The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  Upstairs the same rather weird cleanliness and order prevailed. The beds had been made with hospitaline accuracy. There was not a speck of dust anywhere. A clock ticked quietly. It felt eerie, like the Marie Celeste. I gazed out into the garden at a sleek lawn and irises in flower. The sun was shining brightly but a little coolly. Roger must have cut the grass since Priscilla’s departure. I went to the long lower drawer of the chest of drawers where Priscilla said she kept her jewel case. I dragged the drawer open, but there was nothing in it but clothes. I jumbled them up, then searched other drawers there and in the bathroom. I opened the wardrobe. There was no sign of a jewel case or of the mink stole. Nor could I see upon the dressing – table the silver goblets or the malachite box which were supposed to be there. I felt very upset and ran into the other rooms. One room was simply full of Priscilla’s clothes, lying on the bed, on chairs, on the floor, looking so bright and gay and odd. On my rounds I saw the blue and white striped china urn, which was considerably larger than Priscilla had suggested, and picked it up. As I stood at a loss upon the landing, holding the urn, I heard a sound below me and a voice said, ‘Hello, it’s me.’

  I came slowly down the stairs. Roger was standing in the hall. When he saw me his mouth opened and his eyebrows went up. He was looking healthy and distinguished, wearing a well – cut grey sports jacket. His grey – brown hair was brushed back over his head in a neat dome. I put the vase down carefully on the chest beside the brass jug with the peonies.

  ‘I came to get Priscilla’s jewellery and stuff.’

  ‘Is Priscilla with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She isn’t coming back, is she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God. Come in here. Have a drink.’ Roger’s voice was prissy and plummy, rather loud, a pseudo – varsity voice, a public relations voice, a public – speaking cad’s voice. We went into the ‘lounge’. (A lounge lizard’s voice.) Here too all was neat, there were flowers. The sun was shining.

  ‘I want my sister’s jewels.’

  ‘Won’t you drink? Mind if I do?’

  ‘I want my sister’s jewels.’

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t think I can let you have them. You see, I don’t know how valuable they are, and until—’

  ‘And her mink stole.’

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Elsewhere. Look, Bradley, we needn’t fight, need we?’

  ‘I want the jewels and the mink and that vase I brought down and an enamel picture of—’

  ‘Oh God. You know Priscilla’s a mental case?’

  ‘If she is, you made her one.’

  ‘Please. I can’t help Priscilla any more. I would if I could. Honestly, it’s been such hell. She cleared out, after all.’

  ‘You drove her out.’ I saw Priscilla’s little marble statuette on the chimney piece. It looked like Aphrodite. Miserable pity for my sister possessed me. She wanted her little things about her, they might console her. There was not much else left.

  ‘It’s no fun being in the house with a hysterical ageing woman. I did try. She got violent. And she stopped cleaning, the place was a wreck.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I want the stuff.’

  ‘Everything valuable is in the bank. I thought Priscilla might raid the place. She can have her clothes, only for Christ’s sake don’t encourage her to fetch them in person. In fact I’d be jolly glad to have her clothes out of the house. But the rest I regard as sub judice.’

  ‘Her jewels are her property.’

  ‘No, they’re not. She got them by skimping on the housekeeping. I starved to get those jewels. She didn’t consult me, of course. But my God now I’m going to regard them as an investment, my investment. And the bloody mink. All right, don’t start to shout, I’ll be just to Priscilla, I’ll make her an allowance, but I’m not in any mood for giving her expensive presents. I’ve got to know where I stand financially. She can’t just cream off the valuables. She cleared out of her own accord. She must take the consequences.’

  I felt incoherent humiliation and rage. ‘You deliberately drove her out. She says you tried to poison her—’

  ‘I just put an overdose of salt and mustard into her stew. It must have tasted awful. I sat and watched her trying to eat it. Little pictures out of hell. You’ve just no idea. I see you’ve brought two suitcases. I’ll put out some of her clothes for you.’

