by Iris Murdoch
Pearl breathed the soft fuzzy moist surprising spring air with its message of new life and pain and change. She stroked her hand down her straight brow and her thin nose. She thought, I have got everything wrong, I have played every card wrong, I’ve had luck, oh such luck, but I didn’t understand, I didn’t think well enough of myself - I had such mean small expectations, I wanted too little, and now it’s too late.
She looked at the Belmont lights. A curtain was blowing out below a sash window, frighteningly, like a ghost leaning out. Ruby was going to bed, watching television perhaps. Of course she was not going to be like Ruby. Hattie was a girl from the past. Ruby too belonged to the past. A life like Ruby’s could not be lived now. Ruby was an anachronism, an old brown dinosaur. But had not Pearl made a similar mistake, missed a turning, taken a road that led not higher up, but into a low mean small life? It was the money, thought Pearl, I spent those precious years just being pleased that I had money! And even the other day I got pleasure out of going to see that poor old wreck my foster-mother and showing off in front of her! As if I had anything to show off really! I’ve just been lucky, and I enjoyed the luck in a stupid selfish way and didn’t use it. I’m like someone in a story who is given a fairy wish, and wastes it asking for a pretty dress or a cake. I didn’t use my luck when I could to get up, to get out. I could have learnt the things Hattie was learning, or some of them. I could have learnt French at any rate, or something. I let her do all the talking and the looking while I just packed the cases and mended her clothes. Well, I did look, but I didn’t know enough and now I can’t remember. It isn’t that I’m lazy, but I have the soul of a servant and it didn’t occur to me. I was so glad just to be travelling and using money and feeling like someone in an advertisement. I didn’t see that the door was open. Why didn’t I feel more resentment? That might have helped me. If only I had hated Hattie, as I thought I might. But loving Hattie - that’s terrible - and now -
Pearl thought how in a very little while Hattie would change. Hattie was at the precious crystalline end point of her childhood, of her innocence. The sense of this was in Hattie’s own confused pain, her tears, her cry of ‘Foxie - oh foxie’. And her wish that she and Pearl might stay forever in the never-never land of her own arrested youth, which time was sweeping on toward the rapids of absolute change. Hattie would remember with blushes the sweet silly words she had uttered tonight. She would show Pearl how much she had changed, she would have to.
But she won’t show me, thought Pearl, because I won’t be here. I shall be far away. We shall be separated. He told me to come, to be what I am, and for years I have obeyed him. Now, soon, he will simply tell me to go and be no more seen.
Loving Hattie. Ah, that was bad enough. But Pearl’s predicament was even worse than that. She loved John Robert.
‘Let me have a look,’ said George. He took the field glasses from Alex.
They were installed at the drawing-room at Belmont. Beyond the birch tree (whose droopy pose always reminded Alex of Gabriel) one of the upper windows of the Slipper House was clearly visible. The hazy budding April branches of the tree just brushed the lower right-hand corner of the image. The window was one of the windows of Hattie’s bedroom. George was lucky. He saw what Alex had failed to see, Hattie in a white petticoat suddenly skipping across the room. It was the middle of the morning, and Hattie was an early riser, but she had suddenly decided that she wanted to change her dress. The clergyman was due to call in half an hour, and the subtle voice that tells a woman, even a careless girl, how to dress for a man had told her she must change. Hattie came back into view carrying the dress over her arm, and paused. Her hair was undone and was streaming about everywhere until, with her free hand, she slowly gathered it away behind her bare shoulders. Then she passed out of sight again.
George pressed his lips together and lowered his glasses.
‘See anything?’
‘No.’ He turned away from the window.
Alex followed.
‘A maiden bower,’ said George.
‘I doubt if they’re maidens.’
‘Oh surely the little young one is.’
‘She hasn’t had the courtesy to come and see me.’
‘Two sequestered girls. The town will be in quite a tizzy.’
‘The little cat will get out.’
