by Iris Murdoch
We walked back, carrying stones and pieces of driftwood – there were already too many to bring in one expedition – over the top of the dunes, and saw inland the graceless but already friendly red brick cube of our home, a ruined farmhouse behind it, and then the flat land, a washed yellowy green in colour, under a huge sky scattered with small cornets of gilded white cloud. Far off, beyond a region of shadow, sun shone upon the long grey back and tall tower of a big church. We left our trophies in a pile at the foot of the dunes, where Julian insisted on covering them with sand in case anyone should steal them, a rather idle precaution since there was no one to be seen except ourselves, and then set off across the sort of huge courtyard of flat seaworn stones which divided us from the house. Here mauve sea cabbage and blue vetch and cushiony pink thrift was growing in profusion and wild yellow tree lupins sprawled their starry leaves and pallid cones of blossom about upon the stripy concentric stones of the natural pavement. Glassy dragon flies whizzed and hovered and butterflies idled in from the sea and blew fluttering away with the breeze, soon becoming invisible in the bright air. The exact whereabouts of the paradise I shall for many reasons conceal, but amateurs of the British coastline may hazard their guess.
As I sat and watched her preparing our lunch (she had told me quite correctly that she could not cook) I marvelled at her sheer grasp of the situation, her absolute hereness, and I tried to put off all anxiety, as it seemed that she had done, and to keep at bay the demons of abstraction in protest against which she had hurled herself from the moving car. In the afternoon we drove across the flowery courtyard to collect our trophies and to look for more and we laid them out on the rough weedy lawn in front of the house. The stones were all elliptical and faintly humped and fairly uniform in size but varied immensely in colour. Some were purple spotted with dark blue, some tawny with creamy blotches, some a mottled lavender grey, many with swirling patterns round a central eye or strikingly decorated with stripes of purest white. As Julian said, it was very difficult to decide to leave any of them behind. It was like being in a huge art gallery and being told to help oneself. The most privileged stones she now took inside together with the sheep’s skull and the bits of driftwood. The square piece of wood with the Chinese writing she propped upright like an icon upon the chimney – piece of our little sitting – room, with the sheep’s skull on one side of it and the gilt snuff box on the other, and on the window ledges she arranged the stones among pieces of grey worked tree root, like small modern sculptures. I watched her total absorption in these tasks. We had tea.
After tea we drove over to the big church and walked about inside its bony emptiness. A few chairs upon the huge stone floor betokened a tiny congregation. There was no stained glass, only huge perpendicular windows through which the cool sun shone on to the pale rather powdery stone of the floor, casting a little shadow into worn requiescats many centuries old. The church in the flat land was like a great ruined ship or ark, or perhaps like the skeleton of an enormous animal, under whose gaunt ribs one moved with awe and pity. We trod in silence with soft feet, padding and prowling, separated from one another and yet connected, pausing and gazing at each other across slanting shafts of powdery air, leaning back against pillars or against the thick wall where the cold damp stone was like the touch of death or truth.
We drove back under a sky of light brown cloud streaked with long mouths full of green or orange light, and I felt exalted and hollow and clean and at the same time burning with desire and wondering, but with no will of my own, what was going to happen next. Julian prattled on and I gave her a short tutorial on English church architecture. Then she announced that she wanted to swim and we drove to the dunes and ran to the sea and it turned out that she had her bathing costume on underneath her dress and she rushed into the water and was soon splashing about and taunting me. (I cannot swim.) I think, however, that the sea was extremely cold for she came out of it fairly quickly.
Meanwhile I sat upon the ridge of patterned stones above the water, holding the hem of her discarded dress and, until I noticed what I was doing and deliberately relaxed, crushing it up spasmodically in my hand. I did not think that Julian was deliberately postponing the moment of love – making or that she was doubting her gift of herself. Nor did I think that she wanted me to force her. I felt entirely given over to her instinct and to the tempo of her being. The moment I longed for and dreaded would come at its natural time, and its natural time would be tonight.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries. There are, I am told, people who just want ‘a woman’ or 'a man’. I cannot conceive of this state of affairs and it does not concern me. I had rarely wanted another human being absolutely which was the same as to say that I had rarely wanted another human being at all. Holding hands and kissing, that can mean something in friendship, though it had not been my way. But that trembling dedication to the totality of another I had experienced – well, as 1 sat on the divan bed that evening and waited for Julian I felt, never before: though I knew intellectually that I had been in love with Christian. And there had been another case, of which I do not tell the story here.
It was and was not like the first day of the honeymoon when the newly married pair, in tender deference to each other, feign habits which are not their own. I was not a young husband. I was not young and I was not a husband. I felt none of the youthful spouse’s need to take control, his reflective anxiety about the future, his calmingly classified commitment. I feared the future and I was committed but I felt myself that day in a world so entirely weird, in a land of marvels, where all that was required of my courage was that I should walk on and on. I felt no need to take control. It was not that Julian controlled me. We were both of us controlled by something else.
