An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch Page B

people were offering new furniture. Valmorana looked like an ordinary house again and brought to Mavis, suddenly on stairs and landings, memories of her father.
    Her own future of course was equally at stake. If she leased the house to the local authority she would not stay on as warden. This was tactfully plain to everybody. A number of good people had approached her offering other posts, some of them very interesting. The last few years had been ruled by necessity. But had they been perhaps a little dreary? The idea was disconcerting. Mavis found herself curiously restored to ordinary life and ordinary choices. There was no reason why she should be ruled by her false reputation for holiness. She had not after all given up the world and a surprising number of things were still possible. Mavis felt that she had emerged again into the light, not really such a different person in the end.
    Mavis was now thinking, no, I will not give way about Ronald Carberry. The little boy had a touching face. But he was unmanageable, unworkable, would never be fully a human being. Mavis knew that if she was not careful she would have Ronald Carberry forever. She did not want that sort of responsibility, she did not want to re-enter the hot muddled personal unhappiness of the ordinary human lot. That at least her imitation dedicated life had enabled her to shun.
    Mavis had left the big kitchen and repaired to her drawing-room. To keep herself sane she had reserved, in a separate part of the house, her own rooms, full of furniture and pretty things from the old days. She watched now out of the front window as Mrs Carberry walked away slowly down the road carrying her old shopping bag and looking down at the pavement as she walked. Mrs Carberry believed in God and Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary in much the same way that she believed in Walter and Ronald and Mavis. The sun was shining, making a flowering cherry tree at the corner into a winged gallery of rosy light. The petals were falling slowly to the pavement through the still air like autumn leaves. Mrs Carberry walked into the slow rain of petals with her head down, hump-backed with anxiety. Mavis felt relief when she turned the corner. She moved to the side window which looked down on the garden and watched Dorina who was standing barefoot in the middle of the lawn.
    Dorina when alone, and Mavis had often thus watched her unseen, had the vague pottering ways of an animal, expressive not of boredom so much as of an absolute absorption in the moment to moment processes of life. Dorina was trying to pick up a twig with her toes. She tried to grip the twig by flexing her toes about it as if they were fingers. This failed, so she then manoeuvred it between the big toe and the second toe, lifted her foot a little and surveyed it. Then she tried to toss it away, failed, and had to lean down to extract it. She remained bent over and picked a daisy. She straightened up and examined the daisy and then pressed it rhythmically against her lips several times. Then she turned on her heel and, still holding the daisy, began to comb out her hair with her hands. She had light brown hair, not very copious but rather long, which made a little rill down between her shoulder blades. She wore it loose usually or in a plait. Beyond her was a yellow privet hedge, red tulips nearly over, a prunus tree, the high white wall. She looked like a young girl in a picture who had eternally nothing to do except wait for her lover. It was hard to believe that she was over thirty. Mavis watched her with annoyance, curiosity, pity, love and a kind of fear. If only she had married an ordinary public school boy with a job in the city, instead of a weirdie like Austin with a funny hand. She was enough of a weirdie herself.
    â€˜Dorina!’
    â€˜Darling!’
    â€˜Come up. I want to talk to you.’
    Dorina was in the room. She was wearing a creamy and purple sprigged dress almost to her ankles. She had a long thin