Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Veronica, do you want a lift?’ said Manfred.

  Gertrude said to Stanley, ‘Thank you so much for coming. Give my love to Janet. Tell her how lovely her chrysanthemums are looking.’

  Sylvia said, ‘Gertrude, I wonder if I could possibly see Guy.’

  There was a moment’s silence then, embarrassed, the guests began to talk again among themselves.

  Gertrude flushed. Then a look of strain, almost of anger, wrenched her face, her mouth and eyes. ‘Well, no, he’s very - He can’t see anyone.’

  ‘I’d only want to see him for a few minutes. I wanted to ask him something.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t see Guy - he’s - ill - he can’t see people - any more -’ She put her hands to her eyes as if to prevent tears.

  ‘Drat the girl,’ said Stanley to Manfred at the doorway, ‘has she no tact, no sense? Poor Gertrude -’

  ‘I’d only need a few minutes with him,’ said Sylvia, near to tears herself.

  ‘No -’

  ‘I must go,’ said Stanley.

  ‘I think we should all go,’ said Mrs Mount. ‘Manfred?’

  ‘Who’s got cars?’ said Gertrude. ‘It’s such an awful night.’

  ‘I have, and Stanley,’ said Manfred.

  ‘And me,’ said Victor.

  ‘Who goes which way? You’re going with Manfred, Veronica?’

  ‘I can take Sylvia,’ said Stanley. ‘Come along, Sylvia. I’ll drop you at the tube.’

  ‘I’m sorry - but please understand -’ said Gertrude to Sylvia.

  ‘I’ll take the Count,’ said Victor, ‘he’s on my way.’

  ‘Thank you all for coming - you know it means a lot - to both of us -’

  ‘And Tim, - where’s Tim? You can go with Stanley too, that’s right, isn’t it?’

  Shushed to silence by Stanley they went into the hall and tiptoed to find their coats. There was a smell of wet wool, and the melted snow had made a dark mark upon the carpet. Mrs Mount sat down to pull on her boots. They filed out of the front door one by one. Stanley and Mrs Mount kissed Gertrude.

  The drawing-room was empty. Gertrude came in and closed the door. She went and pulled back the curtains a little at one of the windows. It was still snowing. She heard the cheerful voices below as her guests packed into the three cars.

  The Count would have liked to stay on after the others and talk to Gertrude alone, but he feared to displease her or to draw attention to himself. The Count had been in love with Gertrude for years. Of course no one knew this.

  He allowed himself to be hustled out and into Victor’s car, but he soon made an excuse and asked to be set down. He wanted to walk home by himself through the snow. He bought some chestnuts from a man with a brazier. The stand with the glowing coals looked like a little god in a shrine. The snow was still falling but more slowly. The pavements were white, the roads were moraines of dark tossed snow and slush where the cars hissed cautiously past. Guy had been right to say that the world sounded different. There was no wind, and the large flakes fell solemnly, purposively, as if just released from a huge hand held close above the light of the street lamps. Railings and the bowed-down branches of shrubs in gardens were piled high with glistening crystalline structures. The Count was wearing a woollen cap which Gertrude used to laugh at. He adjusted his scarf and turned up the collar of his overcoat, and as he strode along with his long legs he felt warm.

  The Count lived in a featureless block of flats in the no-man’s-land between the King’s Road and the Fulham Road, and he had not very far to walk. He had eaten some of his chestnuts and carefully put the charred shells away in his pocket. He went up in the lift and along a corridor, past many silent doors, to reach his own flat. He knew his neighbours amicably but very slightly. He let himself in and turned on the light, his face glowing with the change of temperature. His flat had two small bedrooms and a living-room which could have been pleasant only the Count had no sense of the visual world, and no social obligation to exhibit ‘good taste’. He very rarely invited any guest. Dark green metal bookshelves covered four walls. On the third wall there was, above a shiny modern sideboard, a print of Warsaw. The Count had very few mementos from his childhood home, and none of them on view. He had a misty brown photo of his parents when they were first married, two staring youthful almost childish faces. He also had a Polish flag, perhaps the one which had formed his first perception. He kept the flag rolled up at the bottom of a drawer. His hand, questing for something else, touched it sometimes. There had been other Polish things which his mother, in her last illness, had given away to an old Polish lady who used to visit her. His mother did not think that her son would want ‘that old stuff’. The Count remembered this with shame.

