A Fairly Honourable Defeat

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘If we’d hit someone like that we’d be upset too,’ said Axel.

  ‘I don’t think I could ever hit anyone,’ said Simon.

  ‘Nor could I,’ said Julius.

  ‘You surprise me, Julius,’ said Axel. ‘I think I might be able to.’

  ‘Whom and when?’

  ‘Well—I daresay I could hit Simon under certain circumstances! ’

  Axel and Julius laughed.

  ‘Under what circumstances?’ said Julius.

  They both laughed again.

  Simon thought, quite soon I am probably going to be sick or to burst into tears. I had better get out of the room first. He got up and began to make quietly for the door.

  As he passed behind Axel’s chair Axel reached up a hand and gripped Simon’s jacket. ‘Simon.’

  ‘Yes.’ Simon shuddered.

  ‘I think you were very brave, my darling.’ Axel’s hand fumbled for his arm and squeezed it.

  All is well now between us, thought Simon.

  Axel’s head was turned towards him. Over Axel’s head Simon could see Julius’s face, still radiant with delight. The radiant face compulsively drew Simon’s glance. As he now turned to the door Julius slowly and deliberately winked at him.

  Simon got as far as the kitchen. He thought, I am a rotten swine. He put his head down on the kitchen table and wept.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  AS BIG BEN WAS CHIMING TEN O’CLOCK Rupert Foster entered his room in Whitehall. Give or take a minute or two, this was his invariable time of arrival. The big square window showed him St James’s Park, feathery with high summer, the curving lake pale blue enamel under a clear sky, and the Palace as hazy and tree-blurred as any gentleman’s residence in the deepest country. Rupert sighed with satisfaction.

  He laid his copy of The Times down on the desk. He had almost finished the crossword in the train. He hoped one day to create a record by finishing it. The room was business-like and pleasant. Some of Rupert’s colleagues introduced knick-knacks, coloured photos of the family, even flowers. Rupert could not approve of that. He had gone so far as to adorn the white walls with a set of eighteenth-century architectural drawings which he had bought at a sale. For the rest, there was government furniture of no outstanding ugliness. The carpet was thick, the desk immense. Rupert’s papers were set out in neat piles. Papers in neat piles calm the mind. They were weighted down by water-smooth stones brought back by Rupert and his wife from rivers and seas all over Europe.

  Rupert opened the window and leaned on the ledge looking out. He was not really a man for holidays and he would have been quite happy not to have any. He liked these ordinary days when he felt the orderly rhythm of life as a physical pulse of well-being. He liked his job and he knew that he did it well. He was never in a hurry. When he travelled it was more to please his family than to please himself. And the cottage in Pembrokeshire was his wife’s toy. Hilda enjoyed scrubbing the tables and drying people’s wet clothes and catering for a week at a time. She undoubtedly had, as he often told her, a Robinson Crusoe complex.

  Rupert now woke up every morning with a relieved sense of something nice having happened, and then recalled that his son Peter had decided to return to Cambridge in October after all. Peter’s decision to reject society had been happily short-lived. Hilda’s sister had somehow done the trick, capturing the boy’s affections and making him docile. Peter had even visited his home on two occasions, and had had a long talk with Hilda. It is true that he had chosen times when Rupert would be absent. But Rupert was not unduly worried about Peter’s hostility to himself. It was a phase which would pass. He could remember feeling like that about his own father with whom he had nevertheless been on perfectly good terms generally. Of course he and his father had tended to make a common cause of looking after brother Simon, especially after Rupert’s mother had died.

