by Iris Murdoch
‘You can’t say it’s over when it’s just beginning.’
‘It’s over, it’s ended, better so.’
‘But why, and what’s over? It can’t all be spoilt, it’s you that are spoiling it! I don’t even understand.’
‘It’s not necessary for you to understand.’
‘Well, of course, I do understand, but — ’
‘Let’s stop talking.’
‘You know that’s impossible.’
‘We shall have to stop soon. We ought to stop.’
‘You started talking.’
‘I know.’
‘If only you hadn’t - you didn’t have to say anything - you didn’t have to say what you said — ’
‘I know, I know, I know — ’
‘You could have drawn us gradually together, it would have been so easy — ’
‘Please, Hattie.’
‘You’re supposed to be so terribly clever, why didn’t you think how to do it?’
‘I’ve thought too much.’
‘Why didn’t you keep quiet and just let me learn.’
‘Don’t torment me with that.’
‘I’m grown up now, I could have learnt, without your making it into a sort of tragedy!’
‘Don’t torment me!’
‘You torment me! You’ve broken everything up into horrible jagged pieces, you’ve disturbed and changed my heart, and now you talk of ending and parting.’
‘It must be so.’
‘But I love you — ’
‘You are mistaken.’
‘I do, we can manage this, we can manage.’
‘You might, I cannot.’
‘What about my wishes?’
‘Your wishes are unimportant, they are ephemeral, you are young, your interest is not deep, your pain will be brief. Better not a step further. For me this is - not a tragedy - life is not tragic - It is a catastrophe - perhaps it is a merciful one.’
‘You’re only interested in your catastrophe.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I do love you, I want to help you, to save you.’
‘Young girls always see themselves as saviours, but it is the one role which they cannot play.’
‘Don’t generalize. I can. Why not let me try?’
‘Because I don’t want to be hurt by you any more.’
‘Oh, that’s so cruel, so awful.’
‘And so unfair, as you said before.’
‘I can love you and look after you and make you happy, and we can be friends now, like you said you always really wanted.’
‘No. You refuse to see how impossibly painful, for a hundred reasons, I would find that situation.’
‘Yes, I do refuse! Oh, we keep going in circles.’
‘Let us stop talking. It is dawn. The birds are singing. We have talked all night.’
‘It’s nearly midsummer, there is no night, we haven’t talked for long, I can’t stop talking, I can’t sleep. You were afraid I would run away. Now I am afraid you will run away.’
It was early on Sunday morning, though as Hattie said, morning was early. A blackbird was singing in the apple tree at number sixteen Hare Lane. John Robert rose stiffly and pulled one of the curtains back a little, letting a deadly breath of blank clear dawn light into the lamp-lit room. Hattie shuddered and moaned. She said, ‘I was so happy at the Slipper House with Pearl. You’ve taken Pearl away from me. And now you’re taking everything else away.’
Hattie had given John Robert ‘the day’ he had asked for, Friday. But on that morning, after his outburst, they had not really talked. Both were terrified and anxious to draw back. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she, ‘It’s all right.’
John Robert’s mumbling ‘explanation’, his ‘apology’ turned into a long review of their meetings and their memories in which they both took refuge. During these reminiscences, which to a listener might have sounded like the talk of friends, they eyed each other like antagonists waiting to fight, while both were ferociously thinking. Their two intent faces even showed, during this time, a marked resemblance as they inwardly concentrated upon what had happened, and what was going to happen. They assessed, they reflected, they planned. In the afternoon (after they had distractedly played with some bread and cheese for lunch) Hattie said she was tired and had a headache and wanted to lie down, and they parted with relief. She lay on her bed stiff and alert. Now it was he who moved and sighed and she who listened. In the evening they reminisced again, less randomly, more carefully, it was as if they had to go through all those memories, like a kind of litany, before they could, cautiously approaching themselves to the present moment, engage. They discussed and argued warily, even sparring a little, declaring they would go to bed early (which they did), postponing the glimpsed frightfulness of a further clarification. Hattie asked questions about her mother, about her mother’s childhood, and talked a little about her father. They discussed Margot, talking almost pointlessly at last to tire themselves out. That night, on going to bed, Hattie very silently bolted her bedroom door.
She awoke next morning from hideous dreams to intense urgent miserable fear and guilt about Pearl. After promising John Robert faithfully that she would come back, she ran to the Slipper House and found that Pearl had gone. She returned in tears. John Robert looked at her silently with his terrible eyes. By now existence in the little house, eating and drinking and moving and going to the lavatory, going up and down the stairs, standing up and sitting down, had become a sort of nightmarish pattern as for people in a prison. Sometimes, to relieve Hattie of his presence, John Robert went out into the garden and stood there under the apple tree like a big stricken animal, while Hattie, like an image in a doll’s house, looked at him out of different windows. Neither of them could suggest going anywhere or doing anything, nor could they, though they tried, resume the conversation of yesterday. At last, out of his silence and her recurrent tears, the real talk, the awful talk, began to arise, and everything that had most terrified Hattie in her intense thinking and her stiff alert lying began to come about.
