Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography. Peter Conradi J.

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СКАЧАТЬ for those with civil service passes, a meal cost one shilling and tuppence. There were only twelve days off per year, and no Bank Holidays. If you lingered over lunch, you had to stay until perhaps 7 p.m.²² Many were exhausted when they got home and could think of nothing except supper and sleep. Iris later wrote, ‘I was the slave of circumstance at 23.‘²³ Yet she had two advantages over her peers. One was the super-abundance of energy noted at Somerville, an energy that enabled her to write one letter to Frank at 3 a.m.,* and sometimes to write poetry and fiction through the night, until the Tube trains started again in the small hours.† She had wanted, after Finals, to ‘learn jujitso, German, translate Sophocles, learn to draw decently, buy expensive & crazy presents for my friends – really go into the subject of comparative mythology – read many very basic books about politics – learn about America, psychology, animals, my God I could go on for ever’.

      Her other advantage was that she had found for herself a most unusual, magical and much discussed flat, only half a mile from work. Many of her peers had long journeys to the Treasury, or shared tiny rooms with a landlady on the premises, on their very small salaries (Iris earned £5 per week in 1942, which went up to £5.105 in 1944, plus a £40 a year war bonus ‘kindly withheld for her until after hostilities’²⁴). Home in Chiswick had been bombed, probably in the winter of 1941; her parents had by then in any case already moved to Blackpool with the Ministry of Health, where she visited them.²⁵ By mid-August Iris had discovered a studio flat to let for £60 a year unfurnished, on a three-year protected tenancy.²⁶ It would give her a base: ‘London swarms with acquaintances whom individually I like but who collectively are making hay of my life!’ she told Frank. The new flat, Iris’s first, was owned by a Mrs Royalton-Kisch, aged about ninety-four and probably in a nursing-home. Iris was independent. She was also in a place and a time where she would live out, if not (like a character in The Red and the Green) ‘the true and entire history of her heart’, at least some critical chapters of that curious history.

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      In July 1942 Iris wrote to Philippa: ‘Best prospect for a flat is probably a single room in Gerrard Place – with a wonderful view of the blitz & practically no plumbing.’ But she did considerably better, and by mid-August²⁷ found the flat which, a year later, would accommodate Philippa too, and which fifty-eight years later was still ‘in the family’, tenanted by Philippa’s sister Marion. Iris called it a ‘studio-flat … of quite indescribable charm … of utterly irresistible personality … with some 6 square miles of window to guard, in blitz & blackout’.²⁸

      A few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace is a sliver of land called Brewer’s Green, in what was once an area of breweries – Stagg’s, Green’s, Elliott’s and the Artillery – all now long gone. Number 5 Seaforth Place nearby was always known to Iris and Philippa simply as ‘Seaforth’. The tiny alley off Buckingham Gate was marked by a narrow cleft with a white post in the middle of it, and has no other front door. The flat belonged to the stables servicing a curious chain of pubs serving only non-alcoholic drinks, which provided rest-places for the poor.²⁹ Even today ‘Seaforth’ is a tiny, ancient white cube curiously beached in an era strange to it, an ensemble so closed off and secret that it seems, like the mysterious enclosures of Iris’s Gothic fictions, a little lost world on its own.³⁰

      At street level was an empty garage or warehouse where the brewers once stabled their horses; their loose-boxes survived the war. The places on the wall where the halters were attached are visible today. Inside, a little bit of brown linoleum in the hall and a steep, uncovered stairway (with a very narrow, windowless bathroom fuelled by a geyser tucked under the stairs to the left – you could not stand up in the bath) led to the spacious first floor above the stalls. When you reached the top you were in the roughly converted old brewer’s granary, twenty-five feet square and interrupted only by the staircase slicing up the middle, which Iris grandly termed ‘the atrium’.³¹ To the left of this was a corridor where she soon placed an ancient gas-stove, to make a kitchen³²

      twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide, with a small dark window looking out onto a mews containing first-floor drawing offices over garages, and interrupted by an approach just wide enough for a coach and horses to enter the coach-houses on Spencer Street. This kitchen had an ill-fitting greenhouse roof of overlapping glass panes, and so was boiling hot in summer, freezing in winter and dripping when it rained. It contained a primitive improvised stand, pitcher and ewer, and water could be scooped up with a jug from the zinc-lined water-tank nesting under a ringed, wooden-hinged hatch-door at the top of the stairs. There was no water, hot or cold, in the kitchen, so washing-up was done downstairs in the bathroom.

To the right of the atrium, beyond what resembled a proscenium arch from which hung simple blue curtains, was the living-room, once the brewer’s hayloft, similar in size to the granary/atrium. A large skylight on the left looked towards the St James’s Court Hotel; two windows on the other side fronted – only a few feet away, like an alley in Palermo – the Territorial Army drill-halls, one for Artillery, one for Scottish conscripts.³³ Iris put in bookshelves on either side of an old-fashioned Edwardian gas-fire in the living-room, with an elegantly curved chimney-breast. This gas-fire, its perforated porcelain columns giving a Tew pale inches of war-time gas’,³⁴ was the only heating – useful for making toast, too – though the ancient gas-oven could also be turned on, on a bitter winter night. Earlier groom-tenants had had some sort of pied-à-terre in the flat. Into what had probably been their bread-oven set into the wall, Iris put extra bookshelves, still there today. In January 1943 she wrote to Frank: ‘I have a pleasant flat near St james’s Park… which … is rapidly becoming so full of volumes of poetry of all eras & languages that I shall have to go & camp on the railway line (or feed ‘em to the mice, after they’ve finished their present strict diet of airgraphs*).’³⁵ The mice had been eating Frank’s letters.

      Lacking any inner doors, the flat effectively constituted one huge ‘modern’ open-plan space, seventy feet long. Being in so old a building, it also lacks straight lines or true right-angles. There is a gentle swept-back angle between atrium and kitchen, probably to ease the passage of hay. A delightful old coachman survived and was a source of lore about the place, until the coachhouses were demolished, and the character of the whole area changed, by the building of the new Westminster City Hall in 1960.³⁶

      Not that the wider world, especially in wartime, left Seaforth Place untouched. It was near enough to Whitehall to hear Big Ben, and to Westminster Cathedral to hear the angelus. For some friends living out of London, this very central flat was ‘a convenient hotel’. Close friends believe that, on CP advice, Iris nominally left the Party just before joining the Treasury in order to disarm suspicion, while remaining for much of the war what the Party called an ‘underground’ (i.e. clandestine) member, one of those who paid no dues but could be expected to attend some branch meetings.³⁷ Leonie Marsh indeed reported СКАЧАТЬ