We had had eggs for lunch and sausages for supper. At supper we drank some of the wine. Julian had the healthy young person’s indifference to alcohol. I thought I would be too excited to drink, but I downed two glasses with a sort of amazed appreciation. Julian had taken great pleasure in finding a pretty tablecloth and laying the table as elaborately as she could for both meals. Patara was, as advertised, well provided with all household necessities. Julian’s dustpan and brush were otiose. (It also, as advertised, had its own electricity from a generator in the abandoned farmyard.) She had brought in flowers from the garden, straggling canterbury bells of a faded cottony blue, yellow loose – strife and wild lupins from beyond the fence, and one white peony streaked with crimson, as gorgeous as a lotus. We sat down formally and laughed with delight. After supper she said suddenly, ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ 'Uh – hu.’ ‘You understand me?’ ‘Yes.’ We washed up. She went into the bathroom and I went into the bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I inspected my dulled straight hair and my thin discreetly wrinkled face. I looked amazingly young. I got undressed. Then she came and we were together for the first time.
When one has at last got what has been ardently longed for one wishes time to cease. Often indeed at such moments it is miraculously slowed. Looking into each other’s eyes we caressed each other without any haste at all, with a sort of tender curious astonishment. I felt none of Marvell’s frenzy now. I felt rather that I was privileged to be living out in a brief span some great aeon of the experience of love. Did the Greeks know between 600 and 400 BC what millennia of human experience they were enacting? Perhaps not. But I knew, as I worshipped my darling from head to foot that I was under orders, a sort of incarnate history of human love.
My luxuriant sense of destiny had its nemesis however. I put the essential matter off too long and when I came to it it was over in a second. After that I groaned a good deal and attempted to caress her but she held me very closely pinioning my arms. ‘I’m no good.’ ‘Don’t be silly, Bradley.’ ‘I’m too old.’ ‘Darling, we’ll sleep.’ ‘I’m going outside for a minute.’
I went out naked into the dark garden where the
light from the bedroom showed a dim square of jagged grass and dandelions. A mist was coming in from the sea, drifting slowly past the house, curling and uncurling like cigarette smoke. I listened and could not hear the waves but a train rattled and then cried out like an owl somewhere in the land behind me.
When I came back she had put on a sort of dark blue silk night shirt, unbuttoned to the navel. I pushed it back on to her shoul ders. Her breasts were the perfect fruit of youth, rounded and just pendant. Her hair had dried into a soft golden fuzz. Her eyes were huge. I put on a dressing – gown. I knelt in front of her without touching her.
'My darling, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not worrying,’ I said. ‘I’m just no bloody good.’
‘It will be all right.’
‘Julian, I’m old.’
‘Nonsense. I can see how old you are!’
‘No, but – How bruised you are, your poor arm and your leg.’
‘I’m sorry – ’
‘It’s beautiful, as if you’d been fingered by a god, stained with purple.’
‘Come into bed, Bradley.’
‘Your knees smell of the northern sea. Has anyone ever kissed the soles of your feet before?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Sorry to be such a failure.’
‘You know there isn’t any possible failure here, Bradley. 1 love you.’
‘I’m your slave.’
‘We will be married, won’t we?’
‘It’s impossible.’
‘Don’t frighten me by saying that. You don’t mean it, it’s just mechanical. There’s nothing to stop us. Think of other poor people who want to get married and can’t. We are free, we aren’t married to anyone else, we’ve got no responsibilities. Well, there’s poor Priscilla, but she can live with us. We’ll look after her and make her happy. Bradley, don’t just reject happiness stupidly. Well, I know you won’t, you can’t. If I thought you could I’d be screaming.’
‘You needn’t scream.’
‘Well, why do you say these sort of abstract things that you don’t mean?’
‘I’m just instinctively protecting myself.’
‘You haven’t answered properly. You will marry me, won’t you?’
‘You’re quite mad,’ I said, ‘but as I told you, I’m your slave. Whatever you go on wanting will be the law of my being.’
‘That’s settled then. Oh dear, I am so tired.’
We both were. After we had turned off the light she said, ‘And another thing, Bradley. Today has been the happiest day I have ever had in my whole life.’
I was asleep two seconds later. We woke at dawn and embraced each other again, but with the same result.
The next day the mist was still there, thicker, still moving in from the sea with a sort of relentless marching motion, passing by the house in a steady purposive manner like a shadowy army bound for some distant hosting. We watched it, sitting laced together in the window seat of the little sitting – room in the early morning.
After breakfast we decided to walk inland and look for a shop. The air was chilly and Julian was wearing one of my jackets as an overcoat, since it had not occurred to her to purchase a coat during her shopping spree. We walked along a footpath beside a little stream full of watercress and then came to a signalman’s cottage and crossed the railway and then went over a humpy bridge which was reflecting itself in a very quiet canal. The sun was piercing the mist now and rolling it up into great cloudy spheres of gold in the midst of which we walked as between huge balls which never quite touched us or touched each other. I felt very troubled about what had happened, or rather not happened, during the night, but I was also being made insanely happy by Julian’s presence. To torment us I said, ‘We can’t stay here forever, you know.’
‘Don’t use that tone of voice. That’s your “despair”. Not again.’
