Authors: Iris Murdoch
‘Well, I don’t want to discuss your nothings. I must be going home.’
‘Please, Lisa, just consider seeing me, I’ll write to you, don’t be so cruel–’
‘I’m not being cruel. I see no point in this sort of discussion. You seem to me to take a very peculiar view–’
‘I haven’t explained properly. Let me explain. Let’s meet more and talk, please–’
‘I’m a very busy person and I have a life of my own as I’m sure you have too. Now will you get out of the way?’
‘I can’t let you go like this, I’ll write, you will come tomorrow, won’t you –?’ Danby contorted himself in front of her and then stretched out a hand which brushed the sleeve of her coat as she stepped quickly into the long grass to get past him. ‘Lisa!’
She was hurrying toward the gate. In another moment she was outside and had disappeared into the steadily moving crowd. Danby looked after her for a moment. Then he turned back and began to walk slowly away down the long avenue of tombstones.
M
ILES GREENSLEAVE, RETURNING
from the office, stopped abruptly in the Old Brompton Road as he saw in a shaft of sunlight Lisa and Danby Odell deep in conversation inside the railings of the cemetery.
Behind the railings in the green shaded meadowy expanse with its distant vista of pillars in the rainy sunlight the two figures looked large, clear, significant. There was something too about their attitudes, their intentness, which suggested a great seriousness, something at issue. Miles felt a sense of disagreeable shock, as if of fear. He stopped and watched. As he watched, Danby suddenly threw out his hands in a theatrical gesture as if he were trying to prevent Lisa from passing him. Miles looked on with amazement. Still keeping them in view, he began to walk quickly along in the direction of the gate. But before he reached it he saw Lisa dart past Danby, who appeared to be making a sort of lunge at her, and emerge on to the pavement. She dodged between the passersby and had crossed the road before Miles could catch up with her.
He ran across the road after her and came up beside her as she reached the corner of Eardley Crescent.
‘Lisa!’
‘Oh, Miles, good, hello.’
‘Lisa, what on earth was going on? I saw that fool Danby–what was he doing?’
‘Oh he just–We were talking about Bruno.’
‘Was he trying to make a pass at you or something?’
‘No, no. He had some problem or other. He–he wanted me to have lunch with him.’
‘To have
lunch
with him?’
‘He said he wanted to see me–’
‘To
see
you? I hope you told him to go to hell. He seemed to be behaving in a damned impertinent manner, standing in front of you like that and making a grab at you–’
‘It’s all right, Miles, don’t take on.’
‘I will take on! You didn’t say you’d have lunch with him, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘I should think not, that pathetic ass, making a scene like that in public.’
‘I don’t think he was very serious.’
‘Probably blind drunk. Fancy his wanting to have lunch with you!’
‘Is it so very odd that a man should want to have lunch with me?’
‘No, no, Lisa, of course not. I mean you’re–Danby’s such poor stuff. You wouldn’t think he’d have the nerve to approach someone like you. He drinks like a fish. He’s probably making passes at girls all the time.’
‘Maybe. I expect that explains it.’
‘Let me know if he annoys you again.’
‘Really, Miles, I’m not a Victorian maiden. I can look after myself.’
‘I hope you won’t go round to that house again, to Stadium Street.’
‘I did say I’d go and see Bruno.’
‘Well, go sometime when Danby’s out at work. I suppose he does work. Or let Diana go. The old man probably can’t distinguish you anyway.’
‘Diana, well–’
They turned to mount the steps of the house in Kempsford Gardens. Diana, who had been watching out for them from the front window, as she so often did, threw open the front door. ‘Come in, come in, you poor tired things, let me take your coats. Lisa, your mac is quite wet, you can’t have hung it up properly this morning, you are bad. Oh Miles, you’ve got me the
Evening Standard
, good, I meant to remind you, come on in, I’ve lit a fire in the drawing room and now the sun’s doing its best to put it out. I bought a new sherry decanter, eighteenth century one, in that shop in the Fulham Road, you must both have a sip of sherry before you do another thing. Look, cut glass, isn’t it lovely? It was quite cheap too. Do sit down, you both look exhausted, did you meet on the train?’
