by Iris Murdoch
Her love affair with Eric—it had been very brief—now seemed to her something so unutterably mean and unworthy that she could not, even when she tried hard to discipline herself to do so, recognise herself as a protagonist. While she was fairly indulgent to others, had been so to Richard, Paula thought that faithfulness in marriage was very important. Infidelity was undignified and usually involved lying or at least half-truths and concealments. Paula cared very much about what might be called “moral style”. Someone had once said of her, not quite justly, “She wouldn’t mind what awful thing you did so long as you didn’t talk about it in a certain kind of way.” In fact Paula had, by the time their marriage ended, almost succeeded in convincing her husband that she hated his lies about his adventures more than she hated the adventures themselves. And what offended her in memory about her own conduct, was not so much that she had actually gone to bed with Eric but that she had half-lied to Richard about it and that she had played a mean scurrying part and become involved in a situation which she did not understand and could not control. She regretted it all with an undying regret which only continual efforts of her reason prevented from utterly poisoning her life.
What would have happened if there had not been that dreadful scene with Richard she did not know, Richard would probably have divorced her in any case, he was savage with resentment. She could not conceive that she could have gone on loving Eric. He had made her lose too much. But what had really, and it seemed instantaneously, destroyed her love was his crushing physical defeat at the hands of Richard. This was unjust, but with the deep dark logical injustice of forces which govern us at our most extreme moments and which, though they have nothing to do with morality, must sometimes be recognised in our lives like gods. That scene still haunted Paula in sleeping and in waking nightmares, Richard’s distorted face, Eric’s screams, the blood that seemed to have got everywhere. Of course they had all pretended that it was an accident.
Poor Eric. He knew the dark decision of the god as well as Paula did and he submitted to it. He was utterly subdued by shame. When Paula visited him in hospital she soon knew that he no longer wanted her to come. They scrambled through their adieus. Eric wrote that he was going to Australia. He wrote from Australia in a letter of farewell that he had met a girl on the boat and was going to marry her. That had been nearly two years ago. Paula did not want to hear from Eric again. She did not want to know that Eric still existed.
The sun dazzled angrily upon the water. Frowning against it she slowly unfolded the letter.
My dearest,
You will be surprised at hearing from me again—or perhaps you will not. I somehow know that you have been thinking about me. When I last wrote to you I thought I was going to be married. Well, all that has fallen through. I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn’t know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long. I write to say that I know now that coming here was a mistake, leaving you was a mistake. And I have decided to come home. In fact when you get this letter I shall already be on the ship.
Of course I do not know what may or may not have happened to you since we parted, but my intuition tells me that you will not have rushed into another marriage. Paula, we are bound together. This is the conclusion to which, in these awful months of misery, I have at last come. There are eternal bonds which are made in registry offices and in churches, there are eternal bonds which are made in other and stranger and more terrible ways. You understand what I mean, Paula. I suffered for you, I was wounded for you, and there is a lack which only you can fill and a pain which only you can cure. I thought I would “get over” what happened. I have not. And I know that you have not either. (I have had the most extraordinary series of dreams about you, by the way.) I think we belong to each other. We must live with what has happened, we must live it into ourselves, and we must do this together. (How very strange the human mind is. I have had many new causes for wretchedness since I came to Australia. People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down. But everything that has made me really miserable has been somehow connected with that, has somehow been that.) You owe this to me, Paula, and I know that you pay your debts. You cannot be happy yourself or feel pleased with the way you behaved to me when I have been (I use the words advisedly) nearly destroyed because I was guilty of loving you. One must acknowledge the past, assimilate it, be reconciled to it. We can heal each other, we can save each other, Paula, and only we can do this for each other. I feel an echo from you deep in my heart and I know that what I say is true. Wait for me, pray for me, receive me, oh my dear. I will write again from the ship. To all eternity Yours
Eric
Paula crumpled up the letter. Then she tore it up into very small pieces and strewed it upon the still taut surface skin of the water. How that letter conjured Eric up, in all the detail which she had mercifully forgotten, like a demon figure in front of her shadowing the bright sea: his forced ecstasies, his mystical certainties, his blend, which she had once found so touching, of weakness and menace, the ruthless cunning of his egoism. Of course she had acted badly, not least in abandoning him so rapidly at the very end. But she had forever been emptied of love for him and of the ability to help him. That was her certainty. Was it true though, Paula asked herself, trying to steady her mind, could she still help Eric, ought she to try? Perhaps he was right to say that there was still something which they had to do for each other. Her heart shuddered at it. At the idea of seeing him again she felt nausea, a kind of sick fright. There was something demoniac about Eric. Paula had never been frightened of Richard, although he was a man who was capable of violence. She knew now that she had been very very frightened of Eric. This was the quality of the love which she had so completely forgotten.
Six
“It was an Abyssinian cat
And on its dulcimer it sat,”
chanted Edward, hauling Montrose out of the basket into which Mingo, repulsed by the cat’s cold stare, had been making tentative and unsuccessful efforts to climb. Mingo climbed in. Affronted, Montrose escaped from Edward on to the stove and fluffed himself out into his bird look.