‘No, just saying the obvious.’
‘I think we must stay here a while to learn happiness.’
‘It’s not my subject.’
‘I know, but I’ll teach you. I want to keep you here until you become content in your mind about what is going to happen.’
‘You mean about our marriage?’
‘Yes. Then later on I’ll do my exams, everything will be – ’
‘Suppose I were much older than – ’
‘Oh stop worrying, Bradley. You want to sort of justify everything.’
‘I am by you eternally justified. Even if your love were to end now I am justified.’
‘Is that a quotation?’
‘Only from me.’
‘Well, it isn’t going to end now. And do stop boring me about your age.’
‘For all that beauty that doth cover thee is but the seemly raiment of my heart, which in thy breast doth live as thine in me. How can I then be older than thou art?’
‘Is that a quotation?’
‘It’s a damn rotten argument.’
‘Bradley, have you noticed anything about me?’
‘One or two little things, I suppose.’
‘Have you noticed that in the last two or three days I’ve grown up?’
I had noticed that. ‘Yes.’
‘I was a child and perhaps you are still thinking of me as a child. But now I am a woman, a real one.’
‘Oh my darling girl, hold on to me, hold on to me, hold on to me, and if I ever try to leave you don’t let me.’
We walked across a meadow to a little village and found our shop and as we began to walk back the mist cleared away completely. And now the dunes and our courtyard were huge and glistening with sun, all the stones, dampened a little by the mist, shining in their different colours. We left our basket beside the fence and ran on down towards the sea. Julian suggested that we should collect some wood for a fire, but this proved difficult because every bit of wood we found was far too beautiful to burn. However we did find a few pieces which she consented to immolate, and I was carrying them back through the sandy dunes to our collecting point, leaving her still on the beach, when I saw in the distance something which absolutely froze my blood. A man in uniform on a bicycle was just riding along the bumpy track away from our bungalow.
There could be no doubt that he had been to Patara. There was nowhere else to go to. I immediately dropped the wood and lay down in a hollow of sand and watched through a vault of wet golden grass until the bicyclist had ridden out of sight. A policeman? A postman? I have always dreaded officials. What could he want with us? Was it us he wanted? No one knew we were here. I felt cold with guilt and terror: and I thought, I have been in paradise and I have not been grateful. I have been anxious and destructive and stupid. And now something is going to happen, and I shall learn what it is like to be really afraid. So far I have been playing at fear when there was no need.
I called to Julian that I was going back to the house to get the car to carry the wood, and she should stay and go on collecting. I wanted to see if our bicyclist had left anything. I started off across the courtyard, but in a moment she was calling ‘Wait for me!’ and racing after me and clasping my hand and laughing. I averted my terrified face from her and she noticed nothing.
When she got to the house she stopped in the garden to inspect some stones which she had placed there in a row. I moved without obvious haste to the porch and went in through the door. A tele gram was lying on the mat and I picked it up with a quick swoop. I went on into the lavatory and locked the door.
The telegram was addressed to me. I began to fumble at it with trembling fingers. I tore the whole thing, including the telegram itself, then stood there holding the two halves of the paper together. It read Please telephone me immediately Francis.
I stared at these deadly words. They could only mean something catastrophic. And the incomprehensibility of this visitation was terrifying. Francis did not know this address. Someone must have found out, how? Arnold presumably. We had made some slip, how, when, what, some fatal mistake. Even now Arnold was on his way here and F
rancis was trying to warn me.
Julian called ‘Yoo hoo!’
I said, ‘Coming,’ and emerged. I had to get to the telephone at once and without letting Julian know.
‘I think it’s lunch – time, don’t you?’ said Julian. ‘Let’s fetch the wood after.’ She was putting the blue and white check table cloth on to the table again. She put the jug of flowers in the centre of the table, from which it was always ceremonially removed as we sat down to eat. Already there were these customs.
I said, ‘Tell you what, you get lunch and I’ll just take the car down to that garage. I want to have the oil done and I could get a bit of petrol. Then we’ll be ready if we want to go somewhere this afternoon.’
‘But we can go then on the way,’ said Julian.
‘They may be shut this afternoon. And we may not want to go that way.’
‘I’ll come with you then.’
‘No, you stay here. Why don’t you go and pick some of that watercress we saw? I’d love some for my lunch.’
‘Oh good, yes, I’ll do that! I’ll get a basket. Don’t be long.’ She pranced off.
I went to the car, then failed to start it in my agitation. At last it started and I set off bumping horribly slowly along the track. By road the nearest village was where our big church was. There must be a telephone box there. The church was just outside the village on the side towards the sea, and I could recall nothing of the place from our night arrival. I passed the garage. I had thought of asking the garage man if I could use his telephone, but it might not be private. I drove past the church and turning a corner saw the village street and a public telephone box.
I stopped outside it. Of course the box was occupied. Inside it a girl, gesticulating and smiling, turned her back on me. I waited. At last the door opened. I found I had no change. Then the operator would not answer. Finally I achieved a reverse charge call to my own number and heard Francis, who had picked up the receiver at once, babbling at the other end.