Read Online The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch - Free Book Online Page B

doses of water and careful use of the towel, blending the muddy stain into the fortunately fairly dark and ancient carpet. ‘I’m afraid we’re messing up Levquist’s towels, but the scout will replace them. Don’t forget to tip him, Gerard.’
    Someone was running up the stairs, stumbling in his haste, and now bursting open the door. It was Gulliver Ashe. Not immediately noticing Duncan he cried out his news. ‘There’s been such a to-do down there, they say that Crimond has thrown a man into the Cherwell!’ Then he caught sight of Duncan and the water scene and put his hand over his mouth.
    ‘Go away, Gull, would you,’ said Gerard.
    Gull reeled away down the stairs.
    Gulliver had lost Lily Boyne; he was sorry about this, he had enjoyed dancing with her, yet he was not absolutely sorry since he had come to realise that although he had drunk nothing recently except a glass of champagne which he had discovered on the grass, he was once more feeling very drunk, and a little sick, and also extremely tired. Lily, who had in the course of dancing divested herself of her white blouse, which she had rolled up and thrown away among the dancers (where it was caught and appropriated by a young man) revealing a just decently extensive and lacy petticoat beneath, had also at last declared herself ‘flaked’ and gone to sit down. Gull had gone out to attend to a natural need and coming back had found her gone. It was after this that he had heard some people talking about Crimond. Expelled from Levquist’s rooms he now began to wander, first round the cloister where he managed to acquire, although he didn’t really want it, a glass of beer, and then out onto the main lawns between the tents.
    It was now full daylight, the terrible inquisitional finalising daylight had come, sending away the enchanted forest and all the magic of the night and revealing a scene, more resembling a battlefield, of trampled grass, empty bottles, broken glasses,upturned chairs, errant garments, and every sort of unattractive human debris. Even the tents, in the relentless sunshine, looked dirty and bedraggled. The blackbirds, thrushes, tits, swallows, wrens, robins, starlings and innumerable other birds were singing loudly, the doves were cooing and the rooks were cawing, and, nearer now, in the big trees of the deer park, came the hollow repetitive cry of the cuckoo. Dance music continued unabated however, sounding in the more open space of the high cloudless blue sky and surrounded by all that bird song, diminished and unreal. A queue was forming for breakfast, but a considerable number of people seemed unable to stop dancing, possessed by ecstasy or by a frenzied desire to maintain the enchantment, and to postpone the misery to come: remorse, regret, the tarnished hope, the shattered dream, and all the awful troubles of ordinary life. Gull would have liked some breakfast, the idea of bacon and eggs was suddenly extremely attractive, but he did not fancy waiting in the queue by himself, and he felt a more urgent and immediate need to sit down, preferably to lie down. He decided to rest for a short time and to come for the grub later when the crush was less. The desecrated littered grass was also scattered here and there with prostrate human figures, mostly male, some fast asleep. Making his way between these Gulliver even passed, though of course did not recognise, Tamar’s cashmere shawl, now a stained screwed-up bundle, which had been used by someone to deal with a disaster to a bottle of red wine. A faint mist was hanging over the Cherwell. He found his way through the archway and out into the deer park. The park had been declared, for ecological and security reasons, out of bounds to the dancers. Now however, presumably since the dance was nearly over, the bowler-hatted guardians had melted away and couples were strolling here and there in the groves of trees. In the distance, in misty green glades, deer wandered and rabbits ran impetuously