by Iris Murdoch
How hard it was to describe things. How hard it was to see things. He wondered if, since he had completely given up drinking, he had actually been able to see more. Not that he had ever drunk very much, but any departure from total sobriety seemed to damage his perception. Even yet he was not sober enough, not quiet enough, to take in the marvels that surrounded him. The ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese. His Notebook of Particulars was in its third volume, and still he was simply learning to look. He knew that this, for the present, was all of his task. The great things would happen later when he was ready for them.
Miles pushed up the sash of the window. It was evening, just coming to twilight, a time that he loved. The air was damp and warm. He reached a hand out and twisting his arm round took hold of the stocking-brown leaf by its stalk and detached it from the glass. It came away with a faint sucking noise. He examined it for a moment and then dropped it into the invisibility of the darkening air. The rain had ceased and there was a purplish gleam in the sky up above the huge humped roof of the Earls Court Exhibition Hall. The wet roof was glistening and metallic. But the narrow garden down below him was already dark between its walls except for a faint reflection of light from the windows of the summer house. Miles had built the summer house, a square box against the wall a little away from the house, in the hope that sitting in it he might write better poetry. But it did not seem to have made any difference and it got terribly damp in winter.
The garden was obscure in the vibrating diminishing light and he could just discern the grey domes of santolin and hyssop and Jackman’s rue which grew in the neat squares in the pavement. Beyond the pavement was the diminutive lawn with a shaven grass path in its centre and at the end the yew hedge with the gap in it beyond which was Diana’s tool shed. That gap, which the yews were just beginning to roof over with long feathery boughs to make into an archway, somehow made the tiny garden into a dream place, made it seem longer, as if there must be more beyond, another garden, and another and another beyond that. The yew archway was black now and the yews almost as black, thickening with darkness.
How long will it be? Miles wondered. How much longer must I be patient? Will he come, will he really come to me at last? For nearly a year now he had been filled with a growing certainty that he was soon going to write poetry again and that it would be very much better than anything he had yet done, that it would be finally the real thing. Meanwhile he waited. He tried to prepare himself. He stopped drinking and curtailed even further his exiguous social life. Everything important, he told himself, was concerned with staying in one’s place. He spent his evenings with his notebook, and if either Diana or Lisa came near him he had to prevent himself from screaming at them to go away. He said nothing to the women. At first they thought that he was ill. Later they looked at him in silence and then looked at each other. Sometimes he wrote a few lines of verse, like a musician trying an instrument. There were some isolated beautiful things. But the time was not yet when the god would come.
The poetry of his youth seemed insipid and flimsy now. And the long poem he had written after Parvati’s death seemed merely turgid stuff. He had had to write that poem, to change into art and into significance and into beauty the horror of that death. It was a survival poem, born of his own outrageous will to survive. It had sometimes seemed to him like a crime to write that poem, as if it had prevented him from seeing what he ought to have seen and what he had never allowed himself afterwards to see, the real face of death. But it had come with a force of necessity which he had not known before or since. He had called it Parvati and Shiva.
‘Lord Shiva,’ he could hear Parvati saying, in her precise accented voice, as she explained to him some aspect of the Hindu religion. ‘Do you believe in Shiva, Parvati?’ ‘There is truth in all religions.’ ‘But do you believe in him, in him?’ ‘Perhaps. Who knows what is belief?’ Parvati’s oriental ability to see that everything was, from a certain point of view, everything else, baffled and charmed his Aristotelian western mind. They had met at Cambridge, where he was reading history and she was reading economics. They were socialists of course. She was the more ardent. Parvati, in cold Cambridge evenings beside a gas fire, with her grey Cashmere shawl, as light as a cobweb, drawn round her shoulders and over her head, talking about the final crisis of capitalism. They would go back to India and serve humanity. Parvati would teach. Miles would take a course in agricultural engineering. They would work in the villages with the people. Miles began to learn Hindi. They were married immediately after their final examinations. They were both twenty-two.
