Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  The holidaymakers had so far been unambitious. The sheer shock of finding themselves thus alone together had been considerable. The journey, rather unspontaneously hilarious, had been easier. Now suddenly, in this established given space, they had to sort themselves, move about, warily, in relation to each other. Gertrude of course allotted the rooms. She took the large bedroom which had been hers and Guy’s. Anne had the small corner room with the view two ways, over the valley and towards the cleft in the rocks. The Count was given the divan downstairs in Guy’s study, with the cloakroom beside it. In other matters, Anne took charge, and indeed the leadership of the trio seemed naturally to belong to her. The other two were lazy, laughingly compliant. Anne did the shopping and organized their cuisine. They had decided to live simply on bread and cheese and salads with olives and wine and the plentiful fruits of the season, figs and melons and warm golden furry apricots. Oddments from the village deep freeze might be called upon to vary this diet. Anne, with her self-appointed tasks, found it easy to leave Gertrude and the Count together. She also began to plead headaches. This was no fiction. She was being visited by an old enemy, migraine, brought on perhaps by looking so much at those enigmatic spotty unfocusable rocks.

  Since their arrival they had sufficiently amused themselves by walking about in the valley and climbing the nearer rocks. They had all had lunch in the village yesterday at the little hotel restaurant, and Anne had invented one or two pretexts to go shopping. There had been a lot of sitting about and drinking. In the evening they played cards, three-handed bridge, at which the Count was so good that he had to make deliberate mistakes to render the game viable. The other two laughed a lot and threw away their advantages. No one concentrated much. Gertrude, taught by Guy, was in fact not a bad player. Anne, who had not played for many years, was at first ambitious, anxious to regain her skill and win, but she soon stopped trying, especially after she realized that Peter was cheating. It became a game of chance.

  ‘Are you warm enough, darling?’ said Anne to Gertrude. ‘Shall I fetch your shawl?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Shall we eat? I mean, there’s nothing to eat but shall we eat it?’

  ‘Anne always says there’s nothing, and there’s a feast!’

  ‘Like the loaves and fishes.’

  ‘I’ll come and help,’ said the Count.

  ‘No, no -’ Anne never called him Peter in front of Gertrude.

  ‘Anne’s Martha and I’m Mary!’

  ‘Dear me, then who am I?’ said the Count.

  They laughed, as they always did at each other’s silly jokes.

  In spite of a certain quiet tension there was a holiday atmosphere. Gertrude had bought two new dresses, one of which she was wearing, a light yellow robe with wide sleeves, with a little necklace of blue Venetian beads close around her neck. Anne was wearing the cherry-blossom dress which Gertrude had given her. She had resolutely refused to let Gertrude give her any more clothes. The Count had, Anne suspected, invested in a whole new outfit. He wore light-weight flared trousers with a minute blue and white stripe, and a loose blue short-sleeved tunic shirt, open at the neck. His thin bony feet were on display in smart conspicuously unsmirched sandals. It was the first time Anne had seen him informally dressed. She was not sure if it suited him. She watched him now as he lounged, his long legs extended, his knuckles beating a noiseless rhythm on the tablecloth as he looked tenderly, smilingly, at Gertrude. His pale snake-blue eyes, which looked cold when he was sad, were sparkling now, narrowed between little folds of laughter-wrinkles. The sun had touched his cheek with a pinkness which looked almost like rouge. But his thin arms, emerging rather gawkily from the short shirt-sleeves, were white, covered with long drooping black hairs. Anne looked at the thin hairy arms and longed to stroke them very gently.

  ‘The only thing I miss in our diet is English cheese.’

  ‘Why don’t the French import it, they care so much about food?’

  ‘Chauvinism is stronger.’

  ‘When will the crickets begin to chant?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘I vote we eat now.’

  Anne rose to go to the kitchen.

  ‘Darling, would you bring my shawl after all?’ said Gertrude.

  The Count jumped up. ‘I know where it is.’ He ran in through the open glass doors of the sitting-room and brought out the shawl which he began to drape carefully over Gertrude’s shoulders.

  Anne retired quickly. It occurred to her that in preparation for what was to come she was trying to give up her love for Peter as she had given up smoking before it was time for her to enter the convent. Sex had not been difficult to give up. Giving up smoking had been harder. To stop loving Peter was impossible. She found herself, when alone, always stupidly close to tears.

  Anne knew how grateful the other two were to her, how necessary she was and how no one else could possibly, for both of them, have played this necessary part. The atmosphere of a well-suited holiday trio was not a fiction. She could imagine the pleasant things which, complicitly, they said about her when she was not there. Complicitly, looking into each other’s eyes. ‘Anne is marvellous, isn’t she?’ ‘Yes, a perfect dear.’ ‘I’m so fond of her.’ ‘So am I.’ Anne wonderfully enabled Gertrude and the Count to be together in a kind of loving peace without urgent problems, without dangerous decisions. Anne made continued speech between them possible and easy. Of course there was the tension in the air, a kind of high humming sound which they all heard, as of some vital time machine which was running its course. But Anne created, as if with her outstretched hands, a space for them, an interim wherein they did not have to consider either strategy or tactics.

