The Black Prince (Penguin Classics)

by Murdoch, Iris

  ‘Having a grip on life would be quite compatible with having a fling with you, I daresay. Anyway, as you have politely indicated, it’s not my business. I’m sorry if I offended Rachel. I certainly wasn’t intending to pester her with attentions. I was depressed and she was sympathetic. I’ll try to be less disorderly. Can we leave it at that?’

  ‘I read your so – called review with some interest.’

  ‘Why call it a so – called review? It’s a review. I’m not going to publish it.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to have sent it to me.’

  ‘True. And if it’s any satisfaction to you I regret having done so. Could you just tear it up and forget it?’

  ‘I’ve already torn it up. I thought 1 might be tempted to read it again. I can’t forget it. Bradley, you know how vain and touchy we artists are.’

  ‘I know from my own case.’

  ‘I wasn’t excluding you, for Christ’s sake. We, you too. When one’s attacked through one’s work it goes straight into the heart. I don’t mean that one bothers about journalists, I mean people one knows. They sometimes imagine that you can despise a man’s book and remain his friend. You can’t. The offence is unforgivable.’

  ‘So our friendship is at an end.’

  ‘No. Because in rare cases one can overcome the offence by moving much closer to the other person. I think this is possible here. But there are one or two things I must say.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You, and you aren’t the only one, every critic tends to do this, speak as if you were addressing a person of invincible complacency, you speak as if the artist had never realized his faults at all. In fact most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do. Only naturally there is no place for the public parade of this knowledge. If one is prepared to publish a work one must let it speak for itself. It would be unthinkable to run along beside it whimpering “I know it’s no good”. One keeps one’s mouth shut.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘I know I’m a second – rater.’

  ‘Uh – hu.’

  ‘I believe that the stuff has some merits or I wouldn’t publish it. But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better. And an aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is. And less of me. I could be wrong, but I judge this and stand by the judgement. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Also I enjoy it. For me writing is a natural product of joie de vivre. Why not? Why shouldn’t I be happy if I can?’

  ‘Why indeed.’

  ‘An alternative would be to do what you do. Finish nothing, publish nothing, nourish a continual grudge against the world, and live with an unrealized idea of perfection which makes you feel superior to those who try and fail.’

  ‘How clearly you put it.’

  ‘You’re not angry with me?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Bradley, don’t be cross, our friendship has suffered because I’m successful and you aren’t, I mean in a worldly way. I’m afraid that’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Believe me, I’m not trying to make you angry, I’m in a quite instinctive way defending myself against you. Unless I do this reasonably effectively I shall feel deep resentment and I don’t want to feel deep resentment. Isn’t that sound psychology?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Bradley, we simply mustn’t be enemies. I don’t only mean it would be nice not to be, I also mean it would be fatal to be. We could destroy each other. Bradley, do say something for God’s sake.’

  ‘You do like melodrama,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t destroy anybody. I feel old and stupid. All I care about is getting my book written. There is a book, I care about that absolutely. The rest is rubble. I’m sorry I upset Rachel. I think I’d better leave London for a while. I need a change.’

  ‘Oh stop being so self – absorbed and quiet. Shout and wave your arms about! Curse me, question me. We must come closer to each other, otherwise we’re lost. Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi – hostility. We’ve got to fight if we’re going to love. Don’t be cold with me.’

  I said, ‘I don’t believe you about you and Christian.’

  ‘You’re jealous.’

  ‘You’re wanting to make me shout and wave my arms, but I won’t. Even if you aren’t making love to Christian, your “friendship”, as you call it, must hurt Rachel.’

  ‘My marriage is a very strong organism. Any wife has moments of jealousy. But Rachel knows she’s the only one. When you have slept beside a woman for years and years and years she becomes part of you, separation isn’t possible. Wishful thinking outsiders often tend to under – estimate the strength of a marriage.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  ‘Bradley, let’s meet again soon and talk properly, not about these nervy things, but about literature, like we used to. I’m going to write a critical reassessment of Meredith. I’d love to know what you think.’

  ‘Meredith! Yes.’

  ‘And I do wish you’d see Christian and talk to her properly. She needs that talk, it wasn’t nonsense about redemption. It would be a good thing to. I want you to see her.’

  ‘What Christian would call your motivation is dark to me.’

  ‘Don’t take refuge in irony. God, I seem to be wooing you all the time now! Wake up, you’re going along in a trance. We’ve got to wrestle into some sort of decent directness with each other. It’s worth it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Arnold, would you go now? Do you mind? Perhaps I’m getting old, but I can’t stand emotional conversations the way I used to.’

  ‘Write to me. We used to write to each other. Let’s not rapidly mislay each other.’

  ‘OK. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry too.’

  ‘Oh fuck off, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Dear old Bradley, that’s better! Good – bye then. Till soon.’

  I waited till I heard Arnold’s footsteps well out of the court, then I rang the Baffins’ number. Julian answered. I put the phone down at once.

  I thought: what did they say to Julian?

  ‘He knows you’re with me?’

  ‘He sent me to you.’

