The Book and the Brotherhood

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Where’s Duncan?’

  ‘He’s at the office,’ said Jean. ‘He’ll be sorry to miss you. You must come again some evening soon when he’s in. Please sit down and tell me how you are.’

  Tamar sat down on the sofa near the fire and Jean sat opposite to her, experiencing the relief of one who, suddenly aware of another’s troubles, forgets her own.

  ‘Is Oxford term over? I’m so sorry, of course you’ve left Oxford. You’ve been ill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re better now? How is the job going? I believe you’re back at work?’

  ‘Yes. The job’s all right.’

  ‘Do let me give you something, coffee, sherry, biscuits?’

  ‘No, thanks. Did Duncan tell you about me?’

  ‘About your illness? No. But you’ll tell me.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Well – no – what do you mean?’

  ‘Then I’d better tell you as he’s bound to later.’

  ‘Whatever are you talking about?’ said Jean.

  ‘Duncan and me – we had a love affair.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, not a love affair, we had one night – not a night, an evening – one evening – and then I got pregnant – well, he doesn’t know that, at least I think he doesn’t unless it’s got round – I didn’t tell anyone of course, but Lily Boyne knows and I expect she’s let it out, she’s the sort of person who would –’ Tamar uttered these words in a sing-song matter-of-fact rather irritated tone, looking here and there in the room as she spoke. At intervals she grimaced quickly and screwed up her eyes as at a spasm of pain.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Jean. Jean had immediately collected herself. She smoothed down her dress and folded her hands. She felt clear-headed and icy cold. ‘Tamar, is this true? You’re not imagining anything? You have been ill, you know.’ Jean did not believe that Tamar was suffering from delusions, she simply wanted to check her and make her speak more plainly.

  ‘Oh, it’s true,’ said Tamar, still in her nervous and rather dreamy manner. ‘I wish it wasn’t. Only one night – evening. And I became pregnant. Wasn’t that strange.’

  ‘But you can’t have done – Duncan can’t –’

  ‘Oh yes he can, believe me!’ This was uttered in a sudden aggressive, almost raucous voice.

  ‘You must be mistaken – are you pregnant?’

  ‘No, it’s gone, it’s gone, I had it taken away.’

  ‘Tamar, my dear, please, I’m not angry with you –’

  ‘I don’t care if you are,’ said Tamar, ‘I’m far beyond that.’

  ‘You say you got rid of the child?’

  ‘I had an abortion – double quick – it’s gone – don’t worry –’

  ‘Will you please tell me this story right from the beginning? When did it start? You say you had a love affair?’

  ‘No, I didn’t – well, I said so, but that doesn’t describe it – it all happened in a moment, just on that one occasion – I was trying to help, to help – I came to be kind to him – then I felt I loved him – and he was so unhappy he took me to bed – just for a, perhaps, an hour – he regretted it later.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He avoided me, he never spoke to me properly again.’

  ‘You never told him you were pregnant?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it was my business,’ said Tamar savagely.

  ‘Are you sure the child was his?’

  Tamar was silent for a moment, and cast one quick fierce look at Jean, whom she had not looked at since she entered the room. ‘So you think I go to bed with lots of men, that I’m always doing it, perhaps every night?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m very surprised by all this. I’ve got to get it clear.’

  ‘I’m making it clear. Do you think I’d lie about the most important thing that ever happened to me? Did Duncan tell you?’

  ‘No. But, Tamar, the child –’

  ‘It’s gone, it’s dead.’

  ‘We would have adopted it.’

