by Iris Murdoch
‘All.’
‘And nothing to your mother or Aunt Charlotte?’
‘Not a bean.’
‘But shouldn’t you give it to them? I mean, it’s not right — particularly Aunt Charlotte —’
‘We must respect the wishes of the dead. My, have you ever seen such a large diamond really close to?’
Suddenly everything was frightening.
A young man on the doorstep was delivering flowers.
But flowers were for Alison, they must be. Only this week Alison was dead.
Charlotte could read the name of the flower shop on the paper, but there did not seem to be any note attached. The flowers were pink gladioli. She motioned them away.
‘Are they for Mrs Ledgard?’
‘No, they —’
‘There must be some mistake. Are you sure this is the right address?’
‘Yes, I —’
‘All right, thank you,’ said Charlotte. She snatched the flowers and shut the door quickly.
She carried them into the drawing-room which smelt soothingly of lemony furniture polish. She examined the bouquet carefully. There was no note. They must be for Alison, from somebody who didn’t know. Ought she to take them to the churchyard, or would that be stupid? It didn’t matter. Then suddenly she thought, they are from Matthew, for me. There had been no word from Matthew since his return, no word indeed for years. And now these flowers. She closed her eyes.
When she opened them she saw through the window that the young man who had delivered the flowers was still standing outside. He seemed undecided. Then he saw Charlotte looking out at him. The next moment the front door bell rang again.
Charlotte thought, it’s the wrong address, he’s realized it’s the wrong address. The Matthew idea was too good to be true, obviously absurd. She picked up the flowers and opened the door and handed them back to the young man. ‘I told you so.’
‘What?’
‘That this is the wrong address.’ How cruel, thought Charlotte. It was years and years since anyone had given her any flowers.
‘I am very sorry,’ said the young man, ‘I must apologize. You obviously don’t know who I am. My name is Garth Gibson Grey.’
But that’s impossible, thought Charlotte. Garth Gibson Grey is a boy, a schoolboy.
‘We haven’t met for some time, Miss Ledgard.’
‘I see,’ said Charlotte. She saw a shabby tall thin dark-haired man, rather sallow, with a hard bird face. He looked like a thief. Only now she could also see the gawky boy who had, in years which she had somehow mislaid, become this man. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. But who are the flowers from? You see, my mother is dead.’
‘The flowers are from me.’
‘But my mother is dead.’
‘For you.’
‘For me? But why?’
‘Why not? I just thought I’d call on you. I just thought I’d bring you some flowers.’
‘It’s a long time since anyone gave me any flowers,’ said Charlotte.
‘That’s why I thought — I mean —’
‘You thought it might have been a long time?’
‘No, I —’
‘A wreath perhaps. That would be more suitable. Yes. I thought at first they were from someone else. Well, thank you.’ Charlotte took the flowers, which Garth was proffering again. They felt dead and sinister.
‘I won’t detain you,’ said Garth, as Charlotte showed no signs of asking him in. ‘I just wanted to bring the flowers and to say that if ever there was anything I could do for you I’d be so pleased if you would let me know.’
‘What on earth could you ever do for me,’ said Charlotte, ‘and why should you assume that I want anything done? I really cannot think why you’re here.’
‘Oh well — you know — there’s always something one person can do for another, even if it’s only posting their letters.’
‘I can post my own letters, thank you,’ said Charlotte.
‘Well — forgive me —’ said Garth.
‘What for?’
‘For having been a fool. I meant well.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand this conversation,’ said Charlotte. ‘No doubt I am getting old and out of touch with young people. Perhaps I don’t understand the language of flowers any more. Are you what is called a flower child?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that. I just — I’m so sorry —’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Charlotte. ‘Thank you so much for the flowers.’
They stared at each other, seeking words. Then Charlotte made a sort of flapping movement with her hand and shut the door. She let the gladioli drop on the floor and stood by the door listening to Garth’s receding steps. The tears which were her constant companions now came again into her eyes.