  It was the next morning and Rachel and I were sitting on a bench in Soho Square. The sun was shining and there was a dusty defeated smell of midsummer London: oily, grimy, spicy, melancholy and old. A number of tousled and rather elderly – looking pigeons stood around us, staring at us with their hard insentient eyes. Despairing people sat on other benches. The sky above Oxford Street was a sizzling unforgiving blue. Though it was still quite early in the morning I was sweating.

  Rachel, who kept rubbing her eyes and drooping her head, seemed today like an ill person. Her listlessness and her puffy tired face reminded me of Priscilla. Her eyes were vague and she would not look at me. She was wearing a sleeveless cream – coloured dress. The back was unhooked, the zip not fully up, revealing lumpy vertebrae covered with reddish down. A satiny shoulder strap, not clean, had flopped down over the vaccination mark on her plump pallid upper arm. The armholes of the dress cut into the bulging flesh of the shoulder. Her gingery – red hair was in a tangle and her fingers constantly twisted and twisted it, pulling it down over her face with an instinctive gesture of concealment. I found her slightly sluttish unkempt shabbiness physically attractive. There was a kind of intimacy in it, and I felt much closer to her than when we had lain on the bed together. That now seemed like a bad dream. I felt too that confused pity for her which I had experienced and recognized earlier. It is not really true that pity is an inferior substitute for love, though many of its recipients feel this. Often it is love itsel
f.

  I said thoughtlessly, ‘Poor Rachel, oh poor Rachel.’

  She laughed with a kind of snarl, tugging at her hair. ‘Yes. Poor old Rachel!’

  ‘Sorry, I – Oh hell – You mean he actually said to you, “Go and see Bradley”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what words exactly did he use? People who aren’t writers never describe things exactly.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Rachel, you must remember. It can’t be more than two hours since – ’

  ‘Oh Bradley, don’t torture me. I just feel I’m being cut and scratched and ridden over by everything, I feel I’m under the plough.’

  ‘I know that feeling.’

  ‘I don’t think you do. Your life is perfectly OK. You’re free. You’ve the money. You fuss about your work, but you can go away to the country or go abroad and meditate in some hotel. God, how I’d like to be alone in a hotel! It would be paradise!’

  ‘“Fussing about one’s work” can describe a kind of hell.’

  ‘All that’s superficial, what’s the word I want, frivolous. It’s all – what’s the word – ’

  ‘Gratuitous.’ ‘It’s not part of real life, of what’s compulsory. My life is all compulsory. My child, my husband, compulsory. I’m caged.’ ‘I could do with a few more compulsory things in my life.’ ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Bradley. You’ve got dignity. Solitary people can have dignity. A married woman has no dignity, no thoughts which really stand up separately. She’s a subdivision of her husband’s mind, and he can release misery into her consciousness whenever he pleases, like ink spreading into water.’ ‘Rachel, I think you’re raving. A striking simile, but really I never heard such tosh.’ ‘Well, perhaps I’m just describing how it is with me and Arnold. I’m just a growth on him. I have no being of my own. I can’t get at him. I couldn’t do so even by killing myself. It would interest him, he’d have a theory about it. He’d soon find another woman he could get on with better, and they’d discuss my case.’ ‘Rachel, these are very base thoughts.’ ‘Bradley, how I adore your simplicity. As if I understood that language any more! You’re talking to a toad, to an earthworm cut in two and wiggling.’ ‘Rachel, do stop, you’re upsetting me.’ ‘You are a sensitive plant, aren’t you? And to think that I saw you as a sort of knight errant!’ ‘Such a bedraggled one – ’ ‘You were a separate place. Do you understand?’ ‘A wide plain where you could set up your tent? Or are these similes getting out of hand?’ ‘You mock everything.’ ‘I don’t, it’s just a habit of speech. Surely you know me by now.’ ‘Yes, yes, I do actually. Oh I’ve messed everything up. I’ve even spoilt you. Now Arnold has taken you over too. He cares for you far more than he cares for me, He takes everything.’ ‘Rachel. Listen. My relation to you is not part of my relation to Arnold.’ ‘Brave words. But it is now.’ ‘Please try to remember what he said this morning, you know, when he asked you – ’ ‘Oh how you do hurt and annoy me! He said something like, “ Don’t feel you can’t go and see Bradley now. In fact you’d better go and see him straightaway. He’ll be in a frenzy to see you and discuss our conversation. Why not go and see him and have a frank chat, have it all out. He’ll talk more to you than to me. He’s a bit sore and it’ll do him good. Off you go.”’

  ‘God. Does he think you’ll report your conversation with me to him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I don’t understand this situation.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘Is Arnold having an affair with Christian?’

  ‘You’re in love with Christian.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Is Arnold – ’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m getting bored with that question. Possibly not in the strict sense. But I don’t care. He acts as a free man, he always has. If he wants to see Christian he sees her. They’re going into business together. I couldn’t care less whether they get into bed together too.’

  ‘Rachel, now do try to be more precise. Does Arnold really believe that I’m just pestering you against your will? Or did he invent that to smooth things over?’

