The Good Apprentice (18 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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‘Noises?’

‘Oh just owls — and things — I mean owls and foxes and things — and poltergeists and things — ’

Edward giggled feebly at this jest. ‘I expect I’ll survive. Thanks so much.’

‘And mind the rats.’

‘There are no rats,’ said Bettina, who was standing outside the open door. ‘Don’t be silly Ilona. Now, are you all right, Edward? We rise fairly early. I’ll give you a knock in the morning.’

Edward was soon in bed and fell at once into a deep peaceful sleep and heard nothing in the night.

The next morning Edward was awakened by a curious hollow fluting sound which he thought at first was bird song but soon realised was not. It was music. Knowing at once where he was he jumped out of bed, anxious in case he had overslept, opened the shutters and looked out blinking at the still faint daylight. The sound came from outside. He opened the window and pulled up the sash. Mother May and Bettina and Ilona, upon a pavement directly below him, were playing recorders. When they saw his head thrust out they burst out laughing and ran off. Edward withdrew his head, closed the window and leaned his brow against the glass and groaned.

Breakfast consisted of herbal tea and fingers of hot buttered toast lightly scattered with dry oats. There was also fruit, which Edward refused. He did not feel well and the old misery was with him again. The women wore brown hand-woven dresses and wooden beads.

As they rose Mother May said, ‘We must get to our work now. We are very busy here, you know.’

‘This place is a power-house,’ said Ilona, ‘isn’t it, Bettina?’

‘What do you do?’ said Edward. ‘I know you weave your own dresses — ’

‘Oh all sorts of things,’ said Mother May. ‘We are never idle. We cultivate the garden to feed ourselves, we keep the house spick and span, we make our clothes, we do carpentry, we do embroidery, we paint a little, don’t we, we make jewellery to sell, we make Christmas cards, we are not rich, you know.’

‘And we mend the beastly old generator when it breaks down, at least Bettina does!’ said Ilona.

‘We follow Jesse’s example,’ said Bettina, ‘his rule of order and industry. We have a daily routine.’

‘Times of silence,’ said Ilona, ‘times for rest, times for reading, it’s like a monastery.’

‘You must let me help you,’ said Edward. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t any skills — ’

‘You’ll learn,’ said Bettina.

‘After all, you’re going to stay with us a long time, aren’t you,’ said Ilona.

‘One of you girls should show Edward round,’ said Mother May.

‘I will,’ said Ilona.

‘I always do the washing-up,’ said Ilona.

‘I’ll always help you,’ said Edward. ‘I’ll dry.’

‘We never dry, we just stack. There’s so much to do here, we save every possible trouble. For instance, there’s Carrying About.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You know, in every house there’s always things to be moved from one place to another, upstairs and downstairs and so on, like washing and plates and books and things. Well, we have carrying places where things which are on the move are always left, and anyone passing by carries them on to the next place. It makes sense, doesn’t it. These plates, for example, in this big rack. Some are dry, some are not. Someone passing will pick up the dry ones for lunch and put them on the table in the Atrium.’

‘The Atrium?’

‘In the hall, that’s what Jesse calls it — what we call it — it’s the Latin for a sort of main living place. And over there you see dry sheets waiting to go upstairs when someone’s going upstairs anyway. You’ll soon get the hang and know where things live. I mean, it’s pointless to keep running up and down stairs all day.’

‘I see. Time and motion study.’

‘Bettina always says, carry enough, but never too much, otherwise you drop things, anyway I do.’

They were in Transition, the area lying behind the high plain wall which Edward had seen from the outside as joining the hall to ‘Selden’. This had originally been a set of fine stone-built byres lying between the house and the barn, which Jesse had started, retaining a lot of the previous structure, to turn into a cloister, open on the east side. Other plans however, concerning the conversion of the stables, had made him decide to make this the kitchen area, leaving the arches and alcoves of the original project still attractively visible. There was a large handsome kitchen, with a long cast-iron cooking stove, the scullery where Edward had been watching Ilona wash up, the wash room with a washing machine and trapeze-like wooden drying frames, and the ‘brushing room’ full of dustpans and brooms and boots and shoes, which also housed the enormous deep freeze. There was even an ‘electricity room’, like the engine room of a submarine, dotted with dials and fuse boxes and dangerous-looking stray wires.

‘The place needs to be rewired, one thing is always fusing another, only I don’t think any electrician would ever understand that mess. We go easy with the electricity. We’ve been here a long time and many things have changed. We used to entertain a lot, lots of people used to come to see Jesse, but now they don’t since the railway stopped. Come on, I’ve done here, I’ll show you Selden. Here, carry some of these sheets. We never iron things, ironing is a waste of time.’

Edward picked up an armful of sheets from a shelf in a little arched ‘shrine’, and followed Ilona along the corridor and up the stone steps toward his own room. At the top of the steps there was a cupboard into which, as bidden, he unloaded the sheets. Ilona had opened a door next to his room, revealing a small pretty room with a settee, a writing desk, a chinoiserie screen, and a greenish picture representing a child as a drowned mouse.

‘This is your sitting room, at least not really yours, it’s for grand guests. We don’t heat it now. The big bedroom is beyond yours.’

The big bedroom was a corner room, even larger than Edward’s, with an even handsomer bathroom, and a view two ways, towards the trees of the avenue and, at the side, towards the wood on the rising ground which Edward had seen as he approached.

‘Where’s the sea?’

‘On the other side of the house, but it’s a good way off.’

‘This is an old house, eighteenth-century — ’

‘Yes, called Selden House, but it was just a shell when Jesse bought it.’

Edward followed her down and out into the courtyard which he had looked at last night.

‘All this part, the other three sides, was built by Jesse. It’s a fake really, but it looks nice. These two sides are quite thin, just passageways. The bit opposite you is a real house, smaller really only it doesn’t look from here. We live over there, those are our bedrooms, like yours.’

