The Book and the Brotherhood

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘You see, we do read, we do. Perhaps one day we shall go for a walk. Yes, yes, if we are to be dismembered we shall be dismembered together.’

  ‘If only you could be more quiet with me. You said I was your peace. But you are always starting away as if you’d had an electric shock.’

  ‘Then I shall never be at peace with you,’ said Crimond, ‘if peace is quietness. I meant something else.’ He pulled off his coat and sat, apart from her, leaning forward with his head in his hands. ‘You are my weakness, my weak point, that is part of our impossibility.’

  Jean sat stiffly, frightened, as she often was. After a moment she said softly, slowly, ‘When the book is finished perhaps we could travel a little. I’d so much like to be with you in France and Italy. You go on about the importance of Europe. You could visit people and talk to them.’

  ‘When I finish the book I shall cease to be, and so will you.’

  ‘Sometimes you talk nonsense, deliberate tiresome nonsense.’

  ‘Perhaps the book will never be finished.’

  ‘Of course it will, and then you’ll write another.’

  ‘My darling, can you see us growing old together?’

  ‘You won’t grow old,’ she said. Could he, her Crimond, grow old? Then she said, ‘I love you – whatever is to be we’ll be together. Oh Crimond, don’t torment me with this talk –’

  ‘I shall be bald, your lovely live hair will be limp and grey, we shall be weak and crippled. We shall look at each other in fear as we diminish more. I don’t want ever to get used to you, Jeanie dear, why should we, we carry the long mortal burden of age and decline, we who are living gods in this place? I cannot leave you behind, any more than you can leave me behind. Better to consummate our love in death.’ As he spoke he was rubbing his hands over his face and his eyes and through his hair. ‘Oh I am so tired, so tired – my mind is so tired –’

  Jean felt afraid. He had talked like this before. ‘Yes, yes, of course, you are tired, you should stop working, rest, rest, just for a day.’

  ‘I can’t rest, you don’t understand, you betray me, you don’t listen to my words. I’m sorry. Sometimes I feel I am a knife poised at your heart.’

  ‘I do listen, I do understand, you are wondering what you will do when you have finished the book, you imagine you’ll become dull and ordinary, the book has kept you in a state of excitement for so many years, I’ve seen you trembling with emotion as you write –’

  ‘You imagine that explains something, you imagine it explains something away. No, no, there is no away, it’s deeper than that, it’s you and me, we are crushed by our impossibility –’

  ‘Crimond, we make our possibility, we make it day by day –’

  ‘Day by day is an illusion, it’s all now –’

  ‘Do you want to kill me?’

  ‘Only when I kill myself. Jeanie, I love you, you love me, that’s what it’s about. The perfection of our love is now, now we are absolutists, we are gods, later is only less.’

  ‘Crimond, my darling, you know that I will do whatever you want, whatever you want, I am yours, I am you, I will go with you wherever you go. Here is my life, here is my death. But –’

  ‘But you think we should have lunch!’

  ‘But the book is not finished, and after it is finished there will be another book – Besides –’

  ‘Besides?’

  ‘I want to dance with you again.’

  ‘Perhaps we shall dance together again, sometime, at the end of the world.’

  ‘And you will learn to weep then, at the end of the world. Please don’t frighten me by saying these mad things. I know you want eternity, but we can make eternity in time. That’s what love is, after all. Come –’

  ‘No, I can’t eat, I can’t work –’

  ‘Come to bed.’

  ‘Oh my Jeanie, my queen, if only there were only that –’

  ‘That child is going to die,’ said Violet Hernshaw to Gideon Fairfax. ‘She is determined to die. She will die of a wasting sickness, of a mysterious virus, of tuberculosis, depression, starvation –’

  ‘Well, can’t we stop her?’ said Gideon, leaning back in his chair.

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘You and me. Let’s team up. Eh?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t want to stop her, you don’t mind if she dies, you want her to die?’

  ‘What you say means nothing, it’s a vulgar psychological cliché, you don’t know anything about real misery and living with death. You don’t know death exists.’

  ‘That may be true,’ Gideon conceded, ‘though objectively, if I may use that familiar adverb, it looks as if you don’t want Tamar to succeed, even as if you would prefer her not to exist. Would you really not care if she committed suicide? However, as you say, it’s a cliché.’

  ‘She won’t commit suicide. She’s a survivor. You all think she’s a pure maid and a frail flower. But she’s a tough little atom. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?’

  ‘You no longer have a telephone.’

  ‘I can’t afford one. You did it on purpose. You could have written.’

  ‘I couldn’t plan that far ahead. A picture drama is in progress.’

