by Iris Murdoch
My gaze, after wandering vaguely about the room, fastened on Hugo’s desk. I looked at it for a while. Then I got up and approached it. I opened the top drawer. Inside the drawer, half hidden by a pile of empty files, was a copy of The Silencer. I took it out. On the first blank sheet Hugo had written his name in large letters. I turned over the pages. Here and there Hugo had underlined passages, put crosses and question-marks in the margin; and at one place there was a pencilled note, Ask J. This filled me with pain, and I closed the book and thrust it into my pocket. I glanced at the other contents of the drawers, and then I opened the top of the desk. It was crammed with letters and papers. I began very quickly to turn these over. As I delved further into boxes and pigeon-holes a flood of papers began to cascade on to the floor. I could not find what I wanted.
Old letters and bills and blunt pencils and sealing-wax and boxes of matches and many kinds of paper clips and half-empty books of stamps and obsolete cheque-books streamed through my fingers. In a small drawer I came upon a collection of sinister-looking objects which I identified as Belfounder’s Domestic Detonators, of a rather smaller variety than the one which had liberated us from the film studio. Another drawer contained a pearl necklace: perhaps a gift bought with tender care and destined for Sadie, which now would never reach her; or which she had returned, and it had arrived one morning in a registered packet and lain there for days because Hugo had not had the heart to undo it. But I could not find what I wanted.
I sat down and took an empty sheet of paper. I wanted to write a letter to Hugo. I took one of Hugo’s pens and Hugo’s ink. A starling flew in at the window, saw me, and flew out again. There was a soft chattering on the balustrade. I looked up at the blue sky above it. Hugo, I wrote on the paper. Then I could think of nothing more to say. I thought of putting Send me your Nottingham address, but this sounded too weak and impersonal and I didn’t write it down. In the end I just drew a curving line across the page, and signed my name at the bottom of it, adding the address of Mrs Tinckham’s shop. I put the note in an envelope and balanced it on the bookcase and prepared to leave. As I turned, something caught my eye in the wall behind the bookcase. It was the green door of a safe.
I paused, and then moved the bookcase out a little from the wall. I pulled at the safe door, but it was locked. I stood looking at it pensively. Then it was clear to me what I must do. I went back to the desk and took from the drawer one of Belfounder’s Domestic Detonators. I fingered this small explosive, wondering how powerful it was. I wondered this in a detached sort of way as I fumbled in my pocket for matches. The detonator was cone-shaped. I ran my finger over the door of the safe, trying to find some crack into which I could fit the point of the cone, but the whole thing was as smooth as a bishop’s hand, even the hinges were stowed away inside. There were no crevices, neither were there any protuberances on which I might have tried to balance the detonator. Eventually I took a roll of stamp paper from Hugo’s desk and with this I glued the object on at what seemed to be the point of maximum vulnerability on the lock side of the door. A small cotton fuse protruded from the blunt end, like the blue paper of a firework. I applied a lighted match to this and retired to the other end of the room. I watched thoughtfully. I think I would not have been either very surprised or very moved if the whole wall had suddenly disintegrated in a cloud of wood and plaster, revealing the open sky and a view of St Paul’s.
There was a bright flash and a crack. I shut my eyes. The room was filled with smoke, and a cloud of starlings flew up from under the balustrade. When I opened my eyes I saw through the sulphurous mist that the door of the safe had swung open and was dangling towards the floor on one hinge. No other damage had been done. I came forward and looked inside the safe. Its interior consisted of two deep shelves. On the lower shelf there was what appeared to be a great deal of money, done up in bundles of one-pound and five-pound notes. On the upper shelf I saw what I wanted.
There were two packets of letters. I took them out. There was a small packet, in a neat self-conscious hand which I recognized as Sadie’s. The other packet was very much larger. I flicked it over as one flicks a pack of cards. All these letters were from Anna. ‘Beautiful letters,’ Hugo had called them. Guilt and triumph and despair battled in me as I clutched them. I sat down on the settee. Now I would see that which I had been unable to imagine. I drew out the first envelope.