‘No, just outside the station,’ said Miles. He sat down. The sun was shining into the little neat coloured drawing room which Diana kept so fanatically tidy. A small fire was burning gaily in the grate. On a bright Scandinavian tile-topped table the new sherry decanter stood with three glasses. This was his home.
Diana poured out the sherry and gave a glass to Lisa who was still standing in the doorway unknotting her scarf.
‘Any dramas?’ Diana often asked them this question when they came home in the evening.
‘No, no dramas,’ said Lisa. She took the glass.
Miles lifted his head towards her, but she had already drifted away through the door taking the sherry with her.
In fact he had already known, even without the hint from Lisa, that it would be better not to tell Diana about the scene with Danby. Why?
‘The fragile pearly shaft sinks into the table and located where there is a dim red blotch, a shadowed unred red, reflection of a flower. Above yet how above is stretched the surface skin of grainy wood, a rich striped brown. Red reddest of words. Brown luscious caramel word. Yet also loneliest of colours, an exile from the spectrum, word colour, wood colour, colour of earth, tree, bread, hair.’
Miles closed up his
Notebook of Particulars
and stared at the red and purple anemones which his wife had placed upon his work table. A page which he had torn out and crumpled up was uncrumpling quietly with a little mouse-like sound in the waste paper basket. It was late in the evening and the curtains were drawn. The women knew better than to come porlocking at this hour. The expanse of dark time was his.
However he could not work. He had intended to describe the anemones, to continue what he had begun to write about them yesterday evening in daylight. He had wanted to catch in words the peculiar watery pallor of reflections in polished wood. But now it suddenly seemed pointless. The anemones, the
strength
of whose rather thick thrusting stems had struck him yesterday, now seemed to him just a bunch of rather vulgar flowers, pert faces with frilly collars. Diana had put them in a little cheap Chinese vase which increased if anything the vulgarity of their appearance. He could not see them properly any more. They were not worth looking at anyway. He felt distressed, hurt.
That idiotic scene in the cemetery between Lisa and Danby had unsettled him, given him a sense of pointlessness, that old pointlessness which he remembered so well from the war time. He knew the vulnerability of his strength. Seeing Bruno, that had made everything go wrong, it had made him feel guilt, and with the guilt had come that fatal weakness. Miles hated muddle and thinking ill of himself. If only he had kept his head with Bruno and not got excited and upset. How easy it was afterwards to see this and to see how simple it would have been to have acted otherwise. But he had been so shocked and moved by simply seeing Bruno again and had not had time to collect himself. He knew now that he had quite deliberately tried not to foresee what it would be like, tried not to use his imagination. The father to whom he wrote respectful letters twice a year, and whose fault it patently was that they never met, had been long settled in the background of his life, a venerable image housed in a niche, looking rather like a sage represented by Blake. The terrible sick old man in the shabby little room in Stadium Street was something quite else, something requiring thought, something demanding, something frightening.
I shall have to see him again, Miles had thought, even before Lisa brought him the reconciling message. Things could not be left like that, all mangled and awful. It would wreck his work, it would haunt his dreams. The pitifulness of it all had sickened Miles. He did not want to hear Bruno’s confessions. As far as he was concerned now, Bruno had no past. He had long ago forgiven Bruno, that is he had amputated from his mind and his heart all further consideration of Bruno’s offences. He did not want to think about the past in the company of his father. The past was terrible, sacred,
his.
He would have been prepared to enact the dutiful son if this could have been done in a dignified rather impersonal sort of way. Or he would even have been prepared to chat with Bruno, if that would have helped, only what can one chat about with a stranger who is dying? What he could not do was enter into a live relationship with his father which involved the reopening of the past. He could not bear the presence now to both of them of
those
things, that they should see them together. The idea was hideous, sickening. Of course no one could be expected to understand this. It was inexplicable but absolute. He could share no intensity with Bruno. And he would certainly accept no briefing from Danby. Yet he had to go there again and get through it somehow and act some sort of part. And when he did now try to think about how to do it he said to himself; my gods do not know about things of this kind.
