by Iris Murdoch
‘Yes—all your stuff here—I locked it up. Would you like to look?’
‘Yes, please. Tallis, I want us to be very quiet and business-like. No emotional talk. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. The stuff’s here, in the room opposite.’
‘Could I see it at once please? I have an engagement at six.’
Tallis made an inarticulate noise which sounded half laugh half moan. Then he said, ‘I don’t know where the key is.’ He turned and began scrabbling among the things piled on the dresser. Something fell and broke. He uttered a long ‘Ooooh—’ He dragged out a bunch of keys and opened the kitchen door with his head still turned away from her, but she could see that his face was screwed up. She looked at his back and at his flapping bedroom slippers with the trodden-down heels. She said to herself, no tenderness, no pity, nothing. I must see him as a puppet. I must go through this like a machine. She felt sick and breathless but dry-eyed.
Tallis unlocked a door. ‘I’m afraid there’s an awful jumble in here. I just put it all in here when we moved. I kept meaning to—I think the manuscripts are all there in the corner. But perhaps you’d like to look at the rest. There’s—clothes and things—’
‘You might have kept the place dusted.’ A cloud of dust seemed to hang in the doorway like a curtain. Morgan sneezed.
‘Dusted!’ Again the laugh and the moan.
‘Would you mind leaving me to look round?’ said Morgan. ‘I’ll be about ten minutes.’
‘Shall I shut the door?’
‘No, leave it open. I don’t want to stifle. Could you open that window, if you can get to it.’
‘It’s stuck, won’t open.’
‘Well, never mind, thank you, thank you.’
Tallis vanished, the kitchen door closed. Morgan half closed the door of the room and sat down upon a trunk and covered her face.
At any rate I’ve seen him, she thought. Something of the worst is over. That particular shock can never happen again. I’ve managed to stay upright. She had been feeling so sick all day, like an examination sickness. She had made herself wait until five o’clock to be more sure of finding him in. She did not want to have to walk down that street twice. Her imagination could not beforehand frame the moment of meeting. It was as if at that anticipation, her deepest faculties swooned. What she could imagine, and hung onto desperately, was the idea that there would come a moment later on in the day, when she had seen Tallis. When she had seen him and come away. When she would be having a drink with Hilda and telling her about it. Morgan drank a lot of whisky before she left the house. She told no one of her intention.
She had now no memory of what had been said, only of that terrible air of suffering. She tried to remember how much it had irritated her once. Tallis was framed for suffering. Let him suffer. She must remain cold and hard and purposeful and vile. She must keep sharp and rigid her intent to survive, whatever cries were heard, whatever blood was shed. So long as I can keep it all completely dismembered, she thought. Keep everything small and separate and manageable. Frame no general picture. Do not wonder what he is doing now in the kitchen. She thought, and her consciousness seemed to reel at the effort, I simply must not give way to that ghastly heartbreaking tenderness, that animal feeling. For this moment, I must have no heart strings and no heart. She felt giddy. It was as if love or terror or something were trying to thrust itself through into her mind. She felt a pain which was curiously like sexual desire. She knew that in a moment she would be in tears.
Morgan got up. Detail, detail, detail, keep everything small and separate. She closed the door. She breathed in the hot dusty air, expelling it slowly through her mouth. The sun was slanting along the grimy window and the cluttered room was bright and curiously attentive and still, as if all the things in it were watchful and alive. She made herself scan it. The floor was entirely covered. There were three trunks and several suitcases, a lot of cardboard boxes with shop labels on them, several half collapsed heaps of books, and a number of tins. The manuscript notebooks, tied together with string, were in the corner on top of a suitcase. Coats and jackets and jumpers, thick with dust, lay strewn about, together with odd books and pamphlets and off-prints. Morgan kicked a few things aside to clear a space, scuffing up sheets of yellow newspaper which had been laid down as a covering upon the bare floorboards.
