A Fairly Honourable Defeat

by Iris Murdoch

  He opened a white door in the wall to reveal a long wardrobe, and took out his evening clothes which he laid upon a chair. He found white evening shirt and tie in a drawer. Without haste he began to change. He put his day clothes with clean shirts and socks into a small suitcase. He pulled on the black evening trousers and began to adjust the tie at the mirror. Morgan watched. At one point she groaned.

  ‘And now, Mrs B., as I am going away for the weekend without returning here, and as I do not want to leave a naked woman in possession of my flat I must request you to dress and go. I think I have been very patient with an extremely rude and thoughtless intrusion. ’

  ‘I’ll write you a letter of apology!’

  ‘Come along.’ Julius picked up Morgan’s bundle of clothes and threw them onto the bed. He fetched her handbag and shoes and the pair of scissors from the sitting room. ‘I shall retire to the bathroom and not embarrass you by watching you dress. We leave in three minutes.’

  ‘You look wonderful in evening clothes,’ said Morgan. ‘I love your mouth and I should like to kiss it, but I’d be content to kiss your feet if that was all you would allow.’

  ‘Will you please start to get dressed?’

  ‘No,’ said Morgan. ‘I like it here. And I don’t believe that you’re going away for the weekend. No one goes away for the weekend directly after a dinner party. I shall wait here until you come back. And if you don’t come back till Monday I shall wait till Monday.’

  ‘Are you trying to provoke me to violence,’ said Julius, ‘in the hope that if I touch you I shall find your charms irresistible? I might even be tempted to disillusion you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, touch me, Julius, seize me, be rough to me. Hold me and subdue me. Come, let us start it all again at the beginning. Let us cut up the paper again. Remember how I was holding the scissors and you put your hand on top of mine in order to guide it. And we had been laughing. And then we stopped laughing—’

  While she was speaking, Julius had picked up the scissors.

  Morgan’s voice trailed away into silence.

  He stood holding the scissors and staring down at her intently. She became rigid, putting her hand to her breast, to her throat. She remained quite still as he now moved towards the bed.

  Julius picked up the white nylon dress with the navy blue spots and the little-girl collar. He sat down on a chair, drawing the dress across his knee. He began very carefully to fold it. Morgan released a sighing breath. She watched him fascinated. When at last the scissors bit into the material she shuddered slightly. But she watched in silence until the entire dress had been cut through, first one way and then the other. Julius shook the thick pad of folded nylon and what had been the dress fluttered out in a long chain of white spotted links, each link evenly cut in a zig-zag pattern. He gave the chain a light tug and it parted and he let it fall in a heap on the floor. He rose to his feet and kicked it aside.

  ‘You love me,’ said Morgan.

  Julius picked up the black lacy petticoat and began to cut it straight across into narrow black strips, pulling the material tight and letting the flashing scissors rip through it. After that he cut the black brassière and matching pants into ribbons. The suspender belt was rather harder to cut, and Julius contented himself with dividing it into four pieces. The stockings he folded two ways and cut briskly through, tossing the fragments away with the point of the scissors.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Morgan. ‘You are wonderful.’

  Julius stooped and gathered together the ribbony silky pieces of white dress and black underclothes and threw them into a heap in the hall. He put the scissors back into Morgan’s bag and threw the bag onto the bed.

  ‘Who but you,’ said Morgan, ‘would think of cutting a girl’s clothes into ribbons.’

  Julius opened the wardrobe and took out a light raincoat and threw it over his arm. He picked up the small suitcase.

  ‘That was even better than cutting the paper,’ she said.

  Julius went out of the bedroom into the sitting room. Morgan pulled herself out of the bed and followed him through, excited, swaggering, happily naked.

  ‘After that you can’t possibly go, Julius. Don’t you see you’ve given in, you really have?’

  Julius was putting the scattered pages of The Times together again. He folded the paper and thrust it into his suitcase.

  ‘Dear, dear Julius—’

  He passed her by and went to the bedroom. He closed the door and turned the key in the lock. He thrust the key into his pocket and went to the front door.

  ‘Julius—’

  He opened the front door and went out, closing it quietly behind him. His footsteps receded down the stairs.

