The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
‘Don’t go out of your way to annoy me,’ said Nan. ‘Haven’t you got a lesson at two-fifteen?’
‘It’s a free period,’ said Mor, ‘but I ought to go and do some correcting. Is that Felicity?’
‘No, it’s the milkman,’ said Nan. ‘I suppose you’d like some coffee?’
‘Well, maybe,’ said Mor.
‘Don’t have it if you’re indifferent,’ said Nan; ‘it’s expensive enough. In fact, you weren’t really thinking about my German. You’re still stuffed up with those dreams that Tim Burke put into you. You imagine that it’s only my narrowmindedness that stops you from being Prime Minister!’
Tim Burke was a goldsmith, and an old friend of the Mor family. He was also the chairman of the Labour Party in a neighbouring borough, where he had been trying to persuade Mor to become the local candidate. It was a safe Labour seat. Mor was deeply interested in the idea.
‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ said Mor, ‘but you are timid there too.’ He was shaken more deeply than he yet liked to admit by his wife’s opposition to this plan. He had not yet decided how to deal with it.
‘Timid!’ said Nan. ‘What funny words you use! I’m just realistic. I don’t want us both to be exposed to ridicule. My dear, I know, it’s attractive, London and so on, but in real life terms it means a small salary and colossal expenses and absolutely no security. You don’t realize that one still needs a private income to be an M.P. You can’t have everything, you know. It was your idea to send Felicity to that expensive school. It was your idea to push Don into going to Cambridge.’
‘He’ll get a county grant,’ Mor mumbled. He did not want this argument now. He would reserve his fire.
‘You know as well as I do,’ said Nan, ‘that a county grant is a drop in the ocean. He might have worked with Tim. He might have knocked around the world a bit. And if he learns anything at Cambridge except how to imitate his expensive friends — ’
‘He’ll do his military service,’ said Mor. In persuading Donald to work for the University Mor had won one of his rare victories. He had been paying for it ever since.
‘The trouble with you, Bill,’ said Nan, ‘is that for all your noisy Labour Party views you’re a snob at heart. You want your children to be ladies and gents. But anyhow, quite apart from the money, you haven’t the personality to be a public man. You’d much better get on with writing that school textbook.’
‘I’ve told you already,’ said Mor, ‘it’s not a textbook.’ Mor was writing a book on the nature of political concepts. He was not making very rapid progress with this work, which had been in existence now for some years. But then he had so little spare time.
‘Well, don’t get so upset,’ said Nan. ‘There’s nothing to get upset about. If it’s not a textbook, that’s a pity. School textbooks make money. And if we don’t get some extra money from somewhere we shall have to draw our horns in pretty sharply. No more Continental holidays, you know. Even our little trip to Dorset this year will be practically ruinous, especially if Felicity and I go down before term ends.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Nan,’ said Mor, ‘do shut up! Do stop talking about money!’ He got up. He ought to have gone into school long ago.
‘When you speak to me like that, Bill,’ said Nan, ‘I really wonder why we go on. I really think it might be better to stop.’ Nan said this from time to time, always in the cool, un-excited voice in which she conducted her arguments with her husband. It was all part of the pattern. So was Mor’s reply.
‘Don’t talk that nonsense, Nan. I’m sorry I spoke in that way.’ It all passed in a second.
Nan rose, and they began together to clear the table.
There was a sound in the hall. ‘Here’s Felicity!’ said Mor, and pushed quickly past his wife.
Felicity shut the front door behind her and put her suitcase down at her feet. Her parents stood looking at her from the door of the dining-room. ‘Welcome home, dear,’ said Nan.
‘Hello,’ said Felicity. She was fourteen, very thin and straight, and tall for her age. The skin of her face, which was very white but covered over in summer with a thick scattering of golden freckles, was drawn tightly over the bridge of her nose and away from her prominent eyes, giving her a perpetual look of inquiry and astonishment. She had her mother’s eyes, a gleaming blue, but filled with a hazier and more dreamy light. Nan’s hair was a dark blond, undulating naturally about her head, the ends of it tucked away into a subdued halo. Felicity’s was fairer and straighter, drawn now into a straggling tail which emerged from under her school hat. In looks, the girl had none of her father. It was Donald who had inherited Mor’s dark and jaggedly curly hair and his bony face, irregular to ugliness.
Felicity took off her hat and threw it in the direction of the hall table. It fell on the floor. Nan came forward, picked up her hat, and kissed her on the brow. ‘Had a good term, dear?’
‘Oh, it was all right,’ said Felicity.
‘Hello, old thing, said Mor. He shook her by the shoulder.
‘Hello, Daddy,’ said Felicity. ‘Is Don here?
‘He isn’t, dear, but he’ll come in tomorrow,’ said Nan. ‘Would you like me to make you lunch, or have you had some?’
‘I don’t want anything to eat,’ said Felicity. She picked up her suitcases. ‘Don’t bother, Daddy. I’ll carry it up.
‘What are your plans for this evening?’ said Nan.
