Authors: Iris Murdoch
‘I’m not cross, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Would you go and see him?’
‘
Me?
Why me?’
‘I think it would be wise to spy out the land,’ said Bruno. The new thought that Miles might simply refuse to come was frightening him terribly. It had not occurred to him for a moment. Perhaps Danby was right that the risk was not worth taking. He lived so much in his mind now. Suppose he wrote and got no answer? Suppose the telephone were just replaced when he rang up? There were worse torments, other vistas, further galleries. All the rest and that as well.
‘You mean find out if he would come? Perhaps argue him into coming?’
‘Yes.’
Danby smiled. ‘Am I the right ambassador, dear Bruno? Miles and I never exactly hit it off. And I haven’t seen him for years. He thought I was unworthy of his sister.’ Danby paused. ‘I was unworthy of his sister.’
‘There’s no one else,’ said Bruno. His voice was becoming hoarse. He cleared his throat. ‘You’re part of the family.’
‘All right. When do you want me to go? Tomorrow?’
‘Not tomorrow.’ His heart was suddenly beating violently. What would it be like?
Danby was looking at him closely. ‘The doctor won’t approve of this.’
‘It doesn’t matter what the doctor thinks now. Perhaps you would write a letter.’
‘To Miles? Saying what? Asking to come and see him?’
‘Yes. Do everything very slowly. I mean, give Miles time to think. He might be hasty. If he has time to think he’ll come.’
‘Well, all right. Will you compose the letter? You know I’m hopeless at letters.’
‘No, you compose it. But not today.’
Adelaide came in and threw the
Evening Standard
on to the bed. A river of stamps cascaded to the floor. ‘I’ll bring your tea in ten minutes. Would you like muffins or anchovy toast?’
‘Muffins, please, Adelaide.’
The door closed. Danby was picking up the stamps and putting them into the black wooden box. Bruno’s father had disapproved of stamp hinges, which he held were injurious to stamps, and had indeed spent a lifetime vainly trying to invent an alternative device. So although he believed strongly in the aesthetic aspect of his hobby, and had often preached to Bruno that a man who did not love looking at his stamps was a tradesman and no true philatelist, he had never kept the stamps in books. He had constructed the large wooden box with a great many narrow drawers within which the stamps were supposed to lie between fitted cellophane covers, which could be fanned out when the drawers were opened. Bruno however, whose attachment to the stamps was even more purely aesthetic than that of his father, had long ago started to jumble the carefully docketed system by which they were arranged. Of late he had started selecting out his special favourites, regardless of origin, and these were now kept heaped together in a spare drawer at the top.
‘OK, Bruno,’ said Danby. ‘I’ll do that small thing. Don’t worry. We’ll see. Can I help you to the lav?’
‘No, thanks. I can manage.’
‘Well, I’ll be off. I’ve got an appointment at the Balloon. Cheerio.’
He thinks I won’t do it, thought Bruno, gradually moving his legs toward the side of the bed, but I will. It was frightening though, the prospect of a change, something utterly new, the danger of being hurt in a new way. He got his legs over the side of the bed and rested. Suppose Miles wouldn’t come, suppose he sent back a hostile reply? Suppose he came and were unkind to Bruno? Suppose Bruno felt an irresistible impulse to tell about Janie’s death and Miles cursed him? Miles could curse him. He was a violent intense boy. He could hurt him now, terribly. Perhaps Danby was right. It was better to die in peace.
Bruno edged over and got his stockinged feet on to the ground. In between each trip his feet seemed to forget about walking altogether. They curled up into balls under the bedclothes and were reluctant to flatten out again into surfaces that could be stood upon. The process of their reeducation was painful. Bruno stood, stooping a little, supporting himself with one hand on the bed. Still holding on to the bed he began to shuffle towards the door. Once he got as far as the bed post he could reach out and get his dressing gown from the door without having to stand unsupported.
Of course it wasn’t absolutely necessary to put on the dressing gown now that it wasn’t winter any more, but it represented a challenge. It was quite easy, really. The left hand held the bed post while the right lifted down the dressing gown and with the same movement slid itself a little into the right sleeve. The right hand lifted on high, the sleeve runs down the arm. Then the right hand rests flat against the door a little above shoulder height, while the left leaves the bed post and darts into the left-arm hole. If the left is not quick enough the dressing gown falls away toward the floor, hanging from the right shoulder. It then has to be slowly relinquished and left lying. There was no getting anything up off the floor.
