The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Rachel, there’s been a car accident, they’ve telephoned, she’s hurt? What’s happened, what’s happened?’

  Rachel sat down on a chair in the hall and began to moan, uttering great terrible ringing moans, swaying herself to and fro.

  ‘Rachel – something terrible has happened to Julian – what is it? Oh God, what has happened?’

  Rachel got up after a moment or two, still moaning and supporting herself against the wall. Her hair was a thick tangled frizzy mass, like the hair of the insane, torn at and dragged across her brow and eyes. Her mouth, all wet, was open and shuddering. Her eyes, oozing great tears, were slits between the swollen lids. Laboriously, like an animal, she pushed past me, still leaning with one hand on the wall, and made her way towards the door of the drawing – room. She pushed it open and made a gesture forward. I followed her into the doorway.

  Arnold was lying on the floor near to the window. The sun was shining in from the garden, lighting up the brown tweed of his trousers, but his head was in shadow. My eyes strained and blinked, as if trying to see into another dimension. Arnold’s head was lying on something strange on the floor, rather like a tray. His head was lying in a red wet stain which had soaked the carpet round about it. I went closer and leaned over.

  Arnold lay sideways, his knees up, one hand palm upwards extended towards my foot. His eyes were half closed, showing a glint of white eye – ball, his teeth were gritted together and the lips slightly withdrawn from them as if in a snarl. There was blood caking his pale tossed hair and dried in marbled patterns on his cheek and neck. I could see that the skull was appallingly dinted at the side, the darkened hair descending into the depression, as if Arnold’s head had been made of wax and someone had pressed strong fingers hard in. A vein at the temple still oozed a little.

  A large poker was lying on the carpet where the blood was. The blood was red and sticky, the consistency of custard, skinning a little on the surface. I touched, then held, Arnold’s tweedy shoulder, warm with the sun, trying to stir him a little, but he seemed as weighty as lead, bolted to the floor, or else my trembling limbs had no strength. I stepped back with blood upon my shoes, and trod upon Arnold’s glasses which were lying just beyond the circle of blood.

  ‘Oh God – you did that – with the poker – ’

  She whispered, ‘He’s dead – he must be – is he?’

  ‘I don’t know – Oh God – ’

  ‘He’s dead, he’s dead,’ she – whispered,

  ‘Have you sent for the – Oh Christ – what happened – ’

  ‘I hit him – we were shouting – I didn’t mean – then he started screaming with pain – I couldn’t bear to hear him screaming like that – I hit him again to stop him screaming – ’

  ‘We must hide the poker – you must say it was an accident – Oh what shall we do – He can’t be dead, he can’t be – ’

  ‘I kept calling him and calling him and calling him, but he wouldn’t move.’ Rachel was still whispering, standing in the doorway of the room. She had stopped crying and her staring eyes seemed larger and wider, she kept rubbing her hands rhythmically upon her dress.

  ‘He may be all right,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. Did you ring the doctor?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Did you ring the doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll get the doctor – And the police – I suppose – And an ambulance – Tell them he fell and hit his head or something – Oh Christ – I’ll take the poker away anyhow – Better say he hit you and – ’

  I picked up the poker. I stared for a moment at Arnold’s face. The sightless eye – glint was terrible. I felt sick urgent panic, the desire to hand this nightmare over as quickly as possible to somebody else. As I moved towards the door I saw something on the floor near Rachel’s feet. A screwed – up ball of paper. Arnold’s writing. I picked it up and brushed past her where she still stood leaning in the doorway. I went out into the kitchen and put the poker down on the table. The ball of paper was Arnold’s letter to me about Christian. I took out a box of matches and began to burn the letter in the sink. It kept falling into a basin of water since my hands would not obey me. When at last I had reduced it to ashes I turned the tap on it. Then I started washing the poker. Some of Arnold’s hair was stuck to it with blood. I dried it and put it away in a cupboard.

