by Iris Murdoch
Gulliver had come down first to breakfast and had eaten a boiled egg. Duncan had eaten fried eggs and bacon collecting them from the hot-plate on the sideboard. Gulliver now blamed himself for having bothered Annushka to get him a boiled egg. He would have liked eggs and bacon better, he now decided. However he was wearing his dark-blue double-breasted Finnish yachting jacket and felt good. Gerard had eaten a piece of bacon with fried bread. Jenkin was at the sideboard helping himself to eggs, bacon, sausage, fried bread and grilled tomatoes. In the old days there had used to be kidneys too, and kedgeree. Lily had eaten some toast with homemade gooseberry jam. Tamar had toyed with a piece of toast and rapidly vanished. Everyone had had coffee except for Lily who asked for tea. Rose, who got up very early and never ate breakfast, had had her early tea with Annushka, and, flitting about, had not sat down with her guests. She had explained to the newcomers the layout of the house and the various ‘walks’ that were available. There were plenty of places to sit and (since this was the title of the gathering) read. There was the drawing room, and the dining room which had a pleasant window seat, the billiard room (sorry no billiards, the moths had got at the cloth), where you could play records, the library of course (do take out any book) and the study (Rose would not be occupying it). As for walks, it was best to keep to roads and paths, there was a framed map in the study. There was the walk to the river, the walk to the church, the walk to the wood, though the way through it was rather overgrown, the walk to the Roman Road and along it, and of course the walk to the village which was called Foxpath. Yes, there was, Gull had asked the question, a village pub, it was called the Pike. The name referred to the fish of course, not the weapon; an eccentric publican who put up a sign to celebrate the Peasants’ Revolt was soon disciplined by public opinion.
Naturally the guests had brought books though not everyone was ready to declare or discuss his choice. Duncan had brought two fat Government publications, Gulliver had brought the poems of Lowell and Berry man and had vowed to write some poetry during his stay, Lily had brought a travel book on Thailand, Gerard had brought Horace’s Odes and a volume of Plotinus in the Loeb edition, Rose had brought Daniel Deronda, Jenkin had brought the Oxford Book of Spanish Verse, a Portuguese grammar, and a book by a Jesuit called Socialism and the New Theology. (He kept these latter works well out of Gerard’s sight.) Tamar had apparently brought no book but had retired to the library to find one. The ‘regulars’ felt but did not mention the absence of Jean whose comical taunts and restless badinage had always stirred up what might otherwise have proved too quiet a scene. Rose anticipated that Gull and Lily would be bored.
Since they had got up it had begun to snow, at first with tiny indecisive flakes, now with larger ones. The countryside, already streaked by a previous fall, was now entirely white. Rose had warned the newcomers to bring boots and also warm jerseys to wear if necessary inside the house as well as outside. There was central heating, and wood fires all day in the ‘public rooms’ and at evening in the bedrooms, but Boyars was (as Rose complacently said) not a warm house.
‘Is the water meadow frozen?’ asked Gerard.
‘I think so,’ said Rose, ‘it must be. I’ll go over and look this morning.’
Gerard and Rose, who could skate well, kept their skates at Boyars. They disliked the weird and garish atmosphere of indoor skating rinks. Jenkin could not skate but liked watching the others. Duncan could not skate and did not like watching the others who were always, he claimed, and that included Jean who was a good skater, showing off. Tamar could skate but had forgotten to bring her skates. Rose thought an old pair of Annushka’s might fit her. (Annushka, a beautiful skater, had given up.) Lily said she had skated a bit once and was game to try. Gulliver admitted to being able to skate. He did not however reveal, even to Lily, that he had just, for the occasion, bought a pair of skates, the first he had ever possessed. He had spent some time the previous morning rubbing mud over the shining boots to dim their newness. It had been a foolish and expensive purchase. He had still not managed to find a job.
‘I say, Rose,’ said Jenkin, ‘there’s a ladybird walking on the sideboard. What shall we do, put her on those plants? Shall I catch her?’
‘I will,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll put her in the stables. They creep into crannies in the wood, then they fly out in the spring. It’s amazing how sturdy insects are.’
‘They’ll survive the Bomb,’ said Jenkin, ‘I suppose there’s some comfort in that.’
Rose took a wineglass from the cupboard, captured the ladybird and took charge of it.
A white cat with greyish tabby blotches entered with tail erect and was captured by Lily. ‘Rose, what’s the name of your pussycat?’