‘I’ve just arrived, said Felicity. ’I haven’t got any plans.‘
She began to mount the stairs. Her parents watched her in silence. A moment later they heard her bedroom door shut with a bang.
Chapter Two
IT was a fine dear evening. Mor closed the door of the Sixth Form room and escaped down the corridor with long strides. A subdued din arose behind him. He had just been giving a lesson to the history specialists of the Classical Sixth. Donald, who was in the Science Sixth, had of course not been present. It was now two years since, to Mor’s relief, his son‘ had ceased to be his pupil. Mor taught history, and occasionally Latin, at St Bride’s. He enjoyed teaching, and knew that he did it well. His authority and prestige in the school stood high; higher, since Demoyte’s departure, than that of any other master. Mor was well aware of this too, and it consoled him more than a little for failures in other departments of his life.
Now, as he emerged through the glass doors of Main School into the warm sunshine, a sense of satisfaction filled him, which was partly a feeling of work well done and partly the anticipation of a pleasant evening. On an ordinary day there would be the long interval till supper-time to be lived through, passed in reading, or correcting, or in desultory conversation with Nan. This was normally the most threadbare part of the day. But this evening there would be the strong spicy talk of Demoyte and the colour and beauty of his house. If he hurried, Mor thought, he would be able to have one or two glasses of sherry with Demoyte before Nan arrived. She made a point of arriving late, to the perpetual irritation of Handy. Then there would be wine with the meal. Nan never drank alcohol, and Mor did not usually drink it, partly as a lingering result of his teetotaller’s upbringing and partly for reasons of economy, but he enjoyed drinking occasionally with Demoyte or Tim Burke, though he always had an irrational sense of guilt when he did so.
Demoyte lived at a distance of three miles from the school in a fine Georgian house called Brayling’s Close, which he had acquired during his period of office as Headmaster, and which he had left to the school in his will. He had crammed it with treasures, especially Oriental rugs and carpets on the subject of which he was an expert and the author of a small but definitive treatise. Demoyte was a scholar. For his scholarship Mor, whose talents were speculative rather than scholarly, admired him without envy; and for his tough honest obstinate personality and his savage tongue Mor rather loved him: and also because Demoyte was very partial to Mor. The latter often reflected that if one were to have him for an enemy Demoyte would present a very unpleasant aspect indeed. His l
Demoyte had not been easy to live with and he had not been easy to get rid of. He had persuaded the Governors to extend his tenure of power for five years beyond the statutory retiring age - and when that time was up he had only been in duced to retire after a storm during which the school Visitor had had to be called in to arbitrate. Ever since Mor had come to the school, some ten years ago, he had been Demoyte’s lieutenant and right-hand man, the intermediary between the Head and the staff, first unofficially, and later more officially, in the capacity of Second Master. In this particular role, Mor was sincere enough to realize, he had been able to experience the pleasures of absolute power without remorse of conscience. He had mitigated the tyranny; but he had also been to a large extent its instrument and had not infrequently enjoyed its fruits.
Demoyte would have liked Mor to succeed him as Head; but St Bride’s was a Church of England foundation, and at least a nominal faith of an Anglican variety was required by the Governors in any candidate for the Headship. This item Mor could not supply; and a storm raised by Demoyte with the purpose of changing the school statutes on this point, so as to allow Mor to stand, failed of its object. Demoyte himself, Mor supposed, must originally have conformed to the requirement; but by the time Mor first met him his orthodoxy had long ago been worn down into a sort of obstinate gentlemanly conservatism. Under the Demoyte régime not much was heard at St Bride’s about Christianity, beyond such rather stereotyped information as was conveyed by the Ancient and Modem Hymnal; and the boys had to learn about religion, much as they learnt about sex, by piecing together such references to these blush-provoking topics as they could discover for themselves in books. What Demoyte cared about was proficiency in work. This his masters were engaged to produce and sacked for failing to produce; and during his period of office the yearly bag of College scholarships by St Bride’s rose steadily and surely. As for morality, and such things, Demoyte took the view that if a boy could look after his Latin prose his character would look after itself.
Very different was the view taken by Demoyte’s successor, the Reverend Giles Everard, whom Demoyte regarded with unconcealed contempt and always referred to as ‘poor Evvy’. The training of character was what was nearest to Evvy’s heart - and performance in Latin prose he regarded as a secondary matter. His first innovation had been to alter the school prospectus, which had formerly reflected Demoyte’s predilection for star pupils, in such a way as to suggest that now St Bride’s was concerned, not with selecting and cherishing the brilliant boy, but with welcoming and bringing to his humbler maturity, such as it was, the mediocre and even the dim-witted. Demoyte watched these changes with fury and with scorn.
