The Green Knight

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I’ve been painting over the canvas Miss Fitzherbert gave me, just putting on a first coat.’

  ‘A first coat?’

  ‘With oils one must paint into paint.’

  ‘Oh. I see. I’ll buy you some canvases. I know where to buy them. You must let me bring you – well anything you need for painting – ’

  ‘Thank you, but please don’t trouble.’

  Seeking another subject Clement said, ‘Remember when I found you when you had gone to look for Anax, and you came home in my car. That was an adventure, wasn’t it!’

  Moy frowned, cleared the frown, and for a second smiled a strange crooked smile. ‘Yes.’

  Clement was taken aback. He recalled how, returning in the car, he had chided Moy for her ridiculous attachment to him. How could she forgive him for doing so, and for recalling it, and offering it to her now like a sweetie to a child! And how terribly tactless of him to mention Anax! She was no longer a child. Without his noticing she was becoming a grown-up. He saw her now for the first time as a young woman, slimmer, taller, wearing a dark blue dress with a belt, certainly not to be called a shift or an overall! He was about to say to her ‘You’ve grown up.’ Instead he bowed his head, hoping that she would understand.

  He got up and said humbly, ‘I must see your mother.’

  Moy, now grave and sad once more, nodded. Clement raised one hand with an open palm. She raised a hand very slightly, scarcely visibly, in recognition. He left the room. He thought that perhaps some important communication had passed between them, but he was not sure what it was.

  He knocked softly at Louise’s door. He had done so a little earlier, had no reply, and concluded she was asleep. Now there was a murmur. He entered cautiously. The curtains were pulled and the room was dark. Louise, raising herself up, put on a lamp beside the bed. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘Yes. How are you?’

  She sat up on the edge of the bed. Her thick brown hair which usually so easily adjusted itself was tangled, almost fuzzy. Her pale face was shining as if with sweat, or perhaps, he thought, face cream to conceal her tears. She looked at him hostile, wrinkled and frowning. ‘I said you should go, you must not waste your time here. We can look after ourselves.’

  ‘Sefton went out for a while and asked me to stay.’

  ‘Is she back?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Where’s Moy?’

  ‘Upstairs. I have just been talking with her.’

  ‘Is she crying?’

  ‘Not now, no.’

  There was a sound downstairs of the front door opening and closing. Louise looked up, Clement hurried to the landing. ‘It’s Sefton.’

  ‘Now please go, Clement, please.’

  ‘All right. But I’ll come back.’

  ‘No, don’t come back. I mean, we must mourn, not you. I mean – I’m sorry – I’m in such a desolation – ’

  ‘Louise, darling – ’

  ‘Please go.’

  Clement passed Sefton on the stairs. She raised a hand to him, then went on into Louise’s bedroom.

  Clement picked up his overcoat and came out into the street, closing the front door quietly. He pulled his coat on and pulled his scarf out of the pocket. He had left his gloves in the car. He creased his face against the cold. He wanted to cry, at least to cry out. He walked to his car and pocketed the parking ticket. He sat in the car. Desolation, yes, desolation. Where can I go now? I’ll go to Bellamy. No, Bellamy is living with Emil. And they don’t want me, now Aleph is gone. I have been leading an empty life. I must work again, I must get work, I’ll go and see my agent, I’ll accept anything. He went on sitting in the car with his mouth open, screwing up his eyes and trying to weep. Deep, deepest inside his wounded heart, he felt the new pain, the pain which would now travel with him always. Lucas, oh Lucas.

  ‘So that is how it is?’

  ‘That is how it is,’ said Bellamy.

  Bellamy was sitting in an armchair with his legs stretched straight out. He was wearing his bedroom slippers. There was a hole in the toe of one of them through which his sock was now protruding. He looked at it, then cautiously withdrew his leg.

  ‘But why not stay here all the same? It seems to me there are two questions and you have answered only one. I want to see into your soul.’

  ‘Emil, you may see into my soul at any time, and I will attempt to assist you – ’

  ‘Well, why do you not want to stay here? Are you afraid?’

  ‘Of course not! I just want to be by myself. I came to that conclusion some time ago. Then I thought it meant becoming a hermit. Then I gave that up.’