  His departure was so sudden, the transition from presence to absence so fast, that Morgan was quite stunned. She stood in the middle of the room in a state of shock, one arm outstretched, surrounded by a sudden silence behind which, outside the double-glazed windows, murmured the interminable traffic of Brook Street. She said ‘Oh!’ Then she ran to the window just in time to see Julius getting into a taxi. She said, ‘Good God!’

  When Morgan had told Julius that she had wept for him in hotel rooms and thought about him ceaselessly ever since their parting she had told the truth. She had not begun to ‘get over’ him, except perhaps in the rudimentary but not unimportant sense of having survived a certain number of days without seeing him. What she did not tell him was that she had despaired. Morgan had seen something in those later days with Julius which had seemed like a deep truth. It had been like a mystical vision into the heart of reality, as if one were to be promised the secret of the universe and then, with all the sense of significance and finality fully preserved, to be shown a few mouldering chicken bones lying in a dark corner covered with dust and filth.

  Morgan had loved Julius with her whole nature and in the first shock of that love she had found it impossible not to believe that Julius loved her. Such is the natural illusion of a lover. She had heard Julius’s faintly accented, faintly stammering voice saying over and over again, ‘I am not in love with you. I have nothing to offer you except completely superficial emotions. Such emotions do not endure. These will not.’ But the sound throbbed in her ears like the ceaseless cooing of a dove which said, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ What she had, through some strange agency, perceived at the very end was that Julius did not in fact love her. She had perceived an immense coldness from which she had recoiled shuddering and it was to save herself from the icy contact that she had at last fled from the house, packing feverishly, throwing her things together and weeping with haste, on one afternoon when Julius was absent at a conference. How she had been able to sense that deep cold she did not later know, and could not recall any definite change in Julius’s behaviour. Surely he had been as ardent as before. Yet it had seemed to her that she had been driven away, even discarded.

  Later it all looked different again. There was simpler suffering, tearful self-pitying misery in those hotels, the horrible business of the abortion through which she had passed in a coma of grief, the dead time in Vermont. Morgan forgot the details and no longer wondered why or what. She simply felt that she had suffered an inevitable loss which had almost completely crushed her but which possibly she might survive. It scarcely mattered whether she did or not. Each day just had to be got through somehow. Then she began to feel a faint interest, and at last an urgent need to go home to England. She began to need to see Hilda.

  Morgan’s relationship with Hilda was probably the only thing in her life which was so deeply buried that it had never been subjected to any strain or touched by any critical doubt. Of course their relations had sometimes been stormy, especially when they were younger. But Morgan since infancy had accepted Hilda as her shield, the more unquestioningly as it became clear that Morgan was ‘the clever one’. Hilda had never resented that. It was known between them that Hilda had a kind of human strength and a kind of authority to which Morgan did not aspire. It was Hilda who was t
he deeply rooted tree. Morgan had indeed drawn a picture of this tree, the Hilda-tree, when she was six years old and had drawn a little bird in the branches which she announced to be herself. The girls were from the first bound to each other more closely than to their parents. Morgan saw later on how much this had hurt their mother from whom most of all they drew away into the secret society of each other’s company. With their father, a vague rather sybaritic man, an unambitious solicitor, they played the parts of merry affectionate little girls, pretending to be little children in the knowing way that little children pretend. The parts were simple and the need they met was simple too. The more complex hunger of their mother they were unable to satisfy. She died fairly young. Their father, who died many years later, never knew that his wife had yearned so grievously for the love and trust of her two daughters. She had watched the secretive little faces timidly and in vain. Hilda and Morgan had spoken of this much later. It was something about which they both thought for many years before, at what seemed to be the proper moment, revealing their thoughts to each other. The deferred confession, the emotional discussion not without the shedding of tears, consoled them both and mitigated a sense of guilt.

