Iris Murdoch - The Bell

Eventually a kind of quietness came over him, as of a hunted animal that crouches in hiding for a long while until it is lulled into a kind of peace. The silent days passed like a dream. After his work he sat in the refectory with Dora, drinking innumerable cups of tea, while the petals of fading roses fell upon the table, diffusing a sweet weary smell of potpourri, and they talked of Dora’s plans. He watched Dora, turning towards life and happiness like a strong plant towards the sun, assimilating all that lay in her way. And all the time he thought about Nick until it was as if he spoke to him endlessly in his thought, a continual beseeching wordless speech like a prayer.

Very slowly a sense of his own personality returned to him. The annihilating sense of a total guilt gave way to a more reflective and discriminating remembrance. It was indeed as if there was very little of him left now. He need not have feared to grow, to thrive upon disaster. He was diminished. Reflection, which justifies, which fabricates hopes, could not do so now for him. He pondered without intensity on what he was: his general grievance against nature, his particular wrong choices. One day no doubt all this would seem charged again with a vast significance, and he would try once more to find out the truth. One day too he would experience again, responding with his heart, that indefinitely extended requirement that one human being makes upon another. He knew this abstractly, and wondered if he would, in that time, do better. It seemed to matter very little. Nothing could mend the past.

No sharp sense of his own needs drove him to make supplication. He looked about him with the calmness of the ruined man. But what did, from his former life, remain to him was the Mass. After the first weeks he went back to it, crossing the causeway in the early morning through the white fog, placing his feet carefully on the bricks which seemed to glow beneath him in some light from the hidden sun, answering the summons of the bell. The Mass remained, not consoling, not uplifting, but in some way factual. It contained for him no assurance that all would be made well that was not well. It simply existed as a kind of pure reality separate from the weaving of his own thoughts. He attended it almost as a spectator, and remembered with surprise the time when he had thought that one day he would celebrate the Mass himself, and how it had seemed to him that on that day he would die of joy. That day would never come, and those emotions were old and dead. Yet whoever celebrated it, the Mass existed and Michael existed beside it. He made no movement now, reached out no hand. He would have to be found and fetched or else he was beyond help. Perhaps ke was beyond help. He thought of those against whom he had offended, and gathered them about him in this perhaps endless and perhaps meaningless attention. And next door, as it were, to total unbelief there recurred to him the egotistical and helpless cry of the Dies Irae .

Quaerens me, sedisti lassus;

Redemisti, Crucem passus;

Tantus labor non sit cassus.

They got out of the taxi. Michael paid the taxi-driver for the double journey and asked him to wait to take Dora back to the Court. They went into the station.

It was yesterday morning that the letter had arrived for which Michael had been waiting. Mrs Mark informed him that Catherine was a great deal better. She seemed, in fact, to be more or less normal, though at this stage one could never say. Of course he must expect to find her much changed. She had not yet asked after her brother; it had been judged wise that Michael should be the one to tell her about Nick’s death. His presence was therefore urgently requested in London.

Michael was at once eager to be off. His work was done now at the Court. Nothing detained him. He spent the day packing and making telephone calls and arranged to leave next day on the early train. Dora was to leave by a later train which would take her, with only one change, to Bath. She telephoned Sally to expect her late the following evening.

Dora, who had watched with anxiety the arrival of any letter from Mrs Mark, knew by Michael’s excited agitation, even before he told her, that this must be the one. She had waited sadly, but with a sense of the inevitable, for the ending of her time with Michael. She loved him with a quiet undemanding hopelessness. After so much pain and violence his very inaccessibility was consoling. And she could not bring herself to be jealous of a being so rare and so unfortunate as Catherine.

She had not regretted her decision not to return to Paul. With immense relief, and the sense of a load taken off her, she welcomed Michael’s support. She wrote long explanatory letters to Paul. Paul replied with angry screeds, telegram ultimatums, and telephone calls which always ended abruptly with one or other of them banging down the receiver. Paul had, for some reason perhaps connected with Michael, spared her his arrival in person. He announced to her, more clearly than ever before, his philosophy. There were no two ways about it. She was the type of woman who was made to vacillate between teasing and submitting. He had had enough of her teasing. It was time for her to submit. This was in fact what she really wanted to do, and she would find that this was where her true happiness lay. Independence was a chimera. All that would happen would be that she would be drawn into a new love affair. And was it right, because she knew that he would wait for her indefinitely, that she should inflict upon him, indeed upon both of them, these continual and pointless sufferings? He was aware that when she had some new fantasy in her head she was cold and ruthless, but he appealed to her common sense and to any remembrance that she still had of how much she had loved him. And by the way, could he now have back those two letters he had given her?

Dora was moved but not profoundly shaken by these communications. She pondered over them and answered them with clumsy attempts at argument. She also replied at length to a letter from Noel. Noel apologized for having bothered her by appearing at Imber. He realized now that it had been unwise. He was sorry, if she was sorry, that the place had been made to look so ludicrous in the press. But there it is, facts will speak. His own article had been fairly moderate. He was sorry too, subject to the same proviso, to hear that Imber was folding up. However, it was also good news since it meant that Dora would soon be back in London, and when, oh when, should they meet? She owed him a lunch. He had meant it when he said he missed her. He was missing her at this moment.

Dora replied that she was not coming to London. She would see him at some later time. For the present she wanted to be left alone. She felt a nostalgia for the ease of his company; but she no longer had the feverish urge to escape into his world. She attempted to turn her thoughts away from Paul, away from Noel, away even from Michael. It was not easy. She packed her things and collected together the paintings she had made in the last few weeks. She went to bed exhausted. She imagined, as she imagined every night, Paul sitting alone in his beautiful Knightsbridge room, beside the white telephone, wanting her back. But her last remembrance was that on the morrow Michael would be leaving her, and when they met again he would perhaps be married to Catherine. She wept herself to sleep, but they were quiet and comforting tears.

The morning was foggy as usual. They walked along the platform and sat down on the seat. The fog curled in slow tall breakers across the track and the fields opposite were invisible. The air was damp and cold.

“Have you got a winter coat?” said Michael.

“No. Well, it’s at Knightsbridge,” said Dora. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not a cold person.”