Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

Nan thought, he wants me to go, he wants to be rid of me, to move this awful thing away to another place. She felt no animosity against Tim. In the intense rainy sunlight of the yard she saw his face close to hers, pale, unhealthy, puckered up with distress and indecision. She reached out and found his hand. They sat so for a while, rather awkwardly side by side, as if posing for an old-fashioned photograph. Nan laid her glass down and with her other hand plucked some more leaves from the tree. The sun was beginning to warm them. It was a strange interval.

After a while Nan raised her eyes to Tim. He was looking at her intensely. She sustained his gaze.

‘Come inside,’ he said, rising suddenly, and reaching a strong arm to pull her to her feet. ‘Come inside now, and rest in the big armchair.’

Nan got up. The yard began to rotate quietly round her. The whiskey must have gone to her head. She sat down again. The nightmare feeling returned. The objects in the yard were present to her with an appalling precision. She made an effort and stood up on her own. The yard was looking very strange, as if it were growing brilliant and slightly larger. She saw that she had picked nearly all the leaves off the sycamore tree. It stood there rather wretchedly gaunt with a premature autumn, its shadow stretching up the bumpy wall which was steaming in the sun. A curious light was shining. Nan looked up and saw directly above her a rainbow displayed against a pewter-coloured sky. She shuddered, and went back through the door which Tim Burke was holding open for her.

In the little workroom it was very dark. Tim worked there usually by neon light. Nan stumbled against the thick leg of the work bench. The big armchair stood in the farthest darkest comer, a large decrepit thing, banished some time ago from Tim’s small sitting-room upstairs.

Awkwardly Tim led her towards the corner. Nan began to say something and turned to face him. A moment later, half pushed by Tim and half collapsing of her own accord she had fallen back into the grinding springs of the chair. She lay there spread-eagled, suddenly helpless, her legs outstretched, her shoes propped at the high heel. She saw through the small square window a section of the metallic sky and a slice of the rainbow. Tim was leaning over her now, his hands upon the two arms of the chair. He was leaning closer, and the window was blotted out. Then, placing one knee upon the edge, he lay upon her, his arms struggling to meet behind her back while his heavy body crushed her into the depths of the chair.

Nan lay there limply, her hands upon his back and upon the sleeve of his coat, not grasping, but dropped there like two exhausted birds. His shoulder was pressing her chin back and her head sank into the deep dusty upholstery, releasing a musty smell. For a moment or two Nan lay still, looking thoughtfully over his shoulder through the half-open door of the workroom and into the darkened shop. Then she wriggled slightly, trying to release her chin from the pressure. She became aware that the weight of Tim’s body upon her was comforting, was more than that. She began in a half-hearted way to struggle.

At once Tim moved, taking his weight off her and endeavouring to shift her to one side so that he could lie beside her in the chair. For a minute they jostled, Nan withdrawing her arms and awkwardly edging away, her heels braced and slipping on the floor, and Tim burrowing beside her, his big hands underneath her body. Then they lay still again, facing each other. Nan found that her heart was beating very fast. She felt a little fear and a little disgust at finding Tim’s white face so close to hers, his lips moist and parted. Then she threw her arms about his neck and drew him up against her, partly so as not to see any longer the staring look that was in his eyes.

‘Nan,’ said Tim, ‘I do love you, you know that, don’t you? I wish I could do something for you, some good thing.’

‘Yes,’ said Nan. She knew that the strange comfort that she felt would last only a few seconds longer.

‘Dear, I’ve so often wanted to tell you things,’ Tim went on, his voice burring in her ear.

‘What things?’ said Nan. Distantly she could hear the voices of people passing in the street.

Oh, foolish things,‘ said Tim. ’Things about Ireland, about when I was a child there, things I couldn’t tell to anybody else.‘

Nan thought, now Tim is going to tell me about his childhood. She had an instantaneous vision of herself spending the morning lying in the armchair and hearing about Tim’s childhood. I must be drunk, she thought. She began to struggle again.

This time Tim braced his hand against the back of the chair and pulled himself out until he was kneeling beside her. Nan dragged herself up to a sitting position. A light dust surrounded them and a smell of the past.

Now that she could see his face again Nan felt her despair returning. After all, it was nothing but a senseless pause. Another minute and they would both be feeling embarrassment. ‘Please call me a taxi, Tim,’ she said.

Bowing his head, Tim rose and went out into the shop, closing the door behind him. She heard him pass into the street. She sat up and began to search for her handbag. She examined herself in the pocket mirror. As she saw her dishevelled head in the half light she started quite quietly to cry again. But by the time Tim had returned she had combed her hair and applied some powder to her nose.

When she heard his steps she got up and they met at the door of the shop. He put his two hands at her waist.

‘Oh God!’ said Tim Burke. Words failed him.

‘Is the taxi coming?’ said Nan.

‘It’ll be here in half a minute.’

Nan looked into his face. Now that she was erect it no longer appalled her; and suddenly she wished desperately that she could stay with Tim Burke that morning and talk to him, talk to him about anything at all, about Ireland, about his past life of which she knew nothing, about his hopes and fears, about when he had begun to love her. For an instant she apprehended him there, pale, awkward, strong, with his two large palms seeming to enclose her body. In that instant she saw him close, mysterious, other than herself, full to the brim of his own particular history.

There was a loud knock at the door.

‘It’s the taxi,’ said Tim.

They looked at each other.

‘Shall we send it away?’ he said.

Nan was silent. She wanted, very much she wanted to know him now, this person that confronted her. She could not think how she had endured to have so little knowledge of him. In the privacy and difference of his past, in all that had brought him, by ways that he had never told, to the present moment, there lay for her a promise of consolation and a long long solace of discovery.

‘If you could only come to me,’ said Tim, ‘be with me somehow — ’

Nan turned from him. With coldness, with violence, the reality of her situation touched her, the irresponsible silliness of her present conduct. She shook her head. She saw the glass of whiskey standing near by upon the counter and she drank the rest of it in a single gulp. The knocking on the door was resumed.

‘Open the door,’ said Nan.

Tim fumbled at the latch, and then the pale sunlight was falling in a broad shaft into the shop, as far as where Nan was standing. The taxi-man was waiting in the road.

Nan came forward.

‘Don’t forget me,’ said Tim, as she passed him.

‘Yes,’ said Nan. She steadied herself out on to the pavement.

‘Don’t forget me,’ he repeated, standing behind her in the doorway of the shop.

Nan got into the taxi. A moment or two later it was speeding away. Her grief was restored to her.

As the taxi rolled along, Nan wondered what on earth she was going to say to Bill. She had never been in a situation remotely resembling this with Bill before. In ordinary life all her talk with Bill was planed down into simple familiar regularly recurring units. Any conversation which she might have with him was of so familiar a type that they might have talked it in their sleep. This was one of the things that made marriage so restful. But from now on all speech between them would have to be invented. The words spoken would be new things, composing a new world. Nan did not know what she would say - but in spite of Tim Burke’s warning she was determined that it was she who would talk and not Bill. She wondered if Bill would say he was sorry. What did people say at a time like this?