Bruno manages it, twitching the gown forward over his shoulders and drawing it together in front with the left hand. He is breathing deeply with the effort. He slides his right hand down slowly as far as the puckered brass door handle and begins to open the door, sidling slowly round it as he does so. His movement brings him round to face the room and he contemplates it for a moment, seeing his little prison box as an outsider might see it. The yellowish-white counterpane of threadbare Indian cotton is patterned with faded black scrolls which look like copperplate writing on a very old letter. The bed, between its four light brown flat-headed wooden posts, looks coiled up and dirty, a disorderly lair. The sheets all seem to be knotted. It has the desolate incomplete look of an invalid’s bed, momentarily untenanted. The cold sunless evening light from the window shows the small square of thin brown carpet, with the ragged bit tucked under the bed, surrounded by dusty varnished boarding. The wall paper, covered with a dim design of ivy leaves, is pallid and bleached and spotted with tea-coloured stains. The little bedroom was ‘the small spare room’ for years. Bruno occupies it now because of its proximity to the lavatory. On Bruno’s right is a bookcase topped with cracked marble on top of which two detachments of empty champagne bottles frame Janie’s picture. The upper shelves contain paper-back books of great antiquity. The lower shelves house Bruno’s microscope and four wooden frames containing test tubes of spiders in alcohol. On Bruno’s left, behind the door as it opens, is a rickety gate-leg table upon which the great wooden stamp box now rests. At night Danby usually takes it away to his own room, hoping perhaps that Bruno will forget to ask for it again, so that it can then be conveyed to the bank. The full bottles of champagne are under the table. On doctor’s orders Bruno does not drink his champagne chilled. Spider books, which are too big to go into the bookcase, fill much of the rest of the room, piled on the chest of drawers, on the two upright chairs, and on the little bedside table round about the lamp. The sash window shows a segment of wet slate roof, a coffee-coloured sky in slow unseizable tumultuous motion, and one of the trinity of towers of Lots Road power station looking black and two-dimensional in the sullen light.
Bruno levers himself round and begins the journey to the lavatory, his right hand moving along the wall. A dark continuous blur upon the wallpaper, the record of many such journeys, guides his moving hand. The lavatory door is open, thank heavens. The door handle is stiff. It was Nigel’s bright idea that it should always be left open when untenanted. Nigel is full of little ideas for Bruno’s comfort. Bruno’s hand moves on the wall. It was surely not Parvati who had made all that anger. It was Miles. Parvati must have understood. Her own parents, who were Brahmins, had opposed the match too. They never consented to see Miles. If only he had met Parvati everything would have been all right, a real girl, not just an idea of an Indian girl. He hadn’t meant it anyway, it was just something he’d said once about not wanting a coloured daughter-in-law. He could not remember any feeling about it all now, any feeling that he had had. Miles said he had ‘bitterly opposed’ the marriage. It was not true. All he could remember was the muddle, denying he’d said things, and Miles’s cold high-minded anger. It was so unfair.
Bruno was inside the lavatory leaning against the closed door. As he began to fiddle with his pyjamas something dropped to the floor at his feet. He saw at once that it was a
Pholcus phalongioides
which he had dislodged from its place on the door, or perhaps in the corner of the wall, where it had woven its irregular almost invisible scaffolding, unmolested by Adelaide. The spider did not move. He wondered if he had damaged it with his sleeve. He touched it gently with his stockinged foot. The creature lay still, its long legs curled to its body. It might be shamming dead. Slowly stepping across it Bruno lowered the lavatory seat and sat down on it. He took a piece of lavatory paper and leaning forward introduced it carefully underneath the little curled up thing. The spider slid on to the paper together with a good deal of dust and fluff. It stirred slightly. He must have damaged it somehow, but without the microscope, or at any rate a magnifying glass, he could not see how. He tried to look into the spider’s face but without his spectacles all was blurred. He had not kept captive spiders for a long time now. A year ago he had had a sudden yearning to see again a beautiful
Micromatta virescens
and he had sent Nigel, armed with a photograph, to hunt in Battersea Park. Nigel came back without a
Micromatta
but with a jam jar full of assorted spiders, two of them already dead, a poor
Ciniflo ferox
and an
Oonops pulcher,
probably killed by the fierce
Drassodes lapidosus
with which they had been sharing their captivity. Bruno put his magnifying glass away and told Nigel to release them all in the yard straight away. He had never really been a scholar anyway.
