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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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“I expect you’ve heard I’m ghastly!”

 

“No, no! Not still in the C.P. are you, Anthea?”

 

“Dear me no. I’m not even a proper Christian any more I’m afraid. I suppose I’m a sort of Buddhist now really.”

 

“But why didn’t you get in touch with me? I know it’s been a long time—”

 

“And one does hesitate with old friends. Well, I’ve only lately come back to London. And since I’ve been here I’ve had a rather special job. You see, it concerned Carel—”

 

“Carel?”

 

“Yes. You see, the Bishop specially asked me to see Carel and, well, make a sort of report on his sanity. It was to be quite confidential. I was just to say that I was attached to the pastorate. The Bishop was terribly worried—”

 

“But how extraordinary that he should have asked you, I mean what a coincidence—”

 

“It wasn’t exactly a coincidence because the Bishop knew I’d known Carel before. He thought it might help. Oh, the Bishop knows all about little me!”

 

“How fearfully odd though. Carel was very keen on you in the old days, you know! Well, we all were, Julian, myself— You caused quite a lot of trouble!”

 

“I know. I was awful!”

 

“Whatever did you make of Carel now?”

 

“I never got to see him.”

 

“But you must have written to him?”

 

“Yes, but I don’t think he ever got the letters. He had cut himself off completely.”

 

“How strange. And how very sad.”

 

“So you see, he never knew.”

 

Marcus looked at Anthea. Of course she had changed. Yet it was still the same ecstatic, slightly crazy, trouble-making girl. And now she was in psychology. It seemed quite suitable. He had told Norah that he found her funny. He still did find her funny. But he had loved her.

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t write to you, Marcus. You see, Carel was—”

 

“I understand.”

 

“I was just going to write to you now. I got plenty of news of you from Leo, actually.”

 

“Leo? So you know young Leo, do you?”

 

“Oh yes. We’re great friends, Leo and me.”

 

“But how do you come to be acquainted with Leo?”

 

“Oh, it’s a long story! He comes to me with all his little troubles, you know. He misses that mother that he never had. And I’ve been able to help him with a small loan now and then.”

 

“A loan. What was that for, I wonder? Something to do with girls or motor bikes?”

 

“No, no, it was for his work in Leicester.”

 

“What work in Leicester?”

 

“You know, his work in Leicester with delinquent boys. Such a worthy project.”

 

“Delinquent boys! I see! Well, Anthea, so you’re married.”

 

“Divorcee.” She breathed it.

 

“Oh, good. I mean— Come to dinner with me, Anthea. Come next Monday, come to my flat.”

 

“I’d love to. I already know where you live. I looked you up in the telephone book. But aren’t you just moving from there? Someone said—”

 

“No,” said Marcus. “I’m not moving. I’m definitely not moving.”

 

“Look, I must fly. I’m nearly due at the clinic.”

 

“Monday then. Half-past seven.”

 

“Au revoir, Marcus.”

 

When he had heard her footsteps recede and the front door close Marcus began to laugh. He remembered that she had always made him laugh. It was not so much that she was absurd, a kind of electric vitality in her seemed automatically to produce laughter. Carel had laughed for her too, abandoning himself to just such relaxed inexplicable mirth.

 

How confoundedly odd it was, Anthea turning up again, and how extremely invigorating he found this oddness. There was a kind of silly innocence about it all, a kind of thoroughly cheering innocence. He looked forward to seeing her again. With her the ordinary world seemed to resume its power, the world where human beings make simple claims on one another and where things are small and odd and touching and funny.

 

Marcus found that he had left Carel’s room and was walking down the stairs. Would he go on working on his book? Perhaps it was a book which only a genius could write, and he was not a genius. It might be that what he wanted to say about love and about humanity was true but simply could not be expressed as a theory. Well, he would think about all that later on. What he needed now was relaxation, perhaps a holiday.

 

He emerged into the street. He smiled at the feeble sunshine and at the big bustling scene of men at work. He moved out into the gay din of ringing voices and babbling transistor sets. Fancy old Anthea turning up again like that. A psychiatric social worker forsooth! Well, it was odd, it was all confoundedly odd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

 

 

EUGENE PESHKOV WHISTLED softly as he packed his suitcase. It was good to have few possessions. It made moving so easy. Miss Shadox-Brown had arranged for him to move into a church hostel in West Bermondsey. They said he would have to share a room at first, but they were confident they would soon manage to give him one to himself.

 

Eugene had been alone now for several days at the Rectory. The furniture had gone, the girls had gone. Leo, who seemed suddenly to have money in his pocket, had gone off on holiday to Spain. Eugene was sorry to leave the place. It had been a snug hole, especially in winter. Of course it was quite deathly now that it was empty, and the last two days were unbearably noisy since they had been demolishing the Wren tower. Today was happily Sunday.

 

His belongings filled three large suitcases. His clothes were in one, the second contained the crockery wrapped in towels, and this third case was to hold the oddments, his shaving things, his wireless set, the Russian box, the icon, the photograph of Tanya. His paperback books had been deposited in a box in the hall to be collected by Mrs Barlow for Oxfam. The potted plant and its stand had already gone to the hostel on a handcart.

