The Bell - Iris Murdoch [78]
It was at this point that he began to accuse himself of exaggeration. Surely the thing wasn't as important as all that; and was he not, by becoming so idiotically upset, just displaying his naivety and lack of sophistication? Toby had a horror of being thought naive. He began to undress and resolved to think no more about it till the next morning. He turned the light out. But sleep did not come. And as he lay there in the darkness Toby found that after all what had happened had its interesting side. It certainly constituted an adventure, though a somewhat rebarbative one. And what he then experienced, though he did not at the time recognize it as such, was a feeling of pleasure at being suddenly in a position of power vis-à-vis someone whom he had so unquestioningly accepted as his spiritual superior.
This thought led him back toward considerations which were more humane: and it was here that the complexities began in earnest. He began really to envisage Michael. What was it like to be Michael? What was Michael thinking now? Was he lying awake, miserable, wishing that that hadn't happened? What would he do tomorrow? Would he speak to Toby about it? Or would he ignore it completely and behave as if it hadn't been? Toby felt he couldn't bear that. The sense of something needing to be completed began already to be strong in him. He was feeling, for the first time, intensely interested in Michael. He felt too, as he conjured up the image of that obviously rather complicated person, a new emotion about him. He found himself feeling, towards Michael, curiously protective. And with this thought at last he fell asleep.
The next morning he just felt wretched. His disgust had returned, but now it was directed for some obscure reason against himself. He felt as if he had taken part, on the previous night, in some exhausting orgy. Yet although he recalled with undiminished repugnance the incident in question, it seemed that what had constituted the orgy was chiefly his own thoughts. Yet he was far from wanting to turn his mind to other things. Whereas before he had wholeheartedly enjoyed his work in the garden, it seemed today burdensome and time-wasting in that it distracted him from thinking about Michael. He would have liked to spend the morning walking in the woods. Instead he had to sustain a conversation with James, and then with Patchway, and then with Mrs Mark, with whom he was detailed to spend the last part of the morning packing vegetables into nets and boxes. Michael avoided him.
It seemed possible that Michael might take an opportunity at lunch-time to call him aside. But the meal passed off without their having even looked at each other. Toby was anxious not to appear to invite a tête-à-tête, and he vanished during the short interval after lunch to a remote corner of the fruit garden where there was a job of attaching wires to the wall which he had been asked to do when a spare moment came. But when he got there he could not bring himself to do the job. He sat on the path, turning the little stones over with his fingers, until it was time to start work officially again.
In the afternoon he was employed once more on the perennial hoeing. At least here he was alone. The weather had continued