Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

I ran along calling Anna's name. But now suddenly the wood seemed to be full of statues and lovers. Every tree had blossomed with a murmuring pair and every vista mocked me with a stone figure. Slim forms were flitting along the avenues and pallid oblique faces caught the small light which penetrated through the forest. The din from the Concorde echoed along the tops of the trees. I cannoned into a tree trunk and hurt my shoulder. I sped along the colonnade towards a motionless figure which confronted me with marble eyes. I looked about me and called again. But my voice was caught up in the velvet of the night like a knife-thrust caught in a cloak. It was useless. I crossed the main avenue, thinking that Anna might have gone into the other half of the wood. A man's face stared at me, and I stumbled over someone's foot. I ran to and fro for some time like a lost dog.

When at last I paused in exhaustion and desperation I realized that I was still holding Anna's shoes. I turned about, and with a renewed hope I went plunging back towards the place where we had first entered the avenues of trees. The exact place was hard to identify, as each avenue so precisely resembled the next one. When I thought I had found the place, I began to search for the tree with the cavity at its root. But every tree had a cavity at its root; and yet no one of them looked quite like the one where Anna had left her shoes. I began to think that I must have mistaken our point of entry. I went back on to the grass and tried again, but with no greater certainty. I decided after a while that all I could do was to wait and hope that Anna would come back. I stood there leaning against a tree, while whispering couples passed me by in the darkness, and I called out Anna's name from time to time in tones of increasing sadness. I began to feel tired, and sat down at the foot of the tree, still clutching the shoes. An indefinite time passed; and as it did so a very sad stillness descended on me like dew. I stopped calling and waited in silence. The night was getting colder. I knew now that Anna would not come.

At last I rose and chafed my stiff limbs. I left the Tuileries gardens. The streets were strewn with the discarded toys of the evening. Through a sea of coloured paper tired people were making their way home. The party was over. I joined the procession; and as I walked with them in the direction of the Seine I wondered to myself with what thoughts and down what streets, perhaps not far from here, Anna was walking homeward barefoot.

Sixteen

I was waiting for the sun to set. I had been back at Goldhawk Road now for several days. The sunlight moved very slowly on the white wall of the Hospital, casting a long shadow from a ledge half-way up the wall. Longer and longer the shadow grew, and as the shadow moved my head turned upon the pillow. The wall was glaring white at midday, but towards evening the glare was withdrawn and a softer light glowed as if from within the concrete, showing up little irregularities in the stone. Occasionally a bird flew along between the windows and the wall, but looking always more like a false bird on a string than a real bird that would fly away somewhere else when it had passed the Hospital and go perhaps and perch upon a tree. Nothing grew upon the wall of the Hospital. Sometimes I tried to imagine that there was vegetation growing on the ledge: damp plants with long fingery leaves, that drooped from crevices and opened into spotted flowers. But in reality there was nothing there, and even in imagination the wall would resist me and remain smooth and white. In two hours the sun would have set.

When the sun was set I might perhaps go to sleep. I never let myself sleep during the day. Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair. The sun will not tolerate it. If he can he will pry under your eyelids and prise them apart; and if you hang black curtains at your windows he will lay siege to your room until it is so stifling that at last you stagger with staring eyes to the window and tear back the curtains to see that most terrible of sights, the broad daylight outside a room where you have been sleeping. There are special nightmares for the daytime sleeper: little nervous dreams tossed into some brief restless moments of unconsciousness and breaking through the surface of the mind to become confused at once with the horror of some waking vision. Such are these awakenings, like an awakening in the grave, when one opens one's eyes, stretched out rigid-with clenched hands, waiting for some misery to declare itself; but for a long time it lies to suffocation upon the chest and utters no word.

I was afraid to go to sleep. Whenever I began to feel drowsy I would move to some less comfortable position: which was not difficult since I was lying on Dave's camp-bed, which resumed innumerable possibilities of discomfort. It was one of those beds in which the canvas is slung in a rectangle of rigid rods supported by four W-shaped steel legs. At the junction of the legs with the rectangle there are bulging joints into which the rods supporting the canvas also fit. By shifting my body about I could make one or other of these joints bore into my ribs or back. So I would lie for a time contorted, while the haze of sleep was dispelled and replaced by an aching stupor which I knew from experience could continue indefinitely without ever darkening into unconsciousness. My pillow was propped up on a rucksack of Dave's which contained a coagulated mass of boots and old clothes which had not been taken out for years; and sometimes the pillow would fall off, and leave me propped against the rucksack and bathed in its aura of the perspiration of long ago. I needed to see the window. The sun was still moving.

Mars was somewhere in the room. He would lie so silent for long periods that I would think that perhaps he had gone away, and start looking for him with my eyes; only to find him lying close to me and looking at me. Occasionally he would attempt to lie on the bed beside me, but I discouraged this. His warm fur had an aroma of sleep which made me afraid. Then he would stretch out near me on the floor and for a time I would dangle my hand upon his neck. Later on he would poke about the room in a bored way until he threw himself down in a far corner with a grunting sound. Later on again I would hear his claws click on the linoleum and he would come and thrust his long nose into my face and give me a look of anguish which came so near to transcending his nature that I would push his face away and ruffle up the fur of his back to satisfy myself that he was only a dog.

I was worried that he was getting no exercise. Dave, it is true, took him out every morning and evening as far as Shepherd's Bush Green, and there, Dave would tell me, he would race about like a mad thing until it was time to come home again. But this could not be enough for such a big dog; and Dave, who was due to start teaching at a summer school in a day or two, would then have even less time to devote to him. I wondered if Mars was unhappy; and then I wondered whether, supposing that he could not be said to know that he was unhappy, he could properly be said to be unhappy. I decided to ask Dave about this some time.

Dave was often in during the day, and I would hear the distant sound of his typewriter. Then there would be silence. He brought me a meal at midday and in the evening. We did not speak. Sometimes in the afternoon he would open the door and look at me for a while. I saw him as one sees someone through the wrong end of a telescope. Then much later I would remember that the door had shut and he was gone. Dave had seen me like this before. The bed creaked and shivered as I turned upon it restlessly. I was dressed in my shirt and pants, and although it was a sunny day I had two blankets drawn over me. I felt cold in the marrow of my bones. I retrieved my pillow and balanced it again upon the rucksack. I turned away from the window. No sun came into this room, but in the reflected light from the Hospital wall everything was revealed with an abnormal clarity, as if an extra dimension had been added to space, and objects projected and receded with a sharpness which made them almost unbearably present. I lay looking at my shoes and wondering what could have happened to Finn.