An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘She said she wanted Charlotte to come too?’

  ‘Yes, she wants Char too. You know, I think we weren’t bossy enough with Gracie when she inherited from mama. We should have told her firmly to let us deal. She’d have been happier. Children don’t really like freedom.’

  ‘Maybe. Would Char come through? Isn’t she still staying with Mitzi Ricardo?’

  ‘She’s only doing it to annoy us, to show us how little she needs us. She’ll get over her pique. When we’re all together she’ll come. She did it for mama, she’ll do it for us. After all, she loves us and family matters to her, though she pretends not. You and me and Gracie and Patrick and Char. We’ll put a brave face on the world —’

  ‘You’d better go and see Charlotte.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been so upset about Gracie and so busy and now there’s Penny — oh God, I must get dressed — Pinkie, it’s too awful, what can I say to Penny? I think I won’t telephone, I’ll just go round. And I’ve got so much to do today, with the Odmores coming to dinner, at least that’s something, isn’t it, I do so hope —’

  ‘Hmmm, yes. Rather unfortunate. You haven’t seen The Times.’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘“The engagement is announced between Sebastian Robert, elder son of Sir Charles and Lady Odmore and Karen Janice, daughter of Mr and the Hon. Mrs Geoffrey Arbuthnot — ” Now, Clara, please, please —’

  ‘You’re a snob, that’s why,’ said Mitzi.

  Charlotte was silent. She was slowly putting her clothes into a suitcase.

  ‘You haven’t got what it takes,’ said Mitzi. ‘You aren’t capable of real relationships. People like you just aren’t. You’ve always lived in a polite little world. Nobody ever really meets anybody else in your world. How many people have you ever really met in your life? You became all dead and frozen years ago. You’re the real old maid type. You get frightened if anybody looks at you. You’ve just lived by the conventions. You’ve always been protected and looked after and spoilt and dressed up in hats and beads and kid gloves. You don’t know what real people smell like.’

  Charlotte was silent.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m making these eggs for,’ said Mitzi. ‘What’s the use of eggs when everything’s gone to pieces and died on us? I can’t eat. I feel sick with misery. Little you care.’ She spooned the eggs into the bin.

  Charlotte was silent.

  The kitchen communicated directly with Charlotte’s room. The cottage was tiny. The garden was tiny, pretty, with a pebbled path. There was a fir wood on one side. On the other there were red brick bungalows. Charlotte had already planted a beech hedge to screen them.

  ‘You’ve never loved anyone in your life. I don’t think you really know how to love at all.’

  ‘You should never say that to anybody,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Well, go on, who have you loved, tell me.’

  Charlotte looked down into the suitcase where her clothes were carefully folded. Neat packing did not fail when life failed. She bit the inside of her lower lip and breathed deeply. She was determined not to shed any more tears. Mitzi had been hysterical twice, and her own tears had flowed too often. Mitzi was angry and tearless now, but if Charlotte wept there would be more screams. Charlotte forced back the tears, but could not speak.

  ‘Cat got your tongue, dear?’

  ‘Please don’t nag me,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Nag, nag! It’s you who nag, throwing that word at me all the time. When you argue it’s reasoning. When I argue it’s nagging.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mitzi.’

  ‘You’re not sorry. If you were you wouldn’t wreck everything. You’re such a bloody coward.’

  ‘It’s better to go sooner than later,’ said Charlotte. ‘It would be even more awful later.’

  ‘That’s a stupid argument. Why go at all? You haven’t even given it a try.’

  ‘It’s no use.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re just not compatible.’

  ‘Compatible! That’s a silly newspaper word. God, and I thought you were so intelligent! We’re different. But that’s what love’s about.’

  ‘It’s no good, it’s just a mistake.’

  ‘Just a mistake, she announces calmly. Pity you didn’t find that out before we acquired a cottage and a mortgage and a dog, isn’t it. Pirrus thinks you’re horrible, don’t you, Pirrus?’

