The Green Knight

by Iris Murdoch

  Clement said, ‘Thanks very much then. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’

  ‘All right – tomorrow – tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll leave it in the drive, I’ll drop the keys through the letterbox.’

  Peter was sitting on a large curly mahogany chair beside a highly polished walnut table. Above the table there was a distinctly modern expensive-looking green and blue picture. Bellamy could not assemble the picture which seemed to be jumping about, the greens now receding while the blues were protruding, the blues receding and the greens palpably protruding. He felt giddy, he felt exceedingly tired. The big bright hall full of yellow light seemed like an immense dream bubble with a tilting slanting floor upon which Bellamy felt unable to balance. There was a vista of a huge staircase rising and turning, and a sort of gallery above. He set his feet wide apart. He noticed that his overcoat, which he had instinctively unbuttoned on entering, was smeared with mud. Peter’s shirt and part of his jacket and trousers, also his shoes were muddy. His curly hair seemed dark and wet, his dark grey eyes darker, his large beautiful eyes into which tears were dripping, no not tears, rain. During their odd conversation Bellamy had been staring anxiously at Peter and wondering, is he mad? It then also struck Bellamy as odd that all through the business of getting Peter to the car and then travelling in the car he, Bellamy, had forgotten the manifestation. Now he recalled it. Peter burning. An aeroplane burning. A star falling, or was it lightning? Peter falling. He stared, concentrating upon Peter’s face.

  Bellamy said, ‘I am seriously worried about you. You are suffering from shock.’ Gazing through the golden bubble Bellamy could see a chair, another chair. He began to make his way to it, over the parquet floor, then over a priceless oriental rug.

  ‘Shock – yes – but do not be anxious. I am well, I shall sleep well.’

  Bellamy sat down on the chair. He thought, we’re putting mud everywhere. He heard Clement’s voice saying, ‘Come on Bellamy, time to go home.’

  Then Peter’s voice saying, ‘Thank you both very much for your help. Now if Bellamy can just assist me up the stairs – ’

  Bellamy rose from the delightful chair. Peter rose. Clement said, ‘I’ll wait down here.’

  At the bottom of the stairs, Bellamy said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, my shoes are still muddy, I think I made marks on that lovely rug. I’ll take my shoes off here, if you don’t mind.’ Leaning down, he managed to undo his shoes and kick them off. Peter took hold of the banisters, Bellamy took hold of Peter’s arm. Slowly they mounted the stairs.

  Bellamy, never allowed to know where it was, had of course wondered about the house where Peter lived. Why was he so secretive about it? Was he ashamed of it? Was it very small and mean? Perhaps Peter was not as rich as he claimed to be? Or could there be a woman there? Peter had said he was solitary, but had it been naive to believe him? Such thoughts, as they drove along in the car, were however far from Bellamy’s mind, he had been praying: oh let him live, oh let him be well, let all be well. And: oh why did we put him into such danger!

  Now, sitting in an armchair in Peter’s large bedroom beside Peter’s large bed, he felt suddenly at peace. Somehow coming up the stairs had done it. At the bottom of the stairs Bellamy had felt weak and exhausted, even afraid he would have to call Clement to support both of them. At the top of the stairs he felt some sort of new energy. Peter seemed stronger and was perhaps communicating some of his strength. Now he sat, watching while Peter switched on lights, pulled the big long curtains across the windows, and removed the embroidered quilt counterpane from the bed. He was glad he had taken his shoes off.

  Peter, who had evidently now removed his and was moving about, said, ‘Would you mind staying with me a little longer?’

  ‘I’ll stay all night.’

  ‘No, just for a very little while. My bathroom is here, would you like to go in?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I won’t be long, I just want to tidy up a bit.’

  Peter disappeared into the adjacent bathroom and could be heard splashing the water about. Then he called to Bellamy, ‘There’s no towel here, could you get me a towel? They’re in the cupboard by the window.’

  Bellamy pulled a huge towel out of the warm intimate cupboard and put it into Peter’s hand which was stretched out through the door, ‘Thanks. I won’t be a moment.’

  Returning toward the bed Bellamy reverently undid the sheet and blankets on one side, folding them neatly back to invite entry. Then yielding to an irrepressible impulse, he climbed onto the bed and lay down and went to sleep.

