by Iris Murdoch
‘Aren’t I lovely?’
Emma was still reading. He read: ‘Luther was merely advancing still further upon the path which had been trodden before his time by Wycliffe and John Huss. His theology was a continuation of the dissident theology of the Middle Ages; his ancestors were the great heretics of the fourteenth century; he was absolutely untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance. His doctrine of justification by faith was related to the doctrines of the mystics, and although, like the humanists, though for very different reasons, he condemned celibacy and the ascetic life, he was in absolute opposition to them in his complete sacrifice of free will and reason to faith. However, the humanists did not fail to applaud his sensational debut.’ He looked up. He was not pleased to see Tom in drag. Emma himself suffered from secret transvestite fantasies; Tom’s caprice struck him as the idle profanation of a mystery. He said coldly, ‘You ought to telephone your mother.’
‘Not now,’ said Tom.
‘Yes, now.’
‘Oh, all right.’
The telephone was in the hall.
As Tom dialled the number his heart sank. It also beat faster. He hated the telephone. He particularly hated talking to Alex on it. He felt guilty at not being at Belmont, at not having told her, at a hundred matters arising from his imperfect conduct.
‘Yes?’ said Alex at the other end. She always said ‘Yes?’ in that disconcerting way.
‘Hello, it’s me, Tom.’
‘Where are you, when are you coming?’
‘Look, I’m sorry, I should have told you.’
‘What?’
‘I should have said, I met Gregory Osmore in London — ’
‘Who?’
‘Gregory Osmore, and he absolutely begged me to look after his house — ’
‘To what?’
‘To look after his house.’
Emma rose and closed the study door. He did not think it proper to overhear Tom’s conversation with his mother. He regretted that he had already heard Tom tell a lie. He had been present at the party where Tom met Gregory Osmore, and the boot had rather been on the other foot. It was Tom who had (discreetly) insisted to Greg that the house-sitting idea was such a good one. Emma did not approve of lying, and it caused him pain that his friend occasionally indulged in suppressio veri and suggeslio falsi.
‘You know Greg and Judy have gone to Florida?’ said Tom.
‘Where?’
‘To Florida.’
‘Have they?’
‘Yes, and they asked me if I would occupy their house while they were away, to keep it safe, you know. So I won’t be - I won’t be able to stay with you - but I’ll come round and — ’
‘You aren’t going to stay at Belmont?’
‘No.’
‘Where are you now?’
Tom thought of saying ‘in London’, but he did, after all, possess some sense of truth. He said, ‘I’m at their place, at Travancore Avenue.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Am I —?’
‘Are you alone there?’
‘No, I’ve got a friend with me, a chap.’
‘A man?’
‘Yes.’
‘When are you coming to see me?’
‘Oh, soon - tomorrow, I ~ I’ve got to fetch some stuff— ’
‘Telephone first, would you?’
‘Yes, sure.’
They were both silent. Alex hated the telephone too. Neither of them was good at ending a conversation.
‘Good-bye then,’ said Alex, and put the ‘phone down.
Tom replaced the receiver. He felt curiously uneasy, as if disappointed. He had hoped that Alex would not make a fuss about his not staying with her. Well, she had seemed not to mind too much. Of course on the telephone one couldn’t tell. He hated fuss. Yet he wanted her to mind.
He opened the study door.
‘All right?’ said Emma.
‘All right. I say, let’s go out, let’s go shopping.’
‘Shopping? Why?’
‘To buy something for lunch.’
‘I don’t want any lunch.’
‘Well, I do, I’m starving.’
‘You go, I’m reading.’
‘I wish I could read like you.’
‘You can read.’
‘Not like you. Put you down anywhere and you start reading. And you remember what you read, it goes into a slot in your mind. My mind has no slots. Let’s have a drink. I found a cupboard absolutely crammed with bottles.’
‘We can’t drink their stuff.’
‘We can replace it.’
‘Do take that thing off.’
‘Sorry, I forgot I had it on. My God, I left the bath running!’
Tom raced upstairs. He thought, the sitting-room ceiling will come down and we’ve only been here half an hour!
