by Iris Murdoch
When I returned to the house it was empty, the door of my flat wide open. I sat down in the sitting-room, upon the ‘conversation’ chair, and felt for a while pure fear, dread in its most classical and awful form. Arnold’s ‘joke’ was too obscenely good not to be taken as a portent: it was the visible part of some huge invisible horror. I sat there for a while panting at it, too sick even to try to analyse my distress. Then I began to notice that something was wrong with the room, something was missing. At last I pinpointed the absence of the bronze water-buffalo lady, one of my favourite pieces, and recalled with annoyance that I had given it to Julian. How had that happened? This too was a portent, the vanishing object which preludes the vaporization of Aladdin’s palace. Then as I began finally to wonder where my sister was and how she was getting on Rachel rang up to say that Priscilla had been discharged and was on the way back.
Lying horribly awake that night I decided that the matter of Christian and Arnold was simple. It had to be simple: it was either simplicity or insanity. If Arnold ‘made friends’ with Christian I would simply drop him. In spite of having solved this problem I could not sleep however. I kept following series of coloured images which, like the compartments of a swing door, simply led me round and landed me back again in the aching wide-awake world. When I slept at last I was humiliated in my dreams.
‘Well, why did you rush away in such a hurry? If, as you say, you decided ages ago to leave Roger, why didn’t you pack a suitcase and go off in a taxi some morning when he was at the office, in an orderly manner?’
‘I don’t think one leaves one’s husband like that,’ said Priscilla.
‘That’s how sensible girls leave their husbands.’
The telephone rings.
‘Hello, Pearson. Hartbourne here.’
‘Oh, hello – ’
‘I wondered if we could have lunch on Tuesday.’
‘Sorry, I’m not sure, my sister’s here – I’ll ring you back – ’
Tuesday? My whole concept of the future had crumpled.
Through the open door of the bedroom as I laid the phone to rest I could see Priscilla wearing my red and white striped pyjamas, flopped in a deliberately uncomfortable position, her arms spread wide like a puppet, still steadily crying. The horror of the world seen without charm. Priscilla’s woebegone tearful face was crumpled and old. Had she ever really resembled my mother? Two hard deep lines ran down on either side of her blubbering mouth. Beyond the runnels of the tears the dry yellow make-up revealed the enlarged pores of her skin. She had not washed since her arrival.
‘Oh Priscilla, stop it, do. Try to be a bit brave at least.’
‘I know I’ve lost my looks – ’
‘As if that mattered!’
‘So you think I look horrible, you think – ’
‘I don’t! Please, Priscilla – ’
‘Roger hated the sight of me, he said so. And I used to cry in front of him, I’d sit and cry for hours with sheer misery, sitting there in front of him, and he’d just go on reading the paper.’
‘You make me feel quite sorry for him!’
‘And he tried to poison me once, it tasted so horrible and he just watched and wouldn’t eat any himself.’
‘That’s just nonsense, Priscilla.’
‘Oh Bradley, if only we hadn’t killed that child – ’
She had already been on to this subject at some length.
‘Oh Bradley, if only we’d kept the child – But how was I to know I wouldn’t be able to have another one – That child, that one child, to think that it existed, it cried out for life, and we killed it deliberately. It was all Roger’s fault, he insisted that we get rid of it, he didn’t want to marry me, we killed it, the special one, the only one, my dear little child – ’
‘Oh do stop, Priscilla. It would be twenty now and on drugs, the bane of your life.’ I have never desired children myself and can scarcely understand this desire in others.
‘Twenty-a grown-up son – someone to love – to look after me – Oh Bradley, you don’t know how I have yearned day and night for that child. He would have made all the difference to Roger and me. I think Roger began to hate me when he found I couldn’t have children. And it was all his fault anyway. He found that rotten doctor. Oh it’s so unjust, so unjust – ’
‘Of course it’s unjust. Life is unjust. Do stop whining and try to be practical. You can’t stay here. I can’t support you. Anyway, I’m going away.’
‘I’ll get a job.’
‘Priscilla, be realistic, who would employ you?’
‘I’ll have to.’
‘You’re a woman over fifty, with no education and no skill. You’re unemployable.’
‘You’re so unkind – ’
The telephone rings again.
The oily ingratiating tones of Mr Francis Marloe.
‘Oh Brad, please forgive me, but I thought I’d just give a tinkle to ask how Priscilla is.’
‘She’s fine.’
‘Oh good. Oh Brad, I just thought I’d tell you the hospital psych said better not leave her alone you know.’
‘Rachel told me yesterday.’
‘And Brad, listen, don’t be cross, about Christian – ’
1 bang the telephone down.
‘You know,’ Priscilla was saying as I re – entered the room, ‘Mummy would have left Dad if she could have afforded it, she told me so when she was dying.’
‘I don’t want to know things like that.’
‘You and Dad made me feel so ashamed and inferior in the old days, you were both so cruel to me and Mum, Mum was so unhappy – ’
‘Either you must return to Roger or you must make some definite financial arrangement with him. It’s nothing to do with me. You’ve got to face up to things.’
‘Bradley, please, will you go and see Roger – ?’