‘Mousebrook,’ said Rose. In fact the cat’s full name was Mousebrook the Mauve Cat, but Rose did not feel matey enough with Lily yet to tell her that.
‘What a funny name!’
‘Skating this afternoon, don’t you think?’ said Gerard.
‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘This morning you boys must work. Look at that snow! It’s real brass monkey weather.’
What on earth does that mean, Lily wondered, as she struggled with recalcitrant Mousebrook.
After breakfast, while the others were still arguing about their ‘day’, Duncan hurried upstairs to his bedroom. He had already made his bed. Annushka did not make beds, as Rose always reminded them. The room had seemed cosy last night in the firelight. Now the fire was out and the room was cold and filled with a relentless greyness by the moving curtain of snow. Duncan was not in the room which he had always occupied with Jean. Rose had moved him, with tactful intent, to a smaller room at the back of the house where, as she said, the view was better. The view was at least different, but Duncan was cross at being given a small room with no contiguous bathroom. He gazed out at the view through the irritating little diamond-shaped lattice panes of the pointed Strawberry Hill Gothic window characteristic of this part of the house. He sympathised with Rose’s great-grandfather who had altered (or ‘vandalised’) the front of the house by altering the pseudo-Gothic to sturdy Edwardian and adding a graceless but useful extension. He opened the window so as to see better, then closed it abruptly against a massive entry of bitterly cold air and a snowflake or two. His room looked out over the back lawn and garden, the conifers and extensive shrubbery, the rosy walls of the vegetable garden, a segment of woodland, the gentle mild hills of the English countryside, a distant farm, and the Roman Road, a dead straight miles-long section of a famous Roman highway which here ribboned over the hills and dales, constituting a sort of landmark. The Roman Road was not now a main road. The main road, not a motorway but a substantial artery, lay a considerable distance off in front of the house on the other side of the river.
Duncan, distracted for a short while by company, now returned to his wound. He had eaten too much breakfast and felt sick. His whole being felt sick, sick, sick. He had announced on the previous evening that he must go very early on Sunday to prepare for a meeting. He had intended earlier not to come at all, but had decided he ought to appear so as not to seem to be avoiding Tamar. Now that seemed a ridiculous reason. Why should anybody think he was avoiding Tamar, what motive could they imagine he might have for doing so? This calculation was a measure of the guilt he felt about what had, so briefly, so quickly, happened that evening. He could scarcely now picture what state of mind, what sudden desperate need for consolation, had led him to take that little girl, that child, into his arms. It didn’t, now, seem like lust, it was simply an irresistible craving for love, for a woman’s love, for being held close in a woman’s arms and hearing her say, as she had said, ‘I love you, I’ll always love you.’ It was as if Tamar had murmured, ‘I’ll protect you, I’ll shield you, I’ll take your hurt away, I’ll carry you out of the world, I’ll make you invisible and perfectly safe for ever and ever.’ Perhaps she had said something like that. I was very drunk that evening, Duncan said to himself. I must have been dreadfully drunk to act in that way
. Was I disgusting, brutish, awful? She didn’t seem to think so then, I could have been anything and be loved. But what did she feel later? Duncan did not like to believe that she now saw him as a drunken brute. But then neither did he want to believe that she really loved him. What would that mean, what could it bring about? What words could he use, what words could he ever use, to tell Tamar that he was grateful, but it was indeed something momentary and he could not return her love? Was that what he felt now about Tamar, little innocent Tamar with her schoolgirl hair and slender legs? He thought, she’ll assume, she’ll know that it was an aberration. I was in a state of shock, I’d just had the solicitor’s letter, I hope she took that in. Oh God, why did I act so stupidly, why do I have to have this as well! I can’t go on living with myself much longer. Of course it was her doing, she started it, I’d never have made a move, I’d never have wanted to! What a minx, what a temptress, what terrible ill luck, what an accursed doomed creature I am.
