by Iris Murdoch
‘Rose, please come on the cruise, you will, won’t you?’
‘Rose, do come, it’ll make all the difference.’
‘We’ll have such fun, please!’
‘All right,’ said Rose, ‘I’ll come.’
She could no more resist the entreaties of Reeve and Neville and Gillian, and was extremely touched by their urgent wish that she should accompany them. She was extremely grateful.
It was nearly two weeks since Lily’s visit to Boyars, and during this time spring had made its tentative appearance, glorifying London, even in its shabbiest regions, with smells of earth and flowers and glimpses of leaves and sunshine. Gideon Fairfax was giving a party in the house at Notting Hill. Leonard Fairfax was home from America, bringing his friend Conrad Lomas with him. Gideon had asked Reeve and his children, said by Rose to be in town, and Neville had brought Francis Reckitt, son of their Yorkshire neighbour, who had travelled down with them. Gideon’s favourite New York art dealer, Albert Labowsky, from whom he had just acquired the coveted Beckmann drawings, was also present. Rose could hear the American voices, distinct like the cries of unusual birds. Tamar was there, and Violet, and some friends of Pat and Gideon unknown to Rose. Tamar was shepherding a Miss Luckhurst, a retired school teacher who wrote detective stories. There was also in tow a very thin very young man said to be not only a parson but Tamar’s godfather. Rose was surprised to see Father McAlister, conspicuous in his black cassock. Pat was dispensing Gideon’s special tangerine cocktail. Of course Gerard had been asked, but, although some people were already leaving, he had not appeared.
‘What are you doing after this?’ said Reeve. ‘You’ll have dinner with us, won’t you?’
‘Sorry, I can’t. I’m tied up.’
‘Then tomorrow you must come and see the flat!’ said Neville.
‘We can’t give you lunch,’ said Gillian, ‘there’s nothing in it except a tape measure and Papa’s cap which he left behind! But there’s a super Italian-restaurant nearly next door.’
Reeve had just bought a flat in Hampstead.
‘Thanks, I’d love to,’ said Rose. She was troubled by an aching tooth.
Rose had no engagement that evening, but was hoping that Gerard would come, and would have dinner with her. She had still, in the lengthening interim since her time at Boyars, heard absolutely nothing from him. She rang his number less and less often. She wrote a letter and destroyed it. She did not dare to go round to his house. This faint-heartedness was a measure of how, after all these years, remote he had suddenly become: a dear friend, not a close friend, not an intimate. She had no idea at this moment where Gerard was or what he might be doing or thinking, and she dreaded asking anyone for news of him, thus admitting that she did not know what perhaps others did. Gerard might be out of the country, he might be in bed with someone, he might be in hospital or dead. He carried nothing which named her as closest.
Gideon, as master magician, watching his party fizzing on so well, had his chubby pretty look which annoyed Gerard so much. He had moved Gerard out of his house by playing on his weaknesses, his semi-conscious guilt feelings, his unhappiness which made him so unworldly, the sheer nervous irritability which suddenly made him want to get away from his sister and brother-in-law at any price. Gideon had completed the redecoration of the house, doing exactly what he wanted and not what Pat wanted. Pat’s resistance had been minimal, so there was not much to crow about there. The drawing room, which under Gerard’s regime had been an insipid spotty pinkish brown dotted with small pale English water-colours and full of dark dull conventional fat chairs, was now painted a glowing aquamarine adorned with a huge scarlet abstract by de Kooning over the fireplace and two colourful conversation pieces by Kokoschka and Motesiczky. The carpet was a very dark blue with pale blue and white art deco rugs. There were two very large white settees, and no other furniture. Gerard’s hopeless kitchen had of course been completely reconstructed. Only the dining room retained its previous form and colour, exhibiting now upon its dark brown walls the pretty Longhis and the lovely Watteau. Even more pleasing to Gideon was the return from America, for good he hoped, of his beloved and talented son Leonard, now to study at the Courtauld Institute. What a team we shall be, thought Gideon, who had never dared to call himself an art historian, and what fun we shall have! Gideon could also look with some satisfaction upon his success (so far) with Tamar and Violet. After the abduction things had moved rapidly. Tamar had moved into the upstairs flat. Violet (surprising Pat but not Gideon) had suddenly moved in too. Tamar had moved out and now had a tiny flat in Pimlico. Violet’s flat was up for sale. Violet was quiet, letting herself be looked after. What next, time would show, and meanwhile it was another one up on Gerard.
