by Iris Murdoch
‘That’s the past! Rose does it all now with that old woman who lives there.’
‘That pretty girl in the front is that old woman. The dog is Sinclair’s dog. He was called Regent. I haven’t thought about that dog since…’
This was one of the points at which Tamar was afraid Duncan would start to cry. She wished the reminiscing would stop. At every turn of the page she was afraid that the face of Crimond would appear. She need not have worried. Duncan had long ago removed every trace of Crimond from the album: Crimond with a squash racket, Crimond with a tennis racket, Crimond with a rifle, Crimond with his arm round Jenkin, Crimond in a punt, Crimond in white flannels, in evening dress, in doublet and hose (in a Shakespeare play), holding one end of a banner saying Hands off the Soviet Union (Robin was holding the other end), Crimond smiling, laughing, joking, arguing, orating, looking zany, whimsical, noble, thoughtful, solemn. The fellow was everywhere, as this indubitable evidence showed, had been mixed and mingled into all their doings, all their thoughts, and projects, all the gaiety and all the idealism of their youth.
‘How pretty all the girls look,’ said Tamar, ‘and so well dressed.’
‘That was at a garden party. Yes, the girls were pretty in those days. That’s Marcus Field’s sister. That’s a girl called Tessa something, she was a friend of Jean’s, she died in a fire. Jeunes filles en fieurs. As you are now,’ he added politely.
Tamar could not connect herself with those tall elegant young women. She felt sorry for Tessa something who had died in a fire. She felt, these people really existed at Oxford. I only half existed. Tamar had engraved upon her mind, as a text to be meditated upon, Violet’s claim (repeated to everybody) that if she had had enough money for an abortion Tamar would never have happened. This half-nothingness which Tamar might have stored to feed resentment, she treasured rather as proof of some kind of separated dedicated oddity; she was fatherless, motherless, unnaturally conceived, a waif from a land unknown. This was what Gerard saw (and Tamar knew what he saw) as a stainless virgin quality, something good, as if like Cordelia her truth was nothing. Tamar was not sure whether it was good, but she ardently wished never to disappoint that opinion.
‘Did you enjoy yourself at Oxford?’ said Duncan as, to Tamar’s relief, he closed the albums. He evidently felt that he ought to pay more personal attention to his guest.
‘Oh yes, I loved the work. I didn’t seem to get to know many people though, I didn’t have a lot of friends like you and –’
‘Well – everyone experiences a different Oxford. Did you have any lovers?’
Tamar blushed scarlet and moved slightly away from Duncan, pulling down her skirt over her slender legs. She had been aware when she arrived of the smell of whisky on his breath, and she felt repelled by his bulk at close quarters. She was surprised by his question which she felt he would not, in any ordinary state of mind, have asked. She answered it readily enough however. ‘Yes, I had two – well, rather brief – relationships. I liked both the boys, they were very nice, but I think we weren’t in love – we were just anxious to have had the experience.’
‘To get it over! What a way to see it! Then why do it more than once?’
‘I don’t know, it just happened – I wanted to see, to be sure – and they were very kind, it was really good – but they didn’t stay around and I didn’t really want them to.’
‘It sounds rather a quiet scene! What was it you wanted to be sure of?’
Tamar was suddenly uncertain, at least uncertain how to put it. She had known, and clearly known, that she did not want to remain a virgin, literal virginity would have been an irrelevant burden to her, an unnecessary source of anxiety and tension. Better, indeed, to get it over in circumstances where, as she rightly foresaw, no one would get hurt. The two, not thrilling but not unpleasurable, experiences with the nice boys had revealed to her, which was what she wanted to know, ‘what it was like’, leaving her free, until something really serious turned up if it ever did, to forget about it! So far she had not found anything really serious, though she had got as far as imagining that Conrad Lomas might be. Condensing and editing these reflections she said to Duncan, ‘I wanted to have the thing with someone I liked and respected without being committed. I didn’t want intensity.’
‘You’re a cool one, little Tamar.’
