A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘And everyone from everyone!’ said Laura.

  ‘Separation is the essence of a bachelor’s existence,’ I said.

  ‘He likes to live in other people’s worlds and have none of his own.’

  ‘Hilary is all things to all men.’

  ‘Who do you think will succeed Templar-Spence?’ said Clifford Larr.

  They went off into office gossip. Laura disappeared to the kitchen. She was a good cook if you liked that sort of cooking. I contemplated the drawing-room and marvelled at the expensive knick-knacks and the absence of dust. Freddie and my fellow guest had got on to the economy. ‘The Sibyl’s leaves, what an image of inflation!’ said Clifford Larr.

  I never minded being left out of serious conversations. Ignorance should prompt modesty. And it suited me to be the one left to amuse the girls. Women are rarely pompous. I had no instinct to play the man as layer down of law. Freddie Impiatt did so with a touching unawareness. Freddie was stout, a waistcoat wearer, not tall, a little bald, monumental and greying, a kind conceited man with a big honest head and a pleasant horsy smile. He could not pronounce his r’s. Clifford Larr was thin and tall, a bit dandified, not an easy man, nervous, sarcastic, armed with conscious superiority, no sufferer of fools, one of those prickly unwelcoming reserved eccentrics in whom the Civil Service abounds.

  ‘A table, à table!’

  Talking of the pound, they followed me down the stairs in answer to Laura’s shout.

  ‘Fancy French muck again, Hilary!’

  ‘I sympathize with Wittgenstein who said he didn’t mind what he ate so long as it was always the same.’

  ‘Hilary lives on baked beans when he isn’t here. What did you have for lunch today, Hilary?’

  ‘Baked beans, of course.’

  ‘Have some white wine, Hilary.’

  ‘Just a smidget.’

  ‘Are those boys at your place still smoking pot?’

  ‘I don’t know what they do.’

  ‘Another case of separation!’

  ‘I must come and see them again,’ said Laura. ‘I’m writing another article. And I feel I might be able to help them somehow. All right, Hilary, no need to sneer!’

  Laura, as part of the latest exaltation, was attending lectures on sociology and writing intellectual women’s page journalism about ‘the young’.

  ‘The young are so selfless and brave compared with us.’

  ‘Yah.’

  ‘I mean it, Hilary. They are brave. They take such big decisions and they don’t worry about money and status and they aren’t afraid to live in the present. They put their whole lives at risk for the sake of ideas and experience.’

  ‘More fools they.’

  ‘I’m sure you were fearfully anxious and careful when you were young, Hilary.’

  ‘I thought about nothing but my exams.’

  ‘There you are. When are you going to tell me about your childhood, Hilary?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Hilary is pathologically discreet.’

  ‘In my view, the pound should not have been allowed to float,’ said Clifford Larr.

  ‘With this crisis on we’ve decided to stay at home for Christmas.’

  ‘You know so many languages, Hilary, but you never travel.’

  ‘I think Hilary never leaves London.’

  ‘I think he never leaves the perimeter of the royal parks.’

  ‘Do you still run round Hyde Park every morning, Hilary?’

  ‘What’s your view of the pound, Hilary?’

  ‘That it should bash every other currency to pieces.’

  ‘Hilary is so competitive and chauvinistic.’

  ‘I love my country.’

  ‘So old-fashioned.’

  ‘If you sing Land of Hope and Glory, Freddie will sing Soviet Fatherland.’

  ‘Patriotism used to be taught in schools,’ said Clifford Larr.

  ‘My school regarded patriotism as bad form,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Eton is so bolshy,’ said Laura.

  ‘The government will fall on price increases,’ said Clifford Larr.

  ‘I’m fed up with hearing the proles binding about the price of meat,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Why don’t they eat caviare.’

  ‘Hilary has missed the point as usual.’

  ‘They don’t have to eat beef all the time, we don’t.’

  ‘They could live on beans, Hilary does.’

  ‘Or pilchards. Or brown rice. Much healthier.’

  ‘All right. I just don’t like Freddie’s vocabulary’

  ‘Hilary is so combative.’

  ‘Talking of proles, Hilary, I wish you’d tell Arthur Fisch not to let those drunks visit him at the office.’

  ‘They aren’t drunks, they’re drug addicts.’

  ‘But do you agree, Hilary?’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘I mean, it won’t do.’

  ‘Hilary, has Freddie told you about the office pantomime?’

  ‘No, I haven’t told him. It’s to be Peter Pan.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Don’t you like Peter Pan, Hilary?’

  ‘It’s my favourite play.’

  ‘Hilary thinks Freddie will desecrate it.’

  ‘No need to ask who will play Hook and Mr Darling.’

  ‘The director always bags the star part.’

  ‘Freddie is an actor manqué.’

  ‘A great ambiguous work of art,’ said Clifford Larr. ‘Will you favour a Freudian interpretation?’

  ‘No, I think a Marxist one.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Don’t be so negative, Hilary.’