  He turned on the radio. He hated television. He lived in a radio world. He listened to everything, news, talks, plays (especially thrillers), political discussions, philosophical discussions, nature programmes, proms, symphony concerts, opera, the Archers, Woman’s Hour, A Hundred Best Tunes, Desert Island Discs, On Your Farm, Any Questions, Any Answers. At some times of year the steadily changing weekly copies of the Radio Times seemed the most evident movement of his life’s clock. Manfred had teased him by saying that he hated music, it was not true. He would never have gone near a concert hall. (They had stopped offering him tickets.) But he loved music although he had little conception of what it was. (He had had to have it pointed out to him by Gerald that church bells rang changes, not a continuous simple scale.) Ignorant though he was, he listened and was, like Caliban, enchanted. The terrible slow tenderness of some classical music seemed to him like the flowing of his own consciousness. He had his favourite composers too, he liked Mozart and Beethoven and Bruckner. He also got it into his head that he liked Delius because his music sounded English. (He was unwise enough to say this once to Guy, who asked him sarcastically what on earth he meant. The Count could not say, but he went on thinking so all the same.) He liked songs too, rousing memorable ones like The Road to Mandalay, or else sentimental ones which brought tears to his eyes like Oh That We Two Were Maying. Often of course he read while the radio rambled on, read his beloved Proust and Thucydides and Condorcet and Gibbon and Saint-Simon and Rousseau’s Confessions. He did not read much poetry but cherished a narrow affection for Horace, salvaged from the days of miles puellam amat. (This was a taste which he shared with Guy.) He liked a few novelists (he scarcely counted Proust as a novelist, that was more like reading memoirs): Balzac, Turgenev, Stendhal. He had a secret weakness for Trollope and also liked War and Peace. At intervals he obsessively read Conrad, looking for some Polish clue which always eluded him. (His father had hated Conrad whom he regarded as a frivolous renegade.) So, mostly, he spent his evenings until he was sent to bed by the final gale warnings. He thought then of the island on which he lived. He thought of the dark vast sea. He thought of lonely men elsewhere who were listening to these warnings, solitary wireless operators on tossing ships, farmers and their dogs sitting in kitchens in the stormy fens. Attention all shipping. Here is a gale warning. Clyde, Humber, Thames, South east gale force nine, increasing force ten, imminent. Imminent, imminent. Biscay, Trafalgar, Finisterre. Cromarty, Faroes, Fair Isle. Solway, Tyne, Dogger. Imminent.

  There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the great divisions of the human race. Sleep was a problem to the Count. He was well capable of being cheerful, but the possibility of great unhappiness travelled always with him. He never (as Gerald Pavitt did) actually feared madness, but he knew that if he did not tend himself he could fall into a pit of crippling misery. Sleeplessness and night terrors were then greatly to be feared. He wanted the darkness of death-like sleep, even the hurly-burly of bad dreams, anything rather than an active idle consciousness. He would not use pills for fear of addiction. Balintoy had suggested to him a somniferent method which he adopted sometimes, although it could prove a mixed blessing. The Count imagined himself upon a road, or in a garden, or inside a larg
e house, and then began to move (it was not quite like walking) along the road, round the corner, through the garden to a gate where another garden opened, along a grass path to some trees, through the trees, across a field, from room to room, across a hall, up the stairs, along a gallery ... and so to sleep. But what was happening? The rooms had grown dark, they were full of frightened people, the walls were shuddering with shell-fire, there were no doors, only holes in the walls torn by dynamite, through which the fugitives escaped from house to house, from street to street, until now there is the night lit by bursting shells, a jump in the dark onto bricks and rubble, a wide avenue to be crossed raked with bullets, nowhere to go, no food, no water, the enemy ever nearer, nearer ... Sometimes he dreamed of calmer scenes, Warsaw empty, very beautiful, rebuilt or never harmed, a magic city, a city of palaces, sinister. He saw as a place of destiny, perhaps of doom, the pillared war memorial, the grave where the fire ever burns, the sentries at attention day and night, the echoing goose-step of the relieving guard. The Count stands in the dark, glances shyly at the expressionless faces of the soldiers, glimpses upon the pillars the list of Polish battle honours, Madrid, Guadalajara, Ebro. Westerplatte, Kutno, Tomaszov. Narvik, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Arnhem. Bitwa o Anglie. Lenino, Warszawa, Gdansk. Rothenburg, Drezno, Berlin. Or is he back in London, beside the eagle-crowned column at Northolt, remembering the Polish airmen who died for Poland, who died for England? His father’s squadron 303 Kosciusko, best of all in the Polish air force. City of Lwow, city of Krakow, city of Warszawa. Battle of Britain, Battle of the Atlantic, Dieppe, Western Desert, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany. His father and his brother are putting on their helmets and their parachutes and climbing into their Spitfires. And the Count wants to go with them, only there are pillars and more pillars, broken pillars, shattered columns in a ruined city, and on each there is a list of battles, gallant battles, gallant defeats, and now he is seeing, stretching away into the distance, not the past but the future ...