At that moment I heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up, with a great screeching of brakes, in the street outside. I hesitated. I was blushing and trembling. I got up and climbed on to a chair and put my head out of the window, still holding the letters in my hand. A lorry had drawn up outside the door. I watched it for a moment, but nobody emerged, so I got down again. I looked at the envelope; and as I did so I saw as in a vision the dark wood and the figure of Anna stepping into it barefoot. My fingers fumbled with the letter inside. It was a letter of many pages. I began to unfold it. Then I heard the sound of a car. It approached with a strong crescendo and then stopped. I stood rigid, cursing to myself. I climbed on to the chair again. Far below I saw Hugo’s black Alvis. It was drawn up in the road just behind the lorry. An emotion which was neither pleasure nor fear but a mixture of both made me watch the car with a fast-beating heart. I shivered. Hugo was imminent.
Someone got out of the car. But it was not Hugo. I stared for a moment. Then I recognized the fair head and slim figure of Lefty. I watched with parted lips, gripping the edge of the window. Lefty was standing on the pavement, consulting with two men who had just climbed out of the lorry. The strong sun cast their tall shadows upon the pavement. Then I saw across the windscreen of the Alvis the letters NISP. And I understood. I leapt down from the chair. I whirled about and looked at the room as a man might look for a foothold upon a crumbling mountain-side. I snatched up my note to Hugo and put it in my pocket. I stood for a moment paralysed. Then far below I could hear feet upon the stairs. I took in the scene: the rifled desk, the open safe. I looked at the letters which I still held in my hand, and I slipped the one which I had been opening back into the packet. I held them for a second longer and made as if to put them into my pocket. But it was impossible. They were burning my hand. I hurled them back into the safe. Then I selected the largest of the bundles of one-pound notes and thrust it inside my coat. ‘That’s something the Revolution won’t get!’ I said out loud; and I made for the door.
I crossed the landing in three strides, and as I entered Hugo’s kitchen I could hear Lefty’s voice on the stairs. I opened the kitchen window and vaulted out on to the flat roof. I walked firmly across the roof. The skylights of the next door office building were propped wide open to the summer afternoon. I lowered myself through one of them, and found myself on a deserted landing. I began to descend the stairs, and a minute or two later emerged from a door into a side alley. I walked back on to the street and crossed the road; and as I walked nonchalantly past Hugo’s house on the other side they were already carrying out the Renoirs.
Twenty
MARS was delighted to see me. He had been shut in all day. I fed him, and made up the rest of his meat into a parcel. Then I packed some of my clothes into a bag. There were a few letters and a package for me in the hall; I stuffed them into the bag too without looking at them. I wrote a note to Dave, thanking him for his hospitality, and I left the house with Mars.
We got on to an eighty-eight bus. Mars provoked a flood of remarks from the conductor. We sat in the front seat on top, the seat in which I had sat not so very long ago thinking about Anna until I had had to get off the bus and go looking for her. And as I looked down now on the crowds in Oxford Street and stroked Mars’s head I felt neither happy nor sad, only rather unreal, like a man shut in a glass. Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this
shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
So I reflected; and was reluctant to get off the bus. But when we reached Oxford Circus I rose and pulled Mars after me down the stairs. It was the rush hour. I threaded my way through the crowd with the dog at my heels, and turned down Rathbone Place. Soho was hot and dusty, sulky idle and senseless with the afternoon. People stood about waiting for opening time. In an upper room someone was playing a piano. Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it, going away into the distance. I walked along Charlotte Street. The scene trembled and shimmered before me perhaps with the heat or perhaps with fear. Like one pursued I quickened my step.
Mrs Tinckham’s voice came to me out of the wreaths of tobacco smoke. She seemed to have been expecting me. But then she always expected me. I sat down at the little table.
‘Hello, dearie,’ said Mrs Tinck, ‘you’ve been a long time.’
‘It took a long time,’ I said.
Mars sniffed discreetly at one or two of the nearest cats. They seemed to have got used to him and merely turned away their delicate heads and blinked. Behind Mrs Tinck they rose, tier upon tier, and I could see their eyes through the smoke like the lights of a railway termint in the fog. Mars lay down at my feet.
