by Iris Murdoch
When Christopher had first met Millie, at a time when he himself was courting Heather Kinnard, she was already married to Arthur. He had disliked her, chiefly, as it seemed in retrospect, because she had tended to put Heather in the shade. Yet Heather had adored her dominating sister-in-law and defended her heartily against Christopher’s criticisms. He had thought Millie loud, vulgar and thoroughly selfish. He still thought her loud, vulgar and thoroughly selfish, only now these things were meat and drink to him; or rather, he saw her faults with a difference, touched by romance into gaiety and by charity into innocence. Kathleen, whose conceptual armoury did not include the idea of vulgarity, disliked and indeed feared in Millie a merciless rapacity upon which she blamed Arthur’s early death. Kathleen once said of Millie, ‘She respects no one. She does not see where another person begins.’ But Heather enjoyed Millie’s flamboyance, her noise. This paler, frailer quieter soul took from her boisterous sister-in-law the reflection of a more abundant life. Perhaps, Christopher had often felt, Arthur’s attitude to Millie was of this kind too. He had enjoyed being digested by this larger organism. And it also occurred to Christopher to wonder: had he himself similarly engulfed Heather? Was he able to ‘see where another person begins’? No one had seemed to blame him for the way in which Heather had faded from life. Yet perhaps something in himself, less noisy, less overtly colourful, but just as ruthlessly and largely egotistic, had thrust aside that gentler, weaker spirit. But of course these were strictly irrational speculations. Heather had died from a disease of the liver and Arthur from cancer of the stomach. Science proclaimed their deaths normal, unavoidable.
Perhaps, in the long run, it was some deep sense of identification with his sister-in-law, some feeling of the similarity of their temperaments, of a profound likeness underneath a superficial unlikeness, which had made Christopher so interested. Arthur’s demise had preceded Heather’s by some eighteen months, and at the time of these deaths Christopher’s dislike of Millie had been at a maximum: possibly because he felt himself associated with her in some kind of guilty pact. All the same, she had by now become an object of speculation, irritation, fascination. Perhaps too he had in a way learnt from Heather to regard Millie as one of the world’s more significant objects. When her name came up in conversation he would jump and listen nervously, and when she was present he was always unusually argumentative. Then one day she asked him to lend her some money.
That was now about eight years ago. It had been a significant moment and Christopher had felt it to be such at the time. It had been, for him, the first indication that all was not well with Millie’s finances. She lived extremely lavishly and it had been and still was confidently assumed by the world at large that Millie Kinnard was ‘pretty well heeled’. Christopher was surprised, interested, and in a prophetic way curiously pleased to find that this was not so. He lent her the money at once, without comment, happy to be, and happy to be tacitly expected to be, supremely discreet. She was grateful, he was politely, reticently dignified; and at once their relationship was altered. Christopher’s money had come to him from his father, who had been a teacher of mathematics at Trinity, an amateur economist and an expert gambler on the Stock Exchange; which expertize had augmented an already comfortable family fortune. Christopher himself was neither rapacious nor mean and had not inherited his father’s taste for playing with money. Yet money was important to him, its presence was a deep source of security, and it was somehow a stuff through which he was vitally connected with the world. A part of his life-blood ran through it. And when he became financially connected with Millie some warmth passed from him to her with the connection. It was this primitive touching, more even perhaps than the more obvious sense of a power over her, which made him begin to fall in love.
But of course these explanations, upon which he himself later meditated, were in a way otiose. Millie was a gorgeous desirable object. He wondered why all men were not in love with her, and soon began to suspect that they were. She was an overflowing vessel, a plump, gay, generous woman. There was some coldness, some shivering, shrewd thinness in Christopher which needed her desperately, which clung to her as to a source of warmth and life. He only half concealed his need, watching her with a large affectation of detachment, and enraptured by the cool amused gaze which, in the formality of their new relationship, she with equal affectation adopted. He remembered how, in the old quarrelling days, Millie would sometimes shout out, ‘But I adore Christopher!’ Now, as their poker-faced relation gradually broke down into tenderness and laughter, he realized that Millie was not only grateful, she was prepared in effect to adore him. This made Christopher very happy indeed.
Time passed, and Millie’s affairs became more involved and difficult. Christopher lent her more money. He gave her advice too, but he was a prudent rather than an original capitalist and an ineffective helper. Millie took advice in other quarters, without revealing the seriousness of the situation, and merely increased the muddle she was in. She was incapable of economies. Christopher watched these developments with mixed feelings, and gradually an idea which seemed to him both sinister and delightful formulated itself in his mind. Millie’s difficulty would be Christopher’s opportunity.
