride had separated her from Gertrude, her vanity had nearly drowned her in Cumbria, could not at least some vestige of professional smartness have prompted her not to lose this trick? Why had she not imagined Daisy’s loneliness, her possible plight, her possible despair? Anne had been too absorbed in her own hopes; and earlier when she had visited Daisy she had been too highmindedly concerned with organizing the defeat of those hopes to have any thought to spare for catastrophes which her selfless masochistic morality might be bringing about in Daisy’s life.

  Only later did she take to picturing that room with its chaos of clothes and its smell of drink. She recalled her own coldness, her inquisitorial hostility. She remembered Daisy’s friendliness, then her anger. She thought suddenly, supposing Daisy were to kill herself? Everyone was busy surviving, seeking their own, arranging to be happy. No one seemed to have given a thought to Daisy, as if she had never been an actor in the drama at all. Daisy was an inconvenient embarrassing fading memory. Anne, sitting in her chilly hotel room, thought these thoughts quietly, and had leapt up in a sudden frenzy. She ran from the hotel and took a taxi to Daisy’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Someone replied to the bell and Anne mounted the stairs. Daisy was gone. Her successor, a pleasant young girl, told Anne she was sorry, she had no idea where Miss Barrett was, she had left no address. Anne looked over her shoulder into a clean tidy bright room full of books. After that Anne took to going to the Prince of Denmark.

  About the Count Anne felt deep awful pain but, although she continued to speculate, her speculations did not disturb her present plans and motives. Sometimes she felt that this ‘falling in love’ was an illness which had to come to her on her return to the world and which would before too long be cured. Or could she conceivably have combined duty and interest by securing the Count by ministering to his religious need? He had vaguely expressed such a need, but she had not been interested in his interest in Christ, only in his interest in her. Should she not have preached to him more fervently? Sometimes she obsessively relived past times, wondering, if I had only told him then, or then ...? When he had spoken of suicide she should have seized him in her arms instead of offering him rational arguments. Proper scruples, reasonable prudence, self-punishing masochism, or that demonic pride which so many years ‘inside’ had not seemed to have diminished one iota? She felt that she would have died of a rebuff. She thought, I lived on ‘perfect moments’ with Peter, moments like that wonderful telephone call at night. ‘Good night, dear Peter.’ ‘Good night, dear Anne.’ That was the pure honey of love, of hope. I was afraid to move on with him into the horrors of history. Now she had the torment of ‘if only ...’ It was a consolation to think here of Gertrude and of what Anne had come to view as Gertrude’s rights in the matter. Anne’s monstrous love would have shocked the Count and perhaps impaired whatever happiness he might now achieve as Gertrude’s cavaliere servente. It would also certainly have upset Gertrude and perhaps made her ‘acquisition’ of the Count an impossibility. I have no place, no rights, thought Anne. Gertrude, always the princess, had to have whatever she wanted; and was it not proper that she should, as she herself had said, being secure in marriage, proceed to love everybody and be beautifully loved in return? ‘It’s so simple to love everyone and be loved by them. It’s like a sheepfold with the sheep gathered in.’ Ought Anne to have been magnanimous enough to be a sheep? She could even wonder whether she were not actually leaving, as Gertrude had expressed it, ‘in a huff’ and meanly depriving her friend of the perfection of happiness in ‘having Anne as well’.

  Anne at least did not delude herself by imagining that it was her duty to abstain from Peter because of the imminent failure of Tim. She saw Gertrude and Tim as secure. She even endeavoured now to appreciate Tim; and she reflected, as she had reflected in the case of Daisy, upon her own failure to feel, when she should have felt it, pity. She recalled the conversation, perhaps momentous, in which she had pictured Tim’s corrupted future and told the Count that Tim ought to leave Daisy. How impure her judgement had been at that moment, how little sympathy she had really felt for the banished ‘scapegoat’. Of course her scrupulous mind could even see that little outburst as a ‘slip’, a failure to observe her ‘policy’ of ignoring her own interests. And it was a curious thought that perhaps her own censorious coldness at that moment had somehow given strength to the Count’s plea to Tim to return, or at least to separate himself from Daisy. How strangely interlaced all these histories were. Seeing it this way Anne wondered if, here at least, she had not acted half-consciously on her own behalf, but she soon dismissed such speculations as trivial.

  Sometimes more simply she thought that she had been a coward and would pay a coward’s price. That was one way of looking at it. She should have played a bolder and more positive role, questioned the Count, not respected his secrecy and his reserve. What, in these reflections, she tried at all costs to avoid was the terrible love-yearning, the I want him, I want him, I shall die without him which kept returning and rising up in her heart. To this hot desire Anne opposed herself, and was cold, cold. That way indeed madness lay, an impure profitless suffering which at least she could spare herself. She could not yet banish him however, and saw again and again those pale eyes, that thin clever touchable face, and the awkward thin tall figure filling some enchanted separated area of space like the apparition of a holy saint. She saw him transfigured, saw his beauty which she was sure so few could see, and her body ached for him and she mourned. She reflected too upon his heroism, which she could not match. He loved Gertrude so much that he would stay beside her forever and see her belonging to another.