Duncan had not exactly recovered from the solicitor’s letter, but had adjusted his mind so that the letter was not a death sentence, not a total extinction of hope. This was partly the result of a talk with Gerard which had taken place the day after Tamar’s visit. Duncan showed Gerard the letter and they discussed it. It was a relief to talk, for once (for Duncan had not lately been eager to see his friends) to Gerard, though Gerard’s lively pleasure in the talk annoyed him. Gerard loved listing pros and cons. He still thought of himself as the leader, the healer, the one who was never in trouble, the one who had remained young; while Duncan had become heavy, cumbersome, wrinkled and old. Even his hair, though it was thick and dark and crinkly, was like a heavy wig upon his head, while Gerard’s hair curled and shone like a boy’s. These were ludicrous thoughts of course, as ludicrous as a new feeling of jealousy about Jenkin, as if Jenkin, always around the place, made it increasingly difficult for Duncan to talk freely to Gerard as he had once done. The fact that they had once been so close however remained as an eternal guarantee. Gerard had suggested, or rather elicited from Duncan, the idea that the solicitor’s letter did not mean anything final. It could even be some sort of try-on or something which Crimond had ordered Jean to do as a matter of routine. Duncan must not be seen to take it seriously. Thus inspired Duncan had replied to the solicitor that he was surprised to receive the letter, he did not want a divorce, he loved his wife and desired and expected her to return to him before long. Since then nothing more had been heard. Gerard said that was a good sign.
But what was the use of signs and hopes when all being was corrupt and bad, when one had been metamorphosed into something so defeated and contemptible and base? How can an absolutely humiliated person be reinstated, accorded the respect which love implies, even be forgiven for having let himself fall so low? It was no use appealing to justice here. How could Jean want to come back? If Crimond ditched her she would run to Joel, indeed she might do anything. Jean was brave, she was unlike Duncan, she would run against the guns baring her breast, she would never come crawling back, she would find some new amazing thing to do. She was still young. Crimond too, he was young. Duncan dreamed at night, and later more and more in long obsessive fantasies by day, about that farther past in which the myth of his defeat, his fall, had been, once and for ever, established, about the blow, the stairs, and Jean’s voice calling from below, so affectionate, so false, as he stood holding in his hand that little tangle of Crimond’s hair: Crimond, tall, thin, white, naked, pale-eyed, brilliant-eyed, walking about as he pleased in Duncan’s sleeping and waking fantasy. He was as obsessed with Crimond as he was with Jean, and as awfully bound to him.
He had not communicated with Tamar, or heard from her, in the now lengthy interim. He had considered sending a very vague letter, but letters are dangerous. Better to say nothing. They would both say nothing, do nothing, that was how it would be, so that the act itself would be gradually un-done, dissolved by time. Thank God he could rely on Tamar’s silence. The idea of Gerard finding that out… Duncan would never speak to anyone about it. He had never spoken to anyone about his eye. Only about Tamar, he would forget.
He had paraded, as his ‘reading’, a Government White Paper and another Stationery Office publication, about tax, but he had no intention of looking at these. Really to read, he had secretly brought two thrillers, which of course he would not take downstairs. He consumed more and more thrillers in these days. He sat down on his bed and opened one, got up and put on his overcoat, then sat down again. Longing for his wife pervaded him, shook him, in the form of misery and rage. He would soon resign from the Service, become a recluse, disappear, perhaps kill himself. He would do something terrible. He would kill Crimond. He would have to.
Rose Curtland was standing at her window watching the snow falling slowly, thickly, steadily, in plump flakes, in straight lines, since the wind had dropped, like a curtain, like a grille, outside her window, fascinating, dazing, beginning to conceal the landscape. Rose had put on a woollen shawl round her shoulders. The house was cold and uneasy with a new and special unease. Perhaps it was the end of an era. Perhaps they would never again be, all of them, together in that house as they had so often been in the past. Everyone seemed to be uneasy, touchy, nervous; everyone that is except Gerard who always was, or always appeared to be, calm, in charge of himself and others. Duncan was, of course, poor Duncan, unhappy and anti-social, a bit aggressive. Tamar seemed to be ill, had eaten practically nothing at dinner and at breakfast, had admitted that she had a headache. Jenkin, always a problem because of his tendency to disappear, had been excessively invisible, running off at once after dinner when everyone was supposed to sit round the drawing room fire and drink whisky. Annushka, arthritic and not allowed by Rose to carry wood, was cross because Rose had chided her for asking Gulliver to carry wood instead of telling Rose who would have carried it herself. Even Mousebrook the Mauve Cat, deserting his usual winter place, elongated upon the tiles at the back of the big cast iron stove, was irritable and out of sorts and had jumped suddenly away and run off when Rose tried to pick him up. Mousebrook was described as mauve because his tabby grey looked mauvish, and had looked so to Rose on the night, eight years ago, when Annushka had brought him as a stray kitten in out of the rain. The name Mousebrook, appearing out of the air, was clearly his own.
