by Iris Murdoch
‘Yes. You are speaking a strange language. Even your voice sounds strange.’
‘I am possessed. I can’t talk ordinary language any more. I’m sorry. I feel hollow and clean. In a dead sort of way. Sterile. A vacuum. All the ordinary sort of — life germs — have been killed.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Matthew.
‘I can’t even grieve for myself. They say all lamentation over death is lamentation over one’s own death. This is not so.’
‘Yet you said you died with her.’
‘The dead don’t grieve.’
‘I almost envy you,’ said Matthew. ‘You have made her into a goddess. I cannot. But however great the tragedy, you are still subject to truth and time. You are alive and you have a future. Your mind is a living thing which will alter. You even have duties. It is strange to appeal to you now in the name of duty. For myself, I mean. But I need you too. I need you for the forgiveness and healing which only you can give me.’
‘I hear your words,’ said Mavis. ‘I must go now.’
‘It was an accident. Not doom, not fate, accident. We must keep this before us too.’
‘I shall scream, Matthew. Better not to. I must go.’
‘May I kiss you?’
‘No. Please don’t touch me. It’s still impossible. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll ring up.’
‘Yes. Goodbye.’
Mavis was white and her eyes did not look upon the ordinary things of the world. The skin of her face was so taut and drawn that even the bone structure seemed to be giving way to the pressure of an enormous force. She looked much older, but beautiful in a dreadful way. Gazing elsewhere, she walked past him.
Matthew, alone, gave himself up to a luxury of grief which Mavis was without and beyond. He felt misery, regret, remorse, guilt. He loved Dorina, and his love, now set free and made pure forever, battered upon that last impenetrable wall. He saw her, he heard her, he imagined all manner of cherishing of her, and he knew that she was dead. Later Mavis would console him, would hold his hand and hear him accuse himself. But that time of consolation was not yet.
Her funeral had been like the Triumph of Flora. Austin had never seen so many flowers all heaped together. They had made her into a flower maiden. So she might suddenly rise again, resurrected, a maiden composed anew out of flowers. There was magic there. Austin had persuaded the priest to read the Dies Irae. Clara Tisbourne had caught hold of Austin’s sleeve afterward but he had pulled it away. ‘Quick, get Austin!’ Clara had said, but Austin had pulled away.
Dorina was a sort of full-time occupation now, as she had been in the days before her death, only differently. Austin sat a lot with Mavis in the drawing-room. They sat together often in silence, stiff and upright, not as people usually sit together, but more as if each were alone. Sometimes, like Quakers in a meeting, one of them would feel moved to speak about Dorina. The other seemed not to listen, did not reply. Yet in this way they comforted one another.
Sometimes softness came and tears. Austin wondered what it would be like to believe that Dorina was with God. Mihi quoque spem dedisti. Could there be, after all, pure tears for sin and the certainty of redemption into another world? Only his tears were impure and he wept not because he had failed her, but because he had lost her, not even that, because she was so overwhelmingly no longer there, she whom he had petted and bossed and feared about so much. He had feared really more for himself than for her, had feared prophetically how terribly she would hurt him one day. That fear had made him into a tyrant. And now she had gone and taken the fear with her and he felt utterly undone.
Mavis fed Austin regularly but did not eat with him. Mrs Carberry went about on tiptoe. Austin sometimes went for walks by himself, wandering about in a daze so that he seemed to forget that Dorina was dead and kept looking for her still, on buses, in trains, among the crowds of London. He kept searching for her face. The feeling that she was somewhere persisted in him, although he knew that really she was not anywhere any more, least of all in that deep hole into which they had lowered that ridiculously small coffin.
Austin knew that Mavis went to see Matthew. But he also knew that there could at this time be no communication between those two. Austin thought about Matthew occasionally, but not much. It was as if, for the time, Matthew was mercifully dead too. He was out of this, he was an outsider. The present emptiness of everything was a sort of comfort. The elegiac sadness of the desolate world was without joy but also strangely without horror. Dorina had taken her ghosts with her into the grave. It was a very complete ending.
