Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

'Yes, but you haven't been seeing her for ages, have you?' said Sadie, still at the top of her voice.

I began to dislike the conversation very much indeed. I just wanted to get away.

'I've been in France for a considerable time,' I said.

I didn't imagine Sadie had any close knowledge of Anna's doings. I could see Sadie's face focused now into a look of intelligent venom. She looked like a beautiful snake; and the curious fantasy came to me that if I were to look under the drier at the real face and not at the reflection I should see there some terrible old witch.

'Well, you call on me next Tuesday, early,' said Sadie, 'and I'll install you. I mean it about this bodyguard act.'

'That'll be splendid, Sadie dear,' I said automatically, 'I'll be sure to come.' And I rose.

'I have to see my publisher,' I explained.

We exchanged smiles, and I strode out of the place, followed by a large number of fascinated female eyes.

I omitted to mention earlier that I am acquainted with Belfounder. As my acquaintance with Hugo is the central theme of this book, there was little point in anticipating it. You will hear more than enough on this subject in the pages that follow. I had better start by explaining something about Hugo himself and then I will tell you of the circumstances in which I first met him and something of the early days of our friendship. Hugo's original name was not Belfounder. His parents were German, and his father adopted the name Belfounder when he came to live in England. He found it, I believe, on a tombstone in a Cotswold churchyard, and he thought that it would be good for business. It evidently was, for Hugo in due course inherited a flourishing armaments factory, and the firm of Belfounder and Baermann, Small-arms, Ltd. Unfortunately for the firm, Hugo was at that time an ardent pacifist; and after various upheavals, in the course of which the Baermann faction withdrew, Hugo was left with a small concern which came to be called Belfounder's Lights and Rockets Ltd. He had contrived to convert the armaments factory into a rocket factory; and here for some years he concerned himself with the manufacture of rockets, Very lights, small commercial dynamite, and fireworks of all kinds.

It started out, as I say, a small concern. But somehow money always stuck to Hugo, he simply couldn't help making it; and within a short time he was extremely rich and prosperous, almost as prosperous as his father had been. (No one can be quite as prosperous as an armaments manufacturer.) He always lived simply, however, and at the time I first got to know him he used to work on and off as a craftsman in his own factory. His speciality was set pieces. As you probably know, the creation of a set piece is a highly skilled affair, calling for both manual dexterity and creative ingenuity. The peculiar problems of the set piece delighted Hugo and inspired him: the trigger-like relation of the parts, the contrasting appeal of explosion and colour, the blending of pyrotechnical styles, the methods for combining eclat with duration, the perennial question of the coda. Hugo treated the set piece as if it were a symphony; he despised the vulgarity of representational pieces. 'Fireworks are sui generis,' he once said to me. 'If you must compare them to another art, compare them to music.'

There was something about fireworks which absolutely fascinated Hugo. I think what pleased him most about them was their impermanence. I remember his holding forth to me once about what an honest thing a firework was. It was so patently just an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. 'That's what all art is really?' said Hugo, 'only we don't like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.' The enjoyment of fireworks, according to Hugo, ought to be an education in the enjoyment of all worldly splendour. You pay your money,' said Hugo, 'and you get an absolutely momentary pleasure with no nonsense about it. No one talks cant about fireworks.'

Unfortunately he was wrong, and his theories turned out to be his own undoing as a craftsman. Hugo's set pieces began to be in enormous demand. No smart house-party or public festival was complete without one. They were even exported to America. Then the newspapers began to talk, and to refer to them as works of art, and to classify them into styles. This so much disgusted Hugo that it paralysed his work. After a while he began to conceive a positive hatred for set pieces, and after a while he abandoned them altogether.

It was through the common cold that I first met Hugo. This was in a period when I was particularly short of cash, and things went very ill indeed with me until I discovered an incredibly charitable arrangement whereby I could get free board and lodging in exchange for being a guinea pig in a cold-cure experiment. The experiment was going forward at a delightful country house where one could stay indefinitely and be inoculated with various permutations of colds and cures. I dislike having a cold, and the cures never seemed to work when they tried them on me; but on the other hand it was free, and one got fairly used to working with a cold, which was good practice for ordinary life. I managed to get a lot of writing done, at least up to the time when Hugo appeared.

The controllers of this charitable scheme used to propose to the victims that they be domiciled in pairs since, as they observed in the prospectus, few people can tolerate complete solitude. I don't care for solitude myself, as you know, but after a few tries I came to dislike even more the company of garrulous fools, and when I returned to this admirable place for a second season I asked to be allowed to live alone. The limited and protected isolation which such an institution offers in fact suits me quite well. This was granted; and I was hard at work, and battling too with a particularly appalling cold, when it was announced to me that the accommodation problem was now such that I must after all accept a companion. I had no choice but to agree, and I looked with very ill favour upon the enormous shaggy personage who then shambled in, put his things on the bed, and sat down at the other table. I grunted some sort of ungracious greeting, and then returned to my work, to make it clear that I was no fit companion for a chatterbox. I was further irritated by the fact that whereas I had only the cold, my companion was given both the cold and the cure, so that while I was choking and sneezing and using up a sackful of paper handkerchiefs, he remained in complete possession of his human dignity, and looking the picture of health. It was never clear to me on what principle the distribution of inoculations was made, though it always seemed that I got more than my fair share of colds.

I had feared that my companion would chatter, but it was soon plain that there was no such danger. Two days passed during which we did not exchange a single word. He seemed, indeed, absolutely unaware of my presence. He neither read nor wrote, but spent most of his time sitting at the table and looking out of the window across the pleasant parkland that surrounded the house. He sometimes mumbled to himself and said things half under his breath. He bit his nails prodigiously and once he produced a pen-knife and absently chipped holes in the furniture until one of the attendants took it from him. I thought at first that perhaps he was mentally deficient. During the second day I even began to feel a little nervous of him. He was extremely large, both stout and tall, with very wide shoulders and enormous hands. His huge head was usually sunk low between his shoulders, while his brooding gaze traced around the room or across the countryside a line which seemed to be suggested by none of the ordinary objects which lay in his field of vision. He had dark rather matted hair and a big shapeless mouth which opened every now and then, occasionally emitting a semi-articulate sound. Once or twice he began humming to himself, but broke off abruptly on each occasion--and this was the nearest he seemed to get to acknowledging my presence.