 

Well, he was on the move again. That was how it was. On from one camp to the next. He thrust the photograph of Tanya into the bottom of the case and then pulled it out again for a moment to look at it. It was not a very good one. It showed her in one of her tragedy queen moods. He looked at the wooden hut behind her, trying to remember it more exactly. Tanya was a ghost. He looked through her into the hut. They had shared it with another married couple. They had been reckoned lucky. Perhaps they had been lucky. Perhaps he had been lucky. After all the world was just a camp with its good corners and its bad corners. His corners had never been too bad. The world was just a transit camp. The only certain thing was that one was not in it for long.

 

He wished he had been kinder to Tanya. He had felt trapped by her somehow. She had died young in bewilderment and misery and he had been too preoccupied with Leo and with his own future to attend properly to her dying. He had given people cigarettes to sit with her. He was very sorry for her, but he was anxious for it to be over. She was not a brave sufferer and he did not want to undergo her terror of death. He resented this test of the stoicism he had made for himself. He had dropped no tear for his mother, for his sister, persons infinitely dearer to him than Tanya. He had been hard with Tanya and she had not understood. Did it matter now, now that she was nothing?

 

He dropped the photograph into the case and turned to lift down the icon. The milky blue angels were infinitely sad. They had travelled a long way. When Eugene was gone they would still travel on and on, until one day no one knew who they were any more. There was only this travelling. Did it matter now, Eugene wondered, his unkindness to Tanya, since there was no God? He felt that it mattered. But that was just a feeling, a heaviness within him. He shook the crumbs of toast and sugar cake off the furry green tablecloth and wrapped the cloth round the icon.

 

Pattie seemed distant now almost as if she too belonged to a remote era of time. He was already insulated, closed against the pain of thinking of her. The pain existed somewhere separately, and all that came to him bodily was sadness. He had loved Pattie because she was a misfit like himself. But she was a misfit of some quite other kind. They could not really have met each other’s needs. He could not have let Pattie into his past, and he was his past, that sombre egg which had grown around the jewel of his childhood. He could not have contained Pattie. It was too late now for him to contain anybody. Of course he would have forgiven Pattie, he would have come round, he would have tried at least to understand. Only when she suddenly went he was relieved in a way and soon began to think of it as inevitable. The happiness she had represented to him was merely something dangerous. To grow old is to know that not circumstances but consciousness make the happy and the sad. He was a sad man and he would never make the happiness of others or live in a house like ordinary people.

 

His foot touched something which was lying just underneath the bunk and he stooped to look. It was a paperback detective story which he had overlooked. He picked it up and opened the door and began to walk slowly toward the hall to put it in the box with the other books. He stepped softly through the stripped empty kitchen. The sound of living footsteps seemed inappropriate, the waking of echoes which were already moribund. He passed through the darkness under stairs and then stopped abruptly. There was somebody in the hall. Then he saw that it was only Mrs Barlow. He was about to speak to her when he saw that she was behaving oddly. She knelt down beside the crate of books, then sat upon the floor leaning her head back against the crate. He heard a faint whimpering sound. Mrs Barlow was crying.

 

Eugene backed quietly away and tiptoed back through the kitchen. He left the book behind him on the kitchen floor. He did not want to be involved with Mrs Barlow’s grief. For whom or for what she was weeping there alone in the empty hall he did not know, he had never really thought about her, and the mystery of her tears soon passed from his mind. He returned to his packing. The third suitcase was nearly full. He packed his little wireless set next to the icon and tucked newspapers in around it. There was only the Russian box left to put in now.

 

Eugene picked up the Russian box. As he did so, with a rush of memory which made him gasp and brought the blood to his face he recalled what it was. There had been in the drawing-room of their country house a box identical with this one in which he had kept lumps of sugar for his little white English terrier. The little dog had been killed one day by one of the half-savage mastiffs that guarded the house. He could still picture the footman who had brought it in, hanging limp like a little rat. So the tears which had so mysteriously come to him, and which rose again now to his eyes, were not for his mother or his sister after all. Or perhaps indeed they were. For they were tears for himself. It had been the first tragedy of his life.

 

 

 

A BIOGRAPHY OF IRIS MURDOCH

 

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century. She wrote twenty-six novels over forty years, as well as plays, poetry, and works of philosophy. Heavily influenced by existentialist and moral philosophy, Murdoch’s novels were also notable for their rich characters, intellectual depth, and handling of controversial topics such as adultery and incest.

 

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Murdoch moved to London with her parents as a child. She attended Somerville College in Oxford where she studied classics, ancient history, and philosophy. While at Oxford, she was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (which she later left, disillusioned) and, in the 1940s, worked in Austrian and Belgian relief camps for the United Nations. After completing her postgraduate degree at Newnham College in Cambridge, she became a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lectured in philosophy for fifteen years.

 

In 1954, she published her first novel, Under the Net, about a struggling young writer in London, which the American Modern Library would later select as one of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century and Time magazine would list as among the twenty-five best novels since 1923. Two years after completing Under the Net, Murdoch married John Bayley, an English scholar at the University of Oxford and an author. In a 1994 interview, Murdoch described her relationship with Bayley as “the most important thing in my life.” Bayley’s memoir about their relationship, Elegy for Iris, was made into the major motion picture Iris, starring Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, in 2001.

 

For three decades, Murdoch published a new book almost every year, including historical fiction such as The Red and the Green, about the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and the philosophical play Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues. She was awarded the 1978 Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, won the Royal Society Literary Award in 1987, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth.

 

Her final years were clouded by a long struggle with Alzheimer’s before her passing in 1999.

BOOK: The Time of the Angels
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