Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I’d have married you long ago you know that, only you hated the idea of marriage, you hated the very word!’

  ‘Do you imagine we’d have been different married?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s worse than ever. I feel I’m in hell.’

  ‘This is what hell is like, where we live, where we’ve always lived. No money, rows, and off to the pub. Christ, why did I ever get mixed up with bloody men?’

  ‘Oh let’s stop fighting. I apologize.’

  ‘He apologizes! Laissez moi rire!’

  ‘Let’s try and be as we were.’

  ‘We shall never be as we were.’

  ‘Not that that was up to much.’

  ‘You’re spoilt, you’re not my old Tim any more. You smell of that woman.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Daisy darling. Don’t hurt me. OK, we two have made our hell, but can’t we unmake it by mutual consent?’

  ‘Are you suggesting a suicide pact?’

  ‘Or at least be quietly together and not hurt each other.’

  ‘In the municipal graveyard under the mown grass.’

  ‘Oh be serious -’

  ‘ “Be serious” he says. Do you think I’m in a joking mood about this - this - Oh you unspeakable cad!’

  ‘Daisy, I know you’re jealous, or you were jealous -’

  ‘Jealous? You stupid shit -’

  ‘Yes, I am stupid, forgive me my stupidity and all the rest too. If you won’t forgive me, no one will, so you’ve got to forgive me.’

  ‘I don’t see why. I hope you burn. If you aren’t careful I’ll put you in my novel. That’s the worst punishment I can think of for anyone.’

  ‘Dear Daisy, you will be kind to me, you are kind to me -’

  ‘Oh you-I was going to say “rat” - you - guinea pig! You’re a male chauvinist guinea pig. Except that guinea pigs don’t whine.’

  ‘I’m not whining.’

  ‘You make me sick. The sight of your stupid pulpy face makes me sick. OK then, let’s go to the pub. Let’s get sozzled while the money lasts.’

  Tim and Daisy were living in a furnished flat near Finchley Road Station. The flat had been let to them at a modest rent by one of Daisy’s mysterious female friends who was temporarily in America. It was a pleasant quiet flat mainly furnished with bamboo chairs and tables and very large brown cushions which lay upon the floor. There was plenty of room for Daisy’s ailing potted plants. Tim had felt a frenzied need to get right away from anywhere where they could ever find him. (Some of them lived in Hampstead, but not near Finchley Road.) The idea of seeing any of them again, Anne, the Count, Manfred, Stanley, Gerald, made him feel sick with horror. He did not consider seeing Gertrude, he did not touch this idea even with the finest remotest tentacles of his imagination. He was, in spite of Daisy’s battering, in spite of their ambiguous addictive quarrels, trying to settle down to his new life which was also in such a strange way his old life.

  Of course they were not as they were. Tim now looked back upon the old days, when he was painting cats and Daisy was writing her novel and they were having picnic lunches together and meeting every evening at the Prince of Denmark and occasionally making love, as a period of aboriginal innocence. They had been as children. Now he had spoilt all that. He was not Daisy’s old Tim any more. The occasion of the loss caused him such misery that he did not come to work out whether he regretted the loss itself. No doubt the old world had been illusory, not as it seemed. Lies seemed to be everywhere in his life. He could see, still, the worth of Daisy, her courage, her extraordinary tolerant kindness to him. At the same time he saw even more clearly the impossibility of their relationship, an impossibility which they had lived with so long: the rows, the drink, the drift into chaos, the particular way in which they laboured at mutual destruction. Yet even all this could still seem innocent because, out of a kind hopelessness, they still forgave each other.

  Tim was in extreme pain, a greater pain than he had ever felt before. When Gertrude had rejected him, when she had broken off their so improbable engagement and he had run back to Daisy on the previous occasion, he had suffered extremely. He had felt the misery of rejection and deprivation. He had loved Gertrude with wild erotic joy and deep attentive tenderness; and when she had said, ‘I cannot’, Tim had felt his grief as the most extreme that he had ever known. But it had been more bearable, not only because he had then, much as he loved his fiancée, loved her less than he had later loved his wife, but also because the miserable loss had not been his fault. He had run back to his hiding place thinking, I have always been unlucky, it was too good to be true; and he had thought this severance and this disappointment to be the worst thing that he could suffer.

