An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch [Iris Murdoch]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2003-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Charlotte stared at this thoughtfully for some time. The letter and the snapshot she had found together in an old leather wallet. The third item, which she now began to consider, she had discovered separately among a lot of Betty’s old school magazines at the bottom of the trunk. It was a certificate issued by a sports committee of the Fulham Swimming Baths to attest that Miss Elizabeth Granger had obtained a first-class diploma in General Swimming, comprising breast stroke, crawl, butterfly and life-saving.

Charlotte pushed her chair back. One of her lower front teeth was loose and she rocked it painfully with her tongue. It had been general knowledge that Betty Gibson Grey could not swim. Yet why was it general knowledge? Because Asutin had always said so. And when had Austin always said so? After her death.

In retrospect it seemed an odd marriage. Betty was not considered to be a good match by those who care about good matches. She was a typist in a firm that did business with Austin’s firm. Clara had said she was ‘without distinction but jolly’. Betty had certainly been, in the mode of a by-gone age, jolly. She danced and sang and played the guitar badly. Her guitar in fact still existed, at the back of the cupboard where Charlotte found the trunk. Presumably on Dorina’s advent the relics of Betty had been just bundled into the darkest place. Charlotte could not imagine Dorina sorting these things out and asking Austin if they should be kept. Dorina walked innocent and blind over the remnants of her predecessor.

Poor Betty. Destined for a happy ordinariness, what demon had set Austin in her way? And how was it that Austin was so attractive to women? Every woman thinks of herself as a healer. Did they somehow sense the leprosy within and feel confident that they could take the world-resentment out of those fine eyes? Dorina had thought it.

Poor Betty. How had a good swimmer managed to drown herself accidentally in a calm river on a summer afternoon? She fell into a lock. Armidale Deep Lock, the name came back to Charlotte. Austin found her there already drowned. Well, she could have hit her head on the side of the lock, only no one had suggested that.

Austin was a curious man. He inspired love. He inspired fear. Dorina feared him. Everyone had got used to regarding Dorina as a crazy little thing. But perhaps Dorina was not being just irrational and neurotic. Perhaps there was some quite other pattern behind it all.

Charlotte took the things from the table and put them back where she had found them in the trunk. It was lunchtime, whatever that meant now. She leaned into the darkness at the back and drew out Betty’s guitar. She touched a string and it twanged with a surprised painful loudness in the quiet flat. Charlotte sat down nursing the guitar. She forgot Austin and began to think about Matthew. Tears came to her as she

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