But all was well. An interesting funnel at one end of the bath conveyed the overflowing water into a depression in the tiled floor where it ran away harmlessly through a grating. Tom took off his shoes and socks and danced on top of the grating, feeling the steamy exuberant water running away between his toes. He tucked up his trouser ends, but the hem of Ju’s négligé got a little wet.
Tom McCaffrey was an object of interest in Ennistone ‘society’. ‘Society’ in Ennistone was, by this time, classlessly elitist; it was also plural. This was particularly evident of the Institute. Indeed the existence and peculiar nature of the Institute helped this process. History too assisted. Ennistone had lost its ‘landed gentry’ early on, and had become democratic and non-conformist well before the nineteenth century. Some notion of ‘the best families’ persisted, well mixed up with high ideals and moral leadership, but even this, by the time of our story, had virtually disappeared. To take an instance, the mind of William Eastcote, an exceptionally good man, probably contained some grain of irrational superiority, while I believe that absolutely no blemish of this sort existed in the mind of Anthea. Snobbery was with us intellectual and moralistic rather than social in the old sense. Groups of people freely ‘set themselves up’ as arbiters and judges with pretensions to cultural or moral superiority. There was, in so far as such initiatives were concerned, an atmosphere of ‘free enterprise’. There were of course members of the Victoria Park ‘old school’ who simply disliked change, there were those who ‘kept themselves to themselves’, and those who hated everybody. There were differences of opinion and differences of style. My point is simply that those who thought well of themselves tended to think they were right rather than that they were grand. Our old Quakerish Methodistic priggishness promoted this advance, if it was an advance; I think it was.
Our ‘society’ looked tolerantly on Tom McCaffrey. Perhaps this was likely to happen since Alex, George and Brian were in their different ways looked at askance: George for obvious reasons, Alex because she was ‘stuck up’, and Brian because he was brusque and sardonic, and in his own way rather priggish. Tom was seen, by contrast, as young, unspoilt, and ‘rather sweet’. He was also pictured somewhat as setting out on life’s journey with a plume in his helmet and a sword at his knee. He was good-tempered and had as yet been guilty of no outrages, in Ennistone at any rate. Mothers sometimes held him up as an example to their sons. ‘There’s Tom McCaffrey, he’s not on drugs or chasing girls all day, he’s got himself into the University, he’ll make something of his life.’ ‘He chases girls in London,’ the sons sometimes darkly muttered. ‘Well, he does it discreetly,’ the mothers would reply, thus further confusing the moral sense of their offspring. It was true that Tom was not seen to chase Ennistone girls. Many of the potential chasees were sorry about this, but were at least spared the chagrin of seeing a rival preferred. Match-makers had long ago decided that Tom and Anthea Eastcote were made for each other. What these two young people thought was still obscure. Tom was also noteworthy and even popular because of the legend of ‘Feckless Fiona’, and folk memories of her charm, her ‘dottiness’, her cheerful happy ways, and her sad early death.
Tom had indeed, after a worthy career at Ennistone Comprehensive School, got himself into a distinguished London college, where he was supposed to be ‘doing well’, though some said he was ‘talented but lazy’. Darker critics predicted a nervous breakdown: after all, the boy had lost both his parents very early and had been brought up by an eccentric emotional step-mother, with two strong-willed mutually hostile half-brothers playing the role of father. However, of this breakdown there was admitted to be no sign.
Tom had, unlike his introspective friend Scarlett-Taylor, little conception of himself; at any rate he did not reflect much about himself, about his character, abilities and prospects. He was not ambitious and had no plans. It is true that he wrote verses, and was even spoken of in Ennistone as a ‘poet’, which Tom knew perfectly well that, as yet, he was not. His future remained enormously far away, separated from him by a vast cornucopious present. He enjoyed his studies and intermittently tried to do well. He was perhaps lazy, at any rate easily deflected to other pleasures, of which he had a great many. Among those pleasures sex was not obsessively primary. Tom was credited, by some of his ex-schoolfellows, with many sexual conquests in London. This supposition was needed to explain his apparent lack of interest in Ennistone girls. Of course some said that he was homosexual, but this was not the general view. In fact, although Tom did not trouble to deny the supposition, he had had fewer adventures than was supposed. He had had adventures but was ruefully aware that he had rarely initiated or controlled these. ‘Knowing girls’ had on occasion decoyed Tom into bed, and Tom had not complained; moreover his vanity was flattered. But whether he had ever been in love was a subject which he often discussed with Scarlett-Taylor.
