An Accidental Man (proofread) by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch [Iris Murdoch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Classics, etc
Published: 2022-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Mavis lay back relaxed in a big armchair at the Villa. It was late evening. Matthew, with a glass of brandy in his hand, sat in an upright chair leaning towards her. Only one lamp was alight. They were not touching each other. There was no need. That would come. Passion and happiness joined their bodies.

Speech was loosened and had become perfect. They talked intermittently, often at random. Everything needful had been said. Now everything in the world could be said and there was a huge calm expansion of time.

Matthew had unbuttoned his waistcoat. He felt comfortable and justified inside his body at last. Mavis’s faint touch upon his wrist, now withdrawn, made him feel light and pure as if a golden line had defined him altogether and lifted him slightly out of the grosser world: while yet, luxuriously incarnate, his desire waited, confident and curbed.

He saw in Mavis the counterpart of his own feelings, as she lay back, her shoes kicked off, her dress undone at the neck, her hands caressing her throat and breasts, her fuzzy halo of greying hair spread out behind her head, as it turned heavily to and fro.

‘So you see,’ Mavis was saying, ‘I just don’t know what to do for the best about Dorina. I fear making some terrible mistake. There’s some very delicate thread which only she can unravel. One can’t cut the knot. Sometimes I’ve felt that she just wanted me to force her to do something. But even if she did really want it I doubt if it would be wise. What could a psychoanalyst make of that child? There are some things which are very obvious and it could take a lot of time and a lot of pain to go over them. But psychoanalysis is such a blunt instrument. Dorina knows, she knows.’

‘Knows what?’ said Matthew.

‘The obvious things. Sometimes I think it’s like a puzzle and she can see and yet not quite see. I watch her sort of knit her brows over it. She’ll have to find Austin again, they’ll have to come together very quietly at some moment when she’s ready. It may be quite soon.’

‘You are stating the problem, not its solution.’

‘Stating it in a certain way excludes certain solutions.’

‘Quite. Do you think,’ said Matthew, ‘that there is only one thing the matter with Dorina, or are there many things, all quite unconnected with each other? When someone’s in trouble like that one is often tempted to simplify, to think there’s one answer, one exit.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mavis. ‘I believe there’s one thing. I believe it will all come right together. But then I do so much want to—as it were—release her—I mean as one might release a bird. Especially, and this doesn’t make my thinking any clearer, now, my darling.’

‘Yes. Yes. Do you think that she can—if that is the word—save—Austin?’

‘Yes, I believe it.’

‘You don’t think it, you believe it?’

‘Yes. I suppose it’s like religious faith here. One has certain beliefs for other people, half trying to help them with the beliefs.

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