It was the day after Tamar’s visit to Jean. Of course Tamar had no intention of talking to Duncan about Jean, that was out of the question, and he had not lingered over her photos in the albums. Gerard had said there was no need to say anything in particular but simply to be there. Tamar did not think that her being there had been any use to Jean, and did not expect it to do anything for Duncan either. She was merely concerned here to obey Gerard, and looked forward to making her meagre report to him, which she felt she could not do until she had seen both of them. Jean had told her to come again, but Tamar wondered if another visit would be either wise or welcome. There had been no doubt about Crimond’s displeasure, even disgust. Tamar had cried in the train going back to Acton. She had felt too, like a scorching electrical ray passing through her body, the emotional tension between Jean and Crimond. She had cried in the train with shock and fear, but also with excitement. About that experience she would not tell Gerard.
‘I think I’d better go home,’ said Tamar, ‘my mother will be –’
‘Oh don’t go yet,’ said Duncan, who, though usually alone in the evening, could not now bear the loss of a drinking companion, ‘have another drink. Why, you haven’t finished that one.’
‘I feel quite tipsy already. Oh dear!’
Tamar had put her glass on the floor and now, reaching for it, had moved her foot and tilted it over. The sweet sherry which she had preferred, had extended a long tongue of dark liquid across the pale rug. ‘Oh,’ cried Tamar, ‘look what I’ve done, how dreadful. I’m so sorry, I’ll get a cloth from the kitchen –’
‘Oh don’t bother, for heaven’s sake, I’ll –’ Duncan heaved himself up to follow her. He did not want her to see the kitchen.
Tamar got there first, and turned on the light. The sight was indeed horrendous. Unwashed dishes, mildewed saucepans were piled in crazy mounds not only in the sink but on the floor. Empty whisky bottles and wine bottles, some upright, some not, had been there long enough to collect layers of greasy dust. The floor was slippery with egg shells, rotting vegetables, mouldy bread. The rubbish bin overflowed with empty tins and slimy packaging. Tamar thought at once, I’ll clear all this up before I go! Something to do with her relationship with her mother made it impossible for Tamar to clean or tidy the flat at Acton. But here she felt an instant power to do magic, to make all beautiful, all in order, to do at least this thing for Duncan for whom she was feeling such intense pity. But first she would deal with the awful sherry stain. The cupboard where she knew that cloths, and mops were kept was beyond a shelf upon which a variety of oddments were huddled together. To reach the handle of the cupboard door she quickly moved a dirty glass jug, then a packet of instant soup, then an old half empty tin of beans, then a tea-cosy… It was already too late, as she seized the tea-cosy, to do anything about the fact that there was a teapot inside it. The teapot was already in the air. Tamar screamed and grasped at it. But it smashed at her feet, distributing fragments of coloured china and brown tea and spatterings of wet tea leaves about among the empty bottles. Tamar burst into wild tears.
Duncan heard the crash, he reached the door to find his mother’s pretty teapot in smithereens and Tamar wailing. The teapot was an old friend.
The violence, the achievement of breaking the teapot, seemed for a moment like a blow aimed at himself. The shattered thing was terrible, like the murdered corpse of a loved animal. Then the next instant, it became something horrible which he had done, his own disgusting black misery externalised as if his tortured body had sicked it up. He looked down at it and saw hell. He even heard himself say ‘Hell’. He experienced, as in a mystical vision, the infinite wretche
dness of the whole of creation, its cruelty and its pain, the pointlessness of life, the pointlessness of his life, his shame, his defeat, his condemnation, his death by torture.
Tamar seeing his dismay and hearing the word which he had uttered redoubled her wails. She too felt a shock wave of desolation and terror, but this for her was tempered and redeemed by a clearer and more precise feeling of sorrow for the poor teapot, and pity and love for Duncan.
‘Stop it, Tamar, it doesn’t matter, come out of here.’
Shaking her head and weeping Tamar now managed to open the cupboard and got out a cloth which she soaked under the tap, and ran back to the drawing room where Duncan turned on another light. She knelt to mop up the spilt sherry, dropping her tears onto the rug, trying to blend the edges of the stain into the patterned rug, wringing out the cloth to soak the area in water. Then, passing Duncan at the door, she ran back into the kitchen and began hastily picking up the pieces of the broken teapot, scraping up the tea-leaves with her fingers, and mopping up the tea. After that she began, staring down through a haze of tears, running hot water into the sink and dabbing the dirty plates with a mop.