  Pyrrhus, a large black labrador, rescued, not for the first time, from the Battersea Dogs’ Home, looked up anxiously from his place by the stove and wagged his tail. Pyrrhus’s lot had always been cast with couples who fought and parted, abandoning him on motorways, on lonely moors, on city street corners. He had been called Sammy and then Raffles and then Bobo. He had only just learnt his new name. He had been happy for a little while in the snug cottage and the rabbity wood with his new humans. Now perhaps it was starting up all over again. He heard the familiar sounds of dispute, the cries, the tears, and he wagged his tail with entreaty. A virtuous affectionate nature and the generous nobility of his race had preserved him from neurosis despite his sufferings. He had not a scrap of spite in his temperament. He thought of anger as a disease of the human race and as a dread sign for himself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘What do you think you’re going to do anyway? You can’t go anywhere tonight. You’ve missed the last bus. And it’s raining.’

  ‘When I’ve finished packing I’ll go out to the telephone box and get a taxi to take me to the station.’

  And where will you go then?’

  ‘To my sister’s house.’

  ‘To be their pet dog. Sorry, Pirrus. Pirrus has far more spirit and independence than you have. You hate them all. You told me so.’

  ‘They’re my family. Whether I love them or hate them is irrelevant.’

  ‘That’s right, deny love. Deny, deny, deny.’

  ‘It isn’t like that —’

  ‘Thank God I’ve got the dignity of real love to support me, I haven’t got anything else.’

  ‘I want love,’ said Charlotte. She sat down on the bed. ‘I want it more than I want anything in the world. But you and I just don’t get on, we can’t manage it. You bully and I sulk.’

  ‘I’m not grand enough. I grew up in a house with twenty-five people and one lavatory.’

  ‘You’re not educated enough,’ said Charlotte. She snapped the suitcase shut and pushed it to the floor.

  ‘Oh Christ! Well, I can learn, can’t I?’

  ‘It isn’t just that, Mitzi. We’re different animals, we’re set at different speeds, everything that’s natural to one irritates the other.’

  ‘You don’t like my table manners.’

  ‘Manners are modes of being —’

  ‘I see what you mean about irritating. If you could just hear yourself saying that —’

  ‘It’s all my fault, I admit —’

  ‘I ought to have a tape recorder.’

  ‘I should have had the sheer intellect to see that it wouldn’t work. You were very kind to me when I was very sorry for myself and you were a blessed change —’

  ‘Then why not stay with your old blessed change.’

  ‘It was all a novelty. I agree we shouldn’t have got the cottage and Pyrrhus. We were in far too much of a hurry. There was a sort of excitement and a sort of new world. But it was too good to be true. And as soon as there was any strain it came to pieces.’

  ‘What you call excitement I call love. I love you, Charlotte. You’ve made me love you and you’ve let me love you and you can’t just walk out now.’

  ‘It’ll be harder later.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that.’

  ‘Even love doesn’t matter all that much,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘What on earth do you mean? What matters more than love?’

  ‘Reality.’

  ‘What are you talking about in that horrible cold way?’

  ‘You and I are just dreaming of love together
and we’re dreaming private dreams. But reality wins in the end. Reality is family life, duty, everything that’s hard and compulsory and not a matter of the caprices of the will.’

  ‘Maybe it does win,’ said Mitzi, ‘but I don’t see why it should win.’ She picked up the spoon and began slowly to wash the egg off it under the tap. As she turned away her head two tears were rolling down her cheeks. The zip at the back of her dress gaped at the top. She had put on more weight during the honeymoon.

  ‘And what am I supposed to do,’ said Mitzi in a controlled voice. ‘While you go crawling back to family and duty?’

  ‘You can stay here. I’ve told you I’ll give you my half —’

  ‘I can’t stay here alone, I’d be frightened. And what about Pirrus. I suppose he goes back to the Dogs’ Home. The Dogs’ Home man said they’d had him in three times already —’

  ‘Don’t bring Pyrrhus into it,’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s all bad enough without Pyrrhus.’

  ‘You just want your feelings to be spared.’

  ‘I want to get away,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Well, what are we going to do with Pirrus?’

  ‘If you don’t want him I could take him to Clara’s.’

  ‘I do want him. I love him. He’s my dog just as much as yours, I should think! He’s my dog more than yours since you’re going to go away and leave us both.’

