An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  He went into Mitzi’s sitting-room. Mitzi was there, dressed in a tattered pink négligée, a little too small for her. She pulled it together with a coy movement. ‘You might knock!’

  ‘Mitzi darling,’ said Austin. ‘Will you lend me five pounds?’

  ‘I can’t, dear,’ said Mitzi, ‘I really can’t. I’ve got to stop lending. I haven’t a sou until old Secombe-Hughes coughs up. Very sorry and all that. Please don’t be cross.’

  Austin left the room. He caught a last glimpse of Mitzi’s large breasts bulging out above her brassière wispily veiled by the négligée. Outside on the chest on the landing lay Mitzi’s handbag. Austin opened it. It contained a five-pound note, a one-pound note, and some silver. Austin took the five-pound note and closed the bag again. He mounted the stairs.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said to Norman, who was still reposing. ‘Now go.’

  ‘I thought you’d cut and run,’ said Norman. ‘Thanks. Now I’ve been thinking —’

  Austin took Norman by the shoulders and pulled him gently to his feet. Still holding him he stared into his face. Norman had greasy brown hair and a longish brown moustache and a dimpled chin. He had large sentimental brown eyes. Austin patted Norman’s cheek. ‘Run along, Norman, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘We are friends, aren’t we?’ said Norman.

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘I’ll come again Tuesday evening, I’ll bring my novel, OK?’

  ‘OK. Run along now.’

  As Norman’s steps receded and the front door banged Austin came slowly down the stairs. The door of Mitzi’s sitting-room was open.

  ‘Austin. Did you take a fiver out of my bag?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mitzi was sitting now on her sofa, legs wide apart. She was not looking at him. Two huge tears like drops of mercury emerged slow and glistening from her eyes. Austin came over to her. He drew her knees together with his hand. Then very carefully he sat down on them and rolled her over sideways on the settee and nestled his head against the large bosom. Mitzi sobbed, then sighed.

  ‘I like flies more than spiders,’ said Gracie. She drew her fingers through a spider’s web in the corner of the empty room. ‘You can see flies washing their hands. It makes them so much more like us.’

  ‘Poppy dear, I want you to come and have supper at my place,’ said Ludwig.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just because it is my place. A man must have a base of his own. I want to be the boss, I mean the host, just this once. I want to cook you an omelette. Why won’t you come?’

  ‘You know why, Ludwig.’

  ‘You needn’t see Austin.’

  ‘That big girl frightens me.’

  ‘Poppy, you’re being silly.’ Gracie had somehow in the last few weeks become Poppy. She had been Poppet and Moppet, then Poppy. She would be Poppy now forever. It was nice that she had a special private name at last, though it was not a name that he liked except here. He was still ‘Ludwig’. That was part of Gracie’s curious little formality with him. He was scarcely ever even ‘darling’ these days. But they were yet closer than before. She would be his Poppy, he had a Poppy, until the end of time.

  Meanwhile the day of their marriage shimmered in front of him like a triumphal archway. They would pass through it into privacy and silence. The anxious happy pain of their present relationship would be no more. They would be unimaginably different and quieter with each other. They would not be together all the time. Married people were not. Now each day was still a delightful invention. When Gracie’s parents were away they made love. This often happened now, though whether by arrangement Ludwig did not ask. He and Gracie were still shy lovers. They had no words for things that happened or might happen. Ludwig was drunk with this guiltless bliss. Their very shyness graced their proceedings with a sort of innocent radiance which made him realize how much before he had always felt ashamed of love-making. So he lived now with Gracie in that strange lurid anxious light of passion and innocence and felt as pure and as frightened as if he had been chosen to be sacrificed to a deity in whom he most profoundly believed.

  In fact as time went on there were intervals. Ludwig had been engaged just long enough to feel the return of a sense of self-preservation which the uncertainty of a precarious love can temporarily banish even from selfish people. He stopped taking Gracie to the British Museum. It was impossible to explain to her who the Assyrians were nor did she really want to know. Exhausted with happiness, he needed the cool touch of the impersonal. Visiting the place by himself he felt in the oblivion of personality with which the great things quietly overwhelmed him a sense of relief. Nor did he feel guilt at this. He had to be the person whom she admired, and this must involve these breaks in his consciousness of her which were after all no treason. To have a goddess living in one’s heart was not always to be busy at devotions.

