by Iris Murdoch
It was a miracle that the icon had come back and that it was Pattie who had brought it. He felt that the icon itself must somehow have determined how it all fell out. It had been on a miraculous progress and now it had come back to him. Neither he nor Pattie had any idea how it had come back. Pattie had simply found it lying on a table in the hall and had rushed in to give it to him. Eugene really did not want to know any more. It was a happy augury.
Pattie’s significant appearance with the icon had completed the circle of his good fortune. Pattie had made him believe in happiness. He was well aware too that the grace of happiness comes to those who have faith in it. He had been indifferent to it for almost all of his life, had not conceived of it as one of his possibilities. It seemed that he had had his life’s ration of happiness before he was six. Now he wanted a happy future. And he saw Pattie wanting it too, and suspected that this desire was coming to her for the first time. To be the cause that another person desires to be happy is a grave responsibility. Eugene wore his seriously but with an increasingly light heart. He was becoming sure that he and Pattie would get married.
Not that Pattie had said or done anything clear. She seemed confused. She had asked him to wait and not to trouble her. She had said, “I can’t say yes,” but her dark faintly reddish eyes had said yes, yes, yes, and she could not resist touching him to take away any hurt her words might have caused. Eugene believed her eyes and her hands. He and she had been taken in charge by the involuntary chemistry of love. While nothing specific was said Eugene felt day by day and more and more the arrival of Pattie. Like a weight slowly subsiding he could feel the steady increase of her reliance on him. Every day there was more of her for him to care for.
Sometimes it seemed to him that she was worried and upset about something and he tried to make it as easy as possible for her to talk to him about it, but she would always fall silent. He began to speculate about Pattie. She had told him that she had no history, but could this be true? Trying to picture the worst he conjectured that she might have had an illegitimate child when she was very young. Or it might be simply that she could not get over the belief that her colour was repugnant to him. Whatever the barrier was, he longed to know it so that he could sweep it away with the force of love. Meanwhile this little crestfallenness in Pattie made her but the more attractive to him. He cherished her diffidence, her doubt. It was not that he was confident of her innocence, he saw her innocence. She was the innocent, the undiscovered America, the good dark continent.
His cheerfulness in waiting made it easy for him to behave to her with a quiet constant loving kindness. Love made an artist of him. He bought little presents, invented treats. It was years since he had seen himself making anybody happy. He had lived selfishly for far too long and flattered himself that his dull simplicity was a merit. Leo was right, he ought to have fought for a place in English society. He had drifted weakly into a senseless isolation and called it unworldliness. But if he tried he could do ordinary things at last, he and Pattie together.
His happiness overflowed on to her, and although she seemed sometimes with a half-hearted gesture to brush it away she could not escape its influence. She often sang now. And she was easy with him. With a tact which he hoped he could maintain he still restrained a boisterousness which he often felt. He would have liked to seize Pattie, to slap her and set her on his knee. As it was their physical contacts remained like those of affectionate children. Only sometimes would he allow himself to kiss her seriously or hug her in bear-like transports of joy.
If there was anything which his years as a hermit had given him it was a quality of the affections which he hesitated to call purity. It was more like novelty. He felt as if he were a boy in love for the first time. He had never really been in love with poor Tanya. His only loves had been those of his childhood and he had seemed all his life until now incapable of any other.
“I dreamt about my English governess last night. Miss Alison was her name.”
“Were you fond of her?”
“Oh yes. I loved everybody. Children always do.”
“Some children.”
“What did you dream last night, Pattie?”
“I never dream. What happened in your dream?”
“I can’t remember. I think it was at our country house.”
“What was that house called? You did tell me.”
“It was called Byelaya Doleena. That means White Glen or White Glade in English. It was called for the birch trees. You see birch trees have white trunks.”
“I know birch trees have white trunks, silly! There are birch trees in England.”
“Are there? Yes, I suppose there are. I don’t remember ever having seen any in England. Oh, Pattie, you aren’t going are you?”
“I must go. It’s past my shopping time.”
“Have you got your sugar mouse?”
“It’s jumped into my pocket. Shall I wear my new boots?”
“Yes, of course. They make you look Russian.”
“They’re a bit tight. Suppose they start hurting on the way along?”
“What a worrier it is! You wear your new boots like a brave girl.”
“I won’t be long.”
“Be careful crossing the roads. Buy me something nice.”
“Come with me to put on my boots.”
Pattie and Eugene went into the kitchen. Pattie seemed in a happier mood than usual and they had been laughing a lot.
“Let me put on the boots for you. Sit down there.”
