Free Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch

you any news? Miss Rosalind rang me.’
    ‘No!’ said Benet.
    ‘Would you like something to eat or -?’
    ‘No - ’
    ‘Well, goodnight -’
    ‘Goodnight, Jackson.’
    Jackson was his servant.

TWO

    Owen Silbery was sitting alone in his studio. He had had his dreadful recurring dream. He is buried in sand up to his neck, he cannot move his limbs, the tide is coming in, the tide begins to reach him, the spray touches his face, he screams, he tosses his head back, his only possible movement, no one comes, the water begins to attack his mouth, he swallows the water, it has covered his mouth, he cannot scream any more, it begins to cover his nose ... Owen detested this dream, it made him feel very sick, and it particularly annoyed him because he thought that he hadn’t even really invented it, it was not his dream, hadn’t he seen it in a film a long time ago?
    It was the next day, the day after the terrible one. The busy telephone had produced no news. Owen had, on the previous evening, driven Mildred to her tiny flat (he had given up asking her to let him buy her a larger one). He had then returned to his house in Kensington, and eaten some oddments out of the fridge, and drunk a lot of whisky and seen the news on television and gone to bed, imagining he would not sleep. However he slept. And now there was this unspeakable horror and a sense all around him of chaos and depredation. And they would be speculating about whether the poor girl had committed suicide. Owen himself had often contemplated suicide and possessed the requirements thereof. And did he not, he reflected, as a painter, imagine, create, and gaze upon what was degraded and vile? Of course such things too became his art and thereby transformed, ha ha! He must remember to drink a toast to Otto Dix. He was real. Owen was sitting in his quiet studio looking at a half-painted abstract. He hated the picture. Expressionism,Fauvism, Dada, Cubism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Frightfulnessism. Foutu métier. He leaned forward and scratched the canvas with his fingernail. He was becoming lazy, and with laziness came idleness, agonising, solitude and loss of being. The only person who had really understood him was Uncle Tim - though even he -
    He got up and cleaned the brushes and put them in order and rubbed his hands on a paint rag. He sighed a long familiar sigh. He had silenced his telephones. He moved softly about his studio, pulling up the blinds which had been obscuring some of the windows. The cruel sunlight entered. His studio was spacious, occupying the whole second floor of his house. He had created it long ago when he had had three walls removed and enjoyed for the first time, his own space, his own light. His house was big and tall, bought with his first really big money, a retaliation for his unbearable childhood and the wound about which he never spoke. He kept no servant or cleaner. The plain wooden floor of the studio was kept by Owen extremely clean and tidy. The dining room and sleek kitchen on the ground floor, and the drawing room and ‘study’ on the first floor, were reasonably in order. There was also a basement which had once (before Owen’s reign) housed a maid, and now contained correctly slotted special pictures, together with various machines and things. The third floor began to reveal certain ‘natural’ traits of the present owner, now appearing as the stairs ascended. In one large room there was a huge bed, Owen’s bed, never properly made, but randomly covered at times by a huge red counterpane. This bed sometimes reminded Owen of days gone by, when ladies had regularly come down from the north to pose for him, no questions asked. No doubt their husbands were unemployed or had cleared off and they were supporting numerous children. It was no business of his. Opposite, in rows of cupboards, showing only their colourless sides, were other innumerable undisposed of ordinary pictures. Owen sometimes, now less often, pulled out one at