The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [26]
The ways of the brothers parted. My father drifted into Warwickshire and worked in ‘local government’. Drifted: I see him on a raft. Uncle Abel became a successful barrister in Lincoln and lived in a house in the country called Ramsdens: another distinguished place with a name. Ramsdens was larger than Shaxton. I still see both those houses in my dreams. Later on the Uncle Abels moved to London, but kept Ramsdens as what they called their ‘country cottage’. Uncle Abel married a rich pretty American girl called Estelle. I remember her being referred to by my mother as an ‘heiress’. My father married my mother who was working as a secretary on a farm. Her name was Marian. He called her ‘Maid Marian’. She was a strict evangelical Christian. My father was a Christian too of course, so was I, so was Uncle Abel until Aunt Estelle took him away into the world of light. I cannot see my mother as a lovely girl, as the Maid Marian of the Warwickshire lanes. I see her face, in my earliest memories, as a mask of anxiety. She was the strong one. My father and I loved and obeyed and comforted each other in secret. Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.
I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad. I caught him easily and carried him across the wood to the mossy boggy pools beyond the rocks. Here he ambled away. How can such gentle defenceless animals survive? I lingered for a little while after the toad had gone, and looked at the red-tufted mosses and the flowers, mare’s tails which I remember from my youth, and that weird yellow flower that catches flies. Heather grows upon the higher ground inland, towards Amorne Farm. I was told by the house agent that there are orchids in the vicinity, but I have seen none. Perhaps they are as legendary as the seals.
Later on I went into the village to buy deep-freeze kipper fillets (the poor man’s smoked salmon). Of course it is quite impossible to buy fresh fish here, as all the villagers tell me with pride. I also made some rather inconclusive enquiries about a laundry. So far I have washed everything myself, including the sheets which I lay out to dry upon the lawn. Perhaps I will continue to do this; there is a remarkable satisfaction in the performance of these simple tasks. I forgot to record that I have found a second shop in the village, a sort of ironmonger’s, in the row of cottages behind the pub. It calls itself the Fishermen’s Stores and no doubt did once sell gear to the fishermen. This place, I discovered this morning, supplies paraffin and calor gas. I also purchased from them some candles, a new oil lamp and a length of rope. Carrying these trophies I dropped into the Black Lion on the way home. The bar there falls silent when I enter and bursts into raucous chatter when I leave, but I propose to make a habit of coming nonetheless. The mild hostility of the villagers does not worry me. Of course, thanks to television, they know who I am. But they have been at pains to exhibit indifference, and indeed, in all their worthy simplicity, they may even be indifferent. For them I am perhaps something ‘unreal’, touched by the unreality of the medium itself. No one, thank God, has attempted to befriend me.
For lunch I ate the kipper fillets rapidly unfrozen in boiling water (the sun had done most of the work) garnished with lemon juice, oil, and a light sprinkling of dry herbs. Kipper fillets are arguably better than smoked salmon unless the latter is very good. With these, fried tinned new potatoes. (No real new potatoes yet.) Potatoes are for me a treat dish, not a dull everyday chaperon. Then Welsh rarebit and hot beetroot. The shop sliced