Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘What do you want proved? Gertrude said you were writing a book about punishment.’

  Guy frowned. ‘Did she? It’s nothing yet. I mean - it’s nothing, just a sketch.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about it?’

  ‘It’s an impossible subject. If a Home Office official writes a book on punishment it’s bound to be - oh you know - about deterrence and rehabilitation.’

  ‘And leaves out retribution, and that’s what you want?’

  ‘For myself, yes.’

  ‘Don’t you think others may need it, want it, too?’

  ‘Oh maybe, but I’m only interested in my own case. Like you.’

  They both smiled. Anne sat tense, concentrated.

  ‘Justice is such an odd thing,’ Guy went on, ‘it cuts across the other virtues, it’s like brown, it’s not in the spectrum, it’s not in the moral spectrum.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Anne.

  ‘It’s a calculation.’

  ‘What about mercy?’

  ‘Something quite different. Anyway there can’t be mercy.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because crimes are their own punishment.’

  ‘If so why do you want an after-life?’

  ‘Oh but one can’t see. I would want to understand it all. I would want to have it exhibited, explained. That’s why the idea of purgatory is so moving.’

  ‘What about hell, is that moving too?’

  ‘No. Incomprehensible really. But purgatory, suffering in the presence of the Good, what joy. Computerized suffering, suffering with a purpose, with a progress - no wonder the souls in Dante plunge joyfully back into the fire.’

  ‘But purgatory is rehabilitation and you said -’

  ‘Purgatory is magical rehabilitation, guaranteed to work. In real life punishment may produce any result, it’s wild guesswork. And retribution is only important as a check, it’s necessary for the sort of rough justice we hand out here below. I mean, the chap’s got to have done something, and we must have a shot at saying how large or small it is -’

  ‘Otherwise we might penalize people just to do them good.’

  ‘Or to deter other people, yes.’

  ‘I understand what you feel about purgatory,’ said Anne.

  ‘I once saw a Victorian picture called “Abject Prayer”. I envied the man in the picture.’

  ‘I know the picture. Oh - heavens - yes! It’s all so unutterably consoling and as you said romantic, and yet -’

  ‘Why shouldn’t poor sinners be consoled?’

  ‘Yes. But about retribution, when you say you want to be judged is that just a general idea, something “soft”, to use your word, or do you relate it to things you’ve done, as it were - ?’

  ‘Oh well -’ said Guy. He smiled again, sadly, his dark eyes fixed intently upon Anne. His eyes were moist and shining in his dry pale face where the skin was stretched so tight across the bones.

  ‘I mean I’m not asking what you accuse yourself of, or just about how you think of it -’

  ‘We specialize, don’t you think?’ said Guy. ‘We are selectively decent, if we are decent at all. We each have one or two virtues which we cultivate, not much really. Or we pick a virtue which always seems to help, to mediate goodness somehow, as it might be resolution, or benevolence, or innocence, or temperance, or honour. Something not too large, not too impossibly hard that seems to suit us somehow -’

  ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘My - ? Oh nothing high. Something like accuracy.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same as truth?’

  ‘No. We are not really very versatile when it comes to being good, we are awfully limited creatures. How much scrutiny would the lives of the saints stand up to? Everybody is beastly to someone. Even your friend Jesus, what do we really know about him? He had the luck to be celebrated by five literary geniuses.’

  ‘Luck? Well -’

  ‘Our vices are general, dull, the ordinary rotten mud of human meanness and cowardice and cruelty and egoism, and even when they’re extreme they’re all the same. Only in our virtues are we original, because virtue is difficult, and we have to try, to invent, to work through our nature against our nature -’

  ‘But doesn’t every vice have its corresponding virtue. I mean aren’t they defined in terms of each other?’

  ‘Only apparently. For virtue is awfully odd. It’s detached, something on its own.’

  ‘You mean demonic?’

  ‘That’s another romantic idea. No, I won’t pick it up. Just - original - idiosyncratic - odd - Vices are general, virtues are particular. They aren’t in a continuum of general improvement.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Anne. ‘They must be related to each other in some sort of -’

  ‘System? Hierarchy? That’s metaphysics.’