  It was so important to have innocent affections and people to look after. There had always been Simon. Then Hilda, Peter. Now Morgan too. His dear sister-in-law certainly needed looking after. She was a strange case. He had so often discussed her with Hilda, worrying away at the matter with affectionate puzzlement. Morgan had left her husband in order to live with Julius King. Now she had left Julius too. Or had Julius left her? No one seemed to be quite clear about that. Hilda now professed to think that Morgan would end up by going back home again to Tallis Browne. ‘She loves him, she’s married to him, Tallis is her fate.’ Hilda had not always thought that. It was not plain to Rupert why she thought it now. Hilda was very emotional about her sister and Rupert suspected that this new view was simply the outcome of an increasing hostility to Julius. Rupert could understand how people, especially women, might dislike Julius, always assuming they were not in love with him. Julius was so outrageously honest. He never mixed into his behaviour that hazy little bit of falsehood which most people find necessary for the general easing of social intercourse.

  No, Rupert did not think that his sister-in-law would return to her husband. As he saw it, Morgan was traversing a serious crisis of identity. Morgan posed as an independent and liberated woman, but she had really led a very sheltered life. She had grown up in the shadow of Hilda. Although Morgan was so much cleverer than her sister she had always been both cherished and dominated by Hilda’s simpler, gentler less problematic nature. School and university studies had absorbed the ferocious energy of Morgan’s youth. There had been a few scrappy love affairs. ‘These men are just no match for her!’ he had heard Hilda complaining. Certainly nothing flimsy would do for Morgan. Then there had been what Hilda called ‘the Tallis fantasy’. ‘Morgan’s living in Malory or something.’ Rupert could not quite envisage Tallis as an Arthurian knight. But he could see that the poor fellow could do with a little fantastical refurbishing. ‘Morgan thinks that with Tallis she can combine marriage with giving up the world. There’s a fanatical nun tied up inside that girl.’ Rupert could not quite understand.

  All these goings-on, thought Rupert, had merely postponed Morgan’s growing up. It was happening now. She has got to decide what sort of person she is and what human life is about. I cannot see her returning to Tallis. And I cannot see her staying with Julius either. Julius has done her no harm, he has shaken her, probably educated her. But Julius is not a marrier. He is a man who has to strip himself bare at regular intervals. Morgan will have to be alone for the time being. There is a lot of violence in her and she will have to suffer, more perhaps than she yet realizes. She is still trying to be on holiday from her problems. She is trying to be on holiday from herself.

  He thought of her as he had last seen her, helping Hilda to arrange roses in the kitchen at Priory Grove, Morgan in tight mauve pants and blue cotton sweater, clowning around, throwing flowers about, putting pink and white petals into her hair, down Hilda’s neck, pricking herself, screaming, laughing. While Hilda, smiling, placid, plump, her greying hair bunched up inside a scarf, wearing a huge butcher’s apron over her dress, went on clipping off the leaves and arranging the blooms in a pretended disregard of the cries and the capers. She might have been Morgan’s mother.

  She must confront life, he thought, with a twinge of warm preoccupied concern for the younger woman. I must talk to her, help her if possible. She must see that there is a way. Rupert’s mind swerved in a natural and familiar manner towards the book on morals which he had now so nearly finished, and he wondered to himself if that book would ever help anybody who had like Morgan lost their bearings. Would his words ever bring comfort to another, help ever to check a bad resolve or stiffen a good one? It was a presumptuous thought. Rupert did not imagine that he was a great philosopher. He was a clear-headed and experienced man and he knew how to write. But there were plenty of men like that. What Rupert had extra, he often told himself, was simply a confident sense of moral direction and the nerve to speak about it. He knew where good lived. Moralists are far too timid, he thought, especially now when they feel they have to placate the logical positivists an
d the psychologists and the sociologists and the computerologists and God knows who else. They fill their pages with apologies and write everybody’s language but their own. Whatever his book was, it was not apologetic. When it was in typescript he must let Morgan look at it. He would be interested to have her opinion.

  Rupert smoothed down his blond hair. It had become bleached and unruly and dry from the sun, which had also given his face a smooth bloom of reddish bronze, making him look, he was well aware, even more juvenile than usual. Today he would have to be mature and impressive at a meeting of government economists. He would not find it difficult. Rupert knew the meeting game. And he had long since stopped feeling nervous of these latterday panjandrums, or imagining that they had secret expertise of which he was ignorant. He had seen too much of their bungling and privately believed that he could do their jobs better than they did. However they were ministers’ darlings and had to be soft-soaped. He would be deferential, dignified, not quite imperceptibly sceptical.