I stretched out my legs. ‘What about a drink?’ I said to Mrs Tinckham. ‘It’s nearly opening time.’
‘Whisky and soda?’ she said. I could hear the glass clinking under the counter and the gurgle of the whisky and the fizz of the soda. Mrs Tinckham passed it to me and I threw my head back and closed my eyes. Very distantly the wireless was murmuring like the voice of another world. The sounds of a Soho evening came in through the doorway. I could feel Mars leaning against my foot. I took two gulps of the whisky; it ran through me like quickgold and, almost physically, I felt a sort of shiver of possibility. I opened my eyes and found Mrs Tinckham looking at me. She had something on the counter under her hand. I recognized it as the parcel containing my manuscripts. I reached out for it and she passed it over without a word.
I laid the parcel on the table. Then I extracted from my bag the small pile of letters which I had brought from Dave’s. I saw at once that there was a letter from Sadie among them, and I set that one aside.
‘Do you mind if I read my letters?’ I said to Mrs Tinckham.
‘Do what you please, dear,’ said Mrs Tinck. ‘I’ll get on with my story. I’m just at the exciting part.’
I didn’t want to open Sadie’s letter first. So I took up a letter with a London postmark and an unfamiliar hand and opened it It was from Lefty. I read it through several times and I smiled. Lefty wrote in an elegant and faintly rhetorical manner with colons, semi-colons, and parentheses. His first paragraph dealt with our night beside the Thames: a midsummer night’s dream Lefty said it had been for him; he only hoped that he had not played the ass. He seemed to remember talking his head off. He went on to say that he was sorry to hear that I had been ill. He suggested that when I felt better I should come and call on him: and if I felt I could do any sort of political work he would be glad, but that I should call anyway; after all, life wasn’t entirely a matter of politics, was it? I got a good impression from this letter; and although I doubted whether Lefty really entertained the final sentiment I felt that here I had to do with a man.
I pocketed Lefty’s letter and turned my attention to the package. I had already noticed out of the corner of my eye that it came from France. I began to tear it open. It was from Jean Pierre and it contained a copy of Nous Les Vainqueurs with an extremely Gallic superscription addressed to myself in Jean Pierre’s flowing hand. I looked at the book with some emotion. Then I drew out my penknife and opened the first few pages. Before I knew what had happened I had read as far as page five. The impression was startling. Jean Pierre had always been a deft storyteller. But I felt at once that there was more here than deftness. The style had hardened, the manner was confident, the pace long and slow. Something had changed. Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing. I could feel the wind blowing from the first pages of Nous Les Vainqueurs and it blew strongly and tasted fresh. ‘So far,’ I said to myself, ‘so good.’ Something had changed; it would be time enough later on to decide what it was. I looked at Jean Pierre’s name on the cover - and felt for the first time that perhaps after all we were entered for the same competition. And as I found myself thinking this thought I shook my head and laid the book aside.
I selected next a letter in an unknown hand with an Irish stamp on it. I opened it. There was a brief and nearly illegible note inside. It took me a long time to realize that this letter was from Finn. When I did decipher the signature I felt distressed and shocked. It was an odd fact that I had never before received any communication in writing from Finn. We normally communicated by phone or telegram when we were not together; and indeed some of my friends had once had a theory that Finn couldn’t write. What Finn’s letter said was the following.
DEAR JAKE,
I am sorry I went off without seeing you. It was just when you were in Paris. I thought it was time to go back then because of the money. You know how I often thought of going back before. I’ll be in Dublin now and the Pearl Bar will always find me. I think they forward letters, I haven’t got a place to live yet. Hoping to see you when you come over to the Emerald Isle. Remember me to David.
yrs
P. O‘FINNEY
This letter upset me extremely and I exclaimed to Mrs Tinckham, ‘Finn’s gone back to Ireland!’
‘I know,’ said Mrs Tinck.
‘You know?’ I cried. ‘How?’
‘He told me,’ said Mrs Tinck.