She clambered across to the notebooks and slipped the string off. She checked them quickly. Her embryonic articles, the backbone of her book. They looked almost weird to her now. Language, Form or Substance. Association Theory and Homonyms. From De Saussure to Chomsky. The Prague Circle and After. The Real Definition of Phonemes. Towards an Algebra of Language. She tied them up again. There was nothing missing. She would be able to carry them away. She began to look around her at the other things and felt with a sick jerk the appalling reality of the past. All those tins of pâté and jellied chicken and dressed crab and cocktail sausages and lambs’ tongues from Fortnums which she had once suddenly decided to stock the larder with. Why hadn’t they been eaten long ago? Why were they lying here, a little rusty, among these old jerseys which she could now see were moth-eaten? And those awful nightmarish cardboard boxes. During the last period with Tallis, just before, out of her restlessness, she had taken off for that ludicrous philologists’ conference, she had had a bout of frenzied clothes-buying. She always spent money when she was depressed. Dresses, skirts, shoes, even hats, although she hardly ever wore hats. These purchases, which she could not afford, which she had never worn, some of them not even unwrapped, were in those cardboard boxes. They reminded her of what she now knew she had forgotten: the special smell of her unhappiness with Tallis before she even knew that Julius existed.
But had it really been unhappiness? There had been some strange frame of mind which the cardboard boxes now exuded into the thick warm dusty air. She had loved Tallis once. He had utterly pierced her with that agony of protective tenderness, with his quite peculiar unleavableness. And he had exalted her somehow, made her feel that she loved him with the best of herself. She remembered this exaltation and thought now how hopelessly misleading, how fatal that strange idea had been. She simply could not live with that part of herself, it was not operational, it was too small. That love was crippled from the start. Could it have changed in time and did she then believe that it would? Perhaps she had imagined that the rough and tumble of married life would make them both more ordinary with each other, more like warm unreflecting animals sharing a hutch. There had been too much consciousness. Would it all have become easier and better if there had been no Julius? Or would her restlessness have, whatever happened, invented a Julius? He expected too much of me, she thought. No, that wasn’t it, how could it be. He really had so few claims and expectations, perhaps too few. It was as if he bored me, except that it wasn’t boredom. We are made of different material.
‘Can I help?’ said Tallis. He had thrust the door open a little.
‘No, thank you. Well, take these out, could you.’ She thrust the pile of notebooks towards him with her foot. No risking a contact of fingers. Tallis took them away, but was back at the door a moment later as Morgan opened one of the cardboard boxes. To avoid a silence she said, ‘This dress, I’ve never worn it. And it’s too long now.’ She held the dress of dark blue terylene up against herself.
‘You could shorten it,’ said Tallis.
Morgan felt the tears away behind her eyes, gathered, present. She threw the dress down. ‘What a jumble here.’
‘I’m sorry. If I’d known—’
‘Well, you did know.’
‘Yes. I should have—’
‘The moths have got into all these woollies.’
‘I did mean to spray or something—’
‘Why didn’t you eat these tins of pâté and chicken and so on? They’ve probably gone bad by now.’
‘They were your special stuff and I thought—’
‘There was nothing special about them. They were just for eating. Why,
there’s my old necklace of amber beads, I wondered where it was.’
‘I’m afraid it’s still broken,’ said Tallis. He was leaning in the doorway looking down. The tail of the necklace emerged from under some yellowed tissue paper.
Morgan stooped to pull it out. She remembered the clasp had broken and Tallis had said he’d mend it. He liked mending things for her. She recalled the scene in the kitchen. Tallis’s pleased look as he examined the clasp. He hung the necklace on a hook on the dresser and said he would get some Araldite at the ironmongers and mend it. That must have been the evening when she told him she was going to America. The necklace was somehow associated with her departure. She had been a little defiant, Tallis rather silent. They must have both known it was an important step. She left England soon after. And he had not mended the necklace. She avoided looking at him now, knowing that his head was still bent. She glanced at her watch but the dial was hazy. ‘I must keep an eye on the time.’
‘Come into the kitchen for a minute,’ said Tallis.
