The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [28]
I have not swum today. I went to the tower steps in the afternoon intending to swim but found to my annoyance that the rope which I had fixed to the banister had somehow become untied and floated away. I am not very good at knots. In any case, that rope is perhaps too thick to knot easily. It occurs to me that a long piece of nylon cloth might be more serviceable.
Felt a little depressed but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.) I drank a bottle of retsina in honour of the undeserving rope.
It is now late at night and I am sitting upstairs, with one of my old oil lamps and the new lamp. The new one gives a less beautiful light but it is easier to carry. I must get more of these lamps, though I suppose I shall never be able to dispense with candles. Mrs Chorney left me about a dozen candlesticks, handy though not things of beauty, and I have placed these, complete with candles and matches, at strategic positions throughout the house. The smell of the new lamp reminds me of Fritzie. I shall now continue my autobiography.
I was born at Stratford-upon-Avon. Or to be exact, near it, or to be more exact, in the Forest of Arden. I grew up in leafy central England, as far as it is possible to be in this island from the sea. I did not see the sea until I was fourteen. Of course I owe my whole life to Shakespeare. If I had not lived close to a great theatre, indeed close to that great theatre, I would never have managed to see any plays. My parents never went to the theatre, my mother positively disapproved of it. There was little enough spare money for ‘going out’ anywhere, and we never went out. I did not go to a restaurant until after I left school. I did not enter a hotel till later still. For holidays we went to Shaxton, or to Ramsdens or to the farm where my mother had worked as a secretary. I would never have gone to a theatre at all if it had not been that Shakespeare was ‘work’. A master at the school was Shakespeare-mad. That man too made my life. His name was Mr McDowell. We went to the plays often, we saw everything. Sometimes Mr McDowell paid for me. And of course we acted plays too. Mr McDowell was stage-struck, an actor manqué. I became his stage-struck pet. (It was he who took me and some other boys to the sea in Wales for a week. I think this was one of the most important and happy weeks I have ever spent. ‘Happy’ hardly expresses it. I was nearly insane with joy the whole time.) My mother accepted the theatre-going because it was ‘part of my school work’. I even cunningly pretended that I did not really enjoy it: it was just necessary for my exam. Wicked lying little boy. I was in heaven. My father knew, but we would never have confessed to each other that we were deceiving my mother.
My father was a quiet bookish man and somehow the gentlest being I have ever encountered. I do not mean he was timid, though I suppose he was timid. He had a positive moral quality of gentleness. I can picture him now so clearly, bending down with his perpetual nervous smile to pick up a spider on a piece of paper and put it carefully out of the window or into some corner of the house where it would not be disturbed. I was his comrade, his reading companion, possibly the only person with whom he ever had a serious conversation. I always felt that we were in the same boat, adventuring along together. We read the same books and discussed them: children’s books, adventure stories, then novels, history, biography, poetry, Shakespeare. We enjoyed and craved for each other’s company. What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them. I remember feeling in later life that no one else ever knew how good