Under the Net

by Iris Murdoch

‘You can still try to bargain,’ said Dave. He was now changing over from making the worst of the affair to making the best of it. ‘It is conceivable that they might indeed need the dog at once, or they might be worried about its welfare and make you an offer so as to get it quickly. And to make you an offer might be their best course if they are at all uneasy about the felony question. Whether they are uneasy may depend upon an unknown factor, which is the behaviour and state of mind of your Madge.’

  I think I felt more pessimistic at this point than Dave did. ‘It’s hopeless!’ I said. ‘All I wanted was to prevent them from using the typescript. Since that’s impossible, I’d better start thinking about what I’m going to say in court!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Dave. ‘Try to bargain, if only to save your face. You might appeal here to the sporting spirit of this Starfield.’

  This made me wince. I had no further wish to be beholden to Sammy’s sportsmanship. ‘I had rather deal with Sadie,’ I said.

  ‘Well, write to her,’ said Dave; ‘we will compose the letter together. But first we must decide in what persona you are writing, whether as an injured party or as a simple blackmailer. And remember,’ he added, ‘with whom we have to deal. It is my view that if these people at any moment want back their animal they will not trouble with bargains or with the police, they will discover where it is and send four strong men in a car to get it.’

  We were cut short at this point by a thunderous knocking at the front door.

  ‘Police!’ said Finn. I thought it was more likely to be Sammy’s strong men. We looked at each other. Mars growled, his fur rising. The knocking was repeated.

  ‘We’ll let on not to be in,’ said Finn in a whisper. Mars let out a couple of deafening barks.

  ‘That’s given that away!’ said Dave.

  ‘Let’s go and look at them through the glass of the door,’ I said, ‘and see how many there are.’

  I was ready to fight for Mars, unless of course it should turn out to be the police. We walked softly out into the hall. The stained glass of Dave’s front door gave us a jagged image of what lay beyond it. There seemed to be only one person there.

  ‘The rest are in wait on the steps,’ said Finn.

  ‘Oh, damn this!’ I said, and opened the door.

  ‘Two wires for Donaghue,’ said a telegraph boy.

  I took them, and he disappeared down the stairs. Finn and Dave were laughing, but I shivered with apprehension as I tore open the first telegram. At that moment everything was alarming. I read it through several times. Then I walked back into the sitting-room. What it said was: Come Paris Hotel Prince de Cleves at once by air for important talk stop all expenses paid stop thirsty pounds immediate outlay under separate cover Madge.

  ‘What is it?’ said Finn and Dave, following me. I gave it to them to read. The other wire was the order for the thirty pounds.

  We all sat down. ‘What will this be for?’ asked Dave.

  ‘I haven’t got the remotest notion,’ I said. What in the world could Madge be up to now? It was all curiously unreal. Except for the thirty pounds. That was real; like the next morning object which proves that it wasn’t all a dream. What was Madge doing in Paris? A fever of curiosity was already raging in my blood. In an instant I had run over a dozen possibilities without finding one that was plausible.

  ‘I shall go, of course,’ I said thoughtfully to the other two. Madge’s wire was from every point of view a very welcome development. It wasn’t that I was exactly bored with my blackmail scheme; but it had turned out to be rather disappointing and its final stages were likely to be frustrating and mechanical. Perhaps indeed the best thing would be to abandon it altogether. I need small persuading to go to Paris at any time; least of all now, when Anna was there. Or rather Anna might be there. But no, she must be there, I felt, so charged with her presence was the image of that city which now rose up before me; and already in my mind I was walking with Anna along the Champs-Élysées, while the warm breeze of an eternal Parisian spring blew into our faces like drifting flowers the promises of a coming felicity.

  ‘And you would leave us to hold up the baby?’ Dave was incoherent with indignation. ‘You commit stealing and blackmail and when all is confusion you go off to Paris and leave here your stolen property to be found by the police, no?’

  ‘All expenses paid,’ said Finn.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I won’t stay long, only half a day if need be. I’ll just see what Madge wants. If trouble breaks out here you can cable me and I’ll be back in a few hours.’

