by Iris Murdoch
I pushed open the door of Clifford’s flat. It was an evening, not Monday. I had telephoned him both at home and at the office and had had no reply. I wanted to see him. He was, at that time, the only person whom I wanted to see. I had come to Lexham Gardens on a sudden needful impulse and had seen with a pang of relief that a light was on in his sitting-room.
There was a faint clattering in the kitchen. The flat felt slightly odd. I was about to call out to him when I saw, looking into the drawing-room, that the Indian miniatures had been taken from the walls. Unfaded rectangles of Morris wallpaper stood in their stead. Then my gaze found upon the hall table a large Chinese bowl, now filled with an unusual collection of oddments. I saw among these something which stopped my breath even before I fully took in its significance. Lying there among the miscellany of things, matchboxes, letters, keys, was the chain with the signet ring upon it which Clifford had been used to wear about his neck.
I must then have made some sound. A bald round-faced man whom I did not recognize emerged from the kitchen and stared at me with hostile surprise.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I was looking for Clifford.’
‘Oh. You didn’t know?’
But by then I did. ‘Is —?’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Clifford is dead, he committed suicide.’
‘I see. He — often said he would — ’ I stood for a moment looking through the drawing-room door at the miniatures lined up, leaning against the wall: the princess on the terrace watching the thunderstorm, the prince leaving his mistress by moonlight, two girls of transcendent beauty striding through a garden, a girl rather like Biscuit braiding her hair. Presumably they were on their way to the sale room.
I turned to go.
‘I say, one moment, would you mind giving me those keys? I am the heir and — ’
I handed over the flat and the front door key, which I was still holding in my hand, to the piggish cousin, and made my way downstairs.
Milder weather had come and it was raining slightly as I made my way back through Cornwall Gardens to Gloucester Road Station.
Just before I reached Gloucester Road I noticed the church, St Stephen’s, at which, Clifford had once told me, T. S. Eliot served for many years as a churchwarden. Obeying an imperative need to sit down I went into the church and sat in one of the pews in the darkness. As I did so I suddenly began to wish that I had asked the cousin if I could have the signet ring and the chain as a memento. It was impossible to go back now; and anyway, who was I to wear that now forever mysterious token? Clifford had been carried away by the cold river and I had not stretched out my hand to him, not even touched his fingers.
I sat in the obscurity of the church and stared at the high golden wall of the reredos and watched the little baffled fights flickering in the dark, like the light upon the jetty at Cheyne Walk, and tears of vain tenderness and self-pity came into my eyes. I needed Clifford, needed his mockery which was cold and yet not cold, needed him to hear that which now could be told only to him. Only he was gone, and it felt to me as if I had killed him in a fit of anger, as I had, in a fit of anger, killed Anne. And where there might have been the relief of reconciliation or even the relief of retribution, there was blankness and solitude, a greater blankness and a quieter solitude than ever before. I had been turned silently out into the desert, there was no one now to whom I could speak at all of the things which were hourly and minutely devouring my heart.
It only dawned on me gradually, as I suffered the shock of Kitty’s death, that no one knew that I had been there at all. At least, Gunnar knew and conceivably Biscuit; but no one else knew and I had told no one. I had not revealed to Crystal when it was that I was going to see Kitty to say good-bye. Kitty’s accidental fall from the jetty and her husband’s heroic effort to save her burst in upon the story from the outside, and when I saw Crystal afterwards I did not conceal my shock, but let her assume (and she did) that death had forestalled my final scene with Gunnar’s wife. And no one eke, except Arthur, even knew that Kitty and I had ever met except as mere shadowy acquaintances. In deciding not to tell Crystal what really happened I made an important and in some ways terrible decision. I had let the full weight of Anne’s death fall upon my sister, I had let her share everything. This, I decided, I would deal with alone. I would not inject into that innocent life this further and perhaps at last fatally crippling nightmare. But my silence divided me from Crystal in a new way, and obscurely she felt that some deep severance had taken place and we looked at each other across a gap with puzzled sorrowful eyes.
I wondered in the days afterwards whether I should write a letter to Gunnar explaining — and yet what explanation would serve my turn? I could not write the truth without seeming in some way to cast blame, or at least responsibility, upon Kitty; and my own conduct in any case was inexcusable. I wondered too whether Gunnar would write to me, and for a while I watched the post like a lover, hoping to see, whatever horrors it might contain, an envelope with his tiny handwriting. But none came. (He resigned from the department almost immediately after the catastrophe and went back into politics. A timely by-election took him into parliament where he shortly became a junior minister. But this was at an even later time.) I wanted him to know that I was saying good-bye to Kitty forever when he found us together. But as time passed it seemed a pointless attempt at extenuation. And was it even true? I would also like to have known who had sold me. Who had told Gunnar, who had prompted that apt arrival? Biscuit? Clifford? Was it even conceivable that it was a plot prearranged between Gunnar and Kitty to set a scene for murder, was I to that extent exonerated? It was an exoneration for which I could not wish, and of course I did not really believe Kitty to have been, even half willingly, her husband’s instrument.
