by Iris Murdoch
‘He is awakening!’ said Marcia. ‘He said something. What was it?’
‘What do you want me to do with the Artemis?’ said Rosa. She felt very tired.
‘You make me sick!’ said Mrs Wingfield shrilly. ‘Why don’t you put up a fight? I’d give the whole thing to you tomorrow if you had any blood! As for your brother, he’s obviously dying of anaemia!’
‘Don’t shout, Mrs Wingfield,’ said Rosa, ‘you’re disturbing him.’
‘And let me tell you,’ cried Mrs Wingfield rising to her feet, ‘I’d have left you all my money too if I’d thought that you had any blood in you! You’ve missed a quarter of a million, my dear Miss Keepe, just reflect on that! No blood, Miss Keepe, that’s the trouble with you, no blood!’
Mrs Wingfield had left the room and was going noisily down the stairs.
‘Tiens!’ said Marcia.
Rosa shrugged her shoulders.
‘Has there not been too much noise,’ said Marcia, ‘beside what may indeed be a bed of great sickness?’
‘Hunter’s all right!’ said Rosa, and she prodded the side of the bed irritably with her knee. Hunter murmured something inaudible.
‘I came to say good-bye,’ said Marcia. ‘We go on Friday to Dalmatia for our holiday.’ She was looking radiant.
‘I am so glad,’ said Rosa.
As Hunter watched, the spider was getting bigger and bigger. Now only a small patch of light was left within which he could see his mother’s face. At last this too was disappearing.
‘How is Annette?’ said Rosa.
‘So well, my dear,’ said Marcia. ‘So well, so young. Do not worry at all about Annette.’ She touched Rosa’s arm. ‘Do not worry about anything.’
‘I am so glad,’ said Rosa. ‘I am so glad. I am so glad.’
Twenty-Six
NINA the dressmaker was packing her suit-case. She packed only a few clothes and the things which she called her original room, the things which had travelled with her everywhere. They were not many. Some photographs, an embroidered cloth, a Bible which had belonged to her mother, and three wooden horses which a peasant had carved near the place where she was born. As she packed, her tears fell steadily over her hands and into the suit-case. She no longer troubled to wipe them away. She turned round through a haze and stumbled about in the forest of unfinished dresses. From a distant drawer she brought a warm jersey and put it into her suit-case. She would need that where she was going. But where was she going?
Three days ago Nina had received a communication from the Home Office asking her to present herself at a certain department in Westminster, and adding that failure to do so would render her liable to prosecution. For Nina too had been born east of the line. She had not obeyed the summons. Now in a fever of haste she was packing to be gone, at every moment expecting to hear upon the stairs the tread of the police who would come to take her away. She had read everything that the newspapers had to tell her about her situation; and she had no doubt that if she fell now into the hands of the State she would be deported at once back to her own country. And I would rather die, thought Nina, I would rather die.
She had finished packing her case. Everything was ready. She looked into her handbag. She had in it a very large sum of money and her passport. She stared at her passport, and it seemed to her suddenly like a death warrant. It filled her with shame and horror. She took it in her hand and it fell open at the picture of herself. It was an old picture taken in the worst days of her fear. At the Nina whose hair was golden a younger black-haired Nina stared back, anxious, haggard and fearful. Here was her very soul upon record, stamped and filed; a soul without a nationality, a soul without a home. She turned the faded pages. The earlier ones carried the names of the frontiers of her childhood, frontiers which no longer existed in the world. The later pages were covered with the continually renewed permits from the Ministry of Labour. The Foreign Office which had issued this document had disappeared from the face of the earth. Now nothing could make it new. It remained like the Book of Judgement, the record of her sins, the final and irrevocable sentence of society upon her. She was without identity in a world where to be without identity is the first and most universal of crimes, the crime which, whatever else it may overlook, every State punishes. She had no official existence.
