by Iris Murdoch
‘There you are.’
‘What do you think, Jenkin?’ said Gerard to Jenkin’s back.
Jenkin returned from the window and sat down beside Rose. ‘Rose, dear, don’t be distressed. Of course he’s in earnest, but Gerard’s right, he was play-acting to startle us!’
‘Well, what do you think?’ said Rose crossly.
‘I’m longing to see the book.’
‘But if it’s all tosh like that –’
‘Oh, it won’t be tosh, it’ll be deep – but I wish I could have explained.’
‘Why didn’t you then?’ said Gerard. ‘If you’d only condescended to enter the conversation a bit earlier –!’
‘I couldn’t think how to put it, and you were all being so talkative – I wish I could – see exactly how – all his stuff – is based on a mistake…’
‘You said a lie,’ said Gerard.
‘Yes – well – a lie – that’s what one hates – still he may be right in a way that –’
‘That what?’
‘That one has to exaggerate.’
They left one by one, Jenkin first though Gerard tried to detain him, then Gulliver who was (only of course he didn’t say so) going to have lunch with Lily and tell her everything that had happened, then Rose who wanted Gerard to have lunch with her, only he declined. When he had given them a suitable start Gerard left the house himself. Patricia and Gideon were in Paris at the Signorelli exhibition, so Gerard did not have to flee them, but he wanted to be outside and walk, sit in a pub and have a sandwich, think it all over.
He walked for some time in the chilly haze, panting out his moist breath, letting the cold air take him by the throat. He felt displeased with himself for not having controlled the meeting, but he felt too a curious exhilaration. So the book was finished; he longed to read it, but he dreaded it too. What did he fear – that it would be very bad, or that it would be very good? He found himself feeling sorry that the book was finished, as if it were the end of an era, the relaxing of a tension which had had some life-giving resonance. What nonsense. And, today, what a lot of rhetoric and demagoguery, and, when one reflected, rather childish panache! Yet what a curious being, was it after all so surprising that Jean Kowitz was this man’s slave? It flashed on Gerard’s mind that Crimond was a changeling, a mischievous destructive airy spirit, who visited the earth like Halley’s comet every so many years, perhaps every hundred, perhaps every thousand, not a great spirit, no doubt a small one, one of many, but a daemon, who seized ruthlessly upon a woman suitable to be his mate, and (so Gerard’s fantasy went on) upon his departure killed her, or by the withdrawal of his power simply brought about her death, then vanishing in a puff of smoke or a revolver shot. A daemon who could, who knows, actually mediate with other, higher, stronger powers.
Some children were singing Christmas carols in a doorway. The haze was merging into a heavier thicker yellow light which would now persist until dark. Gerard felt full of energy. Was it possible he had actually enjoyed being denounced by Crimond?
Violet searched the flat several times before she rang Gerard’s number to say that her daughter had gone mad, and had now disappeared. The sequence of events was as follows. Violet had of course, as she told Gideon, been noticing for some time that Tamar was not eating, was in a state of anxiety, was perhaps heading for a depression. Her feelings about this state of affairs, though not by any means as callous as those she had expressed to Gideon, were certainly mixed. Part of her was actually pleased to see her daughter unhappy, the same part which would have been affronted to see her happy. There was; to this way of thinking, a sort of justice in a miserable Tamar, and of injustice in a joyful Tamar. Nor was Violet, in another part, indifferent to Gideon’s suggestion that she might be blamed for letting Tamar descend into depression, even perhaps into suicide. She did not want to be so blamed. She wanted to be the victim, not the killer. That Violet did not believe Tamar’s sufferings to be all that serious was perhaps due to yet another part of Violet’s mind which cared for Tamar as her possession, her product, indeed her daughter. Someone who maintained (as Gideon did for instance) that in spite of all appearances Violet really loved Tamar would have been telling a partial truth. Violet did have an affection for her daughter, and this helped her to believe that no serious trouble was involved, that Tamar was just going through a phase, or putting on an act.