  ‘And gave up God.’

  ‘What does that mean. Yes, all right.’

  ‘But have you always lived alone? You see, I have known you a long time, but I do not know these things about you.’

  ‘I have never lived with anyone, though I once – ’

  ‘And you at once thought it was immoral?’

  ‘No, I don’t think it’s immoral!’

  ‘That was your monkish idea, you felt inclined to chastity – ’

  ‘Not just that, I just like being alone!’

  ‘I too have liked it. Well, so later, as we all know, you did want to be a monk.’

  ‘That was romanticism.’

  ‘But you lived in a little room in a poor place so as to be a monk in the world to help people.’

  ‘Yes, but I helped no one and just made myself miserable!’

  ‘Then there was Peter Mir, and you thought him to be an incarnation, an avatar, some sort of high being.’

  ‘Well, not at first – ’

  ‘Ah yes, he wanted revenge on Lucas.’

  ‘But then he was not himself. Then he recovered his good real self and made peace.’

  ‘Would you have lived with him?’

  ‘Emil, I don’t know! And now – ’

  ‘Yes, now it does not concern us. It was – like his mission. What does one know of Jesus before his time came? And what sort was Peter’s mission? They seemed to think he was a magician – well, they thought that of Jesus too. And do you think that he has saved you.’

  ‘I’m not saved! Haven’t we now answered the question and dealt with the problem?’

  ‘Let us say that is one thing. But there is the other thing.’

  ‘What’s the other thing? I can’t see any other thing.’

  ‘The other thing is me.’

  ‘How do you come in?’

  ‘Bellamy, you are naive, sometimes you are positively obtuse. No, listen. A man may want to live for years alone. Then for some reason he may change his mind. I am the reason.’

  ‘Dear dear Emil, if I could be persuaded by a reason, you more than anyone else might persuade me, but – ’

  ‘Really, it seems that there are two questions. Do you want to be chaste? Do you want to live alone? It seems that you want to be chaste, all right. But that need not prevent you from living with another person. All right, you have not wanted to before, perhaps because you could not find a worthy person. Here I present myself. As we know, you have already, if I may use the traditional phrase, rejected my advances. All right, all right. That matter will not be pursued. The point is that you have been living here successfully for a while, we are old friends, we know each other well, we are on the way to knowing each other very well. Why not simply stay here? I need you, I think you have discovered that you need me. Think about it dear Bellamy. Here you can be happy.’

  ‘I don’t care about being happy.’