Morgan blinked hard, dropped the necklace into the mess of moth-eaten woollies, and followed him. Only when she had entered the kitchen and heard the door close behind her did she suddenly feel menaced. She tried the little cough again, but this time it made her feel she was going to be sick. Bitterness rose in her throat.
Tallis very deliberately set the table between them once more. He was looking less pale now and Morgan saw how tired and how dirty he looked. The scanty ginger hair was jagged and uncombed. He wore a shapeless light blue jersey with a crumpled collar and a lot of stains down the front, and rather limp damp-looking grey trousers, baggy at the knees. The big light brown eyes stared at her, not accusingly, but with a kind of amazement. He seemed to be trembling slightly. Morgan avoided looking at the eyes or the mouth. She turned her head, feeling his gaze like a physical ray beating upon her cheek. She leaned back against the dresser. ‘Well?’
‘I think I should be saying “Well?”,’ said Tallis. ‘Are you coming back to me, or are you just visiting?’
Morgan swallowed the bitterness. Some darkness seemed to be hovering just above her head. She said, ‘I didn’t imagine you’d want me to come back.’ She concentrated her attention upon some dirty milk bottles upon the window sill.
‘Of course I want you to come back.’
‘Why “of course”? It’s not simple. It’s certainly not simple for me.’
‘You’re not still with—?’
‘No, that’s over.’
‘Then it’s over, it’s past.’
‘You mean you don’t care?’ she said.
Tallis was silent for a moment. ‘Don’t be a bloody idiot, Morgan. Here you are back again. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t understand you,’ said Morgan. Then she felt, I am not only vile, I’m vulgar. Of course I understand him. He is talking beautiful plain sense and, suddenly, it could be simple. But I won’t let it be. I must act a part, play a scene, to preserve myself, I’ve got to. I ought to show some genuine emotion now, I feel sick enough. I ought to cry. But I won’t. God, I’m a hollow thing.
‘Please don’t—just argue,’ said Tallis. ‘It doesn’t matter about the argument. There is no argument.’
‘I can’t simply come back,’ said Morgan. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me.’
‘You mean something else has got to happen first?’
‘No, no—’
‘I know this house is ghastly. But we could soon clean it up. With you back I’d want to. Everything would be different.’
Morgan imagined herself scrubbing the kitchen floor. Well, why not? ‘Oh, don’t be so irrelevant,’ she said. She took a quick glance at him and saw the small mouth quivering. She thought, I must get away, enough, enough, enough.
‘Morgan, think.’
‘I am thinking. There’s no use in my coming back. I should only run away again. It would all end in tears.’
‘We are in tears anyway.’ The voice was firm enough.
‘You may be,’ said Morgan. She felt exasperated, stronger. ‘But I’m not. I’ve had a wonderful adventurous time these last two years. I’ve really lived. And I’m going to go on having a wonderful adventurous time. I’m not going into any more cages. We ought never to have got married, you and I, as you very well know. We are totally unsuited to each other. I can’t imagine how or why it ever happened. It was a mistake. We never shared our deepest thoughts. I realize that, now that I know myself a good deal better. I imagined I loved you. I didn’t really. Least said soonest mended.’
‘Of course you loved me. And you love me. And I—’
‘Oh, stop it, please. Could you lend me a bag to put those notebooks into? A paper bag will do so long as it’s a fairly strong one.’
Tallis grubbed about under the sink and produced a crumpled paper bag with a string handle. He took the notebooks from the table and put them into the bag. He said, ‘Morgan, I beg you—’
‘And there’s another thing,’ she said hastily. ‘I took all that money out of the bank.’
He stared at her and she looked away.
‘I took the money, your money as well as my money, out of the bank. Or didn’t you notice?’
‘Yes, I noticed.’
‘I’d like to pay you something now. You’ll accept it? Well, why shouldn’t you, it’s your money.’ She fumbled with her handbag. When the cheque book was in her hand she hesitated. She wrote a cheque for a hundred pounds and sighed deeply. ‘Here’s a hundred pounds. I’ll pay you the rest later on.’ She threw the cheque onto the table.
