An Accidental Man Read online

  The old, once vital, remembered myths, still vivid in many characters’ minds as they are in Murdoch’s, prove to be mainly vain fantasies. People keep imagining they’re redoing Biblical stories – Matthew washing Dorina’s wounds like a Good Samaritan, Dorina rising again in ‘the joy of resurrection’ after her three days at Matthew’s place, Mavis thinking Dorina ‘died for us’, Dorina aweing over Matthew as if he had ‘made’ her like a Creator God. But like prayer for these characters, the old formulae are dead. They’re vain repetitions. Charlotte might feel the ‘irresistible authority’ of the old words of Psalm 23 as her mother Alison lies dying, but for the rest hunting out the Scripture is matter of farce (‘What number is it? Somewhere near the beginning’), before the priest arrives with his letting-down talk of Youth Clubs and ping pong. Matthew’s feebleness as a moral saviour is only mocked by the suggestions of godlike powers. Compared with the philosopher kings and guides of the other novels, Matthew is very run-down. His own Master, the Buddhist Kaoru, is even less effective – distant, off-stage, silent. And why, we wonder, at the end, is Matthew running away to America with Ludwig? How good, in fact, is he, really? Indeed, and the question comes home with stunning force in this novel, how good is the good itself?

  As ever, this Murdoch text comes heavily seeded with a vocabulary of the good. Good!, people keep saying, good-good-good, jolly good, good for him and so on. The great plethora of common English phrases involving goodness is always on these people’s lips – on to a good thing, with good wishes, good lover, good friend, too good for me, too-good-to-be-true and the like – is no doubt a way of indicating, as usual with Murdoch, the presence, despite ourselves, of a moral sense, the residue of the God-eras, embedded in our ordinary language. But here this crypto moral vocabulary seems to mock rather than endorse the persistent moral conscience it might be thought to stand for. When, in his last conversation with Austin, Matthew studs his responses with That’s good, Good for him, Good and the rest, it all seems dead, an inert parody of ethical thinking, cynically dismissive even. Austin’s ‘A good thing too’ when he hears of the charlady’s ‘idiot child’ being doomed to an early death confirms the sense of prevailing ethical upside-downness. ‘We are a very good-looking family’ are Austin’s final words. With them any faith we might have had in a meaningful ethical mindfulness contained in ordinary language just flies out of the window.

  It’s all a grim reflection on the prospects for a continuing ethical mindfulness in the modern world, commensurate with Murdoch’s savagely jokey christenings here. J.L. Austin, one of Oxford’s greatest ‘ordinary language’ philosophers, has had his name appropriated by a linguistically casual monster. Kierkegaard, the great Christian agoniser and doubter, master-mind of existentialism, so admired by Murdoch, is now just the nickname of a dodgy motor-car – a piece of suspect material, passed back and forth between the characters, exemplum of the ordinary and the particular as a bad bargain. As old Alison lay dying, Charlotte answered the door to a neighbour concerned about a car blocking his garage, and she ‘looked out . . . at the beautiful, perky, ordinary, selfish, material world of motor-cars and evening appointments.’ The ordinary never altogether lacks a beauty in Iris Murdoch’s novels, but here that charm comes extraordinarily overlain with selfishness and triviality – especially the bourgeoisie’s round of ‘evening appointments’.