Patricia thought, Gideon’s worked really hard to get hold of those two, I hope he won’t regret it! He’s too kind-hearted and of course he’s a power maniac with delusions of grandeur. He’s quite unscrupulous when he gets going like this. How on earth will we ever get Violet out? She’s sitting there like a toad and playing the interesting neurotic, it could go on forever, I suppose we shall have to buy her out! My God though, she may be a mental case, but she’s kept her good looks and her figure, it isn’t fair! Patricia was well aware of Gideon’s funny kinky affection for Violet, and it did not trouble her. She was in any case too happy at present, what with Leonard’s return and the house to play with, to bear any ill-will to her unhappy cousin. As for Tamar, it looked as if they were adopting her after all. Perhaps that was what Gideon had always wanted. Surveying the scene Patricia had already noticed something else which gave her pleasure. Leonard seemed to be getting on very well with Gillian Curtland. Hmm, thought Pat, a nice clever pretty girl, and she’ll inherit a packet. When they come to live in Hampstead we’ll invite them to dinner.
Violet’s capitulation, which had occurred when Gideon arrived on the day after the abduction, was brought about by two kinds of consideration, one financial, the other emotional (Father McAlister would have used the word ‘spiritual’). The latter was a special kind of despair which took the form of missing Tamar. Violet had been intensely and deeply shocked by the ruthlessness of Tamar’s rejection of her. She realised that the docile spiritless girl she had known all her life was gone forever, and that she would never meet that girl again. With Tamar so utterly gone from it the flat was desolate, a cage without its little captive. Keeping Tamar prisoner had been far more important to Violet than she had ever realised. Whether this importance had anything to do with love was a question which did not now concern her; she needed help, she was ready to run, Gideon appeared. The financial consideration could be more clearly stated. Gideon announced, which Violet had anticipated, that Tamar had already given up her job. She wanted time to catch up with her studies. There were debts and bills and very little money. Gideon composed a rational argument. Violet had to face the facts and put her life in order. It made sense to sell the flat, which was a genuine asset, pay what was owed, and come and rest at Notting Hill, then get some sort of job (all right, not in his office) where she could use her wits, or anyway make a plan for a happier and more sensible life. She didn’t have to stay on with him and Pat if she didn’t want to, it could be an interim. Violet, who felt just then that the alternative was suicide, said yes with an alacrity which surprised Gideon, who had looked forward to a struggle, even a row, ending of course in victory. Gideon had given her money to buy clothes. She had accepted the money and bought the clothes. (Gideon, discussing it all with Pat, attached great symbolic significance to this surrender.) Now at the party she felt like some sort of wicked Cinderella. Albert Labowsky was talking to her as if she were an ordinary person. She could see Gideon looking encouragingly in her direction. She had fallen into the hands of the enemy, the other race, who would now expect her to be grateful, even to become happy! Of course they had not expected her to share the flat with her daughter, the new Tamar. Gideon had bought a flat for Tamar before Violet moved in! What shall I do up there alone,
thought Violet. Shall I quickly become ill, bed-ridden, have my meals brought up by kind people who will sit by my bed and chat? Perhaps even Tamar might come and sit, and look at her watch. Violet was experiencing a sudden total loss of energy, what a car must feel when there is no more petrol. She had not really lived, before, on pure unmixed resentment and remorse and hate, she had lived on Tamar, as a presence, as a vehicle, as something always expected and looked forward to. Through Tamar she had touched the world. Could she now live on a hatred for Pat and Gideon, which she did not yet feel, but might have to develop as a source of power? How she would detest their charity as the days went by, how she would loathe their kindness, their tactful sympathy, their gifts of flowers! But how now could she escape? Any relationship with the child who had rejected her seemed now impossible forever, one could only cast, in that direction, one’s curse. Don’t they know, thought Violet, that I’m not an ordinary person, that I’m dangerous, that I’ll end by burning the house down? Now I’m a novelty. Soon they’ll get nervous. I shall start to scream. They’ll have foreseen this too. I shall go to a luxurious mental home and have electric shocks at Gideon’s expense. If I leave now and go upstairs someone will be sent after me to see I’m all right. Soon they’ll begin to be afraid of me. That at least will be something.