  ‘I don’t know what he believes and I don’t care.’

  ‘Please try. Truth does matter. What exactly happened yesterday after Arnold arrived back and we were – Please describe the events in detail. I want a description beginning, “I ran down the stairs.” ’

  ‘I ran down the stairs. Arnold had gone out on to the veranda. So I dodged through the kitchen and into the side passage and then came into the garden as if I’d just seen him, and I took him down to the end of the garden to show him something and I kept him there and that seemed all right. Then about half an hour later Julian turned up and said she’d met you and you’d said you’d been at our place.’

  ‘I didn’t say it. She assumed it and I didn’t deny it.’

  ‘Well, that comes to the same thing. Then Julian started to talk about the boots you’d bought her. I must say I was rather surprised. You are a cool customer. Anyway, Arnold raised his eyebrows, you know the way he does. But he said nothing while Julian was with us.’

  ‘Wait a moment. Did Arnold notice that Julian was wearing my socks?’

  ‘Ha! That’s another thing. No, I don’t think so. Julian went straight on upstairs to try the boots on. I didn’t see her again till after Arnold had gone to see you. Then she explained about the socks. She thought it was a great joke.’

  ‘You see, I just shoved them in my pocket and – ’

  ‘All right, I imagined it all. Here they are, by the way. I washed them. They’re still a bit damp. I told Julian not to mention you to Arnold for a while. I said he was so cross about that review. So I trust the sock incident is closed.’

  I thrust the limp grey objects away out of sight, a sordid reminder. ‘Go on, what did Arnold say after Julian had gone?’

  ‘He asked me why I hadn’t said you’d been.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘What could I say? I was completely taken by surprise. I laughed and said you’d annoyed me. I said you’d been rather emotional and I’d turned you out, and felt it would be kinder to you not to tell Arnold.’

  ‘Couldn’t you think of anything better than that?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t. While Julian was there I couldn’t think, and then I just had to say something. My head was full of nothing but the truth. The best I could do was to tell half of it in a garbled form.’

  ‘You could have invented a complete falsehood.’

  ‘So could you. There was no need to let Julian assume you’d been visiting us.’

  ‘I know, I know. Did Arnold believe you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He knows I’m a liar, he’s often enough caught me in lies. He lies too. We accept each other as liars, most married couples do.’

  ‘Oh Rachel, Rachel – ’

  ‘You grieve over such an imperfect world, do you? Anyway, he doesn’t really mind. If I have some sort of thing on it eases his conscience and leaves him more free. And as long as he’s in control and can bait you a bit it may even amuse him. He doesn’t take you seriously as a threat to his marriage.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And of course he’s quite right. There is no threat.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘No. You’ve just played along out of vague affection and pity. Oh don’t protest, I know. As for Arnold not taking you seriously as a libertine, that can hardly surprise you. The funny thing is, Arnold does care for you a lot.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the funny thing is that though I think in some ways he’s a real four – letter man, I care for him a lot.’

  ‘So you see, the real drama is between you and him. I’m just a side issue as usual.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘When men talk together they naturally betray women, they can’t help it. There was a sort of contempt in Arnold pretending to you that he believed what I said. Contempt for me and c
ontempt for you. But he’d give you a wink all the same.’

  ‘He never winked.’

  ‘I don’t mean a literal wink, you fool. Ah well, my little bid for freedom didn’t last long, did it. It ended in a sordid undignified scrabbling little muddle and Arnold taking over once again. Oh God, marriage is such an odd mixture of love and hate. I detest and fear Arnold and there are moments when I could kill him. Yet I love him too. If I didn’t love him he wouldn’t have this awful power over me. And I admire him, I admire his work, I think his books are marvellous.’

  ‘Rachel, you can’t!’

  ‘And I think that review of yours was spiteful and stupid.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘You’re just eaten up with envy.’

  ‘Let’s not argue about that, Rachel, please.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I feel so sort of broken. I feel resentment against you for not having had the grace or luck to – rescue me or defend me or something. I don’t even know what I mean. It isn’t that I want to leave Arnold, I couldn’t, I’d die. I just want a little privacy, a little secrecy, a few things of my own which aren’t absolutely dyed and saturated with Arnold. But it seems to be impossible. You and he are going to start up again – ’

  ‘What a phrase!’

  ‘You’ll be talking your intellectual talk together and I’ll be outside washing up and hearing your voices going on and on and on. It’ll be just like the old days.’

  ‘Listen, dear Rachel,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t you have a private place? I don’t mean a love affair, neither of us has the temperament for that. I dare say I’m terribly repressed, not that I mind. And an affair would involve us in lies and would be wrong – ’

  ‘How simply you put it!’

  ‘I don’t want to encourage you to deceive your husband – ’

  ‘I’m not asking you to!’

  ‘We’ve known each other for years without ever coming really close. Now we suddenly blunder up against each other and it goes all wrong. We might now recede again to the previous distance or even further. I suggest we don’t. We can be friends. Arnold was holding forth about how he and Christian were friends – ’