A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  Iris Murdoch

  A Word Child

  1975

  To Peter Ady

  THURSDAY

  ‘I SAY, an absolutely stunning coloured girl was here looking for you.’

  ‘She was looking for you.’

  ‘No. I offered myself. She was uninterested. She said she wanted to see Mr Hilary Burde.’

  That was me. ‘Oh.’ It was all very improbable however. ‘Did she say what she wanted?’

  ‘No. By the way, the rubbish chute is jammed again.’

  The first speaker was my lodger Christopher Cather. We had met accidentally in the street, I on my return from the office, he on his return from whatever he did during the day. We were in the lift. The lift held two people and rose slowly, groaning with diffidence. To intensify mutual inspection it contained a long mirror. Christopher was easy to look at.

  We emerged on our floor, the fourth, where a smell confirmed the jamming of the rubbish chute. Mr Pellow, a suspended schoolmaster, standing half inside the doorway of the next door flat, retired slowly. He wanted a drinking companion. Christopher and I shunned him.

  We entered our own flat. I picked up two letters which were lying on the floor. We parted company, I to my bedroom, he to his. I turned on the light, revealing my unmade bed, a pile of underwear, dust upon the discarded debris of my struggle with the world. I stuffed the underwear inside the bed and dragged up the blankets, inhaling without displeasure the familiar badger smell. The curtains had remained pulled across the windows since my hurried early morning departure into the dark. It was winter: November, with late gloomy dawns and a cold wind smacking the leaves about on sticky pavements. The season suited me. Even at forty-one it dawns on one that one will not live forever. Adieu jeunesse.

  My ‘home’ was a small mean nasty flatlet in Bayswater, in a big square red-brick block in a cul-de-sac. Outside the cul-de-sac was a busy noisy street, beyond that street were some modest dingy shops, beyond the shops was Bayswater tube station (District Line and Inner Circle), beyond that was Queensway tube station (Central Line), beyond that was Bayswater Road, and beyond that was, thank God, the park. I instinctively denigrate my flat: it was doubtless my own life which was small and nasty. The flat was certainly cramped and dark, looking out onto a maze of fire escapes in a sunless well. There were three little rooms, my bedroom, Christopher’s bedroom, and the so-called sitting-room into which Christopher, who preferred life at floor level, had lately moved most of the furniture, including the bed, out of his own room. Thus rendered uninhabitable, the sitting-room was never used in any case. The flat was simply a machine à dormir as far as I was concerned. I never spent my evenings there as the place swarmed with demons. The week-ends posed problems. I cursed the five-day week. I had never attempted decoration, having no taste. I desired no personal objects, no ‘elegance’, nothing that could remind me of the past. There was nothing here to love.

  I will briefly explain Christopher. Christopher, whose estranged father was a solicitor in Essex, was, at the time of this story, twenty-three, but already had a glorious past. He was rather beautiful and turned many heads, including some in the pages which follow. He was tall and extremely thin with a lot of tangled fairish hair hanging to his shoulders and a narrow face of clear-complexioned pallor. In summer he had freckles. His eyes were of a blue so pale as to have given him an appearance of weakness had not his large straight nose manifested a countervailing strength. He was graceful, it was like having a lynx or a leopard around the place. He always wore what I would describe as ‘fancy dress’. As a lodger he was less than satisfactory, being an out-of-work genius. At least he did occasionally work, cleaning people’s flats. I do not know who the lunatics were who allowed Christopher to clean their flats. The glorious past amounted to this, that at the age of eighteen Christopher created and led a pop group called the Treason of the Clerks which had a brief but considerable success. The success took place mainly on a tour of Australia, but one of the Treason’s songs made the ‘top ten’ in this country. It was called Waterbird and may still be remembered by connoisseurs. It was a song about somebody leaving somebody and the chorus ran Think again, waterbird, do do do, waterbird, waterbird, boo boo boo, or something of the sort. The group made a lot of money (which vanished leaving only debts to the Income Tax) and then broke up. One stayed in Sydney, one went to Mexico, another (the composer of Waterbird) took to heroin and died. Christopher returned to London and for a while earned a precarious living as an organizer of ‘happenings’. (His father paid the Income Tax.) Then he underwent a conversion to Buddhism and dedicated himself to overcoming duality and passing beyond the bounds of conceptual thought. He was wished on me as a lodger by a friend who said, as you need money and are never in why not let a room? Christopher now owed six weeks’ rent. At least he obeyed the rules I made: no hi fi, no girls, not more than three visitors at a time, no eating of chocolate in the house, no discussions of sex in my presence (etcetera, etcetera). Girls in the flat would have disturbed me. Boys came and went, especially two, Mick Ladderslow and Jimbo Davis. Mick was a layabout from a rich family who wanted Christopher to start a new group to be called The Waterbirds (only Christopher was now given to God). Jimbo was a ballet dancer and even more graceful than Christopher, a laconic Welsh boy whom I liked and who could at least dance. (I saw him do so once in a theatre.) Mick had no talents except for trouble. I thought of them as ‘students’ though they studied nothing but pleasure. They were beautiful mindless creatures who padded in and out like animals; I did not have the unnerving feeling of being surrounded by rational beings. They (and sometimes others) would sit in Christopher’s room and partake of various drugs, a remarkably quiet occupation of which I took care to know nothing. Christopher was learning to play the ‘tabla’, a dreary little oriental drum, but at least it was not a noisy instrument and would always stop abruptly at my command. In general they were, for young people, all remarkably silent, sitting together I presumed in a kind of daze, in intervals of drawing mandalas and consulting the I Ching. I did not know whether these boys were ‘queer’ (in the slang sense). Quite possibly not. Christopher said he had had a surfeit of girls in the old Treason days when they were ‘all over him’. I felt sorry for him. There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life’s bright mysterious expectations.