  ‘Why not a Christian interpretation, Peter as the Christ Child?’

  ‘Hilary says why not a Christian interpretation!’

  ‘Reggie Farbottom will play Smee.’

  ‘Aaargh.’

  ‘Hilary is envious.’

  ‘I must be going now,’ said Clifford Larr. He always left early. We all trooped upstairs.

  After he had gone and we were sitting in the drawing-room drinking coffee he was of course discussed.

  ‘Such an unhappy man,’ said Laura. ‘I’m so sorry for him.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about him,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know why you assume he’s unhappy. You two are always assuming people are unhappy so that you can pity them. I suspect you think he’s unhappy just because he isn’t married. You probably think I’m unhappy. As soon as I’ve gone you’ll say, “Poor Hilary, I’m so sorry for him, he’s so unhappy”.’

  ‘Don’t bite us, Hilary,’ said Freddie. ‘Some whisky?’

  ‘A smudgeling.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A smudgeling.’

  ‘Well, I persist in thinking he’s unhappy,’ said Laura, pouring the whisky. ‘He looks like an interesting man but he’s so stiff and solemn and he only wants to talk about the pound. He never talks about anything personal. I think he’s got a secret sorrow.’

  ‘Women always think men have secret sorrows. It’s a way of separating them from other women.’

  ‘And men like you, Hilary, always think women are against other women.’

  ‘That’s right, darling, hit him back.’

  ‘And he wears a cross round his neck.’

  ‘Clifford? Does he?’

  ‘Something on a chain anyway, I think it’s a cross, I saw it through his nylon shirt last summer.’

  ‘You aren’t angry with me, are you, Laura?’

  ‘Of course not, silly! Hilary talks big but it’s quite easy to put him down.’

  ‘Clifford can’t be religious, can he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddie, ‘he’s so remote and clammed up, I doubt if he has any real friends at all. He might be a Roman Catholic. I certainly daren’t ask.’

  ‘Laura thinks he needs a woman.’

  ‘Hilary’s crest soon rises again!’

  ‘I want to play Smee.’

  ‘Hilary just wants to spite
Reggie.’

  ‘Are you serious, Hilary? If you would like to you can be a pirate — ’

  ‘Of course I’m not serious. You know what I think about the office pantomime.’

  ‘Hilary is anti-life.’

  ‘Yes, thank God.’

  ‘I’m just going to find that brandy,’ said Freddie. He went off.

  I was never sure whether Freddie’s departures on my Thursdays were purely accidental or whether they were concerted with Laura so that she could interrogate me in a more intimate way. She certainly always set about probing at once and made the most of her time.

  ‘I think you’ve got a secret sorrow, Hilary.’

  ‘I’ve got about two hundred.’

  ‘Tell me one.’

  ‘I’m getting old.’

  ‘Nonsense. How is Crystal?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘How is Tommy?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Hilary, you are a chatterbox!’

  When I left the Impiatts the evening was not yet over for me. I did not stay late since I was expected elsewhere well before midnight. Of course I did not tell my hosts this, they would have thought it ‘bad form’. On Thursdays I always went to fetch Arthur Fisch away from Crystal. (Crystal is my sister.) This ‘fetching away’ was an old tradition. The idea was that Crystal sometimes found Arthur hard to get rid of and so I was to come and remove him. Or was it that I had decided to control, in both the French and English senses, my sister’s relations with this young fellow? The origin of the arrangement was lost in history. And indeed Arthur was no longer all that young, none of us was.

  Crystal lived in a bed-sitter flat in one of the shabby little streets beyond the North End Road, and at a brisk pace I could do the walk from Queen’s Gate Terrace in about twenty minutes. I always walked in London if I could. Crystal was over five years my junior and, like myself, unmarried. She had had various jobs. She had been a waitress, a clerk, she had worked in a chocolate factory. She was now modestly set up as a dressmaker, but seemed to spend most of her time altering her neighbours’ skirts for a few pence. I subsidized her a bit. No one could have lived more cheaply than Crystal. Her biggest weekly expenses were entertaining Arthur and me. The Impiatts never invited Crystal to dinner as she was too ignorant to be presentable. Laura used to invite her to tea occasionally.

  Crystal lived alone in a small shabby terrace house. Her bed-sitter, with tiny kitchen annexe, occupied the upper floor. There was a bath in the kitchen. The lavatory was on the ground floor, where there was also a dentist’s surgery and waiting-room. The basement was intermittently occupied by a motor cycle repairer and (we thought) receiver of stolen goods in a small way. The whole area was, or was then, very decrepit and poor. The stucco of the fronts, once painted different colours, had faded into a uniform grime and fallen off in patches to reveal ochre-coloured brick beneath. Here and there a gaping or boarded window or a doorless doorway proclaimed the abandonment of hope. The inhabitants were mostly ‘protected tenants’ at low rents (Crystal was such a one) for whom the landlords found it not worth their while to do repairs.