  Anne did not think that anything would, during this holy time, ‘happen’. She was sorry about this. Being without hope, she wished that the matter could be hurried on to a conclusion. She even wondered whether anything which she could do would hustle them a little. She thought about Peter and Gertrude with the minute care of someone studying a mathematical or philosophical problem. She decided that Peter would do nothing (unless positively prompted to by his beloved) until after the anniversary of Guy’s death. Probably he would wait until next spring. He might indeed go on delaying out of sheer fear of a refusal. At present, enclosed in the space which Anne held sturdily open for him, he was happy. He could look at Gertrude as much as he liked, knowing that he was not yet expected to do anything else. And Gertrude too was grateful to relax; to rest, tended and adored by two devoted beings, held in the warm beam of their concerted love. She sighed now and then, with a sigh as of sad or bitter thoughts, yet at the same time stretching her limbs as if she were positively basking in the comfort of that focused attention.

  Would Gertrude say yes? In the end Anne thought she would. The presence of the Count in France was itself an indication. And in any case, whatever arrangement Peter and Gertrude came to, provided she did not marry someone else, if he were to become her happy cavaliere servente, there would be nothing there for hungry Anne. Of course, Anne had given some thought to Manfred. Gertrude had seen quite a lot of Manfred after the publication of Tim’s shame. But she concluded that nothing was to be hoped for in that quarter. Manfred was a selfish young bachelor (he was younger than Gertrude) with a secret life. No doubt he was fond of Gertrude, she was fond of him. But probably Manfred, if he wanted a partner, already had some convenient one stashed away somewhere. In any case, if he wanted Gertrude he was quite confident and self-assertive enough to set about getting her, and Anne, observing him closely when she could, had seen no signs of this. He was in a good position to put himself forward as Gertrude’s natural protector. As he had not done so presumably he did not want to. The Count had a clear field.

  Anne was making her own plans. She did not want, very much did not want, to hurt Gertrude. Nor, of course, did she want the merest, slightest hint of her own state of mind to reach the other two. They must never know. Their never knowing would be, in the time to come, an important part o
f Anne’s consolation. She would conduct them, like a priest, towards their nuptials. Then she would go. She loved Gertrude dearly, and could spare a little separate bitterness to think that she had found her friend only to lose her again in this particularly painful way. Meanwhile she must behave perfectly, watch with the eyes of love and speed with the feet of a servant. Thus Anne, as she watched that pair, the sight of whom was such a scandal to her heart, moved between a bitter almost cynical chagrin and a would-be selfless love which she felt belonged somehow to her future.

  That future, she thought, would lie in America. Nothing less than another continent would be necessary when those two were united. She had already drafted, though not yet sent, a letter to the Poor Clares in Chicago. She had decided to write to them simply because theirs was the only American address which she knew. It would be a starting point. Something would happen to her in America. She would find work to do.

  Oh but it is so sad, thought Anne, as she poured the greenish strongly smelling olive oil onto the salad. There is so much love in me which I used to give to God; and I shall have to abandon the two people to whom I most want to give it now.

  ‘Anne darling.’ It was Gertrude. They never stayed too long together. One or other of them always came to look for Anne. ‘Can I do anything?’

  ‘No,’ said Anne, ‘just be.’ Maybe I should stay, she thought. Not go to America after all. Just stay and help them to be happy.

  ‘So this is it,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m glad. I wish you’d decided earlier. Perhaps I should have decided. I suppose I thought you’d drift off.’

  ‘Did you want me to drift off?’ said Tim.

  ‘Yes, no - you know how it is, how it was. We’re coming along to the past tense now, aren’t we.’

  ‘Oh God -’

  ‘Don’t be emotional, dear, dear Tim. I’m so grateful to you.’

  ‘I’m grateful to you.’

  ‘We’re stupid really, a pair of duffers.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We loved each other but we could never make any sense of our love.’

  ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘Oh don’t be silly, Tim, that’s your old silliness, making everything emotional, or romantic or something. We’re like two bits of wood in a river. We’ve floated along together for a while. One bit of wood doesn’t ask another bit of wood to forgive it.’

  ‘But you don’t feel - sorry, I can’t find any words that won’t annoy you.’

  ‘You can’t annoy me any more again ever.’

  ‘Unless I go back on what I’ve said.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘You mean -?’

  ‘If you unsay it, I shall say it. Just for once we have agreed. We’re in conjunction. It’s a sort of cosmic moment. We see what’s right and we see it together.’

  ‘Darling, I-I do admire you -’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh, it would be too painful.’

  ‘I’m so glad about what you said about getting on better with the novel when I was away.’

  ‘Oh I just said that. I’m going to chuck the novel.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What will you do?’

  ‘That won’t concern you - any more - ever again.’

  ‘Oh - Daisy -’

  ‘Don’t weaken, oh my dear, don’t weaken. You’ve been so splendidly brave.’