“May we have that seaweed in our bath tonight?” Henrietta asked Mary Clothier.
“Whatever do you want seaweed in your bath for?” asked Mary.
“It’s our special cure for rheumatism,” said Edward.
“You aren’t suffering from rheumatism, are you, Edward?”
“No, it’s for Uncle Theo really, but we thought we’d better test it ourselves in case there were any toxic effects.”
“Last time you two had seaweed in your bath it all went down the plug and it was stopped up for days,” said Casie, who had just come in with a basket of lettuces and tomatoes.
“We promise we won’t let it go down the plug this time!”
“All right then,” said Mary. “Look, I do wish you’d take those stones out into the garden.”
Kate and Ducane who were passing by the kitchen door smiled at each other and went on into the hall. Ducane called back to the kitchen, “Oh Mary. Kate and I are just going up to see Willy.”
“Well, don’t be late for tea, it’s special Sunday tea.”
“And how is my little nymph?” said Ducane to Barbara, whom they met in the doorway.
“J’aimerais mieux t’avoir dans mon lit que le tonnerre,” replied Barbara primly.
Ducane laughed, reaching out to pluck her hair as she skipped for a few paces beside them.
Barbara was round-faced, like her mother, and had the same shortish slightly fuzzy fair hair, only whereas Kate’s unkempt mop shifted about her like a slightly crazed halo, Barbara’s hair, much more carefully cut, cupped her head like an elaborate filigree head-piece. Her complexion was that of a child, rosy and shiny, with that delicious apple-like shininess which usually disappears in adolescence. Short-skirted, long-legged, barefooted, her prancing feet were the same smooth glowing golden-brown colour as her legs.
“Why don�
��t you go and look for Pierce?” said Kate. “I saw him down by the churchyard and he looked rather lonely to me.”
Barbara shook her head with a virtuous air. “I must go and practise my flute. I’m going to give Willy a Mozart recital.”
“Aren’t you going to give me a Mozart recital?” Ducane asked.
“No. Only Willy.” She skipped away into the house.
“How that child has grown!” said Ducane, “She’s as tall as you. And nearly as pretty.”
“Darling! I’m afraid Pierce and Barbara aren’t exactly hitting it off since she came back.”
“Well, you know what’s the matter. They’re growing up.”
“I know. They do develop early these days. I thought somehow, having been together so much like brother and sister, they’d be sort of inoculated.”
“Nothing inoculates them against that,” said Ducane. And he realised as he spoke that he did not at all like the idea of Barbara being involved in that. He would have liked her never to grow up.
“But this poor chap,” said Kate, reverting to what they had been discussing earlier. “Why did he do it?”
Ducane had not spoken to Kate about the enquiry. Although he had received the news of his task coolly enough from Octavian he was feeling far from happy about it. It was the sort of thing which could turn into an awful mess. It might be very difficult to find out the truth quickly, and impossible to demonstrate that there was no security interest and no case for a more elaborate investigation. However, it was not just the prospect of failing and being discredited which daunted Ducane. He did not like the idea of investigating another man’s private life in this way. Moreover the personality of Radeechy, about whom he had reflected considerably since his arrival in Dorset, now seemed to him both puzzling and sinister. He was sure that the spiritualism, or whatever it was, was connected with the suicide; and he felt instinctively that here, once he had started to pry, he would unearth something very unpleasant indeed.
“I don’t know why he did it,” said Ducane. “He lost his wife lately. That might have been it.”
By this time they had crossed the level lawn behind the house with its two tall feathery acacia trees, climbed over a low palisade of string and sticks which had something to do with the twins, and were climbing a path, made with great labour the previous year by Pierce and Barbara out of pebbles from the beach, between twin hedges of plump veronica bushes. Ducane’s hand passed caressingly over the compact curves of the bushes. At this moment his mind was divided into several compartments or levels. At one level, perhaps the highest, he was thinking about Willy Kost, whom he was so shortly to meet and whom he had not seen now for some time, since on Ducane’s last two weekends Willy had declared by telephone that he wanted no visitors. At another level Ducane was thinking in an upset nervous way about Radeechy and wondering what George Droysen would find out in Fleet Street. At yet another level, or in another compartment, he was miserably recalling his weakness at the end of the scene with Jessica and miserably wondering what on earth he was going to do about her next week.
However, he did not, today, feel too bad about Jessica. Ducane did not usually believe in waiting for the gods to help him out of his follies with miracles, but just today his worry about Jessica had become a little cloudy, softened by a steamy cloud of vague optimism. Somehow or other it could still turn out all right, he felt. This was possibly because, in an adjoining compartment, he was experiencing a pure and intense joy at the presence beside him of Kate, at the proximity of their two bodies, which touched occasionally with a pleasant, clumsy, friendly jostling as they walked along, and at the knowledge, with him as a physical aura rather than a thought, that he would kiss Kate when they reached the beech wood.
