Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

‘It’s time you stopped that now, missie, said Demoyte. ’There isn’t anything like enough light to paint by.‘ He shifted restlessly about in his chair. He particularly resented being kept there when Rain was not painting him but painting a piece of the rug. Rain had told him when he complained that ’all the colours belong to each other, so the rug looks different when you are there.

‘I know,’ said Rain abstractedly. She was wearing her black trousers and a loose red overall on top, the sleeves well rolled up. ‘It is too dark. My father would be cross seeing me painting now. I just want to finish this tiny square.’

She had filled in in very considerable detail one small segment of the rug in the top right-hand half of the picture. The rest of the picture was vaguely sketched in with a small number of thin lines of paint. Rain, following her father, did not believe in under-painting. She painted directly on to the canvas with strokes of colour which were put on as if they were to stand and to modify the final result however much was subsequently laid on top of them. Rain also followed Sidney Carter’s system of painting the background first and letting the main subject grow out of the background and dominate it and if necessary encroach upon it. In particular, she recalled her father’s dictum: ‘A little piece of serious paint upon the canvas will tell you a lot about the rest. Put it on and sleep on it’ Rain hoped that the following day she would be able to construct, from the small and finely worked segment of rug, a great deal more of the rest of her picture.

She laid the brush down. It was too dark now. Demoyte began to get up. ‘Please wait a moment,’ said Rain, ‘just a moment more, please.’ He subsided.

Rain came forward and studied him, leaning thoughtfully across the table. The hands. Much depended on that. The hands must be another mark of strength in the picture, shown solid and square, somehow. But how exactly?

‘I don’t know what to do with your hands,’ said Rain. She reached across and took one of Demoyte’s hands and laid it across the top of one of the books. No, that wouldn’t do.

‘I know what to do with your hands,’ said Demoyte. He captured the one that was still straying about on the table and lifted it to his lips.

Rain smiled faintly. She looked down at Demoyte, not studying him this time. Now it was quite dark in the room, although the garden was glowing still.

‘Have I given you a bad day?’ she said. She did not try to free her hand. Demoyte clasped it in both of his, stroking it gently and conveying it frequently to his lips.

‘You’ve kept me sitting here in one position and an agony of rheumatism for the whole afternoon, that’s all,’ said Demoyte. ‘Let me see how much you’ve done by now.’ He lumbered over to the easel. Rain followed him and sat down on a chair to look at the canvas. She felt exhausted.

‘Good God!’ said Demoyte. ‘Is that all you’ve done, child, in the last two hours? You’re still on that square inch of carpet. At this rate you’ll be with us for years. But perhaps that’s what you want-like Penelope, never finishing her work? I wouldn’t complain. And I can think of one or two other people who wouldn’t complain either.’ Demoyte leaned on the back of Rain’s chair and touched her dark hair. His enormous hand could cup the back of her head in its palm. He drew his hand slowly down on to her neck.

‘The picture will be finished,’ said Rain, ‘and I shall go. I shall be sorry.’ She spoke solemnly.

‘Yes,’ said Demoyte. He fetched another chair and placed it very close to her and sat down, his knee brushing hers. ‘When the picture is finished,’ he said, ‘you will go, and I shall not see you again.

He spoke in a factual voice, as if requiring no reply. Rain watched him gravely.

‘When you go,’ said Demoyte, ‘you will leave behind a picture of me, whereas what I shall be wanting is a picture of you.

‘Every portrait is a self-portrait,’ said Rain. ‘In portraying you I portray myself.’

‘Spiritual nonsense,’ said Demoyte. ‘I want to see your flesh, not your soul.’

‘Artists do paint themselves in their sitters,’ said Rain, ‘often in quite material ways. Burne-Jones made all his people look thin and gloomy like himself. Romney always reproduced his own nose, Van Dyck his own hands.’ She reached out and drew her hand in the half darkness along the rough cord of Demoyte’s coat, seeking his wrist. She sighed.

‘Your father, yes,’ said Demoyte, ‘he taught you many things, but you are yourself a different being and must live so. Here I prose on, an old man, and must be forgiven. You know how much at this moment I want to take you in my arms, and that I will not do so. Rain, Rain. Tell me instead, why do you think artists make their sitters resemble them? Will you paint me to resemble you? Would such a thing be possible?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rain, ‘whether it shows a limitation, if we want to see ourselves in the world about us. Perhaps it is rather that we feel our own face, as a three-dimensional mass, from within - and when we try in a painting to realize what another person’s face is, we come back to the experience of our own.’

‘You think that we feel our faces as if they were masks?’ said Demoyte. He reached out and touched Rain’s face, drawing his finger gently down over the outline of her nose.

Miss Handforth came noisily into the room and switched the light on. Rain sat quite still, but Demoyte jerked awkwardly backwards, jarring his chair along the floor.

‘Deary me!’ said Miss Handforth. ‘I had no idea you two were still in here, why you’ve been sitting in the dark! Mr Mor has just come, I sent him up to the library, because I thought you were upstairs.’ Miss Handforth strode across the the room and began lustily pulling the curtains. The garden was dark.

‘I wish you wouldn’t enter rooms like a battering ram, Handy,’ said Demoyte. ‘Leave all that and go and tell Mor to come down here.’

‘Do you want all that stuff left here, or am I to clear it up every night?’ asked Miss Handforth, indicating the white sheet, the easel, and the other paraphernalia.

‘Please may it remain here for the moment?’ said Rain.

‘You propose to take possession of my drawing-room, do you?’ said Demoyte. ‘The whole house stinks of paint already. Go on, Handy, go away and fetch that man down from the library.’

When Mor had walked towards the front door of his house on the previous evening he had still not been sure whether or not he would tell his wife the whole story. The interference of Tim Burke seemed to complicate the picture. Frankness on Mor’s part would now be an exposure not only of himself but of his friend. Yet it was not this that moved Mor so much as a feeling that Tim’s lie, added to his own, made of the whole thing something far more considerable in appearance than it really was. There was something about the way in which Tim had said, ‘I saw you in a car with a girl,’ which made Mor suddenly see the situation from the outside; and seen from the outside it did look as if it were something, whereas seen from the inside it was of course nothing, nothing at all. So that, it seemed obscurely to Mor as he walked back, to tell Nan the truth would really be to mislead her. There was no way of telling the story which would not make Nan think that there was more to it than there was. So, in a way, it was more in accordance with the facts to let Nan think that nothing had occurred. For nothing had occurred and the whole thing would soon be buried in the past. Except for a few inevitable social meetings he would see no more of Miss Carter, and that would be that. Mor echoed again his words to Tim Burke: ‘We won’t speak of it again’ - and this seemed to be the right note to strike. Mor knew he could trust Tim’s tact and discretion absolutely. Whereas, if he told Nan, Mor knew that really, in one way or another, he would never hear the end of it, and that the incident, even against his will, would then be lent a permanent and indelible significance.