  ‘Rachel, I’m going to telephone. Shall I telephone just a doctor or the police as well? What are you going to say?’

  ‘It’s no good – ’ She turned back into the hall, and we stood there together in the dim light beside the stained glass panel of the front door.

  ‘You mean it’s no good not telling the truth?’

  ‘No good – ’

  ‘But you must tell them it was an accident – that he hit you first – that it was self – defence – Rachel, shall I telephone the police? Oh do please try to think – ’

  She murmured something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dobbin. Dobbin. My darling – ’

  I realized, as she now turned away, that this must be her pet name for Arnold which in all the years I had known them I had never heard her utter. Arnold’s secret name. She turned away from me and went into the dining – room, where I heard her fall, on to the floor or perhaps into a chair. I heard her begin to lament once more, a short cry, then a shuddering ‘fa – fa – fa – ’ then the cry again, I went back into the drawing – room to see if Arnold had moved. I almost feared to see him opening accusing eyes, wriggling with the pain which Rachel had found so unendurable. He had not moved. His position seemed now as inevitable as that of a statue. Already he did not look like himself any more, his grimacing expression that of a complete stranger, expressing, like a chinaman, some quite strange and unrecognizable emotion. His sharp nose was red with blood, and there was a little puddle of blood in his ear. The white eye glinted, the pained mouth snarled. As I turned from him I noticed his small feet, which I had always found so characteristic and so annoying, clad in immaculately polished brown shoes, lying neatly together as if comforting each other. And as I moved to the door I now saw little smears of blood everywhere, on the chairs, on the wall, on the tiles of the fireplace, where in some unimaginable scene in some quite other region of the world he had reeled about; and saw upon the carpet the shadowy marks of bloody footprints, his, Rachel’s, mine.

  I got to the telephone in the hall. Rachel’s cries were softening into little almost dreamy wails. I dialled 999 and got a hospital and said there had been a bad accident and asked for an ambulance. ‘A man has hurt his head. His skull cracked, I think. Yes.’ Then after a moment’s hesitation I rang the police and said the same things. My own fear of the police made any other course unthinkable. Rachel was right, concealment was not possible, better to reveal all at once, anything was better than the horror of being ‘found out’. It was no good saying Arnold had fallen downstairs. Rachel was in no condition to be taught a cover story. She would blurt out the truth in any case.

  I went into the dining – room and looked at her. She was sitting on the floor with her mouth wide open and her two hands squeezing either side of her face. I saw her mouth as a round O, she looked subhuman and damned, her face without features, her flesh drained and blue, like those who live underground. ‘Rachel. Don’t worry. They’re coming.’

  ‘Dobbin. Dobbin. Dobbin.’

  I went out and sat on the stairs and found that I was saying ‘Oh – oh – oh – oh – ’ and could not stop.

  The police arrived first. I let them in and pointed to the back room. Through the open front door I saw the sunny street and cars coming, an ambulance. I heard somebody say, ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ask Mrs Baffin. In there.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  Men in dark clothes were coming in, then men in white clothes. The dining – room was shut. I was explaining who Arnold was, who I was, how I came to be there.

  ‘Cracked his skull
like an egg shell.’

  Rachel screamed behind a closed door.

  ‘Come with us, please.’

  I sat in a police car between two men. I started explaining again. I said, ‘He hit her, I think. It was an accident. It wasn’t murder.’

  At the police station I told them all over again who I was. I sat with several men in a small room.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Why did you kill Arnold Baffin?’

  ‘I didn’t kill Arnold Baffin.’

  ‘What did you hit him with?’

  ‘I didn’t hit him.’

  ‘Why did you do it? Why did you do it? Why did you kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  Postscript by Bradley Pearson

  How little in fact any human being understands about anything the practice of the arts soon teaches one. An inch away from the world one is accustomed to there are other worlds in which one is a complete stranger. Nature normally heals with oblivious forgetfulness those who are rudely hustled by circumstance from one into another. But if after reflection and with deliberation one attempts with words to create bridges and to open vistas one soon finds out how puny is one’s power to describe or to connect. Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. Most artists are the minor poets of their little world, who have only one voice and can sing only one song.

