by Iris Murdoch
Mary began to move, not following Willy but going parallel to him. Her sandalled feet touched the woven surface of the springy ivy, which yielded but with no sense of touching the ground below. Walking on water would be rather like this, Mary thought, one would feel the water as thick yielding stuff pressing up against the soles of one’s feet. She paused and touched the iron railing which surrounded one of the obelisks, streaking her hand with brown. She was conscious of Willy near to her, moving. The substance of the summer afternoon joined their two bodies so that when he moved she felt her own flesh very gently tugged at. Today we are like Siamese twins, she thought, only we are joined together by some sort of delicious extensible warm ectoplasm.
Now Willy had thrown himself down on the ivy, falling straight back on to it in the way the children did. Mary approached and seeing that his eyes were closed sat down quietly nearby, leaning her back against one of the stones, the one from which Pierce had so carefully stripped the ivy to reveal a fine carving of a sailing ship upon it.
Willy, who had felt the ivy-tremor of Mary’s coming, said “Ai”.
“Ai.”
Mary was quiet for a while, looking at the whiteness of Willy’s hair fanned out upon the ivy. His face was so small and brown, his nose so thin, his hands so dainty and bony. She was reminded suddenly of the feel of a bird’s claws as it perches on one’s finger, a tender frightening feeling.
“What are you thinking, Mary?”
“Just about the graveyard.” She could not tell him about the bird.
“What about it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I feel these people must have had peaceful happy lives.”
“One cannot say that of any people.”
“I feel their presence—and yet it’s not hostile or troubled.”
“Yes, I feel their presence too. But the hosts of the dead are transformed.”
Mary was silent. She did not feel them as hostile or troubled, and yet the graveyard did make her afraid, with a not too unpleasant fear, especially on these afternoons which had the density of midnight. What are they transformed into, she wondered. She had no images of skulls or rotting bones. She saw them all as sleepers bound about in white with dark empty eyes, open-eyed sleepers.
“You’re shivering, Mary.”
“I’m all right. I think I’ve just got a touch of the sun.”
“Let me cure you of it with my magic stone. Here, catch.”
Mary clasped quickly at something green which was flying through the air. For a second she thought it was going to fall into the dark interior of the ivy matrix, but her hand nimbly deflected it on to her lap. It was a piece of semi-transparent green glass, worked by the sea into an almost perfect sphere.
“Oh how lovely!” She put it to her brow. “And how cool too.”
“You caught it so prettily in your skirt. You know the story about the princess who discovered the prince who was hiding among her waiting women by throwing a ball to each woman. The women all put their legs apart so as to catch the ball in their dress, but the prince put his legs together.”
Mary laughed. She felt the connection between their bodies like a strong soupy swirl of almost visible substance. Willy was moving now, propping himself up against a grave, and Mary thought, oh how I wish he would lean over and lay his head in my lap.
“You mustn’t let the twins see this piece of glass,” she said. “They would want it so much you would have to give it to them!”
“But I’ve given it to you.”
“Oh, thank you!” She closed her eyes, rolling the cool glass over her brow and down the side of her nose to her cheek. She said, “Oh Willy, Willy, Willy.”
“What ees eet?”
“Nothing. I feel so strange. I wish you’d talk to me more. Tell me something about you, anything, any small thing, a toy you had when you were a child, your first day at school, someone who was your friend once, just anything.”
“Well, I shall tell you—I shall tell you the most terrible thing that ever happened to me.”
“Oh!” She thought, now it’s all going to come out, all of it, everything, oh God can I stand it.
“I was six years old.”
“Oh.”
“We were on a summer holiday,” Willy went on, “at a seaside place on the Black Sea. Every morning I went with my nurse into the public gardens and she sat down and knitted and I pretended to play. I didn’t really play because I didn’t know how to play like that in public and I was frightened of other children. I knew I was supposed to run about and I ran about and pretended to pretend to be a horse. But all the time I was worrying in case someone should look at me and know that it was all fake and that I was not a happy child playing at all, but a little frightened thing running to and fro. I would have liked just to sit quietly beside my nurse, but she would not allow that and would tell me to run about and enjoy myself. There were other children in the public gardens but they were mostly older than me and went about in groups of their own. Then one day a little fair-haired girl with a small black and white dog came to the gardens. The little girl’s nurse sat near to my nurse and I began to play with the dog. I was too shy to speak to the girl or even look at her properly. She had a blue velvet coat and little blue boots. I can see those blue boots very clearly. Perhaps that was all I let myself see of her in the first days. She was just a blurred thing near to where I was playing with the dog. I liked playing with the dog, that was real playing, but I wanted much more to play with the little girl, but she would go and sit beside her nurse, though I heard her more than once being told that she might play with me if she wished.