He often thought about his parents but with a carefully bounded vagueness. He imagined Fiona arriving on that motor bike and at once meeting Alan, as the legend ran; the absolute chance that had initiated his existence. These thoughts were very private. Other people tactfully avoided the subject. There was felt to be something both touching and awful in the circumstances in which Tom had been born and orphaned. Tom felt this too and was gentle with himself. Fiona Gates’s family had not figured in Tom’s life, he was never entirely sure why. Robin Osmore, ‘feeling it his duty’, had said something about the matter when Tom was a schoolboy. It seemed that Fiona, living unmarried with Alan, had written to assure her parents that she was well, but probably without revealing her whereabouts. When she wrote later to announce Tom’s existence and her marriage plans, her parents were shocked and upset. Whatever it was (and Tom had no idea) that had induced Fiona to leave home had certainly not been mended by time and her antics. Heated letters passed between Alan and the father. Alan took the pretext to be angry, and relations were, it was then assumed temporarily, broken off. In fact it seemed that Fiona’s parents were mild inoffensive people, bullied by Fiona, intimidated by Alan, and after Fiona’s death by the McCaffrey phalanx in the form of Alex, George and Brian momentarily united. Stunned by their daughter’s death (they had lost her brother as a child), they went to join cousins in New Zealand. From here, later on, they wrote occasional sad inarticulate letters to Tom, to which he never replied since (he never knew this) Alex in her wisdom destroyed them on arrival. Once she had made Tom her property, Alex never tolerated even the most shadowy hint of any other claim upon him. Alex never spoke of these obscure grandparents, and it was Robin Osmore who told Tom of their decease. Later Tom wished that he had ‘done something’ about them. Later still he felt it was a mystery better left alone. He felt the same, with much more intensity, about his father’s death. Alan had died in some ‘medical experiment’ in a laboratory in Hong Kong. No details ever emerged. When he was a schoolboy Tom thought he might go there one day and find out. He even wondered whether his father had been murdered. He vaguely pictured him as someone who might have been murdered. But more recently he had decided to leave Alan in peace. He was afraid of some awful hurt, some awful pain, which might result from probing. He knew there were demons in his life. He thought he could remember Alan. He could not remember Fiona. He possessed some photographs of his parents: his handsome dark-haired father, a figure of authority, his mother, so curly-haired and pretty, so childish-looking, always laughing. If she were still alive she would not yet be forty years old. He also had, and kept in a little wooden box, her wedding ring. (Robin Osmore had given it to him.) On what appalling evening, in what quiet room, had Alan McCaffrey drawn that ring from the thin white finger of his dead wife?
Tom had loved and accepted Alex, from his earliest childhood, with the whole of his heart, but he had never thought of her as his mother. Some simple person, Ruby perhaps, had told him early on that his mother was an angel, and thus he had pictured her, a curly-haired and rather boyish angel, recognizing her image in the hermaphrodite winged figures in the Victorian stained-glass windows of St Paul’s Church, which he occasionally visited out on walks with Ruby. Alex was something else, something wonderful and very powerful which he adored. Ruby was the dear animal being in whose smell he took refuge from power. George and Brian figured as dual fathers vying for his affection, then suddenly and incomprehensibly punishing. It was Brian who particularly set up as his moral mentor, correcting and admonishing, and leading him every Sunday to the Friends’ Meeting House. Meanwhile Alex watched these fraternal influences jealously, particularly irritated by signs of mutual affection between Tom and George. Tom early learnt to be tactful, even circumspect. This combination of rivalry and possessiveness and authoritarian love, the lack of stability between the rulers of his life, often made up, for the child, a difficult regime. Under these strains Tom could have been forgiven for being a sad crazy mixed-up boy, but he simply was not. His guardian-angel mother, always so young, had somehow preserved in him intact her own unquestioning faith in life, her capacity for joy, her vast indomitable self-satisfaction.