  But I have to survive, Anne said to herself, and survive on my own terms. To stay, that would be heroism, yes: but I don’t want to be that sort of hero. And she recalled Gertrude’s words, in order to survive a terrible loss one has to become another person, it may seem cruel, survival itself is cruel, it means leading one’s thoughts away from the one who is gone. Yes, thought Anne, and with a strangely fresh pang she remembered the deaths of her mother and her brother, when she was still at school, her father’s death later when she was already a nun. How rarely she thought in detail about those loved ones now, though a certain consciousness of them, especially of her father, travelled always with her. How had she managed to survive those deaths? And now, with a swift dart of memory, she thought she could rec
all how even in the moment of hearing that Dick was dead, fallen from a cliff face in the Cairngorms, she had instinctively closed herself against pain, instinctively peered ahead into a time when she would be someone else who could be conscious of this loss without anguish. So, Gertrude too had survived, the healthy still youthful strength of her happiness-seeking being had reached out instinctively and found new consolations and satisfactions. Anne pictured her first arrival at Ebury Street and how, mixed with her sympathy and concern, she had felt suddenly safe, pleased with her warm well-appointed bedroom and with her sense of being in the right place. It couldn’t anyway have been like that, thought Anne. She was only just now receiving the full shock waves of her departure from the convent, the full violence of that amazing act, itself like a kind of bereavement, whose full consequences remained still so obscure. And she thought, I have got to survive that too. And she thought that perhaps later on she would see her mad love for Peter as only one incident in some large pattern of change.

  They had said ‘once a nun always a nun’. They had said that they needed this thought of her as being, in their midst, still dedicated and holy. She had been so wise not to tell her love. If one syllable had passed her lips, if one gesture had escaped her, it would have changed the world, as Gertrude had said it could in seconds be utterly changed. I would be a different person, thought Anne, and that’s what’s important. Some great necessary integrity, some absolute availability, some eternal aloneness would have been lost by that revelation. She had kept her mouth shut, she had never told her love, and that at least was for her salvation. She was still ‘empty and clean’, transparent and invisible, although the voice that said this was still the voice of her pride. And she was homeless and free. She had left the convent because it was a home. Foxes have holes, but the Son of Man ... only now, after the safety of her service to Gertrude, was she facing the void which she had chosen.

  But was not the idea of ‘void’ itself an illusion, something ‘romantic’ as Guy might say? How soon she might fill up that void with all sorts of rubbish! Shall I jumble it all again, she wondered, seek refuges, fall stupidly in love? Can I really be an anchoress in the world, and what ever does it mean? Life was so full of chances. She might have drowned in Cumbria before Gertrude’s eyes, she might have set off some new and awful casual chain by taking hold of Peter’s hand. Now she was completely free to put herself in bondage, but what would the bondage be? Marriage? Anne was sure that that folly at least she could avoid. She would never marry, she was not made for the particular safety of married life, and it seemed to her that she had always known this. The Poor Clares were simply a stepping stone, a starting point. Or would she perhaps stay there forever, just at the starting point, a shadowy helper, a servant, without even the dignity of being ‘inside’? Or would she go on to find her cell, her hermitage in a little white wooden house in a little lost senseless American town? Or work in prisons and find out herself as an eternal prisoner? Or maybe become a doctor, as her father had wished? Or would she perhaps end up after all as a priest in another church? At least she knew that she must now seek solitude, innocence and the silence of being totally uninteresting. ‘To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’ Anne gave her own sense to this saying. She knew that her salvation from a corruption which she well understood was to have not, and to be with those that have not. And she thought all these thoughts together with a full and gloomy realization that perhaps all that awaited her ‘over there’ was muddle and confusion and messy nasty moral failure.

  At one time Anne would have put this self-analysis in terms of: only God can be perfectly loved. Human love, however behovable, is hopelessly imperfect. This hard truth had sent her into the convent. It had also in the end driven her out. Happiness sought anywhere but in God tends to corruption. This, which had once been doctrine for her, she held to now simply as a personal showing. She had been right after all, and the events of the last year had confirmed it, to think that she had been irrevocably spoilt for the world by God. And spoilt, and rightly spoilt, even though she no longer believed in Him. St Augustine had prayed by repeating simply again and again My Lord and my God, my Lord and my God. Anne felt now that she too could pray so in her utmost need, calling upon the name of the non-existent God.

