A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Get us some tea, would you, please?’ said Arthur to Skinker.

  ‘Mr Burde’s a deep one, in’ he,’ said Skinker and disappeared.

  Arthur closed the door. ‘Hilary, aren’t you going to — ?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well,’ said Arthur doubtfully, trying hard to read me and to find the proper thing to say. ‘I agree it’s not worth fighting people like that. And I suppose there is something to turn and turn about — I mean I suppose it’s not — or perhaps you think — or something — I mean.’

  I did not help him out.

  Arthur climbed onto the desk and sat there, his knees close to my shoulder. He was probably relieved at not having to second me in some scrimmage. He made as if to pat me, then fluttered his hand back to his lapel. ‘You certainly flummoxed them, Hilary. That was the last thing they expected.’

  I had flummoxed myself. Had Crystal’s decision just deprived me of will-power or was this simply the inevitable beginning of some end which I had not foreseen as starting now? Officewise, lifewise, the beginning of the end? Why was I totally unable to react? Was I afraid I might kill them? No. I had behaved quietly not out of any decent or even intelligible motive but out of an absence of any motive at all. Perhaps this was the collapse of a bully, perhaps this was what collapsing bullies were like. For a desperate man, any setback can tap a deep base of nightmare, every sin represents the original one, indeed is part of it, every crime is The Crime. A sort of quiet ecstasy of pure hate possessed me. I hated Arthur. I hated his stupid knees and shabby shiny shapeless blue trousers which were pushed up so near to my face that I could positively smell them. I abhorred his capture of Crystal about which, I now saw as in a vision, I would have to behave perfectly. What had just happened in the Room was nothing, was a symbol merely, a blank occasion of some older larger state of the universe. A vista, a view of the light, a gateway to salvation was closed, the immuring process one stage further on towards the final pit and pendulum. It was as if an abstract form of some past or perhaps future suffering had coldly come upon me. Misery and sin are inextricably mixed in the human lot. I experienced the inextricability.

  ‘Are you all right, Hilary?’

  Arthur’s cupboard was tiny, constructed of slatted wood like a shed, unpainted on the inside. A high window gave upon the corridor. There was an electric light, only Arthur had not switched it on, perhaps because he did not dare to expose my face. I looked up into Arthur’s mild anxious eyes. My future brother-in-law already looked a different man. Would he and Crystal discuss me with sympathy and concern?

  Skinker arrived with the tea. He was a kind man, and had been trying to think of something suitable to say. ‘Our Lord said we was to turn the other cheek.’

  The matter was thus summed up as a slap in the face, meekly received. ‘Thanks,’ I said to Skinker. I took the tea. ‘Thanks,’ I said to Arthur, and patted his shoulder. I went with the teacup back into the Room and sat down at my desk.

  Edith and Reggie, who had been anxiously waiting for me, began giggling again. There was a charged silence while I drank my tea and fiddled my papers into shape.

  Reggie said at last, ‘Say something, Hilary.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Say you’re not cross.’

  ‘I’m not cross,’ I said. I was not.

  It was Monday evening. I let myself in with my key to the flat in Lexham Gardens. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said Clifford Larr from the kitchen.

  ‘It’s so bloody hot in here.’ I dropped my coat in the hall on a lemon and white striped settee thing, and went on into the kitchen where Clifford (a serious cook), dressed in a long blue apron, was pouring some oil into a bowl.

  ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Something terrible happened.’

  ‘Oh?’ He looked up, interested.

  ‘Mrs Witcher and her minion moved my desk out of the window and puts hers there instead.’

  ‘Was that all? Then you moved yours back again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why not. What’s the point?’

  Clifford, the oil bottle still poised in one hand, looked at me coolly. ‘You want me to sympathize with you. You want me to appreciate some interesting suffering. No. I just think you were a fool. You have lost another trick in the game of life. You will never be able to get your place back now, never. It’s gone for good.’

  ‘I know, why rub it in? I don’t want you to cry over me.’

  ‘I can’t be bothered with the metaphysics of your self-pity.’

  ‘Who’s asking you to bother, fuck you?’

  ‘I think less of you, that’s all. And there is less of you. Because of this defeat there is that much less of you. Someone has taken a slice off you, Mrs Witcher has, she has drawn your blood. And since you let her do so she will do it again. You will become a dull man whose sufferings will interest nobody.’

  ‘I am that already, according to you.’

  ‘And your clothes smell. I wish you’d do something about it.’

  ‘Do you want me to smash something before the evening has even started?’

  ‘You get excited so easily.’

  ‘You are deliberately hurting me.’

  ‘Oh don’t be so boring. I can see that you are going to bore me tonight.’ He was now stirring his horrible blackish oily mixture.

  ‘Am I? Crystal is going to marry Arthur Fisch.’ I had not told Clifford anything about this romance.

  Clifford went on stirring. His face changed, contracting, then slowly relaxing into an almost angelic calm. ‘You needn’t go as far as that to amuse me.’

  ‘It isn’t a joke.’

  After a pause, Clifford said, ‘It couldn’t happen.’

