The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-03-07T20:28:29+00:00

TWO

10. Uncle Edmund “in Loco Parentis”

The best way of curing a crack in boxwood is to leave the block in a cool damp place for twenty-four hours or so; usually the patient makes a miraculous recovery from quite a severe split. I examined with satisfaction the blocks which I had just retrieved from the cellar. They had healed well. Those who do not work with such material, such thingy, aspects of nature may not quite imagine or credit the way in which a piece of unformed stuff can seem pregnant, inspiring. I can imagine how a sculptor might feel about a lump of stone, though I have never felt this myself. But pieces of wood can quite send my imagination racing even in the handling of them. There is the lovely difference between boxwood and pear wood, the male and the female of the wood-engraver’s world. But there is also the strong individual difference between one piece of boxwood and another. Each one is full of a different picture.

It was four days later. I was still waiting, still hanging about. I had no new conception of my role or indeed any clear conception of it at all. And nothing had happened, I had done nothing, Flora had not returned, I could not find her. I was fairly miserable. At moments I told myself that I simply felt “involved” or that I was waiting with morbid curiosity for some outrage of which I could be a useless and somehow gratified spectator. Then I told myself I ought to go. There was a sort of vanity involved in staying, a vain desire to retrieve a lost dignity. I had been more affected than I had liked to admit by Isabel’s picture of me as a healer. Having healed no one and failed grossly in the one task where I had a little power of good, I had better, I argued, go home and digest the bitter incompleteness of my excursion. I had better go home and mourn for Lydia.

Yet I stayed. After so much it seemed impossible to go without more. I was involved, and in no bad sense. I stayed out of some sort of affection for my brother and sister-in-law, I stayed in order to keep some sort of faith with Flora. I had made more vain telephone calls. I had still not said anything to Isabel. This problem continually tortured me, but I decided it was better to keep quiet. Isabel would be as helpless as I was, and if the worst had happened it might even be better that Isabel should not know at all—or at any rate it seemed fair to leave that decision still in the hands of Flora. I am very literal about promises. And from every point of view Otto was better in the dark. But I was tormented by my responsibility, and by a feeling that I was only keeping quiet because I did not want to resign a sort of privileged position,

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