Iris Murdoch - The Sandcastle

1957

PENGUIN BOOKS

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 became a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.

Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including Under the Net , her writing début of 1954, the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea (1978) and, more recently, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). She received a number of other literary awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and Mystics (1997). She also wrote several plays, including The Italian Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince , an adaptation of her novel. Her volume of poetry, A Year of Birds , which appeared in 1978, was set to music by Malcolm Williamson.

Iris Murdoch died in February 1999. Among the many who paid tribute to her as a philosopher, novelist and private individual was Peter Conradi, who in his obituary in the Guardian wrote ‘Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century. Above all, she kept the traditional novel alive, and in so doing changed what it is capable of … She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest is relaxed. We are fortunate to have shared our appalling century with her.’

To JOHN BAYLEY

Chapter One

‘FIVE hundred guineas!’ said Mor’s wife. ‘Well I never!’

‘It’s the market price,’ said Mor.

‘You could articulate more distinctly,’ said Nan, ‘if you took that rather damp-looking cigarette out of your mouth.’

‘I said it’s the market price !’ said Mor. He threw his cigarette away.

‘Bledyard would have done it for nothing,’ said Nan.

‘Bledyard is mad,’ said Mor, ‘and thinks portrait painting is wicked.

‘If you ask me, it’s you and the school Governors that are mad,’ said Nan. ‘You must have money to burn. First all that flood-lighting, and then this. Flood-lighting! As if it wasn’t bad enough to have to see the school during the day!’

‘Shall we wait lunch for Felicity?’ asked Mor.

‘No, of course not,’ said Nan. She always sulks when she comes home. She wouldn’t want to eat anyway.‘ Felicity was their daughter. She was expected home that day from boarding school, where an outbreak of measles had brought the term to an early conclusion.

They seated themselves at the table at opposite ends. The dining-room was tiny. The furniture was large and glossy. The casement windows were open as wide as they could go upon the hot dry afternoon. They revealed a short front garden and a hedge of golden privet curling limply in the fierce heat. Beyond the garden lay the road where the neat semi-detached houses faced each other like mirror images. The housing estate was a recent one, modem in design and very solidly built. Above the red-tiled roofs, and over the drooping foliage of the trees there rose high into the soft midsummer haze the neo-Gothic tower of St Bride’s school where Mor was a housemaster. It was a cold lunch.

‘Water?’ said Nan. She poured it from a blue-and-white porcelain jug. Mor tilted his chair to select his favourite from the row of sauce bottles on the sideboard. One advantage of the dining-room was that everything was within reach.

‘Is Donald coming in this evening to see Felicity?’ asked Nan. Donald was their son, who was now in the Sixth Form at St Bride’s.

‘He’s taking junior prep,’ said Mor.

‘He’s taking junior prep!’ said Nan, imitating. ‘You could have got him off taking junior prep! I never met such a pair of social cowards. You never want to do anything that might draw attention to you. You haven’t taken a vow of obedience to St Bride’s.’

‘You know Don hates privileges,’ said Mor briefly. This was one of the points from which arguments began. He jabbed unenthusiastically at his meat. ‘I wish Felicity would come.’

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with Don,’ said Nan.

‘Don’t nag him about the climbing,’ said Mor. Donald wanted to go on a climbing holiday. His parents were opposed to this.

‘Don’t use that word at me!’ said Nan. ‘Someone’s got to take some responsibility for what the children do.’

‘Well, leave it till after his exam,’ said Mor. ‘He’s worried enough.’ Donald was shortly to sit for a Cambridge College entrance examination in chemistry.

‘If we leave it,’ said Nan, ‘we 11 find it’s been fixed. Don told me it was all off. But Mrs Prewett said yesterday they were still discussing it. Your children seem to make it a general rule to lie to their parents for all your talk about truth.’

Although he now held no religious views, Mor had been brought up as a Methodist. He believed profoundly in complete truthfulness as the basis and condition of all virtue. It grieved him to find that his children were almost totally indifferent to this requirement. He pushed his plate aside.

‘Aren’t you going to eat that?’ said Nan. Do you mind if I do?‘ She reached across a predatory fork and took the meat from Mor’s plate.

‘It’s too hot to eat,’ said Mor. He looked out of the window. The tower of the school was idling in the heat, swaying a little in the cracked air. From the arterial road near by came the dull murmur, never stilled by day, of the stream of traffic now half-way between London and the coast. In the heat of the afternoon it sounded like insects buzzing in a wood. Time was longer, longer, longer in the summer.

‘You remember how poor Liffey used to hate this hot weather,’ said Mor.

Liffey had been their dog, a golden retriever, who was killed two years ago on the main road. This animal had formed the bond between Mor and Nan which their children had been unable to form. Half unconsciously, whenever Mor wanted to placate his wife he said something about Liffey.

Nan’s face at once grew gentler. ‘Poor thing!’ she said. ‘She used to stagger about the lawn following a little piece of shadow. And her long tongue hanging out.’

‘I wonder how much longer the heat wave will last,’ said Mor.

‘In other countries,’ said Nan, ‘they just have the summertime. We have to talk about heat waves. It’s dreary.’

Mor was silent while Nan finished her plate. He began to have a soporific feeling of conjugal boredom. He stretched and yawned and fell to examining a stain upon the tablecloth. ‘You haven’t forgotten we’re dining with Demoyte tonight?’