  ‘You took all the money out of the joint account—’

  ‘Well, it was my money, wasn’t it? There wasn’t any other source of income! She kept drawing it out without telling me and buying clothes. She went mad over buying clothes. There’s a room upstairs full of them, never worn. She simply wasted my money. Please let’s not fight. After all you’re a man, you can understand, you won’t start to scream about it. She’s a crazy disappointed woman and as cruel as a demon. We both wanted a child. She tricked me into marriage. I only married her because I wanted a child.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You insisted on the abortion.’

  ‘She wanted the abortion. I didn’t know what I wanted. Then when the child was gone I felt awful about it. Then Priscilla told me she was pregnant again. That was your mother’s idea. It wasn’t true. I married her because I couldn’t bear to lose a second child. And there was no child.’

  ‘Oh God.’ I went over to the chimney piece and picked up the marble statuette.

  ‘Leave that alone, please,’ said Roger. ‘This isn’t an antique shop.’

  As I put it down there was a step in the hall and a beautiful young girl came in through the door. She was dressed in a mauve canvas jerkin and white slacks, tousled and casual like a girl on a yacht, her dark brown hair gilded. Her face glowed with something more exalted and inward than mere good health and sunshine. She looked about twenty. She was carrying a shopping bag which she put down in the doorway.

  I felt utter confusion. Had there been a child after all? Was this she?

  Roger leapt up and ran to her, his face relaxed and beaming, his eyes looking larger, more luminous, wider apart. He kissed her on the lips, then held her for a moment, staring at her, smiling and astounded. He gave a short ‘Oh!’ of amazed satisfaction, then turned to me. ‘This is Marigold. She’s my mistress.’

  ‘It hasn’t taken you long to install one.’

  ‘Darling, this is Priscilla’s brother. We’d better tell him, hadn’t we, darling?’

  ‘Yes, of course, darling,’ said the girl gravely, pushing back her tousled hair and leaning up against Roger. ‘We must tell him everything.’ She had a light West Country accent and I could now see that she was older than twenty.

  ‘Marigold and I have been together for years. Marigold was my secretary. We’ve been half living together for years and years. We never let Priscilla know.’

  ‘We didn’t want to hurt her,’ said Marigold. ‘We carried the burden ourselves. It was hard to know what to do for the best. It has been a terrible time.’

  ‘It’s over now,’ said Roger. ‘Thank God it’s over.’ They were holding hands.

  I felt hatred and horror of this sudden cameo of happiness. I ignored the girl and said to Roger, ‘I can see that living with a girl who could be your daughter must be more fun than observing the marriage vows with an elderly woman.’

  ‘I am thirty,’ said Marigold. ‘And Roger and I love each other.’

  ‘“For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” Just when she was most in need of help you drove my sister out of her home.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘You did!’

  ‘Marigold is pregnant,’ said Roger.

  ‘How can you tell me that,’ I said, ‘with that air of vile satisfaction. Am I supposed to be pleased because you’ve fathered another bastard? Are you so proud of being an adulterer? I regard you both as wicked, an old man and a young girl, and if you only knew how ugly and pathetic you look, pawing each other and making a vulgar display of how pleas
ed you are with yourselves for having got rid of my sister – You’re like a pair of murderers—’

  They moved apart. Marigold sat down, looking up at her lover with a dazed glowing stare. ‘We didn’t do this deliberately,’ said Roger. ‘It just happened. We can’t help it if we’re happy. At least we’re acting rightly now, we’ve stopped lying anyway. We want you to tell Priscilla, to explain everything. God, that will be a relief. Won’t it, darling?’

  ‘We’ve hated telling lies, we really have, haven’t we, darling?’ said Marigold. ‘We’ve both been living a lie for years.’

  ‘Marigold had a little flat – I used to visit her – it was a miserable situation.’

  ‘Now it’s all dropped away and – oh just to be able to speak the truth, it’s – We’ve been so sorry for poor Priscilla—’

  ‘If you could only see yourselves,’ I said, ‘if you could only see yourselves – Now if you will kindly hand over Priscilla’s jewellery—’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Roger. ‘I explained.’

