The Italian Girl (2 page)
Authors: Iris Murdoch
I looked at what lay before me with a horror which was not love or pity or sadness, but was more like fear. Of course I had never really escaped from Lydia. Lydia had got inside me, into the depths of my being, there was no abyss and no darkness where she was not. She was my self-contempt. To say that I hated her for it was too flimsy a saying: only those will understand who have suffered this sort of possession by another. And now the weird thought that I had survived her did not increase my being, but I felt in her presence mutilated and mortal, as if her strength, exercised from
there,
could even now destroy me. I looked with fascination upon the live, still burnished hair and upon the white, already shrunken face. Leaving the room, I switched the light off and it seemed very strange to leave her there in the dark.
I moved softly across the landing to my own door. The house creaked about me as if in recognition, the inarticulate greeting of some primitive dog-like house-ghost. I had no thought of waking Otto now. The closed doors breathed a stupefaction of slumber; and I wanted desperately to sleep myself, as if to appease with that semblance of death the angry defeated spirit. I reached my own door and opened it wide, and then stopped in my tracks. The moon shone clearly on to my bed and revealed the form of a young girl with long glistening hair.
For a moment it seemed like a hallucination, something hollow and incompletely perceived, some conjuration of a tired or frightened mind. Then the form stirred slightly and turned, the bright hair falling on to an almost bare shoulder. I started back and closed the door in a shock of guilty terror. This was a magic of exclusion which was too strong for me. A moment later, like an evil spirit put to flight, I was stumbling away down the stairs.
A woman’s voice above me softly spoke my name. I paused now and looked up. A face was looking at me over the banisters, a face which I dimly, partly, recognized. Then I realized that it was only my old nurse, the Italian girl. We had had in the house, ever since we were small children, a series of Italian nursery-maids; whether one had led to another or whether this was a foible of my mother’s I never remember discovering. But one result had been that my brother and myself, with no natural gift for languages, spoke fluent Italian. The post had become, in a manner, traditional, so that I had always had, as it were, two mothers, my own mother and the Italian girl. Looking up now at the remembered face, I felt a sort of temporal giddiness and could not for a moment make out which one this was, while a series of Giulias and Gemmas and Vittorias and Carlottas moved and merged dreamlike in my mind. ‘Maggie.’
Her name was Maria Magistretti, but we had always called her Maggie. I came back up the stairs.
‘Maggie, thank you. Yes, I see. Of course, Flora is in my room. You’ve put me in Father’s old room? Yes, that’s fine.’
As I whispered, she pushed open the door of my father’s room and I followed her into the bleak lighted interior.
I had never known her to wear anything but black. She stood there now, a small dark figure, gesturing towards the narrow bed, her long bun of black hair trailing down her back like a waxen pigtail. With her pale, framed face, in the solemnity of the hour, she seemed like an attendant nun: one expected to hear the clink of a rosary and a murmured
Ave.
She looked to me ageless, weary: the last of the Italian girls, left as it were stranded by the growing up of her two charges. She must have been, when she came, but little older than the boys she was to look after; but some trick of fate had left her behind ever since in that northern house. Otto claimed he remembered being wheeled by Maggie in his pram, but this was certainly a false memory: some previous Carlotta, some Vittoria, merged here with her image; they were indeed all, in our minds, so merged and generalized that it seemed as if there had always ever been only one Italian girl.
‘A hot-water bottle in the bed? How kind of you, Maggie. No, not a meal, I’ve eaten, thank you. Just bed. It’s at eleven tomorrow, isn’t it? Thank you, good night.’ With this came to me some old comforting breath of childhood; warm beds, prompt meals, clean linen: these things the Italian girl had provided.
I stood alone in the faded pretty room. The patchwork bedcover was turned back for me. I looked about. A lot of my father’s pictures hung in this room, placed there by Lydia who had, after his death, collected them from elsewhere in the house to make of this place a sort of museum, a mausoleum. It was as if she had, in the end, enclosed him in a narrow space. I looked at the pale water-colours which had once seemed the equal of Cotman and the mannered engravings which had once seemed the equal of Bewick; and there emanated from them all a special and limited sense of the past. They looked to me, for the first time, dated, old-fashioned, insipid. I felt his absence then with a quick pathos, his presence as a sad reproachful ghost: and it was suddenly as if after all it was he who had just died.
