by Iris Murdoch
‘It’s like happy Kafka,’ said Jean.
Or he would say, ‘Our love is entirely necessary and entirely impossible.’ To which she was to reply, ‘It’s necessary, because we have proved it is not impossible.’ To which he would answer, ‘Good. So it exists necessarily like God.’ She was touched, surprised, deeply moved, even terrified by his dependence upon her. ‘You are the only woman I have ever wanted or ever will or could want.’
Downstairs, they sat on the big double divan, low, hard, almost square, covered with a very old quilt of faded green covered with geometrical designs which Crimond said had been woven in the Hebrides and had once covered his parents’ bed.
‘I wish you didn’t have these guns in your life. Have you got a licence?’
‘Ssssh!’
‘Why do you like them? All right, I know that men like guns, but why do you?’
‘I’ve always played with guns. Country people have them. They were around when I was a child. My grandfather was a gillie.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘Well, he was a part-time gillie, so was my father when he was young. They loaded the guns for the gentry and piled up the dead birds. You’ve probably never witnessed those horrible scenes. You’re romantic about firearms because they’ve never been part of your life.’
‘You’re romantic!’ Jean decided not to tell Crimond that Sinclair had more than once taken her to a ‘shoot’. How odd memory was. She saw Sinclair suddenly so clearly with his blond mane and his short straight nose and his luminous intimate dark blue eyes which were so like Rose’s, and his jaunty roguish teasing air of a spoilt boy which was so unlike Rose’s gentle patient withdrawn look. He was holding a shotgun as, in Jean’s memory picture, he turned towards her. His knee-breeches were covered with flecks of golden bracken. Jean had hated it, hated seeing the birds fall. Rose hated it too. ‘Do you imagine you’ll have to defend yourself one day?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Crimond, taking her question seriously. ‘It’s just a matter of precision, I like precision.’
‘Oh, I know you’re good at it, I remember at Oxford, and in Ireland. You said the target was a symbol, you haven’t shot at it since I’ve been here.’
‘I know you don’t like it. I’m going to get rid of most of the guns soon anyway.’
‘But not all?’
‘I want to be able to kill myself if necessary.’
‘Not sleeping pills? Of course you’d prefer a more stylish exit.’
‘And more certain.’
‘I feel sometimes you’d like a war.’
‘I don’t think so, it would interrupt my work.’
‘Really you’d like the Bomb to fall and get rid of all that messy clutter of the past and all that kitsch and false morality you hate so much!’
‘We are fat with false morality and inwardness and authenticity and decayed Christianity –’
‘Yes, but there must be morality! After all you’re a puritan, you detest pornography and promiscuity and –’
‘It’s the final orgy, the last stand of the so-called incarnate individual, who has withered into a little knot of egoism, even the concept stinks. It’s the end of a civilisation which gloats over personal adventures.’
‘Crimond! You’re a person and an adventurer! You enjoy being an incarnate individual! Or do you let yourself off because you’re a philosopher and can see it all – or because you can’t help being a product of a corrupt era? And you say ‘final’, but what next? We’ve got to clear it up, we can’t rely on bombs or God! Sometimes I think you even want to hate sex, only you can’t, you mixed-up son of a Galloway postman!’
Crimond, who had been holding her hand, released it. Their knees were not touching. Crimond out of bed was not a kisser or cuddler. He did not waste the electricity of passion by continual contact. Sometimes he seemed to treat Jean almost formally. Only occasionally, out of bed, did he signal her to come near, to hold his hand or gently caress his hair or face.
Crimond, ignoring Jean’s unusual outburst, took a cue from her last words. ‘I meant to tell you, I must go to Scotland next week.’
‘How is he?’
‘He’s as usual. But I must go.’
Jean knew that Crimond worried continually about his father, now becoming bed-ridden and losing his wits. Crimond did not want to talk to her about this. She was becoming light-headed, almost weary, with her desire for him and with the incarnate joy of the nearness of satisfaction. She did not try to recover his hand.
