by Iris Murdoch
‘He’s too small,’ said Luca, who had already made it evident that he had a set of standards, mysterious but firm, by which to make the anguishing dog-decision.
In silent accord they moved back to the first cage. The Cardiganshire corgi, somewhat resembling a huge caterpillar, with his glossy dark brown flowing coat (tweed colour, Harriet thought of it as) concealing his short legs and almost sweeping the ground, had been shouldered back by the taller dogs but was wagging his plumey tail with equal enthusiasm and in order to get a better view of his human visitors intermittently and clumsily rising on to his hind legs in a most engaging way. His face with its big muzzle, so absurdly large in relation even to his quite burly frame, glowed with intelligence and goodwill and his beautiful eyes, of a limpid colour of peaty brown, gazed upon Harriet with a curiously intimate and personal kind of beseeching. It was as if, already, he knew.
Harriet and Luca looked at each other. Words were unnecessary. Their communion was already perfect.
‘He’s your dog,’ said Harriet ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Harriet was more profoundly moved than she dared (fearing tears, a kind of soppiness which might embarrass her dignified friend) acknowledge even to herself by the excursion to the Dogs’ Home. The combination of Luca and the dogs was almost too much. ‘Dignified’ was indeed strangely the word for the little boy. He was a child of great inwardness and entirely lacking in the anxiety which had characterized her own son at that age. Luca, barbarously under-educated, had something of a savage’s self-possessed beauty. More than that. One was in the presence of a mind. What exactly went on in this mind Harriet could not conjecture. But she experienced the moment to moment perfection of their converse with the pleasure which might be associated with a successful love affair; and the partner who created the confidence and set the tempo was Luca. She felt, even, looked after. With what an extraordinary tact and deliberation he now took hold of her hand. She barred back the wild tears.
Harriet had more than this motive for weeping. Blaise had come back of course, everything was going along, not exactly ‘as usual’, but, under the dreadful new dispensation, with what should have been a fairly steadying degree of usualness, except that Harriet now knew that something awful would happen, was perhaps already happening. This conviction was totally irrational and she resisted it, but it kept returning. The old eternal communication between herself and Blaise had ceased. Of course, looking back, she knew objectively that in the early days of his association with Emily he must have been, with so much to conceal, alienated. But she had not felt the alienation, and it was as if by never recognizing it she had annihilated it. Something wonderful to do with the marriage bond, to do with perfect marriage vows, had made her able retrospectively to assimilate that disloyalty and make it as if it had never been. Blaise had repented and had returned, even long before she ever knew of Emily McHugh’s existence, and Harriet need ask for nothing more. She could, here, do the rest. But this present alienation was new and was another matter.
I am imagining it all, she thought. But there was so much evidence. The house itself bore witness to the dislocation. The objects in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in her boudoir, in Blaise’s study, which usually, untidily and randomly placed as they were, coalesced into an organic interior, like to the world of a rich and well-regulated mind, were suddenly disconnected from each other. Some current which had joined them up into an aesthetic whole had ceased to flow. They lay about derelict, resembling the things in the house of someone who has died, surveyed by some stranger, his heir, to whom their histories and nature were unknown and uncared for. The house just looked a meaningless mess and Harriet had no will any more to cherish it. Customary activities such as ‘doing the flowers’ had simply lapsed. There were no fresh flowers in the house now, not even roses, which were so easy to pick and arrange. A vase of withered Dutch irises had stood in the hall for several days and the task of throwing away the flowers and emptying out the water had been monumentally too difficult for Harriet.
Of course everything to do with David was full of pains and problems. Harriet had, as it were, reconnoitred David with the greatest care, trying to find some way of reaching him. He remained polite, laconic, cold. However her bond with her son was profound and old and even across the estrangement they could still look at each other, there were momentary looks when she pleaded and he frowned, when she knew that their souls touched. She could not lose David and she would win him again somehow. She planned, and had said this to Blaise who distractedly agreed, to do just what David had asked: to take him abroad with her for a few days, just the two of them, to Paris perhaps. Once they were really alone together the barriers would surely fall. She had not yet put any date to this plan or spoken of it to her estranged son, but the idea of it consoled her.