There was also elsewhere, at what was by no means the lowest level, though it was certainly the least articulate, a consciousness of his surroundings, a participation, an extension of himself into nature, into the compact curvy veronica bushes, into the spherical huge-leaved catalpa tree at the end of the garden, into the rosy sun-warmed bricks of the wall, through an archway in which they were now passing. These bricks were so old and worn and pitted, so edgeless and cornerless, that they looked like a natural conglomeration of red stones or playthings of the sea. Everything in Dorset is round, thought Ducane. The little hills are round, these bricks are round, the yew trees that grow in the hedgerows are round, the veronica bushes, the catalpa tree, the crowns of the acacia, the pebbles on the beach, the clump of small bamboos beside the arch. He thought, everything in Dorset is just the right size. This thought gave him immense satisfaction and sent out through the other layers and compartments of his mind a stream of warm and soothing particles. Thus he walked on with Kate at his side, conveying along with him his jumbled cloud of thoughts whose self-protective and self-adjusting chemistry is known as mental health.
They were walking now in a narrow lane with high sloping banks up which white flowering nettles and willow herb crawled out of a matrix of tall yellow moss, so dry and dusty-looking in the hot sun that it scarcely seemed like vegetation. There was an old thick powdery smell, perhaps the smell of the moss. A cuckoo called nearby in the wood above, clear, cool, precise, hollow, mad. Kate took hold of Ducane’s hand.
“I think I won’t come in with you to Willy’s,” said Kate. “He’s been rather down lately and I’m sure it’s better if you see him alone. I don’t think Willy will ever kill himself, do you, John?”
Willy Kost was given to announcing from time to time that his life was an unbearable burden and he proposed shortly to terminate it.
“I don’t know,” said Ducane.
He felt that he had not done enough for Willy. Most people who knew Willy felt this. But he was not an easy person to help. Ducane had first met Willy, who was a classical scholar living on a pension from the German government and working on an edition of Propertius, at a meeting in London at which Ducane was reading a rather obscure little paper on the concept of specificatio in Roman law. He had been responsible for removing Willy from a bed-sitter in Fulham and installing him at Trescombe Cottage. He had often wondered since whether this was not a mistake. He had conceived of providing his friend with the protection of a household. But in fact Willy was able to be as solitary as he pleased.
“I don’t think that if he was really seriously contemplating suicide he would let the children come to him the way he does,” said Kate. While adult visitors were often barred, the children came and went freely at the cottage.
“Yes, I think that’s true. I wonder, when he won’t let any of us see him, if he’s really working?”
“Or just brooding and remembering. It’s awful to think of.”
“I’ve never felt any inclination to commit suicide, have you, Kate?”
“Good heavens no! But then for me life’s always been such fun.”
“It’s hard for people like us with ordinary healthy minds,” said Ducane, “to imagine what it would be like for one’s whole mode of consciousness to be painful, to be hell.”
“I know. All those things he must remember and dream about.”
Willy Kost had spent the war in Dachau.
“I wish Theo would try to see more of him,” said Ducane.
“Theo! He’s a broken reed if ever there was one. He’s just a bundle of nerves himself. You should see more of Willy. You can talk directly to people and tell them what to do. Most of us are afraid to.”
“Sounds awful!” said Ducane and laughed.
“Seriously. I’m sure it would do Willy good if he were just forced to tell somebody what it was like in that camp. I think he’s never uttered a word about it to anyone.”
“I doubt if you are right. I can even imagine how difficult that might be,” said Ducane. But the same idea had come to him before.
“One must be reconciled to the past,” said Kate.
“When one’s suffered injustice and affliction on the scale on which Willy’s suffered it,” said Ducane, “it may just not be
possible.”
“Not possible to forgive?”
“Certainly not possible to forgive. Perhaps not possible to find any way of—thinking about it at all.”
Ducane’s imagination had often wrestled in vain with the question of what it must be like to be Willy Kost.
“I used to think he’d somehow break down with Mary,” said Kate. “She really knows him best, apart from you I mean. But she says he hasn’t talked to her at all about—that.”
Ducane was thinking, we’ve nearly reached the wood, we’ve nearly reached the wood. The first shadows fell across them, the cuckoo uttered from farther off his crazed lascivious cry.
“Let’s sit down here for a minute,” said Kate.
There was a clean grey shaft of fallen tree from which a skirt of dry curled golden-brown beech leaves descended on either side. They sat down upon it, their feet rustling the dry leaves, and turned to face each other.
Kate took Ducane by the shoulders, studying him intently. Ducane looked into the intense streaky smudgy dark blue of her eyes. They both sighed. Then Kate kissed him with a slow and lingering motion. Ducane closed his eyes, turning his head now from the intensity of the kiss, and clutched her very closely against him, feeling the wiry imprint of her springy hair upon his cheek. They remained motionless for some time.
“Oh God, you do make me happy,” said Kate.
“You make me happy too.” He set her away from him again, smiling at her, feeling relaxed and free now, desiring her but not with anguish, seeing behind her the brown carpeted emptiness of the wood, while the sun glittered above them in shoals of semi-transparent leaves.
“You look more like the Duke of Wellington than ever. I love that little crest of grey hair that’s coming right in the front. It is all right, isn’t it, John?”
“Yes,” he said gravely. “Yes. I have thought about it a lot and I do think it is all right.”
“Octavian—well, you know what Octavian feels. You understand everything.”
