A Fairly Honourable Defeat

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I suppose Tallis wants her back,’ said Simon.

  ‘We’ve no evidence one way or the other.’

  ‘But I doubt if she’ll go and I doubt if it would work if she did.’

  ‘Tallis is probably better off on his own,’ said Axel. ‘He’s a natural solitary. I was surprised at his getting married at all and especially to Morgan.’

  ‘I think Morgan is awfully attractive,’ said Simon, and then wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Morgan means well but she’s fundamentally a very silly person. Hilda is far more genuinely a rational being, though like so many women she preferred marriage to the development of her mind. Morgan’s a lightweight.’

  Simon did not care for Axel’s division of humanity into light and heavy weights. He had too clear a notion of which category he might be said to belong to himself. He could never quite understand Axel’s hostility to Morgan. Of late he had very reluctantly suspected that Axel’s old and deep attachment to Julius had been hurt by Julius’s fling with Morgan. Simon was far too diffident to imagine that Axel disliked Morgan because Simon loved her. Yet that in fact was the origin of the dislike.

  ‘I suppose Morgan and Julius have absolutely parted,’ said Simon. ‘Hilda seemed to think that that at least was certain.’

  ‘Haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ll soon know. It’ll be nice to see Julius again.’ What a liar I am, thought Simon.

  ‘I’m glad Julius gave up the germ warfare thing,’ said Axel. ‘I knew he would. I must say I do look forward to seeing him. Julius has style. He is the sort of man who could get away with wearing a monocle.’

  ‘He could get away with anything.’

  ‘He is a most amusing companion.’

  ‘More amusing than me?’

  ‘Why do you make everything personal?’

  ‘But this is personal.’

  ‘You don’t have to amuse me, Simon. I love you.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Simon pressed his arm very slightly against Axel’s back. The contact, which he had been saving up, caused deep joy.

  ‘I’ve always been a bit afraid of Julius really,’ said Simon. This was better, a nearer approach to the truth, a mitigation of the recent lie.

  ‘He can be alarming.’

  ‘He would not be a man to have as an enemy.’

  ‘True. But he’ll never be our enemy so we needn’t worry.’

  ‘I remember someone saying they thought he was a bit ruthless and cynical.’ I am going too far, thought Simon. And in fact I never heard anyone say that. These are my own impressions.

  ‘He’s certainly not cynical,’ said Axel. ‘He may seem so sometimes because he’s exceptionally honest. Dostoevsky says that plain truth is so implausible that most people instinctively mix in a little falsehood. Julius just doesn’t. And as for ruthlessness, a man of principle can seem ruthless to ordinary mortals. Julius isn’t a compromiser.’

  Well I am, thought Simon. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

  ‘Julius is a man with no nonsense about him.’

  I am a man with a lot of nonsense about me, thought Simon. Nonsense is indeed the element in which I live. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Julius might read all your letters if you left him alone in your flat, but he’d be sure to tell you afterwards. He can be tough, but there’s something morally attractive about him.’

  I’m sure I have many attractions, thought Simon, but I doubt if moral attractiveness is one of them. ‘I can see that. Julius is awfully handsome, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. That fair look is so unusual in a Jew. He’s Sephardic, of course.’

  ‘I’d quite forgotten he was a Jew.’ That was another thing. Axel had rather a penchant for Jews.

  ‘Julius is a man almost entirely without vanity,’ said Axel. ‘It’s rare.’

  ‘He always seemed rather proud to me,’ said Simon. Reflection on Julius was bringing back memories of being ignored by him.

  ‘I said vanity,’ said Axel. ‘Not pride. The concepts are different. ’

  Axel, who together with Rupert had read philosophy at Oxford, liked to argue about words. When he carried on these arguments with other Oxford-trained men Simon felt uneasy. Simon had read history of art at the Courtauld. But even about art Axel often contradicted him. And Axel was often right.

  ‘I wonder if Julius will look up Rupert,’ said Simon, ‘or if he’ll keep away?’

  ‘Of course he’ll look up Rupert.’