But it left Austin without any purpose. This absolute absorption in another was, he supposed, love. He mused about love. He had spent, wasted, such a quantity of spirit in wondering whether Dorina really loved him and whether she would go on loving him or murder him by loving someone else. But what was this thing that had seemed so all-important? Could he not simply have willed Dorina, as if he had been God, not greedily desiring a return? Yet did not God always want a return, had He not specifically created us to glorify Him, and did not the word ‘jealous’ make its first appearance in literature as applied to Him? Then must we be better than our creator, could this be done in logic? But there was no creator, and indeed no logic.
What was clear was that he and Dorina had somehow lived wrongly, unable to use except for mutual destruction the spirit of love which inhabited them both. Now spirit has gone out of my life forever, he thought. I am mere animated earth. I shall live on as if in sleep, jerked here and there a little by those automatic purposes with which nature provides this kind of animal. But for the time even these purposes seemed absent and the days passed in a series of blank futureless presents. Only sometimes, with a presage of possible recovery, there was a small spring of satisfaction which oozed and dried up at intervals. It was a tiny impulse of pleasure but it came from a potent source. It was the thought that after all perhaps this death was a felicitous solution. He had wanted Dorina to be held prisoner from the world, to be held secure for him. Now she was shut up forever in the most final of all prisons. Now at last she was absolutely safe, and could never hurt him any more.
Ludwig sat alone in his college room in Oxford. The blurry golden leaves of an unclipped wistaria made the window into a Gothic arch. Beyond were towers, elm trees in the sun. Merton clock spoke the half-hour with a mournful cadence. The afternoon was a pale vain expanse of profitless time.
Ludwig sat holding a diamond ring in the palm of his hand. The ring which Gracie had bought in Bond Street and which he had slipped on to her finger in the shop, dazed with happiness. As he looked at it the atmosphere of that day came back, that particular echoing dusty brightness of sunny London, crazed and rattling and gay.
Gracie’s letter ran as follows.
Dearest, when you said you wanted to be by yourself for a few days I thought it possible that you wanted simply to nerve yourself to break things off. So I am helping you by making you feel free. I am not breaking things off, but I want you now to feel free, to begin again or go away properly. I know that the death of Dorina has seemed to you like a symbol or sign. You blame me because you didn’t go to her earlier. You feel that I lessen you in some way. Oh, Ludwig, I love you more now than ever before, because fear makes one love more I think. This is the most awful thing that has ever come to me. To say these things is so hard. I don’t know if you love me enough. I love you absolutely but you love me only partly. I thought it didn’t matter because perhaps men always love only partly, while love fills a woman’s whole life. But now it is agony. I didn’t talk to you about your ‘great decision’ partly because I thought I’d just sound shallow and stupid and partly because I don’t like moral fuss. You know what I mean. I felt about it but I couldn’t talk it. Another sort of girl would have talked it endlessly with you. Perhaps you need that other sort of girl, and one who is educated. Your father’s letter was terrible to me. I feel you must partly agree with your father about me only you didn’t let yourself k
now it. And when you talked to him on the telephone you were different after. I love you, I love you. We have never been quite at ease with each other though and that is my fault. Perhaps you might come to treat me as an inferior and I would play the part too. But if you really love me none of this matters. Oh God I am sorry to be so stupid and I write this with tears, tears. Of course nothing here is fixed or has happened at all. I have talked to nobody, not even my parents. Let us just think a while. When you went away I felt it was some sort of real parting. Now I don’t know. I wanted to run after you screaming. You said ‘Goodbye.’ Was it goodbye? Is it because of Dorina or that you feel I am not educated enough? I send the ring as a way of sending my love. Keep it safe. Nothing is fixed or final, is it. I am just so unhappy, so unhappy, so unhappy. What did it mean, your going away like that? I love you.
