The Book and the Brotherhood

by Iris Murdoch

  Duncan was looking at a hammer. It was an old familiar hammer with a heavy head and a shortish thickish well-worn wooden handle. The grain-striped handle was unpolished save by the grip of many hands, and was splintered a little at the end. It was beautifully balanced. Duncan could remember his father using that hammer in a little workshop in the garden where he pursued his hobby of mending furniture. The hammer had travelled with Duncan, in his bachelor flats, later into his marriage, a friendly serviceable old hammer, always finding its modest place in a suitable drawer, always to hand, ready to tack a carpet, or hang a picture. Its head, with its substantial shining nose, was pleasantly rounded, as if worn, as if it had spent thousands of years in the sea, it looked like a dark glossy ancient stone. Duncan weighed the heavy head in his hand, testing its firmness, caressing it in his palm, then drew his fingers down the warm smooth wooden shaft. It was a good old tool with a friendly face, humble, faithful. He had gently rubbed the end of the handle with sandpaper. He laid it down on the kitchen table and looked at it. It had never before been for him an object of contemplation. It looked primitive, it looked innocent, a quiet symbol of unassuming diligent toil. He put it away in a drawer. He drew out of his pocket a letter which he had received two days ago and read many times. It was brief and ran as follows.

  There is unfinished business between us.

  If you would like to deal with it come to

  this address next Friday morning at eleven.

  D.C.

  This letter had arrived two days ago. Duncan had at once replied accepting the invitation. He had told no one. It was now Wednesday.

  Jean had been present when, at breakfast time, he had unsuspectingly opened the typed envelope. He had dissembled his emotion and pocketed the letter quickly. His first sensation had been fear, his second elation. He was living now in a state of extreme terrified excitement. He had of course considered every possible explanation, including the implausible one to the effect that Crimond wanted to bring about some sort of reconciliation. Such a project was contrary to common sense, but Crimond’s brilliant crazy mind did not accommodate common sense. After all, he and Crimond had once been friends, even, in the context of the group, quite close friends, in those far off but eternally significant Oxford days. Perhaps Crimond had continued to like him, even felt, as man to man, sorry that they had been divided by a woman. Men who have loved the same woman can feel a bond over many years. Such a bond can have various foundations, of which contempt for the woman in question could be one. There is a relationship, which can also consist of chivalrous surrender on one side and grateful possession on the other. There can also be shared loss and romantic nostalgia mutually enlivened. Working along these lines, for of course he had thought in the interim of nothing else, Duncan could just imagine that what Crimond wanted was a cosy chat, a manly conversation, wherein they would both reminisce about their relations with Jean, and conclude that really, in the end, they were both satisfied with the situation as it was now and need no longer regard each other as enemies. They might even envisage the occasional meeting, a drink together, perhaps billiards or chess. However, distraught as he had become in the intervening days, Duncan was not quite mad enough to take this picture seriously. It was difficult enough to think of Crimond in this mood, it was even more difficult to believe that he might expect Duncan to fall in with it.

  No. The invitation meant war, it signified confrontation. But of what kind? Could Crimond be considering some kind of belligerent self-justification? Was it just possible that he did not want to cut, in Duncan’s vision of him, too bad a figure? He would not want Duncan to see him as a mean despicable rat, would want to explain, perhaps, how inevitable it had all seemed, how eloquently Jean had represented her marriage as unsuccessful, unimportant, virtually over in any case. This was also difficult to envisage and would involve a sort of denigration of Jean, a sacrificing of her in the interests of some kind of understanding with Duncan, which did not seem at all characteristic of Crimond. It was equally out of character to think of him as wanting to demonstrate to Duncan how little he cared that Jean had gone, how relieved he was, to explain perhaps that he had positively thrown her out, so as to efface any image of himself as a defeated man. Crimond was far too arrogant, also perhaps too much a gentleman, to descend to any such justification, however belligerent in tone. Duncan could not really imagine any conversation between them as likely to be possible. He was in any case determined not to let any such conversation begin, and felt sure that Crimond did not envisage it either. These exclusions left only the possibility of some sort of fight – but then again of what kind?

  It was certainly possible that Crimond was testing his courage. If Duncan refused to come Crimond would despise him and Duncan would know that he was despised. If Duncan accepted Crimond might contrive to humiliate or terrify him. Duncan of course dismissed the undignified, indeed contemptible, idea of arriving with a bodyguard. This was man to man, and it was a safe bet that Crimond hated Duncan as much as Duncan hated Crimond. The detested, also the ridiculous, husband. Duncan remembered Jean’s stories of Russian roulette, which she had described as being both tests of courage and elaborate charades. Jean had never believed that the guns were loaded, but it had also been clear that she was required to take the risk. From something which Jean had said, not of course in answer to any question from Duncan, it appeared that Crimond still played with guns, at any rate possessed them. Supposing in this case, the guns were loaded, supposing Crimond intended simply to kill Duncan and make it out to be an accident? Was not Duncan walking straight into a trap, offering himself gratuitously as a target to a man who loathed him? What was clear, was that whatever grim dramas he might imagine now, it was impossible to refuse the challenge. Supposing, later on, Jean were to discover somehow that he had funked it?