  ‘And virtue is often quiet and dull, I’ve seen it. I agree it’s specialized. We are good in a small area that suits us. But you are thinking of virtue as being all interesting and original inside, and I don’t see that. It’s a sort of - conjecture.’

  ‘I didn’t say “interesting” - and it is a conjecture - But you asked me if ... when I wanted punishment ... I wanted it ... for anything in particular ...’

  Guy was staring at her intently. Anne was suddenly frightened and felt her face flushing. It had occurred to her that Guy might actually want to make some sort of confession. Suppose he were now to tell her something terrible, something that was on his mind, tormenting him? Was it for this that he had asked to see her? She thought, if I were a priest it would be my duty to hear it. But I am not a priest. With me it would be muddled and personal. I have no role here, no magic power to transform what might happen, no authority to touch his soul. I could say nothing good to him and he would regret it.

  She said gently, ‘I think I am tiring you. Gertrude said I mustn’t stay long.’

  Guy continued to stare at her. Then he sighed, smiled a little mocking smirking grimace, and turned his head away. He said, ‘I frightened you just now, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it was nothing. And it’s - all right. Hey, hey, the white swan. Nurse will come in a minute anyway.’

  ‘I must go.’

  Guy turned back to look at her. Anne felt a surge of emotion which almost made her gasp. She trembled. She felt for a moment, I can’t go.

  Guy stretched out his hand towards her. Anne took hold of the thin papery hand, feather-light in her strong grasp, and leaned over and kissed it.

  ‘Oh Anne - go now - we’ll talk - another time -’

  But Anne never saw Guy again.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got for our supper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bloody Christ.’

  ‘I suppose we can buy something.’

  ‘Oh shit!’

  Tim Reede and his girl Daisy Barrett were sitting drinking in the Prince of Denmark. Tim was drawing the Prince of Denmark cat. The cat, a slim black beast with a noble bony face and white paws, was cold and vain. It stared contemptuously at Tim out of its ice-green eyes, then stretched voluptuously and adopted another pose. Tim started again. That cat (its name was Perkins) had a larger repertoire of attitudes than any cat Tim had ever drawn, and he had drawn many a cat. The Prince of Denmark, a pub near Fitzroy Square, had also possessed a dog called Barkiss, an animal of infinite jest, recently kidnapped by a passing client. Tim and Daisy liked the place because it was quiet and unfashionable and seedy. There was a big mahogany bar with a superstructure or screen composed of little pivoting panels of Victorian engraved glass which looked like the east end of a Greek orthodox church. There was indeed an ecclesiastical atmosphere. The place was dimly lit and smoky and the customers talked in low voices. Little cubicles, like confessionals, lined one wall. Tim and Daisy were seated in one of these. There was no juke box.

  The time was nine in the evening and the day was five days later than the day upon which, as narrated at the start, Manfred and the Count
and Sylvia Wicks and Stanley Openshaw and Mrs Mount and Tim had gathered for Visiting Hour at Ebury Street. Since then Tim had been there, including the present evening, twice. He did not always ask Gertrude for food, it had to be done casually. He hoped she did not observe in any detail the results of his raids on her kitchen. If he took a little bit of a lot of things it would not show. Tim didn’t want to acquire the reputation of a scrounger. What he had laid out now in front of Daisy upon the beer-stained table was as follows: two slices of bread roughly smeared with butter, two pieces of cheese, one cheddar, one stilton, two tomatoes, four oatmeal biscuits, a slice of cold roast lamb and a small bit of fruitcake.

  ‘I don’t think it’s too bad,’ said Tim.

  ‘Weren’t there any cold potatoes?’

  ‘No.’

  Tim’s mackintosh, into the capacious pockets of which he had hastily stuffed the goodies, hung on the back of his chair, dripping. It was raining outside, and a cold east wind was making the rain run rippling across the streets of north Soho, which glittered like rivers under the street lamps. The brief snow was now gone and forgotten. Daisy had been waiting for Tim for some time.

  ‘I think we’re getting too poor. OK, we wanted to be poor, we chose to be poor, but this is ridiculous. How is it that everybody else has got money and we haven’t? How is it that they can earn money and we can’t? We have talents, why can’t we sell them?’