She stared at the terrible dawn light and felt it turning her face to stone.
‘I don’t want to stop until we’ve got somewhere, made some sense of it, established something, reached a point from which we can start again.’
‘We shall never start again. When we stop this conversation we must not start it again ever.’
‘Please, please don’t say things like that. Why do you have to make such a tragedy of it all? Treat it as a problem. Problems have solutions.’
‘A great philosopher said that if the answer can’t be put into words neither can the question.’
‘But the answer can be.’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘You have a duty to me. Isn’t that what’s most important, what cuts through everything else?’
‘I had a duty. I failed. Duty is over.’
‘Duty is never over. Because you said what you said you now have a duty not to make me terribly unhappy about it. Please make it all easier, make it less awful, think of me. You felt like that when I was younger because we couldn’t communicate. You think it’s worse now I’ve grown up, but it isn’t, it’s better because we can talk about it, we can be friends.’
‘We can never be friends.’
‘Oh stop it, don’t say that! Is it your book, you feel in despair about your book so you want to destroy everything here too, pull it all to pieces, is that it?’
‘Don’t be foolish, you know nothing about my book.’
‘Can’t you be reasonable, can’t you be ordinary, can’t we get back to - well, not to where we were before, we can never be there, but— ’
‘If I had behaved properly, naturally, to you as a child I would not have built up this — ’
‘We’ve said all that - but isn’t it now just as if you had - haven’t you just - by this sudden - thing - made it as it would have been - haven’t you changed the past?’
‘That’s
impossible, that’s sacrilege, one dies for that.’
‘No. You’ve done it, you’ve leapt the gap, oh let me persuade you, don’t you see, we’re together, as loving relations, as loving friends, as family - you’ve made us come close.’
‘It’s not like that, Hattie, and cannot be. I ought to stop this conversation but I cannot bear to, I wish it could go on forever, it’s agony but what will come after will be worse. It’s wicked to talk to you like this because it’s an image of things which are unspeakable and impossible, and that is why I want to prolong it - oh the pain — ’
‘Don’t suffer so, I can’t bear it, try not to — ’
‘I appal you. I revolt you physically.’
‘No.’
‘I did yesterday, or whenever it was, I’ve lost track of time.’
‘Yesterday was a long time ago. I don’t feel like that about you at all. I feel quite differently - I’ve - I’ve discovered you.’
‘You mean it’s an exciting situation, an exciting talk.’
‘No!’
‘Oh wicked, wicked, the pain of it.’
‘You gave me a shock, a surprise, but that’s over now. I’ve lived - it’s as if I’ve lived all these years, lived them in peace, lived them with you, and - oh - happily - that was what was happening when you were talking about the past.’
‘You are making up false fantasies. You are using your intelligence. But your intelligence is not enough. Your being so intelligent is another - twist - but all that is past now, it is over. This is a conversation between two ghosts.’
‘I’m not a ghost.’
‘You are for me. You had not yet come - but I always knew that if you ever did come you would pass me in a sort of atomic flash.’
‘I am not passing you. I refuse to. Perhaps there was a flash. But isn’t that good? Just be still and look round quietly and you will see you are in a new country.’
‘Yes. It is a country in which we can never be together.’
‘Why can’t we be?’
‘What we have done by this talking is to make it impossibly dangerous to go on - anywhere.’
‘Why do you want to define everything? Philosophers define things. But don’t they sometimes give up definitions?’
‘Don’t argue with me.’
‘I am fighting for my life.’
‘Don’t lie, Hattie, don’t exaggerate.’
‘I’m sorry, I just feel like that, I’ve found you, we can communicate, we understand each other, we’re so close, I mustn’t lose you, I mustn’t - oh it’s so awful - look, I can’t bear this sort of light, please pull back the curtains and put the lamp out.’
He rose and did so.
‘See, John Robert, dear, the sun has risen, it’s shining, the sky is blue, the blackbird is singing, we must try to be happy, why can’t we, since we’re both so intelligent! There, do smile at me.’
‘Oh, Hattie, Hattie — ’ He pulled violently at his short crinkly grey hair as if he wanted to drag it down to cover his eyes. He sat down heavily in the armchair. Hattie was sitting upright beside the table which still bore the remnants of a meal they had tried to eat many hours ago.
‘Hattie, don’t tempt me, you’re like a demon, a devil, the way you go on.’
‘How can you say that? Oh you upset me so! You’re so determined to see it all in that horrible way, you destroy everything, every possibility, out of spite, I think you enjoy hurting me - oh why did you tell me, it’s all your fault!’
‘Yes, yes, I know.’
‘You say we can’t be friends, then let us choose to be something else. You love me. I love you. So why can’t we just be together like that?’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Not like - I mean just like loving people are.’
‘That could only be if the past were different, and I’ve told you we can’t remake the past - it would be a fake, an abomination, we are absolutely and utterly not as we would have been if …’
‘I don’t mean that, I mean just being together and loving each other, there is a way to be together.’
‘There isn’t and you know there isn’t, don’t lie to me, Hattie.’
‘A way to be together, caring for each other, telling each other everything, talking.’
