The Book and the Brotherhood

by Iris Murdoch

  Rose turned back from the window and the dazed slow falling of the snow to her pretty bedroom, so coolly and clearly revealed in the snow-light, which had scarcely changed since her parents had slept in it, and Rose had slept in the upper turret room. Rose came less often now to Boyars; the house was slipping from her. Annushka felt it, the cat felt it. She had begun recently, for the first time, to feel afraid at night, frightened not by the silence of the countryside, but by the silence of the house itself. She had begun to think about later on. If only she had someone really of her own to leave Boyars to. If she left it to Gerard he would leave it, or give it, back to her family, if she left it to Jenkin – well, what would Jenkin do, sell it to help the poor probably. It was no use leaving it to poor Duncan, or to Jean who was as rich as Croesus and had no children – or to Tamar who would certainly make a disastrous marriage. Well, why not to Tamar? How cross Neville and Gillian would be! Tamar would have guilt feelings and hand it over, it would burden her, she would have no luck. How dreadfully childless they all were. Now supposing Tamar were to have a son… What foolish, even pathetic thoughts, caged thoughts, mean thoughts, so remote from those happy, free, as it seemed virtuous days, when Sinclair was at Oxford and Gerard and Jenkin and Duncan and Robin and Marcus, whom she now so dimly remembered, had come to this house and really worked and argued. That was before Jean’s marriage, and Rose had been the only girl. It had all depended on Sinclair, if he had only lived… But these were bad dreams, a constant rat-run of her mind, where she always pictured Sinclair as so happy, so lucky. He too could have made a disastrous marriage, given up his studies, squandered what was left of the family fortune and taken to drink. He might have caused her endless grief instead of endless joy; but what could that matter, so long as he was there? Strange, she thought, they all died in accidents, my Irish grandfather was killed out hunting, my Yorkshire grandfather fell from a mountain, my father died in a car crash soon after Sinclair’s death, if I had married Gerard and had a son he would probably have scarred my heart with fear and anguish before he too got burnt or drowned.

  ‘When are you going to see Crimond?’ asked Jenkin.

  ‘Next Thursday.’

  ‘Oh. So you’ve actually fixed it, you rang him up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you told the others?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My place.’

  ‘Play on home ground?’

  ‘I can’t invite myself to his place!’

  ‘A pity. I’d like to know what it’s like.’

  ‘So you haven’t been there?’

  ‘No. Look, Gerard, I’m not in Crimond’s pocket! We just run into each other at meetings!’

  ‘All right,’ said Gerard irritably, ‘you don’t have to tell me!’

  ‘I do have to tell you, evidently!’

  It was a little later in the morning and the snow had abated. They were in Jenkin’s room, preparing to go for a walk. Gerard was ready. Jenkin was putting on his boots. Gerard was anxious to get out quickly so as to avoid being seen by Gull, who might want to come too. He intended to slink out by a side door through the ‘offices’, but feared that Jenkin might oppose this as being ‘underhand’. Though Gulliver’s bedroom was on that side, Gulliver had recently been seen curled up beside the drawing room fire. These were base calculations but Gerard wanted very much to talk to Jenkin alone.

  ‘What time of day,’ said Jenkin, ‘I’d like to imagine it.’

  ‘Morning, ten o’clock. Do hurry up. We’ll go out by the side toward the woods.’

  ‘I thought we were going to the village, I want a drink at the Pike.’

  ‘Oh do you! I can’t understand your passion for pubs.’

  ‘They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind, and each one is different. Besides, they’ll have the Christmas decorations up. Where’s my cap? All right, I’m ready now.’

  Jenkin followed Gerard down the stairs and out of the hall toward, but not into, the kitchen, past the gun room (no guns) and the brushing room (ancient boots) and the washing room (modern technology) and out onto the untrodden snow of a little courtyard. Gerard closed the door quietly and strode on, Jenkin hurrying after him. The very cold clean air made them gasp. They passed low derelict outbuildings, like a deserted village, hung with icicles silently pointed out by Jenkin, and began to walk along the outside of the tall brown-leaved beech hedge which skirted the back lawn. To the left, upon an eminence a mile away, were the woods, ahead of them a view, beyond the garden trees, of open empty snow-covered hill-sides. There was no wind. Everything was very silent. Silence possessed them and they did not speak.

  The sky, uniformly clouded, and lying closely over the land, was yellowish, shedding a sombre yellow light. The snow close by, upon the leaves of the hedge and upon the conifers and red-berried holly bushes, showed sparkling white in contrast to the dark greens and browns, but farther away upon the curves of the hills it looked sleek and tawny. The cold air was unstirring, the garden immobile except for the crunch of their boots breaking the crisp frozen surface of the new-fallen snow, which was already patterned here and there by the straight or curving tracks of foxes and by the wandering hieroglyphs of various birds. They passed on, veering now behind the house, along the line of the herbaceous border where plants which were not snugly underground appeared as snowy mounds, and into the shrubbery. Here the thick ilexes and conifers made a roof of snow and the earth was suddenly brown, covered in pine needles, soft and seemingly warm underfoot, and the silence even more intense. Beyond this was a path leading toward the stable block, through the orchard and thus over a stile to a footpath which meandered between fields in the general direction of the village.

