by Iris Murdoch
Valerie, searching, grieving, had passed on.
Tom thought, I can’t go and knock on the door, I’d look a complete fool there not being let in, it’s all shameful, I really must go home. I’ll write a letter of apology tomorrow. Oh God. As he began to walk unsteadily up the garden towards Belmont he became aware that he was being followed by a girl, a strange girl. Heaven knew who was in the garden by now, but there was nothing he could do about it. He felt reckless and remorseful and angry. He said, ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’ He added, ‘What am I doing here, if it comes to that.’
The curtains were drawn in the Belmont drawing-room, but the big uncurtained landing window, which showed the white sweep of the stairs, gave a diffused light. Tom looked at the girl who was giggling, perhaps a bit tipsy, and throwing her longish fair hair about. She was rather tall and wearing a smart silky multi-coloured dress. Now she came on, sidling boldly up against him. Tom, recoiling, looked at her again, more closely.
‘Emma! You wretch! This is too bloody much! And you’re drunk, you reek of whisky!’
‘Have some, I’ve brought it with me, let’s sit down somewhere.’
‘You’re horribly drunk. How did you know we were here?’
‘I met some drunks near the pub who said there was a party at the Slipper House. Where are the girls?’
‘If you mean Hattie Meynell, she’s in the house with the shutters closed!’
‘I thought you’d come to serenade her, after all Rozanov is forcing you to marry her!’
‘Oh shut up!’
Emma caught Tom round the waist.
Pearl had been gone for some time and Hattie was very upset. She was standing in the sitting-room, but with the door ajar so that she could hear Pearl’s knock and call. She was scared and affronted by the extraordinary mob outside whose noise showed no sign of abating, and deeply hurt and angered by Tom’s extraordinary and spiteful treachery. Now everything had gone so wrong and so sour. She regretted having let Pearl go out to look for him, which might seem like a capitulation, as if she were pursuing him.
At that moment Hattie heard a curious sound at the back of the house as of a door opening and a footstep. It could not be Pearl, after whom she had firmly locked the back door, indeed all the doors were locked and the windows fastened. As she held her hands to her face in horror, the door of the sitting-room began to move and a man came in. It was George McCaffrey.
Hattie and Pearl had of course discussed George, casually before, and in more detail after, their meeting with him on the family picnic. Here Hattie had been as ready as the others to appreciate his heroic rescue of Zed, but had resented the insolent and, she felt, mocking way in which he had stared at her. She had also been annoyed by his misappropriation of the Rover, which had meant that she and Pearl had had to convey Alex and Ruby back to Belmont. (Alex had not concealed her dissatisfaction at this arrangement.) Hattie thought people should behave properly and was unamused by George’s waywardness which the family seemed too much to condone. Pearl had said, though in vague terms since she knew little about it, that George had once been John Robert’s pupil, and this information also, for some reason, displeased Hattie who began to manifest nervous irritation when his name came up. Pearl had earlier imparted to her the usual legend about George’s awfulness, together with her own view that he was simply mad.
George certainly, as he entered the room, looked rather mad. His gaze had the squinting intensity of Alex’s ‘cat look’. His round face was shining, as if covered with sweat, his wide-apart brown eyes were big and moist with emotion, and he was smiling inanely displaying his little square teeth. His head looked weird, like a flickering pumpkin face illuminated from within. He had entered the Slipper House through the coal house, which had an interior window into the back passage which had originally given on to the outside before the annexe was added just before the war. This window, which was covered by a curtain, was inconspicuous and had a faulty catch, promptly highlighted by George’s memory as he walked down the garden. He was excited by the sudden strange night scene and by what he overheard someone say about the girls being ‘barricaded inside the house’. He began to feel that deep nervous urge which he had described to Rozanov as a ‘sense of duty’. He was constrained to, he had to go to the Slipper House and get inside and look again at the girl whose image still chiefly lived in his mind as a flying-haired thing in a white petticoat glimpsed through a window. He had had a good stare at her on the picnic, but this eyeful had on the whole defused the intensity of his interest and fortified his view of her as simply ‘taboo’. He could not afford to be fascinated by Hattie, and was relieved to find that after all he was not. But now, as if he had made a mistake which was being corrected by the gods, everything had switched round again, and he was being drawn towards her by the constraint of an exquisite and agonizing obligation.
