Authors: Iris Murdoch
Diana and Miles had begun to walk back through the cemetery, with their arms round each other’s waists. They walked very slowly, like an old couple. The evening sun shone upon the shining arches of the new grass and a rich smell of wet earth floated in the warm air. The avenue of lime trees was misted with young leaves.
Diana said, ‘I think you ought to have an electric fire in the summer house. It wouldn’t be too difficult to arrange.’
‘Warm days are coming now.’
‘Yes, but it
is
damp in there. And if we made it really warm you could work there in the winter too.’
‘I should like that. Especially if it snowed!’
‘Especially if it snowed. I’d have to make the whole place completely draught-proof of course. What’s the name of that stuff that you put round the doors and windows to seal them?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘I’ll ask the ironmonger tomorrow.’
A
DELAIDE’S TEARS DROPPED
into the open drawer, making damp spots on the pink and blue jumble of her underwear. They fell, as she straightened up, on to the sleeve of her new black suit which was made of a corduroy so fine that it carried a grey surface haze like shot silk. She smudged the tears away with her hand, hoping that they would not make a mark upon the corduroy. She peered at herself in the dressing table mirror. The hotel room did not provide a long glass. The frilly white blouse, also new, seemed to be the wrong size after all. She had bought it in a hurry. The frills refused to emerge elegantly at the neck of the jacket but remained crushed and jumbled inside, and if she tried to pull them out the blouse came adrift at the waist. But it was too late to do anything about that now, or about the blue necklace of Venetian beads which just did not look right on top of the blouse. She should have realised it was the wrong length. She took off the necklace and dropped it into her suitcase. Then she adjusted the mirror, stood back, and began cautiously to mount on a chair. By this method she could see the reflection of her lower half, see the black cord skirt, the invisible nylon stockings, and the black patent leather shoes with the steel buckle. Well, she thought, I certainly look right for a funeral.
She got down again very carefully. Adelaide was always afraid of falling and felt giddy standing on a chair. She picked up her little black velvet hat and began to dust it, holding it well away from herself, and leaning forward a little so that the tears should fall on to the floor and not on to her suit or hat. How is it possible, thought Adelaide, to go on crying for such a long time, one would think that the supply would run out. Where do they come from, these tears? She pictured a great lacrymose reservoir, the tears of a lifetime: and at the thought of how many she would still without doubt have to shed, the flowing stream redoubled. I’ve cried so much lately, it’ll damage my eyes, she thought, it’ll alter my appearance permanently. I really must stop, but how? She studied her face in the mirror. Her eyes were puckered and oozing and surrounded by great red circles of swollen skin. Her whole face was red and swollen and hot, its surface shiny with dried and half-dried tears. God, I look terrible, thought Adelaide. How can I put make-up on to that?
She began to comb her hair, dropping the little balls of loose hair at intervals into the hotel waste-paper basket. Her hair seemed to be coming out more than usual. It was not the right colour either. She had had to go to a strange hairdressers and the girl had tinted it to a much lighter brown. She wondered how noticeable this was. She had not yet got used to having short hair and got a shock from her looking glass every morning. The great length of cut hair travelled with her. The hairdresser had offered to buy it, but Adelaide could not consent to this, although the weird severed object caused her horror. She patted her new head. She had hoped that short hair would make her look younger. Now she thought it just made her look blowsy and untidy. She could not decide whether to push the short light-brown locks back behind her ear or to let them hang. They looked wrong either way. Perhaps it had been an awful mistake to have her hair cut off. But she knew perfectly well why she had done it.
Adelaide looked at her watch. She had still not finished packing. She could leave the big suitcase downstairs with the porter. She began to stuff her underclothes into the smaller bag. She went through the drawers and checked the wardrobe. She searched the unmade bed and found two damp handkerchiefs. She must remember to buy some paper ones. She had not been long in the hotel, but the sheets looked grimy and grey. Everything was ready now except her face. She had put off making it up in the hope that she would be able to stop crying. Now she would just have to put the makeup on and trust that it would somehow check the tears. Leaning well over the washbasin she mopped her face for some time with cold water. Then she dried it and began to smooth on a foundation cream. The touch of her fingers soothed her burning cheeks. She closed her eyes for a moment. Now for the powder. Just as she was preparing to apply the pearly pink lipstick to her swollen lips two great tears rolled down making two deep long furrows over the smoothly powdered curve of her cheeks. ‘Damn!’ said Adelaide. Her hand slipped and the lipstick went on to her chin. She thought, I shall have to wash my face and start again. Well, no I won’t. It doesn’t really matter any more what I look like. Then she repeated to herself, it doesn’t really matter any more what I look like. She felt that it was true and that it was an index of great changes in her life. The solemnity of the thought elicited two more big tears. She tried to rub the errant lipstick off with her handkerchief. It would not quite come off, but the pink blur blended well enough with her flushed face. She mopped her cheeks over lightly and put on her hat. The telephone rang to say that the taxi had come.