  I had the experience of having, as it were, a new character created on me, or to me, in a space of hours. I do not mean the rather pathetic monster which the newspapers invented. I cut a poor figure at the trial. For a short time I was the most unpopular hero in England. Writer Slays His Friend out of Envy, Resentment of Success Led to Writers’ Quarrel, and so on. All that vulgarity passed me by, or rather was transmuted by my consciousness into much longer and more significant shadows. It was like going through a glass and finding oneself inside a picture by Goya. I even began to look different, older, hook – nosed, more grotesque. One paper described me as ‘a failed bitter old man’. I hardly recognized photographs of myself. And I had to live the new being which, as if ready made, had been popped over me like a horrible Goyaesque ass’s head.

  The first days were a maelstrom of confusion, misunderstandings, incredulity. Not only could I not believe what had happened, I could not conceptualize it. However, I am not going to tell anything more of this as a story. The story is over. And what it is the story of I shall attempt in a little while to say. As the time went on I tried various attitudes, said various things, changed my mind, told the truth, then lied, then broke down, was impassive, then devious, then abject. None of this helped at the trial. Rachel in black was a touching figure. Everyone deferred and was sympathetic. The judge had a special inclination of the shoulders and a special grave smile. I do not think anything was planned in cold blood. It occurred to me later that of course the police themselves had decided what had happened, they suggested it to Rachel, they told her what it was all about. She may even have tried to be, at the start, incoherently truthful. But the story was so impossible. The poker, wiped clean of her fingerprints and liberally covered with my own, was soon found. The whole thing was obvious. All Rachel had to do was scream. I for my part acted as guiltily as any man could. Perhaps at moments I almost believed that I had killed him, just as at moments perhaps she almost believed that she had not.

  I was about to write down ‘I do not blame her’, but this would be misleading. It is not exactly, on the other hand, that I blame her. What she did was terrible, both her actions were wicked, the murder and the lie. And I suppose I owe it to her as a kind of duty to see what she did, to look at it and to try to understand it. ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ In a way I might have been flattered. In a way there was something almost to admire, a great spirit, a great will. For of course I did not envisage her as moved by any mere petty pusillanimous desire to preserve herself. What did she feel during the trial and afterwards? Perhaps she thought that I would somehow get off. Perhaps she only settled very gradually with many self – preserving vaguenesses into her final dreadful role.

  There was even a sort of perfection about it. She had taken such a perfect revenge upon the two men in her life. Some women never forgive I would not give him my hair for a bowstring at the end. I would not raise a finger to save him dying.’ Christian had joined Arnold in France, as I learnt much later. But no doubt the will that powered that hammer – blow had been forged much earlier. When I glimpsed it at the start of my narration it was already steely strong. There was, almost, no surprise here. What did surprise me was the strength of Rachel’s feeling for myself. There must have been, to create such a great hate, a very considerable degree of love. I had simply not noticed that Rachel loved me. She must have cared deeply to be able, in order to destroy me, to lie so hugely and so consistently. I ought to have been moved to reverence. Later perhaps I was. No, I do not exactly ‘blame’, though neither do I ‘condone’. I am not sure what ‘forgiveness’ means. I have cut attachments, I have ‘let her off’, I feel no thrilling connection of resentment between us. In some blank way I even wish her well. Forgiveness is often thought of as an emotion. It is not that. It is rather a certain kind of cessation of emotion. So perhaps I do indeed forgive. It matters little what words one uses here. In fact she was an instrument which did me a very great service.