  The novel ends with one of several ‘evening appointments’, a drinks party at Gracie and Garth’s place, the last of Murdoch’s party-pieces done as drama – a Pinteresque torrent, a heteroglossia of overheard voices, trivial, insincere, gossipy, distorting truth and the real into mere rumour and fantasy. The bourgeois, shallow Tisbournes are rampant. Evil Austin is there looking ‘gorgeous’ and prating of his good-looking family. The bad novelist Garth is being congratulated all round on his ‘lovely’ reviews. Proley Mary Monkley, one of the several low-life characters Iris Murdoch has brought into this novel – perhaps in some endeavour to meet her complaining critics and widen her usual exclusive social clientele of dons, philosophers, civil servants and people who know their Sophocles – the rare proletarian is tippling sherry like some Dickensian gargoyle in her apparently appropriate place, on the social margins, in the kitchen. Kierkegaard is ‘parked outside’. The moral worrier Matthew and the conscientious American Ludwig (he who objected to Gracie that what she called ‘an ordinary life’ was ‘for most people . . . an extraordinary one’) are both far, far away. The trivially minded crowd possess the good words, but these are provokingly empty of ethical content. Good night, Good night, Good night, they chorus, repeating, without knowing it, the farewells of TS Eliot’s lowlife immoralists in the pub scene in The Waste Land, ‘Good night sweet ladies’, words which were themselves a parody of Ophelia’s farewell words in Hamlet. Here’s a parody of a parody. Hamlet, a piece of the world’s greatest literature, one of the most life-changing literary myths of the western world, itself of course a drama about the anguished ways of the Protestant moral conscience, has come down in the world, and for a second time in modern times. The touch of farce in the Eliot scene is, of course, as befits this novel, by no means absent from Murdoch’s recall and replay of The Waste Land. But as ironically downbeat endings go, it would be hard, I think, to find a more despondent one than this. And it’s utterly par for this novel’s course.

  VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM

  2003

  Contents

  Gracie Darling Will. . .

  Recession. Yes, said. . .

  Grace Leferrier. It. . .

  Austin Gibson Grey. . .

  I haven’t an. . .

  My dear Ludwig. . .

  May I see. . .

  Suddenly everything was. . .

  Dorina shrieked. The. . .

  One should do. . .

  It must be. . .

  Ludwig. . .

  Where are those. . .

  My dear George. . .

  Austin Gibson Grey. . .

  The privet hedge. . .

  Hong Kong must. . .

  There is nothing. . .

  Matthew held in. . .

  Dearest Hester. . .

  The waste land. . .

  Norman Monkley and. . .

  I like flies. . .

  Dorina sat surrounded. . .

  During luncheon at. . .

  Garth sat beside. . .

  Mavis lay back. . .

  You will read. . .

  I went there. . .

  A packet of. . .

  My dear Oliver. . .

  ‘Austin’s here,’ said. . .

  Norman Monkley looked. . .

  Is that Mavis. . .

  So you are. . .

  I’ve brought your. . .

  We might go. . .

  Matthew, just back. . .

  ‘I’m going to. . .

  ‘Austin hasn’t been. . .

  Dearest Char. . .

  Matthew and Dorina. . .

  Dear Mitzi. . .

  Meanwhile Austin had. . .

  Dearest Hester. . .

  Charlotte opened her. . .

  In these days. . .

  So you talked. . .

  Dorina returned to. . .

  Oh do stop. . .

  I must look. . .

  Her funeral had. . .

  Ludwig sat alone. . .

  I should think. . .

  It must have. . .

  What about this. . .

  May I fill. . .

  My dear Ludwig. . .

  Gracie lay back. . .

  ‘Pinkie —’, said Clara. . .

  He never even. . .

  Matthew was doing. . .

  ‘GRACIE DARLING, WILL darling, will you marry me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ludwig Leferrier stared down into the small calm radiant unsmiling face of Gracie Tisbourne. Was it conceivable that the girl was joking? It was. Oh Lord.

  ‘Look, Gracie, are you serious?’r />
  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I mean —’

  ‘Of course if you want to back out of it —’

  ‘Gracie! But — but — Gracie, do you love me?’

  ‘Can you not infer that from what I said just now?’

  ‘I don’t want inferred love.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘This is becoming a rather stupid argument.’

  ‘Gracie. I can’t believe it!’ argument.’

  ‘Why are you so surprised?’ said Gracie. ‘Surely the situation has been clear for some time. It has been to all my friends and relations.’

  ‘Oh damn your friends and relations — I mean — Gracie, you do really mean it? I love you so dreadfully much —’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Ludwig,’ said Gracie. ‘Sometimes you’re just a very silly man. I love you, and I’ve done so ever since you kissed me behind that tomb thing in the British Museum. I never thought I’d be so lucky.’

  ‘But you expected this?’