  The wind was moodily rattling the windows, producing that odd not unpleasant sense of solitude which winter winds evoke. After a long day in the office and undergoing my fellow men in the tube rush hour I felt tired and crumpled and begrimed with weariness. A hard monotonous life favours salvation, so the sages say. There must have been some other element, absent in my case. Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness! I looked at the two letters. One was from Tommy, and I set that aside unopened. The other was the telephone account. I opened this and studied it. Then I went out and kicked Christopher’s door and entered. Christopher was sitting cross-legged on the floor examining some stuff in a box. He looked up guiltily and when he saw the telephone account in my hand he blushed. He had a remarkable gift for blushing.

  ‘Christopher,’ I said, ‘you promised you would not make any more long-distance calls.’

  Christopher stood up. ‘I’m very sorry, Hilary, I ought to have told you at the time, only I was too scared to, please don’t be cross! I promise it won’t happen again.’

  ‘You promised last time. Or was that a Buddhist promise, remote from the world of mere appearance where one pays telephone bills?’

  ‘I really promise this time. And I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘What with? You already owe me six weeks’ rent.’

  ‘I will pay. Please forgive me, Hilary, and don’t be cross. I can’t bear it when you’re cross. I really truly pro
mise not to do it again.’

  ‘You promise. You really promise. You really truly promise. Where in the series does genuine promising begin?’

  ‘I really and truly and honestly promise — ’

  ‘Oh cut it out,’ I said. ‘I told you if you did it again I’d get rid of the phone.’

  ‘You can’t mean it, Hilary, we must have the telephone, you’ll think better of it—’

  ‘I won’t have time to,’ I said.

  I went into the hall. The offending instrument stood on a small bamboo table beside the front door. I took hold of the wire low down and pulled hard. There was a rending pattering sound and the box came away from the wall together with some of the skirting board and a shower of plaster. The wire would not break. I put one foot on it and pulled hard until it snapped, precipitating me back onto the table. I crushed the table against the wall, smashing one of its legs. The telephone crashed onto the floor and broke open disgorging multicoloured wirey entrails. The dial came off and rolled away into a corner. Silence.

  ‘Oh — Hilary — ’ Christopher, pale under his pallor, stared down at the wreckage. He was shaken.

  I went into my bedroom and shut the door. I would have liked to leave the flat immediately after this episode, but it was my night for dining with the Impiatts (Thursday) and I usually changed for them (not into evening ‘dress’, just my shirt and tie). I shaved for them too. I always needed a five o’clock shave, only had one on Thursdays. Having dealt with that matter at the wash basin in my bedroom, I took off my dirty office shirt and greasy tie and put on a white shirt and a decent foulard. I combed my hair and resumed coat and overcoat. I already regretted my destruction of the telephone. I had only had two drinks at the Sloane Square station bar on the way home. Suppose Crystal were to need me urgently? I emerged.

  Christopher, still agitated, was waiting for me. ‘Hilary, I’m frightfully sorry, please don’t be angry with me, I’ll mend the table — ’ He spoke as if he had done the damage.

  ‘I’m not angry,’ I said. He was between me and the door. I took him by the shoulders and set him gently aside. I felt him wince (with alarm, with distaste?) as I touched him. I got out of the door. Mr Pellow watched me with glazed eyes from the darkness of his hallway. He was sitting down now. He had been suspended for hitting a troublesome pupil. How I sympathized with him. I went down in the lift, alone this time. Outside, the breath of autumn’s being was chasing round in circles after leaves and newspapers and old cigarette packets. By the time I reached the park I felt a little better. London is unreal north of the park and south of the river. Unreality reaches its peak on the horrible hills of Hampstead. For me the park was the great divide between myself and a happier land into which I once thought that I was destined to enter. It was not to be. It turned out that I was unfit for ordinary life. I was always sorry that I had been too young to be in the war. I would have enjoyed the war.

  ‘Hilary dear,’ said Laura Impiatt, opening the door and kissing me.

  The Impiatts, a childless couple full of good works and enterprises, lived in Queen’s Gate Terrace, occupying the lower part of one of those rather overwhelming houses. I hung up my clothes in the hall in the way in which Laura had long ago taught me to do, and followed her into the drawing-room.

  ‘Hello, Hilary,’ said Freddie, who was opening a bottle.

  Clifford Larr, who sometimes came on Thursdays, bowed aloofly.