  ‘You thought a letter would be evidence.’

  ‘Evidence of what? My interest in Tamar, my interest in you?’

  ‘You came about her.’

  ‘And about you, you as part of her, you as yourself.’

  ‘You are sorry for me, you pity me, you despise me –’

  ‘How you do leap from one idea to another! We used to see quite a lot of Tamar, now she refuses our invitations, I think that’s because of you. Do you mind if I have a serious talk with her quite soon?’

  ‘I would mind very much.’

  ‘I’m very fond of that child, so is Pat, so is Leonard –’

  ‘Pat was always dead scared Leonard would want to marry Tamar. Don’t worry! My family isn’t going to come anywhere near yours, ever!’

  ‘Actually I came to say that Patricia and I would like to adopt Tamar.’

  ‘You mean legally?’

  ‘If possible. De facto anyway.’

  ‘You want power over her. That’s Pat’s idea, to keep her off Leonard.’

  ‘You always had a suspicious mind, but this is paranoia. That’s one point, about adoption, I’m just putting it on the map. More immediately, we want to put up the money to get Tamar back to Oxford. I know you’ve said ‘no’ to Rose and Gerard, but I want to persuade you that we’re a special case, that I am anyway.’

  ‘Tamar is the only thing I’ve got, and you want to take it away.’

  ‘You had no education so you don’t want Tamar to have hers.’

  ‘I don’t take money from other people.’

  ‘You prefer to live on Tamar’s earnings.’

  ‘I’ve worked for years and years to support that girl! Why should I go on forever? She’s young, she’s got a good job, it’s right that she should earn. You sneer at me for being uneducated. I’d earn too if I could get a job.’

  ‘I am about to offer you one.’

  ‘To “help out” as Patricia’s “house-keeper”. No, thanks!’

  ‘You could help me in the office. I think Pat said something about this to you at Guy Fawkes. Seriously, Violet, just look at this flat, look at yourself, look at the situation. You and Tamar are like two sick animals in a filthy box, one looks every day to see if they’re still alive. I don’t want to stand by and watch you destroy yourself with envy and grief and chronic unhappiness and lack of love. You’re intelligent, you’re good-looking, if you’d comb your hair, you could do with some make-up too, you’re still young. My business is expanding, I’m going to have a gallery in Cork Street, and a glossy office with rubber plants and a lot of smart machines, and I want someone there that I can trust. You could learn the business, one side of it anyway, it’s not all that arcane. It’s the sort of thing Patricia couldn’t possibly do and she
’d hate it anyway. But you’d be capital at it, and it would interest you, instead of crouching here and dying of dullness and boredom. Don’t you want to use your mind, use all that cleverness you’re wasting now on endlessly documenting your resentment? You and Tamar could live with us too, make an extended family, for a while any rate, you could have the flat we’re in now. This place is beyond help.’

  ‘What do you propose doing with Gerard?’

  ‘Oh we’re going to get him out. I want that house. If we can’t we’ll buy another house, a larger one.’

  ‘I thought Patricia wanted me to clean and cook like before.’

  ‘That was just for an emergency. What I’m suggesting now is something entirely new. I want to transform Tamar and transform you. I want to shake you both and clean you up and dust you down and dress you in smart beautiful clothes and bright colours. You’re dowdy, you’ve got no sense of colour. I might even go into the dress designing business myself, printing fabrics anyway. Violet, I’m serious.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Violet.

  Gideon had appeared unexpectedly at about eleven in the morning, entering through the unlocked door, and found Violet sitting in her tiny kitchen over breakfast reading the newspaper. A pile of dishes tottered in the sink. The dresser was heaped with tins, bottles, string, mouldering bread, saucepans containing messes, unopened envelopes containing bills. Gideon, observing this conglomeration from the corner of his eye, thought it resembled an abstract expressionist picture which he had just bought. Violet had taken her glasses off when he came in. Taken unawares, she looked terrible. Her brown hair, unwashed and in need of trimming, hung in rats’ tails, her face was greasy, her old floppy cardigan was inside out, her jersey was too tight and too short, and her skirt lop-sided and not properly done up. She was wearing bedsocks. She sat crouching and glaring, deepening the two lines above her nose, her eyes wet slits between dry wrinkles. The expensive contact lenses had proved a failure. She evidently felt that since she was taken unawares looking terrible she would make a feature of it.

