Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

‘I hope you lock the house up well at night,’ said Mor. He felt that he was being shown off the premises. They had almost reached the end of the drive.

‘He won’t steal anything from our house!’ said Miss Handforth. ‘Good night, Mr Mor.’

‘Good night, Handy,’ said Mor. He felt extremely disconsolate. He decided to walk back by the main road.

Chapter Eight

YOU can’t behave anyhow to people and expect them to love you just the same!‘ said Nan to Felicity.

‘That’s just what I do expect,’ said Felicity sulkily, and went back into her bedroom.

Mor, overhearing this exchange from downstairs, thought, she is right, that is just what we do expect. He looked at his watch. He was teaching at two-fifteen. It was time to go. He called good-bye, and as no one answered, left the house, banging the front door behind him.

Nan pursued Felicity into her bedroom. ‘You have a good look in here,’ she said, ‘and you’ll probably find it. It can’t have gone very far. If you don’t see it, you’d better look in my room again. I don’t want to discover it in my slippers or in my bed.’

‘It’s no good,’ said Felicity miserably, ‘it must have crawled away into some crack in the floorboards and it’ll die in there!’ She began to cry.

Nan looked on exasperated. ‘What possessed you to bring a nasty slug into the house, anyway?’ she said.

‘It wasn’t nasty,’ said Felicity. ‘It was very sweet when it stretched itself out, it was so long and smooth, and its horns were so nice. I only left it for a moment. It was curled up into a ball, like a lump of jelly, and it kept moving to and fro, but wouldn’t bring its horns out. I thought it was stuck, and I went for some water to wash it with, and when I came back it was gone.’

‘Well, let’s hope it went out of the window,’ said Nan.

‘I’m sure it didn’t. It’s just lost inside the house somewhere. I’ll never find it now.’ Felicity blew her nose.

‘You’ve changed your room back again,’ said Nan with disapproval.

‘I like it better this way,’ said Felicity. She threw herself on the bed and went on crying.

‘Oh, stop it, dear,’ said Nan, ‘do stop it, there’s absolutely nothing to cry about. Just pull yourself together and do something practical. I’ve told you several times to leave out your summer frocks for washing. If I don’t do them today they won’t be ready in time for going to Dorset’ She went away downstairs.

Felicity went on crying for a while. Then she dried her tears and began searching again for the slug. It was not to be found anywhere. A few more tears fell as she pictured its fate. It was all my fault, thought Felicity. It was so happy out there in the garden eating the plants - and I had to go and bring it indoors, away from its world. I won’t ever do such a thing again.

Felicity went into the bathroom and examined her eyes. They were rather red. She washed her face in cold water. Then she decided that she would go into school and look for Don. This was something which was strictly forbidden by all the authorities concerned. Her presence in his room could bring quite dire penalties down upon Donald - and Felicity herself had frequently been told by her parents never to enter the precincts of St Bride’s except when officially authorized to do so. Felicity, though strongly endowed with a sense of right and wrong, did not have any particularly reverential attitude towards authority, and her conscience functioned vigorously enough in complete detachment from the adult world of prohibition and exhortation which surrounded her, and which she often failed completely to make sense of. Felicity could not see that there was anything innately wrong in her going into St Bride’s to see her brother - and this being so, the only remaining question was whether she could do so with impunity. She changed her dress, and combed her hair, making herself look as pleasant as possible. Then she ran downstairs and prepared to leave the house.

‘Where are you off to, dear?’ asked Nan from the kitchen.

‘To the library,’ said Felicity at random, and leaving the house she ran along towards the main road.

As she ran she whistled softly to Liffey, who soon came bounding up to run beside her, turning to look at her every now and then, and smiling as dogs do. She never came into the house now, or entered any human habitation. Since the dissolution of her material body Liffey had become rather larger, and now had black ears and a black tail, to signalize her infernal origin. There was as yet no sign of Angus, but Felicity knew, now that Liffey had come, that it would not be long before she saw him, in one or other of his disguises. Felicity passed the main gate of St Bride’s and began walking down the hill. A dried-up grass verge separated her from the dual carriageway. Up and down the hills the cars roared, going from London to the coast or from the coast back to London. They came savagely up like bulls and sped carelessly down like birds, and the swiftness of their passage made the air rock, so that as Felicity walked along her dress flapped in a perpetual breeze. Towards the top of the hill the school was shut in by a high wall, with broken glass on it, above which could be seen the upper windows of the Phys and Gym building. Half-way down the hill, the wall was changed for a high and well-made fence, above which could be seen the red-tiled roof of one of the houses, Prewett’s in fact, where Donald lived, and then lower down the tree tops of the wood. After this, there was to be seen the green-glass roof of the squash court, and to be heard the frantic shouts and splashing from the swimming pool. Here the edge of the school domain began to swing a little farther away from the road, and a grass verge appeared on the inside of the pavement, and widened gradually as the arterial road and the grounds of the school parted company. By now the white walls and slated roof of Mr Everard’s house were plainly visible at the bottom of the hill.

Felicity followed primly along the pavement, as if she had no interest at all in the school. Liffey, who had been amusing herself by passing spectrally through the bodies of several other dogs who were coming up the hill, was running along now by the fence, and in an instant had passed through it. Felicity paused and looked about her. Then she left the pavement and began to follow the fence, which was now turning sharply away from the road. At a certain point it met at right angles with another fence which was that of a private garden which belonged to a house in a side road. At the end of this garden, where the garden fence met the school fence, there was a shrubbery. Between the two fences at that point there was a very narrow place through which a slim body could squeeze itself. Felicity’s body, though still of a material nature, was extremely slim, and in a moment she was kneeling among the bushes at the bottom of the private garden.

Here she could work at ease. The school fence was composed of slats of wood, each of them about two feet broad. One summer holiday she and Donald had been at pains to extract the nails which held one of these slats in place, and secure the slat again by means of nails which projected at an angle from the adjoining wood on both sides. Thus, by working the slat a little, it could be slipped out, leaving a gap through which a body similarly slim could pass. After pausing a moment to make sure that there was no one in the garden, Felicity began to tilt the slat until it cleared the nails on one side. The other side then slipped out easily and Felicity slithered through into the grounds of the school. She then reached back through the hole and drew the wood into place again.

She found herself in a dreary gardener’s wilderness of rubbish heaps and abandoned bonfires behind some trees below Mr Everard’s house. She began to walk along to her right so as to come up into the wood on the opposite side from the squash courts. This part of the grounds was less frequented, and if a neglected shrubbery which was part of Evvy’s garden was taken into account, there was good cover all the way up the hill. Liffey, who had been waiting on the inside of the hole, glided noiselessly ahead of her, charming her footsteps to silence. Felicity wondered if she would see Angus now. She had only met him once within the precincts of the school, on an occasion when she had entered illicitly and he came upon her in the form of a man sitting in a tree, who observed her quietly without saying anything, and waited while she went past. That was eerie. Felicity preferred Angus disguised as a bricklayer or the driver of a police car. Remembering this occasion she felt frightened for a moment. Liffey disappeared, as she always did at such times. By now Felicity was in Evvy’s shrubbery, making her way along, still close to the fence, by crawling under bushes and slinking behind clumps of greenery. The ground rose steeply here into the wood, and Felicity saw distantly between the trees the sunny open expanse of the playing fields. She moved on in the shadows at the edge of the wood. She would not strike dangerously across it until she was nearly level with Prewett’s.