Father McAlister was looking forward to Easter. He had given up alcohol for Lent and the smell of the tangerine cocktail was inflaming his senses. Also of course he dreaded Easter. I do not know, I cannot tell, what pains He had to bear, I only know it was for me He hung and suffered there. The terrible particularity, the empirical detail, of his religion bore down upon him then as at no other time. He would endure it, he would purvey that story all over again, what else was he for? Without the endlessly rehearsed drama of Christ, His birth, His ministry, His death, His resurrection, there was nothing at all, he, Angus McAlister, was a vanishing shadow, and so were the planets and the most distant stars and the ring of the cosmos. Others live without Christ, so why not I? must be a senseless question. Nothing can separate me from the love of Christ. How did Saint Paul know? Is it not upon his knowledge that the whole thing rests? Without Paul to carry that strange virus from land to land the gospels would have been lost forever, or rediscovered centuries later as local curiosities. So it was all an accident? That was impossible for it was something absolute, and what is absolute cannot be an accident. Suppose there was nothing of Christ left to us but his moral sayings, uttered by some unknown man with not a fragment of history to clothe him? Could one love such a being, could one be saved by him? Could he come closer to one than oneself? Christianity spoils its believers as spoilt children are spoilt. The radiant master, the martyred man, the beautiful hero, the incarnate god, the best known individual in history, the best loved and most powerful: this is the figure Christianity has lived upon and may die of. That was not Father McAlister’s business. He had his own certainties and his own paradoxes; he did not dare, as Easter approached, to call these his lies. It must surely be possible for him – in Christ – not to lie. Such a truth as ends all strife, such a life as killeth death. Christ on the cross made sense of all the rest, but only if he really died. Christ lives, Christ saves, because he died as we die. The ultimate reality hovered there, not as a phantom man, but as a terrible truth. Father McAlister could not dignify his beliefs by the name of heresy. He prayed, he worshipped, he prostrated himself, he felt himself to be a vehicle of a power and a grace which was given, not his own. But his terrible truth was never quite clarified, and that lack of final clarification troubled him on Good Friday as at no other time. This mysterious Absolute was what, during those awful three hours as he enacted the death of his Lord, he had somehow to convey to the kneeling men and women who would see – not what he saw, but something else – which was their business and God’s business – only there was no God. That the priest performed this task in agony, with tears, did him no credit. Rather the contrary.
Tamar had abandoned her brown and grey uniform and was wearing a midnight-blue dress with a jabot of frilly white silk at the neck. Her fine tree-brown tree-green hair had been cleverly cut into layers, she looked boyish and elfin and cool. Her face was slightly less thin, her complexion slightly less pale, she had lost her ‘schoolgirl’ look. She wore no make-up. Her large hazel eyes carried a wary self-consciously melancholy expression which was new. Conrad Lomas had, as he confided to Leonard, admired her for several seconds before recognising her. Tamar had let Gideon arrange her future, he typed letters for her and she signed them. What had seemed so impossible was fixed up easily and swiftly, what had seemed lost forever retrieved, no one seemed to be surprised, no one objected, her tutor, the college authorities, expressed calm pleasure at the prospect of welcoming her back. A van, conjured up by Gideon, brought to her all her remaining clothes, all her possessions down to the tiniest trinkets from her room. The awful old flat seemed gone from the earth, as if it had indeed been burnt, an image which haunted her. She bought books, acquiring again the works which her mother had made her sell and which she had parted from with such bitter tears. Though not without invitations, she remained solitary, as if, in a unique healing interim never to be repeated, she must fast.
