Authors: Iris Murdoch
Parvati had made all other women impossible for him. Parvati plaiting her very long black hair. Parvati with quick deft movements pleating her sari. Parvati sitting on the floor with her tongue slightly out like a cat. Her delicate aquiline face, her honey-coloured skin; his sense of acquiring with her a whole precious civilisation. The jewels in her ears which he was so surprised to learn were real rubies, real emeralds. How she had laughed at his surprise. Parvati ironing her saris in a room in Newnham. Then ironing his shirts. ‘You represent the god.’ ‘What god?’ ‘The god–Shiva, Eros … All poets have angels. You are mine.’ The very small deft brown hands, the glimpse of bare sandalled feet upon the wet autumnal pavements. The red-brown grain of her lips. Her grace, which made any western woman look gauche and stiff. How coarsely made, how dumpy and disagreeably pink her college friends looked beside her. The feel of that long thick plait of hair in his hand the first time he had dared, playfully but trembling, to take hold of it. He had kissed her hair. Then he had kissed the edge of her silken sari where it slipped over her thin arm. She laughed, pushing him away. She was a clever girl who was going to get a first in economics, but she had not been very long out of that enclosed courtyarded house in Benares where her mother wove garlands to place upon images. Parvati talking about
swaraj
and the fundamental problems of an agricultural economy.
He had written hundreds of love poems for Parvati. After the war, poetry, like so much else, seemed to have come to an end. Eros had changed into Thanatos, and now even the face of Thanatos was veiled. The only person he had any real contact with was Gwen. He had not been very close to Gwen as a child. She was several years younger and he had been away at school. He first became really fond of Gwen, indeed first really noticed Gwen, when she stood up for him so fiercely when his father opposed the marriage. Gwen loved Parvati and admired her. Gwen was very partisan and given to making long speeches. He thought much later, when he a little regretted the breach with his father, that perhaps Gwen had done more harm than good. Bruno needed coaxing, and a different kind of daughter might have coaxed him instead of lecturing him. Miles had no intention of coaxing him. He wished his father at the devil.
After Parvati’s death he wanted to see nobody, not even Gwen. Gwen went up to Cambridge and read Moral Sciences and started on a Ph.D. thesis on Frege. The war came and Gwen became an Air Raid Warden in London. Later on in the war Miles arrived in London, still in uniform, working in an office, and for a while a curious almost intimate relationship existed between them. Gwen was usually tired to the point of collapse. Miles felt guiltily how easy a life he was now leading by contrast. They never shared a house, but he used to go round most evenings to her little flat off Baker Street, arriving before she did, and prepare a hot meal for her. Sometimes she was very late and he sat tensely listening to the bombs and trying not to let terrible imaginings break out. Sometimes she worked at night and he saw little of her. They talked a great deal, not about themselves, never of Parvati, but about cool healing impersonal things, poetry, philosophy, art. Eventually they talked mainly philosophy and theology: Karl Barth, Wittgenstein.
Their intimacy was ended, towards the close of the war, by Danby. Miles could never understand about Gwen and Danby. It all happened very quickly. They met on an underground train. On the Inner Circle: they both seemed to attach importance to this, and reiterated it with an imbecile ritual solemnity. They had begun to talk to each other. People did this more readily in the war time. Danby surreptitiously passed his station. Gwen surreptitiously passed hers. When they had been all the way round the circle they had to admit to each other that something had happened. Thus the thing began in a kind of absurdity; and Miles felt that in some way it had never ceased to be absurd. Danby was fundamentally a very absurd person, a contingent person, and Miles resented the absorption into this loose and floppy organism of his close-knit and far from contingent sister.
He felt that Gwen had deceived him. She ought not to have let things happen so fast, she ought to have consulted him. As it was, and only a little apologetically, she just introduced Danby out of the blue as her fiance. Miles scowled politely at this plump bland constantly smiling and obviously self-satisfied person in the uniform of an artillery officer. Danby’s hair was golden in those days and his complexion was pink. He looked like a schoolboy cadet. Miles questioned him closely about his background and his education. His father was a shop-keeper in Didcot. He went to a local grammar school and then to Reading University where he studied English literature for a year and then gave up. He worked in an insurance office and then went into the war where he served without drama or distinction in the artillery and later told Miles he had thoroughly enjoyed it. He appeared to have no intellectual interests. Once married he entered the printing works with an insouciance which irritated Miles, and made a success in business which irritated Miles even more. Miles could not see that Danby had any decent
raison d’etre
whatsoever. ‘I just can’t see it, about Danby,’ he said to his sister once. ‘Oh well, Danby is such
fun,
’ Gwen had replied. Miles had nothing with this answer.