  ‘Then he may run into Morgan.’

  ‘That’s not our trouble,’ said Axel, pushing the Hillman Minx rapidly across the changing lights.

  ‘Oh dear, we are late, Axel.’

  ‘They’ll be perfectly happy drinking. By the way, for heaven’s sake don’t let’s stay too long. I simply couldn’t get you away last time. Remember the signal. When I start fingering my lapel you make our excuses.’

  ‘Well, don’t do it too soon!’

  ‘You know I hate starting to drink so early in the evening.’

  It was never too early for Simon to start to drink. ‘All right.’

  ‘Rupert drinks too much,’ said Axel.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Axel had sometimes shown signs of wanting to reduce Simon’s ration of alcohol. Simon, who was fond of the stuff, was very anxious to avoid a conflict of wills on this front.

  ‘Yes, he does,’ said Axel. ‘Rupert is so damned high-minded one tends to forget how unstable he is.’

  ‘I would never call Rupert unstable.’

  ‘He’s a terribly emotional man. The rationality is superficial. On the other hand, he’s lucky.’

  ‘You mean he hasn’t been tried? But he’s so intellectual, Axel. That book on philosophy—’

  ‘We shall see, about that so-called book on philosophy. I suspect it will turn out to be a farrago of emotion.’

  ‘Don’t tease Rupert about it, Axel.’

  ‘You’re a kind thoughtful boy, and it was smart of you to remember to buy those flowers for Hilda, though I think you’ve bought an absurdly large bunch.’

  ‘It was meant to be an absurdly large bunch.’

  ‘Well, you can hand it over with a few well-chosen words. Don’t do that Simon, damn you, I’ve told you before!’

  Simon had tilted the driving mirror so that it reflected his own face. ‘Sorry.’ What Simon saw in the mirror: a thin-faced pointed-nosed young man with a prominent rounded lower lip and anxious brown eyes. A lot of very slightly curly carefully kept hair of a darker hue than Rupert’s and worn considerably longer. A delicate dandified head. The similarity of the two brothers resided rather in expression than in feature: a look of gentleness in Rupert and a similar look of diffidence in Simon. Axel, whose eye Simon could now apologetically catch in the re-adjusted mirror, was dark, although his surname was Nilsson and his ancestors were Swedish. Axel’s hair was straight, the colour of rich dark earth, and also worn rather long. His eyebrows were bushy and his eyes a curious colour of light blue-grey. His mouth, though not unduly thin, was straight and rather hard. Some people found this face supercilious and forbidding. Simon thought it beautifully austere. He worshipped the traits of ascetism in one to whom, where love was concerned, nothing was denied.

  ‘For God’s sake stop patting your hair, Simon.’

  ‘Sorry, darling.’

  ‘And I believe you’re wearing that ghastly after-shave lotion again.’

  ‘I didn’t put much on. You can only smell it because it’s so hot in the car.’

  ‘Try to remember you’re male not female, will you?’

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’

  Axel hated the least suggestion of ‘camp’. He banned homosexual jokes and indeed risqué jokes of any kind, nor would he tolerate upon Simon’s lips the cant language of the homosexual world; although he was now prepared with misgivings to accept the word ‘queer’, which Simon represented to him as being by this time a general usage and not a term of art. ‘Nothing,’ declared Axel, ‘is
more boring than homosexuals who can talk about nothing but homosexuality.’ Simon, who almost always gave way to Axel, relinquished these trivia with a certain regret. It was a myth of their relationship that Simon’s life before he met Axel had been depressing and even sordid, but this was only half true. It was indeed Simon’s nature to seek to give his heart, and to want to give it entirely, and unresponsive and unfaithful partners, of whom he had had many, had caused him much unhappiness. Yet he had enjoyed some of his adventures and liked the jokey parochial atmosphere of the gay bars which he had been used to frequent in the old days before Athens and Axel. His philosophy had been: one offers oneself in various quarters and one hopes for love. The love he had hoped for was real love. But the search had had its lighter side.