Nina put on her coat. She must lose no more time. She had already wasted two days in distress and indecision. She had made an attempt to see Rosa, but Rosa had told her shortly that her brother was very ill and would Nina come back another time. Another time will be too late, Nina said to herself with the slowness of grief, there is no more time. She had walked home, dragging her feet at a slow pace. Then at last it had come to her that she must run away. After that, she had acted with desperate haste. She had had to wait until the banks opened and she could draw out all her money. Then she had packed up her things and now she was ready to go. But where she was to go to she had not clearly conceived. In the first moments of her decision to fly she had decided to go to Eire. She was not sure whether a passport was needed to get into Eire. She was not sure, and there was nobody, nobody, whom she could ask.
She stood there with her coat on and her suit-case packed, and looked about the room which she had already abandoned. Then suddenly it seemed to her impossible that she should be allowed to leave the country. Every port would be watched. She pictured once again the sort of scene in which she had so often taken part, the scene at the frontier where she watched and waited while uniformed men examined her papers; the long time of waiting until the man who had taken her passport away should return with a surly look, as if she had wasted his time, to tell her that her papers were not in order and she could not pass. I couldn’t stand it again, said Nina to herself, not again. She sat down on a chair.
A loud sob escaped from her like a live thing bursting from her breast. It now seemed to her quite useless to try to fly. She would only be arrested as she was about to board the boat. There was no escape. The men in uniform had only let her run ahead of them for a little way. Now once more they were close behind. They had not really let her go, they would never let her go. It was useless to fly and impossible to stay. Only one frontier remained, the frontier where no papers are asked for, which can be crossed without an identity into the land which remains, for the persecuted, always open.
She got up and started to walk up and down the room. She began to pull her coat off. Tears seemed to come now from her eyes and nose and mouth as if her whole being were dissolved into water. Her coat fell to the floor and she trampled across it. Then she began to pull out from its hiding-place in the bale of cloth the map of Australia which she had cherished there for so long. She opened it and laid it flat and looked at it for a while. Then she left it where it was and continued to walk about, treading upon it and striking the walls with her hands. Her tears began to abate. She could not remember that she had ever cried so much.
As the crying ceased, it was replaced by a low and regular wailing sound which came from her lips, without her will, in a rhythmical cadence. It rose and fell like a song. She had heard lamentation like this in her childhood, but she had never understood it. Now she knew how it was possible to sing in the presence of death. People whom she had known long ago came to her now, not clearly seen but present in multitude, in a great community. She held out her hands to them across the recent past. She stumbled across the room and opened the window very wide. Hazy with sunshine and budding trees the afternoon was revealed. She mounted on a chair.
As she sat upon the window-sill, she swayed to and fro with the continuous rhythm of her song. The sound became higher-pitched and the rhythm faster. The noise seemed now not to pass her lips but to issue out of her head. As she rocked and swayed, like one beguiling a child or a physical pain, she looked back across the room above the colonnade of dresses murmuring now in the warm breeze from the window. She saw the crucifix upon the wall. I forgot it, thought Nina. How foolish. But now it doesn’t matter. She looked at it, and as she
looked she saw it for the first time in her life as a man hanging most painfully from his hands. How strange, she thought that I never saw it in this way before. How he would have suffered, she thought, if he had been mortal. But all that time he knew of paradise, he spoke about it to the penitent thief. It was not the senseless blackness of death, the senseless blackness as it was for her. Then her thoughts coiled back: if not so for him, then not so for her. If for her, then for him too. A dark confusion rose to cover her. For an instant she felt the terrible weight of a God depending upon her will. It was too heavy. Her song came to an end. She gathered her feet under her and pitched head first from the window.
Twenty-Seven
THE train was running along with its wheels in the sea. Or so it seemed to Rosa, as she sat at the window, wishing that she could feel the cool water rising about her knees. After black tunnels, between dark pillars, there could be seen at intervals the Mediterranean, intensely blue and scattered with dazzling points of light. It was late afternoon and intolerably hot. Rosa was extremely tired, burdened with the long journey and the weight of her decision. The smell of the train and the heat of the afternoon enclosed her like a winding-sheet. It required an effort to move her limbs. She glanced down at her watch. Still half an hour to go. The train roared into another tunnel. Rosa closed her eyes. If there were any exhilaration in being in hell it would be of this kind.