  He awoke, wondering at once how long he had slept. He thought, Clement’s waiting downstairs, he’ll be furious with me. He next saw Peter standing beside him. His curly hair had resumed its shining brown colour, his eyes glowed, he was smiling. He was wearing some sort of long priestly robe, a black and white kimono, he looked like a king, a god.

  Bellamy rolled himself hastily off the bed, and tried to adjust the sheets and blankets. He said at once, ‘I must go now.’ He added quickly, ‘I don’t have to go, I’ll stay with you – ’

  ‘I am perfectly all right, do please go home. Goodbye, and thank you.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ said Bellamy. A sudden terror had come to him. Something had happened. Was Peter, for some reason, now saying goodbye to him forever? Was he no longer needed, did this mean the end of Peter in his life?

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I shall sleep well.’ Bellamy followed him to the door, trying to think of something more to say.

  Peter opened the door. He looked down at Bellamy with his glowing eyes. Then he said in a low voice, ‘I have remembered it.’ Bellamy went through the door which closed behind him.

  Clement was not cross with Bellamy. He even indicated a downstairs lavatory for him. Bellamy put on his shoes. They left the house in haste, accidentally banging the front door behind them. For a while Clement drove in silence, frowning. Bellamy kept turning to look at him. He wanted to say many things to Clement but was too tired and confused to decide which ones to say. When he was about to speak Clement spoke.

  ‘Did you notice anything odd about that house?’

  ‘No. It’s rather grand, isn’t it? I’m sorry I kept you waiting. Peter – ’

  ‘That’s all right, I spent my time exploring the place. There’s something strange about it, indeed distinctly fishy.’

  ‘What on earth can you mean? I didn’t notice anything.’

  ‘I did as soon as I came in. It smelt strange.’

  ‘I haven’t any sense of smell. I don’t know what you’re at.’

  ‘That house has not been inhabited for a long time.’

  ‘Are you suggesting Peter just broke in – !’

  ‘I don’t know what to suggest. It was just sort of – empty. I madly wanted something to eat, I still do. There was nothing in the larder, nothing in the fridge, no food anywhere. There was nothing lying about in the kitchen, nothing on any surface, nothing to show that anything had been cooked – ’

  ‘Well, it’s just been put away – ’

  ‘And it was the same in all the other rooms, everything extremely neat, but no ordinary signs of human habitation. No book lying anywhere, no hat, no gloves, nothing on the floor, no writing paper, no pen, no towel in the kitchen – ’

  ‘No towel – ’ Bellamy recalled Peter’s request for a towel, which had not struck him at the time as odd. But anyway, why should these things be odd?

  ‘It’s just that the servants – there must be servants – are very meticulous, they keep things very tidy and – ’

  ‘Tidying away all the food? Not a sign of food, not a crumb anywhere. And a more important piece of evidence – ’

  ‘Well perhaps he has several houses, I don’t know, why not, it’s his business. Or perhaps he’d forgotten where the house was – ’

  ‘Bellamy, do come and stay at my place tonight, you will, won’t you – there’s so much to say – Don’t go back to that ghastly hole �
� ’

  ‘Sorry, Clement, I must go home. I want to be by myself. Thank you and please don’t drive me there, I’ll go by tube, I’m sure the trains are still running – ’

  ‘Of course I’ll take you there, if you want to go there! Damn, we’ve been going in the wrong direction!’

  ‘No, no, please just drop me at the next tube station, I can easily – ’

  ‘I don’t know where the next bloody station is, I’ll take you back.’

  ‘No, no, it’s miles, Clement, please – oh look there’s a taxi, it’s just sitting there, I’ll get it, do stop, do please stop – ’

  ‘Oh all right. Have you got any money?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I think so – ’

  ‘Here, take this note.’

  ‘Thank you – I’ll – ’ Bellamy jumped out. Waving he entered the taxi.

  Bellamy was sorry to hurt Clement’s feelings, but he so intensely wanted to be alone where he could confront the awful cacophony of his own feelings. A terrible thought had come to him. Peter had twice said, ‘I shall sleep well.’ Could that mean that he intended this very night to commit suicide? His wonderful saying, ‘I have remembered it’ – just that could be the very motive for suicide. Should Bellamy tell the taxi to go back? Then he realised that he had no idea where Peter’s house was.

  Clement drove the Rolls very fast through the now empty streets. He felt savagely miserable. He was extremely angry with Bellamy who had, when Clement needed him, refused to be with him. This night, this particular night, he wanted Bellamy to be with him. He feared to be alone with his thoughts.