  Anne’s hand returned to her handbag and she touched with her finger the elliptical grey stone, slightly chipped at one end, which her Visitor had shown to her and left behind him as a sign. The dense hardness of the stone was very cold at all times. Instinctively she touched it with her damaged finger, the finger which had been scorched when she reached out to touch his garment. She could still feel the slightly rough texture of the cloth. The little scar had not healed. Victor, to whom on Gertrude’s insistence she had displayed it, had been puzzled. He prescribed antibiotics. The scar showed no sign of going septic, but it persisted. Anne felt it now against the hard cold surface of the stone: the stone in whose small compass her Visitor had made her to see the Universe, everything that is. And if it is so small, thought Anne, beginning thus a sentence which she was never able confidently to finish.

  There was no God, but Christ lived, at any rate her Christ lived, her nomadic cosmic Christ, uniquely hers, focused upon her alone by all the rays of being. He was defeated, she thought, the way to Jerusalem was not a triumphal progress. He was a failure, a pathetic deluded disappointed man who had come to an exceptionally sticky end. And yet: ‘Weep not for me but for yourself.’ Could she, knowing what she knew of him, of all his failure, all of it, tread that way after him? Could she relive his journey and his passion while knowing that he was after all not God? And she remembered the ‘wonderful answer’ which had made her Visitor laugh and call her ‘witty’, when she had said, ‘Love is my meaning’. And she remembered too in an odd way something which the Count had said once about his own love and its object. ‘I did it all, I enacted both sides of the relation, and this could be done because she was inaccessible.’ And Anne cried out in her heart to her living Christ, ‘Oh Sir, your yoke is heavy and your burden is intolerable. ’ And she was answered in his words, ‘The work is yours.’

  The work was hers; and as she measured its fearful ambiguity she seemed to see before her Guy’s glittering eyes and his wasted face, and hear words spoken a year ago, of which she could not tell now whether they were her words or his. We want our vices to suffer but not to die. Purgatorial suffering is a magical story, the transformation of death into pain, happy pain whose guaranteed value will buy us in return some everlasting consolation. But there are eternal partings, all things end and end forever and nothing could be more important than that. We live with death. With pain, yes. But really ... with death.

  With a mental gesture as if dodging a blow Anne turned aside from these thoughts. They would go with her and there would be times when they would enter bodily into her flesh. Of this sort of corporal reality of thoughts the convent had taught her something. At least she thought it is possible to help people, to make them happier and less anxious, and this is somehow, I can’t at the moment think how, both possible and necessary because of all those final endings. She had helped Gertrude. Gertrude had said, ‘I was possessed by a devil and you saved me.’ How much did I really do for her, thought Anne, how far did I really crucially help that great survivor to survive? At the very beginning, yes, I soothed her pain. Anne could not think of anyone else whom she had helped since her ‘liberation’. Oh yes, she had helped Sylvia Wicks. She had met Sylvia and heard her story on one day when Sylvia, in final desperation, had come to Ebury Street seeking Gertrude. Gertrude was absent and Sylvia poured it all out to Anne, who kept it to herself. She agreed to talk to Sylvia’s son (Paul) and then to the girl (Mary) whom he had made pregnant. Soon after this the young people pulled themselves together and took charge of their weeping raving parents. They decided to have the baby and to do their exams and then to get married. Meanwhile Sylvia would help them to look after the
child. The child (a boy, they called him Francis) arrived in July. He was baptized (Anne was godmother) and the grandparents, transformed, vied for his affection. In fact, Mary’s father was a widower, and, once he stopped shouting, a person of great rationality and charm. He and Sylvia became very fond of each other, to the joyful amusement of their children. Sylvia’s life was totally transformed, she had never been happier, and could hardly now believe that a year ago she had felt suicidal despair. She told Anne that it was ‘all her doing’. Well, thought Anne, I did something.

  Anne met Manfred once at Sylvia’s house. Manfred, to do him justice, knowing nothing of Anne’s connection with her, rang Sylvia up out of his usual casual benevolence to find out if she needed money or anything, and he did in fact later on solve Sylvia’s financial problems for her. He was rewarded and electrified to learn by telephone that Anne was actually with Sylvia at that moment. He raced for his car and arrived plausibly before she left; and this time Anne let him drive her back to her flat. This was the one occasion when he was alone with her. Manfred, driving unusually slowly, wondered if he should stop the car in some convenient side street and take her in his arms, at least make some passionate declaration. It was one of the most agonizing moments of his life. He decided that if he did so Anne would be startled, embarrassed, distressed, annoyed, and would ask him to desist. (This prediction of Manfred’s was in fact correct, and he was of course also right in thinking that Anne never guessed his love.) His pride, equal in this respect to hers, could not have born the shock. He did not risk it. And in just this sense Mrs Mount was perhaps right to say that he did not love her enough.