  Tamar jumped to her feet. She stood for a moment with her mouth open and her head awkwardly on one side, one shoulder raised. Then she screamed. It was a loud deliberate scream, like a call. She picked up her coat and stood holding it. She said in an odd high-pitched voice, ‘How very kind of you. But it was my child, mine to kill if I wanted to. I wasn’t going to give it to you to love. It might as well have had no father. It was mine. I didn’t need your permission! Everything was arranged for you, so that you and Duncan would be together, that’s what everyone wanted, that’s why they wanted me to go and see Duncan, as if I were your servant or your maid or something. I was supposed to help, and that was what happened, so I could tell nobody in case it spoilt your thing, and now you’re back and I had to come and see you because I liked you so much once and I thought you knew, and I’ve been in hell –’

  ‘Please,’ said Jean, ‘please be calm – sit down –’ Tamar’s hysterical vibrating voice and what she had just said frightened Jean very much. The odd thing, and Jean reflected on this afterwards, was that when Tamar began her revelation Jean had taken the situation in instantly and had felt, in the midst of shock and dismay, a kind of pleasure at the idea that Duncan was to blame for something, that his life was imperfect too, he had deceived her and did not yet know that she knew. The sense of a mortal wound came later, her jealousy, her sense of Tamar’s pain and, worse still, of Tamar’s power to hurt. And then the lost child with its long revenge.

  Tears were now streaming down Tamar’s face. She stood holding her coat and her handbag. At one moment she mopped her face with her dangling coat sleeve. She uttered a low moaning sound as she wept.

  Jean, near to tears herself, but still relentlessly controlled, said, ‘Listen, Tamar, don’t tell anyone else about this. It’s better to keep quiet. I won’t tell anyone.’ Except Duncan, she thought. Or shall I not tell Duncan, never tell Duncan?

  ‘I don’t care who knows now,’ Tamar wailed, ‘I don’t care about anything now. Oh it was so stupid of me to come here, I had to find out whether you knew, and now I’ve told you and you didn’t know –’

  ‘You did right to tell me.’ Jean did not try to stop Tamar who was making for the door. ‘My dear – come back again soon – we’ll talk again.’

  ‘No, we won’t. I hate you. I loved Duncan, I loved him – you left him and made him so unhappy – and now all this has happened and I’m ruined, my life is ruined, and I killed my child, and it’s all your doing.’

  ‘Tamar!’

  ‘I hate you!’

  She had opened the door and fled through it, carrying her coat and her bag. The door banged shut in Jean’s face. Jean did not try to follow. She sat down and began to cry over the terrible damage, not yet assessed, which had been done.

  It was Friday morning. Tamar was with Jenkin.

  Jenkin had been up late on Thursday night. He had rushed round to Marchment’s house in a state of wild excitement because Marchment had said that someone was going to lend him a typescript of part of Crimond’s book. This promised treat did not materialise, but Jenkin then spent half the night arguing with Marchment and his friends. For some time now, ever since what Gerard ruefully called the ‘arraignment’, when Crimond had announced that it was finished, Jenkin’s desire to see the book had been increasing until it was almost as if he were in love with the thing. He had dreams about it. The thought of holding it in his hands made him tremble. He did not dare to ask Crimond for news of it, fearing a rebuff.

  Jenkin’s present restlessness had also much to do with what he thought of, with a smile but soberly, as ‘Gerard’s proposal’. He had, since that meeting, been several times alone with Gerard, but neither of them had made any direct allusion to what had then been said. This reticence was, in different ways, characteristic of both. Gerard, too dignified to repeat himself, was clearly prepared to wait indefinitely for Jenkin’s respo
nse or indeed to do without any response except the one he had instantly received. Jenkin, afraid of giving, to someone so meticulous, so demanding of exactitude and truth, the wrong impression, thought it better not to blunder into words until he had something clear to say. But when would that be? Jenkin had been very impressed, more so even than he had realised at the time, by Gerard’s statement. Jenkin preferred to think of it as a statement rather than as a suggestion. The statement had in fact already changed the world, and had in some ineffable sense been answered. Their meetings now, with no word uttered on the subject, were different, there was a new gentleness, a douceur, a closeness. They looked with a new calmness into each other’s eyes. These were not ‘meaningful’ or ‘questioning’ looks. They were undemanding gazes which quietly fed their new sense of each other. They also laughed a lot, sometimes perhaps at an intuition of something harmlessly ludicrous in the situation. These communions made Jenkin feel extremely happy. It was like – well, it somehow was – being in love, and perhaps just that was what had been aimed at and achieved by the statement itself and nothing more had to be done. They had never, it occurred to Jenkin, actually looked at each other so much before.