Soft, sweet, mechanical, senseless music was being stereophonically produced. We were waiting for the coffin to be carried in. There was to be no service; only as I gathered, a few minutes of quietness in the presence of the dead. Lydia had been a firmly convinced atheist. This was one respect perhaps in which my father had influenced her.
I had scarcely seen the family during the morning. Maggie had brought up my breakfast, and I had exchanged clumsy greetings with Otto and Isabel as we were getting into the cars.
I looked now at my niece, who was sitting a little in front of me on the other side, and savoured an astonishment in which last night’s experience had some part. I had not seen Flora for eight years, since she had not been at home on my last visit. I remembered her as a forward exasperating little fairy, yet always to me infinitely gentle, with a spontaneous affectionate grace whose sheer directness seemed a miracle. She made nothing of the complicated barriers with which I had surrounded myself, and she loved me then, naturally and carelessly, just because I was her uncle, and accepted me utterly. She was perhaps the only person in the world who did. As a child she had wonderfully possessed that open simple quality which makes adults oddly ashamed before children with a shame which is also a pleasure. Otto said I ‘idealized’ Flora; but it was true that I might, for her, have come home often, if it had not been for Lydia.
But now she was, not quite grown up, but certainly a little girl no longer. She must be, I reflected, sixteen, perhaps seventeen. After all, I was over forty myself. And now she was beautiful. As a child she had had a broad radiant appealing expression and the sweetness of a little animal. Now there was before me a handsome impressive girl, with long reddish hair, neatly pinned up, and a pale dreamy face in which the innocent radiance which I remembered shone like a surface mist above the firmer features of a grown-up. Her face had that pure transparent look which we suddenly notice in the faces of young girls when they are no longer children. She wore a big, longish, striped skirt and a black tightfitting jacket and a large, black velvet, broad-brimmed hat tilted far back on her head. She did not resemble her mother, but had something of the gipsy grace of the young Lydia.
Isabel, beside her, looked morose and preoccupied. She too had changed, her face had aged in that imperceptible way, becoming yellower or greyer, as if a fine gauze of frowning and anxiety had been pressed upon it. But her mop of intricate brown hair was glossy and unfaded. She was smartly, quietly dressed, and could have been taken for a clever business woman, a woman of affairs, while her face might have been that of a retired actress. She had a face which was in some sense old-fashioned, a round rather wistful, big-eyed, small-mouthed face such as might have peeped and simpered at the turn of the century in some overfurnished drawing-room in France. This appearance blended in a piquant way with her rather precise Scottish voice: Isabel came from the farther north, from north of the border. She caught my look now and half smiled. She had a good smile, that direct beam of one human being at another. I liked Isabel, though indeed I hardly knew her, and had often wondered why she had stayed on in that gloomy house where she must have been so very far from happy. There was Flora, of course. And there are, I suppose, always for unhappy women many good reasons for bearing the devil they know rather than seeking the other one.
Otto I could not see, he was somewhere behind me sitting with Levkin. That completed our party, except for Maggie, of course. Lydia had had, in latter years, few friends. I had scarcely spoken to Otto in the car, and I resolved now to have a quick business talk with him before lunch. There was no reason indeed why I should not get away promptly in the afternoon. Nothing detained me. I had not in the past enjoyed observing the wreck of my brother’s marriage and did not imagine that I would enjoy it now. And though I was bound to Otto by steely bonds more awful than the bonds of love, we had, on our rare meetings, but little to say to each other. I wanted now chiefly to discover whether Lydia, who had been my father’s sole heir, had left me anything in her will. It was unlikely, since after the scandal of my departure our relations had been cold, strained and scanty. I gathered from Isabel that my name was never mentioned. Still, it was just possible that she had left me something, and I certainly needed it.