  Duncan’s inflamed mind went on to imagine a variety of outrageous and ingenious ways in which Crimond might intend to entrap and torment him. The most horrible prospect was that of humiliation, of being tied up, handcuffed perhaps, tortured till he begged for mercy. The room could contain traps, devices. Well, he would act rationally, he would not resist, he would not risk serious injury or extreme pain, he would capitulate and say and do whatever was required. As he imagined scenes of this kind Duncan writhed with misery and rage. After anything like that it would be impossible for Duncan to go on living without killing Crimond. Here he reverted to old familiar, now almost traditional, fantasies of how he would one day destroy his rival.

  Duncan was well aware that Crimond had in him some sort of steely element, some pure mad self-indifferent recklessness, which Duncan, however strong his emotions, however fierce his hatred, simply lacked. Whatever the game was, Crimond was likely to win it; and Duncan even found himself relying, contemptibly, for the outcome, upon Crimond’s rationality, or upon some hypothetical sense of decency which would preclude too brutal a treatment of the hated husband. And from here he would revert to discarded hypotheses about unimaginable conversations. One thing Duncan was determined to attempt was not to lose the initiative. Here the picture was not a very clear or well-omened one. A very little preliminary talk would make clear what it was to be. Then Duncan would hurl himself upon his adversary, as he had done in the tower, relying on his weight and a quick wrestling hold to frustrate whatever fiendish device Crimond seemed to be intending to bring into play. So, he would fight, but not under Crimond’s rules. It was a function of this scenario that Duncan had, on the previous day, purchased a knife. He had posed as a bookbinder who wanted a long sharp knife with a narrow blade which could pass up the spine of a large book, a not too flexible knife with a sharp point, opening with a spring. He had considered and dismissed arming himself with a revolver. It would not be easy to get one in the time available, and the weapon seemed to him otiose. A knife would be unexpected and at close quarters more effective. Close up against this imagined encounter Duncan found his thoughts dwelling not so much upon murder as upon grievous bodily harm
. It was in this context that he then thought of the hammer. The smashed kneecap, the crushed right hand, the eye reduced to pulp, Crimond in a wheelchair, Crimond blind. Of course with such a Crimond still alive Duncan could never sleep secure. On the other hand, a murder charge could rest upon him, with its consequences which in his distraught state he was scarcely counting. The knife man would remember selling the knife. A few well-aimed hammer blows delivered with all his force could do irrevocable damage, and yet could also be passed off, by Crimond, later, discovered bleeding and alone, as some sort of accident; and here Duncan found himself, with another twist of the screw, relying upon something like Crimond’s generosity! There was also Crimond’s vanity, his pride, his unwillingness to appear so very publicly as the victim of the man he had wronged. As Duncan went about his work in the office and lived his quiet convalescent life with Jean, his mind crowded with these gory fantoms, he felt at times that he was going insane.

  After a short time it began to seem to Duncan that Crimond’s letter constituted a sign. It was fated, it came at its moment duly. This feeling was obscurely connected with what was still wrong, sometimes, he despairingly felt, irretrievably wrong, between himself and Jean. What was wrong was, it seemed, nothing obvious. With what was obvious they could deal. To say that he ‘forgave’ Jean was to use superficial language. Well, of course, he forgave her, but that was only a part or aspect of some enormous package, something as large as the world, which in being with her again he accepted. He accepted the pain, the wreckage of their lives, the desolation and the ruin in both their hearts, even the possibility that she might run away again. He accepted all the things he did not know and would never know about her relations with Crimond. It was like asking God to pardon the sins one has forgotten as well as those one remembers. He soon gave up the problem of whether she had left Crimond or whether Crimond had left her, it became like some piece of metaphysics finally seen to be empty. Perhaps Jean did not know, perhaps God did not know. He no longer tried to riddle out what exactly had happened on the night when Jean arrived at Boyars, crashing her car on the wrong road. He listened to the little that she said, and asked few questions. Jean was relieved and grateful, her love enlivened by relief and gratitude and by their world renewed. She was not happy, but, they both agreed, she was almost happy. She would become happy. He did not speculate too much now about her thoughts. He was not happy, but would become happy. All their talk about living in France, the books they opened and the maps they studied, were the symbol, not the substance of happiness to come. Sometimes he wondered whether they were wrong to want or expect to be happy, as they had once been; but had they been, perhaps their memory deceived them, or that was not what it was? Perhaps they had hold of the wrong concept. Perhaps all this thought, all this analysis in which they were both indulging, was simply a mistake, a substitute for some more substantial living in the present? Their living in the present so often seemed (and here too they tacitly agreed) like an ad hoc hedonism which put off the real issues into an elsewhere. This uncomfortable dualism seemed, after the first excitements, to intrude even into their renewed sexual relations which, though apparently so surprisingly satisfactory, took place inside a cloud of anxiety and dread. Of this, in kindness to each other, neither of them spoke. They thought that time would heal them, love would heal them, that love would heal itself, that just here was the place for faith and hope. At the same time he was conscious of something wrong which had not been put in the reckoning, a missing item which made the problem not only insoluble but unstatable. It was after the arrival of Crimond’s letter that Duncan concluded that the missing item simply represented the fact that Crimond was still alive.

