A Fairly Honourable Defeat

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Let me lend you some money,’ said Julius. ‘Or rather, let me give you some. As I explained, I never lend.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Why not? I know you refused before, but we do know each other better now. Think again. I have money, you need it. Morgan owes you money. Let me pay her debt. She owed you four hundred pounds and paid you a hundred pounds. Let me give you the remaining three hundred. Come, be generous.’

  Tallis reflected. ‘All right. It would certainly come in handy. Thank you.’

  Julius wrote out the cheque.

  ‘Yes, well, I must be going,’ said Julius. ‘Good-bye. I suppose in the nature of things we shall meet again.’ He still lingered. ‘You concede that I am an instrument of justice?’

  Tallis smiled.

  The door closed behind Julius and immediately the house was full of noises. Squealing in the kitchen, jazz music in the room opposite, altercation in Urdu upon the stairs, and Leonard calling out loudly for his son.

  ‘Coming, Daddy, coming, coming.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE PALE BLUE HILLMAN MINX was heading south. The sun-striped poplar-shaded road ran straight on ahead, on and on and on. Simon’s arm was stretched along the back of the seat.

  ‘We thought of ourselves.’

  ‘We were so damn relieved.’

  ‘If only we’d thought a little more carefully about them.’

  ‘Yet at the time it did seem rational to keep quiet.’

  ‘But oh God, if only we hadn’t.’

  ‘Don’t keep on about it, Simon.’

  ‘We were so relieved,’ said Simon. ‘We’d found each other again. Being back home inside our own love was so wonderful. I was nearly faint with joy that evening. I just felt I was right out of the tangle. The rest of it was so messy and obscure. I didn’t want to think about it any more. I felt all my own guilt had been left behind there, and I had no responsibility any more outside my love for you.’

  ‘We have lived too much inside our love for each other.’

  ‘Axel, you don’t mean—’

  ‘No, no, stop being so frightened. I just mean I think we should see more people and live more in the world. We’ve been so shut in with each other.’

  ‘Yes. You know, I think if we saw more people and went about more together it would sort of give me confidence.’

  ‘It’s probably to do with being homosexual. We’re all a bit afraid of society. There’s a tendency to hide. It’s bad.’

  ‘You don’t want to send that letter to The Times or tell all Whitehall?’

  ‘No. It’s not their business. But we shouldn’t hide so. I think if we’d been living more in the open we mightn’t have been involved in this terrible muddle.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Simon. ‘I know. It was all my fault, all my doing—’

  They had been through it all over and over and over again. With a melancholy patience Axel had led Simon round the circle of accusation, explanation, exculpation, accusation. Each time Axel said a little more, was a little more definite, a little more pressing, attempting to clarify both charge and excuse, trying to help Simon to accept and understand the full awful detail of what had happened.

  ‘No,’ said Axel. ‘If you think of the terribly tangled network of causes which led to Rupert’s death and how very little any of us actually knew at any given moment about the whole situation and about the consequences of our actions—’

  ‘But I acted wrongly knowing it was wrong,’ said Simon. ‘Everyone else was just in a muddle. If only I hadn’t started telling lies to you, if only I’d told you everything right from the start—’

  ‘If you had Julius probably wouldn’t have told you about his little plan at all.’

  ‘But if I’d told you then, after Julius came to the museum—’

  ‘We might certainly have decided to keep quiet—in fact we almost certainly would. The only person about the place with really sound instincts is Tallis. He led Julius straight to the telephone.’

  ‘Yes. Tallis was right. He saw how awfully perilous it was.’

  ‘And we didn’t because we were so damn self-absorbed. We thought the others would manage.’

  ‘All the same, Axel, I can’t help feeling I’m more to blame than anyone. I simply let Julius enslave me.’

  ‘Dear boy, I am to blame too. I just didn’t take Julius seriously enough as a possible mischief-maker. Yet I’ve seen him do something like this before. And I did nothing about it then simply because I was flattered at being Julius’s friend, at seeing how dangerous he was to other people and yet not to me. Similarly now, I let myself be flattered by Julius, and when I did begin to be suspicious all I could see was his connection with you. That day when we left Rupert’s, after you’d pushed Julius into the pool, when you said “Stop the car”, I thought you were going to announce that you were going off with Julius!’

