The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  In the beginnings of dusk we drove on in silence along lanes of plump white – flowering chestnuts and powdery ladies’ lace. To drive someone one loves in a car is a special mode of possession: the controlled vibrating vehicle becomes an extension of one’s being which now powerfully includes the half – seen person by one’s side. Sometimes my left hand sought her right. Sometimes with a shy deliberation she touched my knee. Sometimes she sat sideways, contemplating me, and making me smile like a flower in the sun as I gazed ahead at the moving roadway. The tunnel – like movement of the car contained us and the accomplice murmur of the engine wrapped up our happy silence.

  Human happiness is rarely in the best of circumstances without shadows, and an almost pure happiness can be a terror to itself. My happiness at this time, though intense, was far from pure, and in the midst of all this mad joy (watching Julian buy the dustpan and brush for instance) I soon started rehearsing terrors and miseries. Of course there was vengeful Arnold, resentful Rachel, miserable Priscilla. There was the quaint and curious fact that I had lied about my age. There was a huge question mark over the immediate future. But these matters were, now that I was with Julian, problems rather than nightmares. Soon and in solitude I would tell her everything and she would be the just judge. The fact of loving and being loved can make (in a way which is of course sometimes illusory) even the most practical of difficulties seem trivial or even senseless. Nor did I in any vulgar sense fear exposure. We would be secret. No one knew of this place. I had told my plans to nobody.

  What troubled me as I drove along in that very blue twilight between fat flowery chestnut trees and saw the full moon like a dish of Jersey cream above a barley field which was still catching the light of the sun, were two things, one vast and cosmic, the other horribly precise. The cosmic trouble was that I was feeling, in some way quite unconnected with ordinary speculations about what might happen, that I should certainly lose Julian. I did not doubt now that she loved me. But I felt a kind of absolute despair, as if we had loved already for a thousand years and were condemned to become weary of something so perfect. I raced about the planet like lightning, I put a girdle round the galaxy, and was back in the next second gasping with this despair. Those who have loved will understand me. I was giddy with fear. A great loop had been made in the continuum of time and space and across the mouth of it Julian’s right hand held my left. All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come. My other trouble was wondering, when we reached Patara and I tried to make love to Julian, whether I should succeed.

  So we started arguing.

  ‘You’re thinking too much, Bradley, I can see you are. We’ll solve all these problems. We’ll have Priscilla to live with us.’

  ‘We won’t be living anywhere.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We just won’t. There isn’t any future. We shall go on and on driving in this car forever. That’s all there is.’

  ‘You mustn’t speak like that, it’s false. Look, I’ve bought brown bread and toothpaste and a dustpan.’

  ‘Yes. That’s a miracle. But it’s like the fossils which religious men used to think God put there when He created the world in 4000 BC so that we could develop an illusion of the past.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We have an illusion of the future.’

  ‘That’s wicked talk and a betrayal of love.’

  ‘Our love is in the nature of a closed system. It is complete within itself. It has no accidents and no extension.’

  ‘Please don’t talk that abstract sort of language, it’s a way of lying.’

  ‘Maybe. But we have no language in which to tell the truth about ourselves, Julian.’

  ‘Well, I have. I’m going to marry you. You will write a great book. I will try to write a great book.’

  ‘Do you really believe this?’

  ‘Yes. Bradley, you’re tormenting me, I think you’re doing it on purpose.’

  ‘Perhaps. I feel so connected with you. I am you. I must stir a little, even cause pain, if I’m to apprehend you at all.’

  ‘Cause me pain then, I’ll bear it gladly, but it must be inside our security.’

  ‘Oh everything’s inside. That’s the trouble.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by “inside”. But you seem to be speaking as if it were all an illusion, as if you could leave me.’

  ‘I suppose it could be interpreted like that.’

  ‘But we’ve only just found each other.’

  ‘We found each other millions of years ago, Julian.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know. I feel that too, but really, ordinary really, since Covent Garden it’s only two days.’

  ‘I’ll meditate on that.’

  ‘Well, meditate properly. Bradley, you couldn’t leave me, what nonsense are you talking.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t leave you, my utter darling, but you could leave me. I don’t mean anything about doubting your love. It’s just that whatever miracle made us will automatically also break us. We are for breaking, our smash is what it’s for.’

  ‘I won’t let you talk like this. I’ll hold you and silence you with love.’

  ‘Mind out. This is tricky light for driving in.’

  ‘Will you stop a minute?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you really think I could leave you?’

  ‘Sub specie aeternitatis, yes. You have done so already.’

  ‘You know I don’t understand Latin.’

  ‘A pity your education was so neglected.’

  ‘Bradley, I shall get angry with you.’

  ‘So we are quarrelling already. Shall I drive you back to Ealing?’

  ‘You are deliberately hurting and spoiling.’

  ‘I am not a very nice character. You must get to know me sometime.’

  ‘I do know you. I know you inside out and backwards.’

  ‘You do and you don’t.’

  ‘Do you doubt my love?’

  ‘I fear the gods.’

  ‘I fear nothing.’