‘I bet yours is the smallest one.’

‘Yes, we call ours East Selden and yours is West Selden.’

The ‘fake’ courtyard did indeed look nice, with its four eighteenth-century facades, with walls of creamy stone, tall windows below, square ones above, and shallow stone-tiled roofs. The square was cobbled with sea pebbles, and there was an Italian well-head in the middle. Edward looked down and saw a distant gleam of water and the dark form of his reflected head.

‘This must have cost a fantastic amount of money.’

‘Jesse was rich then. It’s all gone now.’

Edward heard the familiar sound of a typewriter. ‘Who’s typing?’

‘Mother May. She’s making a catalogue of all Jesse’s work, it’s a big job. Sometimes she writes about the past, things she remembers.’

‘So she’s a writer.’

‘Good heavens, no, it’s just for us! The ground-floor rooms on our side are workrooms. On your side they’re just store-rooms. Come back this way through Transition. That corridor on the right leads to our place. Just pick up those plates, would you. We’ll go through the Atrium and I’ll show you the rest.’

Passing into the hall Edward put the plates on the long table and Ilona added a pile of cutlery. He looked up at the tapestry, now clearly visible. Watched by a large stern cat, a smiling girl with a butterfly net was pursuing through a flowery meadow a flying fish which had emerged from a dark round tree.

‘We wove it from Jesse’s design,’ said Ilona. ‘We did four different designs. Some Americans bought the other three.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Edward. But he found it, like the painting in his own room, rather distressing.

Crossing the hall, her sandals tapping on the slates, Ilona opened another door. ‘This was the eighteenth-century stable block, it juts out at the back at right angles to the barn, it’s awfully pretty outside. Jesse made a Gothic window at the end.’

‘There’s another courtyard!’ said Edward, looking out of a window.

‘Yes, we’re parallel to the piece that joins East and West Selden. The wall is plain on this side as you see, Jesse intended to paint a mural on it. It’s a nice old paved yard. Jesse was going to close it in with another pastiche, but it’s nicer like this, you can see the fen, except that you can’t because it’s misty. This used to be our dining room before the kitchens moved to Transition, now it’s our sitting room, we call it the Interfectory.’

‘That’s an odd word. Don’t you mean Refectory?’

‘Well, that’s what Jesse calls it. It’s our leisure room.’

‘What a nice room.’ Edward surveyed the large long rather untidy room with bookshelves, and numerous much trodden rugs upon the wooden floor, and low slung armchairs of worn red leather, faded and slippery, with long seats and sloping backs, made for long-legged men to lounge in at their ease. There were two old sagging sofas with ragged covers and an open fireplace with the remains of a wood fire and a dark tall many-shelved wooden chimneypiece. On top of the chimneypiece was balanced a long piece of carved wood on which, between interwoven leaves and fruits, was written,
I am here. Do not forget me
. It was a shabby and unpretentious room with brown varnished woodwork, like an old-fashioned snug or smoking room pr the study of an elderly don. It might have represented some idea of a room which Jesse had had when he was a schoolboy. It seemed in some way to belong to the past; perhaps the all-powerful Jesse had decreed it as a place of escape from his fretful and peculiar genius. ‘It looks comfortable and real,’ Edward added. Then, as this seemed to impugn the reality of the rest of the house, ‘It’s
all
marvellous — and extraordinary.’

‘It’s a bit of a mess and it needs dusting, Jesse had so many ideas, but we like it.’

A picture in a dark frame slightly askew hung against the faded leafy wallpaper, representing two adolescent girls with staring pleased eyes and bare small breasts kneeling in a stone recess grown over with damp green plants discovered by a terrified boy. Edward did not need to scrutinise the signature.

‘I’ve never seen any of Jesse’s pictures, except one which I can’t remember reproduced in a paper. I think I didn’t want to look at it. Are they fairies?’

‘What?’

‘Are they fairies?’

‘I don’t know.’ Ilona said this in the neutral self-satisfied tone used by scientists when scrupulously refusing to answer a layman’s silly question. She straightened the picture, dusting the top of it with her finger.

‘What’s the photo beside the fire?’

Ilona took the photograph off a nail where it hung low down and handed it to him. ‘Jesse, of course.’

‘Good heavens!’ A tall thin hawkish young man with a loop of dark straight hair curving over his brow was leaning against a tree and staring at Edward with an intense sardonic expression. Edward almost dropped the photo, and hastily handed it back.

‘Looks like you,’ said Ilona, ‘except he’s got larger eyes.’ She hung it up again. ‘The old kitchen is Bettina’s workroom. She’s a carpenter, we’ll just peep in. All those rooms connect, there’s no corridor, if she’s not there we can go through, there’s rooms beyond.’

Ilona tapped gently on a door on the far side of the room, then opened it cautiously. Edward, behind her, caught a glimpse of Bettina with one knee on a chair leaning forward intently over something on a large wooden table. She did not look up. Ilona closed the door softly. ‘She hates to be disturbed. That door over there leads to the tower.’

Edward moved towards the door.

‘Oh not now. We don’t go there when Jesse’s away. Anyhow I expect he’d like to show you the tower himself. And
that
door leads out into the courtyard. It’s an awfully draughty room.’

Edward followed Ilona back into the hall.

‘There are your shoes, by the way.’ She indicated a box by the door where Edward found his shoes, no longer muddy, beautifully cleaned.

‘They’re clean!’

‘I cleaned them. Cleaning shoes is one of my jobs.’

‘You seem to have all the dirty jobs!’

‘Not at all, there are plenty of dirty jobs.’

‘You’re all so industrious and so skilled, I shall feel useless. Would writing poetry count as work?’