  Ludwig had still not yet met Matthew. This was not entirely an accident. There had been possible occasions, but Ludwig had lightly shunned them, although Gracie kept repeating how much she wanted them to meet. ‘I do so want to see you two dear things together.’ she said to Ludwig, who was quietly annoyed. That Gracie ‘adored’ Matthew was a sort of bird cry of what Ludwig now reluctantly thought of as her ‘set’. One day he realized that the cry was set going largely by Gracie. It was a part of Gracie’s image of herself that she ‘adored’ Matthew. Of course this was harmless but it somehow depressed Ludwig and made him conscious of something which he usually ignored, his own vanity. Like many scholars and artists Ludwig was able to combine profound modesty in his work with a considerable degree of self-satisfaction.

  Matthew was much talked about in the ‘set’, not always with respect. ‘Matthew the Hoax of Hong Kong’ he was called by Sebastian, whom Ludwig had lately met at one or two rather screamy parties. And Karen, whom Ludwig had not yet encountered, apparently referred to him as Matthias Menuhin, which was supposed to be a joke, meaning that he was a great fiddler. Ludwig had early on made up his own mind, on little evidence, about Matthew. It was in this context that he was made aware of his own good opinion of himself. Sebastian was interesting and clever. So was Oliver, so were many other people whom he encountered in the environs of the Tisbourne household. But they caused him little anxiety because he did not feel about any of them that they were in his class. With Matthew, this might prove to be a different matter. And that Matthew was nearly three times his age was something which his instincts found curiously irrelevant. If Matthew were not a carefully cultivated ally he might prove to be a poisonous and formidable foe. Ludwig put off discovering which it was to be.

  His parents had not yet replied to his last letter. It was no use telephoning. He and his father could not communicate by telephone. The impulse to go to them, to embrace them, to explain, returned to him constantly and freshly, succeeded by the remembrance that now he could not go, he could never go, to them. Gradually he began to feel more resigned to the possibility that they would not bless his wedding day. His tasks were to get married, to get settled, to work, and only after that would he be able to win over his parents. If only they would forgive and accept him he would be completely fulfilled and happy. Of this he felt sure, although there was always something else in the picture, a little speck of unaccounted-for pain floating before the eyes and never quite brought into focus.

  He could not really discuss it with Gracie. Part of the difficulty was that Gracie had no concept of America. She regarded it as a far-off barbarous country which was no concern of hers nor, any more, of his. Could one be indifferent to something so large? Apparently. Gracie professed optimism about his parents, though he knew that she was secretly anxious and looked out every day for their reply to her letter. But her anxiety was personal and simple. She saw his parents, as she saw Oxford and the Parthenon Frieze and the Ancient World, as extensions of Ludwig, and that was as far, across the waves of the Atlantic, as she could discern. So Ludwig’s thoughts about honour were private thoughts, and he sought wisdom from a
n Athena who was not Gracie, and certainly not the problematic idea of his native land. Who after all was America? A freedom fighter, a slut, a demon, a Daughter of the Revolution? What now was he to her or she to him; and what was this speck of anguish which floated constantly before him? He would fix his eyes instead upon the grey-eyed one, the pure one, This henceforth must be the religion of his solitude.

  Of Garth Ludwig had seen little. Garth had now got some sort of job at a semi-religious ‘mission’ in the East End which Mavis Argyll had arranged for him. He was regarded by Gracie and her friends as a ‘drop-out’ in a sense which implied ‘a failure’. There was among these young people no tendency to idolize a pointless rejection of society. Ludwig, who had at first thought them worldly, now increasingly saw their point. He felt in any case less impressed by Garth. Garth was so evidently not ‘going anywhere’, whereas Ludwig was, even Sebastian was. This sense of Garth’s pointlessness was increased for Ludwig by Garth’s own gloom. Doubtless he was depressed in a simple way by his surroundings and the dullness of his work. But someone like Garth had no right to be depressed. At Harvard he had spoken with glittering eyes of the freedom which comes to the truly destitute. There was no air of triumph now. Moreover it seemed to Ludwig that Garth only called on him in order to deliver a sermon, to tell him that he ought to look after Austin, or that Gracie ought to look after Charlotte. Garth had questioned Ludwig quite adroitly once about his own problems but Ludwig had answered evasively and Garth had gone away abruptly with a wave of the hand. There is a great force in him, thought Ludwig, a great fire, but all the same he will waste himself.