Blaise was certainly in an odd mood, distraught, preoccupied, excited, but uncommunicative. He was busy. He had cancelled appointments with his patients in an unprecedented manner, and was absent for a lot of each day at, he said, the British Museum Reading Room. He was, he said, anxious now to finish his book, he was just on the last lap. Dr Ainsley, who rang up when Blaise was out, anxious to see him, sounded upset and also, unnervingly, as if he knew things which Harriet did not know, and was trying to find out how much Harriet knew. Surely Blaise could not have confided in the patients something which he had not told her? ‘When are you going to see Emily?’ she asked him. He replied with obvious exasperation, ‘Oh next week some time. She’s away.’ ‘Away? Where?’ ‘On holiday. With that girl Kiki St Loy. They’ve gone off in the car.’ ‘Who’s looking after Luca?’ said Harriet. ‘Pinn is.’ ‘Where have they gone to?’ ‘How do I know? Just don’t keep on about Emily, will you?’ Have they quarrelled, Harriet wondered with a moment of wicked hope. But somehow it didn’t feel like that. Of course questioning Luca, when he arrived on his mysterious visits, was out of the question. The ‘dignity’ of her relation with the boy forbade any such vulgar proceeding.
When at home now Blaise spent his time in his study, where as she could see from the state of the waste paper baskets, he was doing a lot of sorting and tearing up of papers. Perhaps it was something to do with finishing the book. He also made excursions to the loft, where old trunks of his held various treasures. He was even sorting out his clothes. He was putting his affairs in order. What for? Harriet’s mind touched the possibility but instantly shied from it: was it conceivable that her husband was preparing to bolt! However she so knew that this was impossible that she could not so interpret the evidence, could not, in this light, even see it. Blaise was ‘going through a phase’. She could not lose him any more than she could lose David. It was simply a matter of holding on, letting them both feel the absoluteness of her love and trust, and waiting for them to become open to her again. So Harriet waited and hoped. But, for whatever reason, the misery she now silently endured was more intense than any she had known.
‘We’ll have that one,’ she said to the attendant.
The Cardiganshire corgi, separated from his less fortunate friends, emerged from the cage a free dog. Luca, kneeling with bare knees on the dirty ground of the yard, put his arms round the corgi’s neck and had his face thoroughly licked. Luca’s eyes closed in a rare moment of utterly rapt childish bliss as he embraced the dog. Harriet hastily wiped away the now inevitable tears.
‘What shall we call him?’
‘Lucky Luciano.’
‘What name is that?’
‘It’s a gangster. Like what I want to be when I grow up.’
The weather had re-established itself. David, walking along the Upper Richmond Road, was sweating, although he had taken off his jacket. He felt the perspiration running down his ribs and glueing his white shirt to his skin down the whole length of his back.
Last night he had dreamt he was in China. In a wild mountain landscape he had seen, up a steep path, a wooden cistern fed by a warm spring. In the thick creamy water a naked girl was bathing. Then suddenly wi
th horror he had seen the mountain shudder and begin to move. With increasing speed a great roaring avalanche was beginning to descend. The sea of tumbling rocks engulfed the cistern and blotted out the path. And now there was nothing but torn earth and piled up stones and a deep dark chasm out of which the steam arose in swirling clouds.
No one had told him Emily McHugh’s address. He had found it for himself in an old address book of bis father’s cryptically entered under ‘McH’, together with the telephone number. David felt, as he walked along, almost faint with an emotion which he could not name, compounded of fear and excitement and grief. He simply had to see Emily McHugh. What he would say or do when face to face with her he did not know. He felt hatred for her, but had no intent to reproach or revile her, that would be merely absurd. He simply had to see her, and then decide what happened next. He turned down the side street, and a few minutes later, with a violently pounding heart, was in the grubby corridor filled with rubbish boxes and children’s tricycles, and was at the shabby door and ringing the bell.