  The Count was used to nightmares. He wooed them and they left little trace. It was the waking horrors that left him exhausted and afraid. It was as if, at such times, as he lay in his narrow bed in his small bedroom and gazed up at the darkened ceiling his father’s spirit came and stood beside him, eager to conduct the argument into which, while his parent lived, the Count had been so unwilling to enter. What went wrong? They were living in a dreamland. Eastern Poland ought to have been conceded to Stalin while there was still something to concede. They thought the Western troops would reach Warsaw first. The Count’s father had many times described the hour when he realized that the Russians would arrive first. So they were to see off the Germans and then resist the Russians! Were they mad? What was the point of the Warsaw Rising anyway? To ‘stir the conscience of the world’? To assert Polish independence by possessing Warsaw before the Russians came? What a nemesis. They wanted their fight and the Russians left them to it. Why did they not wait until the Red Army was bombarding the city? Accidents, accidents, mistakes, mistakes. The men in London bemused by years of agonizing diplomacy, the men in Warsaw worn out by years of secret organization and nerve-destroying terror. The crucial hours it took to decode messages. The vain hopes of Moscow diplomacy, of Anglo-American help, of German collapse. Two men who were late at a meeting. A false intelligence report. Desire, desire, desire for the longed-for end, the crown of so much scheming and suffering. The inability to wait. Then the catastrophe, humiliation worse than anything dreamt of in their wildest fear. The Count could think of nothing like it in history except the Sicilian Expedition. (The comparison was his father’s.) It was a strange fact that his father had never talked to him about the fight in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 when the Jews of the city had risen in inspired courageous hopeless rage against their tormentors. They fought without hope or calculation like rats in a trap and forced their enemies to tear them to pieces. Like rats in a trap; rats in other traps had not fought. His father’s silence was not anti-Semitism, it was envy. He envied the absolute simplicity of that fight, the purity of its heroism. There was no doubt where the unsmirched flag of Poland was flying in those days of 1943.

  But why did the Red Army not cross the Vistula? The sleepless Count thus continued his argument with his father. Were the Russians really waiting cynically for the Germans to destroy their own prospective foes, the flower, the élite of a passionately independent Poland? When the Red Army entered Warsaw it was empty. Indeed it was scarcely there, the ruins were level with the ground. There was no sign of human habitation except for thousands and thousands of hasty new-made graves. His father had been unjust to the Russians, their lines of communication were stretched to breaking, it was an accident of war, the Count thought sometimes as he tossed sleeplessly to and fro. (Why had Hannibal not marched on Rome? For the same reason.) His father had been unjust to Gomulka. Those men were patriots who had tried, who still tried, to construct ‘a Polish way to socialism’. What else could they do but play the precarious game which kept the Russian tanks from revisiting Warsaw? The Church still existed, a precious evidence of a freedom kept. Ought his father to have returned home? What was this ‘ought’ and this ‘home’? The eternal ‘what should have happened’ of the human being in the face of morality and chance and the eternal malice of events. But then the Count returned to the horror of it all. What did it avail, the suffering of the virtuous, the death of the brave? Had any country ever been so malignantly vowed to destruction by its neighbours? The English had ruined Ireland, but casually, thoughtlessly. While History, like Bismarck, seemed dedicated to ‘tear up Poland by the roots’.

  The Count had, he felt, no illusions about the present state of his country, no sentimentality about what was in obvious ways a bad state. Fear of Russia had to be lived with, life under communism was another world where moral problems appeared with a difference. All states have a background which is partly evil. There the evil was evident, stronger. He saw the corruption, the hardened heart, the bureaucratic cruelty which could not be simply blamed on History or Russia. He constantly endeavoured to know who was in prison and why, who was trapped, who was intimidated, who was silenced. He could not have endured to live in Poland. But he could not help believing (perhaps this was sentimentality?) that his country had in spite of everything a spiritual destiny, an unquenched longing for freedom and spirit. There was some old unique indestructible entity over which the red and white flag could still proudly fly. (Often it appeared that that proud flag was being firmly held in the capable hands of the Roman church.) And he connected in his mind this ideal symbolic Poland with the sufferings of oppressed people everywhere, and the dogged dissenters who refused to compromise with tyranny, who wrote pamphlets and made speeches and carried posters until they were put away in prisons and labour camps where after their brief and apparently useless struggle for freedom and virtue they rotted quietly away into a slow anonymous death.