It was immediately after Mrs Wingfield’s visit that Rosa had suddenly decided that she must act. Reflection and counter-reflection about Mischa Fox had brought her to a point of disequilibrium where rest was no longer possible. She had now no doubt but that Mischa’s curious behaviour at their last meeting was designed to produce exactly this frenzied state of mind. But the diagnosis did not cure the condition. She had left the house meaning to call on Peter Saward. But the way to his house seemed to be lined with telephone boxes. Rosa had never in her life noticed so many telephone boxes. They stretched before her like monoliths that mark the way to a temple; and in each one of them a picture of Mischa Fox was hanging up. Rosa looked in at the black telephones as she passed. In each one of them the voice of Mischa Fox was lying asleep. When she came to the last one before Peter Saward’s house she entered it and dialled Mischa’s number.
Ringing up Mischa was always a discouraging experience. Half a dozen different voices might be heard at the other end of the line before at last there was the voice of Mischa; and it was impossible not to believe that all the nameless speakers were not still somewhere upon the line, listening to every word, and that this was exactly what Mischa desired. Nor was it ever possible to identify these voices with real people in Mischa’s entourage. They were anonymous voices by whom the caller was interrogated, stripped, and often finally rejected. On this occasion it was without much hope of really establishing contact with him that Rosa lifted the receiver. It was simply that she needed to do something, to perform some action in the real world, and to charm herself for a moment out of the world of thoughts and ghosts. She lifted the telephone as one might light a candle in a church, without belief, and yet obeying a need for ritual.
A woman’s voice replied and asked her to hold on. Then a man spoke, asking her name and her business. Rosa gave her name and asked for Mischa. There was a long silence. Then she heard the voice of Calvin Blick Calvin was friendly, apologetic. Unfortunately Mischa had left London and would be for some time resting at his villa in Italy. Did Rosa know the address? Here it was in any case, perhaps she would like to note it down. Mischa would be very sorry that he had missed her in London, very sorry indeed. Had she got a pencil to write down the address? Good, good. In the middle of this Rosa rang off. That was settled then.
She went on as far as Petet Saward’s door. Then it occurred to her that it was not settled at all. She stood quite still for five minutes outside Peter’s door. Then she turned about and ran back the way she had come. The need for action, so far from being satisfied by mere ritual, was grown within her into an obsessive fury. She called on Miss Foy and asked her to be so good as to look after Hunter. Then she took a taxi to Victoria.
Rosa reflected, as the train was leaving Naples, that perhaps she ought not to have left Hunter alone. But then she told herself again that in fact she was now doing the thing which would be of most help to Hunter; and more deeply still she told herself that what drove her now, half blindly, onward was not only her own will but Hunter’s. About what was to come she reflected not at all. She had never visited Mischa’s Italian villa, nor had she ever met anyone who had, though she had heard various fables about it. She knew its address, which for some reason had always been engraved on her mind, without needing to have it recalled to her by Calvin. And it now seemed to her that she had always known that it was a place to which she would go.
The rhythm of the train altered, and as it became slower the beating of Rosa’s heart became faster. She had not told Mischa that she was coming. How she would reach the villa, and what she would find there when she arrived, she had not even dared to imagine. Perhaps, she thought, she would simply take another train back. Perhaps she would do that. She could, even now, do anything that she wished. Nothing irrevocable had happened yet. She picked up her suit-case and went into the corridor. The train was now running along in the open. On the inland side hills were to be seen, spotted with olive trees, with sad cracks running down their woody sides like the tracks of tears. Behind them were mountains, brown and purple in the late afternoon light, and very softly contoured as if a great quilt had been thrown over more jagged shapes that lay beneath. The train began to stop.