  Meanwhile Rose had left her bedroom. She had ‘pulled herself together’, reminded Annushka to make her special fudge which Jenkin liked, put on her boots and her coat and her fur hat, and made her way to the stables carrying a basket containing the captive ladybird in its glass. As she walked she murmured ‘Ranter and Ringwood, Bellman and True,’ an old charm of Sinclair’s guaranteed to calm the nerves and alleviate the ‘blues’. She climbed the worm-eaten wooden stairs to the big loft, released the ladybird who crawled sagaciously into a cranny, and unlatched the square loft door which opened onto countryside in the direction of the Roman Road.

  She knelt in the opening, surveying the yellow air and the motionless white scene which contained no sign of human habitation, nothing, beyond the orchard trees, except fields and hills, and more distant hills. In the early spring Rose would leave the door open for the swallows whose shadowy dartings would continue throughout the summer. She had come for apples. Upon the floor of the loft, avoiding here and there the holes between rotting boards, lay a sea of Cox’s Orange Pippins. The reddish greenish apples, recently harvested by Sheppey the plumber and his sturdy son, placed carefully so that no one touched another one, gave out a faint crisp fragrance. These English apples, much cherished by Rose’s forebears, had always seemed to Rose to be good apples, innocent apples, mythological apples, apples of virtue, full of the sweet nourishment of goodness. They would keep till April, even till May, turning gradually to a faintly wrinkled gold, and becoming smaller and sweeter. Rose liked their later incarnation best, but her father had preferred to eat them straightaway.

  At the far end of the loft was a store of a different kind, a large pile of stones: smooth sea pebbles of different sizes and colours covered with lines and scrawls of natural abstract art, swirls, crosses, lattices, blotches, stains, white upon black, blue upon brown, red upon purple, pure white, pure black, mostly ovoid but some almost spherical, all collected by Sinclair, who had known each individual stone personally and given some of them names. When he was no longer there the stones had been placed, carefully but without intelligible order, in the little bedroom next to Rose’s room; and from there removed to the stables by Neville and Gillian, then aged fifteen and sixteen, in order to clear
the room for a school friend, when their parents had borrowed Boyars for a ‘house party’ in Rose’s absence. Rose never again lent Boyars to the Yorkshire Curtlands, or indeed invited them to the house except in terms of an ‘open invitation’ of which they rarely availed themselves. She contained her rage; but she never brought the stones back to the house. She visited them occasionally, and, more rarely, selected one to take back to London. Sometimes she gave one to Gerard. Once she had given one to Jenkin.

  She heard a faint sound and two figures, dark against the snow, walked into her motionless picture, Gerard and Jenkin: Gerard moving with his rhythmical yard-long stride, Jenkin hurrying beside him. They were not talking. Rose, kneeling, a tense watching animal, saw through the cloudy exhalations of her breath, the pair pass out of the orchard, climb over a stile, and set off along the footpath. She did not watch them out of sight.

  ‘What will you talk about?’ said Jenkin, breaking the spell of the snow silence at last.

  They had abandoned the footpath, which would, as Gerard had wordlessly decided, bring them to the village too soon, and were walking along the Roman Road. They walked in the middle of the road, along which no car had passed since the snow fell. Far in front of them and far behind the road stretched on empty and white.

  ‘We won’t talk,’ said Gerard.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I shall just ask him to say something about the book.’

  ‘Describe it, say when it’ll be finished?’

  ‘If he wants to. I certainly won’t press him.’

  ‘If you don’t engage him in conversation he won’t say anything!’

  ‘That’s up to him. I won’t have a long discussion with the blighter.’

  ‘That’s not what the others want,’ said Jenkin.

  ‘What’s not what the others want?’

  ‘Rose and Gulliver, they want something definite, something we can act on, they want a scrap.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I want – communication.’

  ‘Between me and Crimond?’

  ‘Between us and Crimond.’

  They walked on, more harmoniously in the rhythm of talk, Gerard a little more slowly, Jenkin lengthening his stride, breathing the pure bitterly cold windless air, warm inside their big overcoats. Jenkin’s big winter cap came down over his ears. Gerard was bare-headed. The snowy fields were quiet and desolate round about them, enchantedly still, and the snow-light was yellower and denser, dark, as if the day were already darkening to nightfall.

  ‘There’s nothing to act on,’ said Gerard.

  ‘So you’re just going through the motions to please them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But they won’t be pleased.’

  ‘Damn it,’ said Gerard, ‘what do you all want me to do? We don’t like Crimond or his book but we’re stuck with both. Better just forget it and get on with other things.’

  ‘Pay up and don’t think.’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you agree?’

  Jenkin was silent for a bit. He said, ‘He does work, you know. He’s read and read and thought and thought.’

  ‘He’s read and thought himself into a blind alley. He used to have a few rational followers, now his stuff just inflames the crazies and a few adolescents. Jenkin, you know what Crimond believes, and that it’s absolutely opposed to what we believe. You don’t want me to encourage him, do you?’

