Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  He had been a docile student, and an excellent examinee, and he readily fell with Guy into a relation of pupil to teacher, almost (although they were of an age) of son to father. In fact to many people in his acquaintance, Guy represented some kind of patriarch. He was a very good administrator destined (it had seemed) for the highest office. His dignity, his particular cleverness, his power were for the Count guarantees of stability, proofs of meaning. He enjoyed admiring Guy and looking up to him. He stopped playing chess with Guy because he hated (invariably) beating him. Guy did not mind, but the Count did. And so it was that he became a member of the Openshaw ‘circle’ and found for himself a sort of home in the big flat in Ebury Street, and through it communicated with English society, and as it sometimes seemed to him, with the cosmos.

  The Count stood at attention before Gertrude Openshaw. She did not look at him. In her grief she avoided everyone’s eyes, as if so much grief made her ashamed. A sort of terrible embarrassment united her and the Count. They did not display emotion to each other, there were no outbursts.

  ‘It’s snowing again, did you see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘In good form.’

  ‘Did you have the white swan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or “She sold the ring”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know -’

  ‘Who - what ring - oh God. The upper side of the cube?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘What is this cube?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Count. ‘It could be something in the pre-Socratics.’

  ‘Have you looked?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll look again.’

  ‘Or about painting?’

  ‘Could be.’

  The Count, tracking Gertrude’s mind, knew how appalled she was by her husband’s ramblings, by the fact, which they had all had to face in the last weeks, that Guy was no longer himself. The Count, almost with cunning, had tried to console Gertrude by saying that there was something visionary and poetic in the strange things that Guy sometimes said, that they should be seen as beautiful utterances indicating some inner happiness or light. But Gertrude, who hated religion and anything ‘mystical’, found no ease in these conjectures. She saw Guy’s irrationality as something terrifying and almost disgusting, a kind of mental incontinence. It was an additional unexpected horror. The Count soon gave up his attempts to comfort her by references to Blake. He did not really believe what he said in any case. He had come to see Guy’s mild raving as something mechanical, the unpredictable failure of an electric circuit, a loose connection.

  The Count, Wojciech Szczepanski, stood before Gertrude. He was tall, taller than Gertrude, taller even than Guy, and very thin. He had a pale thin face, very light blue eyes, and straight colourless fair hair. He had the hard keen Slav face of his race, so unlike the solider more sensual Russian face. He looked like a chess player, a symbolic logician, a breaker of codes. His mouth was thin and clever. Yet he had also a timid diffident look, always a little questioning, even bewildered. He still seemed boyish, although his dry pallid face often looked gaunt, tired, no longer young.

  Gertrude (née McCluskie), in her late thirties, was a handsome woman. Age, which draws down curtains of skin about the eyes and pokes holes in the brow, had scarcely touched her yet. She was of medium height, a little inclined to plumpness, with fine radiantly clear brown eyes which gazed at the world with a kind of happy authority. Her olive-golden complexion was like a pleasant sun-tan, and her longish faintly curling hair, a dark rich ochre brown, fell about in a neat copious friendly disorder. She dressed intelligently, austerely rather than smartly, and to please her husband. Guy’s ‘formative influence’ in their married love was discreetly admitted by Gertrude, while at the same time she announced herself as a woman not easily dominated. She was half Scottish, half English. Both her parents had been schoolteachers, and after a successful college career she entered the same profession. After her marriage (she met Guy, who was then in the Department of Education, at a conference) she continued teaching for several years. She and Guy were childless. There had been a miscarriage, then the doctors had told her she could not have children. It was at this time, and feeling that Guy needed her presence at home, that she gave up her work.

  ‘Did he sleep well?’ asked the Count. He always asked this. There were few questions left to be asked about Guy’s health.

  ‘Oh yes - yes - nothing in the night.’

  There was a now-familiar sound in the hall which was the Night Nurse opening the bedroom door to indicate that Mrs Openshaw might now come in and see her husband.

  Gertrude said, ‘Count, you will stay for Visiting Hour, won’t you, for les cousins et les tantes?’

  Guy had a strong sense of family (his father had been one of six children), reinforced perhaps by his frustrated paternal instincts. He was a natural pater familias and would have been a dedicated probably rather strict parent. As it was, it was his fancy to gather his family, including its remoter camp followers, together into a little band under his benevolent supervision. In this picture of his life, his friends too had to figure as family. Thus it was that the Count had become a sort of honorary cousin. This small heterogeneous group of ‘connections’ Guy treated with a mixture of responsible concern and casual superiority. He referred to them collectively, in French for some reason, as les cousins et les tantes. He was a thoroughly kind and generous man, but his ‘superiority’ was not unconnected with money. The Christianized Openshaws (perhaps originally Oppenheims or some such) were a banking family, and accustomed to play the responsible role of rich relations among poor relations.

  ‘Of course I’ll stay for Visiting Hour. I’ve brought a book.’

  ‘Proust? Gibbon? Thucydides?’ Gertrude knew his tastes.

  ‘No, Carlyle.’

