Iris Murdoch - The Bell

One day a letter arrived from Toby. He was by now well installed at Oxford. Michael read bis letter with relief. In awkward terms, Toby apologized for his hasty departure, and for his indiscretions, which he hoped had not caused too much trouble. He thanked Michael for his kindness, said how much it had meant to him being at Imber, said he was sorry to see from the papers that they were all moving, but hoped it would be just as good somewhere else. What mainly emerged, however, from the letter, and set Michael’s mind at rest, was that for Toby the whole business was closed indeed. There was no sign of tormented guilt, no anxious brooding, no speculation about Michael’s state of mind. The full significance of the happenings at Imber had happily escaped Toby, and he had no retrospective curiosity about them now. He was in a new and wonderful world, and already Imber had become a story. He had a marvellous old panelled room in Corpus, he told Michael. He had decorated it with pictures of the medieval bell taken from the“ Illustrated London News ”. His tutor was terribly impressed when he told him how he had discovered the bell! Murphy was very well, by the way, and settling down splendidly with his parents. He wasn’t fretting any more. Hadn’t it been a good idea of Peter’s that he should take over Murphy? How terribly sad and shocking about Nick, he could hardly believe even now that it was true. Michael must come and see him at Corpus if ever he was going through Oxford and take a glass of sherry. Michael smiled a little over the letter and was glad of it. Perhaps he would go one day to see Toby, and to give Toby the pleasure of patronizing him a little, and of telling his friends afterwards that that was the odd chap he had told them of who once made a pass at him down at that place where he found the bell.

All these thoughts of Dora and Toby fluttered intermittently at the surface of Michael’s mind. More deeply and continually he was concerned with other matters. The pain he had felt when he knew that Nick was dead was so extreme that he had thought at first that he could not survive it. During the first days he had been consoled only by the knowledge that he could still kill himself. Such pain did not have to continue. He could occupy himself only in things which concerned Nick, could only speak of Nick when he spoke at all. He searched the Lodge from end to end several times, searching for something, a letter, a diary, which he could construe as a message to himself. He could not believe that Nick had gone without leaving him a word. But there was nothing to be found. The stove contained charred paper, the remains perhaps of a final holocaust of Nick’s correspondence, but it had all been thoroughly burnt and was beyond salvage. The house revealed nothing to Michael as, desperately and blinded by the tears which now started intermittently and without warning to his eyes, he ransacked Nick’s cupboard and suitcases and went through the pockets of his coats.

During this time his love for Nick seemed to grow, in an almost devilish way, to the most colossal dimensions. At moments this love felt to Michael like a great tree that was growing out of him, and he was tormented by strange dreams of cancerous growths. He had the image of Nick continually now before his eyes, seeing him often as he was when a boy, seeing him in flight across a tennis court, agile and strong and swift, conscious of Michael’s glance; and sometimes it seemed to him as if Nick had died in childhood. With these visions there came too an agony of physical desire, to be succeeded by a longing, so complete that it seemed to come from all the levels of his being, to hold Nick again in his arms.

Michael went to see the Abbess several times. Now, when it was too late, he told her everything. But there was nothing, at present, which she could do for him, and they both knew it. Michael felt himself responsible for Nick’s death, as much as if he had deliberately run him over with the lorry. The Abbess did not try to take this responsibility from him; but she could not, either, help him to live with it. He went away, bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now no means of expression. He remembered now when it was useless how the Abbess had told him that the way was always forward. Nick had needed love, and he ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears about its imperfection. If he had had more faith he would have done so, not calculating either Nick’s faults or his own. Michael recalled too how, with Toby, he had acted with more daring, and had probably acted wrong. Yet no serious harm had come to Toby; besides he had not loved Toby as he loved Nick, was not responsible for Toby as he had been for Nick. So great a love must have contained some grain of good, something at least which might have attached Nick to this world, given him some glimpse of hope. Wretchedly Michael forced himself to remember the occasions on which Nick had appealed to him since he came to Imber, and how on every occasion Michael had denied him. Michael had concerned himself with keeping his own hands clean, his own future secure, when instead he should have opened his heart: should impetuously and devotedly and beyond all reason have broken the alabaster cruse of very costly ointment.

As time went on Michael tried too to think of Catherine: poor Catherine, lying there drugged in London, with a terrible awakening ahead of her. He thought of her with great pity but could not purge from his mind the aversion which the idea of her still inspired. He dreaded the arrival of the letter which should summon him to see her. Perhaps he had found her existence, from the start, something of a scandal. Perhaps when Nick had first spoken of her he had felt jealous. He tried to remember. He found himself suddenly full of violent thoughts, wishing that it was Catherine that was dead instead of Nick, and strangely imagining that in some way she had destroyed her brother. Yet he pitied her, and knew in a cold sad way that till the end of his life he would be concerned with her and responsible for her welfare. Nick was gone; and to perfect his suffering Catherine remained.

The first agony passed and Michael found himself still living and thinking. Having at first feared to suffer too much, he later feared to suffer too little, or not in the right way. With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes consolation in the end. Michael told himself that he did not want to survive, he did not want to feed upon Nick’s death. He wanted to die too. But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it. He cast about in his mind for a way of thinking about what had happened which left him finally without refuge or relief. He did not want for a single moment to forget what had happened. He wanted to use his intelligence about it. He remembered the souls in Dante who deliberately remained within the purifying fire. Repentance: to think about sin without making the thought into a consolation.

After Nick’s death he was for a long time quite unable to pray. He felt indeed as if his belief in God had been broken at a single blow, or as if he had discovered that he had never believed. He absorbed himself so utterly, so desperately, in the thought of Nick that even to think about God seemed an intrusion, an absurdity. Gradually he became more detached but there was no sense of his faith being renewed. He thought of religion as something far away, something into which he had never really penetrated at all. He vaguely remembered that he had had emotions, experiences, hopes; but real faith in God was something utterly remote from all that. He understood that at last, and felt, almost coldly, the remoteness. The pattern which he had seen in his life had existed only in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And as he felt, bitterly, the grimness of these words, he put it to himself: there is a God, but I do not believe in Him.