Leaving the flowers where they lay, she went slowly downstairs to the kitchen. If only there had not been that moment of thinking about Matthew. She had been so unkind to the young man, pretending not to understand him. To be thoughtlessly pitied by the young is, after all, one of the least of the trials of age and should be endured with grace. She saw in herself the loneliness of the old and the artificiality of trying to help them. And yet, and yet, she was not old. How quaint of the boy to come round, when he hardly knew her. Had he heard about the will? Everyone must know by now. How agonizingly she felt it as a disgrace.
Upon the draining board lay the two halves of one of the Spode plates which she had broken last night. Just a little while ago it would have seemed worthwhile to mend it. For years she had cosseted these things which now suddenly all belonged to Gracie.
It was not that she had particularly thought of them as her own. She had looked after them as she had looked after Alison because here was home, here was duty. Now there was neither home nor duty any more. She owned her toothbrush but not the mug in which it stood, she owned her dress, but not, although she had worn it for years, the onyx necklace about her neck. Everything was entirely as usual, and yet utterly alienated, as if what one had taken to be someone’s house had turned out to be an antique shop. Just for a moment all these things were proclaiming a secret truth, that they were tough, old, cold, and practically immortal. They had existed, they would exist, until they were burnt or smashed to pieces. They were unconnected and heartless. Ownership was an illusion.
Hardship reveals eternal truths, but only for a moment, since human beings soon recover and forget. Charlotte had not yet recovered and still saw with the awful eye of vision. Of course it was a matter of pride to continue polishing and dusting. But there was no spirit left for mending plates. And this was not really because all those dear old plates now belonged to Gracie, but because it was suddenly clear that life was extremely short. Life was short, ownership was an illusion, nothing really mattered very much. All the same, I ought to have been nicer to that boy, she thought. My life is near its end, she thought. She dropped the two halves of the plate into the refuse bin.
The house was quiet and weird. Clocks ticking in it seemed to be saying something new. Charlotte listened. It was odd how absolutely gone Alison was. The house had already forgotten her. The room had been cleaned, the medicines thrown away, all the untidiness and litter of illness and death had been swept up. Did all human things disappear so quickly and so completely, leaving onyx necklaces and tallboys in cold possession of the centuries? And as the familiar place had slipped forward into another time, so Charlotte herself had changed. Home and duty and pity had prevented more than a rather cursory sense of herself. She had felt sorry for herself, but, as she now realized, in a vague and undifferentiated way. For the intense anxious sense of herself with which she was now suddenly invested she was quite untrained. She had never been a specialist in self-awareness and Alison’s presence, though it had occasioned brooding, had also prevented it from being too detailed. There had always been, after all, Alison to be sorry for. Her mother’s illness, her mother’s pitiful fear of death, had kept mortality at bay. Alison had always bee
n there, in between Charlotte and death. Now that defence was removed. Charlotte stared at death and it seemed very close to her, it had quietly come closer, it spoke to her in the ticking of the clocks, Charlotte’s own death, her very own.
Of course it had all been natural and inevitable, the way it had worked out. Of course Charlotte had had to look after Alison, it had to be Charlotte, since Clara was married with two children, and to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. That bit of the Bible’s true anyway, thought Charlotte. The grace and hope of religion had withdrawn from her long ago. All that was left was fatalism and a special taste in the bitterness of truth. Her life had passed her by, not really lived, not really hers. Only her death was hers, now silently drawn so close.
Everyone would be very kind and, within the limits of their own self-interest, considerate. Gracie would press her to stay on, would offer money, Clara and George would probably move in, Charlotte would become, in the nicest possible way, their housekeeper. Soon Charlotte would be looking after Gracie’s children as she had, it seemed like yesterday, looked after Gracie. A single woman was a great blessing in a family. Usefulness was not at an end. There would be points and purposes in life, never quite her own points and purposes, but was not blood thicker than water after all. The strength of the family bond made other things in her life seem arbitrary by comparison. Usefulness was her destiny. Gracie’s children, Patrick’s children, were her fate in the years to come. She had no private destiny and nothing extraordinary could ever happen to her now.