Tamar’s apparent affliction came to a sort of crisis when she announced to Violet that she was going away for several days. Where? She couldn’t say. Why? Her employers wanted her to have some field experience with the travellers who visited the bookshops. She would, with others who made the arrangements, be staying at hotels, she did not know where. No, she would not have to pay for the hotels. After that she was absent for several days. Violet did not believe this story, which she tested, after Tamar’s departure, by an anonymous telephone call to the publishers, who told her that Miss Hernshaw was unwell and at home. Violet, musing on this, decided that Tamar had gone off with a young man. This idea made Violet exceedingly uneasy, in fact she hardly dared to entertain it, and comforted herself by feeling sure that Tamar would soon return, as glum and as passively docile as ever. It was the time after Tamar’s reappearance that convinced Violet that her daughter had gone mad, and not quietly mad but raving mad.
Tamar, arriving in the afternoon, did not speak to her mother or answer her questions or even look at her. She went straight to her bedroom, took off her coat and her shoes, and lay on the bed, ceaselessly weeping and moaning and mumbling to herself, and tossing to and fro, and uttering little hysterical screams. When Violet brought her some coffee and a sandwich she rejected them with such violence that everything fell on the floor. She tore at the sheets and stuffed them in her mouth. She lay thus crying and moaning from daylight into night, and was still wailing when Violet (who managed to sleep a little from exhaustion) woke in the morning. The sheer strength and energy of Tamar’s grief made it seem mad, surely a creature must be insane to utter such terrible sounds so continuously; there is something called insane strength and, as it seemed to Violet, this was it. She went out to telephone the doctor. When she came back Tamar had vanished.
Gerard’s number did not answer. Gerard had gone to the British Museum, Gideon was at his new gallery, Patricia was out buying Egyptian cotton sheets at Harrods’ sale. Violet then rang Rose. Rose was in, and was suitably impressed and alarmed. No, Tamar was not with her and she had no notion where she might be. As Violet was in a telephone box, Rose said she would continue the search by telephone, Violet should go home and wait and not worry, Tamar would probably come back soon. Rose rang Jenkin who was duly upset too, but did not know where the vanished child might be. No, he did not think they should start informing the police just yet. Rose said she would ring him back if she got any news. Then she rang Duncan who sounded agitated and surprised, but could not help. He asked Rose to be sure to let him know when Tamar turned up, he thought Violet was probably being neurotic and irrational as usual. After that Rose rang Gerard’s number again, in vain, and Gulliver’s number, but Gull was out applying for a job. After that she rang Lily.
Lily answered, asked Rose to hang on for a moment, then murmured into the telephone that yes, Tamar was with her, she was perfectly all right, but please do not let anyone come round. Lily then rang off abruptly. Rose rang Jenkin and Duncan. Jenkin said he would take a taxi to Violet to tell her Tamar was all right. Rose said she was going round to Lily.
As Lily’s she rang the bell and announced her name. After an interval Lily came down to the front door, opened it a crack, and said ‘Yes?’ in a hostile manner. In answer to Rose’s anxious questions she replied that Tamar was all right, was not ill, was resting, and please could they be left alone, sorry. The door closed and Rose went home puzzled and anxious, and telephoned Gerard who was still out.
Tamar was of course not at all ‘all right’ and could almost be described as mad. The operation was over, the inconvenient embryo was gone.
But the sense of relief and liberation prophesied by Lily had not come about. Tamar went into the clinic as one in a dream, walking like an automaton with glazed eyes. She came out all aware, all raw anguished tormented consciousness. She saw now, now when it was so dreadfully absolutely just too late, that she had committed a terrible crime, against Duncan, against herself, against the helpless fully-formed entirely-present human being whom she had wantonly destroyed. She had condemned herself to a lifetime of bitter remorse and lying. She was sentenced to think of that lost child every day and every hour for the rest of time, the child, that child, that unique precious murdered child would be part of every picture she could ever frame of the world, and she would have to keep this appalling secret forever, until she was old, except that she would never be old, she would die of grief. Why had she done it, why had she hastened into such an act, longing for it to be over, longing for the relief, as if there could be such relief, not foreseeing the horror of it, now that the child was dead, as dead and senseless and swept away as the drowned cat she had seen in the river at Boyars as an omen of death? At the clinic, weeping not yet screaming, she had been given sleeping pills and had slept and dreamed of the child, who would now be in every dream, a sinister revengeful accuser turning all rest into nightmare. Now sleep seemed impossible except as some awful brief interlude of haunted fantasy. Awake at night she fancied that she could hear a child crying. She had to suffer consciously, turning and twisting like one impaled. The priest had said she was in mourning – yes, she had been in mourning for the creature that she was going to kill.