Crimond then said, returning to their conversation. ‘Perhaps. The individual cannot overcome egoism, only society can aspire to do that. I have always, except in one miraculous instance, felt degraded by sex.’
‘When you said it was necessary but impossible did you mean because it’s a miracle?’
‘No – just because – Let’s stop talking.’
‘I wish you’d talk to me more about your ideas.’
‘My ideas only live in written words. Come, Jeanie, my queen, my falcon, my sweet goddess, my only love, come to me, come to bed, oh my sweetness, my food, my breath, my life, my dear love, my last home –’
Any suffering which Gerard, at times, imagined Duncan to be enduring was less than the reality thereof. Duncan’s ability to keep up appearances, to put on a brave face and a cool manner, did in fact a little deceive his friends, though they were, they thought, believing the worst. Duncan went to the office, performed his duties creditably as before, smiled at his colleagues, joked and chatted, while all the time a black machine was working frenziedly inside his head. Blackness, that was what he experienced, a feeling of blackness over everything, a black veil over the lamp, black dust upon the furniture, black stains upon his hands, and a black cancerous lump in his stomach. He was not sure whether it was better to suffer the blackness as a great totality of deadly misery, or to analyse it into connected portions which could be separately rehearsed. He did not deliberately banish hope; there was just, on any view, nothing to hope for. He thought often about suicide and this sometimes very slightly eased the pain. It was possible to end this tortured consciousness.
His friends brought him, and he felt they were well aware of this, no relief, indeed made things, if this were possible, worse, by their assiduous attention and concern, their avoidance of painful topics, together with their implied indignation on his behalf. They wanted him to fight; or rather they wanted to do something, for which they required his support or imprimatur. The polite indifferent silence of his office colleagues irritated him less. Gerard and Rose continued to invite him to lunch, to dinner, to drinks, to the theatre, although he consistently and formally refused. Rose rang at carefully timed intervals and asked if she could drop in. Sometimes, not to be too boorish, he said yes, and she came with flowers, stayed for a drink, talked to him about indifferent matters (the news, a film, a book, her new dress) and looked at him with her gentle persuasive loving blue eyes in a way which made him want to scream. She had also lately reminded him of two forthcoming events at which his presence was traditional, the Guy Fawkes night party at Gerard’s, and the Reading Party at Rose’s country house, Boyars. Duncan to stop her talking about these festivals, which he had for so long attended with Jean, said he would come. Gerard, who evidently felt it his duty to force his company on his suffering friend, turned up more often, suggesting or announcing his arrival on various evenings just after Duncan’s return from the office, staying for an hour, never for supper, to which Duncan never invited him. Gerard too talked of indifferent matters, the news, government policy, office life, but also at intervals made openings, ignored by Duncan, for discussion of ‘the situation’. Jenkin did not come. He sent one letter in which he sent his love and said that, as Duncan knew, he would be very glad to see Duncan, if Duncan ever wished, either at his house or at Duncan’s. After that he sent a few picture postcards, selected at the British Museum, mostly with classical Greek subjects, vaguely mentioning a possible meeting sometime. Duncan
did not reply, but he kept the postcards.
Most evenings, therefore, since he tolerated no other visitors, Duncan was alone and spent the time drinking whisky. He had cashiered the cleaning woman and allowed the flat to descend into a disorder which he occasionally ameliorated for Rose’s benefit and lest she should insist on dealing with it herself. He had endeavoured to strip the flat of any traces of Jean’s presence. Soon after her defection Jean had returned during the day and removed her jewellery, a lot of her clothes and cosmetics, some books, some objects from her childhood home; but much of her had remained. Duncan gave away her remaining clothes to a charity shop, smashed or burnt a number of other things, and put away some books and pictures into his little study and locked the door. The places where these things had been remained however but too visible. He also gave away the china which she had bought and they had used, and brought out instead some Edwardian china which had belonged to his mother and which Jean had condemned as ‘pretty-pretty’. He ate lunch in the office canteen and made himself a snack supper at home, drinking and watching television. He searched the programmes looking for disasters, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, floods, famines, murders, kidnappings, torture. He watched thrillers, especially violent ones. He shunned anything romantic or about animals. He had used to enjoy concerts and opera, but now hated to hear serious music, even a few bars of it would make him curse and reach for the switch. Bedtime was terrible. He took sleeping pills of course and not always with success. We are told to go to our grave as to a bed. Duncan went to his bed as to a grave, but one in which he lay active, struggling, suffocating, weeping.