His mind reverted to the scene in the cemetery. This was somehow part of the same business, he felt it was somehow caused by some emanation from that awful room in Stadium Street. Of course Danby was just a clown, but the scene had been in some way horrible. The whole thing was partly Danby’s fault anyhow. Not that Miles imagined Danby had put Bruno up to summoning him. Danby was probably rather unnerved by Miles’s late appearance on the scene. Miles recalled the wording of the message which Bruno had sent him through Lisa: ‘Tell him I didn’t mean what I said at the end.’ What did that signify? Was it just a general revocation of an old man’s curse, or did it mean that Miles would get the stamps after all? Miles had not thought about the stamp collection in years. He had settled down to assuming that Danby would have it. However, supposing Miles did get it it would certainly not be unwelcome. It would mean that he could give up the office and spend all his time writing poetry.
Miles banished the vulgar idea of the stamps from his mind. He got up restlessly and began to walk about his room. Three paces took him across it and three paces took him back, past the lighted grainy polished table which he kept so neat with his
Notebook of Particulars
and his row of varicoloured biros and his fountain pen and his silver ink pot, which Diana had given him, and his neatly aligned sheets of blue blotting paper and the little Chinese vase of red and purple anemones. He paused to look at his face in the small square mirror. He used to think that he resembled the young Yeats. What he saw now in the gilded square, a little blurred as in a small painting by Cezanne, was a long thin crooked face with a lopsided tremulous mouth and a long pointed nose and frowning eyes and an anxious insecure expression, surrounded by jagged wavering stripes of limp dull dark hair well streaked with grey. He showed his wolf’s teeth unsmilingly. It did not matter any more what he looked like. He began pacing again. He thought about Lisa in the cemetery.
His reaction had indeed been, to use Lisa’s expression, rather Victorian! Of course Lisa could look after herself. She was a hundred times tougher than a drunken trifler like Danby. It was odd that although he had got so used to seeing Lisa through Diana’s eyes as a ‘bird with a broken wing’ he had also, and as it now seemed to him from the start, apprehended her as a person with strength. Lisa was somebody. It must be no joke being a teacher in that school. Miles had visited it once and been appalled by the atmosphere of dirt and poverty and muddle, the smell, the haggard mamas, the children brawling in the street. Lisa lived in a real world which seemed very unlike the reality which in his poetry he was attempting to join. That was her vocation and he respected and admired it.
Why then, since Lisa was so patently able to deal with Danby’s foolery, had he been so upset? And why had it seemed so clear that Diana must not be told? Lisa was a part of the household, a part of his life. He and Diana had long ago decided that Lisa would never marry, that she would be with them for ever. Diana had asked did he mind. No, he did not mind, he was glad that Lisa should be there, very glad. She had become a part of his contentment. She gave him a kind of companionship which Diana could not give, she could talk to him about things which Diana did not understand. Miles had come to think of her as a person secluded, segregated, enclosed. She did her work and she lived with Miles and Diana. She was not as other women, she was a kind of religious. After all, she had actually been a nun for several years and the experience had marked her with a coldness and a separateness. Was that why he had been shocked then, as if one had seen a gross man insulting a nun, dragging her by her habit?
‘Is it so very odd that a man should want to have lunch with me?’ No, it was not really odd. Lisa was not pretty as Diana was. Indeed one had to know her well before one could see her attractiveness at all. Miles could see it. He could even, he felt now, see her beauty, her secret beauty, that dark intensity of eyes and mouth. This must be invisible to an outsider. He could imagine how Lisa must look to the outsider, like a gaunt untidy middle-aged schoolmistress. Yet even such people occasionally got invitations to lunch he supposed. Only not Lisa. Danby’s gyrations were meaningless of course, probably the outcome of drink, but they had posed a question, and Miles had begun to be aware of the question like an infixed dart. How would he feel if Lisa had a suitor?
In a way he knew very little about Lisa. In a way the concept of the broken-winged bird had served to conceal her. He had never discussed her past with her. He had imagined, it did not now seem very clear why, that she preferred not to speak of it. He knew nothing about her sex life, if it had ever existed. Diana had mooted a theory that Lisa was not interested in men, and Miles had rather vaguely taken the theory over. When he asked his routine questions about Lisa’s ‘day’ it had never occurred to him to wonder if the day had included a man. In fact he did not imagine that Lisa had any secret life. But what he had now received from that glimpse of the by-play in Brompton Cemetery, and what he now knew that he could never rid himself of, was the idea that it was
possible
for Lisa to be courted. She was loseable. She was free.