by Iris Murdoch
Fivey’s large spotted hand descended and, still staring at Kate with unbroken concentration, he conveyed the marron to his mouth.
He does stare so, she thought, but I rather like it. Bother, now I’ve opened that box I can’t give it to John. I’ll have to take it away with me. Or else give it to Fivey!
She resumed her prowling. “What’s that?” She pointed to a bowl-like steel sink with a round gaping orifice at the bottom of it.
“A waste disposal unit,” said Fivey with his mouth full of marron.
“Oh. I’ve never seen one. Let’s dispose of some waste.”
Fivey came over to demonstrate. He took a soggy newspaper bundle out of the rubbish bin, dropped it down the hole, and turned a switch. There was a formidable grinding sound.
“It’s rather alarming, isn’t it,” said Kate. As she leaned forward over the machine she rested her white nylon gloves for a moment on the edge of the bowl. Then, with a flash like the escape of a fish, one of the little white gloves slid down over the slippery steel surface and into the dark churning void below. After it, with almost equal quickness, went Fivey’s spotted hand, but not quick enough to save the little glove from its fate. Half a second later Kate had gripped Fivey by the wrist.
“Oh, be careful, be careful!”
They stood quite still for a moment staring at each other. Kate drew back a little, drew him back, still holding the thick hairy wrist in a firm grip. Then she released him, sat down, and reached out automatically for the bottle of slivovitz.
She said, “That quite shook me. You must be terribly careful with that dangerous thing. I think I need a drink. Could you get two glasses?”
Fivey put two glasses on the table and sat down, not opposite to Kate but beside her. With a hand that trembled slightly Kate poured out the slivovitz. She had forgotten its quite extraordinary sexy smell. She could still feel the texture of Fivey’s hairy wrist engraved upon the palm of her hand. She turned towards him and they drank.
Kate put down her glass. Fivey had turned his chair to face her, his drink in his right hand, his left hand upon the table. The big extended relaxed hand looked suddenly to Kate like a couchant animal. It’s all very odd, thought Kate, I’d quite forgotten the taste of slivovitz, it’s wonderful, wonderful. She laid her own hand down very slowly and carefully on top of Fivey’s hand, moving it about slightly to feel the hair, the skin, the bone. They continued to stare at each other.
Then with a kind of formal deliberation, as if he were about to take hold of her for a dance, Fivey put down his glass, moved Kate’s glass out of the way, edged his chair nearer, and began to slide his arm round her shoulder. The chestnut-coloured moustaches grew nearer and nearer and larger and larger. Kate closed her eyes.
“Octavian, do stop laughing, I think you’re awful!”
“You mean to say the fellow actually made a pass at you?”
“No, darling, I’ve already explained. I made a pass at him!”
“And then you slipped him a tenner to visit his old mother!”
“It was the least I could do.”
“Kate darling, you’re mad, I adore you!”
“I must say I was rather surprised myself. It must have been something to do with his being Irish. Or something to do with my glove falling into the waste disposal unit.”
“Or something to do with the slivovitz!”
“Oh God, the slivovitz! We drank the whole bottle! I’ve got the most ghastly headache.”
“Anyway, you’ve proved he’s heterosexual!”
“I don’t know about that. He might be both. He’s terribly sweet, Octavian, just like a marvellous animal. And such a simple nature, straight out of the Irish countryside.”
“His conduct seems to me to have been far from simple. London is full of men who would faint with joy if they could get around to kissing you after a year’s acquaintance, let alone twenty-five minutes flat!”
“Oh Octavian, that heavenly moustache!”
“Well, you’re in a proper fix now with Ducane, aren’t you, with his valet as your fancy man!”
“Well, yes, I am—Octavian, do you think I ought to tell Ducane? It’s rather awful, isn’t it?”
“Fivey’s not likely to tell him, anyway!”
“It depends what terms they’re on. Maybe they’re in bed together at this very moment, discussing it just like us and laughing their heads off!”
“Come, you don’t think that.”
“No, of course I don’t. But it’s all most embarrassing. Whatever would the others think if they knew what I’d been up to while they were soberly shopping!”
