The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  Adam was swimming round and round in circles and calling and calling. He had lost Zed. In the end he had swum out quite a long way from the shore, it was such fun playing with the dog in the water, he had never done this before, watching him swim, then carrying him on his shoulder, then swimming ahead and calling to him. Zed swam so well, it was a joy to watch him. The waves were becoming a little higher and more rough and developing sharp ridgy crests. They showed darker against the sky, a cloud was crossing the sun, the wind was blowing a stinging white spray off the crests of the waves, Adam swallowed a lot of water; then suddenly Zed was nowhere to be seen. Adam cried out, screamed with fear, called and called, swam and swam. The little dog was nowhere. A moment ago he had been swimming near. Now he was gone. The waves rose now like high hills, cutting off any view. Adam could only try, as he swam over the crests, to survey the empty hollows beyond, hideous and dark and without dog, while the spray blinded his eyes. Exhaustion gripped him in the form of misery, remorse, terror, agony of longing for the precious lost being. Hope deceived him with white curly patches of foam between the waves. He began to scream hysterically. He thought, I must get help, I must get them to come, and he began with hideous hideous slowness to swim back toward the distant shore.

  Emma let the girls go on ahead. Without Tom, their company embarrassed him and his clearly embarrassed them. As if let out of school, they ran on ahead laughing, probably at him. He wished he hadn’t come. The place didn’t really remind him of Donegal, the sea here was a dull navy blue, the land a pallid yellow and grey, Donegal was full of all sorts of colours. But he would never see Donegal again. He had noticed Brian noticing how much he drank. He thought, I scarcely drink at all for ages, then suddenly I drink like mad. Perhaps it’s being Irish. Curse it, why do I have to think about being Irish, as if I hadn’t enough troubles. And what possessed me to talk to that girl in that familiar way. I don’t know anything about her; she must have thought me a complete oaf. And among all those McCaffreys did he not cut, thought Emma, an absurd figure; even worse, a pathetic one? No doubt he figured in their eyes, as he did for the moment in his own, as a lonely man, with no connections, no relations, no friends, who had attached himself forlornly to a family group. It was true that the whole group, with all their bonds and problems, interested him, not only as an extension of Tom. He had never before seen a family at close quarters, and their oddities and quarrels and misunderstandings and loves and hates and imperfect sympathies and impossible yet inevitable togetherness fascinated him very much. George fascinated him. But it was all a sort of hoax. He couldn’t ever belong to the McCaffreys. He wouldn’t ever, even if his friendship with Tom were to endure. He recalled how Tom had said ‘I love you.’ That scene seemed like play-acting now. How weak love is; it cannot push aside the big ordinary structures of life which divide different private individuals from each other. Then he thought of his mother, and how disappointed she had been because he had only stayed two days. However, as Emma began to walk down the yellow Meld he realized that something was very wrong on the beach. Someone was shouting, they were all running. He began to run too.

  ‘What is it?’

  Tom passed Emma running along the sand and tearing his jacket off as he ran. ‘Zed’s lost. Adam took him out into the sea and lost him.’

  Pearl and Hattie ran hitching up their skirts, Alex ran bare foot, stumbling, Brian and Adam were ahead, Ruby, who had turned up, ran too. Emma ran after Tom. When they reached the long sandy gully which led down to where Adam had entered the sea they all began tearing off their clothes.

  ‘Won’t Zed swim to the shore?’ said Emma.

  ‘He wouldn’t see the shore. Anyway look at those waves and those rocks. He’d never get in.’

  Emma had not gone swimming with the others in the morning. He felt no wish to enter that cold sea. But he began to undress, putting his coat and his waistcoat and his watch and his trousers on to a ledge of rocks. No one bothered with bathing costumes which were all left somewhere behind at the base camps. Tom was rushing into the sea in his underpants. Emma followed him. The two girls, showing no hesitation, pulled off their dresses and kicked off their shoes and ran into the sea in their petticoats. Ruby, who could not swim, watched monumental with folded arms. Adam stood near where the waves were breaking and wept with an absolute abandonment of wailing and gushing tears, his mouth open, his hands raised up.

  ‘What’s happened?’ shouted Gabriel running over the sand. And when she saw Adam crying so terribly, she began to wail herself.