‘I said stop!’ Duncan turned off the tap, took the mop away, took hold of Tamar’s hand and led her back to the drawing room. They sat down again on the sofa. Duncan offered Tamar a large white handkerchief. Her tears abated. The clouded horrors faded. They looked at each other.
Tamar saw, as before, his stout bulk, his flushed plump wrinkled face, but she saw in the same look his big animal head with its flowing mane, his huge nostrils like a horse, his sad melancholy of a beast who has been a prince, and now that he had taken off his heavy glasses the apologetic but intent and humorous gaze of his dark eyes.
She said, ‘I do like your strange inky eye, it’s beautiful, have you always had it?’
‘Yes. The rug looks all right already. But your stockings are all stained with tea.’
Tamar laughed and adjusted her skirt. With the centre light on she could now see the desolation of the room. The pictures had been removed from the walls, the bookcase was empty, the mantelpiece was bare, the armchairs, pushed back against the wall, were covered with newspapers and random clothes. Everything was dusty. Tamar recognised the scenery of un-happiness as it existed too in her own house.
Duncan, seeing her glance around, said, ‘You’d better go now, Tamar, this is no place for a white woman.’
‘But I want to wash up and clean the kitchen.’
‘No. Thank you for coming. Are you coming to Guy Fawkes at Gerard’s? Perhaps I’ll see you there. Please don’t worry about the teapot.’
Once again Tamar cried on the way home, but with different tears.
‘Who was Guy Fawkes anyway?’ said Lily Boyne.
It was the evening of the Guy Fawkes day party at Gerard’s house, and everyone, with the exception of Gideon, seemed to be feeling nervous or out of temper.
‘He tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament,’ said Gulliver.
‘I know that, silly, but who was he and why did he want to blow up the Houses of Parliament?’
Gulliver, already irritable because he had arrived five minutes ago and had not yet been offered a drink, and now irritated at being asked a tiresome question to which he only vaguely knew the answer, replied, ‘He was a Catholic.’
‘So, what’s wrong with that?’
‘There weren’t supposed to be any Catholics, at least they had to keep their heads down.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh Lily – don’t you know any history! England was Protestant since Henry the Eighth. Fawkes and his pals objected. So they tried to blow up James the First when he was opening Parliament.’
‘He sounds like a brave man defending his ideals, a sort of freedom fighter.’
‘He was some sort of shady thug, he may have been a double agent or an agent provocateur. People think now there never really was a plot, it was all organised by the government to discredit the Catholics.’
‘Oh. You mean there was no gunpowder?’
‘I don’t know! I suppose they had to pretend to discover something! Then they hanged a lot of Catholics, and Guy Fawkes too.’
‘I thought they burnt him.’
‘We burn him. They hanged him.’
‘But why, if it was him who arranged it all for their benefit?’
‘I suppose he knew too much. Someone promised to get him off, but then didn’t or couldn’t.’
‘I feel very sorry for him,’ said Lily, ‘he was a protester.’
‘He was a terrorist. You can’t approve of blowing up parliament.’
‘It wasn’t democratically elected in those days,’ said Lily, ‘it was just a lot of boss types. I’ve never understood whether Guy Fawkes day is to hate Guy Fawkes or to love him. He’s a sort of folk hero really.’
‘I suppose people like explosions.’
‘You mean we’re all terrorists at heart? I expect this will dawn on someone one day and Guy Fawkes will be banned, he’ll have to go underground.’
They had arrived, separately, rather early and were now standing, in the awkward lonely attentive attitudes of too-early guests, beside the open fire in Gerard’s drawing room which was lit only by candles. It was the tradition that, except in the kitchen, only candlelight should be allowed on Guy Fawkes night. Gulliver was annoyed, and annoyed with himself for being annoyed, that Lily had been invited. Gulliver had attended now for several consecutive years. Lily had never been invited before. Last year it had been very select. Gull was now, observing Lily more closely in the candlelight, annoyed by her bizarre appearance. He was troubled by the possibility that Gerard had invited Lily because he thought Gulliver liked her. On the other hand, if she had to be there, he wanted her to make a creditable show. Mistaking the tone of the party, and envisaging it as some kind of carnival, Lily had spent some time earlier in the evening painting her face with red and yellow stripes. Just before departure however her courage had failed and she had hastily washed the stripes off, leaving a number of streaks and blotches which were now showing through the powder which she had hastily dabbed on. Gulliver himself, trusting to profit by the candlelight, had ventured to put on some discreet make-up.