  ‘She wanted the jewels, the mink, that statuette thing, that striped urn, some enamel picture—’

  ‘I bought that statuette thing. It stays here. And I happen to like that enamel picture. These aren’t just her things. Can’t you see we can’t start dividing things up now? There’s money involved. She ran off and left the stuff, she can wait! You can have her clothes though. You could put a lot into those suitcases you brought.’

  ‘I’ll pack them, shall I?’ said Marigold. She ran out of the room.

  ‘You will tell Priscilla, won’t you?’ said Roger. ‘It’ll be such a relief to my mind. I’m such a coward. I’ve kept putting off breaking it to her.’

  ‘When your girl friend got pregnant you deliberately drove your wife away.’

  ‘It wasn’t a plan! We were just muddling along, we were bloody miserable. We’d waited and waited – ’

  ‘Hoping she’d die, I suppose. I’m surprised you didn’t murder her.’

  ‘We had to have the child,’ said Roger. ‘That child’s important and I’m going to act fairly by it. It has some rights, I should think! We had to have our happiness at last and have it fully and truthfully. I want Marigold to be my wife. Priscilla was never happy with me.’

  ‘Have you thought about what’s going to happen to Priscilla now and what her existence will be like? You’ve taken her life, now you discard her.’

  ‘Well, she’s taken my life too. She’s taken years and years from me when I might have been happy and living in the open!’

  ‘Oh go to hell!’ I said. I went out into the hall where Marigold was kneeling, surrounded by an ocean of silks and tweeds and pink underwear. Most of it looked entirely new.

  ‘Where’s the mink?’

  ‘I explained, Bradley.’

  ‘Oh you should be ashamed,’ I said. ‘Look at you both. You are wicked people. You should be so ashamed.’

  They looked at me with distress, concern for me, looked ruefully at each other. I could not touch them. It was as if their happiness had made them into saints. I wanted to scratch and tear them. But they were invulnerable, in bliss.

  I said, ‘I’m not going to wait while you pack these cases.’ I could not bear to see the girl shaking out Priscilla’s things and folding them neatly. ‘You can send them on to my flat.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ll do that, won’t we, darling,’ said Marigold. ‘There’s a trunk upstairs – ’

  ‘You will tell her, won’t you,’ said Roger. ‘Tell her as gently as you can. Make it clear though. You can tell her Marigold is pregnant. There’s no way back now.’

  ‘You’ve seen to that.’

  ‘You must take her something now,’ said Marigold, kneeling, her bland face glowing with the tender benevolence of real felicity. ‘Darling, shouldn’t we send her that statuette, or – ?’

  ‘No. I like that thing.’

  ‘Well then that striped vase, didn’t she want that?’

  ‘This is my house too,’ said Roger. ‘I made it. These things have their places.’

  ‘Oh darling, please let Priscilla have that vase, just to please me!’

  ‘Oh all right, darling – What a tender – hearted little muggins it is!’

  ‘I’ll pack it up carefully.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m the devil incarnate, Bradley old man. Of course I’m not a holy character, I’m just an ordinary chap, I doubt if you’ll find an ordinarier. You must understand that I’ve had a rough time. It’s been pure hell running two lives, and Priscilla’s been awful to me for so long, she’s really hated me, she hasn’t said a kind or gentle thing to me for years – ’

  Marigold came back with a bulky parcel. I took it from her and opened the front door. The outside world looked dazzling, as if I had been in the dark. I stepped outside and looked back at them. They were swaying together, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand. They could not check two radiant smiles. I wanted to spit upon the doorstep but my mouth was dry.

  I was drinking light golden sherry in a bar and staring at the red, black and white funnel of a ship which was standing out against a hazy sky of intense blue. The funnel was very clear, very there, filled to the brim with colour and being. The sky was crazily infinite and huge, curtain behind curtain of gauzy granules of pure blue.