  Dave calmed down a little. ‘Can you not wait?’ he said.

  ‘It sounds so urgent,’ I told him, ‘and there may be money in it.’ The all expenses paid aspect had suggested this to me very strongly.

  This made Dave more thoughtful. ‘All right,’ he said, after a little more discussion, ‘you may as well earn your bail. But first we must decide what letter to write, and second, you must leave us much money to feed the animal and in case there is a crisis.’

  ‘There’s no difficulty about money,’ I told him, nursing a secure feeling about Sammy’s cheque.

  Then a dreadful thought spun me round like a bullet in the shoulder. Of course, as soon as Sammy had heard who it was that had kidnapped Mars he would have stopped the cheque. I leapt out of my chair.

  ‘What is it now?’ said Dave. ‘You are getting on my nerves.’

  How far would Sammy’s sporting instincts extend? Not that far, I was pretty sure. Or would it depend how angry he was? A mental picture of his sitting-room as I had last seen it rose before me and I groaned. The only possibility was that he might have forgotten about the cheque altogether.

  ‘You spoke to Sammy personally on the phone?’ I asked Dave.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘from a call box, of course.’

  ‘And was he angry?’

  ‘He was murderous,’ said Dave.

  ‘Did he say anything special?’ I asked.

  ‘Now I come to think of it,’ said Dave, ‘he did. I meant to tell you earlier. He said, tell Donaghue he can have the girl and I’m keeping the cash.’

  I could have wept. Then of course I had to tell them all about it. I went and fetched the cheque and we looked at it together. It was like viewing the corpse of a loved one. Finn said he had never seen a cheque for so much money. Even Dave was moved.

  ‘Now I must go to Paris!’ I said. With the world owing me so much money something radical had to be done at once.

  Finn was studying Sammy’s statement of account. ‘There’s still Lyrebird,“ he said. ’He can’t take that back.‘

  ‘It only hasn’t won yet!’ said Dave.

  ‘You two watch the papers,’ I said. ‘I’ve got about sixty pounds in the bank. How much can you put up, Finn?’

  ‘Ten pounds,’ he said.

  ‘And you, Dave?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ said Dave.

  Finally we agreed that a stake of fifty pounds should go on the horse from the three of us. We were all a little unhinged still by the loss of the six hundred and thirty-three pounds ten.

  After that we discussed the question of the letter. I maintained my view that our dealing should be with Sadie. I was still wounded by Dave’s conjecture, and I recalled with some distress how Sadie had said that she liked me. If there had been more time I would have speculated about whether this had influenced my decision. It wasn’t, however, a moment for indulging in analyses of motive. If one has good reasons for an action one should not be deterred from doing it because one may also have bad reasons. I decided that scruples were out of place here. Sadie was more intelligent than Sammy, and as far as this adventure was concerned Sadie was the boss. Also she had not had her curtains wrenched out of the wall and her sitting-room turned upside down. That Sadie might still fancy me was neither here nor there. I didn’t like it, all the same, and I was impatient to be off.

  We agreed finally that Dave should write a simple letter over my signature to Sadie
proposing an exchange of Mars for a formal recognition of my status in the matter of the translation and an adequate compensation for the use which had been made of it. We argued for some time about what compensation we should demand. ‘What are you after,’ as Dave put it, ‘restitution, damages, or revenge?’ Finn thought that we should make it a straight case of blackmail and ask for as much as we thought we could get by the detention of Mars together with veiled hints about a possible deterioration in his health, and suggested five hundred pounds. Dave thought that we should only ask whatever might have been the fee charged for a preview of the translation. He said that he had no idea what this would be, and that strictly it was owed to the publisher and not to me, but that in the circumstances and in order to uphold my dignity I might ask for fifty pounds. I thought that I needed to receive not only the regular fee but also compensation for the theft of the typescript, and suggested modestly two hundred pounds.

