An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch

busy she was never overworked. Her clients, muddled, illiterate, often delinquent, always pious, interested her but usually did not touch her deeply. She was efficient, and smiled covertly when the good nuns spoke of ‘grace’. She enjoyed her efficiency and enjoyed, like a voluptuary, her regained innocence. During the wild years she had woken every morning to some guilty problem. Above any pain except that of guilt one can hope to climb by seeing what is above, by seeing that there is something above. Guilt and remorse had trapped her during those years. Now she woke to clarity, to an emptiness full of the urgent needs of others. She had achieved, by accident and in a second-rate way, what she had once desired as a high spiritual prize, a life that was like water, a sort of colourless see-through blow-through existence, full of tasks and without ties.
    Well, there was one tie of course and that was Dorina. Valmorana was Mavis’s by entail under the will of her mother who had died long ago. Mavis’s father had married a second time, again a Catholic woman, and again one who died young. In fact Dorina’s mother perished in childbirth and Mavis had to act the little mother. Dorina was a good deal younger and had been still at school during the wild years. She had been a funny little girl, prim and secretive and taciturnly self-sufficient. After their father’s death she had had somehow, only Mavis could never fully attend to it at the time, a rather miserable adolescence at several uninspiring schools, handed around in the holidays. There had been strange incidents. ‘I am afraid your sister attracts poltergeists,’ one headmistress had complained severely to Mavis, who had her own ghosts to contend with. In fact Dorina’s presence at Valmorana provoked incomprehensible electrical storms. Pictures fell. Windows cracked. A noise like a grand piano falling down the stairs occurred once without visible cause. However when Dorina was eighteen these phenomena ceased.
    Dorina left school and came to live permanently at Valmorana in the early days of the hostel. Though intelligent she had never managed to pass any exams. She was often vaguely ill and was regularly suspected of tubercular tendencies. She helped a little in the house, she took a typing course, she worked part-time in a library. On the whole she did nothing much, managing to create in the midst of hurlyburly a quietness of her own. She was the spirit of the garden, the spirit of the stairway, always somehow passing by with flowers in her hand. The tough inmates laughed at her, but treated her as a mascot.
    Often she exasperated Mavis, often she touched her. Mavis knew that her sister was not happy. Sometimes looking at those secretive eyes she wondered if all Dorina’s ghosts had not somehow been simply drawn inside her. There were strange things still. What went on inside? Did Dorina regard Mavis’s girls as interlopers and false children? Was Mavis mother even now? Mavis had never made a proper home for her. Was it even possible that Dorina felt resentment about money because she herself had been left penniless? Of course the sisters loved each other and Dorina’s art could sometimes make things seem idyllic. The nuns, who on the whole kept out of the way, made little sorties to try to get hold of her, but she vaguely eluded them. She seemed even more calmly godless than Mavis. She never worshipped or seemed to feel either the need of it or the guilt of abandoning it. Her spiritual world was other.
    All sorts of plans were made for her but she soon rendered them all hazy and inconclusive. Dorina’s attention to it could make any plan seem incoherent. It was in any case obvious that marriage was her lot and Mavis devoted time and thought to a selection of suitors. Dorina was passive. Mavis invited young men. The idea of Dorina married caused her various kinds of pain. She sometimes invited Austin too, and he sometimes