by Iris Murdoch
‘He always expected more of you.’
Gerard did not dispute this.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t say I was going to see Levquist,’ said Jenkin, serious now, ‘so that we could go together. But I knew that he’d play that old trick on me. I don’t mind failing, but I’d rather you weren’t there.’
Gerard found this explanation entirely satisfactory.
‘How you men do live in the past!’ said Rose.
‘Well, you were remembering Jean just now,’ said Jenkin, ‘standing on her head in the punt. It was May Morning.’
‘Were you there?’ said Rose. ‘I’d forgotten. Gerard was there, and Duncan – and – and Sinclair.’
The door flew open and Gulliver Ashe blundered in.
Gerard said at once, ‘Gull, have you seen Tamar and Conrad? I quite forgot to tell them about coming up here.’
‘I saw them,’ said Gulliver. He spoke clearly but with the careful solemnity of the drunk man. ‘I saw them. And at that very moment Conrad rushed off, leaving her alone.’
‘Leaving her alone?’ said Rose.
‘I conversed with her. Then I too left her. That is all that I can report.’
‘You left her?’ said Gerard, ‘how could you, how perfectly rotten! You left her standing by herself?’
‘Her escort not being far off, I presumed,’ said Gulliver.
‘You’d better go and look for her at once,’ said Gerard.
‘Give him a drink first,’ said Jenkin, hauling himself up from his chair. ‘I expect Conrad’s turned up again.’
‘I’ll have a word with him if he hasn’t!’ said Gerard. ‘Fancy leaving her alone even for a moment!’
‘I expect it was a call of nature,’ said Jenkin, ‘he rushed in behind the laurels, the myrtle, the ivy.’
‘It was not a call of nature,’ said Gulliver. He could see from the behaviour of his audience that they did not yet know his great news. ‘Do you know? Well, obviously you don’t. Crimond is here.’
‘Crimond? Here?’
‘Yes. And he’s wearing a kilt.’
Gulliver took the glass of champagne offered to him by Jenkin and sat down in the chair Jenkin had vacated.
Their dismay was even greater than Gull had hoped for. They stared at each other appalled, with stiffened faces and indrawn lips. Rose, who rarely showed her emotions, had flushed and put a hand to her face. She was the first to speak. ‘How dare he come here!’
‘It’s his old college too,’ said Jenkin.
‘Yes, but he must have known –’
‘That it’s our territory?’
‘He must have known we’d all be here,’ said Rose, ‘he must have come on purpose.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Gerard. ‘There’s nothing to be alarmed about. But we’d better go and find Duncan and Jean. They may not know –’
‘If they do know they’ve probably gone home!’ said Rose.
‘I bloody hope not,’ said Jenkin. ‘Why should they? They can just keep away from him. God!’ he added, ‘and I was just looking forward to seeing the old coll and getting quietly plastered with you lot!’
‘I’ll go and tell them,’ said Gulliver. ‘I haven’t seen them, but I expect I can find them.’
‘No,’ said Gerard, ‘you stay here.’
‘Why? Am I under arrest? Aren’t I supposed to look for Tamar?’
‘Duncan and Jean may come here,’ said Rose, ‘hadn’t someone better be – ?’
‘Yes, all right, go and look for Tamar,’ said Gerard to Gulliver. ‘Just see she’s OK and if she’s alone dance with her. I expect that boy has come back. Why did he rush off?’
‘He went to gape at Crimond. I don’t see what all the fuss is, about that man. I know you quarrelled with Crimond about the book and all that, and wasn’t he keen on Jean once? Why are you all so fluffed up?’
‘It wasn’t quite as simple as that,’ said Gerard.
Jenkin said to Rose, ‘Are you afraid that Duncan will get drunk and attack him?’
‘Duncan is probably drunk already,’ said Rose, ‘we’d better go and –’
‘It’s more likely that Crimond will attack Duncan,’ said Gerard.
‘Oh no!’
‘People hate their victims. But of course nothing will happen.’
‘I wonder who he’s with?’ Rose asked.
‘He’s with Lily Boyne,’ said Gulliver.
‘How extraordinary!’ said Gerard.