I lived a very simple solitary life, but on the other hand I also earned very little money. The art of the wood-engraver may be deep but it is narrow. I passed my days contentedly with the twenty-six letters of the roman alphabet, whose sober authority my father had taught me to love, combining their sturdy forms with wild fantasies of decoration to produce everything from book-plates and trademarks to bank-notes and soap-coupons. My father had frowned upon any decoration of the letter itself, whose classic familiarity he compared to that of the human form, and as a letterer I too counted as a puritan. I did occasional book illustrations, and for my own pleasure, with the names of Bewick and Calvert prayerfully upon my lips, transferred to the precious small surface of the wooden block many scenes, figures, objects that I saw or imagined. But I had never become a fashionable or well-known engraver and in that sense established. I was not ambitious. No type face bore my name. Perhaps I simply lacked talent. I had little curiosity about an exact estimate of my merits, and none at all about my prestige, except in so far as it affected money-making. I would have been happy enough to count myself a craftsman and to jog along in the background of some printing house, only a taste for freedom kept me at my own bench. I had no craving for luxuries and had never had, but I did not honour poverty for its own sake, and disliked its indignities and inconveniences. I lived a solitary life. It had not always been so. But my relations with women always followed a certain disastrous and finally familiar pattern. I did not need a psychoanalyst to tell me why: nor did it occur to me to seek the aid of one of those modern necromancers. I preferred to suffer the thing that I was.
There was a sound of movement, a shuffling, a heavy tread. As we all rose to our feet I half turned to see the little coffin entering, and it seemed suddenly sad that the hirelings who carried it so easily were equal in number to the real mourners. I shivered and closed my eyes as they passed me, and looked again to see the coffin reposing on a sort of stage in front of a blue velvet curtain. The music ceased, but continued in my head, making the silence idiotic. I looked at the coffin and sought for feelings, but could only feel that I was cold, very cold. It was as if she were for the last time waiting, that so demanding spirit turned upon the threshold, and we were there in front of her, an embarrassed, pitiful, half-witted crew, hang-dog as we had always been. At least a Christian burial would with ancient images and emotions have covered up this moment of blankness and lent to that querulous frailty the dignity and sadness of a general mortality. To this we all come. I wished, not for the first time, that I had been brought up as a Christian. Christianity was not inside me, for all that I sometimes aped it, and I knew the loss to be terrible. This was yet another thing for which I could not forgive my parents. I checked the old familiar resentment with the old familiar check. I stared at the blue velvet curtain. The silence went on and on.
Then suddenly, just behind me, there was a weird sound. I saw Isabel turning sharply and I turned too. The coffin-bearers stood stiffly in a row at the back. In front of them was the huge figure of my brother, and as I turned I saw him swaying, bending forward and putting his hand to his mouth. I thought for a moment that he was ill or overcome by tears: but then I saw that he was laughing. Monstrous giggles shivered his great figure from head to foot and turned, as he tried to stifle them, into wet spluttering gurgles. ‘Oh God!’ said Otto audibly. He choked. Then abandoning all attempt at concealment he went off into a fit of gargantuan mirth. Tears of laughter wetted his red cheeks. He laughed. He roared. The chapel echoed with it. Our communion with Lydia was at an end.
The line of coffin-bearers was in scandalized disorder. Isabel had stepped into the aisle and was saying something to me. I turned towards Otto. But already David Levkin had seized him by the arm and was marching him, still gasping and rumbling, towards the door. As I left my place to follow them out I saw, behind Isabel, Flora standing perfectly still, almost at attention, gazing straight in front of her as if nothing had happened.
Outside Otto was now sitting on the stone steps in the sunshine repeating ‘Oh God, Oh my God!’ and wiping his mouth with a filthy handkerchief. He seemed quite unable to stop laughing. He would stop for a moment, stare in front of him with a humorous delighted expression, and then as if unable to endure the exquisitely comic nature of his thoughts, explode again into a roar. ‘Oh my God!’ His eyes were running with water and spittle foamed down his chin. Levkin was sitting on the step above him with his knee against Otto’s shoulder. He was patting him with a patient almost abstracted air. As I approached my brother I detected a strong smell of alcohol.