  His thought, winding ingeniously and endlessly in and out of the past, dwelt occasionally upon the fact that at that earlier time too he had been deceiving Gertrude upon a material point. Yet, she did not know it, which made him, because innocent in her eyes, more somehow innocent. And who was to say how soon he might not have told Gertrude everything if he had been left with her in his first happy state? The shock of her rejection, his loss of confidence, had, he told himself, tended towards the fatal delay in the confession later. There was also the fact that he had gone straight back to Daisy and to Daisy’s bed. How important was that? He was not then to know that he would win Gertrude back. Sometimes he wondered, what exactly is it that I am accused of which makes me feel so cripplingly guilty and gives me this awful new pain with which I can scarcely live? Had he deliberately pulled some filth of sinfulness over himself like a cover? He had been prompt to take Gertrude’s money out of the bank, and no small sum. He had once more run to Daisy, and if he was not yet in Daisy’s bed this was no doubt a temporary accident of their mutual unhappiness and congenital irritation with each other. What have I done, he thought, what does it amount to? Sometimes he felt that his punishment was the main evidence against him.

  It remained that his frightful loss tormented him in a mode of intense guilty remorse. He felt himself permanently stained and damaged by what had happened. He recalled what Gertrude had once said about ‘a moral danger, a moral frightfulness’. What did she know of such perils? He had fallen into a trap of sin like someone falling into a deep pit and although he still did not quite understand why, he took the full consequences as something unavoidable and even just. He had messed around too long, juggled too much, tried to have everything every way and nothing properly, told too many easy and convenient lies. And if he now felt wretchedly miserable because he had been found out and punished, he did not thereby excuse himself. He fiddled around with the problem of what exactly Gertrude thought, what exactly she had said. But he knew that he had cheated. The phenomenon of Daisy was large in his life, it stretched far back into his earliest youth, it was, and perhaps would finally be, the main sense and enterprise of his existence. He could not magic it away out of his past or his present. When he thought of this phenomenon he sometimes hated Daisy; but this too was not for the first time.

  The old Daisy problems were back. They could not live together, they could not live apart. They managed to share the flat for the moment because it was fairly large and they could get away from each other. They slept in separate rooms. Tim in the small bedroom slept with crossed arms, curled into a ball, or lay awake with his hands over his eyes, as the street lamps blazed through the thin curtains all night. During the day Daisy worked on her novel, or tried to and complained that she could not, but at least she stayed in her room. They went to various local pubs in the evenings and got drunk. Tim went out most of the day, occasionally he returned for lunch. Sometimes Daisy was out. They did not ‘tell their day’ any more. They irked each other with abrasive restless presences and itinerant unexplained absences. Doors banged. Tim had given up keeping the kitchen clean. The originally pleasant flat was beginning to resemble Daisy’s place in Shepherd’s Bush. He knew he would have to find somewhere else to live. They would have to return to the old method of meeting wh
ich had once (how touching!) seemed to them romantic. The problem of how they were to live was returning (as Gertrude’s money ran out) towards its old basis in lack of cash. Tim could not work and did not attempt to. He supposed that after a certain lapse of time it would be safe for Daisy to return to Shepherd’s Bush, for him to go back to the studio, but he could not bear to envisage it at present. Lanthano.

  When Tim had said to Daisy that he was ‘in hell’ he had indeed meant something that was ‘worse’, worse than ever before. Nightmares thronged his days and nights. He had frightful recurrent dreams. In one dream a soft floppy effigy, which he was watching with horror, and who was also himself, was being tossed in a blanket by a sinister circle of maliciously smiling girls. Similar effigies, in the form of half-animated demons, followed him slowly but relentlessly in dreams, like soft life-size dolls which came pushing up against him, and when he thrust them away came quietly back again. He was pursued by a stone head which rolled after him, groaning terribly as it went. He dreamed too of a hanged man whom, again, he saw but in some way was. The man, dead and yet also living and suffering horribly, was hanging from a long railing which looked like a stairhead. His eyes and mouth were open in frightful expressive pain, yet he was motionless, his hands and feet hanging limp, his head fallen on one side, a dreadful image of defeated punished guilt.