  In the end we fixed the sum at a hundred pounds. I felt this was very tame; but I was now thoroughly obsessed by the idea of going to Paris and I would have agreed to anything. I signed my name at the foot of a number of sheets of paper, on one of which Dave was to type the letter when he had drafted it along the lines we had agreed upon. Dave wanted me to suggest some endearments or personal touches which could be added to make the letter look more authentic; but I insisted that it must remain completely impersonal and businesslike. I very reluctantly gave Dave a blank cheque. Then I set off to Victoria to catch the night ferry, in order to save money and because I am nervous of air travel.

  Fourteen

  I FIND that sea voyages promote reflection. Not that the ferry can strictly be called a sea voyage in the ordinary sense. A necessary element in the experience of travelling by boat is the smell; whereas one of the special features of the night ferry is that one encounters the kinaesthetic sensations of a boat combined with the olfactory sensations of a train. It was in the midst of such a dérèglement de tous les sens that I now lay thinking about Hugo.

  My interview with Hugo could hardly be said to have been a success; on the other hand it hadn’t exactly been a failure either. I had acquainted Hugo with something which he needed to know, and we had exchanged not unfriendly words. We had even had an adventure together in the course of which I had acquitted myself at least without shame. In a sense it could be said that the ice was broken between us. But it is possible to break the ice without burying the hatchet. As I had been rather busy since my meeting with Hugo I had not yet had time to brood upon my impressions. I now gathered them all together and began to turn them over one by one. I remembered vividly my first sight of Hugo, as he stood there at the top of the steps, like the tsar of all the Russias. He seemed to me now, as I lay upon my undulating pillow, an image of mystery and power. I felt more than ever certain that we had not finished with each other. To whatever effect the threads of my destiny might be interwoven with his, the tangle had yet to be unravelled. So strongly did this come upon me that I found myself regretting that I had to go to Paris and surrender, even for one day, the possibility of seeing him again.

  What had not been made at all clear by our interview, and from this point of view it could be said to have been a failure, were Hugo’s present feelings towards me. He had not, it is true, displayed any overt hostility. His behaviour had been, if anything, rather casual. But was this a bad sign or a good sign? I recalled in detail Hugo’s expression, his tone of voice, his gestures even, and compared them with earlier memories, but without reaching any conclusion. How fed up Hugo was with me still remained to be seen. I then thought about The Silencer and could not help wishing that Sadie and Sammy could have chosen some place other than Sadie’s kitchen for their conspiratorial talk. I would, all things considered, have preferred to have retrieved the book and been without the information, and so been spared a great deal of trouble, past and to come; for I didn’t seriously imagine that my warning to Hugo had any importance save as a gesture of good will. As for the book itself, it figured in my mind, not only as a casus belli between myself and Hugo, but as a constellation of ideas which I could no longer be so disloyal as to pretend to be discontinuous with the rest of my universe. I must reconsider what I had said. But where could I find a copy now? It occurred to me that I might perhaps take off Jean Pierre, if he still had it, the copy which I had sent him on publication and which I could be fairly certain that he had never opened. The thought of Jean Pierre led me on to thoughts of Paris, beautiful, cruel, tender, disquieting, enchanting city, and on these I slept and dreamed of Anna.

  Arriving in Paris always causes me pain, even when I have been away for only a short while. It is a city which I never fail to approach with expectation and leave with disappointment. There is a question which only I can ask and which only Paris can answer; but this question is something which I have never yet been able to formulate. Certain things indeed I have learnt here: for instance, that my happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away. But Paris remains for me still an unresolved harmony. It is the only city which I can personify. London I know too well, and the others I do not love enough. Paris I encounter, but as one encounters a loved one, in the end and dumbly, and can scarcely speak a word. Alors, Paris, qu‘est-ce que tu dis, toi? Paris, dis-moi ce que j’aime. But there is no reply, only the sad echo from crumbling walls, Paris.

