A Fairly Honourable Defeat

by Iris Murdoch

  It was also very necessary to avoid Morgan. About Morgan Hilda felt a sickness too deep to be identified as misery or anger. That particular betrayal had injected its venomous power into the whole of her past, changing all that was good into rotten specious appearance. Everything was different now right back to the start. To cherish her sister had been the chief business of her life, a constant unfailing source of warmth and sense. She had received a note from Morgan saying We will not be divided and she had thought how ridiculously characteristic it was before she had realized with a jerk that such a thought could no longer be a vehicle of affection.

  Hilda came back and fetched her clothes. She saw neither Rupert nor Morgan. Letters from both of them were lying on the hall table at Priory Grove and she read them later in her room at the hotel. Rupert’s letter was hopelessly confused, full of self-accusations and pleading, and at the same time denials that anything worth mentioning had really happened at all. She tore it to pieces with misery and disgust. Morgan’s letter made a good deal more sense. Morgan explained how Rupert had suddenly fallen desperately in love with her, how they had decided not to tell Hilda, how they had hoped that the situation could be contained. Hilda set this letter aside more thoughtfully. On the spur of the moment she wrote a very bitter letter to Rupert. She ended by telling him that she was going to Paris to stay with her old friend Antoinette Ruabon. She conveyed the same information more curtly to Morgan on a postcard. Then she hired a car and drove to Wales.

  The cottage, which was six miles from the main road and further than that from the nearest village, was approached by a rough track which ran between mossy brambly mounds which had once been stone walls. The only habitation near it was a farmhouse now empty and for sale. The sea was two miles away. Hilda had imagined herself staring at the sea and receiving from its indifferent immensity some old grey weary sort of wisdom. In fact she had not been to the sea. She set out towards it on the first morning, tore her leg on some barbed wire, and returned to the cottage in tears.

  She decided, I must go back to London tomorrow. Oh God, I wish I hadn’t written that awful letter to Rupert. There’ll have to be talk and it’s unkind as well as cowardly to run away like this. They must both be in torment. I see now that I ran away in order to punish them. Then she began to wonder: what are they doing at this moment? Then she thought, holding each other’s hands and taking counsel about what to do. Comforting each other. Discussing me. And she cried out with pain, alone there in the dusky comfortless room. She thought, I am the one that is destroyed, by that particular alliance, by that special and absolute cruelty. They have futures, I have none. Can Rupert and I, in the end, attempt to go on as before? Things can never be as before, and whatever they do, what has happened has happened forever. She remembered Morgan’s letter, and thought, I cannot exist without Morgan and yet now it is utterly impossible to exist with her. I cannot accept her back into my life. Oh what will become of me now?

  Hilda rose and bolted the doors. It was dark outside, windy rainy rumorous darkness coming from far away across the empty coast and the sea. She lit three candles and put dry wood onto the fire and carefully pulled the curtains, thinking how solitary and strange that square of lighted window must look, glowing and flickering in the middle of nowhere. She hoped that no being was watching it now. She sat by the fire and began to cry quietly. She had been happy and protected for so long. She was too old to find her way in this wilderness of unpredictable violence and naked personal will.

  A sudden loud shrill noise filled the room. Hilda sprang up with a little shriek of fear before she realized that it was the telephone. Her instant thought was: Rupert. She ran to the instrument and lifted it with clumsy frightened fingers.

  The remote unmoved voice of an operator said, ‘Professor King is calling you from a London call box. Will you pay for the call?’

  ‘Professor—? Oh yes, yes, please, yes—’

  ‘Hello, Hilda,’ said Julius’s voice.

  ‘Oh Julius, thank God. I’ve been just going mad down here, I shouldn’t have come, I can’t think and it’s all turning into nightmare, how I wish I’d seen you before I left London, but I wanted to rush away and I see now it was crazy, I’m simply going to pieces here, oh Julius I’m so grateful to you for ringing, it’s such a blessed relief to hear your voice, can we talk for a bit—’

  ‘Hilda, listen please—’

  ‘Have you seen Rupert or Morgan?’ How terribly real and present Julius’s voice made London seem.

  ‘No, I haven’t. Hilda, I want to tell you something important and I want you to listen carefully.’

  ‘Something about—them?’

  ‘Yes. You have—’

  ‘Julius, I’ve been so wretched, I know I shouldn’t have left London—’

  ‘Hilda, please just listen. Can you hear me all right? You have been the victim of a trick.’

  ‘A trick—?’

  ‘Yes. Rupert and Morgan did not fall in love with each other and they have not been having a love affair. What you have seen is simply a façade of falsehoods. You have all three of you simply been duped.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Hilda. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘A trick has been played upon them and by extension upon you. Each of them was falsely convinced that the other was in love. Their kind scrupulous natures produced the rest of the confusion. There has been nothing else, no love affair and indeed no love.’

  ‘But a trick—who could have—’

  ‘I was the magician, Hilda. It started as a sort of practical joke but it got rather out of hand I fear. But never mind about me. You must attend carefully while I tell you exactly what happened so that you can understand that they are entirely blameless.’