There are states of obsession where it is, it seems, possible to think of one thing all the time. Duncan’s obsessive subject was of course large and allowed him the activity of turning round its different facets. He enacted the whole story of Jean’s relation with Crimond, starting with trying to remember (which he could not) when and how at Oxford they had first met. Had Jean met Crimond before she met Duncan? It was his impression (but was he right?) that Jean and Crimond had paid no particular attention to each other at Oxford. Jean had been busy flirting with Sinclair who was in love with Gerard; while Duncan, already in love with Jean, was trying to kill his painful hopes by seeing her as Sinclair’s wife. But must she not have noticed the clever and good-looking Crimond? Something certainly started later on when Crimond was famous and Jean was his research assistant. Was Jean, then, already Crimond’s mistress? This was poisonous food for much thought. Then they were abroad and Crimond was in eclipse. Duncan recalled the evening when, at the news that Crimond was coming to Dublin, Jean could not conceal her joy. Then there was on a later evening, again in company, that intense look, that stare, exchanged between them. Then waving them off together, departing in Crimond’s car to explore Ireland. When did he know? Oh the certainty, the certainty, so often weakly thrust away, always renewed and increasing. Then, the hideous vividness of that memory picture, the ball of hair and Jean calling from below, a memory renewed daily with a ghastly particularity when Duncan combed his own hair which was now copiously falling out, drew the fluff of hair from the comb and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. Oh Christ, Crimond complacently combing his hair after tumbling Jean! The fake departure and the last kiss, the Judas kiss he gave to Jean before he left her at the airport. The sojourn with the sinners in hell in the Wicklow bar. The horse and the cow and the black-faced sheep and the little flowers. The ascent, the descent, the fight – The fight came in slow motion, and though he thought constantly about the blow, as in a dream he could not evoke the physical pain, the agony of the event was humiliation and shame. Duncan had once been a skilled fighter – a wrestler – but he had simply blundered at the fellow. Would it have been better if he had hurt Crimond seriously? Ought he to have exposed Crimond at once and branded him as a leper? Ought he, then, or later, to have made Jean tell him every detail, every bedding, everything, rather than letting it all be passed over, ‘taken into consideration’, forgiven? He had let Crimond off because he was worried about his eyesight and did not want the public rumpus of declaring himself a cuckold, he had let Jean off because he was so glad to have her back, because he was grateful. He should have destroyed Crimond and punished her. He had been weak and soft, he had got what he deserved, it was all his own doing. These were thoughts which, detached from any manageable reality, led away towards madness.
Duncan was becoming more and more out of sympathy with his body, he hated the bulky graceless mound which he had to move laboriously about. He was even now still putting on weight. He had once been a big thick-set muscular man, a formidable figure with his broad shoulders and his great commanding head, a bear, a bull, a lion. Now he was simply a fat man with a puffy face like a gross baby, his nose was thicker, his nostrils enlarged and sprouting hair, he had been handsome, he had become ugly, the ugly old cheated husband, a traditional figure of fun. He envied Gerard his taut physique and his undimmed idealism, he envied Jenkin his simple uncluttered uncomplicated innocent life. He pictured again and again and saw in his dreams Crimond’s slim tall form, pale as marble, his fierce face, his long nose and gleaming eyes. How could that graceful powerful figure not be preferred to his gross trunk? In his self-hatred Duncan found only one thing to pity, his damaged eye, his poor eye with its curious stain of black. His softened sadness for the creature, as if it were a little sentient thing that had come into his life and had to be looked after, sometimes seemed like a momentary comfort, as he stared at his big head in the mirror, put on his dark-rimmed spectacles, and tried to recapture the quizzical humorous lovable face he had once had.