  When I arrived I felt in no violent hurry to see Madge. I was for letting the usual spell bind me; life has so few moments which announce themselves as sacred. Later on would be soon enough to start thinking the thoughts, whatever they might be, which my interview with Madge would compel me to think; and as I wandered towards the Seine I felt sure that, wherever the line was to be drawn between appearance and reality, what I now experienced was for me the real. The prospect of Madge paled like a candle. It was that time of the morning when mysterious rivers, guided by bits of old sacking, flow round and round the gutters of Paris. The cloudless light drew a wash of colour along the grey facades of the quais and made them look as soft and deep as icing sugar. There are details which even the most tender memory will mislay. The shutter-softened houses with their high foreheads. I leaned for a long time, looking into the mirror of the Pont Neuf, whose round arches make with their reflections a perfect O, in which one cannot tell what is reflected and what is not, so still is the Seine with a glassy stillness which the tidal Thames can never achieve. I leaned there and thought of Anna, who had made this city exist for me in a new proliferation of detail when, after having known it for many years, I first showed it to her.

  At last I began to want my breakfast. I began walking in the direction of Madge’s hotel, and sat down en route at a café not far from the Opéra. Here I began to notice the more mundane details of the busy city; and after I had been sitting there for a while a sort of stir upon the pavement just beside the café began to catch my eye. Several men in shirt sleeves were standing about as if they were expecting something. I looked at them with vague interest; and I soon divined that they were emanating from a bookshop which stood next door to the café. I wondered for a while what it was they were waiting for. They hung about, looking down the street, returned into the bookshop, and then came out again and waited all agog. After a while I turned to study the shop, and there I saw something which explained the scene. The main window was completely empty, and across it in enormous letters were written the words PRIX GONCOURT. When the big literary prizes are awarded each year the publishers of books which are thought to be hopeful candidates stand by, ready to turn out at a moment’s notice a huge new edition of the winning book. This work, reprinted in tens of thousands, is then rushed pell-mell to the bookshops, so that before the news has lost its savour the public can gorge its fill of this hallmarked piece of literature. In preparation for this event all bookshops which have any intellectual pretensions clear their best windows and stand ready to welcome in the winner as it arrives with the break-neck speed of a stop-press edition.


  I sat drinking my coffee and watching this scene and reflecting on the difference between French and English literary maurs, when there was a screaming of brakes and a lorry drew up sharply at the kerb. The shirt-sleeved men precipitated themselves upon it, and in a moment they had formed a chain along which bundles of books were tossed rapidly from hand to hand. Inside the shop I could see that others were anxiously setting up the cardboard display cases in the empty window which, in a few minutes, was to be crammed from end to end with the monotonous and triumphant repetition of the winner’s name. The whole episode had the hasty precision of a police raid. I watched with amusement as the lorry was emptied; while behind me now the window was whitening with books. I turned to inspect it; and there I saw something which stopped my smile abruptly.

  Across the whole window, with the emotional emphasis of a repeated cry, I saw the name of Jean Pierre Breteuil; and underneath it in parallel repetition, NOUS LES VAINQUEURS NOUS LES VAINQUEURS NOUS LES VAINQUEURS. I started from my seat. I looked again at the notice which said PRIX GONCOURT. There could be no doubt about it. I paid my bill and went and stood by the window, while under my eyes the message was repeated ten, a hundred, five hundred times. Jean Pierre Breteuil NOUS LES VAINQUEURS. The mountain of books rose slowly in front of me; there was not one dissentient voice. It rose to a peak. The last book was put in place on the very top, and then the shop assistants came crowding out to see how it looked from the front. The name and the title swam before my eyes, and I turned away.

  It was only then that it struck me as shocking that my predominant emotion was distress. It was a distress, too, which went so deep that I was at first at a loss to understand it. I walked at random trying to sort the matter out. I was of course very surprised to find Jean Pierre in the role of a Goncourt winner. The Goncourt jury, that constellation of glorious names, might sometimes err, but they would never make a crass or fantastic mistake. That their coronation of Jean Pierre represented a moment of sheer insanity was a theory which I could set aside. I had not read the book. The alternative remained open, and the more I reflected the more it appeared to be the only alternative, that Jean Pierre had at last written a good novel.