The Bell - Iris Murdoch [149]
For all that, perhaps partly because of it, Dora grew and flourished remarkably during those days. Michael felt this especially in the later time when there was a little less to do in the office, and he often found her out beside the lake, using as easel the old music stand from the Long Room, making water-colour sketches of the Court, of which she must have done, before she left, some three or four dozen. The weather was colder now, and though still cloudy yet often bright. Skies of dappled dove grey, streaky lemon yellow, menacing purple and limpid green appeared in Dora's pictures behind the silvery pediment of the Court. How wonderfully, Michael thought, Dora had survived. She had fed like a glutton upon the catastrophes at Imber and they had increased her substance. Because of all the dreadful things that had passed there was more of her. Michael looked with a slightly contemptuous envy upon this simple and robust nature until he remembered the last morning when he had been about to visit Nick and how well he too had thriven upon disaster up to the moment when he was vitally hurt.
One day a letter arrived from Toby. He was by now well installed at Oxford. Michael read his letter with relief. In awkward terms, Toby apologized for his hasty departure, and for his indiscretions, which he hoped had not caused too much trouble. He thanked Michael for his kindness, said how much it had meant to him being at Imber, said he was sorry to see from the papers that they were all moving, but hoped it would be just as good somewhere else. What mainly emerged, however, from the letter, and set Michael's mind at rest, was that for Toby the whole business was closed indeed. There was no sign of tormented guilt, no anxious brooding, no speculation about Michael's state of mind. The full significance of the happenings at Imber had happily escaped Toby, and he had no retrospective curiosity about them now. He was in a new and wonderful world, and already Imber had become a story. He had a marvellous old panelled room in Corpus, he told Michael. He had decorated it with pictures of the medieval bell taken from the Illustrated London News. His tutor was terribly impressed when he told him how he had discovered the bell! Murphy was very well, by the way, and settling down splendidly with his parents. He wasn't fretting any more. Hadn't it been a good idea of Peter's that he should take over Murphy? How terribly sad and shocking about Nick, he could hardly believe even now that it was true. Michael must come and see him at Corpus if ever he was going through Oxford and take a glass of sherry. Michael smiled a little over the letter and was glad of it. Perhaps he would go one day to see Toby, and to give Toby the pleasure of patronizing him a little, and of telling his friends afterwards that that was the odd chap he had told them of who once made a pass at him down at that place where he found the bell.
All these thoughts of Dora and Toby fluttered intermittently at the surface of Michael's mind. More deeply and continually he was concerned with other matters. The pain he had felt when he knew that Nick was dead was so extreme that he had thought at first that he could not survive it. During the first days he had been consoled only by the knowledge that he could still kill himself. Such pain did not have to continue. He could occupy himself only in things