  The cosmic explosion of falling in love with Julius interrupted Morgan’s converse with Hilda as it interrupted everything else in her life. Morgan’s marriage had not touched the deep bond with her sister. It remained, often seemingly like a conspiracy, unaltered in the midst of change. Julius of course did not really damage it either. But it was for a long time impossible for Morgan, as she lingered on miserably in America, to think of seeing Hilda or of writing to her frankly. Trying to analyse why this was Morgan concluded that she felt ashamed. Defeated and discredited certainly, and also ashamed. She had always been terrifyingly vulnerable to Hilda’s opinion of her. ‘Be gentle. You can wound me with your little finger.’ That Hilda disliked her relationship with Tallis had seemed to Morgan to operate at one stage as a motive in its favour. Had she married Tallis as an act of defiance against Hilda and was her marriage nothing but an accident in the long drama of her relations with her sister? Of course this was absurd. Later and more soberly she felt that Hilda’s opposition had probably undermined her marriage. After the débâcle in South Carolina, as one day after another was lived through somehow, the need for Hilda began gradually to reassert itself, the old magnetism made itself felt in the deepest places of her heart. Hilda, destroyer and preserver. It was here that defeat must be acknowledged and shame overcome. What had been done amiss could here, and only here, be looked at steadily.

  Yet oddly enough, the glare and violence which had, for a time, blotted out Hilda’s image had not obscured Tallis’s. While she lived with Julius Morgan thought about Tallis every day, but she did so in an odd way. She had told Hilda about seeing his face at night, those great wide open light brown eyes, radiant not accusing. It occurred to Morgan that she did not then, and scarcely even later, connect her immediate sense of guilt with Tallis personally. There was some general situation in which Morgan had failed. Hilda had been right to say that some very stiff pride, some extremely precious sense of herself, of her dignity and her integrity, had been damaged by the adventure with Julius. But her relationship with Tallis, and this was something she had noticed about it much earlier, was in some way temporarily strange. It was as if she had known Tallis for a very long time, as if he were something which was diffused and general in her life. This sense of his not being quite temporarily located had once seemed, though later she could not see why, an argument for his importance. She had more lately decided that this lack of location was simply something to do with Tallis’s own peculiar vagueness, something almost physical about him. Whatever it was, one effect of it was to make her sense of guilt in relation to him less than urgent. If she had offended Tallis she had offended him years ago, years before she knew him, years before either of them was born.

  Of course coming home had brought Tallis more into focus. But still she could think about him constantly, and much more than she ever admitted to Hilda, without feeling any need to act. So it was that she had been able to sit, in the way which so much puzzled Rupert, in S.W.10, thinking about her husband in W.11, and deferring any plan to go and see him. What made that situation suddenly intolerable for Morgan was the fact that Tallis had met Julius. Why that was so awful, even more awful than Tallis’s knowing that she had returned without telling him, she was not entirely sure. It was as if the whole hideous mess represented by Tallis had been in an instant potentiated by the appalling power of the resuscitation, in as it seemed to her an even more violent form, of her love for Julius.

  She had known perfectly well that she had not got over Julius. She had known it with sickening violence when she had seen his picture in the Evening Standard on the evening of her arrival, and had found herself the next second hoping and then believing that he had come to England to see her. She had tried, and tried very hard, to steady herself, to go on behaving as a convalescent. She had attempted to go quietly on with Hilda’s view of the situation. But all the while she had been secretly vibrating with a dark excitement which she had known to be unhealthy and possibly evil. She surrendered herself at last to destiny, that wicked and consoling force, the destiny which made it certain that her path would cross again with that of Julius. When he had come, in order to find her, there could be no doubt at all about that, to Priory Grove, she had felt herself indeed to be in the hands of gods.

  The conversation in the Old Brompton Road was more like an experience of the inferno, but lovers are accustomed to fire. The fate of the child, the child whom she had mentioned to no one, not even to Hilda, and which she had never for a second thought about as a human individual, burdened her suddenly, an indissoluble lump in her inside like a second pregnancy. She had indeed treated the child, as she had told Julius, as a disease to be got rid of, as a growth. That Julius might have cared about the child and wanted it, that the child might have reunited them, that everything might have become unimaginably different and better, these were thoughts which she simply dared not now permit herself to think if she wished to retain her sanity. Mercifully perhaps the other shock, of the encounter between Julius and Tallis, distracted her from this peculiar pain and made it urgent that she should see her husband. She felt a strange impulse to defend Tallis against Julius, against Julius’s belittling contempt, against the rays of sheer personal power which emanated from her former lover. She also felt, with the fearful renewal of her love for Julius, the need somehow to settle with Tallis, to deal with him, to put him, for the moment at any rate, somehow or other out of the way. Of Julius’s other words, his coldness and his apparent unwillingness to see her, she made and thought very little.

