Authors: Iris Murdoch
These are the glories of his night city, a place of pilgrimage, a place of sin, a place of shriving. Nigel glides barefoot, taking long paces, touching each lamp post as he passes. He has seen men prostrated, writhing, cursing, praying. He has seen a man lay down a pillow to kneel upon and close his eyes and join his two hands palm to palm. All through the holy city in the human-boxes the people utter prayers of love and hate. Unpersonned Nigel strides among them with long silent feet and the prayers rise up about him hissing faintly, like steam. Up any religion a man may climb. Along the darkened alleyways the dusky white-clad worshippers are silently carrying the white fragrant garlands to lay upon the greasy lingam of Great Shiva.
Nigel strides noiselessly, crossing the roadways at a step, his bare feet not touching ground, a looker-on at inward scenes. He has reached the sacred river. It rolls on at his feet black and full, a river of tears bearing away the corpses of men. There is weeping but he is not the weeper. The wide river flows onward, immense and black beneath the old cracked voices of the temple bells which flit like bats throughout the lurid black air. The river is thick, ribbed, curled, convex, heaped up above its banks. Nigel makes offerings. Flowers. Where was the night garden where he gathered them? He throws the flowers down upon the humped river, then throws after them all the objects which he finds in his pockets, a knife, a handkerchief, a handful of money. The river takes and sighs and the flowers and the white handkerchief slide slowly away into the tunnel of the night. Nigel, a god, a slave, stands erect, a sufferer in his body for the sins of the sick city.
He reclines upon the pavement where the rising waters have lifted up the window of a houseboat near to his telescopic eye. A man and a woman are sitting on a bed, the man fully clothed, the woman naked. He speaks angrily to her and brings his fist up to her eyes. She shakes her head, moving it uneasily away, her face made ugly by evasiveness and fear. The man begins to take his clothes off, tearing them off, stripping himself bare with curses. He drags back the blankets of the bed and the woman darts inside like an animal into its burrow and hides, peering, with the blankets up to her eyes. The man pulls the blankets off her and turns out the light. Nigel lies on the damp pavement and sighs for the sins of the world.
He lifts himself a little to see over a sill through an uncurtained window. Beside a cluttered kitchen table Will and Adelaide are arguing. He takes her hand which she tries stiffly to withdraw. He hurls her hand back at her. Auntie is knitting an orange cardigan. ‘So there is a Cape Triangular stamp?’ ‘Yes, there’s several.’ ‘You must get the right one, I’ll show you a picture.’ ‘I’m not going to get any one.’ ‘Oh yes you are, Ad.’ ‘Oh no I’m not.’ ‘Sometimes I could murder you, Adelaide.’ ‘Let go my arm, that hurts.’ ‘It’s meant to hurt.’ ‘I think you’re hateful.’ ‘Why do you come here to torment me.’ ‘Let go.’ ‘You enjoy tormenting me.’ ‘Let go.’ Auntie who has noticed, not for the first time, Nigel’s face risen like the moon above the window sill, smiles mysteriously and goes on knitting.
Altogether elsewhere beside a glass door he prostrates himself among feathery grey herbs. Here there is only a chink in the curtains through which he can see a thin-faced sallow man with narrow eyes and a heavy fall of dense dark hair disputing with a thin woman with stick-like arms and a gaunt ardent face. Her brown hair is wild, formless as a dark cloud about her thrusting face.
‘The world is independent of my will.’
‘The sense of it must lie outside it. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value.’
‘And if there were it would be of no value.’
‘If good and bad willing changes the world it can only change the limits of the world. The world must wax and wane as a whole.’
‘The world of the happy is quite other than the world of the unhappy.’
‘As in death too, the world does not change but ceases.’
‘Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.’
‘If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, he lives eternally who lives in the present.’
‘Not how the world is but that it is is the mystical.’
‘Whereof we cannot speak.’
‘Thereof we must be silent.’
A beautiful woman has entered the room with a brow as broad and bland as the dawn. Her night robe of midnight blue sweeps the ground. She sets a tray before the disputants and sits between them patting them both with her hands. Looking upon her with love they sip Ovaltine dissolved in hot milk and nibble custard cream biscuits.