The fervour of her religious conversion had, as the cynics predicted, worn off. It was amazing to her now to remember how she had craved for the sacrament. Had she really swallowed all those wafers of bread and all those sips of rich wine, more intoxicating by far than Gideon’s cocktail? At present, she did not want this food. But the cynics (of whom she was well aware) understood very little. Tamar was indeed puzzled about herself. Father McAlister had constantly talked of ‘new being’. Well, she had new being, she had been permanently changed. But what had happened? Was it simply that she had broken free from her mother, was that what her cunning psyche had, under the guise of other things, always been after? She had been suddenly endowed with a supernatural strength. Like a trapped creature who, seeing a last, already vanishing, escape route, becomes savagely powerful, able to destroy anything which impedes its way. In that final scene, Tamar had felt ready to trample her mother into the ground, and had sensed with satisfaction her mother’s apprehension of an irreversible shift of the balance of power between them. Was one, as a Christian, and a new Christian, allowed to take that much time off from the Gospel of Love? To say it was necessary, it is over, things will be better, there will be a fresh start seemed a shabby way of getting oneself off. Tamar had no idea what she had done to her mother. Tamar had not discussed these more recent problems with her mentor. She was, with his tacit consent, avoiding him. Later they would talk again – though never, perhaps, as they had talked once. She was sure of his concern, indeed, of his love. Only love, his or Christ’s, his and Christ’s, could have rescued her from that inferno of guilt and fear. She was also aware, with a half-amused irritation, of the way in which, when the priest apprehended her withdrawal, he ‘transferred his affections’ to her mother. Tamar and Father McAlister had of course talked a great deal about Violet, and he had visited her first with Gideon, later (as he told Tamar) by himself, brief and, as she understood, fruitless visits. However it took more than snubs and indications of the door to deter this connoisseur of hopeless cases. Tamar’s teacher had insisted to his now, in this matter sceptical, pupil that her mother depended on her, really loved her, and really was loved by her. Before her escape Tamar was not ready to reflect on these theories. Now, reflecting on them, she made little progress. She had been told of, indeed had experienced, the transforming power of love, the only miraculous power upon this earth. Was it possible now for her to love Violet, or discover that she had always loved her? Tamar’s new state placed her further from her mother than she had ever been, her liberation having been made possible by an anger which made her former submission seem more like weakness than love. Could she see more clearly now or less clearly? Had she always assumed that she loved her mother because that was what children did? The priest, who had seen and understood that sinf
ul anger, had told her to banish it by thinking love, enacting love. Approach her! Do little things! She needs you! Tamar was not so sure. She had tried a little thing by bringing her flowers, accompanied by Pat, which had been a mistake. Violet had accepted them with a tigerish smile. Visible hatred terrifies. Tamar determined to try again soon.
Tamar had recovered from her obsessive guilt about the lost child. Magic against magic, she had been cured, relieved of evil pain, as her wizard put it, left with good pain. She had also stopped worrying about whether Jean had told Duncan or Duncan had told Jean. What did remain with her was a curious shudder which occurred whenever she saw a teapot. It was a strange feature of their recent tribulations which would have impressed her, and the priest even more, if they had known it, that Tamar, like the others, like Rose, like Gerard, like Jean, as well as of course like Duncan, felt that she had been responsible for Jenkin’s death. Each one of his friends could enact responsibility. Tamar, the last of them to see him alive, a fact known only to her confessor, could not forget that when she arrived Jenkin had been about to leave the house. If she had not come he would not have received that mysterious telephone call. But what impressed her more was the idea that she had unloaded some sort of fatal evil onto Jenkin. She recalled an awful satisfaction it had given her to ‘tell all’ to Jean, and spatter her with her own misery, and hatred, and then to run to ‘tell all’ again to Jenkin. But she had not been destined to receive the hoped-for absolution. It was as if she had spread out all that evil filth before him and as he took it up and took it upon himself, she had made him vulnerable to some force, perhaps wicked, perhaps simply retributive, which had struck him instead of her. Her priest of course found the idea interesting, but condemned it as superstitious; and her persisting grief for Jenkin gradually ceased to terrify her as she recalled the long day during which she had waited for him to come back. Tamar did not believe in God or a supernatural world and Father McAlister, who did not believe in them either, had not troubled her with these fictions. What he had, in his fierce enthusiasm, wrestling for her soul, intended to give her, was an indelible impression of Christ as Saviour. Tamar was, in her privileged interim, prepared to wait and see what later on this radiant presence might do for her. She prayed, not exactly to, but in this reality, which turned evil suffering into good suffering, and might in time even enable her to reach her mother.