  The Openshaws had kept, in the old-fashioned tradition, a ‘day’ for visitors, when their London friends and relations were expected to drop in for a drink on the way home from the office. These informal gatherings had come to be, for the Count, the most enjoyable part of his exiguous social world. This was indeed the first time in his life when he had known and been known in anything which resembled a family group. When Guy had first become ill, but not yet hopelessly ill, les cousins et les tantes had taken to calling in briefly on other days to ask how he was. As the cancer declared itself, the number of visitors diminished, and only an inner circle of intimates continued to call, a few dropping in every evening to say hello to the sick man. Guy had, it seemed, enjoyed these visits. Of late however he had lost interest in company. The nurses and the doctor (who was a real cousin) advised against ‘tiring’ him. And the Count suspected that Gertrude wanted to conceal her husband, not to exhibit him in his enfeebled state to the sympathetic but necessarily curious gaze of those who in their role as clients and clansmen had so long regarded him with reverence. But to discontinue the visits would have been to announce the end. The ‘family’ continued to turn up for Gertrude’s sake, and though she kept them away from Guy and affected to regard them as a ‘nuisance’ she was really not ungrateful for this show of support.

  In fact the only person whom Guy really still wanted to talk to was the Count. The Count became aware of his privileged status with mixed feelings. He would in many ways, since it had to be, have preferred to say an earlier easier farewell. This long sojourn with Guy in the ante-room of death was a dangerous matter. Something terrible, painful, eternally memorable could happen. Years ago, when he was first admitted by Guy into the charmed circle of friendship, he had been haunted by the fear that it was his fate to be scrutinized and dropped. There was, behind Guy’s suave superiority, something demonic, something which could be cruel. Later the Count saw Guy more as one who could be cruel but never was. Demonic he might be, but he was also dutiful. A strong sense of duty, of the cast-iron necessity of decent behaviour, was a positive characteristic of b
oth. Guy and Gertrude, something which, when you knew them well, was as evident in them as the colour of their hair and eyes. Also, as time went by, the Count, for all his diffidence, came to believe in Guy’s affection for him, although he knew too that this affection was mixed with a kind of intelligent pity. So now, as he found himself the last one left, the only person beside Gertrude herself who regularly talked to Guy, he felt a mixture of gratification and pain. Of course he prized this remarkable sign of trust. But it came too late. And he could not help feeling that Guy, and Gertrude too, tolerated him at or near the end because ‘it did not matter what the Count thought or said.’ He was in the dying man’s room as his dog might be. The Count brooded on this. Sometimes he read it as contempt, sometimes as a vast compliment.

  The evening visitors, the ‘intimates’ that is, although excluded from Guy, continued to turn up. Every evening now a small number of persons arrived, the same or varying slightly, to ask after Guy, to leave messages, books, flowers, and to talk to Gertrude and give her comfort and the assurance of being surrounded. They accepted drinks, talked in muted voices, did not stay long, but the little ceremony had its importance. The Count could not help noticing that some of them could almost be said to enjoy it.

  ‘All right,’ said Gertrude, ‘I’ll just go in now and see Guy.’

  The Count sat down on an upright chair near to the fireplace, where a fire of wood and coalite was burning in honour of the snow. He knew this room very well, better almost than the featureless rooms of his own small flat where there was so little of formal significance to attract the eye or the mind. He felt safe in the Openshaws’ drawing-room. It was large, glowing with colour, and, in the Count’s judgement, perfect. There was nothing large or small which he could have desired to change, or to move by as much as a millimetre. And indeed in the years during which he had known it the fine room had not altered at all. The only item that changed was the flowers, and they were always in the same place on the marquetry table beside the drinks. The Count marvelled at Gertrude’s will even now to arrange flowers. In a large green vase she had artfully deployed eucalyptus and beech leaves with some white chrysanthemums donated by Janet Openshaw. (There were other flower donations out in the hall: not in Guy’s room. Guy thought flowers should be kept in their place.) Guy and Gertrude had, perhaps, worked hard to make a beautiful room, succeeded, and had been content. They were not collectors, and indeed not very seriously interested in the visual arts, but had, for these purposes, ‘good taste’.

  The Count stretched out his long legs, ruckling up a silky faded golden rug which was covered with a very minute geometrical design. He opened his book, Carlyle’s life of Frederick the Great. He was reading about the ridiculous relation between Frederick and Voltaire. This amused him because he hated Voltaire, about whom he and Guy differed. The Count identified himself with Rousseau, although he would have been at a loss to say exactly why. Of course the Count hated Frederick too (his hatreds were abstract compared with those of his father), but there was something about Carlyle’s view of the world which appealed to him all the same.

  ‘Would you like anything?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Tea, fruit juice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nurse asked about supper. Do you want anything special?’

  ‘Just soup.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to see anyone tonight? Manfred?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like any of your books from next door?’

  ‘I’ve got books here.’

  ‘I wish I could do something, bring you something.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’

  ‘It’s snowing again.’

  ‘So Peter said.’

  Gertrude and Guy looked at each other, then looked away.