Adelaide carried the two bags down the narrow stairs, past the dusty potted plants in the brass bowls, and left the larger bag with the porter. She got into the taxi. She thought. Oh God now I shall really start to cry again. And she did. Curiously watched by people in neighbouring cars, she abandoned herself to sobbing as the taxi crawled slowly through the north London traffic. At last they had arrived. Adelaide dabbed her face with a soaking wet handkerchief and tried to powder it again, only now the powder puff seemed to have got wet too. She paid the taxi driver out of her new black patent leather hand bag. She crossed the busy pavement between a newspaper stand and a stack of crates of fruit which were just being delivered to the greengrocer. A tomato rolled across the pavement and broke, revealing its damp blushing interior at her feet. Adelaide skirted it and went into the little dark doorway and up the stairs to the office on the first floor. She knocked and went in.
Auntie and the twins were already there. Auntie was wearing a very long black coat with a fur trimmed collar and a hat which appeared to be made entirely of peacock’s feathers. She was also wearing a big red and green brooch and a number of flashy rings. The twins were in dark suits, Will sporting a red rose and Nigel a white rose. The registrar came forward to welcome Adelaide.
‘Hello,’ said Adelaide, looking past him at the twins.
Nigel advanced and kissed her a little awkwardly on the cheek. He was smiling. Will’s face was thunderous. He had trimmed his moustache into a Hitlerian toothbrush. He came and kissed Adelaide, also on the cheek. He said, ‘Christ, your face is hot.’ Auntie said, ‘
Moya meelaya devooshka.
’ Will said, ‘Shut up, Auntie.’ Adelaide felt that she was going to faint and had to sit down.
‘Now then,’ said the registrar a little coyly, ‘must remember why we’re here, musn’t we. Now let me see, which of you gentlemen is going to be married? Mustn’t marry the lady to the wrong one, must I?’
‘I’m the groom,’ said Will. ‘Oh Ad, do stop crying, turn off the waterworks, will you? Have you got no dignity? Anyone’d think you were going to be executed.’
‘I think we all feel like that on our wedding day, ha ha,’ said the registrar.
Nigel smiled.
Auntie said, ‘
Svadba, soodba, slooshba.
’
Will said, ‘Ba ba black sheep to you, Auntie. Now Ad, do pull yourself together. You don’t want to call the whole thing off, do you?’
‘Nooo,’ Adelaide wailed.
Auntie said, ‘
Ya tosha
,’ and began to sniff.
‘Tosh off, Auntie. Ad, try to behave like a rational being or I shall really get angry with you. Come and sit here beside me, come on. Now stop it, or I’ll give you something to cry for!’
Adelaide came forward. She had knocked her hat sideways by her exertions with her handkerchief and she had smeared her lipstick again. Her breath hissed through shuddering lips. Tears had begun to course down Auntie’s face. Nigel was smiling.
‘Now I think you both know the procedure,’ said the registrar. ‘This is a very simple little ceremony, but it has the force and solemnity of law and society behind it, and is just as binding as if you were being married in a cathedral.’
Adelaide moaned and put her damp handkerchief to her mouth. Nigel, still smiling, wiped away a tear from his eye.
‘First I must check your names please, your full names, and also your fathers’ names. You, Adelaide Anne de Crecy …’
Nigel’s face was streaming with tears. He was still smiling.
‘And you, Wilfred Reginald Boase …’
‘Oh Christ!’ said Will. His face became red, and his eyes filled and overbrimmed with tears. ‘Christ! Sorry, Ad.’
‘And your father’s name–Oh dear–Oh dear me–’ The registrar’s pen faltered and he began to reach for his handkerchief.
