by Iris Murdoch
‘Dangerous stuff,’ said Lily, ‘always stronger than you imagine!’
‘People always say that about fruitcup,’ said Rose, then felt she had been rude. She tried to think of something to ameliorate the impression, could not, and felt annoyed with herself and Lily.
The bell rang and Rose could hear Patricia at the door welcoming Tamar. Rose poured herself a glass of the fruit cup, which was indeed stronger than it seemed, and drank it quickly. She was afraid that Gerard would want her to invite Gulliver and Lily to the Boyars reading party and she would have to do so. Gulliver, though invited to Guy Fawkes, had never yet been invited to Boyars.
Lily said thank heavens it was not raining.
Tamar came in. She was not wearing her usual coat and skirt uniform, and had ventured into a brown woollen dress with an embroidered collar. A near candle revealed her pale transparent milky cheek, flushed a little with the cold, and her cleanly parted silky fair hair, with its evenly cut ends, held in a round slide. Holding Rose’s warm hand in her little cold one for a moment, she kissed Rose. Then after a moment’s hesitation she kissed Lily. Lily liked Tamar but was never sure that Tamar liked her. Tamar smiled at Gulliver, and they made vague gestures. She declined the fruit cup, said she would get herself a soft drink in the kitchen, and went off.
Meanwhile Gerard and Gideon had come in from the garden, leaving Jenkin, the enthusiast, to complete the arrangements, which included the removal of all extraneous obstacles from the lawn. They came in, not by the doors into the drawing room which were still closed and curtained, but by a corridor which passed the kitchen and led to the dining room and hall. In the dining room the long table, which had been pushed back against the wall and covered with a green baize cloth, then by a sturdy white damask cloth, was already occupied by plates, cutlery, wine glasses, open wine bottles, salad bowls, Rose’s smoked salmon canapés which had been allowed out, bread, butter, biscuits, the terrine and the rata-touille, also a display of ham and tongue which Patricia had felt inspired to add at the last moment. The steak and kidney pie, the curry and the potatoes would come in hot. The trifle was still in the fridge. Rose’s sandwiches were not to appear. The fate of the little cakes was still uncertain. Gerard, who had learnt, but too late, of Patricia’s plans, viewed this elaborate spread with dismay. The usual arrangement was that sandwich-style food would be available throughout the evening for people to come and grab informally by hand whenever they felt like it. These pretentious dishes suggested a dinner hour, a queue, guests standing or sitting awkwardly with heaped plates, a scene which he detested. Patricia arrived with a bowl of mayonnaise which she had made in the afternoon.
The dining room was rather dark, looking out on the bushy front garden, with its pair of ash trees, and the street. The heavy bottle-green curtains were pulled, the walls, striped dark brown, and dark ochre, liberally (by Gerard’s standards, for he did not like clutter) covered by nineteenth-century Japanese paintings, shadowy exquisite things with sparse smudgy lines and dashes of colour, representing birds, dogs, insects, trees, frogs, tortoises, monkeys, frail girls, casual men, mountains, rivers, the moon. Gideon respected these, though they were not his cup of tea. He regarded most of Gerard’s mediocre collection with contempt. Looking now at a drawing of a dragonfly on a bulrush he said, ‘Yes, that’s quite cute. But why don’t you try to collect some good pictures? I could advise you.’
‘I don’t want to develop expensive tastes and be like people who can only drink the best wine! I like grand art in galleries. I don’t want it in my house.’
‘I’m not talking about grand art, but you might aim a little higher! I confess I don’t share your passion for English watercolours. Wouldn’t you like a Wilson Steer? You were keen on him once. I could look out for one – of course it wouldn’t be cheap. Or a Vuillard. Vuillard is the chap to buy now, he’s still underpriced.’
‘Far too grand for me.’
‘Chagall, Morisot?’
‘No thanks.’
‘The wallpaper is good. Our Longhis would look nice on it, and the little Watteau.’
‘Look, Gideon,’ said Gerard, ‘this is my house, I don’t want to divide it up. You find a place of your own to live in. You aren’t poverty-stricken. You’ve been here long enough.’