That he might ever ask Millie to marry him was a notion which, after he had fallen in love with her, he had early dismissed. He wanted to be happy, to enjoy the deliciousness of her company, not to ask too much; and it seemed clear that she could not possibly want to marry him. She was a spoilt girl, he was not by any means her only admirer, and she ostentatiously enjoyed her freedom. She ‘adored’ him, but she was not in the least in love with him. ‘Adoration’ was something different. Millie skipped about, bounded like a dog, shouted more than usual when Christopher arrived. But she let him depart without repining. She liked the intermittent character of their converse. He would have wished to be with her day and night. He coveted her body with a passion which his shrewd hedonism constantly quieted and checked. He did not care, at his age, to suffer the sleepless nights of unsatisfied desire, and he did not in fact suffer them. But he wanted Millie; and he knew that she did not, in that way, want him.
Discretion about money had somehow cast a veil of secrecy over their whole relationship. It was not generally known that they were fond of each other or that they met so often; and Christopher kept up for the benefit of some of his relations the fiction that he found Millie ‘trying’. He did this partly out of an innate taste for the clandestine, partly because of the money question, and partly because Millie wanted it that way. Christopher was realistic and resigned about Millie’s desire for secrecy. A popular woman who enjoys her admirers and is also kind-hearted will naturally want to keep her friendships strictly sealed off from each other. To each man Millie seemed available with an undivided attention and a full heart. Christopher was consoled by being more in her confidence than most. He at least knew about the others; and he was fairly certain that, at present at any rate, these ‘relationships’ which Millie cultivated remained at a level of innocuous flirtation, although hearts other than hers were sometimes cracked in the process.
There was, however, yet another and graver reason for Christopher’s secrecy, and that was the attitude of Frances. Frances disliked Millie, perhaps because, although Christopher had always, and quite automatically, concealed it from her, she sensed her father’s interest and was jealous, or perhaps out of a strong temperamental disparity. ‘I don’t like being bounced at,’ Frances had once said coldly after some demonstration of Millie’s. And Millie indeed, who was always made nervous by the presence of Frances, whom she felt as a critic, had made various effusive but vain attempts to win the girl round. Christopher loved Frances dearly, though he had always treated her, even as a child, in the cool ironical manner which he used to the world at large. In this respect, he and his daughter, early left to each other’s company by the vanishing of Heather, perfectly understood one another, and made no display of a strong affection which passed freely between them under a
guise of such calmness that not everyone realized that they loved each other at all.
Before Christopher had formulated the idea of asking Millie to marry him he had not too much troubled about the hostility of Frances. It had merely provided another motive for a total discretion. But when the notion of such a marriage had appeared in the background the view which Frances might take of it became an appalling source of anxiety. That Frances disliked Millie was of course in itself a serious impediment; and there was also the possibility that a projected match between her father and ‘that woman’ might produce in Frances some unprecedented reaction of violence. Christopher was aware that in some respects which were relevant to this problem he did not know his daughter very well. Their relations had been, in a sense, too perfectly organized. Being so much in each other’s company they had early developed an adult language of understatement, and their feelings, just because they were so harmonious, had been tacit. But Christopher divined in his daughter the presence of an as yet unpractised stubbornness, the presence of ferocious will.
The marriage question, for some time hovering in the background, had now suddenly and automatically been brought into the foreground by the almost complete collapse of Millie’s fortunes. This collapse was not yet known to the world. At Upper Mount Street the maids with the white streamers still tripped confidently about the house and under the windows of Rathblane the hunters still strolled and nibbled the green grass. The chauffeur still polished the brass fitments of the Panhard. But all this must shortly vanish like a dream, dissolve like Aladdin’s palace, unless…
Christopher, faced with the supreme temptation, did not attempt to resist it, did not even formulate the idea of it as a temptation, so confident did he now suddenly feel in his gods. He would save Millie, he would save her by marrying her. The idea that he was in effect proposing to buy Millie was perfectly clear in his mind, but seemed in the context entirely innocuous. The one who is in love has the significant destiny and Christopher felt that, beyond his hopes, a path had been made, a door had been opened, especially for him. His significance would felicitously espouse Millie’s misfortune. There was indeed an inevitability about it, the other side of which was that it was somehow clearly ‘impossible’ for Christopher to save Millie without marrying her.
Although the idea that there was only one solution had been taking shape over a period of months, as Millie’s financial affairs went into the final phases of collapse, it was only in the last four weeks or so that Christopher had used explicitly the words which named his intention. This had happened during scenes in which Millie would say desperately, ‘I’ll sell this house and Rathblane and go into lodgings,’ and Christopher would say, ‘Don’t be foolish. You know you can’t face it. You’ll marry me and everything will be all right.’ Then Millie would laugh loudly, say, ‘It looks as if I’ll have to!’ and change the subject. It was true that Millie could not face it, that she would in the end do anything rather than face it; and meanwhile she played a little for time.