The
Pholcus phalangioides
was showing no further signs of life. He must have half crushed it as he leaned against the wall. He dropped it on to the floor and put two more pieces of lavatory paper on top of it and brought his heel down hard on to the little resistant bundle.
Bruno felt the wretched tears near again. The women were all young while he aged like Tithonus. Supposing Janie had wanted to forgive him at the end after all? She held out her hands to him saying, ‘Bruno, I forgive you. Please forgive me. I love you, dear heart, I love you, I love you, I love you.’ He would never never know. The most precious thing of all was lost to him for ever.
‘H
OW IS MY
worthy twin?’ said Will Boase to his cousin Adelaide de Crecy.
‘Oh all right.’ Adelaide looked at him distrustfully. She was never sure how close those two were. They often seemed like enemies, but she could not guess what they really felt.
‘I wouldn’t have his job. I can’t think how he puts up with the poor old fool.’
‘He’s terribly good with Bruno,’ said Adelaide. ‘It’s almost uncanny.’
‘Nigel’s a bit potty if you ask me. He should have stayed in acting.’
‘Look where acting’s got you!’
‘I could get a part if only I had some decent clothes.’
‘I’m not giving you any more money, Will!’
‘I’m not asking you to, am I?’
‘It’s just as well you’ve got Auntie’s pension!’
‘Oh stop nagging!’
‘Danby said you could paint the outside of the house if you’d like.’
‘Tell him to paint it himself.’
‘Don’t be so
silly
, Will. Danby paid you a lot for that last job. Far too much in fact.’
‘Exactly. I don’t want Danby’s blasted charity.’
‘Well, I think you ought to try and make money like other people.’
‘This society thinks too much about money.’
‘You’re just a scrounger.’
‘Oh for God’s sake! I’ll sell my drawings. You’ll see.’
‘You mean those pornographic drawings, the ones you wouldn’t let me look at?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with pornography. It’s good for you. If politicians stuck to pornography the world wouldn’t be in such a mess.’
‘Who’d buy that horrible stuff anyway?’
‘There’s a market. You’ve just got to find it.’
‘I wish you’d keep on at one thing instead of starting all these things that never get anywhere.’
‘I can’t help it if I’m versatile, Ad!’
‘Are you still going to that pistol practice place?’
‘A man has got to be able to defend himself.’
‘You live in a dream world. You’re as bad as Nigel.’
‘You wait, Ad. And I’m going to buy a really good camera. There’s money in photography.’
‘First it’s pornography, then it’s photography. You can’t afford a really good camera.’
‘Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag!’
‘
Vot serdeety molodoy!’
‘The same to you with knobs onski.’
‘Shto delya zadornovo malcheeka!’
‘I think she’s getting worse.’
‘Stop gibbering, Auntie, or we’ll put you in a bin. Go and write your memoirs!’
Adelaide went to Will’s place every Sunday to cook midday dinner for Will and Auntie. She knew better than to call it ‘lunch’ to Will. It was Auntie’s place, really, Will had just moved in when he was out of a job. Auntie was gaga, but she was quite capable of looking after the house. Adelaide cooked a plain dinner since neither Will nor Auntie ever knew what they were eating and Will thought interest in food was bourgeois.
Auntie, who was not a real Auntie but a devotee acquired by the twins in their early acting days when she kept theatrical lodgings in the north of England, had been parting company with reality over a period of several years. She announced periodically that she was a Russian princess, was about to sell her jewellery for a fortune, and was engaged in writing her memoirs of the Czarist court. Of late even her ability to talk seemed to be deserting her. In shops she mumbled and pointed to what she wanted, or uttered a stream of gibberish with Russian-sounding endings.
Da
and
nyet
she had probably acquired from the newspapers. Auntie lived in a dark ground floor flat in Camden Town. Auntie’s flat was genteel. It contained too many objects, including a great many small pieces of china whose number never seemed to diminish in spite of Will’s habit of breaking things in fits of rage. Not everything which ought to be against a wall had a wall to be against. The sitting room was partitioned by a long sideboard and a tall bookcase which stood out at right angles into the room. This did not matter much as no one ever went in there. Life went on in the kitchen. Will had once gone through a short phase of wanting to ‘modernise’ the flat, but had got no further than buying a steel chair of outstanding ugliness which now stood in the hall mercifully covered with coats.