The sight of her mother filled her with loathing. Her mother had wanted to kill her, lack of money not lack of will had brought Tamar into the world. If only Lily had not been there, Lily with her money and her worldly wisdom and her false enticing consolations. Tamar could have had longer to think about the deed which had now slipped with such terrible ease out of the future into the past. Tamar detested Lily, she detested Gerard, who had sent her to Duncan like a lamb to the slaughterhouse, sent her thoughtlessly, using her, sacrificing her, for his own purpose, to salve his own conscience, to exhibit his own power, casting her into deadly peril. She detested Rose and Jenkin and the whole sickening conspiracy of complacent ‘well-wishers’, who saw and understood nothing, smiling painlessly through life, breathing the perfumed air of their own self-satisfaction. She detested Duncan who had wantonly, carelessly, for the sake of an instant of weak comfort, for a little easy bit of sex, given her the deadly virus which would make her life a living death. Her youth was not only blackened and blasted, it was over. Now her face would wrinkle, her limbs would ache and stiffen, she would hobble, she would hunch, she would become old, so dreadful was the illness with which he had infected her. And yet – and this was a further twist of anguish – Tamar could not detest Duncan, she loved Duncan, and recalled with awful clarity that exalted feeling of pure virtuous suffering which she had experienced so little a while ago when she had felt herself so easily, so sweetly, falling in love with Duncan, when she had felt a pure selfless love which was to be a secret forever. Oh if only she could get back to that pain, that suffering, that secret, for such pain was joy and such a secret heaven. Now she had a secret which would consume her, gut her, over which she would bend wailing as over a black burden. Well, she would have to die soon, no being could continue in this pain, she would starve to death, or form in her emptied womb a cancer to destroy her.
Tamar knew well enough too that in choosing her adviser she had chosen her path. She had wanted to be told what Lily told her, and to hear it uttered in exactly Lily’s tone, that tone of easy worldly cheerfulness which made little of the act as if it were a casual obvious matter, just another form of contraception, something which ‘happened to everyone’. Dulled, drugged, by a false promise, and because she had been unable to face the dreadful pain of her dilemma, the pain of indecision, she had not had the courage required to wait and to think, she had killed Duncan’s child, his only child, the child he had wanted and yearned for all his life. She had done it, as it had seemed, for Duncan’s sake, for Jean’s sake, for the sake of a rotten doomed marriage, and so as not to be disgraced in the eyes of people such as Gerard and Rose who now meant nothing to her, she had done it for nothing. Infinitely more important, more precious, more life-giving and life-saving, it seemed now, was the being of that miracle child, a blessing, a God-sent gift, to Duncan, to herself, perhaps even to Jean. Only Jean did not matter, she hated Jean too. How easily, she thought, she could have weathered that storm, she and the child in a boat together, as she saw them so clearly, riding brave-eyed over the waves. She and the child setting out upon their happy free good life together. And in the end everyone would have helped them, everyone would have been so kind. But the child was dead, or even worse, changed into a wicked deadly demon, black with resentment and anger, living on as a horrible filthy ghost, dedicated to punishing its murderous mother, lethal to any other child who might, from that accursed womb, succeed it and live. Tamar’s sense of the reality of that hate, that curse, was one of the most dreadful parts of the future existence which she saw stretching away before her. She had killed the good child, the true child, and created a venomous wicked thing, formed out of her own wickedness, an envious jealous killer, living upon the darkness of her own blood. The thought that this evil child would kill her future children, would not let them live, or more cruelly would cripple them with foul sickness, with deformity, with insanity, coexisted for Tamar with the sense that she herself would not now live long, was beyond the reach of reason and love, was as darkened and solitary as if she had been immured in a bricked-up cell and left to a certain imminent yet torturingly slow death.