Bruno, with whom Gwen had by now re-established relations, was reported to be fond of Danby, and after a while Miles began to tolerate his brother-in-law. Danby was anxious to please, and after Miles had made clear what he thought of the masculine jokes with which Danby at first sought to establish connivance, they did manage to achieve a sort of understanding, based on Danby’s interpretation of his role as a controlled and censored fool. Danby, who was not totally insensitive, managed to extend in the direction of Miles, as a kind of propitiatory feeler, the sense of inferiority which he genuinely felt in relation to Gwen. He accepted Miles as his superior and he accepted and shared Miles’s view of his incredible and quite undeserved good luck in having obtained Miles’s sister. Like that, things settled down; but Miles saw less and less of them. Then after Gwen was dead there was no reason to see Danby any more.
Diana came later, as a surprise, almost as a miracle. The terrible bitterness of Gwen’s death put Miles once more into the presence of that which his long poem had served to shield him from. But as soon as he was able to he ceased to look and to feel and set himself to lead a life of complete retirement and almost ferocious dullness. Writing was inconceivable. He read a good deal, as a matter of routine, mainly history and biography, but without passion. He did his job, avoided his colleagues, was classified as an eccentric and quietly passed over at promotion times. His superiors began to regard him as slightly unbalanced, but on the whole he attracted little attention. He suffered occasional fits of severe depression, but not very frequently.
Then one day in the grocer’s shop in the Earls Court Road where he went twice a week with a large basket to buy his provisions a girl said to him, ‘Don’t look so sad.’ Miles shuddered at being addressed by a woman and left the shop immediately. She followed him. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve so often seen you in here. May I walk along with you?’ And later, ‘Do you live alone?’ And later still, ‘Have you been married?’ Diana did all the work. She explained afterwards to Miles how she had seen him several times in the shop looking self-absorbed and melancholy and had had a fantasy that everything would happen even as it did happen: that he would turn out to live alone, that he had had a great sorrow, that he shunned society, that he had no dealings with women. For Diana it was, in some extraordinary way, the perfect working out of a dream. She had been searching for Miles. She recognised him at once. It was her sense of destiny which carried them both along.
Diana had a very positive conception of her role as a woman. It was in fact her only role and one which had absorbed her since she left school. She grew up in Leicester where her father was a bank clerk. Her parents were vague people and she and her sister did what they pleased. Diana went on a scholarship to an art school in the London suburbs but left it after two years. She became an unsuccessful commercial artist, she worked in an advertising agency. But mainly she just lived. She moved to Earls Court. She had adventures. She lived with men, some rich ones who found her puzzling and gave her expensive presents, and some poor ones who took her money and got drunk and wept. All this she recounted to Miles later on, enjoying his incomprehension and his quite involuntary twitches of disapproval. She had been looking for him, she told him, all this time. She had dreamed of a separated man, a sad austere secluded man, a man with a great sorrow, an ascetic. She was a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame.
She loved him very much and although he told her at first that he was an empty vessel, a nothing, and that her love was to him a nothing, she succeeded at last in attracting his attention. Miles was thirty five. Diana was twenty eight. Miles became aware that she was beautiful. She was a fair-haired brown-eyed girl with a straight assertive nose and a big well-made mouth and a large flat brow and an ivory complexion and a cool enigmatic expression. She tucked her hair well back behind her ears and thrust her pale smooth large-eyed face boldly forward at the world. A quality in her which seemed at first to Miles to be shamelessnesss later seemed to him more like courage. In the early days of his interest he apprehended her, not without a certain pleasure, as a courtesan; and later, when he was certain that she loved him, he felt her ‘adventurousness’ as intensifying, not diminishing, the love which she had to offer. When he married her he still felt that she was his mistress, and that pleased both of them.