Tom had been called away by Hector Gaines, who was asking him how they could end the awful carnival and persuade everybody to go. Anthea Eastcote had gone home disgusted with it all, so someone told Hector who was now chastened and miserable. A crashing among the magnolias suggested that the garden was suffering damage. Emma was waltzing by himself under the ginkgo tree when he encountered Pearl. He recognized her at once although, for her sortie, Pearl had disguised herself. She had on a long dark coat and a scarf round her head.
Emma said, ‘Hello, dear.’
Pearl said, ‘Have you seen Tom McCaffrey?’
‘No, dear. Don’t go, dear.’
‘Excuse me — ’
‘Pearl — ’
Pearl recognized him. ‘Oh - Mr Scarlett-Taylor — ’
‘Don’t be silly, my name is - let me see, what is my name — ’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘I’ve got a whisky bottle here, have some.’
‘It’s horrible, dressing up like that, it’s vulgar, you look awful, it’s all awful, all those people coming and shouting outside our windows, it’s hateful, I can’t understand it. We’re going to call the police. Take off that wig!’
Emma took off the wig. He had found it in Judy’s cupboard as he rooted about when Tom was away and it had given him the idea. He had enjoyed deciding which of Ju’s various garments to put on. He threw the wig up into the branches of the ginkgo tree. ‘Someone said there was a party here.’
‘It’s a disgrace. Go home.’
‘Pearl, do you mind, I’m going to kiss you.’
Emma was only a little taller than Pearl. He dropped his whisky bottle on the ground and put his two arms carefully round her waist, gathering in the black coat and drawing her to him. He raised one hand to thrust back the scarf from her face, then returned the hand to her waist, locking her firmly. Breathing deeply he felt about, feeling her face with his face, seeking her lips with his lips. He found her lips and gently but resolutely pressed his own dry mouth against them. It was a dry kiss between sealed lips. He stood maintaining the pressure, shifting slightly to keep his balance, and closing his eyes. Pearl’s hands, which had been against his shoulders, to push him away, relaxed and then moved a little to hold him. They stood perfectly still together.
George stared at Hattie. Hattie had her hair in two plaits which were drawn forward over her shoulders. She had on the mauve dress from Anne Lapwing’s, for it had been a warm day, and over it for the cool evening a long loose grey cardigan with its sleeves pushed up. She wore short white socks inside her embroidered slippers. She looked like a thin frail schoolgirl, and yet she had a dignified startled embattled look, her head thrown back, her face, milky brown from the sun but still pale, pouting in a kind of intensity which answered the challenge of George’s squinting cat stare. Her lips were thrust forward in an expression of anger, suddenly like that of her grandfather.
George said, ‘Good evening.’
Hattie said, ‘How did you get in?’
‘I hope I don’t intrude.’
‘You do intrude, you simply walked in, I didn’t invite you, this is
n’t your house, just because you’re one of those McCaffreys you seem to think — ’
‘Why are you so cross with us McCaffreys?’
‘You and your brother have organized this monstrous impertinence. This is what it’s for, that you should come like this, I see now what it’s all about — ’
‘Well, I don’t,’ said George. ‘Don’t be so excited.’
‘I’m not excited, I’m furiously angry — ’
‘All right, you’re furiously angry, but don’t be angry with me, I didn’t do this, I’m blameless — ’
‘You’re - you’re horrible -just like people said - go away - you frighten me — ’
This was an unwise thing for Hattie to say. George’s emotions as he had climbed in through the coal house window and tiptoed to the sitting-room had been confused, not excluding fear: a piercing exciting amalgam of apprehension and weird joy and a special old urgent feeling of guilt which was indistinguishable from his special feeling of obligation. The sudden shock of Hattie’s presence, and her defiant stance, sobered him a little and stirred him to think. Thought, evidently, had been absent. He had made beforehand no plan or picture of this encounter. So, there was to be a conversation, perhaps an argument, a battle of wits? This prospect changed the tempo, prompting reflection, intellectual strategy. But Hattie’s words, ‘You frighten me’, were a signal which set off a new stream of emotion, now more clearly defined, a sudden desire not to embrace the girl but to crush her as a large animal crushes a small animal, to feel her fragile bones crack between his teeth.