Parvati came from a rich Brahmin family in Benares. Her family opposed the match. Miles could never quite understand why. Was it social, racial, religious, even perhaps financial? He questioned Parvati in vain. ‘It is many things. They cannot accept. My mother has never lived in the world.’ Once she translated to him a letter from her brother. It was a rather pompous letter. The brother did not seem to conceive that Parvati was serious. ‘For nature so preposterously to err … .’ What could it look like from their side? Parvati was greatly upset and wanted to postpone the marriage. They were both very much in love. Miles would not postpone. He was angry with her family, whose attitude he simply could not get clear about. He was even more angry with his own father who had immediately told him in the coarsest terms that he did not want a coloured daughter-in-law and coffee-coloured grandchildren. Miles broke off relations with his father. They got married and both wrote supplicating letters to Benares. After a while Parvati’s mother wrote asking her to visit them. Miles was not mentioned. Parvati was overjoyed. They would surely come round now, especially when she told them that she was expecting a child. Miles saw her off at London airport. The plane crashed in the Alps. Miles had never told anybody, not even Diana, that Parvati was pregnant.
Miles never went to see the parents. Understandably they seemed to blame him for their daughter’s death. He wrote to them much later when he married Diana but got no reply. He stayed on at Cambridge and did some inconclusive research and failed to get a fellowship. The war came, bringing Miles seven years of dreary misery. He saw no action. He moved from camp to camp, unable to read, unable to write, developing mysterious troubles in his intestines. He was moved into clerical work. He rose eventually to the rank of captain. When the war ended he went into the civil service.
The writing of the long poem, which took him over a year, had somehow prolonged, even in circumstances of dreadful grief, the sense of a life filled with love. He transformed the plane crash into a dazzling tornado of erotic imagery. But the poem was a Liebestod and although art cannot but console for what it weeps over, the completion of the poem left him sour and sick and utterly convinced of the henceforward impossibility of love. His loneliness in the army was increased by his ill-concealed disgust at the depraved casualness of his brother officers’ attitude to sex. He shunned women absolutely and when certain kinds of talk began left the room banging the door. He won himself solitude and even hostility. He did not consciously wish for death but he grieved at night for some blank thing which he could not even name.
Parvati had made all other women impossible for him. Parvati plaiting her very long black hair. Parvati with quick deft movements pleating her sari. Parvati sitting on the floor with her tongue slightly out like a cat. Her delicate aquiline face, her honey-coloured skin; his sense of acquiring with her a whole precious civilisation. The jewels in her ears which he was so surprised to learn were real rubies, real emeralds. How she had laughed at his surprise. Parvati ironing her saris in a room in Newnham. Then ironing his shirts. ‘You represent the god.’ ‘What god?’ ‘The god–Shiva, Eros … All poets have angels. You are mine.’ The very small deft brown hands, the glimpse of bare sandalled feet upon the wet autumnal pavements. The red-brown grain of her lips. Her grace, which made any western woman look gauche and stiff. How coarsely made, how dumpy and disagreeably pink her college friends
looked beside her. The feel of that long thick plait of hair in his hand the first time he had dared, playfully but trembling, to take hold of it. He had kissed her hair. Then he had kissed the edge of her silken sari where it slipped over her thin arm. She laughed, pushing him away. She was a clever girl who was going to get a first in economics, but she had not been very long out of that enclosed courtyarded house in Benares where her mother wove garlands to place upon images. Parvati talking about swaraj and the fundamental problems of an agricultural economy.
He had written hundreds of love poems for Parvati. After the war, poetry, like so much else, seemed to have come to an end. Eros had changed into Thanatos, and now even the face of Thanatos was veiled. The only person he had any real contact with was Gwen. He had not been very close to Gwen as a child. She was several years younger and he had been away at school. He first became really fond of Gwen, indeed first really noticed Gwen, when she stood up for him so fiercely when his father opposed the marriage. Gwen loved Parvati and admired her. Gwen was very partisan and given to making long speeches. He thought much later, when he a little regretted the breach with his father, that perhaps Gwen had done more harm than good. Bruno needed coaxing, and a different kind of daughter might have coaxed him instead of lecturing him. Miles had no intention of coaxing him. He wished his father at the devil.