  So, his mystery play, which he had been so certain that he could direct and control had turned into something awful, something newly awful, some new happening which seemed like a horrible repetition of the first one. Clement could not stop believing that Lucas had done it all. Why had he, Clement, allowed himself to become a pawn in that vile contest between those two hateful enchanters? Confound both of them! Why had he imagined that he had to protect Lucas? He must have been mad. Why had he forgiven Lucas, if that was what he had done? He had been almost magicked into believing that Lucas had never intended to kill him at all. Why had he hung around Lucas, wished to see him when he was back? He was behaving just as he had done as a child. Lucas had treated him abominably when they were children, he had pinched him, punched him, put terrifying curses on him, battered his legs in the compulsory game of ‘Dogs’, lied about him to their mother, knowing all the time that Clement would never accuse him, never complain. When Lucas had disappeared after the court case, Clement had been sick with anxiety! Why had he not rejoiced, thinking ‘perhaps the bloody man has killed himself and I shall be free of him at last’? But no, he could never have thought that. And now he had set up the ‘second event’ almost frivolously. If he had not taken it over Lucas and Peter might simply have forgotten the idea. Well, they had both seemed to want it, even Bellamy saw a point in it. But of course Bellamy was waiting for a miracle, for the appearance of an angel or something! Clement should simply have let the whole thing alone. He had stupidly been unable to resist a little drama, ‘an evening in the theatre’. He had taken up Peter’s words, ‘a mystery play’, but really he had thought of it as a farce. He had composed those ridiculous speeches, and even uttered them, with some sort of genuine passion (but then when is an actor genuine?), while imagining that people might actually start to giggle. Surely Lucas had treated it ironically, as if he were enjoying what he had called ‘a charade’. Had Clement imagined that he could somehow cure them all by creating something absurd? Salvation by the absurd. A conjuring trick by Clement Graffe. Of course theatre is a kind of hypnosis. Clement had certainly, and instinctively, used that form of its power when, with grandiose rhetoric, almost with sincerity, he had exhorted Mir to ‘intensify’ his mental state and ‘break through the cloud which obscures what he wants to remember’. Evidently Mir had succeeded in intensifying his state to a degree which deprived him of consciousness. For a moment Clement thought he had been struck by lightning. Perhaps he had been? What is it like when someone is struck by lightning? Was there not a lightning flash? There had been a great light and some noise. Had he begun to fall before or after the flash? Bellamy had spoken of something falling out of the sky. The whole idea of a ‘re-enactment’ had been mad, it had been for all of them a ghastly ordeal, which could do no good and could do a great deal of harm. How much harm, eddying outward in fateful circles, Clement was beginning to foresee. He could still feel the grasp of Mir’s strong hand upon his neck. And then this evening, taking Mir back to that weird uninhabited house, it was like a bad dream. Suddenly Clement recalled something which he had been about to tell Bellamy, only Bellamy had interrupted him. In that whole tidiedup empty-smelling place he had observed, fallen down beside the refrigerator, one piece of out-of-place disorder. It was a copy of an evening paper. Clement had picked it up. It bore a date in early July.

  He parked the Rolls near his flat and went up in the lift. He entered the flat and turned on every light. He took off his overcoat and dropped it by the door. The flat was cold, the heating was out of order again. He noticed with surprise the early picture by Moy which had hung for a long time in the bedroom, but which, for some reason, he had lately moved to the sitting-room. In vivid crayon it represented a child’s head, round and pale with large blue eyes, rising above a mass of flowers, perhaps lilies, while in the background a white pillar with a white ball upon it, standing upon a green line, suggested that the child was floating in a pool. He thought, the white ball is the moon, which her head is reflecting, and she is drowning. Why didn’t I see this before? He picked up two letters which were lying on the floor. One was from his agent, the other from the little theatre in which he was supposed to be taking an interest. Both requested him to telephone. He dropped them in the wastepaper basket and turned on the electric fire. He saw his muddy footprints upon the kazakh rug. He took off his shoes and threw the rug away into a corner of the room. He sat down beside the fire. Suddenly something occurred to him. The baseball bat. What had happened to it? He leapt up and discovered his overcoat lying in a heap. He shook it and searched it. It wasn’t there. He fruitlessly and stupidly searched the flat. When had he last had it? Lucas had asked him about it when they were waiting in the car. Clement had said that it was in the inside pocket of his coat. He remembered putting his hand in and touching it. What happened to it afterwards? He had not thought of it again till now. It must have fallen out, dropped out somehow in the disorder of the event, and be lying there in that place, constituting some final awful piece of evidence. Or – had Lucas picked it up, or even removed it somehow from Clement’s coat? He now recalled that on the ‘first occasion’ Lucas had taken away his wallet. And now – was it possible that Lucas, in that darkness, had actually struck Peter again? Clement wailed and bit his hands. Should he not now, must he not now, go out and search for it? He thought, I can kill myself, I can always kill myself. He decided that nothing could be done until the morning. The morning – oh how he dreaded it! He took several sleeping-pills and went to bed, but it was long before his terrible thoughts allowed him to sleep.

