Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 13

In the last months of the war Hughes was on leave from his regiment, which was stationed at the Curragh. One Sunday in Dublin, probably in uniform,²⁴ he met Irene Richardson in a tram, en route for the Black Church on the corner of Mountjoy Street and St Mary’s Place, where she sang in the choir.²⁵ They fell in love. Irene was dark, petite, very beautiful and spirited. Dublin is a great singing city, and ‘Rene’²⁶ (rhyming with ‘teeny') as she was always known had a beautiful voice. She was training as a singer, and had already started performing at amateur concerts. She sang the standard operatic arias, and was particularly fond of ‘One Fine Day’ from Madama Butterfly. Its story of an innocent girl made pregnant then abandoned by the sailor she loves perhaps distantly echoes her own, happier story.

Hughes and Rene were married in Dublin on 7 December 1918 – a photo shows Hughes in full-dress uniform. Rene’s sister Gertie (later Bell) was a witness. On the wedding certificate Hughes gives his army rank, second lieutenant, under ‘profession’, and his address as ‘Marlborough Barracks’. Jean Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, the following year, just over seven months later. The marriage was probably therefore hasty.²⁷ Even in October 1918, when Iris would have been conceived, an early end to the war was not certain. Her character Andrew Chase-White in The Red and the Green, born, like Hughes, in a colony and serving, like Hughes, as a young officer in King Edward’s Horse, feels some pressure from relatives to marry and make his wife pregnant before he has to go to the front and a likely death. Arthur Green’s hypothesis that Hughes might have felt he had a comparable duty to perform before his marriage seems unlikely. Iris was probably a happy accident.