  Gideon, scented with aftershave, sat perched on a chair opposite to her upon which he had hastily placed a clean-looking plastic bag from the dresser. He tried to rock the chair a little. It came reluctantly away from the gluey deposit on the floor with a slight sucking noise. Gideon was wearing a dark suit with a reddish pink shirt and a pale yellow tie with blue shapes on it. His curly hair, darker and more closely curled than Gerard’s, shone with health, his chubby red lips were moist, his plump cheeks glowed, they had enjoyed the cold air.

  ‘You think Tamar’s so perfect,’ said Violet, ‘everybody does. Why are you fussing about her now?’

  ‘She’s too perfect. I can’t help feeling she’s in danger. Someone at her publisher’s told someone who told me that she looked really ill. You yourself said that she was dying.’

  ‘She’s been impossible lately. She won’t eat and she looks a little misery and says nothing, she won’t speak to me, it’s like having a ghost in the house.’

  ‘Does she have any social life, any sign of boy friends?’

  ‘No. She wouldn’t say anyway. She goes out in the evening. I think she just walks round and round the roads. Anything to get away from me and the television!’

  ‘Seriously, Violet, won’t you let me help? You accepted Matthew’s money.’

  ‘How did you know that? That was something else, it was money he owed to his brother, it wasn’t much in any case.’

  ‘All right, and you won’t deal with Rose and Gerard, but I’m different, they’re muffs, I’m a doer. I can give effective help, I can take charge. Besides – I’m different because I’m me.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten who you are.’

  ‘Don’t you remember “Hello, swinger”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve known each other a long time.’

  Probably Violet’s most terrible secret was that she had known Gideon when they were young, barely twenty, before he met Patricia, in fact Violet introduced them. Gideon, then a shy thin Jewish boy studying history at a London college, had made little impression. Gideon’s father (a refugee who had adopted the name of Fairfax out of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera) had a junk shop in the New King’s Road. Violet had been in love with a music student who was starting a pop group. By the time she was prepared to take an interest in Gideon Patricia had already appropriated him. The notion that Gideon had been a bit ‘keen’ on her, and proving unwelcome had transferred his attentions to her cousin, travelled with Violet, a dark cancerous nugget, which, as she grew older, became blacker and larger. For years she wondered if Gideon had ever said anything to Pat about that shadowy non-event, later she assumed he had not. She and Gideon never spoke of it, but, as Gideon progressed from poor student to tycoon, their mutual consciousness of this ‘something’ seemed to become, without ever really amounting to ‘anything’, more substantial.

  ‘You don’t want to help us,’ said Violet, ‘it’s just an exercise of your perpetual euphoria, you are in every way successful, your success shines brighter here by contrast. It’s a way of triumphing over us. We’re to join the line behind your chariot. You want to make us look up at the sky and sing, but we can’t. Some people have streams of happiness laid on, others have the black river. We belong to another race.’

  ‘The world of the happy is not the world of the unhappy, as Gerard often says, quoting some philosopher. But what that philosopher did not realise was that the happy can sometimes kidnap the unhappy and carry them kicking and screaming into the world of happiness. That is what money can do, Violet, that is what money is for.’

  ‘You love money, you love power, that’s all. You are an utterly selfish person.’

  ‘Yes, all right, but can’t you attribute any benevolent motive to me? You know how fond I am of Tamar.’

  ‘Oh Tamar, Tamar. I expect you’re in love with her, you find her physically attractive, you want to be her favourite uncle, and God knows what else –’

  ‘Oh shut up. Come on, Violet, just lift your head up, yes, look at the sky and the sunshine for a change. I hate that picture of you trudging behind the chariot. I want you and Tamar in the chariot. Where will you be at Christmas?’

  ‘Here, as usual, of course.’

  ‘I won’t try to imagine how ghastly that must be. Look – we don’t have to spend Christmas at Bristol any more, now that poor old Matthew’s gone, we can be anywhere. Why don’t you and Tamar come with us? We could rent a house in Italy. Tamar’s never been to Italy. We’d have some fun. Why not, please?’

  ‘That’s your idea, not Pat’s, and it’s a silly impertinent idea. We don’t want to be patronised by you and Pat, we don’t want to play the humble grateful poor relations! Tamar wouldn’t want to come anyway, she never wants to go anywhere now.’

  ‘It’s Pat’s idea too, as it happens, I wouldn’t float it on my own!’

  ‘You want to share your happiness with the poor. Well, the poor don’t want it. Pat’s kindness humiliates me. Like last time, I was treated like a servant. It upsets Tamar very much. Pat just wants me there as a visible proof of how happy and lucky she is! When one is really afflicted sympathy is the last thing one wants. I can live with my miseries if only people would leave me alone!’