  Rupert returned to his desk, leaving the window wide open. The air from the park was light and fresh and seemed to smell faintly of flowers. There was that strange lucid lightweight atmosphere of early mornings in summery London, when the sun seems for a time to rinse the city and make it silvery and hollow and clean. Only, as Rupert now reminded himself, it was not in fact all that early and he must stop dreaming and get on with his work.

  His well-trained personal assistant, a charming girl with a passion for potted plants which Rupert only just managed to keep confined to the outer office, had set out his papers, including such of the confidential ones as he allowed her to handle. Briefing copies of ministerial committee papers were fanned out in folders of blue, yellow and green. Something unpleasantly familiar with a red flag on it had been weighted down by a piece of pitted volcanic stone from Sicily, and today’s letters, all opened and sorted, were neatly held in place by a lump of pinkish Aberdeen granite. No, one of the letters had not been opened. A typewritten envelope marked Personal. Rupert looked at it with faint puzzlement. He had never received personal letters at the office, though he knew that, for various peculiar reasons, many of his colleagues did. As he reached for the letter the telephone rang and Rupert’s day began with a conversation with an anxious man who was being pursued by an irate man who was extremely exercised about what a certain minister would think about the thing with the red flag on it which was now lying upon Rupert’s desk. After nearly an hour of telephone calls Rupert wrote a tiny minute and sent the dangerous file away to burn a hole in somebody else’s desk. He noticed the letter again and began with one hand to prise it open, skimming through a memorandum on National Promotion in Absentia at the same time. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the communication inside was from Morgan.

  Rupert felt a curious shock as he saw the familiar handwriting. He dropped the memorandum, pulled the letter out and unfolded it. It was rather long. It showed signs of having been written hastily and there were many crossings out. It ran as follows.

  My dear. Listen. You have been extremely kind to me. You have given me your time, you have given me your company. I have been guided, philosophized at, befriended and have enjoyed every moment of it. You talked such superb sense to me the other day. I suspect you are the wisest person I have ever met. You not only steady my nerves, you make me feel that I am a rational being after all and able to thread the mazes of the world. I am grateful to you for the big things and for the little things: for your help in all the immediacies of my situation, for your so evident and sweet concern.

  Now. What will you say and what will you think when you hear what comes next? I swear to you that I did not expect this and I am as surprised and alarmed as you could possibly be. Since I arrived in this country I have, as you know, had many and various preoccupations. I did not expect this too! Even the last time I saw you I did not really divine it, though I have known for some time that you were becoming important to me and that, oh God, I rather needed you. Now it appears that, quite suddenly, I have fallen as deeply and foolishly in love with you as a child of seventeen. And I feel I have no choice but to put the matter before you. I am a married woman. And you—I dread to imagine what you will think of me for having forced just this problem upon you! You with your orderly and busy life and your quite special commitments! Have pity on me, I am inclined to say: yet I know that your pity might lead us straight into the kind of confusion which I know you detest. I am in a complete muddle, my darling. My own life is full of problems and emotional needs about which you know a little. But that scarcely excuses my making you a present of this embarrassing and unrequested love. I dread your judgement upon me. But I ask you at least to believe in the tragic seriousness of the deep and also passionate feeling which you have inspired in me. Please please don’t do anything hastily about this. I need the coolness and rationality of which you are so pre-eminently the master. I have never needed it more. When I see you I will speak with calmness and I beg you to do the same. But I must see you soon, and not in any of our usual haunts for obvious reasons. My flat is too public. I will suggest a place. Please, my darling, help me now and forgive me for loving you.

  Morgan

  At the bottom of the page, in a hand so hasty and scrawled as to be almost illegible, was written:Don’t reply or speak of this letter even to me. I die of shame. A new start must be made. Meet me on Wednesday at 10.30 at the Prince Regent Museum, Room 14.