‘Plain speaking. All right, Gerard, we don’t want you to divide the house, we want the house.’
Patricia came in again, carrying a jug of fruit cup, hearing Gideon’s words. ‘Yes, Gerry, you owe it to the family.’
‘I have no family,’ said Gerard.
Patricia ignored this bad joke. ‘Leonard will be married soon, I don’t mean he has anyone in view, but he intends to marry. This house is unique, it’s most unusual in this part of London. We’ve always wanted to live in Notting Hill. It has this big garden with trees, and there are those good rooms at the top, and attics, it’s a family house. Doesn’t it strike you as unjust to occupy all this space?’
‘No.’
‘By the way, Tamar says she doesn’t want Perrier, she wants orange squash, I wonder if there’s any in the sideboard?’
‘I regard you two as my lodgers, except that I pay the bills.’
‘I can give you a cheque, old man.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
Tamar appeared at the door. ‘Look, please don’t bother, Perrier is perfectly all right, I don’t want orange squash – Hello Gerard, hello Gideon.’
‘Tamar!’ said Gideon. He went over and kissed her.
Patricia said, ‘He quite fancies her, don’t you, dear?’
Gerard, who did not care for jokes of this kind by married people, concentrated on Tamar. He thought, she is like fresh air, fresh water, good bread. He said nothing but he smiled and she smiled back.
‘Well, here is the orangeade, so you’d better have it,’ said Patricia who had been peering into the sideboard. ‘I suppose Duncan will want to drink whisky all the evening. I’ll leave the whisky and gin out in case anyone wants it, but don’t encourage them.’
Jenkin was taking the opportunity to linger in the garden. The frost was on the grass and he could feel the pleasant crunching of it underfoot. Feeling warm inside his overcoat, woollen cap and gloves, he enjoyed the cold air, nosed it, caressed it with his face. The two heavy cast-iron seats with the swan heads and feet had been moved, with the help of Gerard and Gideon, to the end of the garden beyond the walnut tree, the large flowerpots had been removed from the centre of the terrace, the bottles for the rockets were in place, the posts for the catherine wheels had been hammered in, the fireworks sorted out and set in order in the kitchen corridor, with the sparklers and the electric torches. Jenkin puffed out his steamy breath and watched it in the dim light which came along the side of the house from the street lamps, and also from Gerard’s bedroom where the light was on and the curtains had not been pulled. Breath, soul, life, our breaths are numbered. He breathed deeply, feeling the cold penetrate down into the warm channels and recesses of his body, and felt that never dimmed and never disappointing satisfaction of, after being with other people, being alone. He lifted his head like an animal who might, upon some empty hillside, let out some lonely inarticulate cry, not a sad cry, though not without a sad tone or echo, but just a deep irrepressible cry of being. So in silence he let out his noiseless bellow to the chill night air and the stars.
It was still early but had been dark for some time and in London gardens all about the fireworks had begun to go off. The warm glow of bonfires could be seen here and there, the occasional long leaping flame, and sudden golden lights revealed the brick façades of houses, and the branches, some leafless, some evergreen, of distant trees. There were abrupt whirring and whizzing and popping sounds, small sharp explosions, and the special sizzling noise of ascending rockets and their sighing or crackling burst high in the air and brief glory of scattering or slowly falling stars. Jenkin loved rockets. Gerard always, as a matter of form, invited his next-door neighbours to the Guy Fawkes party, but they never c
ame. The neighbours on one side found firework merriment embarrassing, and those on the other, who had children, set up their own celebration rather earlier than Gerard’s. This party was now nearing its close, the rockets had been seen off with ritual cries of ‘aaah!’ and there was a murmur of talk from the other side of the wall. Jenkin became aware that he was being watched. A row of faces, children’s faces, had appeared at the top of the wall. Jenkin looked at the small heads and said, ‘Hello.’ The children looked at him in silence. Then suddenly, all together, they disappeared, and there was a little muffled burst of laughter from the other side. Jenkin had never really got used to children. That was perhaps one of the secrets (and it was a secret) of his success as a schoolmaster. He understood the awful private miseries of children, their horrors. In school, he enjoyed that easy, enviable, almost absolute authority which seems like a gift of nature, persuasive, magical, very rarely coercive. But he was not romantic or sentimental or maty, he was aware of children as another race, chauvinistic, hostile, often unintelligible. His pupils were a set of individuals to whom his relation was scrupulously professional. A perceptive person (his friend Marchment) once said to him, ‘Jenkin, you don’t really like children!’ He did like children, but not in the general and conventional sense. That row of heads, made by some trick of the light to look red, as if of some island tribe or painted natives, unnerved him, making him aware of the instability and vulnerability of his present state of mind. He felt he had suffered a defeat. Perhaps this was his last Guy Fawkes party?