Tallis picked it up and thrust it unfolded into his trousers pocket. ‘Thanks.’
He stood staring at her and now she could not avoid those eyes. No accusation, but the look was hard to bear. She thought, Tallis is like radium. Too much exposure to him damages the tissues. She became aware of a faint strange booming sound. Perhaps it was just the eternal torment of London’s traffic which she had just become aware of. Perhaps it was the blood beating in her ears. Perhaps—
‘Aunt Morgan!’
Peter had pushed open the kitchen door.
‘Oh Peter, Peter!’ Morgan’s relief was intense.
Peter was wearing tight black trousers and a clean open-necked white shirt. He had the air of a young commander.
‘How marvellous, you’re back, you’re back!’ He rushed at her and they embraced higgledy piggledy, laughing and jostling.
‘Peter, you’re so grown up, so handsome, so tall. I’m terribly glad to see you!’
‘Gosh, Aunt Morgan, you look stunning! I say, I’m sorry to butt in.’
Peter was a good head taller than Tallis. Morgan found herself confusedly delighted by his sheer tallness, mingled with her relief at the ending of her tête-à-tête with her husband. Peter’s plump face was rosy and shiny, his long abundant blond hair glowed in the sunshiny air, he shone with health and youth. He was trying to apologize while laughing with pleasure.
‘That’s all right, I was just going,’ said Morgan. She picked up the paper bag. ‘Will you see me along the road, Peter? I’d love to hear all about you.’
Peter opened the kitchen door for her, still laughing and exclaiming. He took the bag out of her hand. ‘Here, let me carry that.’
‘Good—day,’ said Morgan. She had intended to say ‘Good-bye’ but choked upon it. She attempted a smile.
Tallis said nothing. He nodded his head. His face had become harder and more remote. The light brown eyes gazed in her direction without seeming to focus upon her.
Morgan raised a hand in vague salute and quickly followed Peter out of the door. With relief and now almost with joy she breathed the sunny stale air of the shabby street, she looked in wonder at the houses and the blue sky. She thought, I’ve seen him, I’ve done it, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over. I shall tell Hilda all about it over a drink. Oh God, the relief! Whatever the future might hold, whatever, when she came to have intentions and purposes again, she might i
ntend and purpose, the primal shock was over and everything was going to be ever so much easier and nicer. A sudden sense of freedom made her feel light and unconfined as a dancing shadow. She turned, looking up into Peter’s still laughing eyes. They began to chatter incoherently to each other.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘WHAT A BABY SIMON IS!’ said Rupert.
He and Axel with glasses in their hands were standing at the window of Rupert’s study, looking down at the sunlit scene in the garden. Axel stared gloomily at the slim figure of his young lover who was just climbing out of the pool. He said nothing. Hilda, dressed in a pink towelling shift, was stretched out on a blue rug on the flagstones, rubbing a sunburn lotion into her shiny brown legs. Simon looked up and waved. Rupert waved back. Axel almost imperceptibly raised his glass.
‘My God,’ said Rupert, ‘look who’s here!’
Peter and Morgan had just marched out through the French windows.
Hilda began hastily to get up, upsetting the sunburn lotion onto the rug. Simon gave a joyous cry and opened his arms. Axel moved away from the window.
‘Come on, Axel, let’s go down.’
‘I just thought I’d bring him along with me!’ said Morgan.
‘Morgan, how marvellous to see you, I’ve kept missing you. Hello, Peter,’ cried Simon.
‘Evening, Peter. Nice to see you here,’ said Rupert.
‘Where from?’ said Hilda.
‘From Tallis’s,’ said Morgan with a careless air. ‘Give me a drink, will you, someone.’
‘At once, at once,’ cried Simon. ‘I’ll get more glasses. What a bit of luck we dropped in.’
‘You saw Tallis, good, good,’ said Rupert. He smiled approvingly at Morgan, but she was not looking at him.
‘My dear—’ said Hilda, kissing Peter, who moved stiffly away, then patted her at arms’ length.
