Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch Page B

Henry’s gaze sharpened. A small darkness moved among bushes, detached itself, then began to travel noiselessly across the lawn. It stopped again, and Henry made out the outline of a fox. The darkness which was the fox seemed to be looking at the darkness which was Henry. Then, without haste, it moved away and in a few moments disappeared into the longer grass which fringed the birch woodland beyond. Henry looked back at the house. Then he sat down abruptly on the grass. Some huge violent emotional thought had come to him: the thought, he realized, that this was the first time in his life, since his early childhood, that he had ever seen the Hall without apprehending ‘Sandy’s’. He could not recall much from the time before his father’s death. What he remembered, with his first vivid memories of himself playing upon the terrace, was Sandy saying, ‘This is my house, I could turn you out if I wanted to.’ ‘You couldn’t.’ ‘I could.’ ‘ You couldn’t! ’
    Henry got up after a while, feeling damp. He had somehow or other failed to sit on his raincoat. He vainly tried to brush the wetness off his trousers. Then he picked up his bag and began to walk with careful foxlike silence across the lawn, leaving a wavering track of watery footprints behind him in the moonlight. He had now parted company with the drive which turned away to the left, passing round the house to the front door on the other side, and branching to reach the stable block and join the other driveway to the Dimmerstone road. Henry had intended to arrive unexpectedly, but he had not really intended to arrive at night. Coming like this, he felt himself both menacing and menaced. But most of all now he felt, foxlike Henry, as he approached the house, a piercing tender agonizing emotion which was like a desire to worship, to kneel down and kiss the earth. But what would he have been worshipping? He also, as he set his foot upon the first of the three steps that led up to the nearside of the terrace, felt sick, a positive urge to vomit which he had to pause and quell. The second step was cracked, a corner missing, where a patch of thyme grew. His foot felt the crack and the softness of the thyme. He stopped again on the terrace, summoning up reserves of coldness. He could weep now, but must not. He would be cold, hard, if possible even sardonic, utterly masked. The alternative was a blubbering mess. Henry called up, and felt it come, blessing him from beyond the coldness, sheer old hatred. That was what was needful, that would stiffen him all right, thank God.
    On the ground floor the lights were on in the library, where the tall Victorianized sash windows, which also served as doors, reached down to the ground. The curtains were pulled, but the light glowed goldenly through, revealing in rectangles the damp uneven ochre-coloured stones of the terrace, covered with hairy mounds of yellowish-green moss. Henry set his bag down and glided forward to the nearest window where a slit in the curtains revealed to him the scene within.
    He saw first, directly opposite to him, the tapestry, the outstretched hand of the goddess buried in the hero’s copious hair. Only two lamps were burning, but the interior dazzled him and he could not read how the room lay. Then his body recalled, his head moved, and he saw the big round central table with its drooping red cloth covered with newspapers and the tall Chinese screen that hid the door. For a moment it seemed as if the room was empty, then he saw his mother. Gerda was standing, almost out of his line of vision, beside the fireplace, looking down at the fire, one knee leaned against the club fender. She was wearing a long robe of blue wool, streaked in its folds with long dark shadows, and with a hood or collar which rose up half concealing her hair. The skirt fell away from the leaning knee to show a tract of brown stocking and a velvet slipper. Her hair isn’t