  ‘What couldn’t?’

  ‘That marriage. It couldn’t happen.’

  ‘Why not? Would you prevent it?’

  ‘No. But confess. You’re not serious.’

  It rarely happens that one can construct a friendship with someone which is as complex as one’s thoughts about that person. Clifford Larr interested me very much. I felt admiration, affection. But our relations, though close, remained curiously abstract. This was partly of course because he ran the whole thing, decreeing himself mysterious, a sort of elusive prince. We were not lovers, of course. I was irredeemably heterosexual. That he was homosexual, invisible to me at first (because I tended not to notice such things) was later the essence, the cornerstone, the key: yet a key that could not be used, or which only opened doors to reveal other ones. This was the quality of his unhappiness, which hung like a canopy over our, so oddly as I said abstract, even formal relations. That he had hoped to find a partner in me, had with the most exquisite tact and discretion tried me for this role, now seemed to belong to the remote past, a kind of legend of a time which may not even have existed in reality, but which pervaded and determined the present, coloured it certainly. Nothing was said of course, and I received no confidences about Clifford’s life. The only link with his other existence was Christopher Cather, who figured here as a portent rather than as a source of information. I had met Christopher through Clifford. It was conceivable that Clifford and Christopher had been lovers, though they apparently never saw each other now. I preferred not to think about it. This was not because of any dislike or disapproval of homosexual practices. I harboured no prejudice of this sort. If I shuddered at all it was at what was sexual rather than at what was homosexual. It was that my friendship with Clifford Larr took place under the sign of a vast reticence. It depended on a kind of vow of silence. At any rate it depended on my being passive, incurious, even seemingly insensitive. Second fiddle, of course. But also in a way set up as unsatisfactory, something of a brute, as if unconcerned, and ipso facto perfectly discreet. How was it that I understood all that, the essential structure of the thing, without any explanation, and that I also knew that Clifford knew I understood? It was part of this
vast understanding that I never felt that Christopher had been planted on me as a spy, and that Clifford was well aware that Christopher and I never discussed him. Discretion was doubtless something which Clifford imposed on anyone who came near him. If there were to be revelations, and he sometimes teased me with the possibility of one, these would be a grace decreed by him. They could never be extracted by questioning, indeed questioning was made almost impossible by the rigidly impersonal-personal tone of my communication with Clifford. He wore always round his neck upon a chain the talisman which Laura Impiatt had imagined to be a cross. In fact it was a man’s signet ring. Sometimes when I was with him, Clifford, undoing the front of his shirt in the disgustingly hot centrally-heated atmosphere of his flat, would let the dangling ring be visible, would almost seem to display it. I looked at it, I once even touched it, but I had never so far asked him about it. This was in accordance with the myth of our relations. There was an inhibition of tenderness, a check of curiosity, a sheer silence which, by making me play, under his direction, a slightly unnatural role, provided him perhaps with a weird substitute for the sexual connection which we did not have. Another aspect of this silence was the total secrecy which, again at his wish, covered our Mondays. Perhaps the secrecy mimed a state of affairs which might have existed but did not. I myself would have been glad to let it be known that Clifford and I were friends. I was proud of this friendship which would certainly have improved my standing at the office. There Clifford was an important man, a dark horse, admired, yet also feared because of his sharp tongue; and it is always flattering to be petted by someone who is generally feared. I sometimes wondered if Clifford simply felt ashamed of me, ashamed of liking me, and so did not want our names linked. Even this possibility contributed to the odd tension between us which clearly gave him some satisfaction or he would have dropped me without a pang and forgotten me instantly. That one might at any moment be thus dropped and forgotten was of course itself part of the tension.

  No one knew of our meetings except Crystal. This was another complication, perhaps another bond. I should explain that I had known Clifford, who was exactly my age, very slightly at Oxford. He knew a good deal about the Oxford débâcle. He had told nobody at the office. (I successfully mystified my colleagues about my past.) This fact indeed first suggested that he felt some sort of interest in me. When I first joined the department I had discerned him with dismay and waited fearfully for rumours. There were none. Clifford had said nothing. Then one day he invited me for a drink. It shows how little I understood him that I went to this assignation half fearing that I was to be faced with some sort of blackmail. As it was, it was a little while before my slow mind perceived what it was that he was, so delicately, after, and by then he had already found out the answer to his question. But that, it turned out, was just the beginning of our strange friendship which by now probably meant more to me than it did to him. He was without doubt the most intelligent person that I knew well, and was in this respect a considerable blessing. He animated what was left of my intellectual life. The thing about Crystal was quite unexpected.