Eugene knelt and took off Pattie’s frayed tartan slippers. For a moment he held her warm plump foot in his hand. It was like holding a big bird. He held the boot for her and with pointed toe she pressed a foot in. The boots, which Eugene had encouraged her to buy and which had been much discussed between them, were of black leather, almost knee length and lined with wool. Pattie had never had such boots before.
“They’re too tight, I told you so.”
“You always complain your shoes are too big for you!”
“They aren’t at first. First they’re too tight, then they’re too big.”
“Come on, push.”
“I can’t get in.”
“You don’t know how to put a boot on. It’s just a matter of getting round the corner. Push.”
Pattie’s foot entered the foot of the boot and Eugene could feel her heel press firmly down into its place. “Good. Now the other.”
With much pushing and hauling Pattie donned the other boot.
“Now your fur coat. Now you’re a real Russian!”
Wrapped up in her rabbity fur coat and her head scarf Pattie looked spherical, just such a dear bundle as might be seen any snowy morning on the Nevsky Prospect. Eugene laughed at her and then out of sheer happiness hugged her to him, whirling her round. Over her shoulder he saw standing in the kitchen doorway Muriel Fisher who was regarding them both with an expression of malevolence.
Eugene released Pattie, dropping his hands hastily to his sides. Pattie turned and saw Muriel too. She hesitated and then walked boldly towards the door. Muriel stood aside. Eugene, mumbling “Good morning” followed Pattie into the hall. Pattie went to the front door and opened it. A wave of icy air came in, biting hands and faces. There was much less fog today but little could be seen outside except a thick dark grey light.
“Ouf, Pattie, it’s cold. Better not keep the door open long.”
“Come outside a moment,” said Pattie.
Coatless and shivering, Eugene stood out on the step while Pattie half closed the door behind him. The sudden cold had nipped and reddened their faces and they peered at each other in the bitter dark light. Their faces which had been two flowers each to each were blighted and closed. “What is it, Pattie? I’m freezing.”
“I wanted to say— Oh it doesn’t matter.”
“Say it when you come back.”
“I will come back, won’t I?”
“What do you mean? Of course you’ll come back.”
“And you’ll be there, won’t you?”
“Of course I’ll be there.”
“You’ll always be there, won’t you, Eugene, always?”
“Always! Now you be careful, Pattie, and don’t fall down in your new boots.”
Pattie disappeared into the cold obscurity of the morning, walking rather cautiously on the pavement upon which the snow was frozen in iron-grey lumps. Eugene dodged back into the comparative warmth of the hall. Perhaps he should have gone with her. His few tasks could have waited. He was glad of her words though. She had never said “always” to him before.
Smiling he crossed the kitchen and opened the door of his room. Muriel Fisher who had been sitting down beside the table rose to her feet. Eugene entered more slowly. “Miss Muriel—”
“I’m sorry,” said Muriel in a very low voice. “May I talk to you for a moment?”
Eugene stared at Muriel’s face. He thought at first that she must be grimacing at him. Her face was wrinkled up and drawn as if it was hung upon hooks. She had always had for him a certain repellent quality of ghastliness. Now she had the air of a demon in torment and he shrank from her.
Eugene had never liked Muriel, who seemed to him unwomanly and hard. He classified her in his mind with Miss Shadox-Brown, as that thin brusque efficient type of Englishwoman who has good intentions but cannot help being patronising. Some kind of tough self-confidence built into such women made them more insufferably superior than a man could ever be. Eugene, still sensitive to the tones and accents with which society addressed him, could detect the little strain of contempt in the midst of the most unassuming cordiality. Muriel had questioned him about his past with a quick thoroughness which did not seem like compassion or even curiosity. He felt that Muriel just wanted to “place” him tidily, to sum him up so as to be able to deal with him briskly and appropriately.
The gift of the Russian box had simply upset him. He forgave the box but not Muriel. The act was condescending or familiar and in either case offensive; while the choice of that particular present was an intrusion into a privacy and a mystery she could know nothing of. That she had thereby clumsily touched a nerve in his hidden past, acting on him in a way which he himself could not understand, was an added insult. He resented this, he resented her having witnessed his tears, and he resented her rude treatment of Leo in his presence, as if she could wield over the son an authority which was lacking in the father. He had early realized that she was Pattie’s foe. And since the odious scene of the saucepan of soup he had thought the girl both detestable and dangerous.
Eugene steadied himself now. His immediate thought was that Muriel had come to complain about something which Leo had done.
“Shut the door, please,” said Muriel.
“What is it, Miss Muriel?”
Muriel sat down again. She stared at him, her mouth open in a drooping arc. Her narrow glaring eyes burnt through the squeezed-up mask of her face.