  ‘Your miseries are self-inflicted,’ said Gideon, ‘and you are very unjust. You were not treated like a servant. You make any sort of generosity or kindness impossible, and you do this on behalf of Tamar, as if she were as mean and suspicious and full of spiteful hatred as you are.’

  ‘You despise me,’ said Violet, ‘you treat me like dust, and you seem to think you have a right to, you wouldn’t speak in this outrageous way to anyone else.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t, and maybe I have a right to.’

  ‘You come here as a tourist to see how hideous this place is and how hideous I am so that you can go back and tell Pat!’

  At that moment Tamar appeared at the kitchen door. Tamar did indeed look like a ghost, no
t a transparent wraith, but rather the substantial stick-like kind, which might be a broom handle or a signpost but clearly and terrifyingly is not. She was wearing a long brown overcoat, and a large brown beret which was pulled down over her ears and made her look like a weird pale-faced animal, faintly pathetic, faintly unpleasant. Only her large animal-like eyes, staring with hostility into the kitchen, conveyed, as animal eyes can do, a kind of spirit. Gideon, who had not seen her for some time, was instantly shocked, as by the sight of some unnatural mental-physical degeneration, even metamorphosis.

  He immediately said, ‘Oh Tamar, what a bit of luck, here you are! I was just saying to your mother how nice it would be if you were to spend Christmas with us in Italy, we’re renting a house –’

  Violet said, ‘What are you doing here at this time, have you got the sack?’

  ‘I’ve taken the afternoon off,’ said Tamar.

  ‘Tamar, what about Christmas, Italy?’ cried Gideon, jumping up, as Tamar seemed to be turning to go.

  ‘No thanks.’ Tamar disappeared, banging the kitchen door behind her.

  ‘You see?’ said Violet.

  As he walked away through the cold dark foggy London morning toward his car Gideon pondered upon the mystery of Violet and Tamar. How could people not want to be happy? It was utterly contrary to nature. In Gideon’s view, human beings do, and certainly ought to, reach out instinctively and ingeniously toward the fruit of happiness, seeking through all the branches and shaking the tree if necessary. He pondered, but did not want to ponder too deeply. He would try again of course. He had exaggerated slightly in saying that the Italian idea had been Pat’s too. He had (as Violet had later assumed) never talked to Pat, or to anyone, about the moment (but had there ever really been such a moment?) when he had found twenty-year-old Violet attractive. He did not want to add anything to that little oddity, but neither did he dismiss it. It did not trouble him, it sometimes amused him. He loved his wife, and had found with her the happy life whose possibility he had intuited when he first met her; those two were closer than many outsiders liked to think. Pat certainly also wanted to help that miserable pair, though her motives were perhaps slightly different from his. About this too he did not ponder for long. Gideon could see Tamar’s image as a perfect angel, certainly as a ‘strong good girl’, and he instinctively understood how this appearance, partly a reality, arose from her determination not to be ruined by her mother. Violet had called her a survivor, a tough little atom. Only as Tamar’s impulse so patently lacked joy Gideon could not really believe in it, he saw her, as Gerard did not, as but too likely to ‘break down’. Perhaps the process was now visibly beginning. He did in fact find her physically attractive, and wanted, but in no sinister or improper manner, to kidnap her and transform her, clothe her, take her to Paris, Rome, Athens, buy her a car and a rich successful handsome virtuous young husband. He also wanted to kidnap Violet and shake her into life, but that was a more complex wish, and probably a fruitless, even imprudent or senseless one. He recalled the days when she was ‘swinger’ and he was (a silly nickname which he refused to remember) without any deep emotion but with a kind of loyalty, he was touched by the memory and by her as a continuing element in his life; and he pitied her, though this was a feeling he did not care for, and continually altered into something else, perhaps into the euphoria and the selfishness and the power of which she accused him. As he walked along he banished the problem, he would have another idea about it later. He thought instead about his father whom he loved but with whom, in some profound way, he had never really got on (as he, for instance, got on with Pat). Of course his father was glad that his son was rich, and glad (must be glad) to be now surrounded with what money would buy. But he had wanted his son and only child to be a doctor and still spoke nostalgically of the old hard days in the New King’s Road. Mutual love (for it was mutual) does not ensure mutual understanding. Thank heavens Leonard got on so well with his grandfather, as he had, as a child, with his grandmother, now long dead. She had been a contrary person too. Of course both of them had had terrible childhoods. Easily releasing his ancestors and their childhoods Gideon began to think about some Beckmann drawings which he thought he could obtain for a reasonable price. Then, as he approached his beautiful car, he thought, far more deeply and vaguely, about himself, and began to smile.