Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  Tim had crossed France by train, then come by bus to the village which was seven kilometres from the house. From the village he walked, after purchasing bread and wine. His first concern on entering had been to inspect the larder. This store-house exceeded his wildest dreams. Tin upon tin stretched away into endless recesses, jars of apricots, figs, plums, peaches marshalled themselves upon the upper shelves, immense jars of olive oil lurked in corners, wine bottles glistened in racks, virgin whiskies in cardboard boxes. Tim thought, I can live the whole summer off this, after all, Gertrude said I could eat anything I liked, and I can save the money she’s given me in advance for my salary! The desert island life! I knew it would suit me down to the ground. I’m a solitary chap by nature, I’ve just never had a chance to be really alone. The garage revealed two bicycles, one male, one female, both in working order. Tim (it was now the fourth day on his desert island) had biked twice to the village for bread and milk, fruit, vegetables and the local wine (he felt he ought not to drink the serious stuff in the racks). He had already made friends Frenchlessly with the shop keepers. He had, in his solitude, a new and invigorating feeling of independence. He was entirely alone for the first time in years.

  His solitude was not, however, going to last. Daisy was coming. Tim looked forward to her arrival, looked forward to showing her all the things and places he had made his own. (He felt he had lived here for months already.) Yet also he felt a bit sad. Daisy’s restlessness would alter his perceptions; and he would have liked to be really alone in Gertrude’s house, it would in a way have made him more honest. Of course he had not breathed a word about Daisy to Gertrude. Not that, he imagined Gertrude would have minded, said ‘in that case, no or anything. He was not quite sure why, but it was somehow clear that he could not ask Gertrude if he could take his girlfriend along. It was an aesthetic matter really. He could never have explained Daisy. (He felt herein protective about her.) There would have been an embarrassment, a wrong impression, and somehow Gertrude’s vast imaginative act of kindness would have been insulted and spoiled. Yet was he not insulting and spoiling it now by deceiving her? As often in his life, Tim felt he was in a slightly shady position which had become unobtrusively inevitable. Of course it was not very important. Gertrude need never know, and if later she did find out that a woman had been there, Tim could say that Daisy was travelling in France and had dropped in for a day or two. What made Tim sadder really than his little deception was the fact that now he did just intensely want to be, in this paradise, alone.

  Gertrude had indeed been immensely kind. Before even he left her on the evening when he had broached the matter of being ‘short of money’ she had given him a sizeable cheque, payment in advance for some of his caretaking work and for some hypothetical pictures. Overcome, confused, Tim had offered to deliver, should she wish it, his entire present oeuvre to the flat in Ebury Street. Gertrude had laughingly agreed to accept ‘a little drawing’ as a gift. Long and earnestly, back at the garage, did Tim ponder upon what to give her. Looking at his work in the light of this question made him see, for a piercing moment, how bad most of it was. Cats were out of the question. Some of the crucifixion drawings had charm but were, he had to admit, slight. At last he uncovered one of his earlier works, a pastel sketch for a never-completed Leda and the Swan, a pretty piece that certainly looked like something, though without the title (which Tim did not append) it would have been difficult to say what. This he mounted and framed and wrapped and carried to Ebury Street, rather cravenly hoping that he would not have to have another interview with Gertrude, the last one having been so perfect. Fortunately she was out, and he handed the drawing over at the door into the keeping of cold censorious Anne Cavidge.