Tamar, who was lying on the sofa, quiet for a while with her face hidden, while Lily was playing, or trying to play, patience at the table, began again to moan quietly, saying ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ over and over again. Then in a convulsion she wailed and turned onto her face, tearing at the cushions and thrusting them into her mouth. Lily was appalled and terrified by Tamar’s condition, she had never witnessed such grief and did not know what to do. She heartily wished she had never received that wretched confidence or got so blithely and thoughtlessly involved in this drama which was turning into a nightmare. She saw now that she ought not to have hustled Tamar into a decision whose consequences, as she ought to have realised, were so uncertain. She had said what she thought Tamar wanted to hear, and done what she thought Tamar wanted done. Now it was as if she too were implicated in some awful, perhaps disastrous guilt. Of course no one must know, she had said again and again since Tamar’s arrival that she would never breathe a word, never utter a hint, Tamar’s secret was safe with her, and so on. But Tamar herself, her condition of near insanity, of frightful perhaps deathly illness, that could not be concealed. Tamar showed no signs of recovery and Lily had elicited screams from her guest at the suggestion that a doctor should be sent for. It was equally, indeed even more, impossible to ask for help from them. There was no one for Lily to turn to or whose advice or help she could ask. Even Gull, who had discovered from Jenkin that Tamar was with Lily and had rung up, had to be put off with a vague story. Lily had felt unable to lie to Rose, though she now wished she had put a calmer face on the matter. Besides, Violet had to be told that Tamar was ‘all right’. And now they were all tactfully keeping away! Oh God. I’ll have to get a doctor, thought Lily, I must have some help, I can’t be responsible for all this by myself. Oh I do blame myself so much, I was just pleased when she came to me, I felt superior because I could help, I was glad because she had confided in me and not in them. Oh why ever did I get myself involved in this ghastly business and how will it end!
Lily’s burden of remorse was meanwhile intensified by the vindictiveness of the reproaches which, in intervals of moaning and wailing, Tamar was now heaping upon her.
‘Why did you send me off to that place, why didn’t you let me wait, you kept saying how I had to hurry, you made it all seem so easy, you
said how wonderful it would be afterwards, if only I’d waited, even a day or two, I’d have felt differently, I’d have thought about what it meant, but you hustled me on, you said it had to be, and now I’ve ruined my life, I’ve destroyed everything, and it’s all your fault –’
‘I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep,’ said Crimond. Jean was at her wits’ end. She was weeping tears, death tears, weeping for her life, for the happiness which she now felt that she would never have.
Crimond paid no attention to her tears, he seemed by now to be talking to himself.
Earlier he had been reading poetry to her, some poetry in Greek which he seemed unaware that she could not understand. He had sometimes read her Greek before, but only a little at a time and had translated it. Now the reading was different, going on and on more like a liturgy or an exorcism. That in itself had been a relief.
Jean had not expected the book to be finished, she had assumed that the book was to be lived with for a long time, perhaps for many years yet. She was used to it, used to willing it and loving it as a part of Crimond’s mystery. When he suddenly said, ‘It is finished’, she was taken completely by surprise. She now remembered Crimond’s baleful remarks which she had not taken too seriously at the time. She was afraid; how would Crimond live without the book, what would he do, how would he be, was it some complete change? Of course, she supposed, he would have after-thoughts, think of addenda, there would probably be a long period of transition. His state of euphoria reassured her for a while. He told her, making it into a joke, how he had dumbfounded Gerard and his friends by his sudden announcement. He had indeed told them before, though only just before, he told her. She did not mind that. As, for a day or two, his cheerfulness continued, there was a quiet new ‘sense of being on holiday’, and Jean allowed all sorts of ordinary happy thoughts, which she had carefully and dutifully inhibited, to come out of their seclusion and throng gaily in her head. She thought, she even said, and he did not contradict her, ‘We’ll go away now, shall we, we’ll have a break, we’ll go to Rome or Venice, we’ll see some lovely places together, won’t we, my darling, we’ll escape together and be so happy, that’s what we’ll do!’