After Parvati’s death he wanted to see nobody, not even Gwen. Gwen went up to Cambridge and read Moral Sciences and started on a Ph.D. thesis on Frege. The war came and Gwen became an Air Raid Warden in London. Later on in the war Miles arrived in London, still in uniform, working in an office, and for a while a curious almost intimate relationship existed between them. Gwen was usually tired to the point of collapse. Miles felt guiltily how easy a life he was now leading by contrast. They never shared a house, but he used to go round most evenings to her little flat off Baker Street, arriving before she did, and prepare a hot meal for her. Sometimes she was very late and he sat tensely listening to the bombs and trying not to let terrible imaginings break out. Sometimes she worked at night and he saw little of her. They talked a great deal, not about themselves, never of Parvati, but about cool healing impersonal things, poetry, philosophy, art. Eventually they talked mainly philosophy and theology: Karl Barth, Wittgenstein.
Their intimacy was ended, towards the close of the war, by Danby. Miles could never understand about Gwen and Danby. It all happened very quickly. They met on an underground train. On the Inner Circle: they both seemed to attach importance to this, and reiterated it with an imbecile ritual solemnity. They had begun to talk to each other. People did this more readily in the war time. Danby surreptitiously passed his station. Gwen surreptitiously passed hers. When they had been all the way round the circle they had to admit to each other that something had happened. Thus the thing began in a kind of absurdity; and Miles felt that in some way it had never ceased to be absurd. Danby was fundamentally a very absurd person, a contingent person, and Miles resented the absorption into this loose and floppy organism of his close-knit and far from contingent sister.
He felt that Gwen had deceived him. She ought not to have let things happen so fast, she ought to have consulted him. As it was, and only a little apologetically, she just introduced Danby out of the blue as her fiance. Miles scowled politely at this plump bland constantly smiling and obviously self-satisfied person in the uniform of an artillery officer. Danby’s hair was golden in those days and his complexion was pink. He looked like a schoolboy cadet. Miles questioned him closely about his background and his education. His father was a shop-keeper in Didcot. He went to a local grammar school and then to Reading University where he studied English literature for a year and then gave up. He worked in an insurance office and then went into the war where he served without drama or distinction in the artillery and later told Miles he had thoroughly enjoyed it. He appeared to have no intellectual interests. Once married he entered the printing works with an insouciance which irritated Miles, and made a success in business which irritated Miles even more. Miles could not see that Danby had any decent raison d’etre whatsoever. ‘I just can’t see it, about Danby,’ he said to his sister once. ‘Oh well, Danby is such fun,’ Gwen had replied. Miles had nothing with this answer.
Bruno, with whom Gwen had by now re-established relations, was reported to be fond of Danby, and after a while Miles began to tolerate his brother-in-law. Danby was anxious to please, and after Miles had made clear what he thought of the masculine jokes with which Danby at first sought to establish connivance, they did manage to achieve a sort of understanding, based on Danby’s interpretation of his role as a controlled and censored fool. Danby, who was not totally insensitive, managed to extend in the direction of Miles, as a kind of propitiatory feeler, the sense of inferiority which he genuinely felt in relation to Gwen. He accepted Miles as his superior and he accepted and shared Miles’s view of his incredible and quite undeserved good luck in having obtained Miles’s sister. Like that, things settled down; but Miles saw less and less of them. Then after Gwen was dead there was no reason to see Danby any more.