Tom did not reflect upon the dynamics of these various relationships which would have been (and indeed were) of such interest to (for instance) Ivor Sefton. He loved Alex, Ruby, Brian and George thoughtlessly and in differing ways which he apprehended but did not analyse. He did not want to bother his head about such matters, and if they ever started to puzzle him he would shake his head as if to send away a swarm of bees which seemed to wish to settle in his brain. They were easily dispelled. He hated rows and walked away from them and found (such was his felicity) that his nearest and dearest did not in fact want to involve him, had already instinctively invested him with a kind of blessed neutrality, a status of someone not to be enlisted or dragged into taking sides. His easiest relations were with Ruby and Brian. With Ruby his ordinary natural selfishness simply ran riot in the space which the servant opened to him. He never found himself wondering what she thought or whether she judged. Brian was an alien whom he loved and respected and who had quite convincingly played the role of father. (In a sense, Brian had been more resolute as Tom’s father than he was being as Adam’s.) He was not ‘close’ to Brian, but he knew that in a shipwreck he and Brian would know how to stand shoulder to shoulder. Alex and George were the ‘funny ones’. When Alex annexed Tom (not walking into Fiona’s room and seizing him from the cradle), Brian, in early independence, was beginning his long revenge upon his mother Tor having always so patently preferred George. George, meanwhile, especially unhappy at this period of his life, was taking his revenge on Alex for her possessive and undisguised affections. Alex, who pictured herself as a fighter, felt alone, menaced and rejected. Tom was the key, the godsend, the new love object. (Alan brought Tom to Belmont in his arms, the child clinging to the lapels of his coat like an animal; Alex had difficulty in detaching the fierce little claw-like hands.) Of course she loved and wanted the little boy for himself; love was always Alex’s game. She had coveted the child from the moment he existed, and no doubt her jealousy was salved by the triumphant possession of Fiona’s son. But she needed him too, instinctively, as a weapon against his two brothers, especially against George.
How f
ar this plan of establishing a rival worked in practice was never clear; perhaps in a way it worked only too well. Brian was certainly annoyed, but his sense of duty consoled him here, as it had always done in his other trials. Brian, the owner no doubt of a difficult temperament, was actually capable of being cheered up by the exercise of rational activity. Tom was in danger from Alex’s emotions, from George’s ‘frightfulness’. Brian waded in, as if he had seen the child struggling in a river. He must be hauled out, shaken, dried, stood up, told what was what; and Brian could not help loving what he thus served and protected. George, in so far as he exerted himself in loco patris, did so with motives more obscure. Tom, as a child, was sometimes afraid of George, but only in a rather immediate sense. He was, on a few memorable occasions, at the receiving end of George’s violence. He felt no resentment, however. The strange thing was that while Brian, who was certainly more like George than Tom was, simply did not understand George at all, Tom did somehow understand him. Tom had not in his being one iota of that which made George what he was, but Tom saw and apprehended that, not intellectually or theoretically, but with (for of course he loved George) a loving intuition. This led the now adult, or almost adult, Tom to fear George in a new way and to fear for him. Something in this understanding led Tom to make the only conscious move he had so far made in relation to his family. In the obscure machinery of the familial stars and planets it was time for George to move back towards his mother. They were two of a kind, Alex and George, and Tom’s special task was in a sense done. The old pact between George and Alex had never really been broken. Tom began to move aside, to move away; and as he retired, George came quietly, loping on dark paws, into the space near Alex which Tom was leaving. As they thus passed each other, did they exchange a glance? Perhaps. If so, it was a very ambiguous one.
Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor was a comparatively new phenomenon in Tom’s young life. In general, Tom liked everybody and was friends with everybody, and in so far as there had been closer ties, these had tended to be contextual. His love affairs, which he thought of as ‘romances’, had been comparatively uncomplicated and unhurtful, largely because of the witty good sense of the girls concerned. (This was pure luck.) Tom did not yet possess the concept of a deep relationship except in the unconscious form of his connection with his family. The Irish boy was something of a novelty. He was two years older than Tom, at an age when two years counted for much. Tom had been vaguely aware of him as being a bit of an intellectual ‘grandee’, tipped to get a ‘first’, a gloomy proud solitary sort of fellow. He had a reputation for being arrogant and rude. He had never been rude to Tom, but then on the other hand he had never paid any attention to Tom whatsoever. When Scarlett-Taylor moved into the shabby and cheap lodging-house where Tom was living, Tom had felt dismay, even annoyance. However, his view of his fellow student soon began to change.
