The Italian Girl by Iris Murdoch

and here, where there was a sharper sense of her presence, her absence, to weave as it were, to put on, the idea of her death. But I kept seeming to forget that she had died, as if that didn’t matter, and kept returning in fantasy to the old undying Lydia that I carried inside me. I could not by this sort of meditation invent any decent motive for remaining. And I occasionally thought that I was really only staying on because I could not face the return to my lonely little flat which became, when I was away from it, quite cold and impersonal as if it forgot me completely as soon as I closed the door. By comparison the rectory was as full of warmth and humours as a pigsty. It was, for all its miseries, a wonderfully inhabited house. And emanating from somewhere within it, I was not sure from where, was a gentle compelling air which made me feel unexpectedly at home.
    I had promised Otto that I would help him to go through all Lydia’s things, but we kept putting it off. We were still frightened of her, it still seemed a kind of sacrilege to touch her belongings. We half-heartedly sorted out the contents of her desk which had already been ransacked and disordered by Isabel. There was still no sign of the will, and we concluded there was none. But we found a lot of other things, including all the letters which Otto and I had written her from school, tied up in ribbons, Otto’s in a blue ribbon, mine in a pink. We carried these packages unopened down to the kitchen range and burnt them. We could not bring ourselves to touch her clothes. There were wardrobes full of the gay long-skirted dresses; and since Isabel refused to have anything to do with the matter we eventually asked Maggie to deal with them. They all then vanished overnight, distributed no doubt to those in the town whom Otto called Maggie’s ‘suppliants’.
    I had had, after the curious scene in her bedroom, no further ‘explanation’ with Isabel. But some kind of peace or truce existed between us to which I contributed the rather stuffy dignity with which I had managed to carry that occasion off, and Isabel contributed a sort of rueful philosophical contrition. She did better than I did, and I would have liked to make some more definite, more friendly, gesture to her, but I was afraid of initiating some further muddle. In fact, the situation was saved by a wordless affection on both sides and we continued as if nothing had happened, or almost. I did feel I had gained, for better or worse, a clearer vision of Isabel’s picture of herself as a sort of sexual queen and empress manquée. If she had been a happier woman she would have cast herself as the Lou Andreas-Salome of her little town. As it was, she simply radiated these obscure frenzied little waves of sexual need and would-be authority which, although I was strictly indifferent to them, did have a generally disturbing effect.
    I had had no further talk of an intimate kind with Otto and had indeed scarcely seen him as he seemed now to spend most of the day at the summer-house. I visited the empty workshop at intervals and was grieved to sec his tools so idle. Levkin I saw only in the garden in the distance. Whenever he saw me he would seem to be convulsed with laughter, would gesticulate wildly and then leap into the air. I ignored this.
    I had been eating an orange and the dark wood now smelt pungently of the fruit. It was a childhood smell, lingering with a certain combination of the innocent and the disgusting. Oranges are one of the few fruits whose taste I like but whose smell I dislike. I piled the boxwood blocks up neatly and tidied the orange peel on the table. I was sitting in the kitchen. Since yesterday I had discovered that the kitchen suited me rather well. The weather had turned to wind and rain and I was glad of a warm corner. I equally shunned company and the quaint austerity of my father’s room, but sitting in the kitchen required no justification. It was a high, square place with a