An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Sixty-five!’

  ‘You opted for scheme F.4. with smaller premiums.’

  ‘I see!’

  ‘Here is your signature.’

  ‘But I haven’t any money,’ said Austin, ‘I haven’t a penny. I’ve saved nothing.’

  ‘That is not our affair, Mr Gibson Grey.’

  Was Mr Bransome going to turn nasty? Was Austin going to burst into tears?

  ‘I mean, I think it’s a bit unfair to sack me suddenly after all these years without warning.’

  ‘Temporary non-pensionable staff are always subject to this hazard. This was made clear in your terms of appointment. Would you care to see your terms of appointment? They are here on the file.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘We want to make things easy for you, Mr Gibson Grey.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have here a draft letter of resignation, Miss Waterhouse has just typed it.’

  ‘You mean my resignation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll sign it.’

  ‘Don’t you want to read it?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Austin signed the letter with his left hand. His right hand had been stiff since boyhood.

  ‘And here is a little mark of our appreciation.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A book token. The contributors have listed their names.’

  ‘So all these people knew I was going and I didn’t?’

  ‘We wanted it to be a nice surprise.’

  ‘How charming.’

  ‘Well, I think that is all, Mr Gibson Grey.’

  ‘Can I leave at once?’

  ‘At once? Certainly if —’

  ‘I don’t think I want to meet my successor.’

  ‘I would hardly —’

  ‘And I’ve got my book token.’

  ‘Then it remains to wish you good luck.’

  ‘And good luck to you, my dear Mr Bransome.’

  Miss Waterhouse and the Junior watched with ecstasy as Austin cleared out his desk. It was not every day that they witnessed a sacking. Miss Waterhouse lent Austin a carrier bag. The Junior chewed gum, which Austin had forbidden him to do in the office. At the bottom of one of the drawers Austin found a photograph of Betty. He tore it up and dropped it into the waste paper basket.

  I cannot and will not rise upon my humiliations to higher things, thought Austin. He was sitting in the pub. It was raining. He started to eat a pickled onion and bit his tongue. He always bit his tongue in moments of crisis. Perhaps he had an abnormally large tongue? How did the tongue survive anyway, leading its dangerous life inside a semi-circular guillotine? When he came to think about it, it was like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

  It flickers, he thought, it flickers. Behind the visible world, always just upon the threshold of some possible mode of perception, there was another and more terrible reality. He stared till his eyes grew hazy, till they watered not with ordinary tears. Was it like this for others? No. The world of the happy is not the world of the unhappy, as some idiot philosopher had said. Why was he not a successful ordinary man pulling girls’ tights off in the backs of cars? How to overcome anxiety. He once wrote for a book called that. It was all about diaphragmatic breathing. It did no good.

  Looking-glass man, he thought, trying vainly for the millionth time to flex the fingers of his right hand. If only I could turn myself inside out and make the fantasy real, the real fantasy. But the trouble was that there were no good dreams any more, nothing good or holy or truly desirable any more even in dreams, only that awful thing behind the flickering screen. Dorina had been a good dream. There had seemed to be another place where Dorina walked barefoot in the dew with her hair undone. Altogether elsewhere there were cool meadows and flowers and healing waters. That had been the meaning of Dorina. Could he ever reach that place? Oh softness of fantasy life which nothing resists.

  Garth and Dorina must not know that he had been sacked. But someone in the office would tell someone who would tell the Tisbournes and they would send the news around. The Tisbournes always found out everything. How pleased they would be. How intrusively anxious to help. How delighted all his enemies would be. By his enemies of course Austin meant his friends. How he despised himself for caring what the Tisbournes thought. Even from that petty servitude he was unable to free himself. Thank God Garth was in America. Thank God Matthew was abroad, elsewhere forever, and that they had stopped writing to each other. The Tisbournes’ sympathy would torment him. Matthew’s sympathy might kill him.