  The Count went into the kitchen and put on some potatoes to boil. He liked potatoes. He opened a tin of ham, and when the potatoes were almost ready he made some soup out of a packet. At the table in his sitting-room he drank the soup out of a mug, ate the ham and potatoes, and finished up with a slice of ginger cake. He drank a little red wine mixed with water. He read some more of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. The slaughter-house of history, mediated by Carlyle’s style, could be an object of contemplation. ‘The war was over. Frederick was safe. His glory was beyond the reach of envy. If he had not made conquests as vast as those of Alexander, of Caesar and of Napoleon, if he had not, on fields of battle, enjoyed the constant success of Marlborough and Wellington, he had yet given an example unrivalled in history of what capacity and resolution can effect against the greatest superiority of power and the utmost spite of fortune. He entered Berlin in triumph ...’ The radio was telling the Count what was going on in Cambodia. Then it told him about the life-cycle of the fruit fly. Then there was a programme of Renaissance Music. Then there was a Labour Party political broadcast on ra
ce relations, the Count even knew the man who was speaking, an M.P., a friend of Stanley Openshaw. After that there was a funny programme, then the news. The Count was apparently able to listen to the radio and to read Carlyle at the same time. He was also able to do all this while thinking throughout the whole evening about Gertrude.

  Guy and Gertrude between them had performed some sort of miracle for the Count by introducing him to their ‘set’. The very extension of their generosity made it seem less intense, less in need of definition. What was more natural than that Guy’s discovery, his ‘phenomenon’, should be made welcome, even petted a little? He had not at first wondered, and they had perhaps never thought, just how they saw him: a silent man without a country and without a language, an awkward shy man who had to be jollied into the conversation, a thin pale tall man whose hair might be blond or might be white without anyone caring to determine which. ‘Where did Guy dig up our Count?’ ‘Whatever was he doing before we discovered him?’ These would be perfunctory inquiries. They were infinitely kind to him but they did take him a little too incuriously for granted. They might even take him for a calm man, a placid man! They had rescued him from nonentity, from a narrowing loneliness, and still he remained a shadow in their lives, a footless ghost. Yet all this, which the Count now frequently rehearsed, was unjust. Gertrude and Guy were undemonstrative English people, but they were also unconventional enough to take friendship very seriously. If he was often in their house it was because they often wanted to see him.

  The Count was well aware of the crucial difference between loving someone and being in love. He had loved Guy and Gertrude out of gratitude, out of admiration, out of an amazed pleasure at the sudden welcoming ease of their company. He had now a house to visit, a warm bright significant place, people to see regularly, who were connected with each other and had readily, almost casually, bound him into their company. Then suddenly the absolute preciousness of Gertrude had come upon him in a dazzling transfiguring flash. She was absolutely precious, absolutely necessary. Hitherto his life had had a Polish meaning but no sense. Now Gertrude became the sense of his life, its secret centre. His impoverished soul turned in dumb wonderment to this sudden radiant source. The Count was changed, every particle of his being charged with magnetized emotion. His flesh glowed, his body waked from dull sleep, and quivered. His love endowed his life, every day, every second, with thrilling purpose. It was a happy activity, a little crazed, deeply inherently painful, and yet, as happiness must be, steady, invulnerable, eternal. The situation was impossible, but at the same time it was absolutely secure, and the impossibility and the security and the secrecy were one. He could see Gertrude often, easily, in company. He did not even want to be alone with her. And when accidentally, when he had arrived early or stayed late, they were briefly alone together it was as if they were not alone. He could see Gertrude often, he could go on seeing her often, they were familiar affectionate friends, connected together forever; and yet the barrier between them was as absolute as if he had been her servant. And of course her servant, with joyful brooding pain, he saw himself eternally destined to be. It was moreover also part of the Count’s impossible security that it was inconceivable that he should feel jealous of Guy. He felt no jot of jealousy, even of envy, so high above him was the whole concept of Gertrude’s marriage. It was in a curious and precious sense a remote mystery which did not concern him. He revered Guy as Gertrude’s consort, and continued to love and admire him on his own account. Having Guy as his office chief had transformed his work, his day. Guy, so clever, so cordial, so dotty, had touched and stirred up something in the Count which was becoming dull and selfish and old. And when the Count had stopped being afraid that his clever friend would suddenly drop him, Guy had become a stronghold. That stronghold remained, now become an inextricable part of the absolute secret safety of the Count’s love for Guy’s wife.