  ‘Oh stop it,’ said Charlotte. She put on her coat. ‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘I’ll write from London. If you want to sell the cottage I’ll arrange it.’

  Mitzi came out of the kitchen. Tears were quietly coursing down her face. Pyrrhus followed her with a hesitantly wagging tail.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ said Mitzi. ‘Try it a little longer. I’ll be good. I won’t nag. I’ll learn things. Anything you like. I’ll be different. Just give me time. I love you so much. I’ll make myself what you want, whatever you want.’

  Charlotte stared past Mitzi with unfocused eyes, hard and vague. The door of the trap, still ajar, was closing, and it was the moment to dart through, to escape. Later on escape might be much harder or even impossible. Later there would be far more to destroy, more ties to cut, more pain to cause, less of life remaining in which to become, however meanly and modestly, something else. If she did not get out now she would be condemned to mediocrity, assenting to be diminished. Now was the moment to dart through, if necessary to batter through, not into freedom, for freedom could not ever be hers, but into what she had called reality. It was not snobbishness to prefer the austerity of that truth and whatever hope it held, not of happiness, but of some final bitter wit. It was impossible to explain to Mitzi why all this was a mistake, a fantasy, an illusion, why it could never never work. Mitzi always spoke of particular things as if they could be changed. But everything needed changing, they were the wrong people, it was all a charade, or rather two charades, since each of them was performing alone. It was all false and sickening and ultimately frightening.

  ‘I’m going,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Don’t go. Don’t go.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Nobody loves you as I love you. Nobody needs you as I need you.’

  I suppose that’s true, thought Charlotte. Only nothing follows from it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can’t go. You just can’t go out of that door and leave me and Pirrus behind in this house forever.’

  If I don’t go now, thought Charlotte, I shall have lost a chance which I shall eternally regret and yearn after. I shall look back and see how easy and how painless it would have been now to break a bond which will by then have become a chain. All I have to do is to walk out of that door. These tears will cease. I will walk.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Mitzi.

  Charlotte sat down on the bed. Tears covered her face as with a veil and filled her vision. She could feel Mitzi pulling to get her coat off and she allowed her arms to be dragged from the sleeves. Love, even fake love, even dream love, was something after all. After all she loved Mitzi, though it was with a fake dream love. And Mitzi loved her and needed her. And what would become of Pyrrhus. And they had paid money and got a mortgage and planted a beech hedge. Perhaps in the end reality would win, smashing it all to pieces. But oh not yet, not yet, while there could still be reconciliation and scrambled eggs and late night whisky and the shutters to be closed and Pyrrhus’s bed to be made. Perhaps it would be worse later, but then perhaps later would never come, perhaps she would die, and it was terrible now and she could not walk through that door and refuse comfort and relief and weary shuttered sleep to herself and to Mitzi that night. Charlotte shed defeated tears, and her tears were already like those of married people who love each other, cannot stand each other, and know that they can never now have any other destiny.

  ‘He never even talks now, poor mite,’ said Mrs Carberry. ‘When I came to see him he just turned away his head. Who knows what goes on in his mind, what he suffers and thinks there, poor little boy, all shut up inside himself.’

  ‘I’m sure he doesn’t suffer,’ said Mavis. But she wasn’t sure.

  ‘Still, Walter and the other children are happier,’ said Mrs Carberry, ‘so we must look on the bright side, mustn’t we. Ronald was such a burden to them really. I think he frightened them in some sort of way. It is scarey when people aren’t quite right.’

  You bore the burden, thought Mavis. Women do.

  ‘What will Mr Gibson Grey fancy for his supper now?’ said Mrs Carberry. ‘I’ve got all the list except that. What about lamb chops and kidneys? I know he’s partial to kidneys.’ Mrs Carberry was devoted to Austin.

  ‘Yes, that will do very well,’ said Mavis, ‘and get some runner beans, he likes those.’

  ‘And that Italian ice cream he likes —’

  ‘Yes, a cassata. Thank you, Mrs Carberry. Wrap up well. It’s raining again.’