  During the day Tim walked, he walked down the Finchley Road, through Maida Vale along the Edgware Road to Hyde Park, or else through St John’s Wood to Regent’s Park. Sometimes he went to Kilburn or to his old haunts in the Harrow Road. More often he made for central London, always on foot, and walked in the parks or as far as Whitehall and the Embankment. Walking now was his task. (It was Anne Cavidge’s task too, and they nearly met head-on once in St James’s Park, only Anne stayed by the lake to watch the pelicans and Tim turned off the path and crossed the grass to the Mall. Thus they passed unknowingly within two hundred yards of each other.) Sometimes Tim went into the picture galleries. The galleries attracted him because of terrible things which he experienced there and which he had to keep morbidly returning to. He no longer dreamed at night that the National Gallery was dim and senseless. The dream had become true, he experienced it walking, in broad daylight. The pictures were all dull and stupid, trivial, incoherent, mean. The colours were filmed over as if he had become colour-blind, or else they were suddenly gaudy, garish like sweet papers, like drifting idle trash. He hated the pictures, their pretentiousness, their pompous sentimentality, their pretence of solemn meaning, their essential emptiness.

  Tim began to think about death. He felt tired of the stupid suffering which he was beginning to realize was like a virus, the very essence of his invaded being. No one inflicted the suffering, he was it and it would not go. It could not be removed or run from. When he had said to Daisy that hell might cease she had spoken of death. Well, Daisy could please herself, but he at least could go. He watched the big red friendly London buses rolling slowly along upon their great wheels. He imagined how he would move, slowly too, into the road, kneel, and then lie down carefully beneath one of those merciful moving wheels. It would be over in a second. The image consoled him. He knew indeed that he would not do this today or tomorrow, but it was good to know that it was so simple and he might do it some day.

  He did not dare to think much about Gertrude, it was too agonizing. Sometimes he tried to exorcize her by doubting his love: he had, after all, married her for money. He was no longer young, he had married her for security and ease. He had married her so that he could at last paint as he pleased. He feigned to persuade himself, while yet he knew that his strong terrible love for her survived like a hidden beast, a rabid dog that would have to be pulled from its cupboard one day and killed, or else would take a long time to starve to death. He wished sometimes, rather abstractly, that he could tell Gertrude that it had not been all lies, that it was not all bad, that the bad bit could be simply cut away and leave the rest. But what now was ‘the rest’? He himself had erased it. He never considered writing to her. He did not dream of her. He dreamed more often of his mother. He felt broken, and words like ‘integrity’ and ‘honour’ occurred to him as names of what he had lost: words which were new to him and which he resented. Where had he picked them up? Had he acquired them somehow from the Count? Had the words got out of the Count’s head and into his without being uttered? Could words do that?

  As time went by he thought less about the painful conundrum of his last conversation with Gertrude, and thought more about his last conversation with the Count. The Count had said nightmarish things like ‘I’m sure she would take you back’. Tim was not sure why those words were so repulsive. Perhaps because they reminded him of childhood, of his mother, of grudging untender pardons, of something on a scale which had nothing to do with him and Gertrude. The Count’s persuations, his ‘simple ideas’, had been really insults and proofs of his failure to understand. Of course the Count was doing his duty, and being the Count had done it conscientiously. His rival could hardly expect of him perfect sensibility and inspired eloquence as well. But other things which the Count had said had made sense for Tim, had touched live nerves, and remained with him as somehow uncontaminated thoughts. You ought to be alone, you ought to think and work. Oh yes, thought Tim, one can leave someone forever, it’s possible and I should know.

  If I were alone would it be better, he wondered, could I ever get back those things which I have lost, could I get back at least some scraps of some old innocence? If I were alone could I achieve a clean despair, a clean pain at last? Then I could deal with the beast in the cupboard. Then I could deal with the demons. Yes, when Gertrude and I danced that hay among the blue flowers it was with demons that we danced it.

  He thought, I ought to be alone, and not for any purpose except to be alone. He thought, will I leave Daisy in the end? But he knew that, like kneeling down in front of the merciful red bus, this would not happen today or tomorrow.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘THE ROCKS COME CLOSER at this time in the evening,’ said Anne.

  It was almost twilight, darkening but bright.

  They had pulled the table out of the archway onto the terrace and were sitting drinking white wine. The September evenings were very warm.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gertrude, ‘they become sort of unfocused, I can’t describe it exactly -’

  ‘I know,’ said Anne, ‘I can’t get them into focus either, they sort of jump at one.’