  I did at times accuse her, then withdrew my accusations. It is not altogether easy to save oneself at the expense of another, even justly. I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life. Put any man in the dock and he will feel guilty. I rolled in my guilt, in the very filth of it. Some newspapers said I seemed to enjoy my trial. I did not enjoy it, but I experienced it very intently and fully. My ability to do this was dependent upon the fact that capital punishment had by this time been abolished in England. I could not have faced the hangman with equanimity. The vague prospect of prison affected me, in my enhanced and vivid new consciousness, comparatively little. (It is in fact impossible to imagine beforehand what prolonged imprisonment is like.) I had been forcibly presented with a new mode of being and I was anxious to explore it. I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted. I had never felt more alert and alive in my life, and from the vantage point of my new consciousness I looked back upon what I had been: a timid incomplete resentful man.

  My counsel wished me to plead guilty, and if I had done so a verdict of manslaughter might conceivably have been achieved. (Perhaps Rachel expected this.) I insisted on pleading not guilty, but refused also to offer any coherent account of myself or of what had happened. I did in fact at one point tell the whole truth in court, but my truth was by then so surrounded by my own prevarications and lies that it was never seen to stand out with its own self – guaranteeing clarity. (And it was greeted with such vociferous cries of disgust that the public gallery had to be cleared.) I had decided that I could not accuse myself, but I would not accuse anyone else either. This proved to be, from the point of view of telling any plausible story, an impossible position. In any case, everyone, the judge, the jury, the lawyers, including my own counsel, the press and the public had all made up their minds before the trial even began. The evidence against me was overwhelming. My threatening letter to Arnold was produced and the most damning part of it, which contained an explicit reference to a blunt instrument, was read out with a blood – curdling intonation. But I think what impressed the jury most of all was my having torn up all Arnold’s books. The fragments were actually brought into court in a tea chest. After that I was done for.

  Hartbourne and Francis, in their different ways, did what they could for me. Hartbourne’s line, worked out after discussions with my lawyer, was that I was insane. (‘That cock won’t fight, old man!’ I shouted to him across the court room.) His e
vidence for this view was rather slender. It appeared that I frequently cancelled appointments. (‘Then are we all mad?’ said the prosecuting counsel.) I had forgotten to attend a party which had been arranged in my honour. I was moody and eccentric and absentminded. I imagined myself to be a writer. (‘But he is a writer!’ said the prosecuting counsel. I applauded.) My apparently calm reaction to my sister’s death, which the insanity lobby also tried to use, was later taken over by the prosecution as a proof of my callousness. The climax and raison d’être of the theory was that I had killed Arnold in a brain storm and then forgotten all about it! And if I had displayed uncertainty and clutched my head more often this idea might have been at least worth entertaining. As it was, I appeared as a liar but not as a lunatic. I calmly and lucidly denied that I was mad, and the judge and the jury agreed with me. Hartbourne believed me guilty of course.

  Francis alone did not believe me guilty. However, he was able to render little assistance. He marred his evidence by crying all the way through, which made a bad impression on the jury. And as a ‘character witness’ he was not exactly a felicitous performer. The prosecutor sneered at him openly. And he told so many simple – minded lies and half – lies in his anxiety to defend me that he became in the end something of a figure of fun, even to my own side. The judge treated him with heavy irony. It was, to say the least, unfortunate for me that Francis had not been with me when Rachel telephoned.Francis, latching on to this, soon started saying that he had been: but was then quite unable to give any account of what had happened which could stand up to the simplest queries from the prosecution. The jury clearly believed that Francis was my ‘creature’ and that I had somehow ‘put him up to it’. And the prosecution soon tied him in a knot. ‘Why then did you not accompany the accused to Ealing?’ ‘I had to go out to buy tickets for Venice.’ ‘For Venice?’ ‘Yes, he and I were just going to go to Venice together.’ (Laughter.) In fact, all that Francis managed (quite involuntarily) to contribute to the argument was another sinister theory about my motives, to the effect that I was a homosexual, madly in love with Arnold, and that I had killed him out of jealousy! Some of the lewder newspapers ran this idea for a while. However the judge, probably out of consideration for Rachel’s feelings, did not highlight it in his final summing up.