The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  Dear Edward Baltram,

  Think what you have done. I want you to think of it at every moment, at every second. I would like to stuff it down your throat like a black ball and choke you. You told vile unforgivable lies at the inquest. I know Mark would never have taken that drug. You gave it to him, fed it to him without his knowing, fed him his death, poisoned him as surely as with cyanide. You are a murderer. You killed him out of envy, to destroy something beautiful and good which you knew your mean soul could never equal. You killed my beloved son, blackening for ever my life and the life of his sister. You took his whole life away, which I shall have to live in pain as the years go by. You have got off scot free, but I shall not let you forget. God knows how many other young lives you have destroyed, peddling your poison. You ought to die of shame, you ought to be punished, you ought to be in prison, people like you should be put away. May you pay for this with your life’s happiness. I hope that you will never be forgiven and that people will turn from you with horror, I hope and pray that you will never be happy again. My only consolation is that you will never recover from the drugs to which you are addicted, their effects are irreversible, you have destroyed your mind and will live the life of an idiot, tormented by fantasies. I wish my hatred could kill you. I curse you, I condemn you to a miserable haunted life. The claws which I drive into you now will never release their hold.

  Jennifer Wilsden.

  This letter from Mark’s mother arrived soon after the inquest. Edward thought of writing to her to say that whatever misery she wanted to curse him with was less than what he felt now and would for ever feel. However he did not write. Another similar letter arrived from her in the following week, then another. It was now March. Mark had been dead for nearly a month.

  Edward was entirely occupied with his misery, he had no other occupation. He took the tranquillisers and sleeping pills prescribed by the family doctor. He slept as long and as often as possible, he longed for sleep, unconsciousness, blackness, the absolute absence of light. He found it difficult, indeed pointless, to get up in the morning; curled up, hiding his head, he lay in bed till noon. There was nobody he wanted to see, and nothing he wanted to do except sleep and, when this was impossible, read thrillers. He avidly and quickly read dozen after dozen of the coarsest trashiest most violent thrillers he could lay his hands on. It was at least an occupation to go as far as the library or to the secondhand bookshops in Charing Cross Road. He could, in his state, have readily used pornography too if he had known how to get it. He wandered around Soho and looked into the windows of sex shops and at the photos outside strip joints. But he had not the nerve or particularity of will required to enter any of these establishments. He brooded over the cover pictures of terrible little magazines which had been soiled by eager hands, then slouched guiltily on, afraid of being visible. He wandered a good deal in London, vaguely hoping he might be run over. He stood in underground stations and watched the merciful tube trains thunder in. He did not visit pubs or bars. He had no desire for alcohol, and his old drug was now nothing to him; he could not imagine how he had ever wanted it. All that belonged to a childish phase which he could so gladly and easily have given up, which would be an incident in his past, were it not that now nothing of it could be left behind, he was arrested forever in the place of his crime. Something blood-stained and heavy would travel on with him always, through all of his life. How does one live after total wickedness, total failure, total disgrace? The plough had gone over him and he was dismembered. Grief and remorse were pale names for his condition. He recalled the innocence he had once had which he would never have again; and how happy he had been not so very long ago when, not knowing how blessed he was, he had carelessly thrown away all his possibilities of good. Oh why could not the past be undone, since he regretted it so bitterly and so sincerely? One momentary act of folly and treachery had destroyed all his time. He had no time now, only the dead task of passing the hours, there was no live time, no future, he hated everyone. He especially hated Sarah Plowmain, who had brought it all about by that homicidal seduction in her suffocating Sibyl’s cave. Sexual desire had left him, he could not conceive of feeling it again. The craving for pornography was something else, and even that was dull and lacked intensity. His fantasy life was deadened, he had become an obsessive machine, mechanically afraid of the police and of men in white coats. All cravings were mean now, since he himself was utterly without identity or value. Only occasionally when he woke from sleep did he for seconds recover his lost self, his happy self who did not know that his life was irrevocably smashed and over. Waking perhaps from a happy dream he would exist for seconds as that old self, the lively self that could anticipate a happy busy significant day. Then black memory would come, the blackness that covered everything, blinding his eyes and annihilating space and time. Thus did day bring back his night.

  It was not quite true to say that he hated everyone. One person remained to him, the only one he needed, the only one he loved, Mark Wilsden, his friend, his beloved. Talking aloud to himself Edward would repeat again and again, as the rhythmical moan with which the agonised sufferer tries to soothe unbearable pain, ‘Oh my dear, oh my darling, my poor lost one, my poor dead one, come to me, forgive me, I’m sorry, oh my love, my love, I’m so sorry, help me, help me, help me.’ So he prayed to Mark. A language he would never have used to Mark alive now seemed the only way to speak to Mark dead, to Mark’s image or ghost which was now permanently present, a part of every thought, in the chamber of his mind. Sometimes when he was alone he even pictured that ghost as an unhappy strengthless wraith, crying outside his door, begging to be given back his life; and the transformation of Edward’s grief into pity seemed so likely to kill him on the spot that he had to run out gasping into the street where the alien hostile faces of strangers forced him to control himself and survive. Vain love for Mark grew in him cancer-like and was spewed forth in a black private eloquence often accompanied by tears. Only Edward could not cry properly, not as he had seen girls cry in gushing pouring streams. His tears came forth painfully as a small and healthless dew.