  ‘What colour would you say they were now?’ said the Count.

  ‘Pink? No. Grey? No. They’re certainly not white, yet they’re whitish.’

  ‘Spotty,’ said Gertrude. ‘Well, spotty isn’t a colour. Now I can scarcely see them at all, they’re dancing.’

  ‘In Polish,’ said the Count, ‘colour words are verbs too.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Gertrude.

  ‘One doesn’t just say, “it is red”, one can say “it reds”.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Anne. ‘So one feels the colour as sort of radiating actively from the thing, not just sitting passively in it.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The rocks are certainly pinking!’ said Gertrude. ‘You see they’ve changed - now they’ve gone fuzzy again. My God, how still it is.’

  They listened for a moment.

  ‘The cicadas have stopped.’

  ‘It’s so quiet and so clear, not a leaf stirring.’

  ‘Nothing stirring but the rocks!’

  ‘Look at the leaves of the willows and the olives - they’re sort of fixed, outlined in silver.’

  ‘It’s like a painting,’ said Anne.

  ‘Have some more wine?’ said the Count.

  ‘Count is wine steward,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘I must go shopping tomorrow,’ said Anne.

  ‘You’re always going shopping,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘Well, the driver must shop. I must go to the garage about the exhaust and fill up with petrol.’

  ‘W
e’ll come too,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘No, no, you two must do that walk.’

  Anne had driven Gertrude and the Count to Les Grands Saules in Guy’s Rover. The car had been laid up after Guy’s death, but it had proved quite easy to put on the road again. Guy, a careful meticulous driver, had kept it in excellent condition. Anne, with her brand new driving licence, had felt nervous at first, but the handsome car had eventually decided to drive itself.

  The idea of the three of them going to France had come up in rather a confused way. Gertrude had declared that Anne needed a holiday. After all, Anne had not been out of England for fifteen years, Anne ought to see France, Italy, again. Anne had responded that she thought Gertrude needed a holiday and if Gertrude wanted to go abroad she would go with her. Immediately after this exchange the Count, now a regular visitor at Ebury Street, had arrived for a drink and joined in. Certainly Gertrude needed a holiday. They discussed where Gertrude and Anne should go. Greece was not mentioned. It was Gertrude herself who suggested that they should go to Les Grands Saules, why not. Anne guessed that Gertrude wanted to confront and finish with her embarrassing memories of the episode there with Tim. Guy’s ghost, now Tim’s. By this time it had begun to seem natural, polite, inevitable that Gertrude should ask the Count to come with them. Had he not some leave which he could conveniently take? Why not come and stay at least a little while? After all, he surely needed a holiday too. It was the Count’s idea that Anne should drive them. (The Count of course had never learned to drive.) He became quite insistent. Anne was sadly strangely touched and her heart stirred within her. So the Count wanted to be driven by her. Driving and being driven is a significant relationship. Then she realized that the Count’s purpose was to cut out Manfred. The Count was becoming more confident, more positively Machiavellian.

  They had been there now for three days. The weather was steadily goldenly bright and hot. Anne could see, as in a glass, how happy she would have been to be here with Gertrude if only her heart were not in the process of being broken. It was as if the natural world, from which she had been exiled for so long, had come back to her, posing like a dancer and holding out its hands. No, that was not the image. It lounged rather before her like a lovely animal, it quietly purred and displayed itself. Anne had never liked the convent garden. It had seemed to her skimpy and formal and mean. She had taken her turn at working in it but it had inspired no interest and given no joy. The convent had been for her an indoor place, a hiding place: her little cell, the chapel, the dark corridors smelling of bread. The valley was, as Gertrude said, amazingly still and brilliant with detail. The little meadow where Tim and Gertrude had danced so long ago among the blue flowers was yellow now, the dry prickly grass smoothed and silkened in the evening light. A scattering of little mauve globe thistles had replaced the wild muscari of the spring. The old hunched-up olive trees stretched out their speary silvery foliage like the arrested hands of metamorphosed beings. Even the restless willows of the brook were still. Only the rocks moved, mysteriously mobile in the uncertain light. This was their hour. At other times of day they were starkly blindingly motionless.