Nigel goes home. He kneels on damp slimy moss while Danby gazes at himself in a mirror. Danby smiles at himself, admiring his double row of even white teeth. Kneeling so close to him unseen Nigel smiles too, the tender, forgiving, infinitely sad smile of almighty God.
S
LOW FOXTROT
.
With eyes half closed Danby and Diana were rotating dreamily in each other’s arms. The dancing floor was filled with quiet gliding comatose middle-aged couples, all dancing very well. The lights were reddish and low. The marble pillars of the ballroom soared into an invisibility of cigarette haze. The walls were of golden mosaic with turquoise blue mosaic flowers figured upon them. Upon the pillars gilded cornucopias, cunningly fixed, leaned outward into the hall, above scalloped fringes of purple velvet. Jungles of ferns and palms occupied all corners and masked the entrance. There was a thick, sweet, powdery smell of inexpensive perfume and cosmetic. A few people sat at tables at the side, but most of those present were dancing with their eyes half closed and their cheeks glued together. A few conversed in low whispers. Most were silent. It was the afternoon.
‘Danby.’
‘Yes.’
‘We are the youngest people here.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think all those women are dancing with their husbands?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Will they tell their husbands?’
‘No, of course not. Will you tell your husband?’
‘Isn’t it odd to think it’s afternoon outside and the sun is shining?’
‘Yes.’
‘The afternoon is a wicked time. I think in hell it must be always afternoon.’
Diana spoke in a scarcely audible murmur as if in her sleep. Her attention was almost completely absorbed by the pressure of Danby’s cheek upon her own and by the light, firm, sensitive guiding movements of Danby’s right hand upon her back.
Diana was not sure how or why she was on the dancing floor with Danby. He had rung up. There had been a sense of fatality, a craving, extremely sharp and precise, to feel those authoritative cellist fingers once again touching her back. It was all very unusual. She had spent so many years waiting for children and only lately had consciously told herself that the wait was over. She had occupied so many years–how had she occupied them? Miles had been her occupation: Miles’s loneliness, Miles’s shyness, his nervous animism, his inability in some ways to take hold of life at all. She had soon ceased being ambitious for him in his work. She simply wanted to preserve and prolong her sense of protecting him, of warming him to life. Meanwhile she flirted a little with her friends of both sexes. She told herself that she was not naturally monogamous while remaining strictly so. She took notice of the fact that her vaguely erotic daydreams did not always concern her husband. Yet there was no one who could interest her as Miles constantly, consistently, passionately interested her. The umbilical cord of her early love for him had never been broken. She still counted herself fortunate. Though lately, perhaps prophetically, collected quietly in the kitchen at night, she had found herself looking a little with new eyes, had felt a vague need for change, had sensed even the possibility of boredom.
She had lived upon her inexhaustible love for Miles. She had also lived on something which was perhaps not inexhaustible, her dream picture of herself. Making the house had taken her years and within it she had occupied years in posing. She posed in a silk afternoon dress in the drawing room, in a nylon negligee in the bedroom. While doing the flowers she posed as a lady doing the flowers. She made up her face through solitary afternoons. Miles hated social life and they hardly ever entertained. She was like a prostitute waiting among the toys and trinkets of her trade, only the man she was waiting for was her husband.
Like a religious, she had meditated for years upon her luck in getting Miles. She had never dreamed of so distinguished, so aristocratic a catch. She would even have been contented with much less. Her father was dead, but she still visited her elderly mother in the house where she had been brought up, and she was kind to the old lady, but could not help contemplating with satisfaction the gap between her mother’s life and her own. Miles, without even noticing it, had lifted her across. She set herself to make a beautiful and elegant burrow for them both and within it over the years they grew together like two animals that come to develop a single telepathic personality.
She had played the passionate exacting mistress to Miles with the more conscious abandon since she knew that she was for him a second best. The idea of Parvati did not distress her, on the contrary. She charmed herself with her role of healer. She was not the damsel heroine in the castle, she was the mysterious lady of the fountain who heals the wound of the wandering knight, the wound which has defied all other touches. The role was the more grateful since the damsel heroine was long ago dead, not forgotten, but mercifully absent. There was only the fountain lady now. And the memory of the lost one remained as a guarantee of her husband’s fidelity. The dead Parvati reigned felicitously over their marriage.