  As Garth faded, Oxford became more real, not a dream place of the future but a real city with libraries and shops and pubs. Gracie and Ludwig were in fact at this very moment in Oxford, standing in an empty upstairs room of a house in Rawlinson Road, in a flat which the college were going to let them for a small rent. They were to have a big upstairs half of a red brick Victorian house. Downstairs lived a friendly elderly lady, a Miss Thorrington, who had been a pioneer of women’s education and who had talked to Ludwig about Socrates. Outside the window, through which Gracie and Ludwig were now gazing, lay a small neat garden with a square of lawn and red walls to match the house and two cherry trees which Miss Thorrington said were a glory in the spring time. Beyond were more trees, other gardens, other houses. It’s all so particular and cosy and small, thought Ludwig, with a weird alarm. Must he then begin his married life surrounded by cherry trees, mossy brick paths, windows of a certain size and shape? These definitions seemed too tiny for the world in which he had dreamed he would live with Gracie. But the little particularity and accident of it all was, it seemed, just what Gracie liked best, and her delight delighted him. Gracie loved everything, the coloured tiles in the sitting-room, the stained-glass window on the stairs, the rockery in the front garden, the way the gate fastened, Miss Thorrington’s cat.

  Last night, under the wing of Andrew Hilton, they had actually dined in college at the High Table. Gracie had said beforehand that she was terrified and would be able to say nothing. She sat next to the Master and chattered without stopping throughout the meal. She and the Master never seemed to stop laughing. She got on well too, in a jokey English way, with Andrew Hilton and with several of the other fellows including the philosopher MacMurraghue. At a later stage of the evening, while Ludwig and Andrew were arguing about triremes, Ludwig heard Gracie and MacMurraghue passionately discussing how to get wine stains out of table cloths. When at last Ludwig saw Gracie to her hotel she said to him, ‘I think I shall like Oxford just as much as you will.’ He rejoiced. He then returned chastely to college and drank another bottle of wine with Andrew. They decided to give a joint class on Aristophanes in the Michaelmas term, a prospect which filled Ludwig with heady enthusiasm. Andrew then wrote some very funny improper Latin verses. Ludwig could not remember going to bed and woke up with a hangover.

  Now as he looked down on the gardeny suburban scene through the dusty window pane he thought Oxford, Oxford. Here his mind would live and grow in quietness and in truth. And for a moment he felt almost faint with a sort of physical pleasure which had nothing to do with his pretty fiancée.

  ‘Supposing, to save your life,’ said Gracie, ‘you had to hold on to a trapeze with your teeth, do you think you could do it?’

  ‘No,’ said Ludwig. ‘Whatever put that into your head, Poppy?’

  ‘I was discussing it with MacMurraghue at dinner. In fact one’s back teeth are awfully strong, and if —’

  ‘Darling Poppy! Look, darling, you will come to my place, won’t you, just to say hello to poor Austin?’

  ‘You said I needn’t.’

  ‘I keep thinking about that child who was killed. I feel so sorry for Austin. If you just smiled at him it would help. So little for you, so much for him.’

  ‘Do you rate my smiles so cheaply?’

  ‘Darling, you know I —’

  ‘Ludwig, we’ll never have rows, will we, like other married couples do, never, never?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Austin’s unlucky. I fear unlucky people. It’s contagious.’

  ‘We ought to share our happiness, Poppy.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid. That’s a very dangerous idea, Ludwig. Our happiness is not a great sum which we’ve got and can give. It’s just a dream. We haven’t achieved it. We don’t deserve it yet. I have nothing for anybody else. I just want to seize you and hold you. The generous years may come later. If there is any later.’