“Think of the scenes at the dinner table. The surreptitious glances. The hands touching when the soup arrives. I shall enjoy every moment of it!”
“Oh dear! Do you think John would be hurt?”
“Yes, I do think he would be hurt. And he’d never believe you started it. He doesn’t know you like I do! And he might sack Fivey.”
“You mean he wouldn’t understand?”
“No.”
“Well, in that case I can’t tell him, can I? I’d hate to ge poor Fivey into trouble.”
“Did you leave a note for Ducane?”
“No. And I took away the bottle and the rest of the marrons!”
“And you didn’t tell Fivey whether or not to say you’d called? You’re a very inefficient intriguer. You’d better ring him up tomorrow morning!”
“I can’t. Oh Octavian, I am dreadful. No, I’ll just have to leave it, and if John mentions my having called I’ll say something vague.”
“Well, you’ve certainly entertained me. Never a dull moment with you around. Ready?”
“Ready, darling. Oh Octavian, it’s such fun being married to you.”
Eighteen
PIERCE and Uncle Theo and Mingo were down on the beach together. Uncle Theo was sitting up, with Mingo’s head and front paws on his lap. Pierce, who had been swimming, was extended upon his face, his arms limply stretched out above his head. For some time now Theo had been contemplating the lean stretched out body beside him, first wet, now dry, and baked to a light and almost uniform shade of biscuity brown. As there were no natives in sight Pierce had been swimming naked. Uncle Theo sighed deeply, consuming the sigh inside himself so that it should not be audible.
Uncle Theo’s right hand was automatically twisting and caressing Mingo’s woolly fur. Mingo was generally agreed to be more like a sheep than a dog, and the twins were convinced that he must have sheep ancestry. Mingo’s eyes were closed, but a faint vibrating of his hot body, a sort of internalised tail-wag, showed that he was awake. Uncle Theo’s gaze brooded upon the limp hunched shoulders, the jutting shoulder-blades, the slim sweeping waist, the thin yet firm hips and the long straight legs of what Willy Kost had called ‘a certain kouros’. The soles of Pierce’s feet, which Uncle Theo could just see by leaning forward a little, were pleasantly wrinkled and dusted over with sand. They would be nice and curious to touch, the skin hardened and yet tender. They would taste of sea salt.
Uncle Theo’s left hand, in the small space between himself and the boy, fingered the mauve and white pebbles of the beach. These stones, which brought such pleasure to the twins, were a nightmare to Theo. Their multiplicity and randomness appalled him. The intention of God could reach only a little way through the opacity of matter, and where it failed to penetrate there was just jumble and desolation. So Theo saw it, and what was for the twins a treasury of lovable individuals (it grieved the twins that they could not distinguish every stone with their attentions and carry it into the house) was for Theo an expanse of abomination where the spirit had never come. Does nature suffer here, in her extremities, Theo wondered, or is all dead here? Jumble and desolation. Yet was it not all jumble and desolation, was it not all an expanse of senseless random matter, and he himself as meaningless as these stones, since in real truth there was no God?
The pebbles gave a general impression of being either white or mauve, but lo
oked at closely they exhibited almost every intermediate colour and also varied considerably in size and shape. All were rounded, but some were flattish, some oblong, some spherical; some were almost transparent, others more or less copiously speckled, others close-textured and nearly black, a few of a brownish-red, some of a pale grey, others of a purple which was almost blue. Theo, rooting among them, had dug a small hole revealing layers of damp and glistening pebbles beneath the duller sunbaked surface. He lifted one up to look at it. It was a flattish grey stone with a faint fan-like fossil marking upon it. It was not worth keeping it for the twins whose vast collection already contained many such. Theo rubbed it dry on his trousers. Then with great care and gentleness he laid it upon Pierce’s spinal cord, near to the waist-line, balanced upon one of those vertebrae whose delicate curving line his eye had been tracing. Pierce groaned faintly. Theo picked up another stone and laid it upon Pierce’s right shoulder, and then placed another upon the opposite shoulder to balance it. Absorbed now in his task, he shifted Mingo a little and began to cover Pierce’s back with a symmetrical design of flattish stones. As he laid each stone very carefully down, drying it first and warming it a little in his hands (the surface stones were too hot for comfort) the tips of his fingers encountered the warm flesh, sandy and slightly gritty to the touch. The climax of this activity, to which Uncle Theo looked hungrily forward, and which he provoked himself by deferring, was the moment when he should oh so gently and lingeringly place a stone upon the summit of each of Pierce’s buttocks.