Sex with Jean had never been perfect, but it had been live, continuous, necessary. They had lived together like two good animals, their physical contacts instinctive, always touching, soothing, caressing. The absence of this dimidium animae left him with a hideous paining wound which oozed blood and festered. Sometimes he wished that his love for Jean could just be eaten up by hate and shame, crushed and ground into pieces. In the extreme of this agony it was not Crimond but Jean that he wished to be dead, not as a revenge, but just, like an injection of morphia, as an instant cure. But of course there was no such cure, the Jean who tortured him would exist forever; and however ruthlessly and systematically he tried to sever all the little links which bound his person to hers, he continued to suffer so that he could gasp and bellow like a wounded bull.
This late Sunday afternoon in October as he was shaving (he needed to shave twice a day) and studying his cheeks, reddened with drink and covered with little breaking veins, he was thinking about Tamar Hernshaw who had invited herself for a drink that evening. Duncan did not want to see Tamar, but had been unable deftly enough to handle her telephone call which took him by surprise at the office, and had found himself asserting that he would be delighted. Contrary to what was believed by Gerard and the others, Jean and Duncan had never looked on Tamar as some sort of daughter. Such a relationship would have been, for both of them, too painful, mocking them with a semblance of the real child that had never come. They were both very fond of Tamar however, they cared about her and pitied her. Jean had been touched by Tamar’s ‘crush’ and even moved by it toward a physical warmth which was almost maternal. In earlier days Tamar used to come to tea with Jean and stay until Duncan came home. Duncan was embarrassed by children and had solved the problem by treating Tamar, even when she was quite a small child, as an adult and conversing with her solemnly as with an equal intellect. For this procedure, which had worked remarkably well, Tamar was silently and deeply grateful.
‘This is Jean, as she was when I first met her.’
‘But she’s just the same now,’ said Tamar, ‘she’s so beautiful!’
It had not been Tamar’s idea to look at all those old photos. Duncan, already a bit drunk when she arrived, had brought out the photograph albums and was having an orgy of reminiscence, sitting beside her on the sofa. She was afraid he would burst into tears at any moment. They sat in front o
f the electric fire which Duncan had put in front of the fireplace where Jean used to burn wood. The room was dark except for one lamp. This saved Duncan the trouble of tidying it up.
‘There’s Sinclair looking roguish, he was pleased with himself that boy. There’s Gerard looking dignified.’
Tamar looked solemnly at Sinclair who had died young, only a little older than she was.
‘The dark burly chap who looks like a rugger blue is me.’
‘Were you a rugger blue?’
‘No.’
‘Who’s the girl?’
‘That’s Rose, she’s changed, she’s got a timid girlie look in that picture. There’s Robin Topglass playing the fool. The weird creature watching him who looks like a dwarf is Jenkin. That’s Marcus Field who became a monk. The Jewish fellow with the flowing hair is Professor Levquist. I’d forgotten how young he still was in those days.’
‘Who’s the man who looks like a comedian?’
‘That’s Jean’s father. He never liked me. Of course you’ve met him, haven’t you. He doesn’t look like that now. There’s cricket at Boyars.’
‘Rose is batting!’
‘Yes, she was quite good. They played cricket at their school. Jean treated it as a joke. You can just see Jean in the distance at long-stop. Gerard was jolly good at cricket, damn near got his blue. Sinclair could have too only he never took anything seriously. He was a very stylish player. That’s Boyars again, a lot of us with three maids and two gardeners, standing on the steps.’