  Tim did not know the answer. Tim and Daisy had long made a joke of being penniless. They counted themselves as wanderers, misfits, flotsam and jetsam, orphans of the storm, babes in the wood, mendicant artists, destitute hedonists on a perpetual picnic. Tim had a one-day-a-week teaching job at a polytechnic in Willesden. Daisy, who used also to teach painting, was (Tim hoped temporarily) unemployed. Payment was by the hour, so there was no pay for holidays. The term was now near its end and (Tim had not yet told Daisy) he was not to be employed next term. They both, rather furtively and without telling each other, collected National Assistance. Only somehow, perhaps because they failed to fill in the forms properly, they never seemed to get as much as other people. Their rents had lately been raised (they lived separately now). They had discussed stealing but agreed that they were conditioned against it and would be terrified of the disgrace, it was nothing to do with morality. They could have lived more cheaply it they could have made up their minds to give up drink or to live together again, but they could not make either of these decisions. Spatial problems in cheap rooms had defeated them. Tim now ameliorated their plight (he had a more extensive social life than Daisy) by removing food from the houses to which he was invited (this surely was not stealing). Any sort of party was a bonus, especially a big reception where one could pocket sandwiches. He had laid in a store of nourishment at Jeremy Schultz’s bar mitzvah. (Stale sandwiches are delicious fried.) The wedding of Moses Greenberg’s niece to one of the Lebowitzim was now happily in prospect.

  Tim and Daisy had been together now for a long time, and it was not easy, even for them, to define what their relation was. Earlier Tim would have married Daisy had it not been for her surprisingly ferocious hostility to the institution of marriage, which she connected with ‘homes and gardens and hoovering the wall-to-wall carpet and generally becoming dead’. She had a special resentment against idle women who married so as not to work, and lived lives of bourgeois selfishness. The ‘haves’ with their husbands and their kiddies and their houses full of bloody furniture! Worthless people full of moral complacency and contempt for others! Daisy and Tim prided themselves on being free and having no possessions. They saw themselves as having deliberately and happily missed the bus. They had been young together. Now they were not so young together. Though still childish, they acknowledged the years, years which were fleeting by for both of them. They were comrades with a special relationship. It had long been established that they suited each other, and no one else seemed to suit either of them, and they had searched long enough. They were, for each other, the only ones they couldn’t leave. They had lived, and lived still, by a light of romance, tracking each other across London and meeting in pubs and afternoon drinking clubs as they had done when they were students. These rendezvous, which took place daily, were more thrilling than dull old living together which they had tried and discarded. They envisaged life, they said, as soldiering on from one little festival to another, and for them almost anything counted as a festival. They conspired to be eternally youthful, and on that they restlessly rested.

  They had both, as children, had unhappy homes, and this seemed to make them ‘like brother and sister’, two of a kind. Daisy had a French Canadian father; the family name was Barrault, but had been changed for some reason, by her eccentric father to Barrett. Her mother was a Bloomsbury lady, remotely related to Virginia Woolf, who had been a dim dilettante painter in a Euston Road style and a protégée of Duncan Grant. The marriage broke up when Daisy (an only child) was four. The mother and child stayed in London, the father returned to Canada. He had been some sort of sculptor, according to Daisy, but turned more successfully to art business. Daisy’s mother, who wanted to be ‘in society’, but was now very poor, resented Daisy who, she thought, somehow prevented her from marrying again. The mother died when Daisy was ten and she went to Canada to her father who, though fitfully affectionate, regarded the child as a confounded nuisance. In due course he took her back to England and dumped her at Roedean; while he increasingly lived in France. Holidays were spent scrappily in hotels. Daisy hated Roedean. Then noticing that she was becoming tall and handsome, her father fetched her to Paris to share a house with his latest mistress. Shortly after that he became bankrupt and returned to Montreal to drink himself to death, leaving Daisy in Neuilly-sur-Seine with a remote relation whom she knew as Tante Louise. Encouraged by some of her father’s friends, Daisy began to study art. To escape from Tante Louise she came to London and lived there as an art student. Her father, while he lived, sent her an irregular but not ungenerous allowance. She had talent, and finally reached the Slade. It was here that she met Tim, who was two years her junior. She spoke perfect French but detested France.