The notion that Finn had made a confidant of Mrs Tinckham came to me for the first time and rushed in an instant from possibility to probability. ‘He told you just before he went?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Tinckham, ‘and earlier too. But he must have told you he wanted to go back?’
‘He did, now I come to think of it,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t believe him.’ And somehow this phrase had a familiar ring. ‘I’m a fool,’ I said. Mrs Tinckham didn’t dispute this.
‘Did he have any special reasons for going?’ I asked her. I felt pain and indignation at having to ask Mrs Tinckham questions about Finn; but I needed to know. I looked at her old placid face. She was blowing smoke rings; and I knew that she would tell me nothing.
‘He just wanted to go home, I suppose,’ said Mrs Tinckham. ‘I imagine there were people there he wanted to see. And there’s always religion,’ she added vaguely.
I looked down at the table, and I could feel on my brow a gentle pressure which was the gaze of Mrs Tinckham and half a dozen cats. I felt ashamed, ashamed of being parted from Finn, of having known so little about Finn, of having conceived things as I pleased and not as they were. ‘Well, he’s gone,’ I said.
‘You’ll see him in Dublin,’ said Mrs Tinckham.
I tried to imagine this; Finn at home and I a visitor. I shook my head. ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. I knew that Mrs Tinckham understood.
‘You never know what you won’t want to do when the time comes,’ said Mrs Tinckham in the vague tone in which she utters those remarks of hers which may be deep counsel or may be senseless. I looked up at her quickly. The wireless murmured on and the cigarette smoke drifted between us like a veil, shifting its layers very gently in the slow summer air from the doorway. She blinked at me and her pupils seemed narrowed to vertical slits.
‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said to her.
‘That always the best thing to say, isn’t it, dear?’ said Mrs Tinckham.
At last I took up Sadie�
�s letter. I was extremely nervous of it. I felt sure that it would contain something unpleasant. Mars stirred at my feet and snuffed against my shoe. I opened the envelope. There were two enclosures which I set aside and unfolded a long perfumed sheet down which a narrow column of writing flowed in Sadie’s elegant hand. Her letter read as follows.
DARLING JAKE,
About that wretched dog - you must think me awful not to have written sooner, but the truth is that your letter got mixed up with the most enormous pile of fan mail. (What a problem that is! One never knows whether to look at the stuff or not. Just to see it there is rather uplifting for the ego - though I suppose it does undermine the character a bit. Not that I’d ever dream of reading it even if I had time. My secretary just classifies it into cretins for, cretins against, cranks, professionals, intellectuals, religious, and offers of marriage!) I must say, I was just a little hurt by the tone of your letter - that is, until I realized that of course you didn’t write it. (Did you, darling?)
Yes, now about the dog. The fact is, S. and I have so much on our hands at the moment we really can’t cope with the brute. (You’ve no idea what a bother an animal picture is. The most impossible men in tweeds come in and wander about the set — and the next thing is the Dumb Friends’ League are sending in spies disguised as continuity girls.) S. thought the easiest thing would be for you to keep him if you’d like to. That is, we’d expect you to buy him, of course. (Sorry to be a business girl, but one has to watch the cash, with the cost of living and partly living what it is, and the income tax people absolutely inventing ways to make one poor. Anyway, it’s S.’s thing, you know, not mine. I’m just writing on his behalf.) I should say £700 and call it quits. That covers all film rights, book rights, ad. rights, and so on. (You’ve no idea how many rights there are in this business! Talk about the Rights of Dog!) Of course he’s a bargain at the price But S. got him cheap in fact, and we only want to cover our costs. If you’d like to buy, perhaps you’d get in touch with my solicitor - I enclose his card, if I’ve remembered to do so. If you don’t want to buy perhaps you’d get in touch anyhow and make some arrangement about returning the animal. Sorry not to look after this in person; I’m madly busy getting ready to go to the States. By the way, if you do decide to buy the dog, don’t forget to work the ads. I enclose (ditto) a letter from the dog-biscuit people, I forget their name. They want to use photos or something. Whatever they offer, ask for twice.