An impressive auburn-haired woman in a green linen dress opened the door.
David looked upon her with bulging eyes. He said, just audibly, ‘I am David Gavender.’ The possibility then occurred to him for the first time that his father might be within.
‘Well, I am not Emily McHugh,’ said Pinn.
David felt intense relief. ‘Is she -? ’
‘She’s not here. No one’s here but me. I’m Constance Pinn. Have you heard of me?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve heard of you. You’re much better-looking than your picture.’
After a moment’s silence, David began to turn away.
‘Wait a mo, handsome. What did you want with Emily?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t go away. Or, wait a bit. I’ll come with you. I won’t ask you in, the place is a shambles. Wait.’
David waited.
Pinn emerged wearing a matching green jacket over her dress. She seemed to be full of private glee and actually laughed, staring at him, as they set off down the corridor.
‘Where are you going to, my pretty one?’
David gestured vaguely.
‘Come along with me then. I’m going to the school where I work. It’s a girls’ school. Have you ever had a girl?’
‘No.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to?’
David gestured even more vaguely. He walked mechanically beside Pinn, letting her touch his arm, tug him gently by his napping shirt sleeve to guide him.
‘What do you think of your daddy’s carry-on?’
David was silent.
‘You mustn’t be too hard on him,’ said Pinn. ‘People get in awful messes. You’ll be in a mess yourself pretty soon. Life is a series of messes. It’s easier than you young people think to tell a lie and then have to tell another. And falling in love can’t be avoided and has to be forgiven. You weren’t going to be nasty to poor little Em, were you?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a good pet. Emily’s had a rotten life. Almost as rotten as mine.’
They were walking along beside a high brick wall, and Pinn stopped suddenly at a door in the wall and produced a key. They both went through the door and found themselves in a large vegetable garden, surrounded by three other high brick walls, along one of which ran a row of greenhouses.
‘Where’s this?’ said David.
‘Sssh!’ said Pinn. ‘This is the school. Keep your voice down. There are no men on the staff, only a few outside servants. A man’s voice sounds very conspicuous in here. Just follow me and don’t talk. I want to show you something.’
The tall walls seemed to exclude the sound of main road traffic or reduce it to a bumble-bee buzz, as the two figures crossed the garden by a diagonal path between beds of radiantly healthy lettuces. They reached another gate and passed through it. And as they did so a new sound came to David’s ears, a sweet high-pitched jargoning as of a near-by aviary of little chattering birds.
They were now in what appeared to be a miniature park or meadow, with the uncut grass just coming into flower and covered with a reddish sheeny light. A little way off, almost black with their own density, stood two immobile very large Lebanon cedars. Beyond was an elm, green as the lettuces, and half hidden by some slightly farther trees, the slanted pale facade of an eighteenth-century house. To the right, leading along the brick wall, was a path fringed by golden elder bushes covered in flat saucers of creamy flowers, and along this path, finger on lips, Pinn led the way. The aviary jargoning was louder.
The wall ended, they turned its corner and the scene changed again. Across an obviously disused gravel drive, fuzzed over with little skinny wild flowers, was a high dark yew hedge with a neatly clipped archway in its midst. Pinn crossed the gravel on tiptoe and led her captive through the arch. A square of well-trimmed lawn was here surrounded by four high walls of equally well-trimmed yew where, opposite to their point of entry, another archway was flanked by two yew-niches containing a greyly-naked hatted and booted Hermes and a miniskirted Artemis selecting an arrow. As David followed Finn across the grass he realized, had perhaps known from the start, that the aviary jargoning was the excited voices of girls. He could now hear their high-pitched laughter, the occasional little scream. He passed from sunshine to shadow to sunshine, moving on Pinn’s heels under the second yew arch.