  ‘You deceive yourself. All beings strive for happiness, but it has many names and what is sought is often something else. I grieve so for that poor girl. He will cut her throat and then his own. However cruel he becomes she cannot leave him. This is what she will endlessly attempt to call her joy. Be glad that you are free, Bellamy. You have done no harm. You can still attain your open busy life, helping other people. Why not have innocent happiness as well? You know we love each other.’
r />   Louise longed for sleep and dreaded waking. With waking consciousness came for a second her old bright happy being from the past, then the recall, the black awareness of a world destroyed, and the deep sharp pains of remorse and wild regret. The house was mortally wounded. Louise took her quick scanty meals alone in the kitchen. The girls came in and out. Nobody cooked. Everything was slow, as if in consonance with the slow sad puzzled movements of the grieving soul. She spent long periods in the Aviary, no longer feeling that it belonged to ‘them’, indeed not able to feel that there was any ‘them’ any more. The girls shunned the Aviary, their continuous bird-like chatter was no longer heard there in the long evenings. There was no laughter, indeed no voices. The piano remained untouched. Everyone tiptoed. Louise wandered about in the long room, looking at the bookshelves, which contained a mixture of Sefton and Aleph’s books. History, classical literature, poetry in several languages, novels. She went across into Aleph’s room. It had been perfectly tidied and even dusted by Sefton. There was more poetry and more novels on Aleph’s shelves. Louise picked out a copy of Pride and Prejudice and took it back to the Aviary. She had abandoned A Glastonbury Romance since she suspected that some of the people she liked might come to grief. Nobody rang up, nobody rang the doorbell. Of course she had asked Clement to tell everyone not to come because she and the children wanted to be quiet for a while. She said or thought, ‘I want to be with the children’, but even in saying or thinking it she realised that now ‘the children’ meant something utterly different. What were ‘the children’ without Aleph, could there be children? Of course they loved her, the two remaining ones, they hugged her, they had mingled their tears. But they could not converse with her. Sometimes she felt herself as being a strange quiet animal, perhaps a rare animal, who was to be stroked and petted but not communicated with. She could utter no sound. The children loved her but shunned her, or perhaps she herself was instinctively setting them at a distance. Three days had passed now since the day of Aleph’s letter. No other letter had come yet. As time passed Louise dreaded this next letter; and dreaded that there might be no letter. Well, letters did come, from Oxford, admitting Aleph to Magdalen and Sefton to Balliol. Time was different, long, heavy, lazy, grey. Sefton was out of the house much of the time. Moy sometimes went out briefly, ‘for walks’, she said. Louise saw her once, sitting immobile upon a seat on the Green. Mostly Moy was upstairs in her room where she spent long periods, working she said. Louise called in on her at intervals and always found Moy at work, though she could not be sure whether this were a semblance of work set in motion by the sound of Louise’s feet on the stairs. There was evidence of work. Already the small canvas donated by Miss Fitzherbert had been painted over in wild unusual brilliant colours, representing, Moy said, the old cat Tibellina. (‘Do not fear the colours,’ Miss Fitzherbert had said to Moy, and Moy had mentioned this once to Louise.) The fresh rich oil-paint smell pervaded the room. Upon the sloping sky-lights the rain battered down from the thick dismal clouds. How little light there was for Moy to work in. Louise in her new way, in her utterly changed scenery and way of life, was suddenly worried about Moy. Moy had always been the clever little mouse who could do everything, make bags out of raffia, paint Easter eggs, make masks, make necklaces, sew lovely garments. Thus she had lived as, it occurred to Louise, they had all lived, under Aleph’s great brilliant canopy, in her light. ‘Moy is such a happy little thing, always busy!’ Now this picture seemed to be changing into something much darker, even more macabre. Louise recalled the episode of the fight with the swan. ‘Of course Moy would fight a swan to rescue some beastie or other!’ They had made too little of it, they had not questioned her enough, they had assumed that, whatever it was, Moy must have exaggerated it a little, made it picturesque. Perhaps she had really fought with the swan. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had invented some of it. They had not gone on talking about it, they had forgotten it. They had not helped Moy to find an art school, they had left that to Miss Fitzherbert. They had casually let her leave school. Was that right, would not another two years have been a precious advantage, something she would later grieve for having lost? They had not made her pause, not argued with her or made her reflect, perhaps about how, later on, she would earn her living. Well, Sefton had raised some objection but did not persevere. They had joked about Moy, calling her fey, paranormal, a little witch. Now suddenly she was a mystery, a stranger, perhaps a case, falling into solitude, into the dark, into depression, into a nervous breakdown. Oh, if only Teddy were here, all that is ill would be well. She recalled Joan’s words, ‘They are like a drawn bow, they compose a field of force, it is time for them to fly apart.’ Now with Aleph gone the harmony, the union of souls, the balance of power, is broken. Such good children, such ideal children. Oh how can she do it to us, how can she! But really it is my fault.

  She waited for the letter, for the transatlantic telephone call. Or for the sound of the key in the door, and Aleph weeping in her arms. But she thought too, whatever happens she won’t come back, not like that. Only perhaps later on to show us her children. This idea was hideous. And now in her deep heart an even sharper pain was stirring, a pain which would stay with her always. Lucas had wanted to marry her, her, Louise. She thought, after Teddy died and Lucas came to me and wanted to marry me and I said no, it seemed as if our relations simply had to cease altogether. His pride would have prevented any more real communication. I must have wounded him deeply, I could not conceal my surprise, which he must have interpreted as repulsion. No wonder he withdrew, not only from me but from the others. I ought not to have accepted that withdrawal. I ought to have approached him and held onto him, after all I had learnt to admire him, and to love him, Teddy’s friend, Clement’s brother – I ought at least to have tried to show him how fond I was of him, how much I cared, how much we all cared, how much he belonged to us, I should have tended him, visited him, made him come to Clifton – but I was selfishly concerned with my own grief and then later on it was somehow too late, I neglected him and mislaid him, through a puny lack of nerve, and I became afraid of him. Now, after the catastrophe with Peter, after Lucas had run away and hidden, I ought to have welcomed him back, run to him at once, and helped him to recover – I ought to have shown him affection, love. I thought of going to him, but I kept putting it off, and Clement discouraged me. I might have saved him if only I had been near him from the start – perhaps then he would not have built up that terrible hatred of Clement – oh God, if only – then I would have saved Peter – and saved Aleph. Everything would have been different – and it is all my fault. Now he has taken her away and made it impossible for him and me ever to meet again.