Lisa, poor Lisa, had come to be an occupation too, as she had been long ago in Diana’s childhood, when Lisa’s idealism and lack of common sense had constantly landed her in scrapes with which Diana had had to deal. Diana was devoted to her sister and enjoyed both admiring and patronising her, and had always been helped and supported by Lisa’s return of unquestioning love. With Lisa she had enjoyed by nature that animal closeness and identity which with Miles she had after many years achieved. Adult life parted them and at their rarer meetings they had had increasingly less to say to each other, though something of the old closeness still remained. Diana was glad that Miles liked Lisa; and after Lisa’s illness it had seemed natural for the married pair to ask her, for the time at any rate, to make her home with them. How she and Miles argued! It was all a novelty and somehow a felicitous one.
Diana felt infinitely sorry for Lisa, mediating her compassion through her sense of the utter alienness of her sister, through her sense of her own temperamental luck. Diana was a cheerful unanxious person, endowed with good looks and an aura of self-satisfaction. The faintly enigmatic smile which hovered about her lips like a resident cupid was really a very simple smile of satisfaction, a radiant outward sign of a totality of plump, healthy, gratified, successfully incarnate being. Lisa was without beauty, and such handsomeness as she had once had had gone with her illness. She was clever of course, and on the evidence she was tougher than she seemed. She held down a job as a school mistress at a school in the East End, one visit to which had made Diana feel quite sick. Yet in spite of this she appeared to Diana as a doomed girl. Diana had been surprised at her sister’s recovery. ‘Lisa wants death,’ she had said to Miles. ‘She certainly wants to suffer,’ Miles had replied. ‘That isn’t quite the same thing.’ ‘She’s a mystic,’ Diana had concluded. ‘She wants to be nothinged.’ ‘She is certainly a masochist,’ Miles had agreed.
I am middle-aged, thought Diana, looking round the ballroom at the dreamy couples who were so far from young. I belong with these people. The novelty of Lisa had worn off. Had Diana now reached an age where there had to be, at last, one novelty after another? Was this a kind of wickedness? She could not feel it. She could only feel an excited sense of rejuvenation and
funniness
in the unexpected advent of Danby. Of course she had thought about Bruno and she had thought about Danby, only imagining him quite unreflectively in terms of Miles’s picture. Even after Miles’s recent interview with Danby she had listened quite simple-heartedly to Miles’s exclamations about that fat dolt and that grinning buffoon. She had not expected to be instantly captivated. The sheer surprise of it was life-giving. Danby’s smooth brown humorous face, his drooping crest of white hair, his strong confident smile, hovered in her mind as she told Miles, in somewhat curtailed terms, of Danby’s visit, and while she listened in silence to Miles’s stream of sarcasm. The images accompanied her to bed.
‘The contact of bodies is the contact of minds.’
‘You are a philosopher, Danby.’
‘Think of all the ridiculous years we haven’t known each other.’
‘I feel I’ve known you for ages.’
‘I feel that too. I think we’re each other’s type. Yes?’
‘Maybe. You’re someone I can be entirely light-hearted with without feeling worried. It’s not so easy for a woman of my age to take this kind of–holiday.’
‘Light-hearted. You don’t mean frivolous, cynical?’
‘No, light-hearted. You make me laugh.’
‘Well, that’s all right. Let’s have a love affair.’
‘No, Danby, nothing like that. I love my husband. I’m permanently hooked.’
‘Oh. I think it’s rather bad form for a woman to say that when she’s illicitly dancing with another man.’
‘I’m afraid it’s true, my dear.’
‘Let me pay you the tribute of saying that your remark has caused me pain.’
‘Let me pay you the tribute of saying that I survey your pain with pleasure.’
‘We might get somewhere on that basis.’
‘No, no–’
‘You said no last time and then yes, so I’ll go on hoping.’
‘Don’t. I’m glad you wanted to dance with me, that’s all.’
‘That isn’t all, since we’re here together in this awfully deliciously wicked place.’
‘It is rather an image of sin, isn’t it.’
‘Let’s give the image some substance then.’