Of course Diana understood about Parvati. She knew that for Miles this had been something supreme, a love not of this world only. She submitted, in a way which touched his heart and first made him believe absolutely in her love, to being the second not only in time. She accepted indeed the fact that there was not even any question of a contest. A place in his life, a part of himself, perhaps the best part, was simply not available to her. This Miles tried to explain to her while he was still trying to dissuade her love. Soon after, perhaps even then, he was relieved to find that he had laid every vexation upon her and told her every unhappy truth without dissuading her at all. In the end he stopped fighting and let her use the whole huge force of her woman’s nature to comfort him, to lure him out of the dark box in which he had been living. His pleasure in her joy was the best experience in his life for many years.
They moved to the house in Kempsford Gardens and after a while, although she said nothing about it, Miles knew that Diana was hoping for a child. Miles was not sure what he felt about children. His child,
the
one, had died in the Alps. Could there be another? He began vaguely to want a son. But the years passed and nothing happened. They looked at each other questioningly in the spaces of the house. Their life was simple. Miles had never craved for company. Now that he had Diana he was perfectly contented. He would have been happy to see no one else. Diana met her friends at lunch time. They hardly ever entertained.
Diana supported, even invented, the formalities of their life together. She made the little house in Kempsford Gardens as ceremonious as an old-fashioned manor house. Meals were punctual and meticulously served. Miles was not allowed in the kitchen. The house was always filled with flowers with never a petal out of place. Miles was forced to adopt a standard of tidiness which he found unnatural and absurd and to which he became completely used. It was as if Diana was determined to make him feel that he was living rather grandly and after a while he did begin to feel it. She had a power of making small things seem large, just as she had uncannily made the garden seem large, made it seem to go on and on like an enchanted garden in a tale. Miles suspected that, in all this, Diana was fighting back against her childhood in Leicester. She had once said to him thoughtfully, ‘You were the most
distinguished
of all my suitors.’ Diana had her own strict routine, her own invented personal formalities. Entirely without other occupation, she filled her time with household tasks and enjoyments. There was her hour for working in the garden, her hour for doing the flowers, her hour for doing embroidery, her hour for sitting in the drawing room and reading a leather-bound book, her hour for playing on the gramophone old-fashioned popular music which Miles disliked, but to which also he had become accustomed. Diana would have enjoyed an eighteenth-century country house life of peaceful ennui and formal tedium and lengthy leisured visiting. In the midst of one of the seedier parts of London she almost succeeded in conjuring it up.
A change came into the life of Miles and Diana. Perhaps in a way they welcomed it, though at first it made both of them rather apprehensive. Diana’s younger sister Lisa had made a very different start in life. She read Greats at Oxford and got a first. She went to teach in a school in Yorkshire and joined the Communist Party. Diana, who was very fond of her sister, lost touch with her for a while. Lisa came south for Diana’s wedding and met Miles. Then she vanished again and when next heard of she had become a Catholic and joined the order of the Poor Clares. ‘I’m sure she was just attracted by the name,’ Diana told Miles. ‘She was always rather a literary girl.’ After a few years Lisa emerged from the Poor Clares and the Roman Catholic Church and went to live in Paris. She came back to England with tuberculosis and stayed with Miles and Diana during her convalescence. She got a teaching job in a school in the East End. The idea vaguely materialised that she might stay on living with Miles and Diana. She stayed on.
All three of them needed a lot of persuading that it was a good idea but were at last entirely persuaded and soon it all began to seem quite natural. Perhaps Lisa seemed to fill the gap left by the absent child in the life of the married pair. The sisters were deeply attached to each other and Miles came to be fond of his sister-in-law and to rely upon her presence. He enjoyed the sisterness of the two women, the fugitive resemblances. He liked it in the evenings when he found them sitting together sewing. Lisa, not by nature orderly, had surrendered, even sooner than Miles had done, to Diana’s domestic tyranny. It was good, after all these years
à deux,
to have an extra person in the house, to have in the house two women both devoted to his comfort. Perhaps he had been alone with Diana for a little too long. The extension of their society was refreshing and enabled him to see his wife in a new light.