  ‘Oh Axel, Axel—’

  ‘It seems mad enough now, thank God. As for your telling me lies, why did you do so? Because you were afraid of me. That fear ought not to have existed. It’s not just that I’ve always bullied you a little. A little bullying between lovers needn’t matter. But I’ve always withheld a bit of myself. And you have felt this and it has made you frightened.’

  ‘Yes, I have felt it,’ said Simon, ‘but again I blame myself. Why should you be interested in me at all? I’m so flimsy compared with you. And I know you’ve always hated that world, and I did so absolutely belong to it. It was very easy for Julius to make me think that for two pins you’d throw me over.’

  ‘Well, you should have had a bit more guts at that point. Hope and faith are courage too. But if you’ve had these doubts I’ve really prompted them by holding back from you, by keeping in reserve some corner of my personality, something which you never saw at all and which might be taken away intact to some other place. This was partly failure of nerve, partly pride. I wanted to feel that if all this came to grief there was a part of me which had never engaged in it and which was not discredited or even disappointed. It was a failure of love. You held nothing back, but I played for safety. I haven’t deserved your full and absolute faith.’

  ‘Axel, you aren’t going to go away to some other place, are you?’

  ‘Don’t keep asking that ridiculous question. You know we are much closer to each other now than we have ever been before.’

  ‘So you won’t leave me?’

  ‘No, you fool. You won’t leave me?’

  ‘Axel, what can I swear by—?’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  ‘You’ll never leave me?’

  ‘How do I know? I don’t intend to leave you, that’s all. I love you, that’s all.’

  ‘You won’t flay me in the end?’

  ‘How do I know, child?’

  ‘You’re right that I should have had more guts with Julius.’

  ‘You should have been brave, like you were that night in the restaurant.’

  ‘Will we be all right, Axel?’

  ‘We’ve got a reasonable chance. Mutual love is something in this vale of tears and it’s rare enough. But this sort of thing can be precarious, as you know.’

  ‘Will you, after this, open up that reserve, not shut me out?’

  ‘I’ll try. I’ve never done so with anyone else. But love is awfully difficult, Simon. One learns this as one grows older.’

  ‘It seems easy to me. Nothing in the world is easier for me than loving you.’

  ‘My dear.’

  ‘I say, I can’t help being rather glad Hilda didn’t come with us! I hope we pressed her enough?’

  ‘I think so. It may be better for Hilda not to see us at present. We’re all of us still a bit shell-shocked.’

  ‘I wonder if it’s good for her to be so much with Morgan?’

  ‘We can’t know what passes between those two.’

  ‘It’s almost as if Morgan’s—taken her over.’

  ‘Hilda must be suffering terribly. And there
are very few people in the world whom one can really talk to. Think how much more dreadful it would all have been for us if we hadn’t been able to talk endlessly to each other.’

  ‘You don’t think we’ve somehow—cheated—Axel? I mean, that we’ve taken too much refuge in our love and not really faced what happened, suffering it properly?’

  ‘Of course our love is selfish. Almost all human love is bloody selfish. If one has anything to hang onto at all one clings to it relentlessly. We’ve tried to face it and to suffer it. To take refuge in love is an instinct and not a disreputable one.’

  ‘I feel so damned responsible and so guilty. If I could only see it all clearly—’

  ‘You may never be able to do that.’

  ‘If only I’d told everybody—’

  ‘Don’t begin again, darling. Not today. Now perhaps if you’d just look at the map—’

  ‘Oh Axel, if only—’

  ‘Stop it, Simon. You said there was a village with a Romanesque church.’

  ‘Yes, we must be almost there. Shall we stop and look?’

  ‘There’s your village, I think. We may as well stay the night there, if there’s a decent little hotel. We needn’t rush. We can cross the Alps the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s right, we needn’t rush, need we? What a marvellous strange light. The sun’s shining but I can just see a star. Look.’