  He had hastened at once of course to tell Daisy, had taken the Victoria Line to Warren Street and run all the way from there to the Prince of Denmark where Daisy was waiting to hear what had happened. Daisy had behaved exactly as he expected, saying ‘fuck bloody France’, ‘bugger bloody Frogs’, and declaring that she would never set foot on Gertrude’s property, but falling in with the plan all the same and even becoming childishly excited about it. Already on the following day she was combing through her wardrobe wondering what clothes she would take with her. Tim told his usual lie about having let his studio to the niece of the garage man who wanted to spend a time in London. Daisy forgot her objections to letting her flat and immediately remembered a holidaying American girl who might be just the person to take it on for the summer. The girl however was away for a week and Daisy had remained behind to await her return and make the letting arrangements. Tim had cleaned Daisy’s flatlet from end to end and made it look much more attractive and presentable. Then he had left for France. There was still a space of four days before Daisy’s earliest arrival. Yes, he knew that once she had arrived he would enjoy her company. But now, looking upon the blue-grey shimmer of the rock walls he felt how much better and happier he would have been if he had really planned to be here alone. He had decided to leave the problem of the broken window until Daisy arrived with her perfect French. There was plenty of time, and the French word for ‘window pane’ eluded him, even, hang it, the word for ‘glass’.

  Out of a cloudless sky a sunflower sun blazed down upon an earth still cool from night. The shadows etched the rocks into silently changing forms. A vast silence possessed the little valley. Swallow-tail butterflies visited the white-pink oleander. Upon the low wall of the terrace panting lizards with spider feet lifted up their reptilian heads. From their nest beside the fig tree an army of ants crossed the flag stones in two close columns, one coming, one going. Tim breathed. Behind him the glass doors of the sitting-room stood open. Hairy centipedes, equally at home inside and outside the house, scuttled then paused, brown smudges upon warm grey stone or cool plastered wall. Huge dark moths, escorted by mosquitoes, flittered into the darkness of the house. (Only the upper windows had mosquito netting.) Behind an open shutter a green toad sat thinking.

  Tim had had his breakfast, consisting of fresh crusty village bread, pallid creamy village butter, and Keiller’s orange marmalade from the larder, accompanied by milky coffee. He had prepared a picnic lunch consisting of bread and butter, some paté from a tin, cheese, a yellow apple and a bottle of wine. The goodies were in a basket, the painting gear in his rucksack. After reflection, he had brought with him to France only water colour, gouache, and wax crayon. He breathed, he looked. He picked up his things and set off, crossed the flowery ‘lawn’ and the olive grove, traversed the streamlet on a wooden bridge set in a density of willows and green canes, passed through the middle of the aligned poplars, went steeply up through the vineyard, and made for the rocks. Tim had not at first gone far afield, there was so much to enjoy near the house. He had drawn the fig tree, the spear-leaved willows, the old tortured glaring olive trees with their sweet veils of silver foliage. The poplars defeated him. Many an impressionist could have rendered those straight smooth densely textured stems, those high clouds of flickering communicating leaves; but Tim could not. Dutifully, he had at once attempted to draw the house, but this too was curiously hard. The interest of the house lay in the squareness of the upper windows, the odd way the tower grew out of the roof, the live faintly powdery colour of the well-cut rectangular grey stones, the shallow tilt and faded look of the tiles. In Tim’s sketches the house looked quaint and dreadfully English. He was in any case by now becoming obsessed by the rocks.

  A little path which he was following hopped here and there among the vertical strivings of the rocks, mysteriously keeping its identity. Already the house was out of sight. The sun was hot on Tim’s neck and a pleasant runnel of perspiration drew its light touch down his brow and crept onto his cheek. He was climbing. Down in the valley the cicadas were singing, but the rocks had their own silence disturbed only by his breath and the occasional scrape of his shoe. A distant bird chucked. But it was a sadly bird-less land. The only wild things he had seen were some very early morning rabbits playing among th
e olives. What he had taken to be animal bones turned out to be pieces of stripped wood bleached white, very smooth and shapely. He had already collected some of these. Close to, the rocks were whitish grey, close-grained and extremely hard, covered with tiny black spots. They were ridgy with small undulations as if convenient to the hand. They rose out of each other in pillared segments, each tilted and recessed a little from the one below, so that there was an effect of steps, and up these steps, following intermittent lodgements of grass and earth, the path continued; and it was a path, a trodden way of pilgrimage although the landscape through which Tim moved was one of the emptiest he had ever seen. Despite the olive groves and apricot orchards and vineyards down below, there was absolutely no sign of human beings. The few houses he had seen, all closer to the village, turned out to be derelict, or else shuttered up like little fortresses, their owners far away in Paris or London. The village was populous enough, but outside it the population ceased. Once, upon the road, when he saw a man in the distance, his heart had fluttered with fear. Up among the rocks there was nobody, and yet there was a path.