Diana came later, as a surprise, almost as a miracle. The terrible bitterness of Gwen’s death put Miles once more into the presence of that which his long poem had served to shield him from. But as soon as he was able to he ceased to look and to feel and set himself to lead a life of complete retirement and almost ferocious dullness. Writing was inconceivable. He read a good deal, as a matter of routine, mainly history and biography, but without passion. He did his job, avoided his colleagues, was classified as an eccentric and quietly passed over at promotion times. His superiors began to regard him as slightly unbalanced, but on the whole he attracted little attention. He suffered occasional fits of severe depression, but not very frequently.
Then one day in the grocer’s shop in the Earls Court Road where he went twice a week with a large basket to buy his provisions a girl said to him, ‘Don’t look so sad.’ Miles shuddered at being addressed by a woman and left the shop immediately. She followed him. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve so often seen you in here. May I walk along with you?’ And later, ‘Do you live alone?’ And later still, ‘Have you been married?’ Diana did all the work. She explained afterwards to Miles how she had seen him several times in the shop looking self-absorbed and melancholy and had had a fantasy that everything would happen even as it did happen: that he would turn out to live alone, that he had had a great sorrow, that he shunned society, that he had no dealings with women. For Diana it was, in some extraordinary way, the perfect working out of a dream. She had been searching for Miles. She recognised him at once. It was her sense of destiny which carried them both along.
Diana had a very positive conception of her role as a woman. It was in fact her only role and one which had absorbed her since she left school. She grew up in Leicester where her father was a bank clerk. Her parents were vague people and she and her sister did what they pleased. Diana went on a scholarship to an art school in the London suburbs but left it after two years. She became an unsuccessful commercial artist, she worked in an advertising agency. But mainly she just lived. She moved to Earls Court. She had adventures. She lived with men, some rich ones who found her puzzling and gave her expensive presents, and some poor ones who took her money and got drunk and wept. All this she recounted to Miles later on, enjoying his incomprehension and his quite involuntary twitches of disapproval. She had been looking for him, she told him, all this time. She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.
She loved him very much and although he told her at first that he was an empty vessel, a nothing, and that her love was to him a nothing, she succeeded at last in attracting his attention. Miles was thirty five. Diana was twenty eight. Miles became aware that she was beautiful. She was a fair-haired brown-eyed girl with a straight assertive nose and a big well-made mouth and a large flat brow and an ivory complexion and a coo
l enigmatic expression. She tucked her hair well back behind her ears and thrust her pale smooth large-eyed face boldly forward at the world. A quality in her which seemed at first to Miles to be shamelessnesss later seemed to him more like courage. In the early days of his interest he apprehended her, not without a certain pleasure, as a courtesan; and later, when he was certain that she loved him, he felt her ‘adventurousness’ as intensifying, not diminishing, the love which she had to offer. When he married her he still felt that she was his mistress, and that pleased both of them.
Of course Diana understood about Parvati. She knew that for Miles this had been something supreme, a love not of this world only. She submitted, in a way which touched his heart and first made him believe absolutely in her love, to being the second not only in time. She accepted indeed the fact that there was not even any question of a contest. A place in his life, a part of himself, perhaps the best part, was simply not available to her. This Miles tried to explain to her while he was still trying to dissuade her love. Soon after, perhaps even then, he was relieved to find that he had laid every vexation upon her and told her every unhappy truth without dissuading her at all. In the end he stopped fighting and let her use the whole huge force of her woman’s nature to comfort him, to lure him out of the dark box in which he had been living. His pleasure in her joy was the best experience in his life for many years.
They moved to the house in Kempsford Gardens and after a while, although she said nothing about it, Miles knew that Diana was hoping for a child. Miles was not sure what he felt about children. His child, the one, had died in the Alps. Could there be another? He began vaguely to want a son. But the years passed and nothing happened. They looked at each other questioningly in the spaces of the house. Their life was simple. Miles had never craved for company. Now that he had Diana he was perfectly contented. He would have been happy to see no one else. Diana met her friends at lunch time. They hardly ever entertained.