  ‘Yes - very - brave -’

  ‘You won’t come running back this time, will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyway I won’t be here - or at Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘Which of us is to have the Prince of Denmark?’

  ‘You can. I’m going to vanish. I think I shall leave London. I hate London, I’ve been trying to leave it for years.’

  ‘Daisy, will you be all right for money?’

  ‘That’s another thing that won’t concern you.’

  ‘But really -’

  ‘Yes, yes, I have rich friends, same like you.’

  ‘I have no friends.’

  ‘Well go and find some.’

  ‘I could let you have -’

  ‘No. I’ve got friends, for Christ’s sake, they aren’t all that rich actually, but I won’t starve. I’ll be absolutely somewhere else.’

  ‘I never sort of thought -’

  ‘Of course not. You pass your life in never sort of thinking. When you weren’t with me you imagined I didn’t exist. I have a whole world of people you know nothing of.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Well, don’t mope about it now, poor old Blue Eyes.’

  ‘It’s been a crazy relationship, hasn’t it.’

  ‘It’s a crazy world.’

  ‘We haven’t been any good for each other.’

  ‘We haven’t been very bad either. We’re people in limbo. Other folks settled down to making sense of their lives, making compromises and definitions and projects and that. We’ve remained children, we’ve retarded each other.’

  ‘It felt like innocence.’

  ‘Fuck innocence, we’re ghosts.’

  ‘Compromises and definitions, yes. Anyway - Daisy, you know I’m not doing this for Gertrude. This has nothing to do with Gertrude. It’s something you and I are doing.’

  ‘Our last action. Fuck Gertrude. I don’t care why you’re doing it, so long as you really are doing it.’

  ‘No, but it’s important.’

  ‘Let him go, let him tarry, let him sink or let him swim, he doesn’t care for me and I don’t care for him -’

  ‘Daisy, it’s not for Gertrude, Gertrude’s finished. I couldn’t do it for that sort of reason. It’s because it’s - absolute - and clean - and -’

  ‘Oh yes yes yes.’

  ‘But you do understand? This is just us.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, all right.’

  ‘I feel-I feel I love you more perfectly now than I’ve ever loved you before.’

  ‘It’s the effect of parting. It will pass and you will feel relief.’

  ‘Oh Daisy, you are so beautiful -’

  It was true. They were in the sitting-room, facing each other, perched upon bamboo chairs amid an archipelago of cushions and potted plants. Daisy was in jeans and a clean shirt. She had ‘done’ her eyes with immense circles of powdery blue, but her lips were unpainted. Tim feared to see them tremble. But Daisy was strong, she was magnificent. He was strong and magnificent himself. They were like divine beings together. They seemed too like a new pair of people meeting each other for the first time.

  ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ said Tim.

  ‘I know, I feel a bit like that -’

  ‘My God, perhaps this is our only moment of real love, our first moment of real love.’

  ‘No, it’s an illusion, a sentimental by-product of our courage. It means nothing. It certainly doesn’t mean that. We are in the presence of death. Death is love they say, but not our sort.’

  ‘Suppose we were to start again, now. You’re - you’re transfigured. ’

  A lazy sun was making the room dusty, full of slowly moving particles. Daisy, sitting very straight, her hands on the arms of her chair, her short hair combed flat to her narrow head, her eyes huge, her face austere and hard, looked like a goddess. Tim had never seen that face before and it ravished him with love.

  ‘No, my dear Tim, we shall not meet again in the world. This is it. This is the end.’

  ‘But how’s it done?’ said Tim. ‘It is like death, isn’t it.’

  Something weakened in Daisy’s face, but only for a moment. ‘And please, if ever in the future you’re tempted to look for me, don’t - for my sake, don’t -’

  ‘Daisy, I -’

  ‘You say you’ve removed all your stuff?’

  ‘Yes. I removed it . . . yesterday . . . when you were out . . .’

  ‘That was sensible. There’s nothing left in your room?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like to go and make sure?’

  �
��No.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing left to do but to go out of the door.’

  ‘Daisy . . . I can’t . . .’

  ‘You are asking the executioner for one more minute of life.’

  ‘Yes - But - Daisy, I can’t do it - we can’t do it - We’ll both be in the Prince of Denmark tomorrow.’

  ‘No, Tim, be true to me here. We must give the coup de grâce. You’ve shown such pluck. This is the best thing you’ve ever done for me. Don’t spoil it now. You’ve amazed me, you’ve done what I could never have, I think, and I believe you’re not doing it for Gertrude, you’re just doing it, and if you could see yourself now you’d see a god, I’ve never seen you more beautiful. But that has no connection with the future. We have no future. Be true to me, be good to me, brave dear Tim.’

  ‘We’ve suddenly become - so much better - we’ve sort of - redeemed - so why can’t we -’

  ‘Oh don’t make me laugh. We’re stiff, we’re strong, we’re even sober because we are about to kill each other. It is like a suicide pact. But if we called it off we’d just become those two old zombies once more, quarrelling and boozing and being miserable and stupid. You know that.’