  Tim’s objective was an amazing place which he had discovered the previous day, just as he was about to set off for home. Twilight sent him homeward promptly. He was frightened of that empty rock-lorded land at night, and indeed during the day too. He had been drawing an ash tree that hung over a small chasm. Then he had been attempting to draw a rock formation. As has been mentioned, the visual arts had been Tim’s university, but his studies therein had been eclectic and eccentric. When quite young he had been immensely pleased and impressed by some drawings of rocks by Ruskin. He had thought that if he could ever draw one tenth (hundredth) as well as Ruskin he would be content with his life (he still thought this). Having (on the previous afternoon) found the grey spotty rocks curiously undrawable, he gave up, returned to the path, and began to climb higher, hoping to reach the crest, which seemed so near, and to look down (which he had not yet done) into another valley, another country. He was searching in fact for somewhere to swim. Tim loved swimming, it had been one of the few joys of his time in Wales, but in recent years it had almost entirely passed out of his life. The streamlet near the house was too small to swim in, but it boded other water, and Tim had climbed towards the crest hoping therefrom to see, perhaps below him, a tree-shaded river, green pools. He did not reach the crest; the rocks he saw as the summit revealed beyond them another summit, and then another. But he found something else. The path had made one of its intermittent stops at a narrow square-cut rocky cleft, rather like a door. Tim hesitated, then decided that his way led through the cleft. Holding the two sides of the rock, he had to lever himself up onto a step-like platform within the ‘doorway’, and then to descend two or three smaller rock steps on the other side. Occupied with scrambling, he did not look about him until he had descended onto a level place beyond, where there was an unexpected stretch of grass. Then he looked up and saw it.

  It was a rock, a rock face, and indeed in some unspecifiable way like a face, which some fifty or so yards away down an enclosed glade rose before him. Uneven rocky walls rising on either side shut out the declining sunlight and the place was dim. At the far end there was a sort of cliff, something quite unlike the endless tilted ridgy progressions of the open rocks. Part way up this cliff, and in the uncertain light seeming almost to hang separated from it, was a conspicuous paler area which looked like marble. The stone here was smoother, as if polished, nearly circular, and pitted with shadowy marks. It glowed a little like an occluded mirror. The cliff above it was darker in colour, scored with vertical straight lines, very faint like pencil lines. The relation of the parts was unclear. Sometimes it looked as if the lower paler part was itself a face, or a head wearing a crown. Sometimes the whole large formation looked like an indecipherable awful countenance. At the top, how high Tim could not reckon, there was a dark irregular mark, probably a large crack containing vegetation. From somewhere above that, long strands of creeper were hanging down. Most amazing however to Tim’s startled gaze as he advanced across the grass was something which had been invisible at first. At the base of the cliff below the ‘marble’ where the rock was recessed a little, there was a large circular pool of very clear water. The gleaming pool was so round, its rock edges so smooth, that Tim could scarcely believe it to be a work of nature. He looked upon it with awe. Then all of a sudden he was aware of the absolute silence, the absolute solitude, the darkening air. He turned and fled, scrambling through the door-like cleft and scuttling away down the winding path between the rocks, across the vineyard, through the poplars, over the murky bridge, between the twisted olive trees, up the meadowy lawn, over the terrace and into the house, where he turned on all the lights and closed and bolted the doors.