  Gertrude had spoken to no one about the way in which her relationship with Guy had now simply broken down. This was as terrible to her as the event of his death which it remained for her to live through. It was, in a way, his death, its true beginning, his death to her, the breaking of the bond of consciousness. There was a nightmarish barrier between them through which neither of them could pass. Guy had ceased even to try. He gazed at her with remote brooding preoccupied eyes. He could talk to the Count, but not to her. When he did talk he often rambled and said the strange things which frightened her so: that fine clear mind in whose light she had lived become helplessly confused and darkened. Perhaps he was silent because he feared to affright her. Or perhaps abhorred this final loss of face before his wife, this unspeakable defeat at the hands of fate. Or would not feed a love which was so soon to be transmuted, he to sleep, she to mourn.

  They had always been very close to each other, united by indistinguishably close bonds of love and intelligence. They had never ceased passionately to crave each other’s company. They had never seriously quarrelled, never been parted, never doubted each other’s complete honesty. A style of directness and truthfulness composed the particular gaiety of their lives. Their love had grown, nourished daily by the liveliness of their shared thoughts. They had grown together in mind and body and soul as it is sometimes blessedly given to two people to do. They could not be in the same room without touching each other. They constantly uttered even their most trivial thoughts. Their converse passed through wit. Jest and reflection had been the language of their love. I shall die without him, thought Gertrude, not suicide, but I shall just have no more life. I shall be a dead person walking about.

  Certain subjects the instincts of their affections made taboo. They never spoke later of the lost child. And (this was somehow connected) they never had any pet animal, a dog or a cat. Certain sweet and touching things had to be avoided. It was as if the mesh of their tenderness must not be made too fine if they were to avoid agony. Though they were playfully and demonstrably loving together they kept a rein upon certain runs or courses of sentiment. Their language was chaste and there was a reticent dignity in their love.

  Of course they had always been very frank with each other and had lived their marriage as a mutual transference. They confessed to each other and redeemed each other. They discussed their past adventures and their present thoughts, their faults, their mistakes, their sins, always tactfully, always wittily, without self-indulgent gloating. They preserved consciously between them a certain modesty and innocence, an awareness of their luck and a determination to be innocuously happy.

  Both had been, in different ways, fortunate spoilt children. Guy was the doted-upon only child of wealthy clever parents. Gertrude, also an only child, the great beloved of her father, had been the late offspring of practical busy public-spirited schoolteachers. Gertrude’s father had taught her that she was a princess in the world. He had also taught her to love books and work hard, and to enjoy the things of the intellect without worrying too much about being an ‘intellectual’. Her parents died before her marriage, but had the pleasure of seeing their splendid daughter become a very able teacher. Guy’s mother never knew Gertrude, but his father lived long enough to bless his son’s marriage. He approved of Gertrude, though he would have preferred a Jewish girl, having secretly returned in his heart to the faith of his ancestors. (He never of course revealed this shocking frailty to Guy, who despised all religion.) He grieved bitterly over the lost grandchild. About further progeny he never asked. He died soon afterwards. Guy was frighteningly upset.

  Gertrude and Guy took it for granted that they would always be useful and busy. They were versatile, still young, and constantly thought that they might do ‘all sorts of things’ in the future. There were books to be written, skills to be learnt, intellectual heights to be scaled. They travelled a little, but not very much because Guy wanted to use his holidays for studying. As the years passed he had never settled it with himself whether he were not a scholar rather than an administrator. He became determined at any rate to be a scholar too, and began work on a book about justice, punishment and the criminal law. Gertrude had studied history a
t Cambridge. Guy had studied classics and philosophy at Oxford and always felt a sort of lingering irritable interest in the latter subject. When she stopped teaching Gertrude had intended to write a novel, but was soon dissuaded by Guy, and of course she came to agree. Did the world need yet another mediocre novel? For a while she employed herself as Guy’s research assistant. She learnt German. She considered going into politics (they were both left wing). Just lately she had begun to teach English to Asian immigrants. There was no worry, no anxiety. There was plenty to do. Time passed, but there was always plenty of time.

  But now time had gone mad. Guy’s illness seemed to be carrying him through the stages of life towards old age before her eyes. Gradually the dimension of the future disappeared from their converse with each other. Gertrude, at a certain stage, stopped saying, ‘You’ll feel better in the spring.’ She had never said, ‘There is no cure.’ Nor had the doctor. When she asked him if he had told Guy, he said, ‘He knows.’ When did he begin to know? There had been some hopeful treatment. Their eyes rarely met now. And what was most terrible to Gertrude, the little rituals of tenderness were gone from their lives. She did not dare now to take his hand. When she massaged his terrible thin cramp-ridden aching legs she did so as a nurse. In her avoidance of any word, any gesture which might cause them to weep, Gertrude felt that she must seem to him at times almost cold, as if she just heartily wished it was all over; and there were times when she did wish it was all over and that his suffering had ceased, cleaned away by death. If only she could unavoidably break down; but no, she was strong and would not break down. There was nowhere for her tormented love to run to and no expression which it could find. Yet the discipline of their happy life together divided them now perhaps mercifully, and she hoped and prayed that Guy too understood that mercy. If they were to start to cry and wail over the unspeakable cruelty of it all they would run mad with pain.