  The dusty floorboards converged on a window framing cherry-leaved vistas of brick houses. The neat trapped garden was sweet and desolate with ordinariness. Such indeed, if one was lucky, was life. They would lie in bed and see the cherry trees in flower. She was right to fear the gods.

  ‘We’ll be happy here,’ said Ludwig. They moved into the next room.

  ‘And this,’ said Gracie, ‘shall be the nursery. Miss Thorrington will baby-sit. I’ve already asked her.’

  There was a strange hazy look in her eyes. O god, thought Ludwig, perhaps she’s pregnant already!

  Dorina sat surrounded by her judges. She fought back tears. Garth was smiling at her with a smile which she could not understand. There was no complicity in his smile however. It was meant simply to help her. It was not meant to remind her that he had kissed her. Although they were both conscious of that too.

  Clara was ending a rather long speech. ‘So as I see it, my dear, you can do no harm and only good if you come and stay with us. George entirely agrees and joins me in inviting you. Austin can come and see you there. We’ll look after you. We’ll sort of chaperone you. You can go out with Austin and then come back and stay with us, you can do whatever you like and feel protected. You’ll be like our daughter and Austin can come and court you! Don’t you agree, Mavis? Mavis and I have talked it over, we’ve all talked it over.’

  ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘I did try to telephone you,’ said Clara.

  ‘The telephone’s cut off.’

  ‘George will pay Austin’s telephone bill,’ said Clara. ‘We needn’t even tell Austin.’

  ‘Does Austin know?’ said Dorina. ‘I mean about this idea of my coming to you?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Clara. ‘We thought we should tell you first and tell him when you’d agreed.’

  ‘He won’t like it,’ said Dorina.

  ‘Really, Dorina,’ said Clara, ‘you mustn’t be so slavishly sensitive about what Austin will like or not like. That’s always been part of the trouble. Please forgive me for speaking so frankly. Besides,’ she said, aside to Mavis, ‘I don’t think he’ll mind now.’

  They behave as if I was not here, thought Dorina. How can they speak like that. She understood perfectly what Clara meant. She looked at Garth to see if he understood. He smiled his mysterious helpful smile.

  Mavis, with lips a little parted, was gazing vaguely across the room. Her eyes were big and dazed. Last night
she had lain for hours in Matthew’s arms. He had wanted to make love to her but she had not let him. They had talked softly for hours about themselves. Next time she would not refuse his love, she would give herself utterly. Tonight, perhaps. Dorina knew, of course. Mavis had returned late. Dorina had been waiting up alone. Dorina said, ‘You smell of tobacco. You smell of man.’ They had not talked of it further.

  Charlotte was thinking of an aching tooth and of three pieces of paper which she had in her pocket. She touched the tooth with her tongue, the papers with her finger. She had not meant to pry into Austin’s things. She had found a key on the dresser which fitted an old trunk and had opened the trunk looking for sheets. It was full of a jumble of old letters and photos. She saw a photograph of Matthew, young, plump, graceful, with copious fair hair, hands in pockets, laughing beside a river. After that she had started to delve further and had found something which had led her very much to speculate. Charlotte too was in the secret of Mavis’s vague look. Not that Mavis had told her. Charlotte had seen Mavis and Matthew together, laughing in a certain sort of way, and Charlotte had become stiff. She felt this stiffness in her now, the stiffness of age and envy and barren hate.

  Clara thought, I am putting on a silly sort of manner, I always do when Char is there, she sort of makes me. Why can’t I sound more sincere? After all I am sincere. ‘Most sincerely, dearest Dorina,’ she said, ‘we do just want to help you. A change would do you good. We’ll invite Austin. We’ll give a little party for you. Anything.’

  Dorina shuddered.

  ‘A sort of engagement party,’ said Charlotte, and laughed.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Char. I mean Dorina can have her friends over at our place —’

  ‘I have no friends,’ said Dorina.

  ‘Come, come,’ said Garth. Everyone stared at him, expecting him to say more, but he said no more.