Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

'Oh if you want to, there's plenty of room, I don't care, but it won't be any good.' She started to cry.

Tamar was being closely observed now by Rose who was sitting on her bed. Rose had brought Tamar up a chocolate drink, specially made by Annushka, which Rose knew that Tamar liked, and Tamar had drunk a little of it. Rose had also brought aspirins and sleeping pills which had been refused.Tamar had politely insisted that she was quite well, nothing was the matter, she had eaten quite a lot really, she never had much appetite, she had slept perfectly well last night and would sleep perfectly well tonight. She was enjoying the Tale of Genji, there it was on her bedside table, and she was looking forward to reading a little before she went to sleep. Then she had suddenly started to cry. The tears were brief, like the automatic opening and closing of a sluice gate, large tears, they rolled down copiously for half a minute, then ceased. Rose tried to hold her hand, the hand with which she had been wiping away the tears, but she hid it in the bedclothes. Sitting up in bed in the little round room, with her striped pyjamas and thin tear-stained face, she looked like a small boy. Rose thought, she's ill, she may be in for a depression, I must speak to Violet, but what's the use of speaking to Violet, oh God, if I could only get hold of this child, kidnap her, take her away, and keep her! Perhaps I should have done just that years ago. But Violet is such a savage creature, she has so much will.

'Tamar, you're ill. I want you to see Doctor Tallcott, the doctor here in the village.'

‘Doctor- no!' Tamar looked quite alarmed.

'Your mother needn't know – Well, see your own doctor then. Of course Violet says he's no good -'

‘I'm not ill, I'm perfectly all right, I just want to be left alone, please, Rose dear, don't be cross with me -'

'Darling, I'm not!' Rose knelt down beside Tamar's bed and captured the little thin hand which had strayed out again, and kissed it. 'Will you really sleep now, can I do anything, bring you anything?'

`No, no, I'm all right, I'll sleep now I think, I won't read Genji, I feel you've done me good, don't worry about me, it’s nothing, I promise you, nothing.'

Rose had to be content with that. She left the room and stood for a moment outside. Tamar's light went out.

Rose went downstairs to her own bedroom. This always reminded her of her mother who had been so pretty, so anxious to please everyone, so lost after her son and her husband had both so quickly, so incredibly, so suddenly disappeared; so much under her husband's thumb, under Sinclair's, later under Rose's, even Reeve's. Rose still missed her mother, and looked about for her. She remembered being outraged when someone, a friend of Reeve's, had called her `idle'. Her mother was not idle, she was always busy, though not always with tasks which people would think had much point. The flowers were so beautifully done in her day. Rose and Annushka lacked that talent. The room, not intentionaly altered by Rose, had gradually disintegrated and faded while, remaining generally the same: the old-fashioned dressing table with the glass top, which used to be dusted over with her mother's face powder, the big 'gentlemen's wardrobe', dating from the days when she and Rose's father had occupied the double bed – how far away that seemed now, as if in another century – the shabby armchairs not suitable for guest rooms, the Axminster carpet covered with shadowy flowers, the pink and white striped wallpaper, the pink nearly invisible, the paper peeling, the ghostly rectangles of vanished pictures. The tapestry renderings of Biblical scenes had belonged to her mother's mother, herself an expert embroiderer.

Rose sat in one of the chairs and thought a bit about Tamar. Then she thought about Jean. All these thoughts were painful, fearful, remorseful. She considered going downstairs again and joining the others, but Gerard and Jenkin and Duncan would probably be locked in some theoretical argument, and she did not feel like entertaining Lily and Gull who had been in the process of going to bed anyway. She had better go to bed and seek the silent innocence of sleep and the silly anxiety of dreams. Dear sleep, like death. She noticed Daniel Deronda lying on the bedside table under the pink-fringed shade of the lamp. She couldn't read it. She thought, perhaps I have come to the end of reading. J’ai lu tous les livres. She knew all her favourites by heart. No novel pleased her now with that glad feeling of escape and refuge. She did not want to read biographies, or the well-informed political books which Gerard sometimes recommended. No one reads books of imagination now, one of Reeve's friends had told her (Tony Reckitt, a farmer, the man who had called her mother `idle'), they want facts. Rose could not do with facts, but the other things had gone too. Was she becoming, like the century, illiterate?

Outside in the snowy darkness a fox barked. For a moment Rose took the sound to be a dog's bark before she recognised the crazy sound of the fox. In any case, no village dog would be so near unless it was lost. A barking dog in the country always made her remember Sinclair's dog, Regent. He had disappeared soon after Sinclair died. For a long time Rose had expected him to return, scratching at the door, down at Boyars, or in London. Even now she expected him, a ghost dog, coming back to look for his master. Listening to the fox back again, wildly, crazily, sadly, desperately, she shuddered. Then she actually began to feel afraid.

She thought, am I growing old at last? I must take a grip upon myself, upon my life. It's all about Gerard, this pointless feeling, this fear. Rose had suffered anguish, terror, as she watched Gerard and Lily dancing upon the ice. That utterly unexpected intrusion, that theft, had made her want to weep and scream. She would never forget those moments and the entirely new and special and intense feelings of jealousy, even of rage, even of hatred, with which she had witnessed LilyBoyne’s triumph. She had congratulated Lily afterwards, put her arm round her shoulder, laughed and smiled with Gerard as he exclaimed joyfully. It had been a terrible portent, a warning arrow. Yet what was she afraid of, did she think Gerard would fall in love with Lily? It's the same old trouble, she thought, it's the same old endless illness. There were dear good men that I might have married, that I loved, but I wasn't in love, my heart was a captive with a life sentence. I am a fool, it's wicked to be so stupid.

As if to allay the fear, the loneliness which the fox's cry had carried to her out of the dark, she began to feel and welcome the love-pain, the hideous desire, the longing for Gerard which came to her s ometimes, which she had felt so intensely when she stood at the window of Levquist's room at the dance and saw the tower bathed in light. Sometimes it seemed to her that Gerard had become her brother, taking Sinclair's place. Did he feel this, had he uttered that dread word once, and then seeing her wince never repeated it? Perhaps it was a sense of her as a sibling which made him so calmly content with their deep intimate yet somehow passionless, even hygienic, relation. God, how I want to smash it all sometimes, she thought, and rush at him screaming. How displeased he would be by such a ,tantrum', as she could hear him call it, and how kindly he would forgive her! Her position was hopeless, however ingenious she was there was no move she could make. It was too late now to have his children. Rose averted her thoughts from these too conceivable beings. But why was she thinking of that? Marriag ewith Gerard had never been a possibility, she could not even accuse him of having 'led her on'. That strange episode after Sinclair's death was more like a kind of sacred rite, something with no consequences, to be wrapped in it religious silence. She recalled something she had heard Jenkin say about Gerard. 'The thing to remember about him is that he is basically dotty!' She had been annoyed at the time; later it had even brought her comfort.