  Tim’s history was different but equally unsatisfactory. His father, who was Irish but had always lived in England, had been a barrister and an amateur musician. Music not law was his real love and he finally gave up his law practice. He was a good pianist but never achieved excellence. He had dabbled in composition, but now devoted himself wholly to it, at first with some modest success. He was a big brilliant funny laughing red-haired man, a great success with women. He had a fine baritone voice and knew every song. He could play anything on the piano. He was a concert in himself, whether comic or serious. As a husband and father he had fewer talents. Tim’s mother was also a musician. She had played the flute in the Jeunesse Musicale, later in the London Symphony Orchestra. She was a Welsh girl of modest background and delicate health (she had had TB as a child) and was briefly extremely beautiful. The two got married in haste and repented at leisure, at least Tim’s mother repented. Tim’s father, who departed soon after the birth of Tim and his sister Rita, showed no sign of uneasy feelings. He went to America, and though his musical career gradually foundered he apparently did not cease to enjoy himself. He married again, then divorced. He turned up in England at intervals to see the children of whom he was, when he saw them, demonstratively fond. Neither parent attempted to give Tim or Rita any musical education. The father was absent, the mother, whose flute was heard no more, had no will to urge her unruly children to practise the art which had brought her only sad memories.

  The children adored their father. In the rather dreary and impecunious life which they were living with their mother in a London suburb he was a beam of brilliant light, a being from another world, a boisterous shining god. The children laughed and shouted with pleasure when the big handsome red-headed papa made his appearance and sat down at the piano. They mourned his departures and longed for his return and lived in a dream of going to join him in some par
adise of wealth and freedom (they assumed of course he was vastly rich) on the other side of the Atlantic. Their frail nervous irritable disappointed impoverished money-grabbing mother excited their aversion. Their talk was always of when they would ‘get away’. Their mother’s departure came first however. When Tim was twelve and Rita was ten the unhappy woman reverted to her TB and died, and Tim and Rita were whisked off to Cardiff where they lived in the family of their maternal uncle, among cousins who resented their presence. Tim, who dreamed of protected children in warm nurseries, was tormented by a gaggle of disorderly little girls. When Tim was fourteen Rita died of anorexia nervosa, a disease at that time very little understood. After the mother’s death the brilliant father never reappeared. He was killed fairly soon after in a motor accident.

  However the god-like papa had in fact laid up one last useful little treat for his children and it was through this that Tim came in due course into contact with Ebury Street. His father had been in his London days, a friend of Rudi Openshaw, also a musical lawyer, who was one of Guy’s uncles. Cornelius Reede (for that was the father’s name) had left in his will some money in trust for his children, in the care of Rudi Openshaw and the ‘family bank’. Rudi became in effect the children’s guardian. He was a bachelor, awkward with children, and saw his wards only once when he came to Cardiff to make some financial arrangements with Tim’s uncle. These arrangements, though welcome to the uncle’s family, did not improve Tim and Rita’s lot in any way. Rita died. Rudi died; and the trust for Tim’s benefit passed to Guy’s father, and later to Guy, who became in this odd way in loco parentis to Tim.

  Tim’s desire was and had always been to get back to London. When he was seventeen, with Guy’s father’s consent and the blessing of his uncle, aunt and cousins, he travelled to the capital to become an art student. He suspected later that the idea of his studying art had arisen not through an analysis of his talents, but because this represented an easy inexpensive way of giving him a scrappy bit of further education. What Tim never knew was that the trust money had given out some time earlier and that Tim’s quite lengthy student days were financed by Guy’s father, later by Guy, out of their own pockets. Guy never told anyone, not even Gertrude, about this. Tim’s tuition was paid for (later he obtained a government grant) and he received a modest allowance upon which he lived in a student hostel, then in digs. He began his studies in a suburban art school, after which, to his teachers’ surprise and not least to his own, he scrambled into the Slade. When he had finished his final course Guy informed him that the trust money was nearly at an end and that the allowance could continue only for another six months. After all, thought Guy, the young fellow must learn to stand on his own feet. Whether Tim ever stood there was something which Tim himself often wondered. When Tim left the Slade he was twenty-three and Guy was thirty-four.