‘No, I will not!’
‘Oh God, if only I’d taken my jewels with me, they mean so much to me, I saved up to buy them, and the mink stole. And there’s two silver goblets on my dressing table and a little box made of malachite – ’
‘Priscilla, don’t be childish. You can get these things later.’
‘No, I can’t. Roger will have sold them out of spite. The only consolation I had was buying things. If I bought some pretty thing it cheered me up for a while and I could’ save out of the housekeeping money and it cheered me up a little bit. I got my diamante set and I got a crystal and lapis necklace which was quite expensive and – ’
‘Why hasn’t Roger telephoned? He must know you’re here.’
‘He’s too proud and hurt. Oh you know in a way I feel so sorry for Roger, he’s been so miserable, shouting at me or else not talking at all, he must be so terribly unhappy inside himself, really wrecked and mentally broken somehow. Sometimes I’ve felt he must be going mad. How can anyone go on living like that, being so unkind and not caring any more? He wouldn’t let me cook for him any more and he wouldn’t let me into his room and I know he never made his bed and his clothes were filthy, and smelt and sometimes he didn’t even shave, I thought he’d lose his job. Perhaps he has lost his job and didn’t dare to tell me. And now it must be even worse. I kept the house a bit tidy though it was hard to when he so obviously didn’t care. Now he’s all alone in that filthy pigsty, not eating, not caring – ’
‘I thought he was surrounded by women.’
‘Oh there must have been women, but such awful women, so sordid, just wanting his money and getting drunk, all like Roger was before I married him, such an empty materialistic world – Oh I am so sorry for him, he’s made such a hell all round himself and now there he is in the middle of it having a sort of breakdown and the place full of unwashed dishes – ’
‘Well, why don’t you go home and wash up!’
‘Bradley, please would you go to Bristol – ’
‘It sounds to me as if you’re dying to go back to the man – ’
‘Please would you go and get my jewels, I’ll give
you the key.’
‘Oh do stop going on about your jewels. They’re all right. They’re legally yours anyway. A wife owns her own jewellery.’
‘The law isn’t anything. Oh I do want them so, they’re the only things I’ve got, I haven’t got anything else, I haven’t anything else in the world, I feel they’re calling out to me – And the little ornaments, that stripey vase – ’
‘Priscilla dear, do stop raving.’
‘Bradley, please, please go to Bristol for me. He won’t have had time to sell them yet, he won’t have thought of it. Besides, he probably imagines I’m coming back. They’re all still in their places. I’ll give you the key of the house and you can go in when he’s at the office and just get those few things, it will be quite easy and it will make such a difference to my mind, and then I’ll do anything you like, oh it will make such a difference – ’
The front door bell rang at this point. I got up. I felt stupidly upset. I made a sort of caressing gesture to Priscilla and left the room, closing the door: I went to the front door of the flat and opened it.
Arnold Baffin was outside. We moved into the sitting – room, smoothly, like dancers.
Arnold’s face, with any emotion, tended to become uniformly pink, as if a pink light had been switched on to it. He was flushed so now, his pale eyes behind his glasses expressing a sort of nervous solicitude. He patted my shoulder, or dabbed at it with the quick gesture of one playing ‘tig’.
‘How is she?’
‘Much better. You and Rachel were so kind.’
‘Rachel was. Bradley, you’re not angry with me, are you – ’
‘What is there to be angry about?’
‘You know – they did tell you – that I went off with Christian?’
‘I don’t want to hear about Mrs Evandale,’ I said.
‘You are angry. Oh Christ.’
‘I am NOT angry! I just don’t – want to – know – ’
‘I didn’t intend this, it just happened.’
‘All right! So that’s that!’
‘But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, can I ? Bradley, I’ve got to talk to you about it – just to make you stop blaming me – I’m not a fool – after all I’m a novelist, damn it! – I know how complicated – ’
‘I don’t see what being a novelist has to do with it or why you have to drag that in – ’
‘I only mean I understand how you feel – ’
‘ I don’t think you do. I can see you’re excited. It must have amused you very much to be the reception committee for my ex-wife. Naturally you want to talk about it. I am telling you not to.’
‘But Bradley, she’s a phenomenon.’
‘ I am not interested in phenomena.’
‘My dear Bradley, you must be curious, you must be. If were you I’d be dying with curiosity. There’s hurt pride, suppose, and – ’
‘There’s no question of hurt pride. I left her.’
‘Well, resentment or something, I know time doesn’t heal. That’s the silliest idea of all. But God, I’d be so curious. I’d want to see what she’d become, what she was like. Of course she sounds like an American now – ’
‘ I don’t want to know!’
‘You never gave me any idea of her. To listen to you talk – ’
‘Arnold, since you’re such a clever novelist and so full of human psychology, please understand that this is dangerous ground. If you want to imperil our friendship go ahead. I can’t forbid you to be acquainted with Mrs Evandale. But you must never mention her name to me. This could be the end of our friendship, and I mean it.’
‘Our friendship is a tough plant, Bradley. Look, I just refuse to pretend that this thing hasn’t happened, and I don’t think you ought to either. I know people can be awful dooms for each other – ’
‘Precisely.’