George had arrived unannounced. Alex came down to find him standing in the hall. George had a way of standing, with his head slightly tilted, which suggested, simply by the way in which he occupied the space, that he had just been slinking along and was now only partly visible. So he stood, looking up under his eyebrows, at his mother. God, how conceited he is, she thought as she looked down on him. But, also, her heart turned over for him, it shifted and burned.
Now, in the drawing-room, he had wandered, touching things, moving the little encampment of bronze figures which had stood more or less in that same place on the mantelpiece since he had been a child.
Alex’s unease about George’s arrival blended with a baneful memory of a dream which she had had last night. She dreamed she was in Belmont, but the house had become enormous like a palace, and rather dark and twilit as if pervaded by a yellowish fog. Alex was walking through the house, sometimes accompanied by a woman who seemed to know it better than she did. In the course of this walking, Alex found herself alone in a gallery from which she looked down into a large dim room, almost like a hall, which was full of all sorts of lumber. The room was obviously abandoned and, Alex felt, had not been entered for a long time. Tables and chairs and boxes and piles of things like lamp-stands and old clocks lay about in disorder, and near the middle of the room there was an old-fashioned gramophone with a huge horn. Alex, looking down into the silent abandoned foggy room, felt terrible fear. She thought, but there is no such room in Belmont. Where could such a large secret derelict room be in my house? She hurried away and told her discovery to the woman who seemed to know the house so well. The woman said, ‘Oh, that’s just the old downstairs sitting-room, remember?’ and threw open a door to reveal a shabby disordered room which Alex recalled as a former housekeeper’s room. Alex thought with relief, oh yes, that’s all it is! Then, looking, she realized that this ordinary room was not the room that she had seen.
George had taken off his black mackintosh. He was wearing one of his light grey check suits with a waistcoat and, today, had put on a tie and combed his hair. His head had its sleek hair-oil look. He took off his jacket and stood before Alex in his shiny-backed waistcoat, staring at her and showing his little square separated teeth. It was not exactly a smile.
Alex thought, he’s different, he’s the same yet different. He smells different, sort of sour. And then she thought of the room in her dream. And she thought, he’s the same, yet he is mad.
Alex looked at George with her cat-look, while with clever quick fingers she adjusted the collar of her blouse. She was wearing an old coat and skirt. If she had known George was coming she would have changed. She noted the little instinctive movement of her vanity.
‘How are you, George?’
‘Fine. How are you, Alex?’
‘All right. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘A drink?’
‘No.’
‘Any news of Stella?’ Alex said this, and indeed at that moment felt it, as if it were the most ordinary sort of inquiry after someone’s wife.
‘No,’ said George after a moment, almost thoughtfully, in a kind of dreamy pensive manner, as if seeing a truthful vision, ‘Stella is all right.’
‘You’ve heard something?’
‘No. But you may be sure … that she is all right …’
‘Good,’ said Alex. Sometimes she and George quarrelled in such an odd painful senseless way because their conversation went astray at some point, took a wrong turn. It was as if George, from a position high above, had decided how the conversation ought to go if it were not to break some law. When the hidden law was broken Alex
, punished by pain and confusion, always felt it was her fault. Was their talk, this time too, going to become something awful? She must try hard, she must keep in touch with George. She wanted to place her hand upon his arm, just above the shirt cuff, but of course that was impossible.
‘We may be dead, and indeed perhaps are …’
‘Are you coming with us to the seaside?’ said Alex.
There was something crude, almost pointless in this appeal to a family tradition, just a substitute for touching George’s arm.
‘Lordie, are we going?’ said George, and smiled. He had stopped moving about and sat down near the fire-place, looking up at his mother with his wide-apart eyes and wrinkling his small nose.
‘Yes, I don’t care, but Brian and Gabriel insist.’
‘It isn’t yet anyway. Why do you bring it up? Isn’t it time we stopped going there? You know, we shall never forgive you for selling Maryville.’ George was still smiling.