‘Sssh -’ Her hand gripped his as they emerged very cautiously on to a further stretch of lawn. Straight ahead of them was an immense tangled hedge of pink roses and it was from beyond this that the sweet hubbub arose. Pinn scanned the lawn in both directions before she drew him out after her, murmuring, ‘Now quick, follow me.’
She released him and moved with long Artemis-like strides across the intervening space and almost with the motion of a diver projected herself into the rose hedge and disappeared into its interior. Panting after her and lowering his head David saw a rounded burrow-like space, like a pathway of a fox or badger, which led into the innermost part of the wide tall hedge, and with a similar dive, half stumbling over his jacket which he was still carrying over his arm, he fell on all fours and scuffled in after his companion.
He fell against something warm and yielding, Pinn’s leg. They were kneeling close together on earth which was suddenly crumbly and moist, inside a sort of low domed hall, greenly twilit and surrounded by the robust reddish thorny stems of the roses, glowing and faintly translucent The rose smell was overwhelming. David became aware of a long pain in his arm where a thorn had scored him in his precipitate entry. He covered his mouth to still his panting. The voices of the girls were very close.
Pinn, jostling to face him, her two knees now touching his knees, was suddenly glaring into his face and holding him by each forearm, sliding her hands in beneath the tumbled shirt sleeves. In a vivid momentary flash David saw Pinn’s small hand with two silver rings upon it, dabbled with blood, presumably his. Pinn’s face glared, round-eyed, puff-cheeked, like a comic mask, close to his, vividly smiling, and for a moment he thought that she was going to kiss him. But she had simply leaned forward to whisper. ‘Not a sound. I’ll show you where to look.’
She twisted about and lay down full-length, wriggling herself gingerly into a space between the glassy red stems where a similar but smaller burrow gave on to the other side of the hedge. David began to follow her, but was stayed by her sandalled foot pressing urgently upon his shoulder. There was evidently only room for one in the burrow. In a moment Pinn was wriggling back and kneeling to push him forward by the shoulders into the place she had vacated. David, almost prone, edged himself towards a circle of leafy sun-shot brightness on the other side of the hedge. An aperture now at last showed him the scene beyond.
A whitish marble basin, half sunk in the grass, filled with water and with the area of a fair-sized swimming pool, lay in the foreground with, rising up behind it, an immense and very battered baroque fountain representing Poseidon surrounded by sea nymphs. In the
marble basin, as lithe and pink as fishes, six or seven girls were disporting themselves. They were all entirely naked.
Only much later, as he endlessly rehearsed in his mind the brief vision of the bathing damsels, did David realize how much, in what turned out to be a very short glimpse of them, he had actually seen. At the moment of seeing there seemed to be nothing in his mind except the somehow terrifying distressing impression of those wet pinkish-brown limbs, those long agile legs, the dripping defenceless often graceless buttocks blanched by bikinis, the equally pale small scarcely-grown breasts, the long wet darkened strands of hair plastered to cheeks and necks and backs. Later on however he found he could fill out in memory the whole scene as he had evidently, in spite of his sheer startled terror, managed to perceive it.
Beyond the fountain was a big largely ruined portico, with a cracked and grass-grown pavement, between whose pillars a latticed fence well covered with white flowering clematis formed a screen. To the right of the basin was a high beech hedge, and to the left a fence at whose foot young beeches had been planted. The towering fountain, made of a pale coarse licheny limestone (the basin was also of limestone: only in David’s first feverish vision of it had it seemed to be made of marble) presented a long-bearded and grimly magisterial Poseidon wearing a high, now brokenly, jagged crown and gazing abstractedly into the distance, while a messy tide of nymphs, dolphins, fishes and other merfolk climbed towards his knees, attempting in vain to attract his attention. A dolphin, held aloft by a two-tailed nymph, had evidently once, when the fountain was able to ‘play’, gushed water right up on to the god’s curly beard, which cascading in involuted rings as low as his navel, had been stained in some now distant era of the nineteenth, or even of the eighteenth, century a vivid blackish green.