  Later on they were shooting pigeons and the funnel was blue and white, the blue confounded with the sky, the white hung in space like a great cylinder of crinkly paper or like a kite in a picture. Kites have always meant a lot to me. What an image of our condition, the distant high thing, the sensitive pull, the feel of the cord, its invisibility, its length, the fear of loss. I do not usually get drunk. Bristol is the sherry city. Excellent cheap sherry, light and clean, is drawn out of huge dark wooden barrels. I was feeling, for a time, almost mad with defeat.

  They were shooting pigeons. What an image of our condition, loud report, the poor flopping bundle upon the ground, trying helplessly, desperately, vainly to rise again. Through tears I saw the stricken birds tumbling over and over down the sloping roofs of warehouses. I saw and heard their sudden weight, their pitiful surrender to gravity. How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change: an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain. I was looking at a ship’s funnel and it was yellow and black against a sky of tingling lucid green. Life is horrible, horrible, horrible, said the philosopher. When I realized that I had missed the train I rang the number of my London flat and got no reply.

  ‘All things work together for good for those who love God,’ said Saint Paul. Possibly: but what is it to love God? I have never seen this happening. There is, my dear friend and mentor, some hard – won calm when we see the world very detailed and very close: as close and as vivid as the newly painted funnels of ships on a sunny evening. But the dark and the ugly is not washed away, this too is seen, and the horror of the world is part of the world. There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. There is no drying of tears or obliteration of the sufferings of the innocent and of those who have undergone crippling injustice in their lives. I tell you, my dear, what you know better and more deeply than I can ever know it. Even as I write these words, which should be lucid and filled with glowing colour, I feel the very darkness of my own personality invading my pen. Only perhaps in the ink of this darkness can this writing properly be written? It is not really possible to write like an angel, though some of our near – gods by heaven – inspired trickery sometimes seem to do it.

  I felt, after leaving Roger and his Marigold, a humiliated misery which made me almost hysterical with anger. I saw, for this time, with perfect clarity how unjust and how unkind life had been to my sister. I felt a frenzy of remorse because I had not somehow imposed my will upon Roger and really made him suffer. I felt so unhappy and ashamed because I had not brought away even the few little pieces of consolation which she had, really with such humility, wanted: the ‘diamanté set’, the crystal and lapis necklace, th
e amber ear – rings. I had not got the mink stole, not even the little marble statuette of Aphrodite or the enamel picture of the lady picking apples. Poor Priscilla, I thought, poor poor Priscilla, with a pity for which I deserved no credit since I was simply feeling sorry for myself. Of course I ‘put myself out’ for Priscilla, and did it without any hesitation, because one has to do what one has to do. That human beings can acquire a small area of unquestioned obligations may be one of the few things that saves them: saves them from the bestiality and thoughtless night which lies only a millimetre away from the most civilized of our specimens. However if one examines closely some such case of duty’, the petty achievement of some ordinary individual, it turns out to be no glorious thing, not the turning back by reason – or godhead of the flood of natural evil, but simply a special operation of self – love, devised perhaps even by Nature herself who has, or she could not survive in her polycephalic creation, many different and even incompatible moods. We care absolutely about that with which we can identify ourselves. A saint would identify himself with everything. Only there are, so my wise friend tells me, no saints.

  I identified myself with Priscilla for simple old mechanical reasons. If Priscilla had been an acquaintance for whom I cared as little as I cared for my sister not only would I not have lifted a finger for her, I would not even have retained the story of her sufferings in my head for a matter of minutes. As it was, I was humiliated and defeated in her humiliation and defeat. I tasted injustice and the special horror of seeing its perpetrators flourish. How frequent and how bitter is this aspect of human wretchedness. The wicked prosper in front of our eyes and go on and on and on prospering. What a blessing it must have been once to be able to believe in hell. A great and deep human consolation was lost to us when that ancient and respectable belief faded from our minds. Yet there was more offence even than that, something profoundly ugly and repulsive to me: that vision of Roger with his grey hair and his genial pseudo – distinguished air of an ageing worldly man, holding a girl who could be his daughter, a girl unused, unmarked and fresh. That particular juxtaposition of youth and age offends, and, I felt, offends rightly.