‘Typical,’ said Rose.
‘I’m sure he’s here accidentally,’ said Jenkin. ‘I wonder if he’s got his Red Guards with him?’
Gerard looked at his watch. ‘I’m afraid I must go and see Levquist, otherwise he’ll have gone to bed. You two go and look for Jean and Duncan. I’ll watch out for them too on the way across.’
They departed, leaving Gulliver behind. Gull was at a stage of drunkenness at which the body, dismayed, sends out unmistakable appeals for moderation. He felt very slightly sick and very slightly faint. He had noticed the slowness of his speech. He envisaged the possibility of falling over. He could not easily focus his eyes. The room was moving jerkily, and emitting flashes rather like the pop group effect. (The group was the Waterbirds, the college having failed to secure the Treason of the Clerks.) Gulliver, conscious of a desire to dance, was not sure whether his condition favoured it or precluded it. He knew from experience that if he wished to go on enjoying the evening he must have an interval from alcohol, and if possible something to eat. After that he would look for Tamar. He was anxious to please Gerard, or more exactly afraid of the results of not pleasing him. As he had come in to break his news, a queue had already been forming outside the supper tent. Gulliver, who hated this sort of queueing, and who felt that without a partner he might attract suspicion or, worse still, pity, had eaten well in a pub before arriving at the dance; but that now seemed an infinitely long time ago. Moving cautiously about the room he found a bottle of Perrier and another plate of cucumber sandwiches. He could not find a clean glass. He sat down and began to eat the sandwiches and to drink the water which tasted headily of champagne. His eyes kept closing.
The three friends passed out of the cloister and onto the big lawn where the marquees stood. Here they separated, Rose going to the right, Jenkin to the left, and Gerard straight on toward the eighteenth-century building, also floodlit, where Levquist kept his library. Levquist was retired, but continued to live in college where he had a special large room to house his unique collection of books, left of course to the college in his will. He also kept, in his sanctum, a divan bed so that he could on occasion, as tonight, sleep among his books rather than more domestically in his other rooms. His successor in the professorial chair, one of his pupils, continued in an insecure and subservient relation to the old man. Levquist was indeed not easy to approach. This was an awkward fact, given the strong attraction which he exerted upon many of those who had dealings with him.
Gerard looked about him as he went, glancing into the tents and scanning the supper queue, without seeing any sign of Jean or Duncan or Tamar or Conrad or Crimond. The noise of music and voices and laughter made a textured canopy, there was a smell of flowers and earth and water. The lawn, between the supper tent and the marquees, was dotted with shifting groups of young people, and a few embracing couples standing alone kissing. There would be more of these as the night wore on. Gerard set his foot on the familiar stairway and experienced the familiar shock of emotion. He knocked upon the dimly lighted door and heard the harsh sound, scarcely verbal, with which Levquist invited entry. He entered.
The long room, barred with jutting bookshelves, was dark except for a lamp at the far end upon Levquist’s huge desk where the old man sat with hunched shoulders, his head turned toward the door. Beside the desk the big window facing onto the deer park was wide open. Gerard advanced along the dark well-worn carpet and said, ‘Hello, it’s me.’ With deliberate restraint, he did not now lard all his speeches with the word ‘sir’, nor could he bring him
self, though well aware that he could not be by any means Levquist’s only ‘old pupil’ visitor that evening, to utter his own name.
‘Hernshaw,’ said Levquist, lowering his cropped grey head and taking off his glasses.
Gerard sat down in the seat opposite to him and stretched out his long legs cautiously under the desk. His heart beat violently. He was still afraid of Levquist.
Levquist did not smile, neither did Gerard. Levquist fiddled with his nearest books and with an open notebook in which he had been writing. He frowned. He left Gerard to open the conversation. Gerard stared at the large beautiful grotesque Jewish head of the great scholar. ‘How’s the book getting on, sir?’ This was just a standard opening move.
This book was Levquist’s interminable book on Sophocles. Levquist did not regard this as a genuine question. He replied, ‘Slowly.’ Then said, ‘Are you still in that office?’
‘No, I’ve retired.’