  ‘Zed’s lost in the sea,’ Alex cried. She had jumped out of her slacks and was unbuttoning her blue shirt. ‘Stay with Adam.’ She scuttled down the sandy shore and into the breaking waves. Weeping Gabriel ran to Adam and fell on her knees and clasped him in her arms, but he resisted her, flailing his arms and screaming with terrible woe.

  Time passed, and they came back one by one. Alex returned first. She was used to long swims in the warm pool, but only to a brief dip in the sea. Clouds now covered the sun and the wind was sharper. Ruby had sensibly fetched the rugs, clothes, towels and other gear from the various camps. Alex, her teeth chattering, pulled off her wet underwear, dried and put on her slacks and shirt and woollen sweater belonging to Brian and wrapped herself in a rug. She had left her warmer clothes in the car. She did not approach the weeping pair. Hattie and Pearl came in next and seized their bundles and dressed fast. Emma felt it his duty to swim and search for a long time. He was very upset about Zed and so much wanted to be the one to find him and kept seeing little white phantom dogs in the sides of the sullen green waves. At last he gave up. Brian came in next and Tom last. There was no longed-for cry of ‘There he is!’ Ignoring each other and shivering with cold, the would-be rescuers searched for dry towels and dry clothes. Brian looked for his big jersey and took some time to realize that Alex had it. He put on Gabriel’s mackintosh. Ruby had started to distribute mugs of hot tea out of the picnic thermos flasks, and everyone stood or sat about in silence. Hattie was crying quietly. Gabriel was weary of crying and sat with her wet mouth open and her face disfigured, staring out to sea. She refused her mug of tea. Beside her Adam sat hunched up, his face invisible, as if he had become himself a little diminished animal. Someone had to think of something to say. Tom thought of a number of possible things but rejected them.

  Alex said at last, ‘There’s that current that goes round the point.’

  Tom said, ‘Maybe we should have looked on the other side.’

  ‘It’s impossible to get into the sea there.’

  ‘I suppose it’s no use going up to Maryville and borrowing some glasses?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have they got a boat?’

  ‘If it’s at the house we couldn’t launch it here, if it’s in the sea it’ll be down the coast.’

  ‘It’s too late anyway,’ said Brian.

  There was a little silence.

  Brian went on, ‘He’ll have got cold and tired and just drowned quietly. He won’t have known what was happening to him.’

  ‘No, he won’t have known,’ said Tom, ‘like going to sleep.’

  ‘Well, let’s get ourselves home,’ said Brian. ‘Come on. It isn’t as if one of us had drowned. We’ve got something to be thankful for.’

  After lunch George had kept clear of the party. He walked along the little tarmac road, first away from Maryville, where the road turned inland into a wood (this was ‘Brian’s walk’) and then back again toward Maryville (when he met Tom), passing the house and the promontory on his right, and descending toward the cliff where it was ‘impossible to get into the sea’.

  George felt so blackly unhappy that he wondered how anyone so unhappy could go on living. Could one not die of resentment and remorse and hate? How too could a man feel so stupid and dull, when his soul was so full of frightful fantasies? How would it all end, how could it all end? George thought to himself, I’m like a rabid dog which has rushed growling into a dark cupboard. The best thing t
hat can happen is that my owner will have the nerve to pull me out by the collar and shoot me. Who is my owner? The answer was obvious. But that could not happen, nor did George yet seriously consider killing himself. His misery was present to him as an occupation, as a part of the weird ‘duty’ which increasingly and horribly presented itself. Gentler influences, in so far as they touched him, seemed like frivolity, a waste of time. He had lain as gentle as a lamb in Diane’s arms. He had joined the family picnic. He came of course ‘to annoy’ and because he was expected not to, and to prove who he was through the exercise of old irritations and pains. Seeing Adam always reminded him of Rufus, and this particular grief was even not unwelcome, since it absolutely licensed him to hate the world. Yet he was fond of Alex and he was fond of Tom, and he wanted to see the sea, which had always ‘done something’ for him, a curative influence which Tom indeed had indicated when he had cried out to him that they should swim together. He would never have got himself to the sea alone. There was a kind of compulsory sanity in being with people he had known so long. Even the curious and interesting distress and excitement, upon which he looked forward to reflecting later, at finding Hattie Meynell of the party, was mingled with his resentment of her as an alien. Beyond, lay insanity. That morning he had looked at his body, at his hands and feet and what he could see of his trunk, and felt his grasp of his being waver. What was this pallid crawling object? He had stared at his face in the mirror and felt mad, as if he might have to rush whimpering and slobbering into the street and ask to be arrested and looked after. The pigeons in the early morning softly said Rozanov, Rozanov.