  Perhaps it was providential after all that Dorina was still at Valmorana. O my little caged bird, how painful it is to think of you and yet how sweet! Dorina was to have been a fresh start, a stepping-stone into some sort of elegant life. Her innocence had been so important to him, his capture of it such an achievement. How he had loved her dependence, even her ghost-haunted weakness. Would he ever live with her again in blameless ordinariness? That was his only significant goal. But now everything they did seemed to hurt each other. How had it come to be like that? And how had it all become so public with everyone endlessly interfering and trying to run his affairs? Why could he not keep his trouble to himself like other people did? Sister Mavis had carried Dorina away into her never never land, her fairy domain of false light. But Dorina was the real princess. Mavis was just a smart Bloomsbury Catholic with a failed life. I’ll get another job, he thought, and get Dorina back. For the present it’s just as well she’s with Mavis. She’s safe there, they can’t get at her there, she’s protected and shut in. Later on I’ll take her away. I was in a rut at that stupid office, that was part of the trouble. Need I despise myself for ever because of a fat boy in a football jersey?

  What a pity Dorina had turned out not to have any money after all. The world of the pecunious is not the world of the impecunious. If there is nothing in the bank any more what happens, what does one do? What happens when a human life just irretrievably breaks down? Now he had debts and no income. Whom could he borrow from? Charlotte? I’ll let the flat and move in with Mitzi Ricardo, he suddenly thought. What a good idea. I can make a bit on the letting. Mitzi had suggested this once before when he was broke, after Betty’s death, before Dorina. Mitzi loved him. He knew that Mitzi had suffered at his second marriage and had quietly rejoiced at his troubles. Mitzi was a big powerful girl, a big blonde with a big face and a loud voice, who had been quite a famous athlete before she wrecked her ankle. He liked Mitzi and her tough defeated acceptance of the mediocre. Mitzi thought Dorina thought her ‘common’, but of course Dorina couldn’t even think a word like that. Mitzi would be sweet and gentle with him, yes, that was what he needed now, gentleness and a healing of bruises, the gentleness of lame people. Mitzi would ask nothing and expect nothing. What a relief. And he need not discuss things with her. One hated outsiders and confidants in the end.

  Ludwig Leferrier was there too, whom Austin trusted. An American friend of Garth’s had seemed the last thing that Austin could do with. But he had got on amazingly well with Ludwig. He could talk about Garth to Ludwig without pain. Perhaps because the big slow American boy conceived of no horrors here. Ludwig’s admiration for Garth both touched and exasperated Austin. Ludwig thought of Austin as a fond father proud of his clever son, as if such a relationship somehow covered and accounted for everything. Of course Austin was a fond proud father. Yet was Garth really so remarkable? Austin feared his son’s judgment, but that was another thing. There were indeed many other things. He was grateful to Ludwig too because Ludwig, while being friendly, loyal and discreet, could make neither head nor tail of the Dorina business, and did not, as everyone else did, pretend to understand it better than Austin did himself.

  What did I do with that photo of Betty, he thought, as he lifted his steel-rimmed specs out of a pool of beer. Austin was vain about his appearance and resented the glasses, which were new-comers in his life. He began to ferret about in Miss Waterhouse’s carrier bag. Then he reme
mbered that he had torn the photo up and thrown it away. Why had he done that? Why was he always doing things that he didn’t mean to or want to? The pub was closing and he would have to go back to the flat. He would take some aspirins and lie down. But then the demon asthma would come and bind his breast in a hoop of steel. It had been his constant companion, forbidding rest, ever since the accident with the gas. And afternoon repose was hell anyway, as he knew from terrible Saturdays and Sundays when his body and his mind ached with twitching boredom and fatigue and fear. Quietness came to him now only when he was unconscious.

  Suppose he were to go to the National Gallery. Would Titian or Rembrandt or Piero work a wonder for him, as they had once done? No. All books, even the greatest, became exhausted if read often enough and all pictures lose their power to charm. Only youth preserves some illusion of radiance because the ability to be surprised has not yet worn away. And when he felt wistfully that his own life had once had the clarity of art, he was merely remembering his boyhood, the bright time before he fell down that rivulet of stone while the fat boy laughed and laughed.