‘Rather young to retire, aren’t you? Were you at the top?’
‘No.’
‘Why retire then? You’ve got the worst of both worlds.
Power, isn’t that what it was all about? What you wanted was power, wasn’t it?’
‘Not just power. I like arranging things.’
‘Arranging things! You should have arranged your mind, stayed here and done some real thinking.’
This was an old traditional liturgy. Levquist, who scarcely believed that very clever people could exercise their minds anywhere else, had wanted Gerard to stay on at Oxford, get into All Souls, become an academic. Gerard had been determined to get away. The political idealism which largely prompted his flight soon lost its simplicity and much of its force; and a humbler perhaps more rational desire to serve society by arranging it a little better, had led him later into the Civil Service. Gerard was, as he was intended to be, hurt by Levquist’s familiar jibe. Sometimes he did wish that he had stayed on, tracing the Platonic streams down the centuries, becoming a genuinely learned man, a justified ascetic, a scholar. He said mildly, ‘I hope to do some thinking now.’
‘It’s too late. How’s your father?’
Levquist always asked after Gerard’s father whom he had not met since Gerard was a student, but whom he remembered with some sort of, not fully intelligible to Gerard, respect and approval. Gerard’s father, a solicitor, had been, for instance, entirely unable upon the first occasion of their meeting, which Gerard recalled with a shudder, to converse with Levquist about Roman law. Yet this, by contrast, ordinary ignorant man, patently unafraid of his son’s formidable teacher, had, perhaps just by this simple directness, made himself memorable. Gerard in fact respected and approved of his father, saw the simplicity and truthfulness of his nature, but was used to finding these qualities invisible to others. His father was not brilliant or erudite or witty or particularly successful, he could seem mediocre and boring, yet Levquist, who despised mediocrity and ruthlessly refused to allow himself to be bored, had at once met Gerard’s father upon the ground of the latter’s best qualities. Or perhaps he was just startled to meet some ‘ordinary person’ who was not, in his presence, a little awed.
‘He’s very ill,’ said Gerard in answer to Levquist’s question, ‘he’s–’He suddenly found himself unable to bring out the next word.
‘Is he dying?’ said Levquist.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry. Well, it is for all of us a short walk. But one’s father – yes –’ Levquist’s father and his sister had died in a German concentration camp. He looked away for a moment, smoothing over the close-cropped silvery fur which covered the dome of his head.
Gerard, to change the subject, said, ‘I hear Jenkin came to see you earlier.’
Levquist chuckled. ‘Yes, I saw young Riderhood. He was quite stumped by that piece of Thucydides. A pity –’
‘He hasn’t got anywhere?’
‘A pity he’s let his Greek slip so. He knows several modern languages. As for “getting anywhere”, ridiculous phrase, he’s teaching, isn’t he? Riderhood doesn’t need to get anywhere, he walks the path, he exists where he is. Whereas you –’
‘Whereas I – ?’
‘You were always dissolving yourself into righteous discontent, thrilled in your bowels by the idea of some high thing elsewhere. So it has gone on. You see yourself as a lonely climber, of course higher up than the other ones, you think you might leap out of yourself onto the summit, yet you know you can not, and being pleased with yourself both ways you go nowhere. This “thinking” that you are going to do, what will it be? Writing your memoirs?’
‘No. I thought I might write something about philosophy.’
‘Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! They fancy their substanceless thought can lead to deep conclusions! Are you so unambitious?’ This was an old conflict too. Levquist, teacher of the great classical languages, resented the continual disappearance of his best pupils into the hands of the philosophers.
‘It’s quite difficult,’ said Gerard patiently, ‘to write even a short piece of philosophy. And at least it has proved to be rather influential empty thinking! Anyway I shall read–’
‘Play around with great books, pull them down to your level and make simplified versions of your own?’
‘Possibly,’ said Gerard, unprovoked. Levquist, used to roughing up his best pupils, always had to get rid of a certain amount of spleen upon them when they reappeared, as if this was necessary before he could speak gently to them, as perhaps he really wished to do, for there was usually some kind thing which he wanted to say and held in reserve.
‘Well, well. Now read me something in Greek, that sort of reading you were always good at.’