Nan had never taken to Demoyte. This was partly because Demoyte had never taken to her, but she would have disliked him, Mor thought, in any case. Nan hated eccentricity, which she invariably regarded as affectation. She did not, it seemed to Mor, care to conceive that other people might be profoundly different from herself. Nan had, moreover, a tendency to be hostile towards unmarried people of either sex, regarding them as in some way abnormal and menacing; and in Demoyte the sort of bachelor behaviour which made Nan particularly uneasy had developed, through age and through the long exercise of tyrannical power, to the point of outrage. Demoyte was overbearing in conversation and rarely sacrificed wit to tract. Although he was a Tory by habit and conviction, there were few institutions which he took for granted. Marriage was certainly not one of these. In the sacred intimacy of the home Nan was often pleased to refer to ‘our marriage’; but she did not think that this was a subject which, either in particular or in general, could be discussed or even mentioned in the company of strangers - and everyone beyond the family hearth was to her a stranger. Demoyte felt no such delicacy, and would often embarrass Nan by outbursts on the subject of the married state. ‘A married couple is a dangerous machine!’ he would say, wagging a finger and watching to see how Nan was taking it. ‘Marriage is organized selfishness with the blessing of society. How hardly shall a married person enter the Kingdom of Heaven!’ And once, after an occasion when Mor had sharply defended Nan from one of Demoyte’s sarcasms, he had almost turned the pair of them out of the house, shouting, ‘You two may have to put up with each other, but I’m not bound to put up with either of you!’
After that Mor had had great difficulty in persuading Nan to accompany him to Demoyte’s dinners. But he knew obscurely that if it ever became established that he went alone, Nan’s hostility to Demoyte would take a more active form and she would seriously endeavour to bring the friendship to an end. As it was, Nan worked off her spleen on each occasion by making bitter comments to Mor as they walked home. With these comments Mor would often weakly concur, excusing his disloyalty to himself on the ground that he was thereby averting a greater evil. Nan was prepared to tolerate Demoyte on condition that he was judged finally by Mor and herself in unison; and to placate her Mor was prepared to allow the judgement to seem final, and to keep his private corrections to himself.
On this occasion as Mor walked across the asphalt playground in the direction of the bicycle-sheds, averting his eyes automatically from the windows of classrooms where lessons were still in progress, he remembered with a small pang of disappointment that tonight Demoyte would not be alone. Mor would sometimes cycle over to Brayling’s Close in the late evening after supper - but there was something especially sacred about the short encounters before dinner, when the glow of Demoyte’s drawing-room came as a sharp pleasure after the recent escape from school. Mor was glad when Demoyte had guests, but he liked to see the old man alone first, and as he tried to arrive soon after five-thirty he was usually able to do so. This evening, however, the portrait-painter woman, Miss Carter, would of course be present. Mor had a vague curiosity about this young woman. When her father had died some months ago the newspapers had been filled with obituaries and appreciations of his work which had contained many references to her. She was supposed to be talented. Concerning her personal appearance and presence Mor had been able to obtain only the vaguest account from Mr Everard, who, as Nan had remarked, was not generally to be trusted in summing up the opposite sex. Mor’s thoughts touched lightly on the girl and then returned to Demoyte.
In spite of the difference in their political views Demoyte had, somewhat to Mor’s surprise, been very much in favour of Tim Burke’s plan to make Mor a Labour Candidate. ‘You won’t do us any harm,’ he told Mor, ‘since whatever else you’ll be doing at Westminster you certainly won’t be governing the country - and you may do yourself some good by getting out of this damned rut. I hate to see you as poor Evvy’s henchman. It’s so painfully unnatural.’ Mor was of Demoyte’s opinion on the latter point. As far as this evening was concerned, however, Mor was anxious to warn Demoyte not to mention the matter in Nan’s presence. Demoyte’s approval would merely increase her opposition to the plan.
The master’s bicycle-shed was a wooden structure, much broken down and overgrown with Virginia creeper, and situated in a gloomy shrubbery which was known as the masters’ garden, and which was nominally out of bounds to the boys. Beside it was a stretch of weedy gravel, connecting by a grassy track with the main drive, on which stood Mr Everard’s new baby Austin and Mr Prewett’s very old enormous Morris. Mor found his bicycle and set out slowly along the track. He bumped along between the trees, turned on to the loose gravel of the main drive, until he reached the school gates and the smooth tarmac surface of the arterial road. Fast cars were rushing in both directions along the dual carriageway, and it
Now between trees the Close was distantly in sight. At this place on the road it seemed as if one were deep in the country. The housing estate was momentarily hidden behind the bridge, and the shopping centre, which lay on a parallel road on the other side of the fields, had not yet come in sight. Demoyte’s house stood there, stately and pensive as in a print, looking exactly as it had looked when company had come down in coaches from London, across heaths infested by highwaymen, to report to their friends in the country what was Garrick’s present role and what the latest saying of the Doctor. Mor waited again for a gap in the traffic to get back across the road, turned into Demoyte’s drive, and cycled up the untidy avenue of old precarious elm trees. These trees had long ago been condemned as unsafe, but Demoyte had refused to have them cut down. ‘Let Evvy do it when I’m gone,’ he said. ‘I don’t grudge him that pleasure. He has so few.’