  ‘Perfection is instant despair. Instant despair. Nothing to do with time.’

  ‘If you despair you doubt that I love you.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Will you please stop driving?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What can I do to prove that I love you absolutely?’

  ‘I don’t see that you can do anything.’

  ‘I shall jump out of the car.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I shall.’

  And the next moment she had.

  There was a sound like a small explosion, a puff of air, and she was gone from my side. The door gaped, cracked open, swung and slammed back. The seat beside me was empty. The car careered on to the grass verge and stopped.

  I looked back and saw her in the half light lying in a dark motionless heap by the side of the road.

  I had had terrible moments in my life. Many of them came to me after this one. But this was, seen in retrospect, the most beautiful, the purest and the most absolutely punishing.

  Gasping with terror and anguish I got myself out of the car and ran back. The road was empty and silent, the air filled with atoms of darkening blue, defeating the sight.

  Oh the poor frailty of the human form, its egg – shell vulnerability! How can this precarious crushable machine of flesh and bones and blood survive on this planet of hard surfaces and relentless murderous gravity? I had felt the crash and crunch of her body upon the road.

  Her head was in the grass, her legs hunched up on the verge. The moment of stillness when I got to her was the worst. I knelt beside her, moaning aloud, not daring to touch or move that perhaps terribly damaged body. Was she conscious, would she in a moment begin to scream with pain
? My hands hovered about her with a condemned tragic helplessness. I had a very different future now as I ineptly questioned that inert and scattered being that I did not dare even to fold in my arms.

  Then Julian said, ‘Sorry, Bradley.’

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’ I said in a grating breathless voice.

  ‘Don’t — think – so – ’ Then she sat up and put her arms round my neck.

  ‘Oh Julian, be careful, are you all right, is anything broken?’

  ‘No — I’m sure – not – Look, I fell on to these humpy cushions of grass or moss or—’

  ‘I thought you fell on the road.’

  ‘No, I just – grazed my leg again – and I banged my face – ouf! I think I’m perfectly all right though, it just hurts – Wait a moment, let me just try moving – Yes, I’m perfectly all right – Oh I am sorry—’

  I took her in my arms properly then and we held on to each other, half lying among the little mossy grassy hillocks beside a ditch full of white flowering nettles. The creamy moon had become smaller and paler and more metallic. Darkness began to thicken about us in the dense air as we held each other in silence.

  ‘Bradley, I’m getting cold, I’ve lost my sandals.’

  I let go and swivelled my body round and began kissing her cold wet feet as they lay dinting a cushion of damp spongy moss. Her feet tasted of dew and earth and the little green frond – flowers of the moss, which smelt of celery. I clasped her pale wet feet in my arms and groaned with bliss and longing.

  ‘Bradley, please. I hear a car, someone will come.’

  I got up, burning, and helped her up, and then in fact a car did come by and its lights showed her legs, the blue of her dress which matched her eyes, and a flash of her shaggy brown – gold mane. It also showed her sandals lying together upon the road.

  ‘There’s blood on your leg.’

  ‘It’s just a graze.’

  ‘You’re limping.’

  ‘No, just stiff.’

  We walked back to the car and I turned on the headlights and made an intricate bower of green leaves in the middle of the dark. We got into the car and held each other’s hands.

  ‘It won’t be necessary to do that again, Julian.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’

  Then we drove on in silence, her hand on my knee. For the last bit she read the map by torchlight. We crossed a railway line and a canal into a sort of empty flat land. There were no lights of houses to be seen now. The lights of the car showed how the roadway faded into a stony verge of smooth grey pebbles and vivid green wiry grass. We paused and turned at a featureless crossroads where Julian turned her torch on to the finger post. The road turned into a stony track along which we bumped at five miles per hour. And at last the headlights swung round and revealed two white gate posts and the name written in bold Italian lettering: Patara. The car moved on to gravel and the lights jerked over red brick walls and we came to a halt outside a narrow latticed porch. Julian already had the key, she had been holding it for miles. I peered at our haven. It was a little square red brick bungalow. The agent had been a trifle romantic. ‘It’s marvellous,’ said Julian. She let me in.

  All the lights were on. Julian had run from room to room. She had pulled back the sheets of the double divan bed. ‘I don’t think this is aired at all, it’s quite damp. Oh Bradley, let’s go down to the sea straightaway, shall we? Then I’ll cook supper.’

  I looked at the bed. ‘It’s late, my darling. Are you sure you’re all right after that fall?’

  ‘Of course! I think I’ll just change, it’s got a bit chilly, and then we’ll go down to the sea, it must be just there, I think I can hear it.’

  I went out of the front door and listened. The sound of the sea sieving pebbles came in a regular harsh grating sigh from over the top of some little eminence, sand dunes perhaps, just in front of me. The moon was slightly hazed over but giving out a golden, not silvery, illumination by which I could see the white garden fencing, ragged shrubs and the outline of a single tree. A sense of emptiness and level land. Air moving softly, salty. I felt a mixture of bliss and pure fear. After a few moments I went back into the house. Silence.