  ‘I expected it now.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘So are you now dismayed?’

  ‘No! I’ve loved you for ages. But you’re so sort of grand. Everyone’s after you.’

  ‘I’m not grand. And that’s a very vulgar way of putting it.’

  ‘Sorry —’

  ‘I’m small and ignorant, whereas you know everything.’

  ‘As if that — ! I thought I was one of hundreds.’

  ‘Well, you’re one of one.’

  ‘You’ve been so calm!’

  ‘A girl has her pride. Shall we now go hand in hand and tell my parents?’

  ‘No, please — I say, will they mind?’

  ‘They’ll be delighted.’

  ‘I somehow thought they wanted you to marry that guy Sebastian.’

  ‘They want what I want.’

  ‘They won’t mind my being American?’

  ‘Why should they? Especially as you aren’t going back to America any more.’

  ‘You said once they wanted you to marry an Englishman.’

  ‘Only because anyone else might take me away. But you won’t. We’ll be living in Oxford.’

  ‘I don’t know about Oxford. Oh Jesus, Gracie, I can’t believe it, I’m so happy — Darling, please —’

  Gracie’s divan bed, on which they were sitting was very narrow and fitted in beneath a long white shelf. Small fat cushions, which Ludwig hated, and which Gracie referred to as her ‘pussy cats’, further reduced the sitting or lying area. Ludwig banged his head on the shelf. One hand burrowed under Gracie’s warm thigh. His head sank and he felt the roughness of his cheek against the smoothness of her taut dress. Crushed close together, two hearts battered in their cages. No screen of calm now. Ludwig groaned. He had never made love to her. The thing was anguish.

  ‘Mind the table!’

  He began to fall off, twisting a rubbery leg to avoid a crash, and subsided embracing the coffee pot while Gracie above him stifled laughter. ‘Ssh, Ludwig!’

  The Tisbourne’s house in Kensington, pretentiously called Pitt’s Lodge, was a narrow poky little gentleman’s residence cluttered with elegant knick-knacks masquerading as furniture. Ludwig had already broken two chairs. Behind the papery walls of the small rooms Gracie’s parents were omnipresent. Now just outside the door Clara Tisbourne was calling down to her husband, ‘Pinkie darling, the Odmores want us for the second weekend.’ It was an impossible situation even if Gracie had been willing. He could not take Gracie to his own apartment because Gracie disliked Mitzi Ricardo. Mitzi also disliked Gracie and referred to her as ‘little Madam’ until she realized that Ludwig loved her. Perhaps it would have to be the British Museum again.

  ‘Whatever shall we do?’ he said to Gracie.

  ‘About what?’

  They had never discussed sex. He had no idea whether Gracie was a virgin. Must he now tell her about his campus amours? Oh Christ.

  ‘Here. Yes, I know. Dear Ludwig, just sit quietly and hold my hand.’

  He looked into the mysterious guileless eyes of the girl to whom he had committed himself, his life, his future, his thoughts, his feelings, his whole spiritual being. She was so fantastically young. He felt centuries older than this opening flower. He felt coarse, gross, ancient, dirty. At the same moment it occurred to him that she was almost totally a stranger. He loved, he was engaged to be married to, a complete stranger.

  ‘Gracie, you are so pure, so true.’

  ‘That’s your silly talk.’

  ‘You’re so young!’

  ‘I’m nineteen. You’re only twenty-two.’

  ‘When shall we get married? How quickly can one get married in England?’

  ‘We’ve only just got engaged. Please, Ludwig. You know the way mama bounces in.’

  ‘What’s the use of being engaged? I want —’

  ‘It’s nice being engaged. We shall be a long time married. Let’s enjoy our engagement. It’s such a special time. I’ve so much liked the first five minutes of it.’

  ‘But, Gracie, how are we going to —’

  ‘Besides, mama will insist on a big white wedding and those things take ages to organize.’

  ‘Surely we don’t have to have all that crap? Gracie, you know you can always get what you want —’

  ‘Well, I want it too. It will be such fun. I’ll have Karen Arbuthnot as a bridesmaid —’

  ‘Gracie, have a heart —’

  ‘We couldn’t get married now anyway with grandmama so ill. Supposing she were to die on our wedding day?’