  He had dreamt of Stella, he saw her handsome royal Egyptian head in his dreams. He was touched by Diane and she gave him a little peace, but he despised her. He admired Stella but he could not get on with her, she was an enemy. He felt a vague relief that she was somewhere else and no anxiety or curiosity about where she was. Wherever she was she was strong and sane and eating up the reality all round her to increase her own. He reflected, even in an odd way valued, that terrible strength which also made her so dangerous, so hateful. He kept on recalling the incident with the car. He remembered the huge sickening sound of the car entering the water, and the extraordinary way in which Stella came out of the door like a fish. But he could not clearly see what had happened just before. Had he actually pushed the car, could he have done that? Was he simply imagining that he had put his hands on the back window and braced his feet on the cobbled quay and made the car move forward? Surely that was a fantasy, he had so many violent fantasies and dreams. He was a weak crawling creature and his violence was purely fantastic. He thought, I can’t go on like this. I must finish my relation with Rozanov. I’ll see him again. If he would only say one kind word to me, just one, it would change the world. After one kind word I could go away in peace. How can he be so cruel as not to speak that word? And how can I be so abject as to need it?

  George had reached the cliff and the other view over the sea which he knew so well. Here the yellowish grass ended abruptly at a steep edge. The dark blackish-brown rocks with red streaks in them did not descend neatly to the water but went down in a jagged graceless mess of cracks and slides and overhanging ledges. In the sea, not very far below but seemingly inaccessible, a mass of brown herring gulls were crowding and crying over some trophy. George looked at the birds’ soft spotty backs and their fierce eyes and they gave him some satisfaction. They reminded him, through old sea memories, of holidays and of his father, blessedly so dead. George had disliked his father and early turned him not into a monster but prophetically into a ghost. Twice ghosted, some association with the herring gulls passed like a harmless chill. It seemed impossible to get down to the water; but George had explored the favourite area thoroughly on visits as a child, before Alex bought Maryville, when the coveted house still belonged to a Colonel Atheling who was famous for objecting to the McCaffrey children (big George and little Brian) crossing his land. There was a way down (which George had never revealed to his brothers) where one descended through an elder tree into a round hole in the rock through which one could slither, holding on to a branch, on to a shelf from which one could jump to some ‘steps’, and so to the water. He undressed on the cliff top, he was out of sight of the house, removing all his clothes and folding them as if for a ritual. He stepped down into the tree and, bracing himself against the rock, felt with his foot for the hole which was invisible from above. He could now only just get through the hole, and the rock chafed his naked body. On the shelf he sat down to lever himself to a flat rock below, then went cautiously down the ‘steps’. He thought, I’m getting old. He dived into the deep lifting and falling water and gasped at the coldness.

  George was a good swimmer and made his way otter-like out to sea. He thought, as the water laved his head and shoulders, that’s good, that’s good. At the same time the cold sea was menacing; one could soon drown in such a sea, one could die of exposure. He thought, I would like to die like that. If I just swim on and on and on I shall die and then I shall really have finished with Rozanov. Well, in that case he will have won. But does that matter? He went on, cutting through the tops of the frothy crests, on and on toward realms of sea where land was never seen or heard of. Suddenly, in the green swinging hollow of a wave, he saw below him and nearby something which he took at first for a plastic bag floating. Then he took it for a dead fish, then when it seemed to move for a strange crab or big jelly fish. He turned, halting his course, to look at it. It seemed to be some horrid kind of thing. Then he saw that it was a little four-legged mammal, a dog. It was Zed.