The only trouble is, thought Charlotte, that I hate all these people. Through so many years she had detested Alison’s sickliness, Clara’s worldliness, Gracie’s pertness, Patrick’s cleverness, and George’s unspeakable assumption that Charlotte was eternally in love with him. Had she ever loved George? Perhaps. But now George was just something hanging in the corner of a spider’s web. Clara had eaten and digested him long ago, and only the memory of a legend lingered on to taint George’s invariable kindness, Clara’s too attentive sweetness. Yet it remained that these people were all she had, they were her daily bread, as Matthew, who had once mattered so much, could never be.
Charlotte went slowly to the door. The cold stale smell of loneliness came to her from the dark stairway and her face felt naked and cold with solitude. Would anybody ever look into her face again and really see it? She came up into the hall and saw a bunch of flowers lying beside the front door. She especially disliked gladioli. She plodded downstairs again and began to arrange them in one of Gracie’s cut glass vases.
Dorina shrieked. The water closed over her head.
She woke up. That dream again. Had she really shrieked or had it been just a dream cry? Was it night time?
She saw that it was day. A hot sun was burning a line down the centre of the drawn curtains. She was lying in her petticoat on the bed in her little attic bedroom. It was afternoon. Mavis was away and she was alone in the house and had sought refuge in sleep from a fearful consciousness. But such awakenings were terrible, when nightmares could escape into daylight rooms and the emptiness of the house invited hauntings.
She sat up and pulled her dress on and continued to sit on the edge of her bed. She remembered Louis’ letter and how he would not come any more. The insincere letter had hurt her. Of course he could not realize how important it was to her to see him. It was not just the link with Austin, though that was important, the little gifts that came. It was that Louis was a part of the ordinary world, through him she could still glimpse ordinary things, ordinary streets, ordinary conversations, laughter. Laughter had somehow gone out of her life. When had it gone? As for the streets which surrounded Valmorana, where she went to shop for Mavis, they were full of portents. Strange looks, strange numbers, dead birds.
Valmorana seemed to have few memories, it had become, when Mavis transformed it, a different place. Only in the drawing-room the shade of their father lingered a little, and in the garden beside the privet hedge, gentle, intense, stooping. Twice widowed, he had been in love with his two daughters, two lovely replicas of two lovely wives. Death had been an angel to him that was terrible and yet gentle. He had been happy when he was older with the two girls and with his painting. But that quiet spirit could not help Dorina now.
She never told Mavis how much she feared the weird unfortunates who usually filled the house and how the cries of those unwanted babies sickened her. Grotesque faces peered at her and mocked her timidity. Yet the uninhabited house was perhaps worse. She could not picture the outside of the house from within, it was as if it had no outside, but spawned inwardly, breeding new darkness and full of the obscure frightening smell of menstrual blood. Thus she dreamed about it often, dreamed of a huge sprawling place in the centre of which were rooms, or a room, which she had never seen before. She could never quite get into this room, which was large and dark with no external windows, reddish usually, full of red furniture or lit by a dim red light, and she would glimpse it with amazement and horror through a door-way, or more often from a gallery or peephole where she looked down into it from above, empty and dusty and full of big old-fashioned furniture. Sometimes too she would see something in it which she knew to be a ghost, the figure of a woman projecting from the waist upwards high up in the wall opposite to her, like the prow of a ship, and moving slightly as if tortured. Once or twice in waking hours in Valmorana she had for a second seen or imagined a similar figure.
Of her private horrors she did not now speak to anyone, not even to Mavis. The quality of them would have been hard to tell. Memory and dream sometimes became confused and things of the mind crowded close behind a screen. There were figures like statues upon the roof and in the garden and dogs with strange heads. She had talked a little to Austin in the early days, but her experiences terrified him so dreadfully that his terror frightened her out of further confidences. To terrify others, that was worst of all. Later he said he had not believed her, and she smiled. What had then frightened her most was her sense of other horrors in him, quite different and worse perhaps, which she was stirring. How fatally and truly they had found each other, so suited and so kin. If only one of them could have been ordinary. And yet how much she had been led, to begin with, by a sense that, for him, she could be. She had seen herself saving Austin, doing something as comprehensible and commonplace as that. She wanted to cook for him, and for a while she did. She wanted to sit by his fireside and sew.