  I let myself in with my key and made my way upstairs. Crystal and Arthur were sitting at the table. They both rose when I entered, behaving as usual as if they were slightly afraid of me. They always acted a little guiltily on these occasions. Not because they had been making love, because they had not. Crystal, at thirty-seven, was still a virgin. Arthur was in love with her, but nothing happened, that I certainly knew. This evening I thought the atmosphere was rather more charged than usual, as if I had interrupted some particularly intense discussion. This annoyed me. Arthur was rather red in the face, and Crystal made little awkward darting movements to simulate some neutral and innocent activity. Perhaps they had just been holding hands. A bottle of cheap wine, brought by Arthur, stood on the table. Crystal hardly drank. There was always plenty left for me.

  I sat down at the table in the third chair. They sat down. The table was an ancient kitchen table of straw-coloured deal with a pleasant ridgy grainy surface out of which Crystal vigorously scrubbed the bread crumbs. It never wore a cloth, except when I came to supper with Crystal on Saturday evenings. We sat there under the naked central light like three conspirators. Crystal had cleared the dishes. Arthur poured me out a glass of wine.

  ‘What did you have for supper?’

  ‘Shepherd’s pie and beans and apricot tart and custard,’ said Crystal. She shared my taste in food. She still had her northern accent. I had got rid of mine.

  ‘What did you have at the Impiatts?’ Arthur asked. We always asked each other this.

  ‘Quenelles de brochet. Caneton à l’orange. Profiteroles.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You did better,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure we did!’ said Crystal, smiling her utterly innocent uncomplicit smile at Arthur, who grinned.

  Let me try to describe Crystal. She cannot be said to be beautiful. She was short and dumpy, she had no perceptible waist. She had pretty small well-worn capable hands which moved a lot, like a pair of little birds. She was round-faced and rather pallid or even pasty. She rarely took any exercise. Her hair was orange-brown and fuzzy and fell in a thick heavy mat almost to her shoulders. She had a large mouth with a prominent moist lower lip, very mobile. Rather bad teeth. A wide and distinctly upturned nose. Her eyes were hazel, of the kind which are pure golden without a hint of green, but they were usually hidden behind thick round spectacles which made them look like gleaming stones. None of this really describes Crystal however. How is it possible to describe someone to whom you are oned in love? Crystal often appeared stupid. She was like a sweet gentle patient good animal.

  Arthur was a little taller than Crystal, considerably shorter than me. He had a tentative humorous face of a rather dated sort. (Not that he was ever witty, he was far too timid.) He had soupy brown eyes and an apologetic much-chewed mouth and a well-grown but not quite drooping brown moustache. His hair was rather greasy, not long, hanging in lank brown waves. He looked like some unidentified person in a nineteenth-century photograph. He wore oval steel-rimmed glasses. This sounds like a prejudiced description. Let me try to amend it. He was an honest man devoid of malice. His soupy eyes could express feeling. (I do not wear glasses. My eyes are hazel like Crystal’s. Crystal and I had different fathers.)

  I never lingered long on Thursday evenings. I liked to condition those about me, and Arthur was conditioned to reach for his coat as soon as I arrived. He had in fact already reached for it. I took Crystal’s little busy hand. I did not mind Arthur’s presence any more than that of a dog. ‘All right, my darling?’

  ‘All right, dear. Are you all right?’ We always asked each other this.

  ‘Yes, yes. But are you really all right?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got a new lady. She wants a cocktail costume. Such lovely stuff. Shall I show you?’

  ‘No. Show me on Saturday.’ I kissed her wrist. Arthur rose. A minute later we were outside in the wind.

  I felt that emotion again, the emotion in Arthur from whatever had happened during the evening, something more than usual. I wondered if I should question him, decided not to. We walked up the North End Road. Arthur lived in Blythe Road. The wind was suddenly very cold, a winter wind. I felt something out of darkness grab at me, an old old thing.

  ‘Freddie was on about your junkies again,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t stop them from coming to the office.’

  ‘You could stop collecting them.’

  Arthur was silent. The wind blew bitterly. Arthur was wearing a sensible absurd woollen cap. My head was uncovered. I usually wore a flat cloth cap when it got really cold. Time to dig it out. I had forgotten to tell Crystal about the telephone. I must remember to do so on Saturday.

  ‘Has Freddie decided about the panto?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘Yes. Peter Pan.’

  ‘Oh goodie!’

  We reached the corner of Hammersmith Road, where we parted
.

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘Hilary — ’

  ‘Good night.’

  I walked abruptly away. It was after midnight when I got to Bayswater. There was silence in the flat. I glanced quickly through Tommy’s letter. The usual rigmarole! I went to bed in my underclothes. (This shocked Christopher.) I had never had any sleep problems since the orphanage. A talent for oblivion is a talent for survival. I laid my head down and merciful pain-killing sleep covered me fathoms deep. Not to have been bom is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.