‘Why, Violet, you’re looking really smart tonight!’ said Gideon. ‘Isn’t she?’
Violet actually blushed and wriggled like a coy maiden, as Patricia said later. She had certainly made an effort. She had put away the blue spectacles; it emerged later that she had treated herself to contact lenses. She had also, with the help of a hairdresser, made her hair look more attractively tousled, the fringe less dominant, less straight and less severe. She was wearing a fairly simple well-cut light-blue cocktail dress with some glittering decoration round the neck.
‘You look almost sophisticated,’ said Patricia, ‘but those spangles at the top won’t do, I expect you could get them off. I do wish you’d come over and help us like you used to, and Gideon needs a secretary, don’t you, darling? Everyone needs to be needed –’
‘We didn’t expect you,’ said Gideon, smiling benevolently.
‘I expected her,’ said Gerard, ‘come and get a drink, I’ll mix you a special.’
Violet followed Gerard into the dining room and Gerard quickly closed the door. He said, ‘Violet, we do so want you to think again about the money.’
‘Who’s “we”?’ said Violet, deepening the frown lines above her nose and the tragedy lines below her mouth.
‘Pat and me and Rose.’
‘How does Rose come in?’
‘She just agrees with us.’
‘It’s none of Rose’s business.’
‘All right, but look, Violet, be rational, be kind to us. Father said in his will that he trusted us to look after you. You must let us execute his wishes – it’s like being forced not to keep a promise.’
‘He said no such thing in his will, he didn’t mention me in his will.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Pat told me. Not only no money, but no mention.’
Damn, thought Gerard. What do I say now? ‘Violet, my father wished us to help you, he assumed we would.’
‘If he had wanted me to be “helped” after his death he could have arranged it! Anyway I don’t want “help”!’ Violet’s face, now that of a demonic cat, also expressed a kind of spiteful glee. ‘Pat wants me to be her housemaid, you heard her just now, she wrote me a patronising letter, and you tell me lies about Uncle Matthew’s will. I may be poor and a relation but I’m not going to play the part of poor relation to gratify you and Pat!’
‘Well, we are determined to help Tamar. She must go back to Oxford.’
‘Oh, I know it’s all a plot to help her, not me! Nobody really cares about me! Tamar’s perfectly all right, she’s got a good job. Later on she might not get a job, it gets worse each year, she realises she’s lucky.’
‘We shall help Tamar.’
‘You know perfectly well she won’t accept it, you’re just humouring your conscience! It would be psychologically disastrous for her. Can’t you leave her alone? You think she’s some sort of sturdy virtuous peasant girl. She isn’t, she’s a precarious unstable neurotic. She couldn’t stand the pace at Oxford, she’d have had a breakdown. Why do you think your precious Oxford is such a wonderful place for a girl to be? You know Tamar never enjoyed it, she just made herself ill with work! Tamar needs a quiet orderly life and a steady job. She’s not an intellectual, thank heavens!’
Gulliver put his head round the door, took a look at Gerard and Violet, said ‘Sorry!’ and disappeared.
‘Why can’t you be happy?’ said Gerard. ‘You seem not to want to be.’
‘That’s my business. Oh, you understand nothing!’
Gerard poured out a glass of the fruit cup and gave it to Violet. ‘I’m sorry. You mustn’t be cross with Pat, she means well. We’ll talk again later.’
‘You said you’d mix me a special!’
Gerard took a bottle of gin from the sideboard and poured a generous quantity into Violet’s glass.