  With Tallis she had been determined to be cool. There was, she felt, no action now of gentleness or love which could genuinely profit her, or even him. All kindness must mislead. What she feared most of all was a renewal of that fatal gushing tenderness, that pitiful ‘animal’ feeling which she had described to Hilda, and which had made it seem to her long ago that Tallis was the one man whom it was impossible to leave, the being whom it would be her happiness to render happy. How much joy this happiness, his amazed humble sense of his luck, had given her once. But that way pity lay and dangerous and tender tears. Morgan had realized, as soon as she was inside the door, how hard it was going to be not to weaken and to make him, even for a moment, happy once again. She had at the same time realized what it was that could save her: contempt. That which was at the opposite extreme from love: the cynicism of a deliberate contemptuous diminution of another person. As she profited by it she thought, I am seeing him as Julius sees him.

  Of course Tallis was not ‘settled’. But he was for the moment put aside. The road away from Notting Hill was the road back to Julius. Come what may, she would try again. Julius: the second adventure. And let the gods decide. Now as she watched Julius’s taxi recede and vanish she felt shock, but rather joyful shock. Julius had said terrible things, but his
tongue had always been terrible. What gave her hope was his assault on her clothes. This act of violence did not belong to the conduct of a man who did not care. Julius cared. It was such a deeply characteristic action, and indifference does not produce such actions. She had seen Julius in this mood before when he had carefully and ruthlessly dissected a hat of hers which she had gleefully reported to have been much admired at a garden party at Dibbins by a colleague who had been making tentative advances. Julius’s reaction had thrilled her with alarm and joy. After the destruction of the hat, it is true, they had gone to bed.

  Standing, still rather dazed, upon the thick tawny Indian carpet beside the window in Julius’s sitting room Morgan became aware of another curious feature of her situation. She was completely naked. She went to the bedroom door and shook the handle. Locked. She leaned against the door and pushed. Well and truly locked. She paused for thought. She was beginning to feel the tiniest bit cold. The telephone: but the telephone was in the bedroom. Then she began to search the rest of the flat. No garment of any kind was to be found. No friendly mackintosh hanging behind the door, no capacious bathrobe in the bathroom, no odd jacket and trousers tossed down in a corner. Julius was a fanatically neat man. Of course all his clothes would be hanging on hangers in that inaccessible and now so highly desirable wardrobe. What was more, not only were there no garments, there seemed to be no loose textiles of any description, except for one rather exiguous washing up cloth and a very damp towel in the bathroom. There weren’t even any rugs and the bath mat was made of cork. There were the sitting room curtains, of course. The kitchen and bathroom had frosted glass and were curtainless.

  Alert but not yet anxious she surveyed the curtains. Inner curtains semi-transparent nylon. Outer curtains thick blue velvet stiffly embroidered with golden threads. The windows were tall and the tops of the curtains well out of reach, even if she were to stand on any available piece of furniture. Of course a stout pair of scissors would soon make two half curtains available to her. But could she find a stout pair of scissors? Her own scissors were incarcerated in the bedroom. A search of the kitchen revealed nothing handier than a carving knife, and armed with this Morgan advanced upon the curtains, only to become instantly aware of two things. It is practically impossible to cut through thick velvet curtains stiffly embroidered with gold thread with a bluntish carving knife. And in any case the curtains would be useless to her except possibly for purposes of keeping warm. She had vaguely intended to fashion them into a makeshift dress, but they were so very stiff and thick, and would be extremely difficult to sew, even if, which she was not, she were able to cut them up, and even if, which there were not, there were any sewing materials available in the flat. I could probably get the curtains down by just hauling the rail out of the wall, she thought, but what’s the use? Well, I may yet need them as bed clothes if I have to stay here till Monday!