‘But sometimes if you face a thing it becomes tolerable. You ought to face this, and anyway, you’ve got to, she’s here and she’s determined to see you, she’s absolutely mad with interest, you can’t avoid her. And you know, she is a most enormously nice person – ’
‘ I think that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard you say.’
‘All right, I know what you mean. But since you still feel so emotional about her – ’
‘I don’t!’
‘Bradley, be sincere.’
‘Will you stop tormenting me—I might have known you’d come round here with that air of triumph—’
‘I don’t feel any triumph. What is there to triumph about?’
‘You’ve met her, you’ve discussed me, you think she’s “a most enormously nice person” – ’
‘Bradley, don’t shout. I – ’
The telephone rings again.
I go and lift the receiver.
‘Brad! I say, is that really you? Guess who this is!’
I put the telephone down, settling it carefully back on to its stand.
I went back into the sitting – room and sat down. ‘That was her.’
‘You’ve gone quite white. You’re not going to faint, are you? Can I get you something? Please forgive me for talking so stupidly. Is she hanging on?’
‘No. I put the thing – down—’
The telephone rings again. I do nothing.
‘Bradley, let me talk to her.’
‘No.’
I get to the telephone just after Arnold has lifted the receiver. I bang it back on to the rest.
‘Bradley, don’t you see, you’ve got to deal with this, you can’t shirk it, you can’t. She’ll come round in a taxi.’
The telephone rings again. I lift it up and hold it a little way off. Christian’s voice, even with the American tang, is recognizable. The years drop away. ‘Brad, do listen, please. I’m round at the flat, you know, our old place. Why won’t you come round? I’ve got some Scotch. Brad, please don’t just bang the phone down, don’t be mean. Come round and see me. I do so want to take a look at you. I’ll be here all day, till five o’clock anyway.’
I put the telephone down.
‘She wants me to go and see her.’
‘You’ve got to, you’ve got to, it’s your fate!’
‘I’m not going.’
The telephone rings again. I take it off and lay it down on the table. It bubbles remotely. Priscilla calls in a shrill voice, ‘Bradley!’
‘Don’t touch that,’ I said to Arnold, pointing at the telephone. I went in to Priscilla.
‘Is that Arnold Baffin out there?’ She was sitting on the side of the bed. I saw with surprise that she had put on her blouse and skirt and was putting some thick yellowish – pinkish muck on to her nose.
‘Yes.’
‘I think I’ll come out to see him. I want to thank him.’
‘As you like. Look, Priscilla, I’m going to be away for an hour or two. Will you be all right? I’ll come back at lunch – time, maybe a bit late. I’ll ask Arnold to stay with you.’
‘You will come back soon?’
‘Yes, yes.’
I ran in to Arnold. ‘Could you stay with Priscilla? The doctor said she shouldn’t be left alone.’
Arnold looked displeased. ‘I suppose I can stay. Is there any drink? I wanted to talk to you about Rachel, actually, and about that funny letter you wrote me. Where are you off to?’
‘I’m going to see Christian.’
Marriage is a curious institution, as I have already remarked. I cannot quite see how it can be possible. People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self – deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together. Those outside the cage can, to their own taste, satisfy their need for society by more or less organized dashes in the direction of other human beings. But the unit of two can scarcely communicate with others, and is fort
unate, as the years go by, if it can communicate within itself. Or is this the sour envious view of the failed husband? I speak now of course of ordinary ‘successful’ marriages. Where the unit of two is a machine of mutual hatred there is hell in a pure form. I left Christian before our hell was quite perfected. I saw very clearly what it would be like.
Of course I was ‘in love’ with Christian when I married her, and I felt that I was lucky to get her. She was a showy pretty woman. Her parents were in business. She even had a little money of her own. My mother was impressed, slightly intimidated; Priscilla too. Later, when I imagined I knew more about ‘love’, I decided that my feeling about Christian was ‘just’ overwhelming sexual attraction, plus a curious element of obsession. It was as if I had known Christian as a real woman in some previous incarnation, and were now reliving, perhaps as a punishment, some doomed perverted spiritual pattern. (I suspect there are many such couples.) Or as if she had died long before and come back to me as a demon lover. Demon lovers are always relentless, however kind in life. And it was sometimes as if I could ‘remember’ Christian’s kindness, though all now was spite and demonry. It was not that she was usually, though she was sometimes, grossly cruel. She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct. And I was Siamese – twinned to her mind. We reeled about joined together at the head.
The reason why, after swearing that I would not see her, I changed my mind and rushed to her was simply this. I realized quite suddenly that I would now be in torment until I had seen her and settled that she had no more power over me. Witch she might be, but surely not for me any more. And this was of course made much more obviously necessary by Arnold’s having, by this vile chance, ‘got in on her’. I think his describing her as ‘an enormously nice person’ had some cosmic effect on me. So she had got out of my mind and was walking about? Arnold had seen her with innocent eyes. Why did this threaten me so terribly? By going to see her myself I would be able to ‘dilute’ the power of her meeting with Arnold. But I did not think all this out immediately. I acted on instinct, wanting to know the worst.