Gracie.
Ludwig put the ring away in a drawer. Gracie’s letter caused him terrible pain. But his going away had meant something, and perhaps it would have been yet more agonizing if Gracie had decided not to understand. His way of life with Gracie had, for the moment at any rate, broken down. He had to take flight into loneliness. A sense of absolute confusion about the deep bases of his life had rendered him almost mad with misery. Only solitude itself, in a blank way, though it brought no solutions, brought a very small measure of relief.
That Dorina should have electrocuted herself with an electric fire on a rainy morning in a small hotel in Bloomsbury made Ludwig feel a disgust with himself and the world which was almost mysterious in its intensity. He did not blame Gracie. He did not think that Dorina had done it on purpose. The thing was pure chance and yet weighted with a significance of horror which he could not bear to contemplate. That he had actually seen Dorina on the day that she died and had passed her by was so nightmarish that he felt he would never be able to tell anybody about it. It was something to brood upon forever or to whip oneself with into some frenzy of new desperate action or flight. So he had run to Oxford. And now everything seemed at stake, everything in doubt, every issue once more wide open. Hearing his father’s quiet slow authoritative voice on the telephone had shaken him so much. His identity rocked, he had to rethink the world.
He had written to Matthew but had had no reply. He had a nervous desire to see Matthew and to try to explain himself to him, but he hesitated to intrude at this time upon Matthew and Mavis, who would now be more than ever in each other’s company. Ludwig felt sad that Matthew’s special lonely availability seemed now to be a thing of the past. Also he felt a suspicion that, after all, Matthew’s spell might prove to be broken. Ludwig now intuited muddle, even despair, where previously he had revered experience and wisdom. Matthew was on the rocks too, perhaps, and Ludwig would have to struggle on by himsef.
But where to? The college was empty now, except for a few servants, as everyone was on holiday. Oxford, deserted by its academics, full of troops of marching tourists, seemed now unreal and unconvincing. Its dreadful old beauty appalled him. He tried to work but found with terror that he had not the will. He sat in the Bodleian and drowsed away into terrible dreams. How could he become complete, could he ever be, or was he a man doomed to kill half of himself to let the other half live?
One torment was that it was every hour possible to take a bus to the station and get on a train to London. Tonight he could lie in Gracie’s arms. In constantly deciding not to return to London he was constantly obeying some obscure imperative which somehow seemed to him to be on the side of his salvation. Was this paralysed muddling on from moment to moment what moral thinking at its most difficult was really like?
Merton clock struck the three-quarters, casting down the last hollow note into a trough of everlasting incompleteness. Human life perches always on the brink of dissolution, and that makes all achievement empty. Ludwig felt his youth, he experienced it physically as if the whole of his body surface had been fused into some charged and glowing material. He stirred and twitched inside it. Decisions which he made now would affect his whole life, not only in its circumstances, but in its quality, in its very deepest texture. According to what he chose now he would become a totally different person later. Various forty-year-old, fifty-year-old Ludwigs regarded him from the shores of possibility with sad and perhaps cynical eyes. To which of these shadowy forms should he give the spark of life? Who did he want to be?
Such precious things had been granted to him, sources of happiness, sources of good. Was it that he was unworthy of them, since he now conceived of surrendering them out of what seemed at moments a stupid guilt-ridden petulance? For any good that lay beyond, elsewhere, his eyes were dim. It seemed unthinkable that he should sacrifice his whole career now because of some idle nervous intuition. Or because his father thought that he was evading the truth. Or because he imagined this or that about his future self on no evidence at all. And meanwhile he had given one of the gravest of all promises to a young girl. And he loved her. And he wanted now more than anything else in the world to be in her arms. He groaned, darkening his face, hiding it from the golden time-ridden light of the leafy window. If only delay itself could have no consequences. If only all could stand still and the relentless procession of the hours be checked so that he could rest quietly in a real interim. Oh was it not even now somehow possible that everything could be well?
