The Bell, The Bell
Neighbours loud and clanging, I put in my headphones and press play. The Bell, by Iris Murdoch, read by Miriam Margolyes. The unhappy marriage of a naive girl who studied Art at the Slade.I’m hooked.
As I drift in and out of consciousness, I am aware of Dora, not my heroine nor my mirror, holding a butterfly in her hand. She releases it to the astonishment of the men around her.
Night after night, I enter the narrative at different points. I seem to wake most nights around the time of the drunken embrace, pouring rain and glaring car headlights. That he was a violent man was clear from the start. Is this Dora’s knowing or my own?
After weeks of restless nights, I am given a copy of the book. I read it in sequence. The pace slows and quickens. My dreamlike encounters with the spoken book inflects my reading, imagery hazy and already half known.
'The Bell is a quaint, dated novel about religion and sex in a community of self-obsessed people,' Amazon Review.
I am sitting with Iris in the Lord John Russell in Bloomsbury.
I picture Dora’s multicoloured jazz-skirts while she sets the Slade on fire. She was never a serious painter and always felt like an imposter. Is this in the book?
The bell, the bell. Echoes through the woods in the cloak of the night, the word repeats and reverberates like waves. The sea, the sea.
There is a film of Iris. Everything crumbles and collapses, the thread is lost. Judi Dench reminds me of my grandmother, and I don’t want to watch her lose herself again. Anyway, Iris is not my grandmother.
Luey Graves
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