Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

‘Nan,’ said Bill, trying to look up again, ‘how did you find out?’

‘I overheard the children talking on the telephone,’ said Nan.

Bill jerked himself upright. He said, ‘The children know, do they - Oh, Christ!’ He turned to face the wall and leaned his head against it. The shoe hung limply from his hand behind him.

‘Don’t use that language, Bill,’ said Nan. ‘It’s not a very nice thing to inflict on them, is it? At least the children won’t tell anybody. I only hope the gossip hasn’t started already. Does anybody else know about this little caper?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Bill, ‘no one who’d talk, that is. I think Demoyte has probably guessed. And Tim Burke knows.’

‘Tim Burke knows?’ said Nan. She leaned back among the cushions. A feeling of extreme tiredness came over her, and with it the nausea was renewed. The strength which had carried her through the interview faded from her limbs, leaving them heavy and restless. She knew that the misery was still there, after all, waiting for her. She wanted to end the conversation.

‘Oh, go away, Bill,’ she said. ‘You know what you ought to do, just go and do it.’

Bill stood irresolutely at the door. ‘Are you going to stay here now?’ he said. ‘Can I get you anything?’

‘No, go away,’ said Nan. ‘Go away into school and don’t come back for a long time. When I’ve had a rest I’m going back to Dorset.’

‘Going to Dorset?’said Bill. He seemed alarmed. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed here?’

‘To keep an eye on you?’ said Nan. ‘No, Bill, I trust you completely. I don’t want to spoil Felicity’s holiday. — and I don’t want to make people talk by suddenly reappearing here. I leave you to finish this thing off by yourself.

‘But, Nan — ’ Bill began to say.

‘Oh, get out!’ said Nan. ‘I’m tired, tired of you. Get out. I’ll write to you from Dorset.’ She turned over on the sofa, hiding her face in the cushions.

She heard Bill take a few steps across the room as if he were going to come to her. Then he stopped, turned back, and went out of the door. A minute later she heard the front door close behind him. Nan waited another minute, and then she got up, went into the kitchen, and was extremely sick.

Chapter Thirteen

IT was Sunday. Mor was sitting in his place in the school chapel. Although it was well known that he had no religious faith, he felt bound, as a housemaster, to attend Mr Everard’s Sunday afternoon services. These functions were attended by all the boys whatever their denomination - although in fact most of the boys at St Bride’s were Anglicans. The chapel was a high oblong building with cream-washed walls, somewhat resembling a parish hall. The congregation sat on rather comfortable modern wooden chairs. The altar was a large table, decorated with flowers, not unlike the sort of object that would be found in the waiting-room of a progressive country doctor. The tall neo-Gothic windows on either side of it were of plain glass, and outside in a tree birds could be seen tumbling about and chirruping. A plain cross hung above the altar, and a low wooden stockade, folded up by one of the senior boys when not in use, divided the chancel from the nave. A sort of crow’s nest of light oak, to which access was had by a pair of rickety detachable steps, stood at the side, and served Evvy as a pulpit, from which at this moment he was preaching.

The chapel was consecrated as a church in the Anglican communion and every morning something which Evvy insisted, to the manifest irritation of Mr Prewett, in calling Mass was celebrated at seven on ordinary days and eight on Sundays, either by Evvy himself or by the local parson or his minion. On Sundays a large number of boys usually attended this ceremony; but on week-days, except just before confirmation, very few turned up. Often, as Mor knew, there was nobody present except Evvy and Bledyard. His mind dwelt upon this gloomy rite. His nonconformist upbringing, still strong in him, gave him a general distaste for such goings-on. In addition, the thought of Evvy dispensing the body and blood of Christ to the solitary Bledyard was faintly ludicrous and, in some obscure way, appalling.

Mor spread out his legs. He felt stiff and restless. Evvy had been going on now for some considerable time and showed no sign of stopping. He had taken it into his head lately to preach a series of sermons on popular sayings. They had already had ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good’, and ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’, while ‘You may lead a horse to the water but you can’t make him drink’ was rumoured to be still to come. Today it was ‘God helps those who help themselves’. Evvy had started, as usual, with a little joke. When he had been a child, he explained, he had understood the phrase ‘help themselves’ in the sense of the colloquial invitation ’Help yourself!‘ and so had thought that the saying meant that God helped thieves or people who just took what they wanted. Evvy explained this point rather elaborately. The juniors, such of them as were listening, or understood what he was talking about, giggled. The senior boys wore the expression of embarrassed blankness which they always put on when Evvy made jokes in chapel.

Mor was not attending now. He was thinking about Rain. It was four days since the drama of Nan’s return. Nan had carried out her intention of going back at once to Dorset. Since then Mor had received a letter from her in which she repeated what she had said to him. It was a rational, even a kind letter. Everything had happened that might overturn his love for Rain: the sheer shock of being found out, from which he had still not recovered, and which he had thought at first could not but kill his love by its violence, and now in addition the reasonableness of Nan and the manifest sense of what she urged. Yet when Mor had found himself able once again to consider where he stood he found that his love for Rain was still fiercely and impenitently intact. This was no dream. The vision of beauty and happiness and fulfilment with which he had been blessed, so briefly, in Rain’s presence, had come again and with unfaded power. What he rather feared was that the shock which had so much confounded him would have destroyed her.

In fear and trembling he sought her out at Demoyte’s house in the evening of Nan’s second departure, and they had walked round the garden together. He had found her extremely shaken and sobered. She had then reassured him by saying that her feelings were quite unchanged by what had happened - and that the fact that this was so proved to her, what indeed she had scarcely doubted before, that she truly and seriously loved him. But she went on to say that there was no issue. There was, after all, no issue. They had walked through the gate in the yew hedge and across the second garden towards the stone steps. Mor had said in his heart, there must be an issue. To save himself he would have to impose upon her simplicity his own complexity. Only so could he win what he wanted with the desperation of a perishing man, a little more time. He talked with eloquence and subtlety, he argued, he used what he could of his authority — and after he had at last drawn her into discussing the matter he knew with a deep relief that they would not have to part. At any rate, not just yet. And as they walked through the rose garden in the direction of the avenue of mulberries the intense joy which they felt at being together overwhelmed everything.

Mor had felt extreme relief at the discovery that the shock which they had undergone had not dislocated their love. Now when they began to talk he was surprised to find himself able quietly to unravel so many deep and obscure thoughts about himself and about his marriage, things which he had in the past but half understood, but which as he drew them out at last in Rain’s presence emerged clear and intelligible and no longer terrifying. He talked and talked, and as he did so his heart was lightened as never before. He was able, a little, to explain how in the long years Nan had frustrated him, breaking within him piece by piece the structure of his own desires. He was able to explain how and why it was that he no longer loved his wife.