  Sometimes he tried to think simply that he had committed a sin, was feeling guilty, and should repent; but these familiar ideas seemed abstract and flimsy, unable to take any hold upon the devastation of his life. One moment of absolute treachery had proved everything against him, his guilt was a huge pain which blotted out ideas, and he lived in it like a fish at the bottom of a dark lake. If only he could have, somehow, somewhere, a clean pain, a vital pain, not a death pain, a pain of purgatory by which in time he could work it all away, as a stain which could be patiently worked upon and cleansed and made to vanish. But there was no time, he had destroyed time. This was hell, where there was no time. If only he had been accused of some definite outrage and sent to prison. The idea of being for a definite period, however long, in prison occasionally seemed attractive in a world where all natural desire had ended. He even considered committing some ordinary crime in order to get to prison. But the will was lacking. He could not invent anything, not even, at present, his own death.

  Like Cain I have killed my brother whom I loved. Perhaps I killed him purposely, out of envy, like someone said, how can I know? Oh forgive me, will not someone forgive me? If Mark were alive in a wheelchair would he forgive me? Surely he would. But he is not alive, and I killed him. Edward heard these thoughts, endlessly repeated, ringing in his head, ringing out as if everyone could hear them, and sometimes he found himself, even when he was not alone, starting to recite them aloud as a mechanical litany, and weirdly smiling when the agony was worst. Oh for any other pain except this one, a merciful pain that would wipe away the deed itself, perhaps in a million years, but sometime. I left him alone, the final eternally unpardonable moral failure, the ultimate dereliction of duty. If only the telephone hadn’t rung, if only I had not gone away, if only I had left the door unlocked, if only I had come back twenty minutes sooner, ten minutes, one minute … Perhaps he rattled the do
or again and again, calling my name — as now I hear him calling in the night, calling out and crying.

  Mark Wilsden had been cremated and his ashes scattered. It was as well. If that smeared and broken body had still existed, buried somewhere, Edward would have had to go and lie upon it.

  ‘Listen,’ said Harry Cuno, patiently and not for the first time to his stepson Edward Baltram, ‘You are having a nervous breakdown, you are ill, it is an illness, like pneumonia or scarlet fever, you will receive help, you will be given treatment, you will get better, you will recover. Please take this in. Please be patient and do what you are told.’

  Edward, sitting opposite his stepfather in the drawing room of the tall house in Bloomsbury to which Chloe Warriston had fled, pregnant with Jesse’s child, stared at Harry for a moment, then looked away.

  My God, thought Harry, both my boys have lost their senses at the same time, and just when they were doing so well, they seem to want to destroy themselves, Edward with this depression and Stuart with religious mania. They’re both in love with death.

  Harry Cuno, though he loved both of them, was well known to prefer his stepson to his son. Harry, instinctively placed by Edward as ‘not exactly successful’, had ‘suffered’ from being the only child of a famous father, Casimir Cuno, a popular highbrow novelist. Harry had detested his father’s books, but greatly valued his success. The unusual surname, of which Harry was also proud, was of Provencal origin. Casimir’s reputation was now in eclipse, but he had bequeathed to Harry, together with a lot of money, a versatile ambitious restless temperament, and a cluster of talents, which Casimir had learnt to use, and Harry had not. Sarah Plowmain had voiced a general view in calling Harry an ‘adventurer’, and a ‘hero of our time’. Harry was sorry to miss the war. After a stormy sojourn at his father’s old public school in the north of England, and a brilliant career as a university student, and after the death of his father in a yachting accident, Harry had played at journalism, at literature, at business, at politics, at enfant terrible. He was a disappointed spoilt child. He had published a novel and some poems, been an unsuccessful Labour candidate, set up a short-lived avant-garde publishing house. He never seemed to fail, and although many years had passed without any further visible achievements, and his sons were now grown up, much was still expected of him, as if he had the gift of eternal promise. There was always something, endlessly put off but still there. He continued to look handsome and young. His career as a husband and father had been similarly clouded and remained suitably picturesque. He had amazed his friends by marrying a shy quiet girl, with timid gentle hazel eyes, from New Zealand (‘the girl from far away’), whom he had met at college. When she died of leukaemia soon after giving birth to a son, Harry got over his grief by playing the libertine. If Harry was a playboy, as some said, it was because all his activities, whether serious or not, appeared to take this form. He next married a more notorious young lady, Chloe Warriston, a painter, but more famous for being Jesse Baltram’s favourite model. Unfriendly critics said that Harry, having married someone quiet, ordinary and decent, whom he loved, was kept in the real world by the effort. When he married a professional dream girl he was taken over by his obsessions and his feet finally and permanently left the ground. The girl from far away had been a felicitous accident, Chloe was a fate. He saw her at an Arts Club party, and immediately ‘recognised’ those tragic eyes, peering from among masses of untidy brown hair. He fancied her reputation, and when he married her she was already pregnant. Some said this alien pregnancy was what attracted Harry most. It was a restless marriage, although Chloe loved her opportune pirate whom, she said, she always pictured swarming on board with a cutlass between his teeth. No hand-to-hand combat had been necessary however, since Jesse had certainly abandoned Chloe, and did not later on show any interest in his casual offspring. It was Jesse’s long-suffering wife May who had, on two or three occasions, asked Chloe to bring Edward, aged five or six, over to see his father when the Baltrams were staying in London. They had already by this time left Chelsea for the country. On these visits Chloe, who had never forgiven her faithless lover and perhaps was still in love with him, left Edward at the door to confront alone the big dark-haired man who looked at him with amused curiosity, the nervously effusive stepmother, and two staring overtly hostile little girls. Harry stayed away from these encounters of which he disapproved, and which after Chloe’s early death (Edward was seven) were not repeated. May Baltram later sent two or three Christmas cards to Edward which Harry intercepted and destroyed. That was the end of a matter about which Edward retained remarkably little memory in the motherless years during which he so took for granted Harry as father and Stuart as brother. He could not recall his mother at all clearly, he remembered mainly her large sad eyes as the wasting illness took her away, and his own feeling of a terrible sadness, and a kind of guilt which he had imbibed from the sense of a tension between her and Harry, as if perhaps her reproaches, addressed to those who would survive her, were falling upon him too. Later, as he became more aware of the oddity of his parentage, he protectively clouded her image. A little extra ‘family’ was provided for Edward by Chloe’s younger sister ‘Midge’, a fashion model, once the smartest woman in London, who amazed everyone by marrying an ‘older man’, Thomas McCaskerville.