‘You mean like ex-lovers?’
‘Don’t speak in that horrible hard way. I don’t mean like anything except just us.’
‘Angels could do it. Humans not. Our minds lack that degree of particularity. Anyway you don’t love me. Oh you think you do now, but that’s just excitement, because of this unspeakably wicked argument for which I am entirely responsible, because of what you call the drama, and because you’re flattered!’
‘Flattered!’
‘Young girls are flattered by attentions from older men, especially if the older men are famous.’
‘Don’t you lie, that’s a sort of false lying vile speech!’
‘Yes. All right. But I’m probably the first man who has - made advances - and if I’m not - don’t tell me - oh God.’
‘How can you use such language to me!’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean - it’s just - I’m so unhappy.’
‘Oh how can I show you what it’s really like! If you had been my teacher I would have loved you.’
‘If I had been your teacher everything would have been entirely different.’
‘Well, can’t you be my teacher now, somehow —?’
‘No.’
‘Why can’t we make our home together, like you said, you actually talked about it, have you forgotten, about going to California and buying a house for us near the ocean, you said I’d like that, you said you’d keep me with you very much more.’
‘I was mad, I knew it couldn’t be, it couldn’t ever be.’
‘Well, you said it, anyway.’
‘Yes, but that was before I - broke the barrier, leapt the gap - we can’t go back to that.’
‘Why not? Why can’t you try? You’re a free man, not a helpless victim.’
‘I am a helpless victim - I’m pinned down and screaming - can’t you understand, can’t you feel the difference between us now? You’re talking, you’re thinking, you’re being clever, you’re trying this and trying that to make me stop upsetting you. But I’m in a different world, I’m in pain, I’m in the presence of death.’
‘Death.’
‘I don’t mean I’m ill or going to kill myself or anything, it’s just death-pain, parting-pain, bereavement.’
‘No, no, no, it doesn’t have to be. Why can’t we live together in that house? I could be so happy in that house, if we could only live together, you and me and Pearl.’
‘And Pearl - exactly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘Oh if only you’d kept silent, we might have gone there.’
‘If I’d kept silent and gone on pretending - I thought I loved you then - but I feel - so much more now - speaking of it brings that about - and so - brings it all to an end.’
‘But why?’
‘You speak of Pearl - could I bear now, after what we’ve both become, to witness even your friendship with Pearl?’
‘But you wanted me to marry Tom McCaffrey.’
‘That was before, before we changed, it was to avoid this.’
‘Can’t we just be ourselves, surely we can live beyond all these things, we, surely we, can do as we please.’
‘Hattie, don’t tempt me, don’t end as a devil in my life, I’ve got to live afterwards with a memory of you.’
‘Why can’t you try to imagine a way?’
‘No, no, not there, we will not go there — ’
‘Where?’
‘There where everything switches and starts to run the other way. No, I will not imagine. You don’t know what you have been to me, what an image of purity and innocence. Of course you don’t know what you’re saying, but just please don’t talk any more. You are innocent n
ow, later you’ll be like the rest. I almost feel I’d like to kill you, simply to keep you as you are now.’
He pushed the chair back violently, but did not rise.
Hattie was sitting very still, her two hands flat upon the table, as she had sat before, just before he revealed his secret. Her face was hotly flushed and her eyes were shining, whether with excitement or tears John Robert could not see. They were both silent for a moment.
Hattie relaxed, rubbing her eyes and falling into a dejected stoop. She said in a dull almost whining voice, ‘Then you won’t want to think of me - as I shall be later on.’
‘No. I won’t want to know - anything about you - later on.’
‘And you call that love. You have no common sense - no decent feeling - at all.’
The words were flat and terrible after their lofty wrangle.
John Robert felt their deadly flatness, he felt with dread the ending of their talk. He said, ‘You have been excited, and stirred, for you this has been an experience, and now you are disappointed. But for me - oh Hattie - I cannot tell you the hell I am in.’
She refused to express pity. She was thinking of herself, of her feelings. ‘You have forced me to feel love for you - that is what has happened - and now you instantly kill it all. You’ve made me feel - so much. Would it surprise you - how much I feel - what I feel - now?’
‘You are close to me. I mean we are both here breathing and sweating in this small room. I am a big animal. You find me powerful and frightening and interesting. It is a momentary impression.’
‘It is your atomic flash. I feel now - almost - in love with you.’
‘Don’t be silly, Hattie. Keep your sense, keep your senses.’
‘I’ve never felt just this before.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘Oh you - you - I don’t understand you!’
‘It’s all to do with the past, Hattie. When I told you what I ought never to have told you - you are quite right - a sort of guillotine came down. I didn’t realize it at once. But time was cut off. I have no more time - I mean, for you. It is as if I have killed you. You will always be the same now, but dead.’
‘How can you say such hateful cruel things? Why not let me try to make you happy somehow? Don’t say it’s impossible. Think about it. Not now, but later, we’ve done enough now, we’ve said enough and we’re beginning to talk nonsense. Only don’t cut it all off, don’t consign me to being dead.’