  This was certainty not a simple matter. It was not, that is, simply to do with hypotheses about Crimond’s appearance on the doorstep or Jean running back to him. It had more to do with falling down the stairs at the tower, even falling into the river. Yet again, it did not simply represent a desire for revenge. The whole world was out of joint and some radical adjustment was necessary. Rationally, Duncan did not imagine that if he killed Crimond ‘things would be better’. If he actually committed just this murder, or this maiming, he would be in prison, or if he got away with it he would be consumed with guilt and fear. It did not appear to him as something owed to Jean; he was indeed aware that, just for this, Jean might hate him forever, and it was a measure of his obsession that he did not reflect much about this possibility. The requirement presented itself as a very pressing duty or the release of an agonising physical urge: something that had to be done about Crimond. When Crimond’s letter came Duncan felt at once the appropriateness of the wording. ‘Unfinished business’ was precisely what there was between them; and he felt it too.

  So it was that he looked forward to their meeting as to something fated and necessary, without at all seeing what it would be like. The hammer, the knife, were perhaps just blind symbols. He just had to pass the time somehow until Friday came.

  On Thursday morning Jean had an unexpected visitor.

  Often Jean felt very very tired. Among the things which she had not fully revealed to her husband were the continuing physical effects of the car crash. She had, on return, visited her doctor and the hospital. After all, she was told, you can’t expect to turn your car over and just sprain your ankle! There was a jolt to the spine, a stiffening of the shoulder, nothing too serious, but needing prompt physiotherapy. Was she not in pain? No, mental anguish had for a time taken her out of her body, to which she now returned. She went to the hospital for heat treatments and to swim, as in a weird dream, in the warm hospital swimming pool. It’s the pool of tears, she said to herself, but not to Duncan. She did exercises. The ankle mended, her shoulder felt better, but now she ached all over and errant pains crept about her body. She was too proud to mention these mundane matters to Duncan, except, for he knew that she went to the hospital, as a sort of joke. They talked laughingly of going to Baden-Baden, even to Karlsbad, when the spring arrived.

  Meanwhile, upon that other plane, Jean too was experiencing the mutual incompatibility, yet necessary connection, between analysis and hedonism. She found some relief in both, but neither would relieve her of her deeper, spiritual, sickness, her love for Crimond, from which she had to try, and hope, day by day, hour by hour, to recover. She tried sometimes to remember what it had been like on the previous occasion. Had she really tried then – or had she simply kept the thing intact, hidden away like a virus or embryo, preserved alive in some mysterious jar in some secret cupboard? Would it be like this now, or did the thing at last face extinction, must it die, would it die? Like Duncan – for she was like him, had perhaps become like him, her mind like his mind, her talk and mode of argument like his talk and mode of argument – she sometimes wondered if she had misconceived the problem, had obscured its essence by a wrong concept. Why put the question at all? What mattered now was loving Duncan and being happy. In this light the loss of Crimond could seem almost like something mechanical, an inevitable happening, now past, which had not radically altered the flow of her life. In this mood she attached herself for support to certain memories, Crimond’s repeated assertion that their love was ‘impossible’, and, which seemed to her particularly significant, his cry, upon the Roman Road, of ‘take your chance!’ Well, her chance had been his chance too, and she believed what he said. The brutality of his departure must have been intentional, a seal upon their separation. She was helped by her faith in his truthfulness. It was over and had to be over. There could be no resurrection now. He had needed his freedom and she must learn to need hers. But the illness was heavy and the healing was slow.

  Duncan had gone to the office. He had not yet given in his resignation, that would happen soon. This time was an interim, a breathing space. Even the flat, which they planned to leave, knew it, although Jean tidied and cleaned it and made it almost as it had been before. There was something provisional about their present mode of life which they acknowledged, convincing each other th
at a move to somewhere else would rejuvenate them both.

  Jean had been reading in a history of Provence about how they had found the skeleton of an elephant, which must have been one of Hannibal’s elephants, when the bell rang at the door of the flat. She went to open the door. The person who stood outside was Tamar.

  Jean had not seen, or indeed thought of, Tamar since her return to Duncan, though she remembered now that someone had told her that Tamar had been ill. She was glad to see her.

  ‘Tamar! Come in, I’m so glad to see you! Are you better? Someone said you were ill. I’m so sorry I haven’t asked you round. Duncan and I have been so busy. Come in, come in, sit down. Is it terribly cold out there? Let me take your coat. Thank heavens the snow has gone away. Would you like some coffee, or a drink? I can give you lunch if you’d like to stay.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Tamar, surrendering her coat. She dropped her handbag on the floor.

  Jean saw at once that Tamar was different. She was leaner and looked paler and older, she even seemed taller. Her complexion, usually so delicately transparent, seemed thicker and more dull. Dark rings surrounded her large green-brown eyes. She was wearing her usual coat and skirt and a faded polo-necked jersey round the top of which her untidy hair stringily strayed. She stared about the room in an anxious irritable manner.