  When he was ten he had had to learn to write with his left hand. Every nerve of his being resisted this. He had fallen through the looking-glass and could never get back. Even now when he was tired he formed his letters the wrong way round and the old weak penetrating feeling of impotence swept over him again. His Quaker parents had told him to make of his physical disability a spiritual advantage but he could not and would not. For him the Inner Light was early quenched. He detested his parents’ complacent seriousness. But he had never made it out of their rotten milieu like Matthew had.

  That was all long ago and even poor Bet was dead long since and the miseries she had caused him were spectres which the years had wasted and the fat boy in the football jersey was an elderly Buddha, an ambassador, a ‘Sir’. ‘Oh, are you Sir Matthew’s brother?’ people would say with ill-concealed amaze. Let Matthew now stay away from him for ever, let him end his days in an eastern monastery, as he once said he would, and let the world know him no more. Indeed, Austin had already come to believe that Matthew was dead, for only so could his own heart be at rest.

  ‘Grace Leferrier. It’s a nice name. Yes, very nice.’

  ‘You aren’t too sorry about Sebastian Odmore?’

  ‘I knew Gracie would never marry Sebastian.’

  ‘I think you’re making the best of a —’

  ‘No, I’m not, Pinkie. I think it’s lovely.’

  George and Clara Tisbourne were drinking after-luncheon coffee in their tiny dining-room. George was a civil servant working on Millbank and came home to lunch most days. The rain had stopped and a faint steam arose from the wet cement in the tiny garden-yard. There was a lake about the drain which was blocked again.

  ‘And it all happened this morning?’

  ‘Yes, about eleven o’clock, Gracie said.’

  ‘Was she calm?’

  ‘No. She pretended to be. But she was all of a tremble. So am I. ‘Let’s have some cognac.’

  ‘Gracie engaged!’ said George Tisbourne. ‘It’s certainly a significant moment.’ He fetched the brandy. ‘Or will she change her mind?’

  ‘She loves him. She’s all hazy.’

  ‘She’s often hazy. Better wait a bit before announcing it.’

  ‘I did want an Englishman,’ said Clara, ‘but I suppose an American is next best, and he is a very nice American. I must say when Americans are sweet they’re very very sweet.’

  ‘And he’s definitely staying here?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’s the expatriate type. Detests his homeland. Besides, he was born here.’

  ‘Good. He seems to be a clever chap. I wish Gracie had condescended to have a bit more education.’

  ‘Gracie knows what’s best for herself. She’s a very sure-footed animal. She will make her life work.’

  ‘Yes, she’s always known best, she never really depended on us, even as a child.’

  The parents contemplated in silence the awe-inspiring mystery of their daughter.

  ‘He’s quite good-looking too,’ said Clara. ‘That wide smile and those nice square teeth. Even being prematurely grey rather suits him. Only I wish he didn’t speak so slowly, sometimes one’s concentration fails in the middle of a sentence.’

  ‘Who are his people? What does his father do?’

  ‘Naturally I asked Gracie at once. She didn’t know!’

  ‘I suppose his parents aren’t rich?’

  ‘I somehow think not. And I couldn’t ask Gracie that when she was in such an interesting spiritual condition.’

  ‘Hmm. Speaking of — do you think?’

  ‘No. But I think the sooner we have that weekend with the Odmores the better.’

  ‘Clara!’

  ‘Oh Pinkie, I do hope it will all work, I couldn’t bear it if Gracie wasn’t happily married. Think of the torment. Will they communicate all the time like we do? I shall never be able to talk enough to you between now and the end of the world.’

  ‘If they don’t talk it needn’t matter. Every marriage is an individual.’

  ‘I think St Mary Abbots, or whatever it calls itself, don’t you?’

  ‘You mean for the wedding? Why not St George’s, Hanover Square!’

  ‘Well, we are Barkers people, you know, not Harrods people, and it is our local church.’

  ‘I suppose the parson won’t mind? We never turn up. I haven’t been since Patrick’s christening.’

  ‘I know the parson, he belongs to Penny Sayce’s bridge circus.’

  ‘I say, have you told Alison?’