  In fact Axel did something extremely important for Simon. He made Simon understand for the first time that it was perfectly ordinary to be homosexual. Simon had never exactly felt guilty about his preference. But he had felt it as a peculiarity, something rather nice and even perhaps a bit funny, something rather like a game, but definitely odd, to be concealed, giggled about and endlessly discussed and inspected in the private company of fellow oddities. He had never quite seen it as a fundamental and completely ordinary way of being a human being, which was how Axel saw it. Axel gloomily accepted a degree of discretion which the prejudices of society seemed still to make inevitable. But he refused to belong to a special homosexual ‘world’, to what he called ‘that goddamn secret organization’.

  Simon did his best to change his ways and to drop what Axel referred to as ‘tribal habits’. But sometimes he felt that the change was only superficial and he was almost being guilty of insincerity. He felt uneasy about some of his instincts which he now judged to be frivolous. He speculated endlessly about what Axel really thought about him. He did not doubt Axel’s love. But at the beginning Axel had certainly loved against his better judgement. Was he still doing so? How much did it matter not understanding about the balance of payments? Did Axel think he was stupid? Did he see him as a bit shallow, as a trifle corrupted, even worst of all as rather vulgar?

  A spiteful spectator of the early stages of Simon’s romance had once said to him, ‘Axel says he just adores your particular brand of vulgarity.’ This reported remark tortured Simon until he suddenly realized that Axel could not possibly have made it. Why was this not obvious at once? Because it corresponded to a deep fear. In three years the fear had diminished but not departed. Simon remained diffident and uncertain. ‘You’re a damn muddler, Simon,’ Axel had once said to him angrily. ‘It’s a moral fault and it’s not charming.’ Simon reflected and realized how much in the past he had traded on the charm of a certain fecklessness. (‘Oh you flibbertigibbet, you!’ one of Axel’s predecessors had been used to cry, while Simon hung his head coyly.) Would fecklessness and muddle one day lead him to make a fatal mistake? Could there be a fatal mistake? He thought sometimes of asking Axel this question, but he knew that Axel would not answer it, any more than he would ever answer Simon’s so often repeated cry of ‘Will you love me always?’ ‘How on earth do I know?’ said Axel.

  ‘I will love you forever, Axel, to the end of the world. I give myself to you now and forever. I will be faithful to you always. I rejoice that you exist, that I have met you, that I can touch you, that we live in the same century. I will never cease to bless you for my good fortune.’ Simon could not prevent himself from saying such things constantly. They burst out of him as a paean of thanksgiving at his phenomenal luck in having discovered Axel and at finding that where he loved he also was loved. Axel smiled. Occasionally he said ‘Good’ or ‘You do that’ or ‘That’s all right then’, and pulled Simon’s hair. Sometimes he said, ‘Oh do shut up, Simon. It means nothing.’ Simon was not good at Axel’s moods, whose principle he could not understand. Axel was often gloomy without explanation, and very occasionally made Simon distraught with tenderness and anxiety by bursting into tears. We feel life so differently, thought Simon. Oh what agony it is, he thought, to love somebody so much and not to be him.

  This difference of ‘feel’ was sometimes the occasion of conflict. Simon was greedy for the surface texture of his life whose substance he luxuriously munched second after second as if it were a fruit with a thin soft furry exterior and a firm sweet fleshy inside. Even unhappiness if it were not terrible unhappiness came to him like that. (Terrible unhappiness was different. It divorced him from his body.) Simon loved times of day, eating, drinking, looking, touching. All his experiences were ceremonies. He liked the slow savouring of moments of pleasure and he engineered his life to contain as many of these as possible. It sometimes seemed to him that all his enjoyments were similar in kind though not in degree, whether he was stroking a cat or a Chippendale chair or drinking a dry martini or looking at a picture by Titian or getting into bed with Axel. Whereas Axel had a much more petulant and withdrawn attitude to time, and his life was much more layered and segmented. Simon felt sure that Axel’s delight in Don Giovanni was quite different in kind from his delight in Simon. Axel had secret lives and hidden utterly un-Simon modes of experience. He had a passion for opera. Simon, who detested opera, had pretended for nearly a year to like it until a frenzy of excruciating boredom had wrung the truth from him screaming at last and exposed him to Axel’s bitter reproaches, not for his lack of taste but for his failure to be honest. When they travelled abroad together Simon was an anxious busy greedy tourist while Axel was often maddeningly abstracted from the urgencies of the present. Axel was capable of sitting reading a novel in his hotel and ignoring a great monument at a hundred yards distance. They quarrelled furiously once in Venice when Axel’s dilatoriness made them arrive two days running at the Accademia just when it was shutting.