  ‘ “The evening star is the morning star.” Frege.’

  ‘Come, Axel, that’s poetry, not logic.’

  The solid grey forms of the village rose from behind a meadowy hillside where the strange light had turned the grass into a furry green velvet. The light blue Hillman Minx took the hill at a rush and glided into the grey square where the declining sun was making shadows between the cobble stones. A little mairie with a glittering high-pitched roof of bluish slate faced the façade of the church. The church tower reached upwards in crazed irregular lines of arcades and archlets to a slender spire of matching blue slate whose weather-cock had become a blurred spear of gold. In the tympanum above the doorway a very battered Christ wearily opened long arms and huge hands, receiving, judging.

  ‘Let’s go in at once!’ said Simon.

  ‘No. It’s already too dark inside. We’ll see it tomorrow.’

  Simon did not argue. He felt that he would never argue with Axel again.

  ‘There’s our hotel,’ said Axel.

  The modest-looking Hotel Restaurant du Commerce occupied the corner of the square. The Hillman Minx stopped outside it.

  Simon followed his friend in, and stood aside while Axel asked the patron for a room. Simon could read French but could scarcely speak it. He liked Axel to be the one who knew such things.

  The little hallway of the hotel was dark and smelt of something very good to eat. Simon looked through and saw that there was a garden beyond where the sun was shining onto a clipped lawn and onto a vine which had trailed over a trellis to make a little arbour where there was a table and two chairs.

  Simon went on through the hallway and out into the garden. The sun was still warm and bright, though the evening star had strengthened. The vine was hung with grassy green translucent grapes and the leaves and tendrils glowed with a pale green radiance, outspread and welcoming and still in the quiet sunlight. Simon moved towards the vine, bowed his head under its shadowy arch, and touched the warm pendant beads of the grape bunches.

  Axel came out, removing his jacket and rolling up his white shirt sleeves. The sun made gold in his dark hair. ‘I’ve asked the patron to bring us a carafe of wine out here straight away. I’m just going up to look at the room. You stay here.’

  Simon sat down at the table. The patron bustled over wearing purple braces, with a carafe and two glasses. ‘Merci.’ Simon poured out some wine and tasted it. It was excellent. The serrated green leaves extended above him, before him, their motionless pattern of angelic hands. The air quivered with warmth and a diffusion of light.

  Simon thought, it is an instinct, and not a disreputable one, to be consoled by love. Warily he probed the grief which had travelled with him so far, and he felt it as a little vaguer, a little less dense. His thoughts of Rupert now reached back further into the past, to good times which had their own untouchable reality. He drank some more wine and raised his face to the dazzle of the sun among the leaves and felt his youth lift him and make him buoyant. He was young and healthy and he loved and was loved. It was impossible for him, as he sat there in the green southern light and waited for Axel, not to feel in his veins the warm anticipation of a new happiness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘EVEN MATCHBOXES aren’t what they used to be. When I was young a matchbox looked like something, it had personality. Now they’re just insipid trash or else garish catch-pennies for tourists.’

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea, Daddy.’

  ‘The world is poisoned and starving and on the brink of nuclear war and all you can do is bring a cup of tea. And you’ve slopped it in the saucer.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’ve got the most frightful pain in my hip, little you care.’

  ‘Have you taken your tablets?’

  ‘Yes. They’re no good. Just placebos. Probably made of sugar. There’s the Health Service for you, and you have to pay a shilling.’

  ‘Let me do your pillows, Daddy, they’re all over the place.’

  ‘I can do my own pillows. You might bloody well spend some of your valuable time cleaning this room out. It’s a wonder I’m still alive at all with all the germs there must be crawling about here. That piece of toast I threw at you last week is still there going mouldy underneath the dressing table.’

  ‘I’ll take it away.’