Adelaide had anticipated pains and difficulties in her married life, and her anticipations were fulfilled. Will’s temper did not improve as the years went by, and a chronic dyspepsia, caused by the irregular life of the theatre, did nothing to soothe his frequent tantrums. Adelaide submitted meekly at first. Later she learnt how to shout back. But she always felt ashamed and tired after their rows. Will never seemed even to remember that there had been a quarrel. Yet if Adelaide had certainly foreseen the bad things it was also true that she had not managed to foresee the good ones. She had married Will in a mood of cornered desperation because she felt that Will was her fate. She had not even framed the idea of happiness in connection with her marriage. Yet there was happiness too. Adelaide had not realised beforehand how very much she would enjoy being in bed with Will and how greatly this enjoyment would lighten the way for both of them. Nor did she, as she wept and signed her new name, Adelaide Boase, for the first time, dream of much later and sunnier days, in spite of Will’s cantankerous temper, when her tall twins would be up at Oxford (non-identical, Benedick and Mercutio), when Will would be one of the most famous and popular actors in England, and a greatly transformed Adelaide would be Lady Boase.
Nearer in time, and a financial godsend to the young household, was the surprise they got when Auntie died and her jewels turned out to be worth ten thousand pounds. Auntie’s memoirs too, when translated into English, proved a bestseller, as well as being a mine of information for historians about the last days of the Czarist regime. Adelaide and Will kept saying that they would learn Russian one day so as to read Auntie’s memoirs in the original, but they never did. However Benedick became a Russian expert. Mercutio was a mathematician.
D
ANBY WAS SITTING
on the edge of his bed. It was ten o’clock in the evening. The walls of the room were still a bit damp, but he had managed to dry the bed out with hot water bottles. On warm days he put the mattress in the sun. The electricity had been off for weeks, as the whole house had had to be rewired. Fortunately the government were going, if he filled in enough forms, to pay for that. Fortunately too the weather had been exceptionally warm for the time of year.
The room had not suffered too much. Getting the mud off the floor had been the difficult thing. It was fantastic how much mud that water had brought in with it. The carpet had been mud-coloured anyway, but the walls were darkly stained up to about four feet from the ground. It was no good having the place redecorated until the walls had dried. With luck, the government would pay for that as well. Danby had been sleeping upstairs, but he was wondering if tonight he wouldn’t move back into his own room. He didn’t like it upstairs, though of course it was nearer if Bruno called in the night. But Bruno very rarely called in the night now. He seemed to be sleeping better, and indeed spent quite a lot of his time asleep.
Danby had stopped going to the printing works and spent his days at home now. Someone had to stay with Bruno. Nigel had simply vanished from the scene, leaving most of his belongings behind, and Danby felt there was no point in engaging another nurse at this stage. The doctor was surprised that Bruno had lasted so long. Diana came nearly every day in the late afternoon and Danby went out for a breather and a visit to the pub while she sat with Bruno. He could hear her talking to Bruno sometimes, as he went out of the hall door, but he never asked her what they talked about. He talked a little with Bruno himself, usually about immediate things, food, the weather, Bruno’s room. Bruno could talk quite sensibly about these things, but the background of his mind seemed to have come adrift, and Danby often caught Bruno looking at him with a puzzled expression, as if he did not know who Danby was and did not quite like to ask. Diana too was a source of puzzlement, though Danby lost no opportunity of repeating, ‘Diana, you know, Miles’s wife.’ But Danby did not explain his own identity. He did not want to remind Bruno about Gwen.
With Diana Danby had achieved a sad but strangely sweet relationship such as one might have with a wife one had divorced long ago. They kissed each other on the cheek and squeezed hands. The tending of Bruno made a solemn and melancholy bond between them. ‘How is he today?’ ‘Not too bad. He took some soup.’ Danby knew that Diana was afraid that Bruno might die when she was alone with him and Danby was not there. She never said this, but Danby understood what it meant when she asked anxiously, ‘You won’t be too long away, will you?’ It was strange and terrible, this waiting for death. Every morning Danby wondered if Bruno had not died quietly during the night, and then saw, with a shock of pain and relief, the bedclothes still rising and falling a little. He had come, during this last time, to love Bruno with a blank almost impersonal sort of love, and he was able at last to measure that vast difference, that distance between presence and absence. Bruno’s presence in the house was something real, so positive, so profoundly touching. And yet it was also impossible not to feel it as a defilement. Danby looked forward with dread and yet with longing to the time when he would come home and take off his coat and get out the whiskey bottle in a house utterly empty of Bruno. Yet between that moment and now there was that terrible unforeseeable
thing
to be endured.