Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch

absolute secret safety of the Count’s love for Guy’s wife.
    The Count had always known that he was not a gentleman volunteer in the army of the moral law. If ever a soul was conscripted he was. He intensely feared disgrace, loss of honour, loss of integrity. He stood, in his mind, as still and as expressionless as the soldiers at the Unknown Warrior’s grave in Warsaw. Indeed he could do nothing wrong, since the situation held him in a merciful steely grip. Sometimes he imagined how he might one day defend Gertrude from attack, rescue her from danger, sleep across her doorway like a dog. Die for her. Indeed Gertrude was somehow to be there ‘at the hour of his death’ as he departed from her in gentleness with his secret intact. He had, in these flashes which were too swift and physical to be pictures, occasionally imagined a touch, an embrace, a kiss. But these were the involuntary lapses of a man attentive to the beloved in the whole of his dedicated watchful body. He never permitted any extended fantasy. It would have been wrong, it would also have been torture. He knew which way madness lay. Reason and duty commanded him to desist. So he had lived, happily enough, in the cast-iron safety of her marriage. It was a house that would surely last forever.
    But now his life was about to change utterly. He felt grief, terror, and a more awful hope. He tried to banish hope, to banish the desire which breeds the illusion which breeds the hope; as the long long nourished desire to free Warsaw had fed the illusory hopes of those who fought and died in the ruined city. He must not think of ... anything which he might want to have ... as being in any sense ... a possibility. Rather he must think of it as remote, as receding, as lost. He thought, my happiness was an oversight, a mistake made by fate, and is now over. Behind almost every misfortune there is a moral fault. I am like Poland, my history is and ought to be a disaster. I am guilty because my father fled, because my brother died, because my mother pined away in a cell of solitude. I can expect nothing now but to be returned to the grey loneliness from which I came. Ah, how I have lived on illusions and fed myself with dreams! And I thought at least that my secret was harmless, to others of course, but also to me. Guy, it all depended on Guy, and soon Guy will be gone and my world will be a dead planet. Without Guy there was no way he could be near to Gertrude and safe, near to Gertrude and happy, near to her forever. No way ... except one way ... and of that ...
    He tried now to think of Guy, to grieve for Guy, Guy propped up in bed with his gaunt old face and his unimaginable thoughts, reading The Odyssey. Guy had spoken of himself as Odysseus. But it was a different story now. Odysseus was setting sail upon his last journey and he would not return again to his house and his home. And Penelope ... Suddenly the Count saw it: Penelope and the suitors! The siege of Penelope by the suitors; but no master ever to return now to claim her as his true wife. She was to be the prey of lesser men. And they were all there ... already ... round about her ... The Count turned off the radio and buried his face in his hands.
     
     
    While the Count was listening to the Renaissance music programme on the radio, Gertrude had already had her supper (soup and cheese) and had said good night to Guy. The Night Nurse was sitting reading in her bedroom which adjoined Guy’s room. Gertrude could not read. No book could serve her now. She walked to and fro. She thought about cigarettes, but there were none in the house. (Victor had persuaded most of them to give up smoking.) She readjusted the chrysanthemus in the green vase. She looked out of the window. It had stopped snowing. She was sorry about that. She wanted extreme weather. She desired tempests, mountains of snow. She desired screarning winds and floods, a hurricane which would destroy the house with her and Guy in it. She wished that