  ‘No, no, leave it, I’m getting quite fond of it. It’s nice to see a familiar face. Since you never seem to bother to come and see me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, I have to go to my classes and—’

  ‘The idea of you teaching anybody anything is a laugh all right. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a stupid son. I suppose you are mine. Other men of your age manage to live all right. They have proper jobs and decent houses and wives that don’t run off with Jews.’

  ‘Drink your tea, Daddy, you’ll feel better. Would you like some cake?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. And I feel perfectly all right except for this ghastly pain. I’m not going to go to any more of those heat treatments. They aren’t doing any good. I feel worse than I did when they started.’

  ‘It’s the damp weather. You’ll feel better soon.’

  ‘And those whelps at the hospital talk about me as if I were some sort of animal or moron. “Shove him along, Joe,” one of them said last week. “Shove him along,” I ask you! I wonder they didn’t say “it”! And they chatter to each other all the time and giggle and ignore the patients. I bet they’re all pansies.’

  ‘If you hate it,’ said Tallis, ‘you shan’t go any more.’

  ‘Well, and why shouldn’t I go! It’s a chance to get out of this shit-house. Makes a change from these four bloody walls and you and your cups of tea. And the blasted Welfare State may as well do something for me, even if it’s completely futile, since I’ve been paying through the nose all these years. And to think people are dimwitted enough to be grateful, after the state’s stolen nearly everything they earn and given them some rotten slapdash medical attention at the end when they’ve got one and a half feet in the grave and they don’t realize they’ve already paid for it fifty times over! People as blockheaded as that deserve a government like this one. They deserve to be treated as they are treated, like sheep.’

  ‘People are a lot better off now—’

  ‘Now that they have television sets to make all the horrors of the world into an evening’s entertainment. It all went wrong from the start. It’s no better now and no worse, only stupider and more vulgar. The sooner it’s all bombed into oblivion the better.’

  ‘Daddy, I must go and write my lecture—’r />
  ‘I wish I had half a crown for every time you’ve uttered that inane formula so as to get away from me.’

  ‘It’s true—’

  ‘You and your lectures. You’re like an old maid with her crochet work. Except that crochet amounts to something.’

  ‘Can I do anything for you?’

  ‘No, just clear off. Yes, you can take some of the newspapers off the floor. Not those ones. Those ones. They’ve been here for weeks. Be careful, there’s some muck inside one of them, God knows what it is, you’d think half the dogs of Notting Hill had been shitting in here.’

  ‘You haven’t drunk your tea.’

  ‘Your stench spoils the taste of it. And it’s cold. No, I don’t want any more. And you can tell that bloody nig nog to turn off his blasted transistor.’

  ‘I’ll ask him to turn it down.’

  ‘ “I’ll ask him to turn it down.” You talk like a blinking constipated deb. I sometimes think you’re just a girl in disguise. You’re afraid of those nigs, afraid you might say something nasty and hurt their precious feelings. They’re all a bunch of crooks anyway.’

  ‘All right, Daddy, I’ll—’

  ‘Filthy habit wearing a turban all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wears it in bed. Don’t suppose he’s washed his hair in years. We’ll have lice in the house at this rate. Don’t suppose you’ve washed your hair in years if it comes to that. All right, go away, go away.’

  Tallis retreated. Through the closing bedroom door he saw his father sitting bolt upright in bed dressed in an old tweed jacket and dirty crumpled blue shirt. Leonard’s eyes were brilliant with aggrieved vitality. His face was losing the podgy wrinkled look and was gaunter, paler, transparent, the skin pulled and smoothed and yellow, the nose sharper. The tonsured bush of silver hair was flatter, thinner.

  Tallis went down the stairs and knocked. The Sikh, asked to turn down his transistor, turned it off altogether. He inquired kindly about Leonard. Tallis inquired about the dispute at the bus depot about the turban. It appeared to be over. The men had got used to their outlandish fellow worker. The Sikh was now happily united with his fellow males in an attempt to sabotage a campaign for women bus-drivers. Tallis was offered tea but refused. He looked with gratitude into the gentle dark sympathetic eyes of the man from so far away. He had heard the story of the Sikh’s life. It was not a happy one.