  ‘You, Julius—but—?’

  ‘I stole your letters, the ones that Rupert wrote you, from the secret drawer in your desk, and I sent them to Morgan as if they came directly from Rupert. And I sent Rupert’s letters which Morgan once wrote to me. Never mind the details. They were each persuaded of the other’s love. They met a few times to discuss the situation. Nothing else has happened at all, there is nothing else to it, and when they find out, apart from being naturally a trifle annoyed with me—’

  ‘I can’t believe you, Julius,’ said Hilda. ‘Please don’t jest with me, this is making the nightmare worse, you are just trying to help us by inventing this, I know about this thing, I’ve got proof, I’ve seen—’

  ‘What have you seen, my dear Hilda? You found a letter from Morgan in Rupert’s desk? That letter was written to me, and I planted it there for you to find. They’ve both behaved like people with a guilty secret, but their secret was simply the mutual delusion of each other’s love. There is nothing there—it is all a magical emanation which the utterance of the truth will blow quite away. You have all three been deceived by mere appearances and apparitions. ’

  ‘Julius—this can’t be—Rupert behaved so strangely and—’

  ‘Rupert is always irrationally anxious to blame himself, and he thought that he was protecting Morgan.’

  ‘But how could they both be mistaken—?’

  ‘Quite easily. People are never too unwilling to believe themselves valued. Ordinary natural vanity led them into this maze. I will tell you the details later. The important thing now is that you should believe me. I invented it all, Hilda, I invented it and made it happen.’

  ‘Julius, I can’t accept this, it’s too fantastic, why should you do something so extraordinary, and anyway it’s utterly impossible that—’

  ‘She won’t believe me. Would you like to have a word with Tallis? He’s here beside me. Wait a moment.’

  Hilda heard Tallis’s voice saying, ‘It’s true, Hilda. Julius has deceived all three of you, and Rupert and Morgan are quite innocent, they’re simply victims like you. Julius really did send the letters as he said and made both Rupert and Morgan imagine that the other had fallen in love. There is honestly nothing more to it than t
hat. It was a sort of joke, that’s all. And no one else knows anything about it, there haven’t been any rumours or any talk. So you see, nothing’s changed really—’

  ‘But I—Have you told them, Rupert and Morgan?’

  ‘Not yet. What do you want us to do? You do believe this, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes—if you say it—but it’s so weird—’

  ‘Yes, it is. But Julius will explain later. Listen, Hilda, shall I telephone Rupert?’

  ‘Yes. No, I’ll telephone him. I’ll tell them both. Don’t you do anything more. Please leave it to me now. Thank you for—Tallis, did Julius really do that?’

  ‘Yes, he did. You will ring Rupert at once, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, at once, at once. Thank you, Tallis. Good-bye.’

  Hilda began to put the telephone back onto its rest. Her hand was shaking and she pushed the instrument a little towards the edge of the table. The next moment it had tilted and crashed to the floor. The receiver clattered away under the table. Hilda knelt awkwardly in the obscurity, pulling at the tangled wire. She lifted the telephone up, replaced the receiver, and began to dial for the exchange.

  But something seemed to have gone wrong. The telephone was an old-fashioned one with a projecting dial. As Hilda put her finger into the hole to spin the dial she realized that something or other must be broken. The outer part of the dial moved easily, too easily and unresistingly, while the inner part with the circle of numbers appeared to be shifting too. In the receiver the dialling tone continued unchecked. The dial was no longer properly attached to the interior of the instrument. Hilda stared at it. It was projecting too much and tilting slightly sideways. She tried to push it back into place, to screw it in, but could get no purchase, and there seemed to be some sort of resistance behind it. She tried again to turn the dial and again it spun idly and the numbered circle lurched round together with the outer casing. She looked at the machine and tried to think. In a second the telephone had been transformed from a natural means of communication, an extension of herself, into a grotesque senseless object, useless and even sinister. Hilda shook it desperately and put it down.

  She lit two more candles and ran to the kitchen and found a screwdriver. She turned the instrument over and began to unscrew the bottom of it. A mass of little wormlike wires of different colours were swarming about inside the dark box. What happened inside a telephone when one dialled? It wasn’t magic. There must be some way of doing what the dial did. Something had broken. Could she not see what it was and mend it? If only she could get through to the exchange. She put the telephone down on the table and it fell apart, disgorging entrails of pink wire.

  This is no good, thought Hilda, I must put it together again. But now there was too much wire, fat coils and bundles of it, hanging down and refusing to go back inside. The dial was hanging off the instrument like a dislodged eye. She began to pull on the wires from within, hoping to pull the dial back into place. It seemed to be coming back into position. Only now the moving section of the dial had shifted round so that only half the holes were opposite the numbers and the other holes were blank. Moaning with exasperation Hilda seized the outer casing and tried to twist it back. Something cracked and the metal disc came away loosely in her hand. She threw it on the floor and tears streamed down her face. She must talk to Rupert, she must talk to him at once, she must tell him that all was well, that all was unchanged, she must ask him to forgive her. Why had she in an instant judged Rupert? Why had she had so little faith in her husband and her sister? All those years of love and trust should have made her at least wait, at least keep quiet. Hilda pulled on her mackintosh. She would have to drive to the village, to the telephone box there.