  ‘Is she very ill?’

  ‘Aunt Charlotte says she’s dying. But that may be wishful thinking.’

  ‘I feel so terribly afraid I’ll lose you.’

  ‘Don’t be idiotic. Here’s my hand here, feel it.’

  ‘Gracie, poppet, are you sure you don’t mind —’

  ‘What? Ludwig, you’re trembling.’

  ‘It’s all so sudden. I’ve been in such a state these last weeks.’

  ‘About little me?’

  ‘Yes, about you. And about — Yes. Gracie, you’re sure you don’t mind what I’ve done? I mean my not going back ever, my not going to fight, you know —’

  ‘Why should I mind your not wanting to fight in a wicked war? Why should I mind your choosing to live here in England with me and become English?’

  ‘Later on you might want to go to America and we couldn’t, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to America. You are my America.’

  ‘Dear Gracie! But — you don’t think it’s dishonourable?’

  ‘How can it be dishonourable to do the right thing?’

  How indeed.

  They were sitting side by side, precariously, as if they were on a boat. Ludwig held her right hand tightly in his. His left arm was stretched round her shoulder. His bony tweedy knees were pressed against her sleek knees, pale brown and shiny through openwork tights. She smelt of young flesh and toilet soap and pollen. Oh God, if they could only take their clothes off! Outside it was raining. Warm early summer rain playfully caressed the window. A bright subdued light showed the small pink and white houses opposite against a dark grey sky which shone like illuminated metal. There would be a rainbow somewhere above the park. Elsewhere that war was going on, high explosive and napalm and people killed and maimed. There were people out there who had been at war all their lives.

  The crucial date had passed. He had torn up his draft card some time ago. But until lately there had been a way out. Now there was none. He had taken a carefully considered step and with it had chosen exile. He had no regrets, except about his parents. He was their only child. It had been the achievement of their lives to make him what they could never be, genuinely American. They would never understand.

  ‘Have some more elevenses,’ said Gracie. ‘Have some Tennis Court Cake. I know you like marzipan. Have some Russian gâteau.’

  Her little bedroom, which she c
alled her sitting-room, and in which indeed they had so far done nothing but sit, was cosy and prim. Its formality and order were those of a child. This schoolroom neatness, this bitty folky flowery charm, represented, Ludwig suspected, not only Gracie’s unformed taste but also some vanished era in the taste of her parents. He had once heard Gracie resisting Clara’s enthusiastic ideas about redecorating it. A growing miscellany of pictures now fought with the sprigged wallpaper: small Impressionist reproductions, engravings of hawks and parrots, photos of the Acropolis and Windsor Castle and the Taj Mahal. Yet Gracie knew nothing about architecture, nothing about birds, and constantly mixed Van Gogh up with Cezanne. Indeed she appeared to know very little about anything, having firmly left school early and refused any further education. What on earth is one to do, he had once thought, with a girl who has no idea who Charlemagne was and who doesn’t care? Later he admired her nerve and came to prize her calm ignorance. She was without the pretensions and ambitions which powered his own life. Her simplicity, her gaiety, even her silliness lightened his Puritan sadness. Yet he also knew that she was no mere kitten, this almost-child. There was a formidable will crushed up inside this unfolding bud.

  ‘No thanks, no cake.’

  ‘Have a jelly baby.’

  ‘No. I’m still feeling kicked in the stomach.’

  ‘Well, I’m hungry.’

  Gracie was a great eater, but remained slim. She was a pale miniature-looking girl with a small well-formed head and a small eager face. She had glowing powdery flesh, very light blue eyes, and wispy half-long silvery golden hair. When she was petulant she looked like a terrier. When she was self-satisfied, which was often, she looked oriental. She was not coquettish, yet she was very conscious of herself as a young and pretty girl. Her tiny mouth was aware, thoughtful, stubborn. She seemed to Ludwig like a precious relic, an heirloom of vanished feminine refinement, something almost Victorian.