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the police officer. ‘I am looking for a Mr Gibson Grey.’
‘That’s me,’ said Garth, who had opened the door.
The sudden sight of the policeman made Garth flush with fear and a whirling sense of guilt. What had he done, or what had happened? Immediately he thought, my father is dead. Then he thought, my father has commited some terrible crime.
‘Could I come in, sir, and talk to you for a moment?’ said the policeman. He followed Garth in and up the stairs.
Garth’s room had a large square uncurtained window opaque with dirt through which the sun mercilessly shone to reveal a dance of moving dust particles, bare gritty floorboards, Garth’s grey sheetless unmade bed, a chest of drawers with all the drawers open, a rucksack, a toppled pile of books, and a vague sea of underwear. There was a sweaty smell of old socks and a darker smell of filth and rats.
Garth went every morning to the emergency housing centre. What he did there was beginning to feel a little bit more like a profession and a little bit less like doing odd jobs. There was a certain primitive satisfaction in the evident importance of the work. And it was nice, sometimes, to occasion a look of relief in the eyes of those who were at their wits’ end. All the same Garth felt dissatisfied and unhappy and even, to his surprise, lonely. He had never, in what now seemed his tougher and more hopeful days, imagined that solitude would be other than a welcome friend. Now he yearned vaguely for more mundane relationships.
That he had saved Charlotte’s life, which he had undoubtedly done, had given him an almost childish sort of pleasure, it was like an unexpected present or a treat. Oh good, he felt whenever he thought of it. He did not expect Charlotte to be grateful and he did not even think that it was likely to constitute any sort of bond between them, he felt it rather as a little private achievement of his own, something he had felicitously pulled off. Also he wondered if he should perhaps regard it as a sign that he was after all upon the right road. But then Dorina had died.
When his mother was drowned Garth had been ten. He was away at school at the time. The shock of it sliced several years out of his life. He could remember his earlier childhood, his jumbled home, his gipsy mother’s sweetness, his father’s emotions. Austin had been a tempestuous father, affectionate, permissive, suddenly harsh, often lacrimose. There was a good deal of quarrelling and shouting. Children can manage storms of emotion provided there is love. A sturdy precocious little figure, he fought his father and bossed his mother. He was the centre of the world. Then suddenly there was no mother and no father and no world, only a blackness covering years now inaccessible to memory. And when he emerged his father was much older and a s
tranger.
The shock of Dorina’s death produced a phantasm of being in love with her. Had there really been a pent-up passion behind that taboo? A woman paced his dreams who was half Betty and half Dorina. And he began to remember. He remembered his mother’s funeral, Austin crying, Austin jerking his hand away. He remembered that appalling distress, his own defeated grief, the beginning of estrangement, the beginning of real fear. So in those years, which he could now dimly see, his emotional loving bullying young father had become the changeling of today. Dorina had somehow been a product of those years of misery, a sort of alleviation and yet a sort of embodiment of all those awful thoughts, a wounded grounded angel, a piece of spirit lost and crazed, no longer connected with its source and centre, but spirit still. Garth now saw a little into the mystery of his father’s passion, and her death had this use for him, that a stream flowed again between himself and the past and after being dry-eyed for many years he was able to weep again.
After this, so swift is spirit, though still in sadness, he began to feel a new interest in himself.
Garth stood in the dusty sunlight in the stained room and faced the officer of the law. If it should be his father’s death, or worse. Love for his father possessed his body like memory.
‘Well now, sir,’ said the policeman, ‘I wonder if you recognize this bag here?’
Garth looked down at a black leather suitcase which the officer was carrying and which he now dumped on the bed. It looked familiar. Then Garth recognized it as the bag which had been stolen from him at the Air Terminal when he returned from America.
‘Why, yes, it’s mine! So it’s turned up!’
‘Perhaps for identification purposes you would be so kind as to name some items which might be found inside it?’