Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

The meeting was breaking up. Mor rose to his feet and stretched. He felt only tired now, his eagerness dissipated. He hoped that he would be spared a private interview with Mr Staveley, and moved nearer to Tim Burke for protection. Tim was gathering up the papers with which he felt it part of his duty as chairman to strew the table. Tim was an old friend of the Mor family. They had met through Labour Party activities, when Mor had been teaching in a school on the south side of London, and Mor and Nan had to some extent taken Tim, who was a bachelor, under their wing. They saw less of him now than formerly, but Mor still counted Tim as one of his best friends. He was a trifle older than Mor, a lean pale man with a pock-marked face and large white hands and rather thin pale hair of which it was hard to say whether it was yellow or grey. He was distinguished chiefly by his eyes, of a flecked and streaky blue, and by his voice. Tim Burke had left Ireland when he was a child, but there was no mistaking his nationality, although long residence in London and the frequenting of cinemas had introduced a Cockney intonation into his brogue and a number of Americanisms among the flowery locutions of his Dublin speech. He was an accomplished goldsmith and could have been richer if he had wished.

‘Take it easy, chief, we’ll get you out of this if it’s the last thing we do!’ said Tim, casting a wary eye at Mr Staveley, who was standing by himself in brooding meditation.

The meetings took place in the Parish Hall, an exceptionally featureless building whose bright unshaded electric lights had just been turned on. The evening was still blue and bright outside and through it a large part of the audience were already making their way towards the Dog and Duck. The rest stood about on the bare boards, between trestle tables and tubular chairs, talking or listening or casting uneasy glances towards the speaker, wondering if they dared to ask him a question and whether they could make their question sound intelligent. Nan was pulling her gloves on in a very slow way which Mor knew she adopted when she wished to detach herself in a superior manner from the surrounding scene. Mor had hoped that Nan might make some friends at this class, and had originally imagined that perhaps this was why she came. But Nan had steadfastly refused to get to know anyone or to pay any attention at all to her fellow-students. If Mor ever referred to a member of the class she would be unable, or profess to be unable, to remember who it was. She behaved as one surrounded by her inferiors.

Nan came slowly down the room. Donald had already come forward and was holding on to the table while Tim Burke gathered up his things. At such moments Donald seemed to attach himself directly to Tim as if invisible threads joined their bodies. In passing between them, as he moved now past Tim in the direction of the door, Mor felt a shock. He stopped close to his son, but he knew that it was Tim only that Donald was aware of, Tim’s gesture and Tim’s voice for which he was waiting. Don’s admiration for his friend was another thing which irritated Mor. It was so totally non-rational. He could not conceive why it should exist at all.

It was customary after these meetings for Tim to carry off the Mor family and take them down the road to his shop, where he would offer them refreshment until it was time to take the train. Tim held, and Mor agreed, that it was not necessary for Mor to run the gauntlet in the Dog and Duck. Tim now took a quick look at the scene. Mr Staveley was lifting his head. A look of renewed determination was on his face.

‘Out the back!’ said Tim, and in a moment he had shepherded them out through a kitchen and an alleyway and round into the road. Marsington was an old village with a fine broad main street with grassy cobbled edges. The fields about it had long ago been covered with the red-roofed houses between which the green Southern Region trains sped at frequent intervals bringing the inhabitants of Marsington and its neighbouring boroughs to and from their daily work in central London. The main street now carried one of the most important routes to the metropolis, and its most conspicuous features were the rival garages whose brightly lit petrol pumps, glowing upon ancient brick and stone, attracted the passing motorist. The traffic was incessant. For all that, in the warm twilight it had a remote and peaceful air, the long broad façades of its inns and spacious houses withdrawn and reassuring.

Tim Burke’s shop was a little farther down, in the middle of a row of old shops, dark below and white above. A black sign swung above the door. T. Burke. Jeweller and Goldsmith . Tim stood fumbling for his keys. Mor leaned against the wall. He felt relief at having escaped, mingled with uneasiness at the presence close beside him of Nan, who was probably angry and preparing for a sulk. He cast a quick glance sideways at her. Her lips were pursed. A bad sign. The door gave way and they all stepped into the shop, and stood still while Tim turned on a lamp in the far corner.

Mor loved Tim’s shop. The wooden shutters which covered the shop windows at night made it quite dark now within and in the dim light of the lamp it looked like some treasure cave or alchemist’s den. Near the front there was a certain amount of order. Two large counters, each in the form of a glass-topped cabinet, faced each other near to the street door. But beyond these the long shop became gradually chaotic. Loaded and untidy shelves, from floor to ceiling, ran round the three walls, well barricaded by wooden display cases of various types which stood, often two or three deep, in front of them. Between these, and in the rest of the available space, there were small tables, some of them also topped with glass and designed for display purposes. The more precious jewellery, such of it as was not behind the bars of the shop window, or hidden in safes in the back room, was laid out in the glass-topped cabinets, and ranged in fair order. Tim, when he tried, knew how to display his wares. He loved the stones, and treasured and displayed them according to his own system of valuation, which did not always accord with their market prices. This week, Mor noticed, one of the cabinets was given over to a display of opals. Set in necklaces, ear-rings, and brooches they lay, black ones and white ones, dusky ones flecked with blue or grey patches, and glowing water opals like drops of water frozen thick with colour. The other cabinet was full of pearls, the real ones above, the cultured ones below, and worked golden objects, seals, rings, and watches. Mor had learnt a certain amount about stones during his long friendship with Tim. This had been somewhat against his will, since for reasons which were never very clear to him, he rather disapproved of his friend’s profession.

The front of the shop was orderly. But the cheaper jewellery, which lay behind, seemed to have got itself into an almost inextricable mess. Within the squat glass-topped tables especially, ropes of beads were tangled together into a solid mass of multi-coloured stuff, and bold was the customer who, pointing to some identifiable patch of colour, said, ‘I’ll have that one.’ Heaped together with these were clips and ear-rings, their fellows often irrevocably missing, brooches, bracelets, buckles, and a miscellany of other small adornments. Tim Burke was not interested in the cheap stuff. He seemed to acquire his stock more or less by accident in the course of his trade and dispose of it without thought or effort to such determined individuals as were prepared to struggle for what they wanted, often searching the shop from end to end to find the second ear-ring or the other half of the buckle. The remoter parts of the shop were also found to contain other objects, varying in value, such as snuff boxes, pieces of embroidery, foreign coins, pewter mugs, fans, paper-weights, and silverhilted daggers — concerning all of which Tim Burke would declare that really he had no idea how the creatures got there for he couldn’t for the life of him remember buying them.