I sat in St Stephen’s Church crying for Clifford as I had not cried for Kitty, and just then his death seemed even more awful than hers. Crystal had seen Kitty as a femme fatale luring me to my doom. In fact I had lured Kitty to her doom as I had lured Anne. But the world’s will had mingled in our loves and the purest of chances had been present at those deaths. I could at least see that much now. Clifford had died differently, he had died of being unloved and uncared for, as if the door had been shut upon him on a cold night. I did not know, and would never know, how much he had really cared for me. Perhaps he had died as a part of some quite other drama, for someone of whom I had never even heard. And I wept, and gradually in the vagueness of misery, wept for Kitty, for Gunnar, for Anne and in some quieter way for myself. And after a while I began thinking about Mr Osmand, and how he had died alone, and how he had once taught me out of Kennedy’s Latin Primer to conjugate the verb of love, his shabby coat sleeve pressing gently against my arm.
In the few days after the river scene I had expected to go mad. I passed the time alone in my bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. The resolution not to tell Crystal came early, without its reasoning, just as an imperative. This albatross, I could not hang around her neck. But could I bear it alone? It did not then occur to me to talk to Clifford, I had as yet no grain of desire to expose this delicate horror to his mockery, to his, as it seemed, bottomless coldness. At first the thing itself, wrapped up in this awful sentence of silence, simply confronted me and I felt that no rational or even conceptual judgment could be made upon it. It and I were alone together and my mind was frozen by grief and fear, and the possibility of madness seemed like a refuge. Later, as I became able to talk to myself and to reflect and turn the matter round and, in however chilled a way, to see facets, the desire to speak to Clifford, the memory of, in spite of everything, his wisdom, and of, however self-mocked, his affection, made him appear providentially as a last resource. Now there was no resource and that too seemed like the work of a mercilessly just providence.
It was indeed crucial that, this time, I had not told Crystal. Then I had someone, a passive spectator who was also a fellow sufferer, to enact it all to. I suffered before Crystal as believers suffer before
God; only doubtless the latter derive more benefit from their suffering than I did. And she, innocent loving darling, connived, out of her sheer goodness and her identification with me, at an establishment of pure desolation. I was determined that our lives should be wrecked and she, poor sparrow, had so readily made her little nest in the wreckage. How profitless it had all been I could now very clearly see. Repentance, penance, redemptive suffering? Nothing of the sort. I had destroyed my chances in life and destroyed Crystal’s happiness out of sheer pique, out of the spiteful envious violence which was still in me. It was burning the orphanage down all over again, only now there was no one to stop the work of destruction. I had spoilt my talents and made myself a slave, not because I sincerely regretted what I had done, but because I ferociously resented the ill-luck which had prevented me from ‘getting away with it’. What had impressed me really was not the crime itself but the instant and automatic nature of the first retribution, the loss of Oxford, my ‘position’ and the fruits of my labour. If I had indeed got away with it I could perhaps have recovered. As so often, as in my own childhood, guilt sprang from the punishment rather than from the crime. And I perpetuated my suffering out of resentment. If I had been the only recipient of this violence the incident might have been, in some recording angel’s book, regarded as closed. But I deliberately made Crystal suffer with me. Could her pure suffering have redeemed me? In some ideal theory, yes, in reality, no.
Of course I regretted what I had done. I regretted all those wrong choices with their catastrophic results, and not just as pieces of ill luck. I saw where I had behaved badly, the selfishness, the destructiveness, the rapacity. But I could now see too how hopelessly this ‘penitence’ was mixed in with the grosser elements which composed almost all of me. There are religious rituals for separating out the tiny grain of penitence. There are rituals for this, even when, as anything experienced, the penitence does not exist at all. But I could not use these machines. It all remained, for me, grossly muddled up, penitence, remorse, resentment, violence and hate. And it was not a tragedy. I had not even the consolation of that way of picturing the matter. Tragedy belongs in art. Life has no tragedies.
I wondered about the future. Was another cycle of misery, intensified, more dense, beginning for me? If so, it would last out my lifetime. Did not the same crime twice committed merit more than double retribution? Or was it now quite a different scene? I was older, I lacked the recklessness of youth and its generosity. When I was in the cold Thames I soon forgot about Kitty. The deepest me who knew of no one else was desperate to survive. The middle-aged are more careful of themselves. Would such a desperation, or such a mean carefulness, now at last and in this more awful need, guard me from the self-destruction to which I had earlier doomed myself? Would it help me now that I could more coolly see the ingredients of chance? Was it cynicism to hope this? Would even cynicism help me? Or was I perhaps actually wiser? How Clifford would have loved to discuss these questions. Certainly I could better measure now, what had been invisible to me then except as a provocation to rage, the amount of sheer accident which these things, perhaps all things, contained. Then I had raged at the accidental but had not let it in any way save me from my insistence upon being the author of everything. Now I saw my authorship more modestly and could perhaps move in time towards forgiving myself, forgiving them all. Or was this the most subtle cynicism of the lot? There is a religious teaching which says that God is the author of all actions. What I wonder is its secular equivalent?