Sometimes she could not keep fear out of her eyes. Austin imagined that she was afraid of him, and in an unforgettable time of revelation, sitting alone, she had realized that she was afraid of him. It had all started in tenderness and pity. How had this fear got in? Was she perhaps just afraid for him, afraid of his nightmares? No, she feared him and he knew it, and this was yet another barrier for love to surmount. For there was love, not just compassion in her, not just possessiveness in him. He was not just the greedy boy who grasps the pretty bird and breaks its wing. Of Betty they never talked. Dorina had never even seen a picture of her, though oddly enough as a child she might have met her, only she never did.
It was only very lately, only perhaps when she had received Louis’ horrible letter, that she had fully realized how much her love for Austin cut her off from other people, as if she were being gradually cornered by a relentlessness of which he was the almost unconscious agent. He seemed to feel almost any contact between herself and others as a betrayal. If she were to see the Tisbournes, or even Charlotte, he would scent a plot. Matthew of course was out of the question. And Garth was taboo. She would have liked to see Garth, to see him all grown-up and different, but the embarrassment and anxiety which had always attended her relations with him would doubtless have become even worse. And Austin would think they had discussed him. Now even Louis was gone. It was as if something were closing in for the kill.
Dorina knew that many of her thoughts about her situation were ridiculous. But she knew also that she was n
ot mad. When the pictures had fallen off the wall other people were more frightened than she was. These things were, perhaps, chemical. What she most feared was spiritual, some end point where even love died tortured. She feared the final inhumanity of man to man which she saw on the television set in the kitchen. Now the girls were away, she watched the television often, fascinated by these amazing images. She could never get used to it. She knew that there were such cruel things in the world, even her in own little world. Mavis had once suggested that she should see a doctor, once suggested that she should see a priest, but Dorina knew that this was pointless, quite apart from the hurtfulness of it to Austin.
Her only way back to the world was through her husband. Only here could magic be changed into spirit in the end. And now she had run away from him. Or was that what had happened? Was it simply fear of him that kept her here? He had never been really cruel to her, though he had stormed at her often, he had wept at her, he had accused her of destroying him. He had wanted protection, but she was danger. Once she thought that he was drugging her, but that was only imagination. She had felt her whole consciousness battered by him, as if because he so desperately wanted from her what she could not give there was a little less of her left every day. She had had to escape to breathe, to be. And yet in escaping she had made yet another obstacle between them of a quite new kind. For Austin was relieved at her departure. Of course he wanted her back, he wanted some new and better dream of his marriage, but meanwhile he too breathed. He surrounded her with anxious possessive jealous tenderness, but in obedience to what he professed to think were her wishes he did not come to see her. He wandered about outside her prison like a fierce protective wolf. She heard him baying in the night.
Thus they remained utterly obsessed with themselves and each other, and some natural healing process of which Dorina felt she ought to know the secret could not take place. If only there were somewhere else towards which she could look. Mavis talked sometimes, her eyes far away, a little embarrassed, preaching to her, about simple duties simply understood, about obvious needs and obvious claims. But nothing here was simple and obvious, and almost any move was fearful. She might have prayed to God to dissolve the obsession and to show her simplicity if only she had believed in Him. His absence at least remained significant to her, but it was an utter absence of help, an absence of recourse. Worship would have been a relief, like tears. C’est impossible de trop plier les genoux, impossible, impossible. Who had said that to her once? The voice of some teacher, otherwise forgotten, came to her from convent days, from earliest childhood. Should she not kneel, and would it aid her, even if there were no God? Sometimes she did kneel in her room at night, but rose quickly, knowing that she knelt to demons.