Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

He wondered for the hundredth time what it was that he wanted from her. It was not just to be the owner of that small and exotic being. He wanted to be the new person that she made of him, the free and creative and joyful and loving person that she had conjured up, striking this miraculous thing out of his dullness. He recalled Bledyard’s words: you think of nothing else but your own satisfaction. All right, if two people can satisfy each other, and make each other new, why not? After all, he thought, I can be guided by this. Let me only make clear what I gain, and what I destroy. With relief he felt his mood shifting. The cloud of nightmare which had hung over his head while he was waiting at Waterloo was lifted. In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.

Rain had finished with the connoisseurs. They said good-day, and all departed together. She turned to Mor. ‘You haven’t been looking!’

‘I have ,’ said Mor, smiling. ‘Now you show me the pictures.’

They began to walk round. Mor was not used to looking at pictures, and these ones startled him. They were very various. Some were meticulous and decorative, like the portrait of Demoyte, others very much more impressionistic, with the paint plastered heavily upon the canvas. After making one or two wrong guesses, Mor gave up pretending to know which were Rain’s and which were her father’s. There seemed to be no way of deciding on grounds of style.

‘How do the experts know?’ he asked Rain.

‘My father’s pictures are better!’ she replied.

The pictures all showed a great intensity, even violence, of colour, and a bold harsh disposition of forms. Everything was very large and seemed to have more colours and more surfaces than nature possessed. Compared to these works, the portrait of Demoyte seemed more harmonious and sombre.

When Mor said this, Rain said, ‘I am only just beginning to develop my own style. My father was such a powerful painter, and such a strong personality, I was practically made in his image. It will be a long time before I know what I have in myself.’

Mor thought, even at this moment she knows that there is a future. He wished that she could communicate this sense of futurity to him. He said, ‘Is there a picture of your father here?’

‘Several,’ said Rain. She stopped him in front of a portrait.

Mor saw at first the jagged mountains and valleys of the paint, and then he saw a thin-faced man, looking suspiciously sideways towards the spectator, his face turning the other way, a thin wig-like crop of straight black hair, grey at the temples, big rather moist eyes with many wrinkles about them, and a slightly pursed thoughtful mouth.

‘Did you paint that?’ asked Mor.

‘No, my father did,’ said Rain, ‘a little while before he died. It’s a very good painting. See the authority of that head. Mr Bledyard would not have criticized that .’

Mor felt unable to make any judgement on the painting. He had a dream-like sensation of being translated into Rain’s world, as if she had laid him under a spell in order to show him the past. How objective she is, all the same, he thought. They moved on.

There was a portrait of a young girl with long black plaits, leaning over the keyboard of a piano. Out of a haze of colour her presence emerged with great vividness, bathed in the light and atmosphere of a southern room.

‘Who is that?’ said Mor, although he already knew.

‘Me,’ said Rain.

‘Did your father paint it?’

‘No, I did.’

‘But you were a child then!’ said Mor.

‘Not so young as I look,’ said Rain. ‘I was nineteen. It’s not very good, I’m afraid.’

To Mor it looked marvellous. ‘And you had long hair!’ he said. ‘When did you cut it?’

‘After — In Paris, when I was studying there.’

They moved on quickly to the next picture. Rain’s father stood in a doorway, leaning against the jamb of the door. He was dressed in a loose-fitting white suit, and his face was in shadow. Beyond him through the door could be seen a dazzling expanse of sea.

‘I painted that too,’ said Rain. ‘That’s a more recent one, not quite so awful. That’s through the door of our house.’

‘Your house!’ said Mor. He must have supposed that Rain and her father lived in a house - but somehow his imagination had never tried to provide him with any details of how she must have lived in the past, before he knew her.

‘Here’s our house again,’ she said. ‘You see more of it here.’

Mor saw the façade of a white villa, powdery with sun and scored with blue shadows, with pinkish patches on the walls where the plaster was falling off, and decrepit grey shutters disposed in various positions. A ragged cypress tree partly obscured one of the windows.

‘Where is the sea?’ said Mor.

‘Here,’ she said, indicating a point beyond the foreground of the picture.

‘Which was your room?’ said Mor.

‘You can’t see it here,’ she said. ‘That was my father’s room. Mine looked out at the back. You can see the window here.’ She pointed to another picture. It was evening, and the back of the house was glowing in a soft diffused light. A wilderness of flowering shrubs, with grotesque shapes and violent purple shadows, crawled right up to the wall.

‘There’s no path!’ said Mor.

‘No, you have to push your way through.’

‘And the view from the window?’ said Mor.

‘Here,’ she said. It was mid-afternoon, and line behind line a drowsy landscape, crumbling with dryness, receded into mountain slopes spotted with vines and mauve distances of dry vegetation and rock.

Who — ‘ he began.

‘I painted this one,’ she said. ‘The other ones are by my father. He never tired of painting the house.’

‘Who has the house now?’ asked Mor.

She looked surprised. ‘I have it,’ she said.

They moved from picture to picture. Almost all were either pictures of the house, or of the landscape near it, or self-portraits, or portraits of each other, by the father and daughter. There were two or three pictures of Paris, and about five portraits of other people. Mor looked with bewilderment and a kind of deeply pleasurable distress upon this vivid southern world, where the sun scattered the sea at noon-day with jagged and dazzling patches of light, or drew it upward limpidly light blue into the sky at morning, where the white house with the patchy plaster walls was stunned and dry at noon, or shimmering with life in the granulous air of the evening, as it looked one way into the sea, and the other way across the dusty flowers and into the mountains. He looked, and he could smell the southern air. And here at last in the room that he had come to recognize as the drawing-room sat a black-haired girl in a flowered summer dress. It was midday, but the shutters were drawn against the sun. The room was full of the very bright and clear but shadowed light of a southern interior. The girl had tossed back her very short hair and turned towards the spectator with a smile, one hand poised upon a small table, the other touching her cheek. The picture had something of the fresh primness of a Victorian photo. This was a Rain whom Mor recognized, the Rain of today.

‘One of my father’s last pictures,’ said Rain.

Mor was moved. How he must have treasured her. In this sudden movement of sympathy towards her father it occurred to him for the first time that his general attitude to this person was one of hostility.

‘Who possesses that picture?’ Mor asked.

‘The Honourable Mrs Leamington Stephens,’ said Rain.

Mor frowned. What right had the Honourable Mrs Leamington Stephens to possess such a picture of Rain? ‘I want it!’ he said.