  Jenkin did not answer this. He said, ‘One might be interested all the same, even if it’s only in the phenomenon. There’s so little respect for learning these days –’

  ‘You mean miners don’t read Marx any more!’

  ‘Learned people, intellectuals, have lost their confidence, their kind of protest is being esoteric. And at the other end it’s smashing things. There’s a gap where the theories ought to be, where the thinking ought to be.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Gerard, ‘all right, maybe we need another philosophical genius – but meanwhile we may be better off without theories, particularly that kind. Any nonentity who wants to feel himself remarkable and licensed to kick what he can’t understand is “against the bourgeoisie”. There are times when only pragmatism is honest. What they call opportunism. Crimond’s material is no good, his whole background is rotten. He read State and Revolution at an impressionable age and then fell for the Frankfurt School. It’s for thrills. All that is old hat, all those people are living in the nineteen thirties, it’s not new, it’s just the old emotions rigged out as thinking. They’ve seen Soviet socialism, but they can’t get rid of the idea that there’s something wonderful hidden away in the old package.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Jenkin, ‘Marxism hasn’t gone away. And you must admit there were good things in the package which we’ve simply helped ourselves to.’

  ‘Marx changed our view of history, but only as one way of looking among others. Jenkin, wake up, you’re dreaming about this stuff! Marxism claims to be a science, even Marx thought so in the end, all those pathetic simplifications expressed in that revolting jargon are taken to be the fundamental principles of reality! All right, the top cadres see through it, but that just proves that Marxists are either naive fools or cynical liars!’

  ‘Well, yes, but – if it could only liberate itself into being moral philosophy!’

  ‘That’s been tried, and either it’s the same old rubbish, or a refutation of Marxism!’

  ‘All right, all right. I can’t picture Crimond’s book, I must say I’m curious. At least he’s trying to put it all together. I see him as a sort of religious figure, someone right out on the edge of things, expecting some sort of general change of being.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear you romanticising this rotten magic!’

  ‘Hope is something, perhaps even a virtue. I suppose every age thinks it’s on the edge of an abyss – one has to think outward, onward, into the dark.’

  ‘Only as far as one can see. After that it’s fantasy. We can’t imagine the future. Marxism is attractive because it pretends it can.’

  ‘So we decide the future must look after itself, we’ve given enough, we’ll just be kind to our friends and enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘Jenkin, you make me sick! You were the one who said that it’s not only our destiny but our duty to be powerless!’

  ‘That’s not quite what I said, but never mind. You may be right – but one can feel restless.’

  ‘And is your restlessness soothed by thinking that someone still believes in a system and has all the old illusions?’

  ‘Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.’

  ‘That’s the trap all liberals fall into. Are you really such a tame helpless pessimist?’

  ‘So much of our thought is going to be smashed, it’s got to be smashed, God for instance –’

  ‘As if that mattered!’

  ‘I think it matters what happens to religion, I don’t mean supernatural beliefs of course. We must keep some sort of idea of deep moral structure.’

  ‘Which Marxism denies!’

  ‘People have talked about “demythologisation”, but South American and African Christianity will put all that stuff through the shredder.’

  ‘So long as Plato and Shakespeare don’t go into the shredder too!’

  ‘Oh, they will. Or they’ll have to go to the catacombs together with God and the Holy Grail! Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe nothing matters except feeding hungry people.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly not what Crimond thinks, he’s given up political action, he’s only interested in his own thoughts, he’s not concerned with real human miseries.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘You are beginning to exasperate me.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m just thinking about your meeting him. The thing about that man is that he’s a puritan, he’s a fanatic, his ancestors were Scottish Calvinists, so he’s got a huge sense of sin and death-wish, he believes in hell but he’s a perfectionist, a utopian, he believes in instan
t salvation, he thinks the good society is very close, very possible, if only all the atoms could shift, all the molecules change, just very slightly – maybe this could happen, maybe it won’t, everything is changing, deeply, terribly, like never before, and maybe it’s hell ahead, but he thinks it is his job to say it’s possible to accept it all and sacrifice almost everything and somehow make the new thing into a good thing, and that’s –’

  ‘Jenkin, stop this,’ said Gerard. ‘Just stop it.’

  They walked on in silence, now, as the words ceased, noticing their surroundings, the hedges thickly encased in snow, the brown fuzz of old man’s beard appearing here and there, the straight road like a white river, streaking onward, dipping from view and rising further on, the snow surface brittle and frozen now, the snow soft and woolly beneath as they achieved their footprints. The light was changing becoming whiter, lighter, almost misty. The sky was a uniform white-grey, not hinting sun, but with an intense soft glare, as if snow particles, almost invisible, were crowding suspended in space. Then far away ahead of them upon the road a black thing appeared, a motor car. They looked at it with amazement. It dipped down out of view, then reappeared closer to them, moving very slowly, until they could hear the soft sibilant sizzling sound of its black wheels in the snow. They stood aside. As it passed them the people in the car waved and they waved back.