‘What shall I read, sir?’
‘Anything you like. Not Sophocles. Perhaps Homer.’
Gerard got up and went to the shelves, knowing where to look, and as he touched the books he felt some fierce and agonising sense of the past. It’s gone, he thought, the past, it is irrevocable and beyond mending and far away, and yet it is here, blowing at one like a wind, I can feel it, I can smell it, and it’s so sad, so purely sad. Through the window open on the park came the distant sound of music, which he had not been aware of since he entered the room, and the wet dark odour of the meadows and the river.
Sitting again at the desk Gerard read aloud from the Iliad, about how the divine horses of Achilles wept when they heard of the death of Patroclus, bowed their heads while hot tears poured from their eyes onto the ground, as they wept with longing for their charioteer, and their long beautiful manes were darkened with mud, and as they mourned Zeus looked down on them and pitied them, and spoke thus in his heart. Unhappy beasts, why did I give you, ageless and deathless as you are, as a gift to Lord Peleus, a mortal? Was it so that you too should grieve among unhappy men? Indeed there is nothing that breathes and crawls upon the earth more miserable than man.
As Levquist reached across and took the book from him and they avoided each other’s eyes, Gerard was, in the swift zigzag of his thought, thinking of how Achilles, mad with grief, had killed the captive Trojan boys like frightened fawns beside the funeral pyre of his friend, then how Telemachus had hanged the handmaids who had slept with the suitors who were even now dead at the hands of his father, and how, hanging in a row upon a line, they jumped about in their death agony. Then he thought of how Patroclus had always been kind to the captive women. Then he thought again about the horses shedding burning tears and drooping their beautiful manes in the mud of the battlefield. All those thoughts occurred in a second, perhaps two seconds. Then he thought of Sinclair Curtland.
Levquist said, for his mind by some other secret thoughtway had also reached Sinclair, ‘Is the Honourable Rose here?’
‘Yes, she came with me.’
‘I thought I saw her when I was coming over. How she still resembles that boy.’
‘Yes.’
Levquist, who had an amazing memory, reaching back ve
ry many years over the generations of his pupils, said, ‘I’m glad you’ve kept your little group together, these friendships formed when you are young men are very precious, you and Riderhood and Topglass and Cambus and Field and – Well, Topglass and Cambus got married, didn’t they –’ Levquist did not approve of marriage. ‘And poor Field is some sort of monk. Friendship, friendship, that’s what they don’t understand these days, they just don’t understand it any more. As for this place – you know we have women now?’
‘Yes! But you don’t have to teach them!’
‘No, I thank God. But it spoils the scene – I cannot tell you how much it mars it all.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Gerard. He would have felt the same.
‘No, the young men don’t make friends now. They are superficial. They hunt the girls to take them to bed. In the night when they should be talking and arguing with their friends they are in the bed with the girls. It is – shocking.’
Gerard too conjured up the dreadful scene, the degeneration, the collapse of the old values. He wanted to smile at Levquist’s indignation, yet he also shared it.
‘What do you make of it all, Hernshaw, our poor planet? Will it survive? I doubt it. What have you become, are you a stoic after all? Nil admirari, yes?’
‘No,’ said Gerard, ‘I’m not a stoic. You accused me of being unambitious. I’m too ambitious to be merely stoical.’
‘You mean morally ambitious?’
‘Well – yes.’
‘You are rotted by Christianity,’ said Levquist. ‘What you take for Platonism is the old soft masochistic Christian illusion. Your Plato has been defiled by Saint Augustine. You have no hard core. Riderhood whom you despise –’
‘I don’t,’ said Gerard.
‘Riderhood is tougher than you, he’s harder. Your “moral ambition” or whatever you call your selfish optimism, is just the old lie of Christian salvation, that you can shed your old self and become good simply by thinking about it – and as you sit and dream this dream you feel that you are changed already and have no more work to do – and so you are happy in your lie.’
Gerard, who had heard this sort of tirade before, thought, how exact he is, how acute, he knows I have thought all those things too. He answered flippantly, ‘Well, at least I am happy, isn’t that a good thing?’