  I went into the bedroom. Julian, in a mauve and white flowered petticoat with a white fringe was lying on the bed deeply asleep. Her glowing brown hair was spread all over the pillow and half over her face in a silky network like part of a beautiful shawl. She lay on her back with her throat exposed as if to the knife. Her shoulders, pale in colour, were as creamy as the moon at dusk. Her knees were a little drawn up, the bare muddied feet sideways and pointed. Her hands, also brown with earth, had found each other and nestled between her breasts like a pair of animals. Her right thigh, below the line of the white fringe, was red and scraped in two places, once where she had climbed over the fence, once where she had thrown herself out of the car. She had indeed had an eventful day.

  So had I. I sat and brooded over her and pondered a hundred things. I had no intention of waking her, though I did wonder if I should bathe her thigh. The long scratches looked quite clean. This sudden magical withdrawal into unconsciousness was just what I had been wanting at different times during the day, to be with her and yet not with her. And now as I sat and sighed beside her there was a strange pleasure in not touching her. After a while I lightly lifted the bedclothes over her, laying down the folded sheet just below those clasped and nestling hands, and I wondered what I had done, or more perhaps what she had done, since it was more her will than mine which had so completely transformed our lives. Perhaps tomorrow morning it would all seem to her like a dreadful dream. Perhaps tomorrow I would be driving a weeping girl back to London. For that too I must be faithfully ready, for I had already been given a fortune which I did not deserve in the least. How wonderful and terrible it had been when she leapt out of the car. But what did it mean except that she was young and the young love extremes? She was a child of extremes and I was a puritan and old. Would I ever make love to her? Ought I to? Would I be able to?

  ‘Look, Bradley, an animal’s skull, all washed by the sea. What is it, a sheep?’

  ‘A sheep, yes.’

  ‘We’ll take it back.’

  ‘There are all those stones and shells to take back too.’

  ‘Well, we can get the car down, can’t we?’

  ‘I think so. There’s that cry again. What did you say it was?’

  ‘The curlew. It says its name. Oh Bradley, look at this beautiful piece of wood, the way the sea has had it, it looks like Chinese writing.’

  ‘Are we to bring that too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I took the square piece of wood, all its wrinkles smoothed and joined by the sea water until it looked like a sort of delicate sketch of an old face, a sketch such as some Italian artist, Leonardo perhaps, might make in a rather abstract way in his notebook. I took the sheep’s skull. The skull, bereft of teeth but otherwise fairly complete, had been in the sea for some time. There was nothing sharp upon it. It had been smoothed and caressed and polished until it seemed more like a work of art, some exquisite fabrication in ivory, rather than one of nature’s remnants. The bone was densely smooth to the touch, warmed by the sun, the colour of thick cream, the colour of Julian’s shoulders.

  In fact Julian’s shoulders had already changed their hue to a glowing angry – looking reddish – brown. It was the afternoon of the next day. My meditations of the previous night had been cut short by an attack of sleep almost as sudden as that which had laid Julian low. Sleep sprang upon me like a jaguar launched from a tree. I had half undressed and was wondering how to array myself as Julian’s consort and whether to array myself at all, when the next thing I knew was that it was morning, the sun was shining into the room and I was lying by myself underneath the blankets, dressed in my shirt, underpants and socks. I knew instantly where I was. I felt a shock of fear at Julian’s absence, allayed at once by hearing her singing in the kitchen. Then I felt annoyance at having displayed myself to her
sleeping in such an undignified garb. Shirt and socks form a most unattractive deshabillé. Had I got into bed myself or had she covered me? Then it seemed dreadful, scandalous and funny that my beloved and I should have slept side by side all night, stupefied into total unawareness of each other. Oh precious precious night.

  ‘Bradley, are you awake? Tea, coffee, milk, sugar? How little I know about you.’

  ‘Indeed. Tea, milk, sugar. Did you see my socks?’

  ‘I love your socks. We’re going straight down to the sea.’

  And we did. We had a picnic breakfast with milky tea in a thermos flask and bread and butter and jam, down on the flat stones of the beach, just beside where the sea, much more gently than last night, was touching the clean fringe of the land, which it had itself fashioned to be its pure spouse and counterpart, withdrawing to breathe and returning again to touch. Behind us were wind – combed sand dunes and yellow arches of long reedy grass and blue sky the colour of Julian’s eyes. Before us was the calm cold English sea, diamond – sparkling and rather dark even under the sun.

  There have been many moments of happiness. But that first breakfast beside the sea had a simplicity and an intensity which it would be hard to match. It was not even plagued by hope. It was just perfect communion and rest and the kind of joy which comes when the beloved and one’s own soul become so mingled with the external world that there is a place made for once upon the planet where stones and tufts of grass and transparent water and the quiet sound of the wind can really be. It was perhaps the other side of the diptych from last night’s moment of seeing Julian in the twilight lying motionless beside the road. But it was not really connected, as moments of pure joy are not really connected with anything. And human life which has such moments has surely put a trembling finger upon nature’s most transcendent aim.