‘Well — ’
‘How’s your friend Professor Rozanov?’
So that’s it, thought Alex. He has come to find out … And of course I too want to find out … A dull stale sadness came over her.
‘I don’t know. He asked me to come to talk about letting the Slipper House, that was all.’
‘You haven’t seen him since?’
‘No.’
George seemed relieved. He now leaned back in his chair, letting his attention wander.
It was Alex’s turn to walk about the room.
‘How are you getting on with Rozanov?’
‘Me?’ said George. ‘He loves me, he hates me, he pushes me, he pulls me. It’s the old story. How will it end? He’ll be dead soon anyhow. The old people are being cleared away.’ He cast a malevolent look at Alex. ‘We who remain will have other troubles. Hey nonny nonny-no.’
Alex, who had wandered to the window, turned her back on him.
‘Good heavens!’
‘What?’ George got up and joined her at the window.
There were people in the garden.
Alex had lived her life with the view from the window, the drooping birch tree, the copper beech, the fir tree whose noble reddish shaft on which the sunlight glowed soared up so high, the furry lithe awkward ginkgo, and down below the perfect lawn, mown to a shaven sleekness by the gardener, more often now (since he was grown so old) by herself. She had been a child, looked at, in that garden, where she had later looked at her own children. But after, for years and years, there had been no one in the garden, it had remained as the Slipper House. No one, that is, except, when Brian and Gabriel came visiting, Adam and Zed whose presence there she so intensely resented.
Now in fact the first person whom she saw was Zed, right in the middle of the lawn, quite near to the house. She thought, what is that white thing, has someone left a bag there? Then, as she recognized the dog, Adam walked across the grass in the direction of the garage, touching the birch tree and the fir tree on his way. Never before had Adam entered the garden except under licence from Belmont. The back gate had always been kept locked. Now beyond there were figures under the trees near the Slipper House, even a sound of voices. Alex recognized Brian, Gabriel, Pearl Scotney, and coming into view the ill-omened priest in his cassock.
‘The damned impertinence,’ said Alex.
‘Well, you let the place,’ said George. ‘Why did you let it if you hate it all so?’
‘I thought Professor Rozanov would be there.’ Alex immediately regretted this entirely unnecessary revelation.
George said, ‘Oh,’ and then, but without intensity, ‘Don’t mess with Rozanov, he’s dynamite.’
‘Of course they came in through the back gate,’ said Alex. ‘Anyone can come in now. They’ll wear a path across the grass. Oh damn, damn, damn.’
George laughed. He said, ‘The defences are breached. Everything is deep but nothing is hidden. There are meanings in the world.’
The door behind them opened and Ruby came in.
Ruby stood there mute. She was wearing a long white apron, not spotless, over her long brown dress. She stared, not at Alex, but at George.
George said, ‘Hello, old Ruby thing!’ He went forward and touched her shoulder.
‘Ruby, could you get some coffee?’ said Alex.
Ruby vanished.
‘Why should she come in?’
‘She came to look at me,’ said George.
‘Who invited her? She just comes into rooms now, she just walks in.’
‘Maybe she reckons she lives here.’
‘She takes things. I think she takes and hides them and then finds them again. She’s becoming very peculiar. I had to ask for the coffee to get rid of her.’
‘You ought to pet her a little. She wants to be touched.’
‘Really —!’
‘Plato said that everything you say to a slave should be an order. You carry out that advice pretty well. Now I come to think of it, I’ve never heard you say anything to Ruby which wasn’t an order, not even something like “It’s raining.”’
Alex felt suddenly that she might burst into tears, weep bitterly like a child in front of her eldest son. Everyone was against her, everyone criticized her and attacked her. She said, ‘Why don’t you go and join them at the Slipper House.’
‘And spoil the fun?’
‘You want to see the girl. Go and see her.’
‘And seduce her? What about my còffee?’
Alex was silent, calling up old allies, rage and hate, to blunt her grief and dry her tears.