Hattie saw his inane smile and his lighted eyes and she picked up the limestone hand from the table.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ said Ruby to Diane.
Ruby had been wandering about among the revellers, sometimes standing with arms folded and looking. The scene seemed to afford her satisfaction. Prowling like a dog, sniffing for the hated foxes, round the perimeter of the stone wall which enclosed the Belmont garden she had come across Diane, crouched, balanced awkwardly against the low branch of a yew tree, half-hidden in the thick blackish foliage.
‘Are you hiding?’ said Ruby. ‘What are you hiding for?’
With a little ‘Ach!’ of misery and irritation, Diane pulled herself up out of the yew. She had come to church without a coat and was now feeling extremely cold. Her dress had become clammy from damp earth and dew as she scuttled like a trapped mouse round the edges of the garden in the dark spongy mossy ‘corridor’ between the trees and shrubs and the wall, trying to catch a glimpse of George from whose rumoured proximity she could not bring herself to depart.
Upstairs in the warm brightly lit space of the Belmont drawing-room, behind drawn curtains, Alex opened another bottle of whisky. She was no longer frightened, she no longer cared about what was happening in the garden or who invaded it. She rather hoped there might be some catastrophe, a murder, or the Slipper House catching fire. As she returned across the room she caught sight of herself in the gilt arch of the big mirror over the mantelpiece. Her face was flushed and puffy, her eyes framed by discoloured wrinkles, her hair hanging down in dull witchy strings. She thought, can it really and truly be that I am no longer beautiful? Tears came into her eyes.
‘Well, should we just go home?’ said Hector.
‘We can’t go home and leave this mob here,’ said Tom.
‘Some people have gone.’
‘Yes, but others have come, I saw someone coming through the gate with beer bottles just now. I have an unpleasant feeling they’re all waiting for something to happen!’
They were standing on the grass just outside the Slipper House.
Valerie Cossom appeared, her white robe now smudged with green from sitting on the grass. ‘George is here, have you seen him?’
‘George? Oh no!’
At that moment the shutters of the Slipper House sitting-room were suddenly thrown open from within, and the bright lights of the room flooded out making a brilliant rectangle upon the lawn. There were exclamations, a little cheer, people appeared out of the dark and crowded forward.
The scene within was clearly visible. Facing the window was George. At the window, in profile to the spectators, was Hattie, who had just opened the shutters. As the jostling, giggling spectators watched, George advanced upon the girl. It was evident that he wanted to close the shutters again. But Hattie, with a gesture of defiant authority, stretched out her arm, half-bare with the cardigan sleeve tucked up, across the unshuttered window. George paused.
Tom, who was standing in front of the others, close up against the window, as he had stood earlier in the evening, thought his head would burst. Then he cried out in a loud voice, ‘George, go home - oh George, go home!’ In the next second someone (it was Emma) took up Tom’s cry, intoning it softly as a chant to the tune of ‘Onward Christian soldiers’, better known to some as ‘Lloyd George knows my father’. This latter song (as is well known to college deans) is irresistible to drunks and can be guaranteed to charm the savage breasts of troublesome students in their cups. In a moment all the revellers assembled in front of the Slipper House were singing at the tops of their voices, ‘George go home, oh George go home, George go home, oh George …’ The considerable noise of united voices, penetrating through Victoria Park, drew a number of late home-comers including myself (N, your narrator). I had been attending a learned meeting at a house nearby, was coming down Tasker Road just as the song rang out, and was able to witness some at least of its sequel. A little crowd soon collected in front of Belmont. The police arrived when it was all over.
