The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch

touched each other. Alex had had a full life of triumphs and disasters and marriage and children and thoughts. She had a copious past and vivid interesting dangerous future. Ruby lived under another law. Alex did not feel that she herself was old, and had only lately come to think that Ruby was. Was Ruby wondering whether she would tend Alex in Alex’s old age, or Alex her in hers? But something much less rational than that was now at issue.
    Alex had never quite dominated Belmont. She had not lived in the house as a child. Her father often let it, and when, between tenancies, the family occupied it for a while Alex felt that she was a visitor. This feeling persisted after she came home to it as a bride. The children, now departed, had made no mark upon the place, and Alan had always regarded it as her father’s house. It was a big white stucco house, one of the finest in Victoria Park, with bow windows and ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ windows and a wide graceful curving staircase and a turret. But in spite of the thick spotless glittering white paint which covered every piece of wood, inside and out, it was a sulky house full of its own moody thoughts. Alex could feel them vibrating. It was a frame within which she and Ruby moved about on their separate paths. The house evaded Alex, a reflex of her loss of grip upon life. It menaced her at night with smells of smoke and fears of fire. She had dreams in which she lost her way in the house and came upon rooms she did not know existed where some other form of life was proceeding, or had proceeded recently and ceased. Not that there were dead people there, but dead things. At these times of evasion it seemed that Ruby was more at home in Belmont than Alex was, and Alex turned to Ruby as to a monumental security. Yet this had an opposite aspect. Ruby’s great silent being could seem to be maliciously in league with the house against Alex. There were places where things disappeared, dropped out of the world or into another one. It was absurd how things vanished. Yet Ruby would always find them. Ruby, with her gipsy blood, was popularly credited with having second sight. But was it not more likely that Ruby could find them because Ruby had, perhaps unconsciously, hidden them?
    It’s being alone together at last, thought Alex; we get on each other’s nerves. Ruby had been nurse to the three boys, she had seen them grow up and go. Tom, now a student, had gone last. Ruby had never got on with Brian, but she had been close to George and to Tom. Alex had not felt jealous of Ruby in the past; the idea of jealousy would have seemed absurd. But a little while ago when she had seen Ruby talking to George she had felt her servant as an alien power. And only yesterday she had come into the drawing-room and found Ruby sitting there. Ruby had risen and departed silently. No doubt she had just been dusting and had felt tired. But Alex felt menaced as if she were suddenly diminishing in Ruby’s eyes. Alex’s mother had worked with the servants; she had been at ease with them because the distance between them was absolute. She could never have been where Alex was now and feared what Alex now feared. Was there then a power with which Alex would have to treat? Was she supposed to make some significant move, some concession? If so, the old order was falling and a new law was coming to be. Could there be a sudden failure of obedience, a failure of respect which would bring them face to face in some unimaginably crude and painful encounter? The sulky house echoed and Alex could hear Ruby locking and chaining the doors each night. Did she imagine that Ruby was noisier and rougher and clattered more and banged? Alex told nobody about these irrational insubstantial fears which were perhaps nothing more, though indeed nothing less, than the general shadow of her death.
    Leaning at the mantelpiece, her bowed head reflected in the big arched gilt-framed mirror, she gently