The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
Rain seemed in no hurry. She exchanged news and gossip with the three experts. They spoke a little of her father’s work, mentioned the recent sale of one of his pictures, and the price. The price astonished Mor. He stood aside in silence, looking at Rain. She seemed now so utterly at her ease, quite unlike the weeping ragamuffin he had seen two nights ago when they had talked for hours about their situation. She could step out of that into this. He marvelled again that she had not gone away altogether. She was dressed today in a dress which he had not seen before, a clinging dress of light grey wool, which made her look taller. As she talked, he watched her bright thrown-back boy’s face, and the extreme roundness of her breasts, displayed now by the close-fitting wool. He noticed that she was wearing high-heeled shoes, instead of the canvas slippers which she usually wore down at St Bride’s. He noticed he handbag and a long black-polished heel tapping rhythmically. He coveted her, and his need for her was suddenly so extreme that he had to turn away.
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 u
‘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.
‘I will paint one for you, dearest,’ said Rain. ‘I will paint many, many. I will paint pictures of you. I will paint you over and over again.’
Mor saw the years ahead. The room was full of pictures of himself and Rain. Himself reading upon the terrace at evening, working in the drawing-room in the noon light, walking in the wilderness between the dusty leaves of the bushes where there was no path. Rain, slowly losing her boyish looks, the tense and precious simplicity of her childhood changing into the serenity of middle age, and so picture behind picture away into the farthest future. Rain with her brush in her hand, looking through a thousand canvases towards the end of life.
He said nothing. Rain was looking up at him. He met her eyes without smiling, yearning for her to decide his fate.
‘Is there no picture here of your mother?’ Mor said at last.
‘No,’ said Rain. ‘My father hardly ever painted her.’
They moved a pace or two and Mor wondered to himself how much that missing face would have told him. He wanted to ask a question, but Rain interrupted.
‘This is rather a curiosity,’ she said, pointing to a large canvas which hung at the end of the room. Here both the faces appeared. Rain’s father sat behind a table which was strewn with books and papers, facing the spectator. Upon the left side of the table, propped up upon it, was a large gilt mirror, in which could be seen the reflection of Rain and of the canvas which she was painting, whereon the same picture appeared again, severely foreshortened. Rain’s father was wearing an open-necked shirt. His close-cropped dark hair fell in a silky fringe along his brow, his narrow brooding face looked intently upward towards his daughter, and one hand rested upon the frame of the mirror wherein was seen the reflection of her face, equally intently looking down on him. The heads were close together and the resemblance between them was marked and touching.
‘That’s extraordinary!’ said Mor.
‘Not very successful, I’m afraid,’ said Rain. ‘I must try again sometime with you.’ She spoke in the most ordinary tone, her attention still upon the picture.
Mor thought: she has decided. She has decided. He began to want to get away from the pictures. Without words they turned and went slowly down the stairs. As his heels bit into the thick carpet Mor felt the pain of the transition, back to the cold rainy autumnal afternoon and the roaring traffic outside the door. Here all was the same as before, chilly, noisy, ugly, without space, without leisure, without peace. He looked sideways at Rain as they came out of the door. No, she was not quite the same; a new light fell upon her from the pictures, she was strengthened and made radiant by her past. All the different faces that he had seen, from the young girl with the plaits to the posed beauty in the flowering dress dwelt in her face now, giving it suddenly a new authority and a new age. He thought too how much at this moment she resembled her father, except that what in him appeared as a sort of self-contained moroseness appeared in her as a pedantic and dignified serenity, which combined with her rounded head and fresh face of a child was absurd and affecting. Mor was overcome with emotion.
It was raining steadily. Mor had no overcoat. Rain had a small umbrella swinging over her arm. She handed it to him in silence and he opened it above them both. Arm in arm they made their way back to Bond Street.
‘Tea at Fortnum and Mason,’ Rain decreed.
Tea at Fortnum and Mason! Mor was suddenly filled with a deep and driving joy which furrowed through his body with such force that he did not at first know that it was indeed joy that shook him so. She had decided. He had decided too. He could do no other. ‘Rain — ’ he said.
She looked up, squeezing his arm, bright-eyed and confident. ‘I know, she said.
The rain began to fall faster. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Mor. ‘I’m not sure that I could really live outside England, not all the time, not even most of the time.’
‘Dear Mor, then we’ll live in England!’ said Rain.
She clutched his arm more tightly. The rain began to pelt down with spitting violence. They started to run as quickly as they could in the direction of Fortnum’s.
Chapter Sixteen
IT was the following day. That evening Bledyard was to give his famous art lecture, and Rain had been persuaded by Mr Everard that she really must be present — especially as the lecture, on this occasion, was to be on the topical subject of portrait painting. Mor usually cut Bledyard’s lecture, but this time, as Rain was coming, of course he would come too. Since he had finally and definitely made up his mind, the world had been completely altered. A tremendous energy, which had previously consumed itself in perpetuating his indecision and conjuring up all kinds of catastrophic fantasy, was transformed into the purest joy. Mor now felt an intense benevolence towards his colleagues, including Bledyard, and he found himself positively looking forward to the lecture as if it were to be the most enormous treat. He would be sitting in the same room as Rain, and as Bledyard talked he could think about her, and see again the extraordinary and moving images of the previous day which still hovered for him about her head, like a cloud of angels surrounding the madonna.
Mor had had a bad hour during the afternoon when he had drafted a very frank letter to Nan. Even this task had been lightened, however, by the extreme relief which he felt at finally knowing what the truth was and being able to tell it. When he had completed the draft he roughly sketched a letter to Tim Burke explaining briefly that after all he would not be able to stand as a Labour candidate. Concerning this, Mor felt another quite separate and deep regret. But he gave himself the same answer. He had won a great prize. He was willing to pay for it. When he had done, there was no time left to copy the drafts, so he put them away in a drawer. They would go on the morrow.
The one matter to which he had not yet let his thoughts fully turn was the matter of the children. When he felt him self inclined to think about them he told himself: whichever way I move, something must be destroyed - and the destruction may well be less than I fear. After all, the children are nearly grown-up now. We cannot lose each other altogether. But so far as he could he prevented himself from considering the children. He had made up his mind, and there was no point in indulging in painful self-laceration which had no longer any relevance to the making of a decision. He had suggested in the draft letter to Nan that nothing be said to Donald or Felicity until after Donald’s exam. He had considered the possibility of delaying his letter to Nan until after this date - but his anxiety to tell her what he had decided was too intense. He felt, still, that his achievement was precarious and must be fixed and established at once. Towards Nan he felt no more of his former anger, only a dull feeling of hostility, mixed with pity and regret. He knew that she would be very surprised. She would hardly be able to imagine that he would turn against her decisively at last. At the thought of her surprise he felt a very slight satisfaction which faded into a sense of shame. Then pity began to take possession of his mind — and as soon as he was able to he brought the full focus of his attention back towards Rain.
Bledyard’s lecture took place after supper and was to be given, as usual, in the Gymnasium, which was easier to black out than the hall. In fact, it would be dark soon after the lecture started, but it was worth blocking out the twilight for the sake of the first few slides. It was to be hoped that the epidiascope w
He met Mr Everard crossing the playground. His face wore an anxious expression. ‘I hope you’re coming this time, Bill?’ he said.
‘Most certainly!’ said Mor. He felt like embracing Evvy. He wondered if he was looking as wild as he felt.