Rose occupied the big corner bedroom beside the turret in the ‘Gothic’ part of the house. She loved this side with its glittering high-pointed windows, facing toward the garden, and the turret with its little French-style leaded dome, and deplored the philistinism of her great-grandfather who had, after his father had sold ‘the big house’, so insensitively altered and enlarged the pretty place, whose complete elegant beauty survived only in photographs. Sinclair had talked about restoring it. From her two main windows Rose enjoyed the same view as Duncan’s, over the garden toward the Roman Road. The turret room, which opened directly out of her bedroom, and which she used both as bathroom and dressing room, looked three ways, toward the back, toward the side and toward the front. At the side beyond the stable block and the orchard, visible between curving fields, was a segment of the village of Foxpath, while nearer to the river, and about half a mile from the village, was the church, its light grey tower rising above the snowy trees. A small congregation still trudged out there on Sundays, Rose always turned up too when she was in the country, and some of her guests usually came out of politeness or curiosity. The view toward the front, best from the big front bedrooms of the Edwardian façade, showed the front lawn, the fancy iron gates, a brick wall along the lane, fields, water meadows, and the twisting of the river marked by big pollarded willows. The view on the farther side of the house which was encrusted with useful Edwardian ‘horrors’, was toward the woods, also showing, as a straight line drawn over the curve of a distant hill, the continuation of the Roman Road. There was one good bedroom on that side which Rose had given to Gulliver. The two best bedrooms in front were occupied, as always, by Gerard and Jenkin, Lily was in the room
on the village side usually occupied by Duncan and Jean. Rose felt that Duncan would be especially unhappy there alone, and besides, Lily, as a new guest and a woman, must be given a fine room. A small bedroom between Rose’s and Duncan’s remained unoccupied. Tamar was in the upper turret room, above Rose’s dressing room, which she had always occupied since childhood on her visits to Boyars. Annushka had a self-contained flat on the ground floor beyond the kitchen.
The Reading Parties, two or three in a year, which had originally lasted a week, and now usually lasted three days, were designed originally to fit into university vacations while avoiding summertime travels, and Christmas when other obligations might divide the group. Rose always spent Christmas in Yorkshire at the house of her cousins, Reeve and Laura Curtland, the parents of Neville and Gillian. She felt bound to observe this custom, it was the only time when she regularly saw what remained of her family, though she made occasional visits at other times. Rose did not get on too well with Laura Curtland, a rather peevish malade imaginaire; and since Reeve had become more of a recluse and Laura more of a (as Rose saw her) self-pitying invalid, they rarely came to London. Rose, who had always assumed that her cousins regarded her as ‘odd’, now felt that they saw her, and pitied her, as an eccentric ageing spinster; but when it came to it she quite enjoyed these Christmases and was fond of her relations who certainly knew how to leave her alone. Neville and Gillian, grown up now and at the university, Gillian at Leeds and Neville at St Andrews, were talking about a London flat; so, they would be more frequent in her life, expecting to be invited to Boyars, even perhaps to be allowed to borrow the house, and generally patronising her with the naive insolence of the young. Rose was alarmed at how much this prospect depressed her; she was not used to thinking of herself as cut off from young people, and she liked the vivacious pair in question. Gerard had always spent Christmas with his father and his sister and Gideon, and till lately Leonard, at the house in Bristol, and it had never been suggested that Rose should join that family party. Jean and Duncan, fleeing English festivities, had usually disappeared to France. Violet and Tamar, refusing all invitations, had a Christmas by themselves, always described by them as ‘quiet’, and assumed by others to be abysmally dull. Plans for this year were still vague, but with Matthew gone and as Pat and Gideon showed no signs of being elsewhere, Gerard assumed that the trio, with Leonard if he condescended to turn up, would celebrate the feast at Notting Hill. He would, no doubt, for Christmas Day at least, invite Duncan and of course Jenkin. Jenkin’s Christmases were mysterious. Rose believed that he went to ‘help out’ at some charitable ‘settlement’ in the East End, and then got drunk with his schoolmaster friends. He never told anyone, not even Gerard, exactly what he did. Rose wished that she too could be in London, but could not, without prior notice and without a signal from Gerard, ‘disappoint’, if that was the word, her worthy cousins.