  My love is never without anxiety, thought Simon, never without pain. Yet perhaps this piercing quality is inseparable from my happiness, from my own peculiar highest best happiness. Could it ever be otherwise? Was it not perhaps quite otherwise for heterosexual married people, for Hilda and Rupert for instance? He could not believe that they lived in this constant condition of ecstatic pain. For Axel not to hurt him terribly in the most ordinary passages of their life together cost them both a kind of effort. There was at every moment total vulnerability. There was a dangerous thrilling trembling inner circuit of the soul. Simon had once tried to explain to Axel about this terrible vulnerability and Axel had not mocked him. Yet Axel had not said, ‘Yes, I feel like that too’. Did love fill Axel’s life in the way that it filled his own? There was peace sometimes at night. Sleeping with someone one loves one escapes from time. Yet there were early morning awakenings too when Simon wondered: what dreadful things lie ahead?

  The light blue Hillman Minx swept into the Boltons. Feathery bushes and plump trees posed motionless with evening against white walls yellowed by a powdery sun. Pink roses clambered upon stucco balustrades and multi-coloured irises peered through painted lattices.

  ‘Yes, I think Tallis is probably in for a bad time,’ said Axel thoughtfully.

  ‘Why now especially?’

  ‘Morgan will make—some ghastly muddle.’

  ‘Poor Tallis.’ And poor Morgan, thought Simon. Poor poor Morgan. Proud Morgan. I must try to help her, he thought. I shall go to her. I shall help her to pick up the pieces. And with the phrase ‘pick up the pieces’ a curious thrill of pleasure shot through him. He would enjoy that somehow, helping Morgan to pick up the pieces.

  The car turned into Priory Grove.

  ‘Oh do look at that poodle, Axel. Isn’t he perfectly sweet?’

  ‘Don’t be soppy, dear boy. Yes, he is rather nice.’

  ‘I do wish we could have a cat, Axel. Don’t you think we could?’

  ‘It would be too much of a responsibility, Simon. We did agree about that before, you know. We’re out all day. How would it get in and out?’

  ‘We could have a cat-flap.’

  ‘A cat-flap! Sorry, no!’

  ‘I would accept the responsibil
ity. And think of the pleasure of a beastie in the house!’

  ‘One beastie in the house is quite enough! We’d be enslaved by the animal.’

  ‘But I’d love that!’

  ‘ “If you want to eat spaghetti you must use your teeth.” Wittgenstein.’

  ‘I don’t think Wittgenstein really said any of those things you say he said!’

  ‘Hell, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to park.’

  ‘When I first knew this road there wasn’t a single car in it.’

  ‘You make that remark every time we go to Rupert’s.’

  ‘Sorry to be such a bore, darling!’

  ‘No, no, it’s rather nice and cosy to hear these repetitions.’

  ‘Axel!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The way your hair grows down the back of your neck drives me completely and absolutely crazy.’

  ‘Good show.’

  ‘Will you love me forever?’

  ‘Haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘I’ll love you forever.’

  ‘Decent of you. Could we get in there, I wonder?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. You’re Apollo and I’m Marsyas. You’ll end by flaying me.’

  ‘That’s an image of love, actually. Apollo and Marsyas.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The agony of Marsyas is the inevitable agony of the human soul in its desire to achieve God.’

  ‘The things you know.’

  ‘The things you failed to learn at the Courtauld.’

  ‘I don’t believe it though. Someone is flayed really. And there’s only blood and pain and no love.’