My grief for Kitty and my memory of her love for me, whatever it had meant, remained and would remain clear. Perhaps such griefs are the most unalloyed and enduring things in the fickle muddled selfish human heart: grief existing not as guilt or calculation or rational regret, but as pains and pictures. These would go with me secretly until the end. I wished, with a surly bitter sadness, that I could communicate even once more with Gunnar, but that was impossible, and even to imagine that he would one day return to kill me was a romanticism which the more awful reality of life forbade. There was simply a loose end which guilt would twist and the only salve, indeed the only duty, was to recognize the impossible, standing as it were at attention before some end-point of human endeavour.
There was, however, one glint of light and I was blessed to have, amid these fruitless burdens and these blank obstacles, a place of decent labour after all. I could still, before it was too late, try to make Crystal happy. Before I had had the force to envisage that future, some right instinct had led me to keep the catastrophe concealed. I would look after Crystal now, as I ought always to have done, as if she were my child, not darkening her soul with my private atrocities, but working practically to give her happiness and ease and the kind of simple joy which was so native to her but of which I had so consistently deprived her. Everything could please Crystal, provided only I were well, every simple little thing could please her. So it was a monstrous scandal that she had not had a happy life. I could not work for her now as I had meant to do when I was young, as I had thought it and envisaged it at that moment in Oxford when she had said, ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’ I could not give her that happiness. But I could work myself weary to give her another smaller shorter more modest happiness wherein her native joy could frisk about at last. This would be now my only task. Crystal was the only being whom I loved and I was fortunate to be able to express this love in innocence and fullness of heart and to devote to it what remained of my life. I would take her far away from London and find in some country place the very best-paid job which my talents could command. And I would live with her in a cottage and she should have her garden and her animals and all her little heart’s desires, and I would simulate with her a kind of peace, perhaps even a kind of joy, into which some of the reality of these things might merge at last. We two alone shall sing like birds in the cage.
I got up to leave the church. I felt exhausted by grieving and the thought that Clifford was now dead came freshly again to my heart. I walked into the south aisle to make my way out. At one end of the aisle under a tasselled canopy the Christ child was leaning from his mother’s arms to bless the world. At the other end he hung dead, cut off in his young manhood for me and for my sins. There was also, I saw, a memorial tablet which asked me to pray for the repose of the soul of Thomas Stearns Eliot. How is it now with you, old friend, the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings being over? Alas, I could not pray for your soul any more than I could for Clifford’s. You had both vanished from the catalogue of being. But I could feel a lively gratitude for words, even for words whose sense I could scarcely understand. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.
CHRISTMAS EVE
‘WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?’
‘I do.’
‘I, Arthur Mervyn Fisch, take thee, Crystal Mary Burde, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part, in accordance with God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.’
Arthur mumbled his part. His eyes were glowing with joy, his face was blazing with triumph, but he was shuddering as if at any moment he might fall to the ground. Crystal, who was crying as if her heart would break, whispered her part. When I touched her to perform my act of giving her to Arthur she was rigid. Arthur fumbled the ring onto her finger and she stared at it through her tears with a sort of amazement, then turned round to me with the look of a frightened child. ‘With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, with all my worldly goods I thee endow …’
It was over. The parson led us to the vestry to sign the register. Crystal wrote her maiden name for the last time: Crystal Burde. Arthur dropped the pen and made a blot. I signed my name as a witness. Tommy signed hers, taking up a great deal of space with various Scottish flourishes: T
homasina Uhlmeister.
The rites had been blessedly short. Crystal had wanted us to sing He who would valiant be, but with my last act of authority in her life I had vetoed that. Ours was the last ceremony of the day and the parson, who was probably anxious to scurry along to some seasonable celebration, shook our hands and smiled his way out. It was Christmas Eve.
Tommy and I were left alone with Mr and Mrs Arthur Fisch. Tommy had also been in tears throughout. ‘Well, congratulations, Arthur,’ I said and shook his hand. He had resumed his moustache but happiness had in other ways improved his appearance.
‘Don’t greet so, my poor bairn,’ said Tommy to Crystal.
‘Must you use these affected Scotticisms?’ I said to Tommy. ‘Stop crying, Crystal, my duck, there’s my darling. You’re a married woman now.’
‘That’s what’s fashing her,’ said Tommy. ‘Oh dear, oh dear — ’ Tommy’s own tears overwhelmed her.
I tried to exchange glances with Arthur, any cliche would have helped, only he was hovering over Crystal and seemed about to start howling himself. Someone at the back of the church coughed meaningfully. No doubt they wanted to flossy the place up for midnight mass. Arthur had now endowed Crystal with the Empire State Building firescreen and the aeroplane armchair and was licensed to worship her with his body. Tommy had made for the fifth time the joke about Crystal having changed from being a crystal bird into being a crystal fish. I had given my sister away. It was time to go.