This period of their relationship had had, for Christopher, a special rather sad charm. Millie had been of late, even in the last year, more subdued, less boisterous. It was not that she seemed older or positively melancholy, but her beauty wore a sort of gauzy veil which perhaps only he could see. She was less rowdy and her gaiety sometimes seemed ‘switched on’, an effort, and she was often thoughtful. Christopher had her cornered, and she knew it. She used now her resources of irony and humour to cover the loss of her dignity as a free being. She seemed without resentment. There was something beautiful and sad in this loss of power which made him feel very tenderly towards her. It was like a stage in taming a wild beast when it becomes suddenly gentle and puss-like. It plunges far off, but feels the rope that draws and draws it. Now it trots more soberly near by. Soon it will come to the hand. It will have to.
This was how Christopher saw it most of the time; but there were moments of uneasiness when he felt that the closer he came to her the more likely it was that Millie might suddenly bolt. He would have been prepared to let her decide very slowly indeed. He rather enjoyed his state of undeclared sovereignty. But financial pressures set the pace and Millie herself seemed increasingly anxious to settle her fate although she still avoided any clear commitment; while Christopher, who had intended not to press her, could not now prevent himself from advancing upon her as the situation itself relentlessly advanced. No, he did not really think that she could escape him. Yet with a woman like Millie one never knew. She was used to doing things on the hunting field which seemed equivalent to suicide; and although she was probably incapable of facing poverty, she was not incapable of pulling the house down, of provoking some total catastrophe on the assumption that the world was going to end immediately.
‘Have some of your special cider and sherry mixture,’ said Millie. ‘I’ve got some here in a jug.’
‘Thanks.’ Christopher was partial to a mixture of two parts of Tio Pepe to one part of dry cider.
She released the glass into his fingers, but kept her hand lightly resting against his, looking down at him. The purple silk brushed his knee.
‘You look Chinese today, Millie. It must be the dress.’
‘Good. I shall need all my inscrutability for dealing with you.’
She suddenly laughed and moved away. ‘Do you know, poor dear Hilda, I was watching her at tea. I think she thinks she’s got you hooked.’
Christopher laughed too. ‘Not hooked, no. She pictures us as two ancient craft driven by the storms of fortune into the selfsame anchorage!’
‘When is Frances getting married?’
Christopher drew a quiet breath. Millie’s jumpy nervy mood both frightened and exhilarated him. How endlessly she must have thought about Frances. Yet the name was rarely mentioned between them. ‘Soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘I don’t know. That foolish boy still hasn’t fixed it. But he will directly. I’ll make him.’
It was a sad thing to Christopher, and perhaps the only thing about which he really felt guilt, that he was now actually impatient for Frances to be married. Indeed she must be married before anything else could happen. He feared that will of hers, roaming unoccupied and uncaged.
‘Christopher—’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘Do you think I’m getting old and ugly?’
‘You know perfectly well what I think.’
‘I must be getting old. I need to hear somebody saying that I am gorgeously attractive. Once I didn’t need to be told, except by my looking-glass.’
‘You are gorgeously attractive, Millie.’
She paused by the tall mirror and with a large gesture lit the candles on either side of it. Like a new ghost in the flickering light her reflection gazed at Christopher, and the reflection had suddenly the remote distinction of a work of art, and something too of the eternal sadness of art.
‘Well, it’s not true, but bless you for saying it. This soft light suits me, don’t you think? It makes me hazy. One mustn’t look too close. I am getting old. I’m nearly ready to retire. Perhaps I’ll retire with you and we’ll go and live in the hotel at Greystones and become a well-known old couple taking a turn on the front.’
‘I wish you would! You know how much I wish—’
‘Sssh, Christopher.’
‘Yes?’
‘I like you because you are so clever.’
‘Oh, Millie, do stop tormenting me.’ He had not meant to strike this note, but suddenly it was unbearable, the enclosed scene and her proximity. The straight silk dress moved upon her body as if she were naked beneath. She was very close and it was an agony not to touch her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a suddenly desolate tone, and moved out of the soft aura of the candles.
After a pause she said, ‘I don’t want to sell Rathblane.’
‘I know you don’t.’
‘I like being Lady Kinnard of Rathblane.’
Christopher gripped his glass. Milli
e was now going to say something which he had long guessed to be in her mind although she had never explicitly uttered it. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Christopher—would we have to change things altogether? You know you could have anything that you wanted. I am that sort of girl. Or rather I could be for you.’
‘But I am not that sort of man. Besides—’
‘Besides?’
‘I should require—shall we say moderate faithfulness.’
Millie laughed but became tense again the next moment. ‘You are modest! I would be faithful to you—moderately.’