Iris Murdoch - The Bell

A figure emerged from among the trees opposite and was coming to meet Toby across the open grass. Even at that distance there was no mistaking Nick Fawley. He walked with a characteristic stride of rather aimless determination, his dark head thrust well forward. Michael saw that he was carrying his rifle. The dog Murphy followed him from the shade of the trees and ran ahead towards Toby. The boy bent down to greet the dog, who pranced about him, and then walked on to greet its master.

As Nick came up to Toby he turned and saw Michael watching them from the other side. It was too far for speech, and even a shout would have been indistinct. Nick’s face was a distant blur. For a moment Michael and Nick looked at each other across the water. Then Nick raised his hand in a slow salute, solemn or ironical. Michael released the painter and began to wave back. But Nick had already turned and was leading Toby away. The boat came lazily to a standstill in the middle of the lake.

MICHAEL had known Nick Fawley for a long time. Their acquaintance was a curious one, the details of which were not known to the other members of the Imber community. Michael did not share James’s view that suppressio veri was equivalent to suggestio falsi . He had first encountered Nick about fourteen years ago, when Nick was a schoolboy of fourteen, and Michael a young schoolmaster of twenty-five, hoping to be ordained a priest. Michael Meade at twenty-five had already known for some while that he was what the world calls perverted. He had been seduced at his public school at the age of fourteen and had had while still at school two homosexual love affairs which remained among the most intense experiences of his life. On more mature reflection he took the conventional view of these aberrations and when he came up to the University he sought every opportunity to encounter members of the other sex. But he found himself unmoved by women; and in his second year as a student he began to fall more naturally into the company of those with inclinations similar to his own. What was customary in his circle soon seemed to him once again permissible.

During this time Michael remained, as he had been since his confirmation, a somewhat emotional and irregular member of the Anglican church. It scarcely occurred to him that his religion could establish any quarrel with his sexual habits. Indeed, in some curious way the emotion which fed both arose deeply from the same source, and some vague awareness of this kept him from a more minute reflection. Toward the end of his student days, however, when the conception of perhaps becoming a priest took shape with more reality in his mind, Michael awoke to the inconsistencies of his position. He had been an occasional communicant. It now seemed to him fantastic that he could, in the circumstances, have come to approach the communion table. He did not, for the moment, alter the mode of his friendships, but he ceased to receive the sacrament and went through a time of considerable distress, during which he continued rather hopelessly to do what he now felt the most dreadful guilt for doing. Even the attraction which his religion exercised upon him, his very love for his God, seemed to be corrupted at the source. After a while, however, and with the help of a priest to whom he had confided his difficulties, more robust counsels prevailed. He gave up the practice of what he had come to regard as his vice, and returned to the practice of his religion.

The change, once he had made up his mind, was attended by surprisingly transitory pains. He emerged from Cambridge chastened and, as it seemed to him, cured. Equally far away now were the days of his indifference and the days of his guilt. His love affairs appeared as the étourderies of a much younger man. Michael set his face towards life, knowing that his tastes would almost undoubtedly remain with him, but certain too that he would never again, in any way which could conflict with his now much stricter sense of morality, gratify them. He had passed through a spiritual crisis and emerged triumphant. Now when he knelt to pray he found himself devoid of the guilt and fear which had previously choked him to silence and made of his prayers mere incoherent moments of emotion. He saw himself with a more rational and a more quiet eye: confident of a Love which lay deeper than the contortions of his egoistic and unenlightened guilt, and which worked patiently to set him free. He looked to the future.

After he left Cambridge he spent a year abroad, teaching in a school in Switzerland, and then came back to a post as Sixth Form Master at a public school. He enjoyed the work and was moderately good at it, but after another year had passed he was firmly decided that he wished to be ordained. He consulted various persons, including the Bishop in whose diocese he found himself, and it was agreed that he should complete another year’s teaching, while studying some theology in his spare time, and then enter a seminary. Michael was overjoyed.

The presence in the school of Nick Fawley was something of which Michael had been acutely aware from his first arrival. Nick, then fourteen, was a child of considerable beauty. He was a clever, impertinent boy, who was a centre of loves and hates among his fellows: a trouble-maker and something of a star. His very dark curling hair, which if it had been allowed to grow would have been hyacinthine, was carefully cut to fringe his long face with affectedly waif-like tendrils. His nose tilted very slightly upward. He was pale, with striking dark grey eyes, with long lashes and heavy eyelids, which he kept narrowed, either to increase their apparent length or his own apparent shrewdness, both of which were already considerable. His well-shaped mouth was usually twisted into a mocking grin or pursed in a menacing expression of toughness. He was a master of the art of grimacing and in every way treated his face as a mask, alarming, amusing, or seductive. He put on a sardonic expression in class and hung his long hands ostentatiously over the edge of his desk. The masters doted on him. Michael, while not blind to his qualities, thought him essentially silly. That was the first year.

In the second year Michael saw, owing to the accidents of the time-table, a good deal more of Nick. He became aware too that the boy was directing towards him a more than usual intensity of interest. Nick would sit now in class staring at Michael with an appearance of fascination so bold and unconcealed as to be almost provocative. Yet when questioned he seemed always to be following the lesson. Michael was irritated by what he took to be an impertinent joke. Later on, the boy changed his behaviour, looked down, seemed confused, was less ready with his answers. His expression seemed to have become more sincere, and with that far more attractive. Michael, by now interested, surmised that what Nick had previously feigned for the amusement of his fellows he now perhaps genuinely felt. He was sorry for the boy, thought him now more modest and generally improved, saw him once or twice alone.

Michael was perfectly aware that Nick’s charms were beginning to move him in a way which was more than casual. He knew himself to be susceptible without for a second feeling himself in danger, so confident and happy did he feel in his plans for the future. The fact, too, that he had never before felt attracted in this way by a person so much younger than himself contributed to make him regard his affection for Nick as something rather special but in no way menacing. He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life. At prayer the boy’s name came naturally, with others, to his lips, and he felt a painful joy at the contemplation in himself of such a store of goodwill which asked for itself no ordinary reward.