Lily was remembering an occasion in her childhood when she had seen a large realistic guy burnt on a bonfire. The children laughed as the guy jumped about in the heat and even raised his stumpy hands up in the air. Lily had felt horror and terror and devastating pity and a kind of rage which, as she could not intelligibly direct it against anyone else, she turned upon herself. She bit her hands and tore her hair. She felt that old emotion for a moment now and raised one hand to her hair, the other to her heart.
Rose came in carrying a tray of glasses and a jug which she put down with a bump and a tinkle on the table. She turned on a lamp. She too was irritated with Gerard for asking Lily. She felt this ridiculous unworthy irritation even though she liked Lily and invited her to her own parties. Rose was feeling tired. She had spent a lot of the day making sandwiches and smoked salmon canapés and shopping for cheese and the kind of little cakes which Gerard was partial to. It was not exactly a buffet, more a bunfight as Jenkin once put it. The main thing, Jenkin said, was to get a little drunk. He was the one who bought and organised the fireworks, which Gerard paid for. Jenkin was now in the garden with Gerard and Gideon fixing posts for the catherine wheels and digging in the bottles to take the sticks of the rockets. Thank heavens it was not raining. Rose was also exasperated with Patricia who had welcomed Gulliver and Lily as if it were her house. Rose, who had left her coat upstairs on Gerard’s bed as she usually did, had found it removed by Pat to a downstairs cloakroom where guests were being told to leave their things. Then when Rose carried her carefully packed food into the kitchen she found Patricia in control expressing amazement that Rose had brought all that stuff when she, Patricia, had already made a terrine, a steak and kidney pie, a vegetable curry, a ratatouille, various salads, and a sherry trifle. Rose did not say
that surely Patricia knew by now that Gerard, who hated standing about with a plate and a knife and fork, or perching on a chair with a plate on his knee, spared his guests this indignity, and at such a party, only tolerated food which could be held in the hand. She did not even protest when she saw Patricia putting away her sand-wiches at the back of the fridge. Perhaps Rose should have consulted Patricia beforehand about the food. But Patricia and Gideon, though always asked to this party, did not often come, and Rose was not yet used to the idea that they now lived in Gerard’s house and were all ready to be the life and soul of the evening. Violet was always invited too, and sometimes actually came, this was another hazard. Rose was also in a state of anxiety about whether Duncan would turn up and whether if he did he would get impossibly drunk. The general view was that Duncan would not come. Rose identified very much with Duncan’s suffering and probably understood it even better than Gerard did. She also grieved and worried about Jean and very much wanted to write to her, but felt she could not do so without telling Gerard beforehand, which she was not prepared to do. Gerard had told Rose portentously that Tamar had seen both Jean and Duncan and had reported back to him, though he did not say what she had said. Rose did not share Gerard’s view of Tamar as all-wise and all-holy, and she thought poorly of his idea not least because Tamar might get seriously hurt or upset. If Tamar had been upset she certainly would not tell Gerard. Rose resolved to talk to her herself later on.
Rose was wearing a markedly simple dress, a sort of oatmeal shift with a brown leather belt, suited, she felt, to this occasion at which, she now also realised, she and Jean had often been the only women. Patricia had put on a swishy black evening skirt with a striped blouse. Lily was clad in a bulky voluminous much pleated robe of light blue crepe, hitched up in Grecian fashion over a low invisible girdle, revealing dark red suede boots. Rose, now noticing the curiously mottled, indeed marbled, appearance of Lily’s face, turned off the lamp which she had turned on. She poured out two glasses of the mixture in the jug. These were gratefully accepted. ‘It’s fruit cup.’