  However a query had been set up in his life by Gerard’s prescient démarche. Was he going to go or to stay? Jenkin, in some pain, had gone over possible compromises and rejected them. If he did what he was intending to do he would be getting right away from Gerard and from his present ‘world’ altogether. He would be somewhere else, in another country with other people, doing new things, and as he saw it very absorbing and demanding and time-consuming things. Taking a plane to London for an occasional lunch with Gerard did not seem to fit into this picture; and such glimpses were likely to be more distressing than satisfying. Some comfort, some satisfaction, which belonged to his staying was just entirely incompatible with his going. If he went away he would lose, would never develop or regain, that peace which at times he now experienced and knew that Gerard experienced, in their mutual presence, a sense of having come to rest in absolutely the right place. His departure would destroy that for ever. It was not at all that he imagined that Gerard would resent his decision and somehow cut him off, it was just that an almost continuous absence would make them into strangers. They might try to overcome this alienation but time and space would not be denied. Whatever happened Jenkin knew that Gerard’s behaviour to him would be perfect. But such an absence would starve love of anticipations and treats and make of their old long friendship something smaller and different. The thought was agonising. Of course Jenkin had faced the prospect and felt the pain of it before but now what was to be lost had gained considerably in volume. The ideas of home and of peace which Gerard had trailed so temptingly before him did attract him deeply and did surprise him as things which he had never really thought he would achieve. He had, without reflection or regret, dismissed them as, for him, impossible, and so not objects of desire. He had had of course his own peace of mind which depended on his solitude. He had never even thought that he would ever get to know Gerard any better or come any nearer to him than what had been their splendid but static friendship of so many years standing. Now, if as Gerard had actually envisaged (and this still amazed Jenkin) they were to share a house this would involve what he had never in relation to Gerard dreamt of, a genuine life together. Jenkin had considered a shared life as, for him, out of the question, utterly not his lot, had not even, save in the vaguest way when he was very young, wanted it. His relations with women about which he had been so successfully secretive had never brought him at all near to notions of marriage; and he had settled down quite early in life to being cheerfully celibate and solitary, his only steady and important relationship being with Gerard and the set which had so long ago crystallised around him. Now this possible shared life with his oldest closest friend seemed immensely attractive to him and not only attractive but somehow in prospect easy, natural, appropriate, proper, fated. In this prospect problems about sex bothered Jenkin not at all. He had always since he first saw him when they were both eighteen adored Gerard. The idea of being in bed with him had never occurred to him for an instant and would have seemed, and seemed now, actually comic. Jenkin in fact felt perceptibly flattered by Gerard’s (evidently) not finding his old friend unattractive, though this too was immensely funny. Gerard’s lovers had all been beautiful, Sinclair and Robin for instance, or formidably handsome, Duncan. But possible ‘dramas’ on that front were not part of his worries. Here again, whatever happened or more likely did not happen, Gerard would be perfect. Contemplating Gerard during their recent peaceful meetings Jenkin had even reflected that an old dog might still be taught new tricks; and this idea too made him laugh, afterwards. However all these tempting and beautiful thoughts, these deep tender desires, ran harshly up against Jenkin’s equally deep resolution about the necessity of an absolute departure; and he felt uncomfortably that the voice of duty also spoke on that side. Jenkin did not want just yet to have that uncomfortable interview with duty. He was, he was aware, putting it off, being drunk upon the honeydew of Gerard’s love.

  Such thoughts were in his head when Tamar appeared at his door at about ten o’clock. He was not expecting her.

  ‘Tamar, what luck, you’ve just caught me, I was just going out shopping. Come in, come in!’