  The panelled drawing room of Harry Cuno’s house, which had been his parents’ and his grandparents’ house, was a long room on the first floor with windows at each end. It was painted, had been painted long ago and had pleasantly aged and faded, a darkish green, now made sombre again by an afternoon mist outside. One lamp was on. A fire was burning in the grate. Harry was a large blond broad-faced fresh-complexioned man, his thick lively hair, skilfully cut, which had only lately faded a little from being ‘golden’, standing up in a crown above his unlined brow. He had cordial blue eyes which looked with inquisitive friendliness about him. Sitting by the fire, he was leaning forward now with his elbows on his knees. Edward, tall and thin and dark, with a hawk nose and limp dark straight hair which flopped across his face, a little taller than his stepfather, cringed back into his shabby boxlike armchair. Harry’s words did not, could not, reach him, had no connection with his sufferings, did not concern him in the least. He was having an imaginary conversation with Mark. ‘Look, Mark, it was her talking about my family that delayed me …’

  Harry thought, I’ve got to do something. We’ve let him rest, stay in bed, wander about, be by himself, he seemed to prefer that, but he’s fading away, he’s like a dying animal. If only there was something he wanted. ‘Why don’t you go on holiday? Go with anybody you like, go with a girl. I’ll fix it all. Go to Venice. You were talking about going to Venice.’

  Edward, his gaze fixed on the corner of the room, slowly shook his head. The double-glazed windows admitted faint traffic noise, at the other end gave glimpses of close misty trees.

  ‘Has Thomas said anything, arranged for you to see him again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Curse him, why doesn’t he do something? He’s got some idea in his head. He’s so devious. This leaving you alone is no good. You will come to dinner tonight?’ The McCaskervilles had invited Harry and Edward and Stuart to dinner.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s for you, you know, to get you out of yourself.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Willy and Ursula will be there.’ Willy Brightwalton was Edward’s tutor. (Edward was studying French.) His wife Ursula was the family doctor. ‘Are you taking those pills Ursula gave you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Edward, do listen to me, concentrate, take a pull on yourself, get yourself together a bit. Try to put all this behind you. Nobody blames you, you’re not guilty of anything, it was an accident. Don’t be so self-important, everybody isn’t thinking about you, if that’s what’s worrying you. People have other troubles, you’ve been forgotten. You’re free now, you’ve been through it all and got off. British justice has forgiven you and sent you home to g
et on with your life, so can’t you forgive yourself and do just that? You’ve got every advantage, you’re young, you’re attractive, you’re clever, you’re healthy, don’t chuck it all away. Happiness, that’s what life’s about, it’s your job to be happy, not to spread gloom and despair all round. Don’t be so selfish. Get your courage back, get your narcissism back, get your myth back, straighten your spine and believe in yourself again.’

  Edward looked at Harry, or glanced at him, with an expression of faint wincing distaste, huddled himself further into his chair, and resumed gazing into the corner of the room.

  Harry, who had only lately seen his sons’ faces change from the soft vague sweetness of boyhood to the hard anxious definition of manhood, looked with despair and anguish at Edward’s weak puckered discontented almost feminine air.

  ‘You want to be a writer, don’t you? Well, here’s an experience, why not write about it!’