Eugene, very uneasy, said, “I expect you want to—there’s something wrong—I expect Leo—”
“I want your help,” said Muriel in a sepulchral growl. She had some difficulty in speaking.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Muriel swallowed hard, took hold of the tablecloth, and bowed her head, shutting her eyes tightly for a moment in a grimacing frown. Then she said, “I found your icon for you.”
“What?”
“I found your icon for you. I brought it back. Pattie just found it in the hall. I should have brought it to you.”
“But did you have it then? Did you get it from— What do you mean?”
“It’s too complicated. I tell you I found it. I was just going to bring it back to you only Pattie stole it.”
“Stole it? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Eugene. She is dangerous, dangerous, he thought to himself. He looked at her with hostility.
Muriel regarded him with screwed-up burning eyes. Her face seemed to express hatred. She said. “When are the wedding bells going to ring out for you and Pattie?”
Eugene felt anger, a small red spot in the middle of his field of vision. He said, “That is our affair I think, Pattie’s and mine.”
“So you are getting married? You’re in love? That happy scene I saw in the kitchen—”
“Will you leave us alone, please? What did you come here to say? Say it please and then leave me to get on with my work.”
“You have no work,” said Muriel. She leaned back in the chair. Her face had suddenly become smooth and hard and cold, like ivory, like alabaster. She looked up at the icon. She said, “I think there are one or two things you ought to know about Pattie.”
A prophetic fear clutched Eugene’s heart. “I don’t want to talk to you—”
“Just listen then. You realise of course that Pattie is my father’s whore?”
Muriel’s gaze slowly returned to Eugene. Her eyes were large now and dreadfully calm.
Eugene stared at her. He tried to speak. “I don’t want—I don’t—”
“She has been my father’s mistress for years,” said Muriel, with a slow clear enunciation as if lecturing. “She took my father away from my mother and drove my mother to despair and to death. She has been at my father’s disposal ever since. They were at it only last week, making love on the floor of his study last Friday afternoon. I heard them at it, like two animals. Just you ask Pattie and see what she says.”
Eugene put his hand to his heart. He pressed his hand very hard against his chest and swallowed some blackness which was coming up from inside him. He said, but the words were little dry wisps, rustling and crackling in his mouth, “It’s not true.”
“Just you ask her.”
“Please go away.”
The conviction had fallen from her and she was thin and cold and hard as a needle. He hardly saw her go through the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“EXCUSE ME, DEAR, it’s Anthea again. I’m sorry to be so persistent—”
“He won’t see you.”
“I just wanted to explain to you—”
“He won’t see you. Can’t you understand English?”
“If I may be just the tiniest bit critical—”
“Go away.”
“I realize Father Carel is ill—”
“Mind your own business.”
“And the Bishop is—”
“Shut up and be off with you.”
“But Pattie, you see, Father Carel is—”
“Miss O’Driscoll to you.”
“But, Pattie, my dear, I know all about you—”
“No, you don’t. Nobody knows about me, nobody.”
“Poor Pattie, I can see you’re in some sort of trouble. Wouldn’t you like to tell me—”
“Go away, you interfering bitch. Take your bloody foot out of the door.”
With tears starting again, Pattie pushed with all her might. The Persian lamb gave ground. In a brown haze Mrs Barlow slithered and expostulated on the grey ridges of the frozen snow. The door banged.
Pattie, who was on her way to Muriel’s room, turned back into the empty hall and forgot the incident instantaneously. Misery filled her mouth and her eyes. Head drooping, she mounted the stairs. Near the top she lost a shoe and did not stop to pick it up.
Eugene had rejected her. She could not but tell him the truth, or rather admit the truth of what he already knew. She had tried to explain that last Friday, that was exceptional, it was just that once, it hadn’t happened before for a long time— But to speak of a date, of a happening at all, was something fatal. Even as she stammered to say how it was she was accusing herself. A destructive demon of despair seemed to leap out of her own mouth. This was not anything which could be explained and seen not to matter. She was unclean, she was unworthy, she was black, and she belonged to another, it was all true. Even if Carel had not taken her then he could have taken her at any hour, at any minute. Her will was his. He was the Lord God and she was the i
nert and silent earth which moves in perfect obedience. How much, how hopelessly, she did belong to Carel she realized as she faced Eugene’s anguished but relentless questioning. She had been bought long ago and could never now be ransomed.
It was not that Eugene would never forgive her or that his disgust would last forever or that he was not perhaps good enough to redeem her from the place in which she was fixed. It was that indeed she belonged there. What he charged her with clung to her and no gracious wedding-ring could change her now. Her feet could not run to reach him, the innocence of their converse had been a fake. Pattie did not even appeal to Eugene. He turned from her and she released him. It was the end.