‘Do you expect me to drink that?’ She kept the glass however and went off smiling.
Rose had rescued her sandwiches from the fridge and brought them into the drawing room, where Gulliver had declared he was hungry. The sandwiches were now cold and damp, Gulliver and Lily were eating them however. Rose then fetched her canapés from the dining room, just vacated by Gerard and Violet. The form had always been that people ate and drank all the evening and wandered about as they would. Now Patricia wanted to make a drama of herding everyone to collect their plateful. This also raised the question of when exactly the fireworks were to begin.
‘What’s the matter with Tamar?’ said Patricia, coming in and looking disapprovingly at the rapid unauthorised consumption of food which was going on. ‘She can’t keep still, she won’t sit down, she keeps sliding about the place like a cat. I suppose she wants a tête-à-tête with Gerard.’
‘She’s just shy,’ said Rose, ‘she’s so self-effacing.’
‘I don’t think she’s effacing herself, she keeps jumping around like a performing flea! I expect it’s mummy’s presence.’
‘Violet looks lovely. She can still do it when she tries.’
‘She usually prefers the hag act. Tonight it’s “I care for nobody, no not I.” She can turn herself into anything, she’s better adapted to life really, she doesn’t suffer like we do. I’ve never seen so many fireworks, the side passage is full of them. They’re just like schoolboys, aren’t they, our men.’
Rose did not care for ‘our men’.
Jenkin came in from the garden, entering through the glass doors and pushing his way between the curtains. ‘Has Duncan come?’
‘No, but Violet has.’
‘Duncan won’t come,’ said Rose.
But just at that moment the door bell rang.
Patricia’s knife and fork and plate policy worked out much as Rose had anticipated. The regulars, trained by Gerard, resented the innovation and ignored the pie and curry and trifle arrangement, eating up the sandwiches and canapés, and thereafter, scorning the plates and utensils, making their own impromptu sandwiches by tearing open rolls and jamming in lettuce leaves and bits of ham and tomato which then fell out onto the carpet. Gerard’s little cakes, discovered in the larder, were popular too, so was the cheese which Rose had provided. One or two guests out of politeness (Jenkin) or because they were genuinely interested in the steak and kidney pie (Gulliver) or because the whole thing had been their own idea (Patricia) fussily found a place to sit and some piece of furniture to sit at and uncomfortably, while the others strolled about, sat down to a pretence of ordinar
y dinner. Gideon, to Patricia’s annoyance and chagrin, defected to the strollers. Claret was now provided, and the fruit cup was still available. The gin and whisky were not in demand at the early stages, even by Duncan who was the last to arrive and startled his friends by asking for Perrier, then drinking the cup, then only at a later stage the whisky. By then Gulliver and Lily were also on whisky. Lily, who had earlier discovered the gin-laced glass abandoned by Violet and drunk it up, was by now distinctly tipsy. Tamar caused distress by eating nothing; at last she accepted a plate of the trifle which was discovered next morning, untouched, upon a window ledge behind a curtain. She also, for a while, disappeared, and was found by Rose upstairs in Gerard’s bedroom in the dark, sitting at the window and, she said, watching the children next door who had been capering round the garden in their night clothes. By the time coffee was served it was getting very late and the evening was in danger of being wrecked by what Gerard subsequently called ‘that simulacrum of a dinner party’. It appeared that no one was in charge. Gerard had pointedly given up the responsibilities of a host, Rose who would normally have kept an eye on the time had withdrawn into the position of a spectator. Jenkin was in some kind of a dream, almost seeming gloomy, perhaps getting steadily drunk on the powerful claret. Gideon, impishly enjoying himself as usual, was everywhere about with a smile on his face, waiting to see what would happen. Violet too was smiling, drinking very little, picking up pieces of kidney in her fingers out of the pie, and spooning trifle into her mouth and replacing the spoon in the bowl. Patricia was already in the kitchen washing up.
‘What about the fireworks?’ said Jenkin, suddenly awaking from his reverie.
‘It’s too late for fireworks,’ said Gerard, ‘we would disturb the children next door.’