  George cried out with surprise and distress. He saw clearly now the little white muzzle held high, the eyes staring, the paws weakly moving. The next moment the dog was gone, lifted with swift force over the crest of the wave. George followed quickly, his eyes desperately fearfully straining to see the little helpless thing. He was suddenly distracted, aware of the huge sky above, the huge ocean round about, full of fast-moving heights and hollows and dazzling flashes of foam. He perceived Zed again and caught him up, then treading water lifted him. The bedraggled creature hung limply in his hands, but Zed’s blue-black eyes gazed with conscious intelligence, at close quarters, into George’s eyes. George thought, I can’t climb the cliff carrying Zed. Besides they must be in a fair state by now. However did the poor little beggar get here? I’ll swim on round the point; if I get in close to the rocks I’ll be out of the current. It was not easy, cold and now tired, in a strong-running sea, to swim with one hand while holding Zed clear of the sea with the other. But as George paused to rest and tread water, Zed slid as if on purpose on to his shoulder and clung on against his neck (as Adam had just this day taught him to do). George understood, and now holding one strand of the dog’s coat and keeping one arm against his chest he could more vigorously make way. Tom was the first who, when George had reached the rocks on the other side and felt shingle beneath his feet and lifted his head up, heard the triumphant shout.

  The unhappy group had struggled away slowly over the sand. Alex had looked once more perfunctorily for her watch but had not mentioned it to anyone. Gabriel packed the last few scattered things, Adam’s socks, Zed’s lead, dropping her tears over them, into a bag. Brian, who was leading, had just reached the inland rocks that led up to the field when Tom cried, ‘There’s George.’ They had forgotten George. At first Tom did not understand George’s signals. Then he heard him shouting, ‘I’ve got him! He’s all right!’

  Tom shouted too. They all turned round and began running back. ‘What is it?’ shouted Brian, also running.

  Tom reached George and took the dog from him. ‘Oh George, you hero! But he’s cold, quick, find a towel, poor Zed!’ For a terrible moment holding the dog Tom thought the little thing was dead, so limp and cold and motionless it felt. Then a pink tongue licked the back of his hand.

  Gabriel ran up and seized Zed and wrapped him in a dry towel and sat on the sand and rubbed him. Adam, transfigured, leaned a
gainst her shoulder wailing with joy. Brian stood behind them holding out his hands in an incoherent gesture and thankful helpfulness. (Tom said later they looked like the Holy Family with John the Baptist.)

  ‘I’m bloody cold too,’ said George.

  George, rather plump, stark naked and pink with cold, stood there like some weird manatee. They all ran at him armed with towels, rugs, garments. George sat on a rock, his back hunched, like a big wet sea animal, and they surrounded him and stroked him and patted him as if he were indeed a beneficent monster. Tom tore off his shirt and hopped out of his trousers. Alex handed over Brian’s jersey. Brian found an extra pair of socks in Gabriel’s bag; Gabriel always packed extra socks. Ruby handed over a mug of whisky. George told the story of the rescue among many exclamations of amazement and praise. Then everyone had hot tea and whisky and felt extremely hungry and ate up all the remaining sandwiches and cheese and veal-and-ham pie. Tom ran in record time in his underclothes all the way to fetch George’s clothes, which he put on himself to run back in, looking very comical. It was some time, however, before poor Zed was quite himself again, and Brian felt an anxiety which he did not impart. The little dog, though he wagged his tail, continued to shiver and tremble, though Gabriel opened her blouse and held him against her warm breasts. At last when he seemed to be warm and dry and lively she gave him into Adam’s arms. Then Gabriel went to George and kissed him, and Alex kissed him and Tom kissed him too, and Emma and Brian clapped him on the back, and Hattie and Pearl, who had been standing a little in the background of the family scene, waved him a very special wave. Then Tom and George exchanged clothes and they all decided to go home.

  The last act was less edifying. As they went along, Alex paused again (in vain) to look for her watch. George and Ruby led the way up the field. Brian ascended more slowly carrying Zed and holding Adam by the hand. He squeezed Adam’s hand at intervals, but Adam would not look up at him. Gabriel followed. She suddenly felt mortally tired as if she might fall on her face, and kept stumbling on the slippery yellow grass. Hattie and Pearl, who had somehow become very separate and alien, climbed by a different route, often pausing to look back at the sea and point things out to each other. Tom and Emma came last, having waited for Alex who was complaining that no one would help her to find her watch.