  Mavis returned to the drawing-room. The room was dusky with yellow afternoon rain. She kicked her shoes off and lay down on the sofa. She felt desperately tired these days. Matthew was still in Oxford.

  She allowed her mind to become vague. She often drifted into vagueness now, bidden by nature to rest out of an almost chemical self-defence. From this vagueness later certainties would come perhaps without too much pain. She feared pain terribly just now, senses of loss and failure which might maim her mind with their horror. She lived in many worlds.

  She talked to Matthew on the telephone. He was loving, he was waiting, he understood perfectly. For a long time she had told herself, I am suffering from shock. After Dorina’s death how can I live as an ordinary person, make decisions, be held responsible? I am permitted to drift, to perform simple tasks, Mrs Carberry, Austin. The care of Austin was after all Dorina’s legacy.

  The resting and the vagueness had made already some things clearer. There was no question of reanimating the hostel. That era of her life seemed not only closed but distant. From that service she had been definitely demobbed. The will for it was gone. God was dead at last. The decision itself, thus quietly formed for her by drifting time, was clear enough, but its significance was still somehow obscure. Was she now different because some of her had died with Dorina? Or was this newness a still dormant seed of life which she had gained from Matthew? Drifting time would doubtless answer these questions too. She had only to rest and to wait. Should she sell Valmorana? Matthew would decide.

  Meanwhile Austin was still there and showed no immediate sign of moving. Garth was occupying the flat, busy with his new novel, and Austin, who attached great importance to Garth’s novel, did not want yet to intrude. Austin had no money and no job. Sometimes he went out and looked for a job. Sometimes he just went out. He was omnipresent and yet not burdensome. He was charming to Mrs Carberry. Her great treat was when he helped her to wash up. Mavis chastely kissed him goodnight when he went off to bed. He was like a child or a younger brother. Mavis had always so much wanted a brother, not a sister.

  She and Austin had sto
pped talking about anything important. The great storm of talk had passed over and gone. They had said everything to each other. They had talked Dorina through and through. They had talked about their childhoods. They had even talked about Betty. The only subject on which they were silent was Matthew. Now they only chatted.

  I am still wearied out by that death, thought Mavis. And I am aged by it. It sets me in the midst of some new truth which I have yet to recognize. The fiercer agony of it had abated sooner than she would have expected. It was as if Dorina’s shade had deliberately withdrawn so as to cause her less pain. She died for me, Mavis thought. But the thought remained vague. She was somehow selfless, she thought, she was somehow good. Now it was as if Dorina had been merely a stage of herself, a phase which she was growing out of. Dorina’s departure had released her into some sort of vast beyond.

  Changes were taking place, there was no doubt, within the haze. Austin had quietly ceased to be an emergency and was becoming something else, she was not sure what. She had said and thought, and she still said to Matthew on the telephone that she was helping Austin, saving him from collapse, saving him from misery and mad-making shame. She had helped an him certainly, with the help which only she could have given and which his marvellous instinct had led him even relentlessly to seek. Misery and shame she still apprehended in his atmosphere, demonic familiars which could no doubt never be entirely exorcized. Yet now they seemed at last domestic, tiny as flies.

  Austin had been to see Matthew, setting off and returning with at least apparent jauntiness. He spoke of Matthew with airs of responsible sympathy, Matthew was not looking well, not looking at all well. ‘Matthew is a spent storm,’ he then said. Mavis had not commented on the phrase, but it haunted her. On the telephone she asked Matthew about the meeting. ‘We talked, it was quite relaxed.’ ‘What did you talk about?’ ‘Oh, many things. Betty.’ ‘He talked to me about Betty too. It must have been a relief.’ ‘Yes. He seems rather better, wouldn’t you say?’ ‘Much better. He said you looked tired.’ ‘Yes. He said I needed a change. In fact I think I’ll go to Oxford for a bit.’ ‘Darling — then I won’t see you —’ ‘I’ll be back soon, don’t worry.’ ‘Are you going to persuade Louis to stay here?’ ‘Yes, we’ll talk of that.’ ‘I’m sure you’ll persuade him if anyone can. Don’t be long away, my darling.’