  He ushered Tamar into his sitting room and turned on the lights and lit the gas fire. It was cold and misty outside. He went to the kitchen and brought back a mug with holly in it and put it on the mantelpiece. He thought, when I’m in Spain at Christmas I shall get a sign. Tamar refused coffee, hot soup, toast. She kept her coat on. They sat down in the cold room, huddled near the fire.

  ‘Not at the office?’

  ‘I’m on sick leave again.’

  ‘Well, how is it with you, my dear, and how are you?’

  ‘I think I’m done for,’ said Tamar. She spoke calmly and her face, still thickened and dulled as Jean had seen it on the previous day, was not jerking in spasms of pain, nor were her eyes straying about. She kept moistening her parted lips and looked down steadily at the green tiles in front of the little spluttering fire. She breathed deeply.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve told Jean.’

  ‘You mean about Duncan and the child?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Jenkin was dismayed to hear this. ‘How did that come about?’

  ‘I just couldn’t bear not knowing whether Duncan had told her. He hadn’t. But I went to her and blurted it all out, for nothing as it were. Now she’ll tell him I’ve given him away and that he made me pregnant and the child is gone and so on.’ She spoke slowly.

  Jenkin’s thoughts raced about in many directions. ‘Jean and Duncan will survive. It won’t wreck them all over again. You aren’t afraid of that, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Tamar went on with her terrible calmness, staring down at the green tiles. ‘I’m not concerned about them. I’m concerned about myself.’

  ‘What did Jean say?’

  ‘She said she and Duncan would have adopted the child.’

  ‘Oh –’

  ‘That put me in a rage. It was as if they would have pushed past me and left me in the gutter and gone on together into the sunlight carrying my child away.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I told Jean she had been horribly cruel to Duncan, and that I loved Duncan, and that I hated her.’

  ‘But you don’t hate her.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I shall never see her again. We shall be unable to bear each other. And Duncan will detest me. Everybody will detest me. But perhaps even that doesn’t matter. I shall tell everyone now, I think.’

  ‘Better wait a while,’ said Jenkin. ‘Absolute frankness sounds good, but it’s not always the right policy.’

  ‘I expect Lily Boyne had gossiped about it all over the place.’

  ‘I feel sure she hasn’t.’

  ‘Jean will tell some version of it to someone. I’d ra
ther tell my version straightaway.’

  ‘Tamar, wait,’ said Jenkin. ‘We’ll see. I feel rather confused about this and your head isn’t exactly clear. Would you like me to go round to Lily and see her – and perhaps Jean too – would that help? I’m not sure –’

  ‘I don’t care. Perhaps I won’t tell anyone. Let them hear anything they like and believe anything they like. I’m done for.’

  ‘That’s not true and it’s wrong to say it. It’s a way of trying to get out of trouble by pretending to give up, when you’re dealing with trouble which you can’t give up. You must endure this thing and know that it will pass and you will outlive it in a good way. There are all sorts of things, wise and unwise things, which you might do now and you’ve got to think about these – and they affect other people too.’

  ‘Oh – other people! Actually there is something I can do, but it may be awful – wicked –’

  ‘Tamar –’

  ‘I just need help, extreme help –’

  ‘What –?’

  ‘I’ve decided to become a Christian.’

  Jenkin was very surprised. ‘Good heavens – do you really think –?’

  ‘You, even you,’ said Tamar in her quiet explanatory voice, ‘do not at all understand how black and how destroyed my whole mind has become. That’s what I meant when I said I wasn’t concerned about Jean or Duncan or anybody, only about myself. I’ve got to be saved from destruction – I can’t even say that I want to be, but somehow I must be, and I can’t do it myself, and you can’t do it either. I need supernatural help. Not that I really believe it’s supernatural or there is any supernatural. But perhaps there is help somewhere, some force, some power –’

  ‘But, do you believe –?’

  ‘Oh you and your belief and your sincerity and so on, I knew you’d start on that, you all think that’s so important! I don’t. When you’re drowning you don’t care what you hold onto. I don’t care whether God exists or who Christ was. Perhaps I just believe in magic. Who cares? It’s up to me, it’s my salvation.’