  Today, in the bright morning light, a good deal braver, he was going to revisit the Great Face, perhaps even draw it. He had some difficulty in finding it since his path seemed to have developed since yesterday any number of tributaries and ambiguities in its upper reaches, and he kept discovering new and distracting marvels, such as rock-bound shelves where little pink and white tulips were growing upon miniature lawns. At last when he thought himself lost and about to reach the real summit of the endlessly receding piled-up rocks, he suddenly saw, some distance away, his narrow cleft gate, now below him, and began to clamber down towards it panting and streaming with sweat. He pulled himself onto the high step of the gate, and in a moment was standing once more upon the long stretch of grass in the enclosed presence of the Great Face.

  In the daylight the huge thing looked different but no less awe-inspiring. Tim could now see, far up, the V-shaped crack out of which some ferny vegetation was hanging. The pendent creepers came from farther above where the rock merged into leaves and shadows, he could not see the top of it. The descending cliff with the narrow ‘pencil lines’ was now seen to be marked by a yellowish moss which grew in the narrow shallower scoring of the lines, giving to the rock a soft glowing stripy look. The round area beneath was remarkable, slightly salient, without vegetation, shadowed still but glistening in the bright reflected light. It hung above Tim, its lowest part a little above the level of his head, and its diameter might have been about twenty feet. Below it the rock receded into a shadowy alcove. Coming nearer Tim saw that the whole circular surface, of a pallid creamy whiteness which contrasted with the surrounding rock, was gleaming with water which seemed to be somehow exuding from the round shallow pores with which it was lightly pitted. The water veiled the rock, yet did not drip into the pool below.

  The stone basin, seen by day, was clearly a work of nature, though a surprising one. It was circular, roughly the same size as the pale sweating stone above it. The verge was formed of the grey spotted rock which here rose vertically out of the grass, surrounding the water with a sort of broad undulating frill, and joining the base of the cliff in the rocky ‘alcove’ which projected a little way over the pool. The water of the basin was, as Tim had apprehended last night, particularly pure and clear, almost radiant with its own clarity. It was difficult to say how deep it was, perhaps eight or ten feet in the centre, towards which the sides gently and regularly sloped. The entire floor of the basin, including its sloping sides, was covered with small crystalline pebbles, some white, some creamy, as if little stony tears had dropped down from the face above. Gazing at the strange pool Tim saw, with a further thrill of surprise, that the whole body of contained translucent water was very very faintly, throughout its entire extent, shuddering or quivering but with so small a vibration that the transparency of the medium was unaffected, while being as it were shot through by swift invisible almost motionless lines. Nor was the tension of the surface disturbed at all. The basin was evidently a source, but where exactly the water rose from and where it departed to Tim was unable to determine. None spilled over the side, nor was any streamlet visible nearby. The beautiful radiant pool simply quivered in perpetual occult donation and as perpetual renewal.

  Tim stood fo
r a while gazing at the cliff and at the pool, and his heart was so filled with joy that at one moment he had to clutch at it with both hands. The great round white pitted rock now seemed to hang there like a vast heroic shield. It was (or did he imagine this?) faintly steaming in the hot air, although the sun was not shining, perhaps never shone, directly upon it. He began to look cautiously round about him, at the expanse of grass which was so fine and short as if cropped by sheep (only there were no sheep) and at the way in which the loop of grey rocks, composing a narrow amphitheatre, made the place so secret. At last his pulse slowed down and he walked back to the cleft where, at the base of the ‘doorway’, he had left his rucksack and his basket.

  The idea of swimming in the pool had at once occurred to Tim, and been at once rejected. He could not sully that pure water with his sweat or with his gross splashing interrupt its sibylline vibration. He permitted himself only to break the surface with his fingers. It was extremely cold. Now Tim unpacked his little stool, his sketch book, his pencils, his crayons, his paint box and brushes, his handy water-pot, filled at the kitchen tap. He had that pure clean blessed beginning-again feeling. He was full of grace. He sat down, completely happy, and began to draw.