Rosa got out on to the small station. She was the only passenger to leave the train. It was a lonely remote little station, with no houses round it and a single square ochre-coloured building which housed the station offices. Rosa stood on apath of sharp stones beside a dusty grove of oleanders and waited for the train to go on, so that she could cross the line. It went away, curving away inland towards the hills and leaving her behind in a sudden silence. Her feet crunched on the stones. Then she crossed the rails and gave up her ticket. She emerged from the station and found herself at a little crossroads which was deep in white dust. She looked about her.
Then she saw on her left, stark as a little picture in the heat and silence of the afternoon, something which made her stand quite still. At the side of the station, drawn a little off the road, was a smart carozzella, with tall red wheels, one horse in the shafts, and a white fringed awning, which was tilted at a drunken angle over the driving-seat. In the driving-seat, with his head fallen sideways so that he was almost toppling out on to the road, was Calvin Blick He was fast asleep. The horse, whose head was drooping so that its nose was almost on the ground, appeared to be asleep too. As it breathed, at long regular intervals, it raised a tiny cloud of dust upon the ground below its nostrils. Rosa put her hand to her heart and began to laugh.
Her laughter wakened Calvin, who jolted violently upright and opened his eyes. His movement wakened the horse, who lifted his head and set loudly ringing the five bells which grew upon a little tree upon the harness at its neck. Rosa went on laughing. She had never felt so pleased to see Calvin Blick.
‘Dear me!’ said Calvin. ‘Well, you’ve arrived at last! This is the third train I’ve met today. Get in quick before the animal lies down.’
‘But what are you doing here?’ said Rosa. ‘You were in London.’ She was feeling enormous relief.
‘Ever heard of aeroplanes?’ said Calvin. ‘Swifter, in this case, than the thoughts of love, I flew with British European Airways.’
Rosa stepped into the body of the carriage, which tilted perilously towards her as she set her foot on the step. Calvin adjusted the white awning so that it was above her head. Then he donned a wide-brimmed straw hat, shook the reins vigorously, and shouted ‘Avanti!’
The sleepy horse set itself in motion, and the jerky movement of its body communicated itself to the carozzella, which moved forward in an irregular impulsive manner. The l
ittle bells upon the harness began to ring, the polished tin upon the collar sparkled in the sun. A cloud of dust arose above the tall wheels, and through it Rosa saw the countryside unfolding. It was a bare countryside, pale with rocks and dust, where the olives and vines which rose upon shelves above her were grey rather than green, and weary with the heat even in this early summer. Between light brown curves of hill she saw through the blue haze white farms, scanty as bones, and beyond them now and then the dark line of the sea. There was an intense evening light which now mottled with colour the mountains farther away and drew the sky downwards like a silk cloth. Rosa breathed in the warm air. It was long long since she had been in the south.
She could have wished that the drive would last forever. She had never felt closer to Mischa and more totally at her ease in this proximity. In the poverty and beauty of that denuded landscape she embraced him. It now seemed to her strange that she had imagined Mischa’s Italy so differently, almost as a tropical paradise. She now saw that it could only be like this. The carozzella rattled through a small village, and a crowd of children shouted after it. The white doorway of a church appeared round a bend in the road and was gone. Then there was a procession of heavy carts, drawn by little donkeys scarcely out of the womb. Then the countryside again. They were moving faster now. Rosa sat up and leaned forward. The air smelt of dust and sea and unknown flowers and the south.
The carriage suddenly left the road and began to climb up a little track. The horse which had, after a fashion, been trotting, slowed down to a walking pace. Calvin jumped off and began to lead the animal up the slope. Rosa could see white walls appearing at the top of the hill, and a shallow roof which had once been red but which now, following the colour of the countryside, was paled towards a ruddy grey. The declining sun struck the side of the wall, dazzling Rosa with a rectangle of gold. She covered her eyes. She was still dazzled as the carriage turned into a small courtyard and she stepped out almost into Mischa’s arms.