Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

Nan had the towel ready for her. She began to rub her down vigorously as she had so often done when she was a small child.

‘Don’t, you’re hurting me!’ said Felicity. Then, with snuffling sobs, she began to cry.

‘Dear me, dear me!’ said Nan. ‘What a cry baby! You’re always wailing. Now then put your vest on quick - and tell me what’s the matter.’

Felicity was trembling with cold. She got her vest on and began to fumble with her dress. She said, ‘I saw a butterfly flying out to sea. It will get lost out there and die.’ She pulled the dress on over her head. Her tears were still falling.

‘What nonsense, child!’ said Nan. ‘It could fly back again, couldn’t it? Anyway, they can fly for miles, they often fly over to France. That’s nothing to cry about.’

Felicity sat down. It was quite dark now. The moon shone out of a cloudless sky of dark blue, revealing on either side of them the tumbled heaps of rock. Felicity was trying to dry her feet. Nan felt them. They were limp and cold as ice.

‘I saw a fish,’ said Felicity, ‘that a man had caught. It was a big fish. It was lying all by itself on the sand, and struggling and gasping. I wanted to pick it up and throw it back into the sea. But I wasn’t brave enough to.’ Her voice broke in renewed sobs.

Nan bent forward, chafing one white foot between her hands. She felt the tears rising. She could not control them any more. She took a deep breath and her weeping began. Sitting there, her hand still clasped about her daughter’s foot, she wept without restraint. The moon shone brightly down upon them both.

Chapter Fifteen

DURING those days Mor learnt what it was to have a mind diseased. There was no longer any point at which his thoughts could find rest. They fled tortured from place to place. Only by absorbing himself in the routine duties of the school was he able to find, not peace, but the means simply of continuing to exist. He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly to pieces. Other strange physical symptoms came to trouble him. An unpleasant odour lingered in his nostrils, as if he could literally smell the sulphur of the pit; and he had from time to time the curious illusion that his flesh was turning black. He had to look continually at his hands to be sure that it was not so. Nightmares troubled him, waking and sleeping — and one bad dream conjured up another, running from box to box to release its fellows. The world around him seemed to have become equally mad and hateful. The newspapers were full of stories of grotesque violence and unnatural crimes. He knew neither how to go on nor what to do to bring these horrors to an end.

Part of his torment was the knowledge that Rain was tormented equally. She had stopped painting, and had told Mr Everard that the picture was finished. The date for the appalling presentation dinner had even been fixed. Her decision distressed Mor, not because he imagined that it mattered now whether the official date of her departure was late or early, but because he felt responsible for having ruined the picture. Although he did not think that in the long run he either would or could do harm to her art, he could not forget what Bledyard had said. Rain had intended to improve the picture, to paint the head over again. She had not done so, because he had reduced her to the same frenzy that he was in himself.

Mor was standing in Waterloo station. He was waiting for Rain to arrive by train. He had had some school business in London, and they had agreed that she should meet him after lunch when it was done and they should spend the rest of the day in town. Mor noted, desperately, that to be together was not now quite enough of a salve for their unhappiness - they had to have novelties and distractions. He thought, this is what it is to be one of the damned.

There was still fifteen minutes to wait before the train arrived. Music began to play through a loud-speaker. Mor looked at the people hurrying to and fro in the wide echoing hall between the booking-offices and the platforms. The music drew the scene together until it had the look of an insane ballet, eerie, desolate, and sinister. The performers glided to and fro across the stage, weaving in and out with an inscrutable precision. Mor turned his head away. He bought a paper and opened it quickly. Dreadful headlines stared him in the face. Bridegroom Kills Bride in Car Crash. Possible Contamination of Earth’s Atmosphere: Scientists’ Grave Warning . Mor crumpled the newspaper up and threw it into a wastepaper basket. He sat down on a seat and lighted a cigarette. He would have liked a drink, only it was the middle of the afternoon. He had taken to drinking quite a lot lately.

His thoughts began again upon the old round. Had he misled Rain totally concerning the nature of his marriage? Did Rain really love him anyway? Would her attachment to him endure? Supposing he were to destroy everything in order to be with her, would it turn out in the end to be a disaster? Was he not simply criminal to contemplate a union with so young a girl? Perhaps he was no more to her than an ephemeral father figure, endowed by the pain of her recent bereavement with a size larger than life? All this he had discussed with Rain herself in considerable detail for hours and hours and hours, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion. These talks went on now so far into every night that Mor was exhausted, waking tired and headache-ridden, scarcely able to stagger through the minimum of necessary tasks. She had tried to convince him, oh she had tried to convince him, at least that she loved him. He knew that she was convinced herself. At times, the spectacle of this love moved him so much that it seemed that nothing else mattered. But Mor knew now, and it was both a torment and a consolation, that in this damned condition no state of mind lasted for very long. Certainty and uncertainty chased each other through him at intervals, and it seemed that it would be a matter of chance in which phase exactly he should decide irrevocably to act.

One decision at least had been definitely put off. Rain had not yet become his mistress. She herself had wished to. But Mor had decided that it was better to wait a little while until the situation had become clearer. Time passed, the situation did not become clearer, and Mor began to conjecture that just this delay might be his fatal error. But it was some lingering puritanism out of his rejected childhood which still made him hesitate to become in the final and technical sense unfaithful to his wife. He knew that, in almost every way that mattered, his unfaithfulness was now complete. He had written to Nan hinting as much - but he had not dared to speak clearly to her, for he feared that she might return while he was still in a state of indecision. He saw that he had now definitely and irrevocably parted company with the truth. In the country where he lived now, truth could not decide his choices. Neither could happiness. He had told Bledyard that this would guide him - but now even this light was gone. He no longer conceived, as measurable entities capable of being weighed against each other, his own happiness, Rain’s, or Nan’s. He scarcely conceived that he could ever be happy again - nor did this especially matter.

What remained real and composed his agony was his intense, and it seemed to him increasing, love for Rain; combined with doubts about whether it was not wrong to thrust this love upon her, and complete paralysis at the thought of having to announce to Nan and the children that he was going to leave them. If only his love for Rain could drive him a little madder, or, on the other hand, his sense of belonging to his previous life become a little stronger, he would be able to decide. As it was, he was perfectly balanced in the midst of all these forces and quite unable to move. Only from time to time, consoling in itself and carrying the promise of a possible decision, there came to him a vision of himself and Rain together, far away from the present agony, beyond it, having forgotten it, enriching each other by love. This vision, he felt, if he could only hold it steady in his imagination for long enough, would draw him to a decision. Yet even this would not be sufficient. He realized, with a spasm of pain, that in order to come to his beloved he would have to summon up not his good qualities but his bad ones: his anger, his hatred of Nan, his capacity for sheer irresponsible violence. Between him and Rain lay this appalling wilderness; and how changed by it would he be before he could finally reach her? He must keep his look upon her very steady if he was to go across.