  Clifford Larr had evidently noticed me at Oxford more than I had noticed him. This was not only because of the disaster which ended my life there (and in many ways ended my life) but because he was, as he told me later, a connoisseur of oddities, and I was an oddity. Perhaps I was discussed more than I realized. He knew that I had a sister to whom I was devoted. Clifford also had a sister. She was very unlike Crystal. She was a distinguished mathematician and died of cancer in her twenties. After it had become clear between Clifford and me that we were to see each other regularly (the Mondays arrangement was the only part of my mode of life which I managed to impose on him) he expressed a desire to meet Crystal, and I brought her along once or twice to his flat. He also visited her occasionally at her place with me. Crystal fell in love with him. I was very upset and totally amazed. I should not have been. Who after all did poor Crystal ever meet? She might as well have been Miranda on the island for all she really saw of men. Clifford was a glittering object, good-looking, clever, charming when he wanted to be so, and surrounded with the sort of melancholy and the sort of mystery which make women feel for men pity, then quickly love. Moreover he behaved to Crystal in a wonderful way, with a gentleness and a tact which I never otherwise saw in him. He even looked different, his face was different, when he was with her. And when he was with her he also enacted, or perhaps this was instinctive, a sort of respectful affection for me which helped to win her heart. He treated her, not quite as an equal, that would have been impossible, but more nearly so than did any other of my friends except Arthur of course). He explained things to her. The Impiatts patronized Crystal. They were kind to her but they never saw her quite as an individual person. She did not interest them. She did interest Clifford. Under his interest she flowered, and she loved him.

  Of course Crystal never told me in so many words that she had fallen in love, but it was sufficiently evident and she knew that it was. It was also evident that this was a hopeless love. Clifford was totally homosexual and in any case could have no deep relationship with an uneducated person. Crystal had clearly inspired some sort of warmth in him, perhaps simply pity. It may even have been that he liked the idea of Crystal. It amused him to inform me that I was fixated on my sister. (A harmless rival?) And he took a curious and lively pleasure in the fact that she was a virgin. ‘And is she really a virgin?’ he would say to me with satisfaction, wanting to have this information repeated again and again, like a child who wants the repetition of a story. ‘It’s so nice to think of anybody being a virgin in these days.’ When it became clear what had happened, Clifford did what I suppose was the only thing he could do, and doubtless also the right thing, he withdrew completely. ‘He won’t come again, will he,’ Crystal said to me in the monotonous tone which she used for grief. ‘No,’ I said. He did not, nor did she ever go again to his flat which had seemed to her like a magic palace. Silence fell again, falling like snow upon this so unlikely moment of communication. She never spoke of him. He rarely spoke of her, though he sometimes asked me, formally and without curiosity, now she was. At the severance of relations between them I felt profound relief.

  When my friendship, if that was what it was, with Clifford Larr began, I imagined it would, even if not very dramatic, be a moderately dynamic business with a beginning, a middle and an end. Basically I suppose I had no confidence in my ability not to bore a man as cultivated as Larr. He was an âme damnée. Of course I was one myself. Only I was a coarse stupid accidental semi-conscious âme damnée and he was a refined and highly self-wrought one. I could not believe that, given I manifestly did not share his preferences, he would go on wanting to see me. He did, however, and that without seeming to want things to develop beyond a certain point which he fixed. (And we reached this point relatively early.) There was no dynamism, yet at the same time there was no stability. Knowing Clifford was a pleasure, but it was also a pain. He saw to that. I naturally felt envious and inferior, and Clifford knew exactly how to make me feel more so. Clifford was rich. His father had been a successful barrister, later a judge. Clifford had grown up in a wealthy bookish home. He was educated and cultured in a way in which I would never be, and probably could never have been even if I had stayed at Oxford. Clifford’s flat was like a museum, a temple, a House of Mysteries. At night it was, though full of lamps, curiously dark. When Clifford was depressed, which was often, he went out and bought an objet d’art. The place was crammed with tiny fancy bookcases and little rugs and Chinese vases and bronzes and things. He had a collection of Italian drawings, a collection of Indian miniatures (I liked these) representing princesses in palaces, in gardens, on boats, conversing with animals, awaiting lovers. It was an education to visit him, or would have been if I had been willing to be taught anything. He soon gave up trying to make me listen to music or to let him teach me to play chess. However, I knew more languages than he did and I never let him forget it.

/>   Clifford went on wanting to see me, but he made me pay. He was often out of spirits and talked regularly about committing suicide. When he was in black moods he needled me mercilessly. At first I gratified him by becoming frantic. One day in a rage I broke a valuable bowl of red Bohemian glass. He was amazingly upset and practically cried over the thing. (Possessiveness is fed, I suppose, by multitude of possessions.) His anger came later. After that I became more restrained, though there were still occasional rows when I had to rush blindly away out of a sheer inability to answer him back. His malice was universal and, when not directed at me, amusing. He enjoyed inciting people to be complacent so that he could despise them. (The Impiatts were especially easy game in this respect.) I felt privileged when he was contemptuous of the world but exempted me. Perhaps that was my form of complacency. He was, as I have said, dry and thin and tall. He had slightly waving pallid hair, the kind that goes grey without anyone noticing. He had narrow close blue eyes and a straight pointed nose and a thin mouth which usually looked sarcastic, but which, when he was listening to music or looking at a picture or looking at Crystal or (very occasionally) looking at me, became relaxed and pouting and conveyed a look of serene sweetness to his whole face. He dressed in soft expensive velvety corduroys and soft expensive vividly coloured shirts.