The effect upon George was clearly visible in the utmost detail. He stepped back and a look of embarrassment and irritation, then of extreme dismay, appeared on his face. Those who do not fear disapproval may be abjectly terrified of ridicule. The combination of Hattie’s outstretched arm and the loud derisive singing was too much. He turned and vanished from the room. He plunged through the hall to the back door, unlocked it and shouldered his way past Pearl who was desperately knocking on the outside. Pearl skipped in and locked the door. Hattie closed the shutters.
George ran through the garden in the direction of Belmont, then down past the garage to the road, followed by the scornful hooting of those who had spotted his escape. (This ludicrous episode was the nearest which George came at this time to being lynched.) The song continued for a while, then raggedly died away in laughter. George ran away down the road, turning in the direction of the canal. In the confusion not everyone noticed (but I did) that he was followed by two women, first Valerie Cossom, and then Diane. Following the two women padded the priest, Father Bernard, and after Father Bernard padded I.
Tom held his head, which was still bursting. The revellers, pleased with their exploit, were laughing and dancing about. Some had reached the stage of drunkenness where more drink and the continuation of the party had become absolute necessities. Rupert Chalmers, Maisie’s brother, son of Vernon Chalmers whose house was close by, was heard asking for volunteers to raid his father’s cellar. Hector, in despair, had started drinking again. He was gazing in a confused manner at Emma, who, with his glasses on and without his wig, had evidently forgotten that he was wearing one of Judy Osmore’s cocktail dresses.
‘Good evening, Scarlett-Taylor,’ said Hector, swaying slightly to and fro.
‘Emma,’ said Tom, ‘how on earth are we going to get rid of this lot? Someone will call the police, and I’m scared cold that Rozanov will find out. Oh God, if only you weren’t drunk — ’
‘Well, I got rid of George, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, yes, marvellous - but now - think of something — ’
Emma stepped back with a movement like that of an athlete or dancer about to perform, with perfect confidence, a very difficult feat. He half turned, spread out his arms, and began to sing. He sang now with his full voice, with all its high weird slightly husky penetrating force, he sang as a fox might sing if foxes could sing. The sound of his voice filled the garden and made
it resonate like a drum; waves of sound gathered the garden together into a great vibrating bubble of thrilling sound. And beyond the garden, Emma’s voice was heard in the night in streets and houses far around, where people awoke from sleep as if touched by an electric ray, and china in distant kitchens shuddered and rang in sympathy. It was claimed later that his singing could be heard as far away as Blanch Cottages and Druidsdale, though this no doubt was an exaggeration. What he sang was,
Music for a while
Shall your cares beguile …
Come away, do not stay,
But obey, while we play,
For hell’s broke up and ghosts have holiday.
The effect upon the revellers was indeed that of an enchantment. They became, of course, instantly silent. It would have been impossible to utter speech against the authority of that voice. And they stood where they were, as still as statues, some even in the attitudes in which the music had surprised them, kneeling on one knee or holding up a hand. It was as if they had all drawn a deep breath and were holding it. Their faces, dimly seen beneath the lamp-lit trees, were rapt and grave as the song continued. Tom whispered to Hector, ‘Quick, see them off, quietly.’ Tom and Hector, as if they were the last men left alive, began to move among the throng, touching people on the shoulder and whispering, ‘Go now, please, it’s time to go,’ ‘Time to go home, please go now.’ Sometimes a little push was necessary. More often the grave-faced listener, as if he were reverently leaving a ceremony in church, turned and tiptoed off. One after the other, the touch of Tom and Hector animated the petrified guests and sent them on their way. Some even bowed their heads and folded their hands as they set off, now trooping in a long line, toward the back gate. At last they were all gone, even Bobbie Benning who had been found asleep on the seat where he had sat and confided in Father Bernard. Even Hector had gone and the song had died away. Tom and Emma stood alone in the garden. They put their arms round each other and silently laughed or perhaps cried.