Iris Murdoch - An Unofficial rose

He turned over and came into contact with something. He opened his eyes. With a rush which made him start up now on to his elbow it all came back to him. He was in Rome, in a hotel in the Piazza Minerva, in a big bed with Lindsay. The great summer light was there, but muted by Venetian blinds to a hot twilight, the singing bird was there, but it was a canary in a cage that bung outside a near-by house. And here was Lindsay lying beside him on her back fast asleep. The sheet was thrust down from her nakedness to make of her a sort of recumbent Aphrodite Anadyomene, an Aphrodite of the world of sleep. Her pale metallic golden hair, flattened into shining strips, spread over the pillow and down on to her breasts. Lifting himself a little, Randall detached some tresses from the side of his sweating body. It had been a hot night.

He looked at his watch. It was not yet seven o'clock. He decided not to wake Lindsay yet. They had been late to bed. He studied her face. Her head was thrust back and her chin pointed at the ceiling in an attitude of decisiveness which she retained even in sleep. Her lips, so much more beautiful he thought in their untouched pallor, were a little parted and there was a gleam of teeth between. The thin veined eyelids were as smooth as the skin of some miraculous fruit. Her breathing could be heard in a soft repeated sigh, gentle, insistent, suggestive. The wide serene oval of the face, the big rounded forehead, slightly domed, pale and even for such a scrutiny quite unlined, lay before him like a lovely domain seen from a mountain. Here sleep seemed a miracle of beauty, warmth and life strangely arrested and made into a thing of contemplation. So in miraculous castles great princesses might slumber out the centuries. Randall gazed and worshipped and felt again the thrill of achievement and possession.

Yet these awakenings were always the same. He woke always thinking himself at Grayhallock, as if the fact of his new condition had not yet been broken to his unconscious mind. His unconscious mind had indeed, and luridly enough, other concerns. He had never dreamed so much in his life. Every night in dreams he saw Ann, a wild Ann running past and not hearing him call, an Ann passing strangely in a boat as he watched from a window, an Ann receding down an avenue of trees and becoming, by the time he had followed her, a glimmering statue. Once he saw her in a dream weeping and holding Joey in her arms; and the next night he was trying to reach her through a hedge of roses. He dreamt too, and disturbingly, of a youthful figure who was both Ann and Miranda, and who in one dream of hallucinatory power seemed to rise like a goddess, with her dazzling crown of hair, at the very foot of the bed. At other times he dreamt of Steve, simple realistic dreams: Steve playing, with his soldiers or his trains, Steve throwing the German dagger at the stable door. He dreamt a little of his mother. He dreamt twice of Emma Sands, but forgot the dream. He did not dream of Lindsay.

Randall had never dreamed so much, and he had rarely eaten and drunk so much. They were drunk every afternoon and every night, and what with the drink and the dreams and the curious gaps in his memory and the dazed excitement and exhaustion induced by perpetual love-making Randall was at times at a loss to know where reality lay. For reality he made do with a vague shimmering apprehension of Lindsay's continual presence. She was indeed the Aphrodite of the world of sleep.

They made love continually. Randall made of Rome a sort of map of love, a series of love-pilgrimages where places were identified by embraces and ecstasy as if they only came into existence when they rose into the heightened consciousness of the. lovers. He took Lindsay to the Appian Way and made love to her behind the Tomb of Caecilia Metella. He took her to the Palatine and made love to her in the Temple of Cybele. He took 'her to the Borghese Gardens and made love to her near the Fontana dei Cavalli Marini. He took her to Ostia Antica and made love to her in the back of a wine shop. He took her to the Catacombs. He took her to the English Cemetery and would have made love to her on Keats's grave only some American ladies arrived. And it was as if at these places the map had smouldered leaving a round hole, a blankness which was at the same time an opening into another world.

What, through these openings, Randall saw, in so far as at this dazed time he either saw or expected to see anything, was another matter. He had not neglected to take Lindsay, in a more ordinary sense, on tour, and he had, in this city which he knew and loved, shown her a great deal. Her ignorance of Italian art and indeed of anything pertaining to the past staggered him, and he was a little pained, not so much by the ignorance itself as by a tendency on Lindsay's part to conceal it where possible. What he had in England cheerfully and robustly thought of as her vulgarity appeared in this context as an uneasiness which detracted the tiniest bit from her grace. But these were details.

Settled back on his raised-up pillows now above the sleeping girl, Randall lit a cigarette and contemplated the hot blurred rectangle of the window, the doors open to a balcony behind the long Venetian blind, the white curtains, soft and translucent as a dream, falling unstirred by any breath of air. The canary continued its song. There was something unfocused, something a little unnervingly fragmentary, in his present apprehension of Lindsay. A number of things, seemingly unrelated, contributed to there being, in his attempted pattern, significant gaps. Talking casually about her childhood Lindsay had given him a quite different account of certain matters from the one she had given at first. Yet what did it matter to him if she was a liar? He was a liar himself. One evening in a restaurant when he had tried to buy her some roses she had said absently that she did not really like roses, as if she had forgotten who she was talking to. But what did it matter to him if at moments she hardly knew who he was? There were moments, particularly late at night, when he hardly knew who she was. Then again she had said to him, only the previous day, 'It wasn't true what we said about Emma Sands; We did like her, didn't we? We did love her.

Randall had figured his flight in the perfect image of freedom. To be alone with Lindsay in Rome and to be rich seemed to constitute the very peak and essence of unimpeded activity. He had a little reckoned without his mind; and although he told himself that he would change, that he would soon don a new personality, the personality which he had slipped on, as for a tailor's fitting, the day he lunched at Boulestin's and saw the waiters bowing to the ground, he had not yet, he had to admit, quite put off the bad old self. He worried. He could not help reflecting still about Lindsay and Emma, though he told himself it was ridiculous to speculate about that now. Even if his more bizarre images of their relationship, even if his more nightmarish suppositions concerning their collusion about him should have some part of truth, why should he trouble about that now, why should it matter now what Lindsay was then? He shrugged his shoulders but he could not get Emma out of his mind.

This unfortunate obsession had another aspect. It was as if Emma had produced the situation in which he had desired Lindsay. Emma had been, as it were, the impresario of his passion. He had loved Lindsay as the enticing but untouchable princesse lointaine which Emma had (how deliberately and with what end?) made of her; and in now possessing Lindsay Randall experienced, though very rarely and for a second at a time, the touch of a disappointment analogous to that of the girl who desires the priest in his soutane, but wants him no more when he has broken his vows to become, less ceremoniously, available.

It was not that Lindsay, possessed, brought with her anything of the sober commonplace. The region they jointly inhabited was mad and exotic enough. But Randall felt curious stirrings of another freedom, as if this degree of hurling himself about still did not satisfy his awakened energy. It was not, either, that Lindsay was below her destiny. She was, on the whole, magnificent. Her moments of faltering were few compared with her great serenities and certainties. She dressed exquisitely in the array of flowered marvels, soft or crisp, flowing or sleek, which Randall had bought for her by the armful. She wore her jewels like a duchess, and everywhere she went, leaning upon his Ann, admiring heads were turned. Whatever her occasional blanks where the quattrocento was concerned, Lindsay could sufficiently impersonate a great lady. She had, in the void of their new existence, both style and form, and moved in its boundlessness with a boldly spread and finely articulated wing.