Iris Murdoch - An Unofficial rose

She could not, of course, confide in anybody, not even, or especiaIly not, in her father, to whom she had always been so close. Her attachment to him was something warm and organic and formless and infinitely comforting, though at moments too it caused her a sort of shame, almost a sort of disgust. He was the sole recipient of her tenderness, the only one for whom she was still a soft and nestling creature; and with this softness she combined, as she grew older, a fierce loyalty and a desire to protect him whenever, as it increasingly seemed to occur, he was in any way 'in danger'. That her love for Felix was a sort of danger to him she early apprehended. He would be hurt by it if he knew. And from this knowledge also she protected him. She did not conceive her two loves as rivals. They were as different in nature as were their objects. Randall seemed to her infinitely frail compared with Felix, but through frailty infinitely dear.

When it became abundantly clear, and it was clear very early to Miranda, not only because of her almost scientific observation, but also because of hints her father dropped, that her parents were going to be parted for good, she felt that she could scarcely endure what was to come. She felt it as very likely that Felix would court her mother, that her mother would hesitate and procrastinate, but that Felix would get her in the end. Miranda told herself that she would not survive that moment. If Felix married Ann she would kill herself; and indeed the terrible interim, the new situation, with its promise of such interesting developments, which had been initiated by her father's departure seemed equally likely to torture her into desperation. The indifference to life which she had expressed to Felix at Seton Blaise seemed to her genuine, and she had leapt from the tree with. She felt, a real preparedness for death, though also with the hope of impressing Felix and landing in his arms. The days that followed, during which she received a demonstration of what she more than half knew, that Felix saw her as a child and noticed her only because of Ann, brought her private anguish to a climax.

In general, and from the point of view of her troubles, Miranda was in fact far from seeing her father s departure as an unmitigated disaster. In a curious way, even apart from Felix, she had often wanted him to go, wanted him to take off, like a bird sent from her hand to guide her into a better country. Miranda loved the violence latent in her father, she longed for an assertion of his strength, and the spectacle of his at last bursting out made her lick her lips and open her eyes.

Randall would go ahead of her, her envoy, her ambassador, into the land of colour and shape, the country of her embezzled delights, and she would follow him there. It had the air of a rescue; and there was a place too for this romance in the economy of her nature. But as far as the matter of Randall's flight had repercussions on the matter of Felix, Miranda's feelings were at least mixed. Randall left a place for Felix and produced a state of affairs more immediately tormenting and menacing to her. But his disappearance, by making things more acute, brought them also, one way or another, nearer to their end; and Miranda told herself that anything was better than the indefinite, year after year, continuance of Felix’s mute passion. Now, he would have either to succeed or to fail, and if thus explicitly he failed he would have to go away altogether. Miranda made it her business to see that he would either succeed or fail soon.

The strategy, when it came to it, was almost a consolation. There was her father to be seen off, to be encouraged not to hesitate to go. Now that she had at last decided to pull everything down, for better or worse, on top of her, Miranda felt a frantic impatience for his departure, and hoped indeed that she had not too evidently bundled him off. She could not have borne, now, hesitations, heart-searchings partial reconciliations. She wanted Randall well cleared off the scene: about how to handle her mother she had had beforehand little idea. But when he began to try she was amazed at how easy it was. She felt, and this too was consolation, the beginning of a sense of her own strength. Her mother by comparison was a shapeless directionless mess, full of guilt and confused attachments, still hopelessly married. Miranda saw enough for her purposes and saw it with surprise and a little shuddering.

She sat moodily turning over the photos. They had little effect on her now. She felt as if Felix were dead, and she felt in a way that was not totally disagreeable that she was, for the present, dead too. She felt dull and listless, like after an examination. She looked at the photographs with unfocused eyes. Then she began slowly to tear them up. She tore them as they came, not troubling to turn them over or notice them as she did so, and then she tore up the letters and cuttings without reading them. She reduced everything to small pieces. Then she put the fragments into a big envelope and sealed it. Then she sat there on the floor pursing her lips and scratching her ankle and humming a little tune.

She looked back over the country she had traversed, but already it seemed covered with mists and she could not see it as a whole. She was too tired to peer, and anyway it didn't matter any more. She speculated a little blankly about her mother and Felix. It didn't matter. She would never know, but she was indifferent to knowing and she would survive. People survive, and she would devote if necessary the whole of her life to a programme of survival. Coldly she surveyed its elements. In a year or two she would run away to her father. He would have left that other woman by then; or if he had not yet left her Miranda would soon persuade him to. He would be living in some gay Southern town. She saw him there, brown, exotic, vivacious, free, speaking foreign tongues. There she would arrive, thin, pale, mysterious and sad; and though greatly courted she would remain with her father. That is how it would be; and until then she would live as one dead.

She got up stiffly and walked to the shelves. She looked dully at the German dagger on which was still impaled the doll which Felix had given her. She pulled the dagger out and threw the remains of the doll into the waste-paper basket. Tomorrow she would drown the dagger in the Marsh. She stared at the quiet rows of dolls and picked one up mechanically and held it to her breast. It was a thing she had done a thousand times. But now suddenly it felt as if she were hugging a dead puppy. It came to her eerily that the dolls were all dead. The life with which she had endowed them was withdrawn. They were nothing now. She looked at them with widened eyes and touched her lips with her tongue. They were rows of dead semblances, mocking her solitude. She held the doll dangling at arm's length; then she took hold of its head and body and pulled. The china head came off and she threw it on the floor and it broke. She took the next doll and hurled it by its legs against the wall. Gradually the room filled with sawdust and fragments of pink china. What she could not smash she slashed to pieces with the German dagger. Poussette was last. She looked into the inane familiar face, and tore Poussette's head and limbs off. Now they were all gone, the little princes.

A BIRD was singing somewhere out in the beech trees, somewhere in the great still light of the summer morning. The Marsh would be pale green beneath the sun, mixing its own strange light with the gold, and stretching away to end in a blue haze. Already upon the slope the ten thousand roses would be opened, uncovering their exquisite hearts and making of the hillside a great unfolding fan. Up above him Miranda would be still asleep, but Ann would be up already, at work in the kitchen. Nancy Bowshott would be arriving with the milk. Lazily he listened for the sounds of the early morning household. Randall Peronett was waking up.