  ‘I never talk to poor Mama now on the telephone, it’s too painful. I rang Char and Char will tell her.’

  ‘What was Charlotte’s reaction?’

  ‘Dry. Surprised Gracie had that much sense. Poor old Char, she’s always resentful and trying to score.’

  ‘She tries to put us down a bit, but that’s natural. Of course she loves us, but she’s got to defend herself. An elder sister always has ambiguous feelings about a younger one, especially when the younger one is happily married and she’s single.’

  ‘And especially when the younger one has married the man she wanted!’

  ‘If Charlotte ever wanted me those wants are past and gone long ago.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Charlotte is deep. She’s distinguished and weird and proud. What goes on in my dear sister’s mind I wonder?’

  ‘Nothing mysterious, Clara.’

  ‘All minds are mysterious. What goes on in your mind, Pinkie, if it comes to that? We talk ceaselessly and without a shred of concealment and yet the real quality of being you is utterly hidden from me.’

  They looked at each other. George had no sentimental secrets from his wife, but there was one thing he had never told her. He had studied mathematics and intended to be a mathematician. But before those cold Himalayas of the spirit his courage had fainted, and he had turned early away to the world of the warm, the lucrative and the easy. He was a clever man and an able civil servant, but these were simple skills which he exercised, and he often felt his mind sluggish and cheated of greatness. He never talked to his wife about these matters or told her that he despised himself eternally for this failure. Yet perhaps now it did not matter too much, that pusillanimous choice, because as one grew older and saw death in the distance nothing mattered too much any more, even virtue.

  ‘You can read my mind as if it were all cast on a screen over my head,’ said George, and drank some brandy.

  ‘Poor Char. I wonder how often she has regretted answering the call of duty and looking after Mama. I don’t think she knew when she started how much of her life was being asked of her.’

  ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘I know you used to think Mama was a malade imaginaire.’

  ‘She began as one. I think she was amazed when she found she was really ill.’

  ‘Well, Char got stuck long before that. Does one regret having been dutiful, I wonder?�
��

  ‘I think sometimes one regrets that most of all. Charlotte was trapped. It wasn’t just duty.’

  ‘I know. Some people just miss the bus. Poor Char has had no sort of life.’

  ‘You’re wrong. She plays a very special role. The role that some unmarried people play in the lives of their married friends. Married people need unmarried people. There’s a kind of priestly efficacy.’

  ‘You mean Char’s always available? She isn’t, you know. She hates it all. She’s not a kindly minister.’

  ‘That’s not necessary. The thing is partly symbolic. She’s there.’

  ‘Like the family cat!’

  ‘How is your mother, by the way?’

  ‘Sinking. I suppose she might go on sinking for years. You remember that crisis ages ago, and she recovered. I think all the same we won’t have this house redecorated.’

  ‘You think this time next year we’ll be in the Villa?’ The Villa was the family name for Clara’s mother’s house in Chelsea.

  ‘I don’t know. You won’t mind Char being there too? Mama did say she was leaving the place to us jointly. We can convert the basement into a nice flat for Char.’

  ‘If we move in Charlotte will move out.’

  ‘Oh God. Well, let’s not worry about it now. I must say the Villa is a stunning house. And it’ll be marvellous to have some more space, after this shoe box. And some more money. Aren’t I being hard-hearted and worldly?’

  ‘You used to say you enjoyed making economies. You used to say you’d hate to be rich.’

  ‘I’m growing old, Pinkie. I’ve changed my mind.’

  Clara’s mother, Alison Ledgard, had married an ineffectual solicitor who had wanted to be a poet but had written few verses after his marriage. Alison’s own family however were Ulster linen merchants and Alison had been a considerable heiress.

  ‘You ought to see Alison more often,’ said George.

  ‘I know I ought to. But it’s so terribly painful seeing her so frail and not herself any more and some days she can’t even speak. And all that fearful energy isn’t gone, you know, it’s just pent up inside, her eyes can glow, it’s terrible. And somehow one feels her life was so wasted just because she was a woman. She ought to have been galloping across the steppes at the head of some horde.’