  The morning came. Bellamy, who had expected to stay awake all night thinking, had in fact, after falling exhausted into his bed, slept soundly. The room was cold, a damp patch had developed over the window, he put all available blankets on top of the bed, together with all his clothes, except for his underclothes which he wore underneath his pyjamas. As he woke up, rising through a dream, his first thought was of Father Damien’s letter. He particularly remembered, and repeated to himself, the words: Do not seek for God outside your own soul. He seemed to wake with those words upon his lips. And then for a short time lay, suddenly suspended, in some warm fluid, which was indeed God, the perfect love of God. But then he thought, surely God is not in my soul, I am in God’s soul, or rather I am in the womb of God. Why did I never realise this before?

  He was thoroughly awakened by shouting in the st
reet. Someone banged on his window. He sat up. He thought at once, but there is no more Father Damien and no more God. He was aware of someone who was trying to reach him through a cloud. Could it be Magnus Blake? Then he remembered what had happened on the previous day. He uttered a sob. He got up and dressed quickly. He must go at once to Peter. Why had he ever left him? He could so easily have hidden himself in the house. Why did that obvious idea not occur to him? He could have stayed there all night, watching over Peter, he could have saved Peter from suicide. He must leave at once. But then he realised he had no idea where Peter lived, he had no notion even of the part of London, carried in cars he had paid no attention. Perhaps he would never find Peter again. He thought, I’ll go to The Castle, perhaps the landlord knows. But perhaps if he does, Peter has told him not to tell. Then he thought, Clement must know, he must remember. But suppose he has forgotten? Bellamy pulled on his coat and ran out of the house to the nearest telephone box. It had been vandalised. He ran about looking for another one. When at last he found one he rang Clement’s number but there was no answer. He continued to wander about, looking for telephone boxes, agitating his arms and talking to himself.

  Clement woke, after what seemed, and perhaps was, a short sleep, to an instant awareness of the situation. He absorbed, as it were in one large gulp, the whole of the last evening’s events. Predominant in his mind was the crazy belief, which hung there like a black object, perhaps like the cloud which he had (conceivably) conjured away from Peter Mir’s mind, that somehow Lucas had engineered the whole thing. It had been like a duel, and Lucas had won. Part of all this was the hideous business of the baseball bat, and an image of Lucas raising it up to kill Peter a second time. It was all Clement’s fault! Why had he taken it there, yesterday evening, to that place? Because Lucas told him to. Indeed, why had he so idiotically looked after the fatal object during Lucas’s absence, and carried it back to him, like an obedient dog, on his return? Why hadn’t he destroyed it or, given that it was almost indestructible, thrown it into the Thames? He had laid it down obsequiously upon Lucas’s desk. Because after all it was Lucas’s property, because it had belonged to their childhood, because it was an accusing reminder of what Lucas had done, because it was a magical object, fatally bound into their long weird relationship? Clement looked at his watch. It was seven- thirty. He thought, I’ll go there at once. If it’s not there it may be anywhere – in Lucas’s desk or in a police station. Then he remembered the Rolls. He thought, I’ll get rid of the Rolls first, then I’ll get a taxi. He ran out, found the beautiful car where he had left it (no parking ticket), and set off across London. But it was the rush hour. The journey, which had taken scarcely more than twenty-five minutes last night, now took him more than an hour. He got lost at the last moment and spent time driving about among similar roads containing large houses. He turned the Rolls into the drive at last, got out and locked it. He dropped the keys through into the hall. There was a dull echo. Silence. He moved away and surveyed the house. In an upstairs room, which he reckoned to be Peter’s bedroom, the curtains were still closed. Turning to go he looked at the Rolls and felt a quaint twinge: how much, if things had been different, he would have enjoyed driving that car through London.