‘All right,’ said George, well aware of those mounting emotions. ‘I’ll go. And when Ruby comes with the coffee ask her to sit down. I’d like to think of you having coffee together.’
He picked up his coat and jacket and faded from the room.
George went downstairs and into the garden by the back door, but he did not go to join the ‘intruders’ who were standing outside the Slipper House. There had been, at this juncture, no glimpse of ‘the little one’. He stood near the garage looking down the garden. Adam, who had been sitting in the Rolls, heard the sound of the opening and shutting door. Standing up on the seat of the car he could watch George through the dusty window of the ‘motor house’. He had never observed George like this before, at such close quarters, unobserved himself. It was exciting. George’s face at that moment was worth observing, being like that of a tragic actor registering indecision together with some deep emotion, then clearing and becoming round and benign. He was carrying his mackintosh and his jacket over his arm. He dropped the mac on the grass, put on the jacket, then slowly put on the mac, still gazing down the garden. Something like what Alex saw as his ‘conceited’ look had returned. Then he turned and went away along the path which led to the street in front of the house (Tasker Road). Adam sat down again and took hold of the steering wheel of the car. Somewhere, he heard Zed utter a bark.
George, though he was indeed curious about ‘the little girl’, decided not to join the group at the Slipper House. Something almost like shyness deterred him, a sudden sense of how it was becoming harder and harder to communicate with anyone. He had visited Alex partly to find out the meaning of her visit to John Robert (of which he believed her account) and partly to reassure himself that, confronted with his mother, he could actually talk to her. Alex would have been surprised to know that in some way his talk with her had fortified him. George was also deterred from going to the Slipper House by a very special feeling of fear which came to him quite suddenly, a sense of taboo. The image of Hattie in her petticoat came back to him with intense vividness. He had thought: that girl, his grand-daughter, is dangerous, she’s the most dangerous thing in the world. It was as that thought came to him that his face had cleared; for he had not at all liked the sense of being, almost, too embarrassed to walk up naturally to those strangers. As he neared the front gate some movement caught the corner of his eye and he saw that he was accompanied by Zed. The little dog, as George’s head turned, barke
d at him, then retreated and posed, front feet down, back up, the rump and plumy tail aloft. Then he sprang up, stamped his tiny paw, whined eloquently, then barked again. George lifted a threatening fist and Zed snarled, showing white pointed teeth. George thought with satisfaction, even the dogs bark at me now. He went out into the road, banging the front gate after him. He thought, shall I go to the cinema? No, I’ll go and see Diane. She’d better be in.
Zed ran past a viburnum bush and came face to face with a fox.
Zed had not meant anything in particular by barking at George. He had followed George from the garage, sniffing at his heels. George always smelt different from other humans; but today there was a new smell, stronger and more exciting, but also rather nasty. It was an animally smell, yet also it offended Zed in some fastidiousness of his soul, which was clothed in white plumage and burning with ecstasy and love. Zed was endlessly interested in George. He smelt him, when he could get near enough (which was not often) with a special nose-wrinkling fascination. If he had seen George buried he would have dug him up. When Zed saw the front gate he began to run on toward it, but was startled by George’s sudden turning and his threatening gesture. This gesture wakened an old feeling in Zed that George was dangerous to Adam. So he had snarled (which he very rarely did) and then, satisfied with his performance, scampered back toward his master. As it happened, Adam, who was still in the garage, had shut the door, so Zed ran on down the garden; and it was then that he came face to face with the fox. It was the big dog fox.
Zed had never seen a fox but he had smelt the strong frightening odour and he knew what the apparition was. He recognized, as he had never done before, an absolute enemy. Cross humans and snappy dogs were hazards. But this was different. Zed, as he came to an abrupt stop, felt suddenly his solitude and with it the completeness of his doghood, only in which lay now his salvation. It did not occur to him to bark for help. Indeed as his black eyes stared at the fox’s blue eyes he felt incapable of barking.