Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

There was a bright flash and a crack. I shut my eyes. The room was filled with smoke, and a cloud of starlings flew up from under the balustrade. When I opened my eyes I saw through the sulphurous mist that the door of the safe had swung open and was dangling towards the floor on one hinge. No other damage had been done. I came forward and looked inside the safe. Its interior consisted of two deep shelves. On the lower shelf there was what appeared to be a great deal of money, done up in bundles of one-pound and five-pound notes. On the upper shelf I saw what I wanted.

There were two packets of letters. I took them out. There was a small packet, in a neat self-conscious hand which I recognized as Sadie's. The other packet was very much larger. I flicked it over as one flicks a pack of cards. All these letters were from Anna. 'Beautiful letters,' Hugo had called them. Guilt and triumph and despair battled in me as I clutched them. I sat down on the settee. Now I would see that which I had been unable to imagine. I drew out the first envelope.

At that moment I heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up, with a great screeching of brakes, in the street outside. I hesitated. I was blushing and trembling. I got up and climbed on to a chair and put my head out of the window, still holding the letters in my hand. A lorry had drawn up outside the door. I watched it for a moment, but nobody emerged, so I got down again. I looked at the envelope; and as I did so I saw as in a vision the dark wood and the figure of Anna stepping into it barefoot. My fingers fumbled with the letter inside. It was a letter of many pages. I began to unfold it. Then I heard the sound of a car. It approached with a strong crescendo and then stopped. I stood rigid, cursing to myself. I climbed on to the chair again. Far below I saw Hugo's black Alvis. It was drawn up in the road just behind the lorry. An emotion which was neither pleasure nor fear but a mixture of both made me watch the car with a fast-beating heart. I shivered. Hugo was imminent.

Someone got out of the car. But it was not Hugo. I stared for a moment. Then I recognized the fair head and slim figure of Lefty. I watched with parted lips, gripping the edge of the window. Lefty was standing on the pavement, consulting with two men who had just climbed out of the lorry. The strong sun cast their tall shadows upon the pavement. Then I saw across the windscreen of the Alvis the letters NISP. And I understood. I leapt down from the chair. I whirled about and looked at the room as a man might look for a foothold upon a crumbling mountain-side. I snatched up my note to Hugo and put it in my pocket. I stood for a moment paralysed. Then far below I could hear feet upon the stairs. I took in the scene: the rifled desk, the open safe. I looked at the letters which I still held in my hand, and I slipped the one which I had been opening back into the packet. I held them for a second longer and made as if to put them into my pocket. But it was impossible. They were burning my hand. I hurled them back into the safe. Then I selected the largest of the bundles of one-pound notes and thrust it inside my coat. "That's something the Revolution won't get!' I said out loud; and I made for the door.

I crossed the landing in three strides, and as I entered Hugo's kitchen I could hear Lefty's voice on the stairs. I opened the kitchen window and vaulted out on to the flat roof. I walked firmly across the roof. The skylights of the next door office building were propped wide open to the summer afternoon. I lowered myself through one of them, and found myself on a deserted landing. I began to descend the stairs, and a minute or two later emerged from a door into a side alley. I walked back on to the street and crossed the road; and as I walked nonchalantly past Hugo's house on the other side they were already carrying out the Renoirs.

Twenty

Mars was delighted to see me. He had been shut in all day. I fed him, and made up the rest of his meat into a parcel. Then I packed some of my clothes into a bag. There were a few letters and a package for me in the hall; I stuffed them into the bag too without looking at them. I wrote a note to Dave, thanking him for his hospitality, and I left the house with Mars.

We got on to an eighty-eight bus. Mars provoked a flood of remarks from the conductor. We sat in the front seat on top, the seat in which I had sat not so very long ago thinking about Anna until I had had to get off the bus and go looking for her. And as I looked down now on the crowds in Oxford Street and stroked Mars's head I felt neither happy nor sad, only rather unreal, like a man shut in a glass. Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

So I reflected; and was reluctant to get off the bus. But when we reached Oxford Circus I rose and pulled Mars after me down the stairs. It was the rush hour. I threaded my way through the crowd with the dog at my heels, and turned down Rathbone Place. Soho was hot and dusty, sulky idle and senseless with the afternoon. People stood about waiting for opening time. In an upper room someone was playing a piano. Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it, going away into the distance. I walked along Charlotte Street. The scene trembled and shimmered before me perhaps with the heat or perhaps with fear. Like one pursued I quickened my step.

Mrs Tinckham's voice came to me out of the wreaths of tobacco smoke. She seemed to have been expecting me. But then she always expected me. I sat down at the little table.

'Hello, dearie,' said Mrs Tinck, 'you've been a long time.'

'It took a long time,' I said.

Mars sniffed discreetly at one or two of the nearest cats. They seemed to have got used to him and merely turned away their delicate heads and blinked. Behind Mrs Tinck they rose, tier upon tier, and I could see their eyes through the smoke like the lights of a railway termini.. in the fog. Mars lay down at my feet.

I stretched out my legs. 'What about a drink?' I said to Mrs Tinckham. 'It's nearly opening time.'

'Whisky and soda?' she said. I could hear the glass clinking under the counter and the gurgle of the whisky and the fizz of the soda. Mrs Tinckham passed it to me and I threw my head back and closed my eyes. Very distantly the wireless was murmuring like the voice of another world. The sounds of a Soho evening came in through the doorway. I could feel Mars leaning against my foot. I took two gulps of the whisky; it ran through me like quickgold and, almost physically, I felt a sort of shiver of possibility. I opened my eyes and found Mrs Tinckham looking at me. She had something on the counter under her hand. I recognized it as the parcel containing my manuscripts. I reached out for it and she passed it over without a word.

I laid the parcel on the table. Then I extracted from my bag the small pile of letters which I had brought from Dave's. I saw at once that there was a letter from Sadie among them, and I set that one aside.

'Do you mind if I read my letters?' I said to Mrs Tinckham. 'Do what you please, dear,' said Mrs Tinck. 'I'll get on with my story. I'm just at the exciting part.'

I didn't want to open Sadie's letter first. So I took up a letter with a London postmark and an unfamiliar hand and opened it It was from Lefty. I read it through several times and I smiled. Lefty wrote in an elegant and faintly rhetorical manner with colons, semi-colons, and parentheses. His first paragraph dealt with our night beside the Thames: a midsummer night's dream Lefty said it had been for him; he only hoped that he had not played the ass. He seemed to remember talking his head off. He went on to say that he was sorry to hear that I had been ill. He suggested that when I felt better I should come and call on him: and if I felt I could do any sort of political work he would be glad, but that I should call anyway; after all, life wasn't entirely a matter of politics, was it? I got a good impression from this letter; and although I doubted whether Lefty really entertained the final sentiment I felt that here I had to do with a man.