  Freddie Impiatt and Clifford Larr both worked at my office. I call it my office, but it was more like their office as they were both considerably senior to me. It would have been difficult not to be. I worked in Whitehall, in a government department, it boots not which. I worked in the section called establishments’ which deals with the administration of the office itself. I dealt with pay, not with the metaphysics of pay but with its mechanics. It was a dullish unexacting job, but I did not dislike it. I occupied a humble obscure position and when promotion time came was regularly ‘passed over’. (Expressive phrase: a beat of triumphant wings, then silence.) In the office hierarchy I was, if one omits typists and clerks, near to the bottom. I worked to a man called Duncan, now briefly seconded to the Home Office, who worked to a Mrs Frederickson, now on maternity leave, who worked to Freddie Impiatt, who worked to Clifford Larr, who worked to someone too exalted to be in question here, who worked to someone more exalted still, who worked to the head of the department Sir Brian Templar-Spence, who was now about to retire. Arthur Fisch worked to me. Nobody worked to Arthur.

  Freddie then was much my senior, and Clifford Larr almost at vanishing point. It was therefore notably kind of Freddie and Laura to invite me regularly to their house, since I was so particularly nobody. It was the more notably kind since both Freddie and Laura were snobs: not gross snobs of course, but quiet intelligent surreptitious beavering-away snobs, as most cultured middle-class people are, unless there is some positive quality of character or education to stop them. They pursued and cultivated all sorts of ‘grandees’ and had them to dinner, but of course not on the days when I was there. When they gave cocktail parties I was not asked. Important office men such as Clifford Larr rarely appeared on my days, and titled people and famous writers never. Laura imagined that she concealed this discrimination by remarks such as ‘It’ll be just us, we’re going to be selfish and keep you to ourselves!’ However these aspirations made their unrewarded kindness to me the more touching. It took them a little while to understand the peculiar rigidity with which my life was arranged but they did understand it and they respected it. I had dinner with the Impiatts every Thursday. Sometimes, though not too often, they cancelled me in favour of something more amusing. But they never asked me to change the day.

  As I may sometimes seem in what follows to mock the Impiatts let me here make it clear once and for all that I thoroughly liked them both, as we often do those whom we mock. I thought they were decent people and I admired them because they were happily married, quite a feat in my estimation. Of course this latter achievement is not always totally endearing. The assertion made by a happy marriage often alienates, and often is at least half consciously intended to alienate, the excluded spectator. The brightness of the Impiatt hearth made me feel sometimes like a slinking sniffing wolf. And they, the happy ones, like to have a wolf about, like to glimpse him now and then from the window and hear his hungry howling. How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. How offensive it can be, the natural instinctive showing off of decent happy people.

  ‘Have some more sherry, Hilary, just a smidgin?’ A new fashionable word of Laura’s. Diminutive of ‘smudge’ ?

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re wearing odd socks again. Look, Freddie, Hilary’s wearing odd socks again!’ This was a regular joke which I was tired of. I would have checked my socks but for the telephone episode.

  ‘I’ve been admiring your luscious stockings, I can’t take my eyes off your ankles.’ I talked this sort of vulgar nonsense to Laura. I always acted the goat with the Impiatts, they seemed to expect it. Sometimes there was not a pin to choose between me and Reggie Farbottom, the office comic.

  Laura, no longer either young or slim, was a good-looking woman. She came of a Quaker family and had given up her education to marry Freddie, a fact to which she often alluded. She was, like her husband, extremely energetic. There was something of the games-mistress. Will and energy poured from her, often in the form of a sort of anxiety, possibly an anxiety always to be doing something worth-while. She had a sweet radiant intense face and those very wide-apart eyes which give a slightly dazed and dazing mesmeric effect to the glance. She grinned rather than smiled and had a deep resonant emphatic incisive cultured voice which could be tiring to listen to. Some word in each sentence had to be rather comically emphasized: a sign more of shyness than of the bossiness which it often seemed to express. She was always quipping. Her eyes were a fine chestnut brown and her hair, once a dark brown and now rather grey, had until lately
been bound about her head in two severe plaits. Now however she had taken to wearing it loose, streaming down her back nearly to her waist. This was disconcerting: a woman with long streaming grey hair cannot but look a little strange, especially if her eyes glitter with some exalted yearning. Now that her hair was down Laura’s energy, quite undiminished, seemed to have become more diffused, less directed and prosaic, as if she were recovering some of the misty electrical indeterminateness of youth. She had also lately developed a taste for flowing robes. Tonight she was wearing an ankle-length tent of green shot silk, split up the side to reveal blue stockings. She always dressed up for our Thursdays, even if it was only me. I did not fail to note this, and she knew I noted it. No wonder I shaved.

  ‘How is Christopher?’ said Laura. She took a maternal interest in my young people.

  ‘Much the same. Harmless. Picturesque. Useless.’

  ‘Have you given Christopher a day?’ The reference was to my having regular days of the week for seeing my friends.

  ‘No one under thirty is allowed to have a day.’

  ‘Is that a rule? I think you’ve just invented it!’

  ‘Hilary lives by rules,’ said Freddie. ‘He separates everything from everything.’