There was a sudden crunching sound and two shadows fell upon them. Pierce twisted away, scattering the stones, and sat up. Damn, thought Theo, damn, damn, damn.
“Please may we have Mingo?” said Edward. “We need him for our game of Feathers.”
“He won’t come,” said Pierce. “He’s in a love-state with Uncle Theo.” Pierce did not cover himself for Henrietta, who was used to male nakedness.
“He’ll come if we ask him specially,” said Henrietta. “He’s such a polite dog.”
“Come on, Mingo, stop lazing,” said Theo, pushing the dog off his lap.
“Seen any saucers lately?” said Pierce.
“Yes, we saw one yesterday. We think it’s the same one.”
“Funny, isn’t it,” said Pierce, “that no one seems to see those saucers except you two!”
The twins were dignified on the subject of their saucers.
Edward, who had been engaged in hauling the reluctant and rather floppy Mingo up on to his four paws, said “Oh how I wish it would rain!”
Henrietta was now beckoning her brother aside and whispering to him. Edward released Mingo who forthwith collapsed again. After a good deal of whispering and fumbling, Edward cleared his throat and addressed Pierce in what the children called his official voice. “Pierce. We’ve got something here we should like to give you.”
“What?” said Pierce in an indifferent tone. He had lain down again upon the pebbles, on his back this time.
The twins came round to him and Pierce raised himself indolently upon an elbow. “Here,” said Edward. “We’d like you to have this, for yourself.”
“With our best love,” said Henrietta.
Edward held out something and Pierce received it in a brown gritty hand. Theo, peering, saw that it was a fossil, a rather remarkable one, an almost perfect ammonite. The delicate finely indented spiral of the shell was clearly marked on both sides of the stone as Pierce now turned it over in his palm, and the sea had rounded the edges and blurred the pattern just sufficiently to produce a thing of great beauty. Theo knew that the gift of the ammonite must represent a considerable sacrifice on the part of the twins, who valued their stones for aesthetic as well as for scientific reasons.
“Thanks,” said Pierce, holding the stone rather awkwardly.
Edward stood back, as if to bow, and then quickly turned his attention again to the animation of Mingo. Pierce got lazily up to his feet. With many “Come on”s and “Good boy”s the twins had cajoled the dog into following them, and they were just beginning to march away across the dazzling mauve and white expanse, when Pierce suddenly twitched and straightened as if he had received an electric shock. He then twisted his naked body like a curling spring, his arm flung back, rotated upon his heels, and with a mighty cast sent the ammonite spinning far out to sea.
Edward and Henrietta, who had seen what happened, stopped dead. Theo leapt to his feet. Pierce turned away with his back to the sea. The twins started walking again, and receded stiffly, followed by Mingo.
“You absolute little swine,” said Theo to Pierce, “what ever possessed you to do that?”
Pierce looked at him, half over his shoulder, with a scarcely recognisable face as contorted as a Japanese mask. Theo thought, he is furiously angry, no, he is about to burst into tears.
“Steady on, Pierce.”
“I’m so bloody fucking miserable.”
“All right. But you oughtn’t to take it out of the twins.”
“Maybe. Oh what does it matter. I hate everyone. Everything’s black.”
Picturing himself taking the naked kouros into his arms, Theo settled down on the stones and sat firmly upon his hands. Pierce stood between him and the water, twisting and rippling his brown body like a prisoner in bonds against the luminous blue sheet of sky and sea.
“Keep the blackness inside yourself then,” said Theo. “Don’t pass it on.”
“If I kept it all inside I think I’d die of it. Have you ever been hopelessly in love, Uncle Theo?”