  Rupert read the letter through carefully twice. Then he lifted the telephone and asked his personal assistant to see that he was not disturbed during the next hour. Then he went to the window once more and surveyed, with a very different eye, the hazy bosky vista of St James’s Park. Later, Rupert was to tell himself censoriously, though it was by no means so clear to him at the time, that his very first feeling had been one of mad elation. Human beings crave for novelty and welcome even wars. Who opens the morning paper without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing some great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself. Rupert liked order. But there is no man who likes order who does not give houseroom to a man who dreams of disorder. The sudden wrecking of the accustomed scenery, so long as one can be fairly sure of a ringside seat, stimulates the bloodstream. And the instinctive need to feel protected and superior ensures, for most of the catastrophes of mankind, the shedding by those not immediately involved of but the most crocodile of tears.

  Yet this was only a momentary leap of the consciousness. Rupert was not in any way inclined to discount what lay before him. He might have been, if not wiser at least luckier, if he had decided at once to laugh it off. But Rupert was not a laugher off. He took the letter seriously and settled down to study the situation. He thought: poor Morgan. Then he thought, and this was less pleasant, we are all endangered. Things can never be quite the same again. Our quiet world, our happy world, has been disturbed. Life will be anxious, uncomfortable, unpredictable.

  Rupert returned to his desk and sat there rigid while nearly an hour went by. He cared for Morgan. He grieved deeply that this strange aberration had damaged, perhaps fatally, a friendship whose warmth had been so easily carried by the sweet casualness of family life. How much warmth there really had been he now felt with an almost elegiac sadness. The impetuous girl had brought all to consciousness and landed them both with a really frightful problem. Morgan had spoken of quite special commitments. Yes! If Rupert were married to anyone else in the world but Hilda it would all matter much less. Rupert drew in his breath. He began gradually to see the whole hideousness of what had happened.

  Rupert thought, of course the girl is in a thoroughly unbalanced state. Tallis, Julius, me. No one must know, for the present not even Hilda. Morgan must be persuaded to go away. And yet, poor child, where could she go? She had come to England, she had come, it was now suddenly clear, to him, as to a last refuge. To drive her out now would be to drive her into a life of desperation and perhaps into a mental shipwreck. I’ve got to enclose this thi
ng, thought Rupert, I’ve got to contain it, I’ve got to live it through. I can’t just send her off. This has got to be dealt with by love. How would I feel if I told her to go and she committed suicide? Morgan was someone who could commit suicide. She must not feel rejected, he thought. I must keep her with me.

  Rupert got up and began to pace the room. He saw now with a coldness which really did chill his heart what the difficulties were likely to be. He was, in a way which ordinarily would not matter at all, damn fond of Morgan. What he had said to Julius once had been true: he had come not so much to despise as simply to ignore the drama of his motives. He sought simply for truthful vision, which in turn imposed right action. The shadow play of motive was a bottomless ambiguity, insidiously interesting but not really very important. Could he do it here, latch himself onto the machinery of virtue and decent decision, and simply slide past the warm treacherous area of confusing attachment? For there was no doubt that he was extremely attached to his sister-in-law.

  The more reason, he then thought, to be absolutely coolly responsible. He would, he could, say nothing to Hilda. It’s just a matter of steadying her through, he thought. In extremities human beings need love and nothing else will do. Morgan was hungry for a steady unviolent unpossessive love which neither Tallis nor Julius could give her. I cannot refuse this challenge, Rupert told himself. All my life as a thinking man has led me to believe in the power of love. Love really does solve problems. To adopt a mean safe casual solution here would be unjust to both myself and Morgan. She has called me wise: let me attempt to be so. True love is calm temperate rational and just; and it is not a shadow or a dream. The top of the structure is not empty.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘NATURALLY,’ said Julius, ‘you felt you had to have a flat of your own. This can be important.’