  The rain was sizzling down, thickening the air, as Hilda splashed her way towards the car. She tumbled into the driver’s seat and switched on the headlights which revealed lines of rain, tumbled yellow stones, nettles. The ignition key was still in the dashboard. She turned it. There was a brief fruitless mutter from the starter motor. She turned off the headlights and pulled out the choke and tried again. The same dry empty whirring sound. Again. Again. Again. Oh no, thought Hilda, and the tears were leaping out of her eyes. She sat still for a minute, then tried once more to start the car. The starter motor whirred idly. The engine would not turn over. ‘Rupert!’ cried Hilda aloud, ‘Rupert!’ She jumped out of the car and found a torch and opened the bonnet with the intention of drying the distributor head. Perhaps rain had got in. But so much more rain immediately rushed past her in the light of the torch, blown by the wind in great watery gusts, that she began hastily to close it up again. In any case the engine looked incomprehensible and lumpish and she could not remember what it was that she was supposed to do.

  Hilda turned and began to run stumbling along the muddy stony track, lamenting as she went. Her torch jerked and flickered over glittering boulders and black pools and brambles and heather and watercress and swathes of old wire. Calling out to Rupert she plunged ahead into darkness and the square dimlighted window of the cottage grew smaller and smaller behind her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MORGAN RANG THE BELL at Priory Grove. It was ten thirty in the morning. Rupert would be at the office. There was no reply. She tried the door. Locked.

  When Morgan had written her we shall not be divided to Hilda she had felt cold and hard. Her love had been resolute and purposive. She would not be destroyed, she would survive this mess, she would regain her sister. It could all be explained after all and Hilda would see that it was certainly not Morgan’s fault. As she wrote her second explanatory letter she felt, as she covered the pages, that the nightmare thing was really being unravelled. Telling Hilda the truth calmed her heart and made her feel confident that all would be well. She delivered the letter by hand late at night.

  The next day she felt a little less certain. She telephoned Priory Grove several times but got no answer. She went round, risking Rupert, and knocked on the door. No one there. Then came Hilda’s curt card to say that she was going to Paris. This frightened Morgan. She ran to the public library and asked for the Paris telephone directory. There were several Ruabons. She telephoned them all but none of them was Hilda’s friend. Hilda had said Paris, but of course she might have meant somewhere, anywhere near Paris. Morgan then cautiously telephoned one or two of Hilda’s charitable acquaintances, but none of them could help her. Morgan’s need to see her sister was by now becoming extreme. It seemed idiotic to cross to France and search, but she felt almost ready to do so out of the sheer need to do something. She told herself that of course Hilda would very soon come back. It was not in Hilda’s nature to leave everything in confusion and run away. She might return at any moment. Indecision and the sheer multiplication of possibilities racked Morgan. She lay aching and sleepless till the early hours of the morning and then dozed wretchedly to see in dreams Hilda’s dear face, that orb of kindliness which had always shone forth in her life with more than a mother’s love. She awoke again to tormented puzzlement. If only she could see Hilda, hold her quietly by the hand and explain.

  Morgan could not bring herself to ask Rupert for Hilda’s address. Rupert might not know. In any case communication with Rupert had now become unimaginable. Morgan now saw Rupert as a blind instrument of destruction. In tampering with his marriage he had damaged more than he knew. Rupert’s grand passion had been essentially something frivolous, or so it now seemed in the outcome. And Morgan blamed herself for not having rejected this dangerous frivolity at the very beginning. She ought to have laughed at Rupert’s love. She could not even quite remember what she had felt about Rupert at the start. She had been touched, tender, sentimental and she supposed somehow rather thrilled. She groaned with remorse. The sight of Rupert now would make her sick with shame and about the future of her relations with him she forbore to think. She reproached herself constantly with Hilda’s voice, falling down in abject and passionate supplication before that accusing shade.

  Everything that I have done
lately has been a disaster, thought Morgan, and yet each thing when it came along seemed absolutely natural. It was natural to fall in love with Julius, it was natural to feel sentimental pity for Rupert. How can one live properly when the beginnings of one’s actions seem so inevitable and justified while the ends are so completely unpredictable and unexpected? The only thing I ever did in my life, she reflected, which was unnatural was to marry Tallis. And that turned out to be a disaster too. That had seemed inevitable and unnatural. Whatever had she hoped for? She had certainly hoped for something. Had she simply forgotten that hope? The idea came to her sometimes that she should go to Tallis and tell him all about Rupert and Hilda, tell him everything, everything, everything. If only Tallis had that much more authority, that much more dignity and stature, she could have put her head on his knees. As it was he could not compel her at a distance. And it seemed to her that to confide in Tallis would be disloyal to Hilda.

  Morgan began to walk down the side of the house, through the wooden gate into the garden. She had decided that she must get into the house somehow and find out from Hilda’s address book the whereabouts and telephone number of this Ruabon.