  Clement had visited his agent. (Telephone calls were no good.) The agent had now suggested some quite interesting things to him which would normally have cheered him and brightened his eyes. He had said in each case that he would pursue the matter, but he lacked energy. He kept saying to himself, it is a time of mourning, a time of dust and ashes, a time of penitence. He had twice telephoned Clifton but Sefton had answered, saying Louise was resting. He went to bed early and lay sleepless. He kept thinking about Peter. Ought they to have stopped that doctor from carrying him off? But he wanted to go and what could they do, really they knew nothing about Peter, he was a visitor from another realm. He recalled Peter pinning him against the wall and gripping his throat. How was he to think about it all now that Lucas too was gone? Did Lucas’s crime, the awful abduction of Aleph, suddenly make everything different? Had Lucas decided to take Aleph as an act of revenge, taking her away from Peter? But that was the wrong way round. It was Peter who wanted revenge, and had then forgiven Lucas and as it were set him free. And Peter forgave me, thought Clement, as he tossed restlessly in the dark seeking vainly for sleep, and good heavens, Lucas forgave me too! But what about Aleph, had I ever wanted to marry her, could I have married her, did I love her? That did not seem like reality, more like a fairy tale and now more like something dark and awful, Cle
ment’s guilt for not having protected Aleph, his guilt for having been cruel to Lucas when he was a child. Yes, was not that how it all began? Am I to go on believing all my life that Lucas hated me so much that he wanted to kill me? That is more real than his ‘forgiveness’. And now what matters, Aleph’s happiness? Will Lucas betray her, humiliate her, strangle her? Or will they be a happy academic couple living out their lives on some American campus, giving drinks parties round the swimming-pool? All that will go away and perhaps we shall never know. So what is fundamental? For me it remains that Peter saved my life and gave his life for me. Then sleepily Clement found himself thinking about the baseball bat, which was shining suddenly like a holy relic. That toy, with all its childhood memories, must have put into Lucas’s head the idea of taking revenge. And how very strange to think of that awful weapon now far away in Belgium, the innocent plaything of Belgian children!

  As Clement turned his head upon the pillow, closing his eyes at last to the advent of sleep, he suddenly recalled the evening at Clifton when they had lost Anax and Peter had brought him back, and when Peter had gone they had all said who he reminded them of, and Aleph had said ‘the Green Knight’. At the time Clement had vaguely assumed that she was referring to the green umbrella with which he had first appeared to them. But was there not perhaps a deeper meaning, was there not some Middle English poem about a Green Knight? He now thought he recalled reading a translation of it when he was at Cambridge. What was the story? Arthur’s knights are at the Round Table when a huge entirely green knight appears and challenges one of them to cut off his head, after promising to visit the knight for a return match in his own realm on the same day next year. Gawain takes up the challenge and cuts off the knight’s head. The knight picks up his head and holds it up in his hand and reminds Gawain of his promise. Next year Gawain sets out gloomily to meet his adversary, but loses his way and is entertained at a castle by a Lady whose husband is out hunting. The Lady tempts Gawain but he resists her charms. At last he gives in as far as to accept the significant gift of her green girdle. He leaves the castle and finds the meeting-place, the Green Knight appears with his axe. Gawain, expecting instant death, kneels down, the axe descends – but makes only a small superficial wound upon his extended neck. The knight, who is of course the Lady’s husband, congratulates Gawain on his courage, but chides him for his moral failure in accepting the girdle, for which he has mercifully received only a mild punishment. Gawain declares he will wear the girdle forever after as a token of his sin, in giving way to temptation and staining his perfect chastity.