Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [20]
was still a late blue summer evening that made the trees and the river vibrate with colour. Some little while later I heard the sound of a car starting. I went to the window, and by leaning out a little could command a piece of the roadway. As I looked out a luxurious black Alvis purred round the corner and up towards the main road. I wondered if Anna was inside. For the moment I hardly cared. As for her ambiguous dismissal of me, I was used to this. Most of the women I know behave in this way, and I have become accustomed to asking no questions, and even to thinking no questions. We all live in the interstices of each other's lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything. I knew that there was a man in it somewhere; there always was where Anna was concerned. But that speculation could wait. I was glad to be alone. I had had what was for me an intolerably eventful day--and now for a long time I leaned on the window sill, looking down towards Hammersmith Bridge. The river murmured past, carrying with it the last fragments of daylight, and finally it became a dark gulf of unseen movement. I thought over my meeting with Anna. She had said some strange things, but it was not on these that I was brooding. I was remembering the way she moved her hands, her nervous gestures as she fingered now a ball and now a necklace, the curve of her thigh as she lay on the floor, the grey locks in her hair, the weariness at her neck. All this called up what seemed to me to be a new love, a hundred times more profound than the old one. I was deeply moved. Yet at the same time I took the thing with a grain of salt. I had often known myself to be moved in the past, and little had come of it. What was certain was that something had remained intact of that which there had formerly been between us; and it could not be but that the passage of time had somehow made this remnant the more precious. I thought with some satisfaction of our interview and how splendidly Anna had responded to all the old cues. Street lamps were lighted now on the bridge, and far away the dark river ran into a crackle of light. I turned back into the room and stumbled my way to the door. I clicked the electric-light switch, and somewhere in the corner a lamp went on, buried under a covering of gauzy materials. Anna had asked me not to prowl; but it had been rather a vague prohibition, and I thought that just a little prowling might be in order. I felt a great desire to stand again in the little theatre; indeed, it had been largely for this that I had asked Anna on the spur of the moment to let me stay. By the dim light I found the switch on the landing, and closing the door of the props room behind me I went to the door of the theatre. I would not have been surprised to find the silent mime in progress there in the dark. I tried the door, but it was locked. I tried the other doors on the landing and then the doors in the hallway downstairs. To my great exasperation they were all locked. Then the stillness of the place began to choke me like a mist, and a sudden panic came over me in case I should come back and find the door of the props room locked too. I ran noiselessly up the stairs again and bounded into the room. The lamp still burnt dimly and all was as before. I thought of going outside and trying to get into the auditorium from the road, but some spirit forbade me to leave the house. I removed two or three layers of textiles from the lamp and surveyed the room. It looked, in this half light, more fantastic than ever. I wandered about for a while, picking up the objects which Anna had handled. My gaze kept returning to the thundersheet and I felt a nervous urge to rush up to it and strike it. I thought of all the superb noise that lay asleep there, and how I could make the whole house rock with it. I made myself almost sweat with nervousness imagining it. But something compelled me to silence, and I even walked about on tiptoe. After a while I began to have an uneasy feeling of being observed. I am very sensitive to observation, and often have this