“Yes.” Hopelessly just about describes it, thought Theo, pressing the palms of his hands down on to the stones.
With an indolent stoop and a grimace Pierce picked up his clothes and began to walk slowly away along the beach in the opposite direction to the twins.
Theo wanted to call him back. But then he thought, oh let him go, there’s no mending a fruitless love, it just has to be endured. I endure, let him endure.
He rose to his feet, but did not follow Pierce. He walked along to where, further on, he could see that the twins had sat down, with Mingo beside them. They had not started on their game of Feathers. As he came nearer he saw that Henrietta was crying.
Mingo greeted Theo as if they had not met for a year. Theo sat down beside Henrietta. “Come, my pet, don’t grieve. Pierce is very unhappy, you know that. And when people are unhappy they often make other people suffer, quite automatically.”
“What did he have to do that for?” cried Edward indignantly. “If he didn’t want it he could have given it back to us. It was such a lovely one.”
“It was the most beautiful one of all,” Henrietta wailed. “Edward didn’t want to give it and I persuaded him to, just to cheer Pierce up. Oh I do wish I hadn’t!”
“Never regret a good action,” said Theo. “It has more power than you know. Pierce will tell you he’s sorry, and you must promise to forgive him.”
The twins agreed, after a little argument, that they would forgive Pierce. Henrietta was tearful for a while longer about the sad fate of the ammonite deep in the sea, until Theo and Edward joined in consoling her by picturing how happy it would be talking to the crabs and the fishes and how it would much rather be there than getting dusty up in Pierce’s bedroom.
Why ever did I do that, Pierce asked himself as he stepped into his trousers. I’ll tell them I’m sorry, he thought, but that won’t do any good. Oh well, I don’t care, I detest everybody. I believe I’m becoming bad, like Barbara said. All right, I’m bad and I’ll be bad.
Barbara was absent at present, staying with a school friend in town. Pierce had hoped that her absence might bring some relief, even in the form of apathy, but had not reckoned with the sheer pain of the absence itself. His black mood, which during the unpredictable torment of her presence had remained incoherent, now seemed to be becoming much harder and more definite as if he were gathering himself for some final destructive assault. And his physical desire for the phantom Barbara seemed ev
en more teasingly painful than his desire for the glimpsed girl of flesh and blood.
He had been unable to prevent himself from following her about and provoking her, until she had told him in plain terms that she was going to town for a holiday from him. They had quarrelled violently, and Pierce had returned later to his room to find lying about on his bed all the objects which he had ever given to Barbara as presents. He had retaliated by returning to her room, and breaking some of them in the process, all the things which she had ever given him, including the excellent all-purpose knife which she had brought him from Switzerland and which had been the apple of his eye.
Pierce, fully dressed now but barefoot, stood by the edge of the glossy sea. He looked down at the receding underwater stones which the sun was revealing through a panel of green, still but bubbly like imperfect glass. He thought, I shall punish her somehow, I shall have to. And then I shall go into Gunnar’s Cave and jolly well stay there and drown.
Nineteen
MARY climbed over the low wall of the graveyard. Her blue and white cotton dress caught on a sparkling edge of warm stone and a fine shower of dusty earth spilled over into her sandal.
Willy was a little way ahead of her, moving slowly over the bouncy interlaced ropes of the ivy. He moved with a rhythmical dancer’s motion, his limp imperceptible, the mysterious pliancy of the ivy floor entering into his body.
Mary leaned back against the wall. She was in no hurry to catch him up. The hot afternoon was silent with a thick powdery fragrant silence which Mary breathed ecstatically up into her head. A very very distant cuckoo call endorsed the silence like a mark or signature. Mary thought, I am lazy, I am in no hurry. She thought, today I have him on a lead. She smiled at the thought.
From this part of the graveyard nothing was visible except the whitish grey monuments, their tops tapering into invisibility in the over-abundant light, and the octagonal church, up whose walls Mary noticed the small-leaved ivy was beginning to climb. At some later time perhaps the church itself would simply be a mound of ivy, as so many of the gravestones had already become. Beyond the shimmering forms of the graves the afternoon sky was empty, a pale colourless radiant void.