Then she began to come near to me when I was petting the dog, and once when I was sitting on the grass with the dog lying beside me she came and sat down beside the dog too, and I asked her the dog’s name. I can still feel the warm smooth feeling of the dog’s back on which I had put my hand and I can see her hand near to mine stroking the dog’s ears, and now I can see her face as I first saw it clearly for the first time, a round rosy rather shiny glowing face. She had short very fair hair and a funny little cross mouth and I loved her. We talked a little bit and then she asked me to play with her. I was an only child and I did not know how one played with another child. I knew no games which could be played except alone. I said I would play with her but did not then know what to do. She tried to teach me a game, but I was too foolish and too much loving to understand, and I think anyway it was a game needing more people. In the end we just played with the dog, running races with it and teasing it and trying to make it do tricks. Now I wanted every day to come to the public gardens to see the little girl and I was very very happy. I think I was happier in those days than I have ever been since in my whole life. Then one day I thought I would like to bring a present to the little girl and the dog, and I persuaded my parents to buy a little yellow bouncing ball for the dog to play with and for us to throw and for him to bring back. I was so impatient for the next morning, I could hardly wait to show my friend the yellow ball and to throw it for the little dog. Next morning then I went to the gardens, and there was the girl in her blue coat and her blue boots and the black and white dog frisking round about her. I showed her the yellow ball and I threw it for the dog and he went running after it and he caught it and it stuck in his throat and he choked and died.”
“Oh God!” said Mary. She knelt up in the ivy. The climax of the story had arrived so suddenly she did not know what to say. “Oh how—Oh Willy—What happened then—?”
“I did not see all as my nurse took me away. I was in a hysteria for that day and had the next day a fever. Then it was time for us to go home. I never saw the little girl again.”
“Oh Willy,” she said, “I am sorry, I am so sorry—”
There was a silence. The distant cuckoo call hollowed the quiet air. The scene, like a faded brown picture postcard, hovered in Mary’s mind, making the graveyard invisible. She saw the formal public garden, the gossiping nursemaids, the sedate quaintly dressed c
hildren, the frisky dog. Desperately searching for speech, she meant to ask, What was the little girl’s name? She asked, “What was the dog’s name?”
The silence continued. She thought, he cannot remember. She looked up.
Willy was sitting perfectly still, his arms clasped round his knees, and tears were streaming down his face. His mouth drooped, half opened, and after two attempts he said, “Rover. It was an English terrier and it was fashionable then to call them by English names.”
“Oh my darling—” said Mary. She moved awkwardly, trying to lever herself upon the springy surface. She leaned against him, thrusting one arm along his back, bowing her head on to his shoulder. Willy dabbed his face with a clean folded handkerchief. Mary put her other arm round him and clasped her hands tight upon his other shoulder, her cheek crushed against his jacket. She felt his body rigid in the ring of her clasp and she thought desperately, this does not comfort him, this does not comfort him at all. She squeezed him closer and then drew away. The bright airy light surprised her as if she had been in a dark place.
She said, “Listen, Willy, listen, and don’t think me mad. Will you marry me?”
“What?”
“I said will you marry me?”
Mary was kneeling opposite to him now. Willy continued to mop his face. He shifted himself, tucking one leg under him. His gaze moved slowly across the graveyard and by the time it had come to rest on Mary his face had changed completely, plumped out into the radiant, perky, puckish face which she had seen him wear once as he jigged about his room to some music of Mozart.
“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!” said Willy. “No one has ever proposed to me before!” Then as Mary began to say something he added in a low voice, almost under his breath, “I am impotent, you know—”
“Willy, Willy!” A shrill cry came to them across the graveyard and they turned to see Barbara climbing hurriedly over the wall. She came bounding towards them, her blue sandals scarcely touching the dark green matting.
“Oh Willy, Mary, have you seen Montrose?”
They both said no.
“I’ve been looking for him and he isn’t anywhere, not anywhere. It’s been so long and he’s never been away like this ever and he didn’t come for his milk and Pierce says he must be drowned and—”
“Nonsense,” said Mary. “Cats don’t get drowned, they’ve got far too much sense. He’ll turn up, he’s sure to.”
“But where is he, he’s not like some cats, he never goes away—”
“Now then,” said Willy, getting up rather stiffly from his ivy couch. “We’ll go back to the house together and I’ll help you look for him. I expect he’s quite near, lying asleep under a bush. I’ll help you find him.”
“But I’ve looked everywhere and it’s long past his tea-time and he always comes in—”
Willy was speaking to her in a soft sing-song comforting voice as he led her away.
Mary stayed where she was. After a while she began slowly to get to her feet. With a start of alarm she remembered the piece of green glass which Willy had given her, throwing it into her lap like the prince finding the princess, only of course in the story it was the other way round. When she had sprung up to put her arms about him it must have rolled somewhere away. She began to search, thrusting her arm down above the elbow into the dark dry twiggy interior of the ivy thicket, but though she went on searching for a long time she could not find the piece of green glass again.
Twenty
THE immense literature about Roman law has been produced by excogitation from a relatively small amount of evidence, of which a substantial part is suspect because of interpolations. Ducane had often wondered whether his passion for the subject were not a kind of perversion. There are certain areas of scholarship, early Greek history is one and Roman law is another, where the scantiness of evidence sets a special challenge to the disciplined mind. It is a game with very few pieces where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules. The isolated and uneloquent fact must be exhibited within a tissue of hypothesis subtle enough to make it speak, and it was the weaving of this tissue which fascinated Ducane. Whereas he would have found little interest in struggling with the vast mass of factual material available to a student of more recent times. There was in this preference a certain aestheticism, allied perhaps to his puritanical nature, a predilection for what was neat, enclosed, demonstrable and highly finished. What was too empirical seemed to Ducane messy. His only persistent source of dissatisfaction with his dry and finite subject matter was that the topics which interested him most frequently turned out to have been thoroughly investigated some years previously by a German.
At the moment Ducane, who had just returned from his evening with Octavian during which, contrary to their intention, they had talked shop, was sitting on his bed and turning over a paper which he had written while he was still at All Souls on the problem of ‘literal contract’ and wondering whether to include it in a collection of essays which he was shortly going to publish under the title of Puzzle and Paradox in Roman Law. He knew quite well that he ought to be otherwise engaged. He ought to be writing a letter to Jessica to suggest a time of meeting. He ought to be drafting an interim report on his enquiry into the Radeechy affair. He was putting off the former because anything he was likely to write was likely to be at least half a lie. He was putting off the latter because he had not yet decided what to do about Richard Biranne.
Attempts by Ducane’s various minions, George Droysen and others, to get on to the track of ‘Helen of Troy’ had all so far failed. And a sub rosa investigation, for which Ducane had at last received a personal authority, of Radeechy’s house and bank account had revealed nothing of interest. At least, there was only one thing that was odd, and that was a negative thing. Radeechy’s library contained a great many books on magic, but there were no traces at all of the ‘goings-on’ of which McGrath had spoken. Ducane had looked forward with a certain shame-faced curiosity to examining the tools of Radeechy’s curious trade; but there was nothing whatever to be seen. Ducane concluded that Radeechy must have destroyed them all before killing himself, which suggested that the suicide was premeditated and not impulsive. This piece of reasoning helped very little, however.
Ducane had put off, and was inclined still to put off, the moment of actually asking Biranne for an explanation, because he was beginning to feel that this was his last card. The report on Biranne from the security people had been, as he had expected it to be, without interest, and his own discreet enquiries and speculations had been fruitless. He could get no ‘lead’ at all to help him to interpret that surprising connection; and he did not want to confront Biranne without having found out a good deal more. Biranne was a very clever man and could scarcely be bluffed into thinking that ‘all was discovered’. All was very far from being discovered and Biranne would certainly become aware of this. Ducane had no doubt in his own mind that Radeechy’s relations with Biranne somehow contained the key to the suicide, but the evidence for this, when he came to reflect upon it, was suggestive rather than conclusive. Biranne had lied about his acquaintance with Radeechy, he had been the prompt discoverer of Radeechy’s death, and he had in some way moved or fiddled with Radeechy’s body. But if Biranne chose to maintain that he had lied out of nervousness and touched the body out of impulsive curiosity, what more could be said? And that his promptness upon the scene was accidental could well be the truth.
Ducane had reopened in his mind the possibility that Biranne had actually murdered Radeechy, and that the left-hand right-hand discrepancy between Radeechy’s finger-prints and the position of the gun was due to either accident or cunning. But he could not satisfy himself: accident was too unlikely and cunning too devious and unclear. If Biranne had seen Radeechy ‘doing things’ in the course of his magical operations would he not have known that Radeechy was left-handed? In fact Ducane knew from experience that left-handedness often escapes notice; and in any case there was no proof that Biranne’s visi
ts to the house were connected with the magic at all. On the whole Ducane was not convinced by the idea of murder. He felt pretty sure that Radeechy had used the gun and that Biranne had unthinkingly moved it in the course of his search, or whatever it was he had been doing, and had instinctively replaced it beside the right hand. In the end, perhaps very soon, he would have to tax Biranne with this. But the interview, to which he did not in any way look forward, was crucial and must not be bungled. He wanted not only to surprise Biranne but to have enough information to be able in some way to trap him. At the moment, however, it simply seemed impossible to find out anything more, he ruefully concluded, short of having Peter McGrath put upon the rack.
“There’s a gentleman downstairs to see you, Sir. He says his name’s McGrath.”
Ducane jumped. Fivey, who preferred not to enter a room if putting his head round the door would do, was leaning over, supported by the door handle, at an angle of forty-five degrees. Even his moustaches admitted the pull of gravity.
“Where is he? I’ll come down.”
“He’s in the hall, Sir.”
As Fivey stood aside Ducane apprehended a curious and unfamiliar smell, a sort of piercing sweet-sour odour, which seemed to be emanating from his servant. He hurried past and out of its range. Fivey followed him down the narrow stairs droning Bony Chairlie’s noo awa half under his breath.
Ducane caught a quick glimpse of McGrath’s orange hair and blue eyes. Then they were blotted out by the large form of Fivey who, sidestepping like a dancer, passed in front of Ducane, opened the door of Ducane’s small drawing-room with a flourish, and turned the lights on. McGrath, no longer looking at Ducane, was staring at Fivey who was now leaning against the lintel of the door more in the attitude of a spectator than of one about to usher others into a room.
“Go in, please,” said Ducane.