The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Do you really think so? He wouldn’t go. Thomas wants to take him off drugs altogether.’

  ‘Thomas is crazy. Edward could be in for a long depression. I’ve seen such cases.’

  ‘Stuart seems pretty daft too. I feel sorry for Harry. Just when they were both getting on so well.’

  ‘Oh Stuart and Harry, they’re all right. Harry is the perfect hedonist, calmly determined not to be disturbed by the grief of one son and the dottiness of the other.’

  ‘Harry doesn’t really believe in neurosis,’ said Midge, ‘he thinks people should just pull up their socks.’

  ‘I’m not worried about Stuart,’ said Ursula, ‘he’ll be back a little battered in a year or two, sadder and wiser, knocking at the door of the university. Anyway why shouldn’t he want to help poor unhappy people, no one seems to give him any credit.’

  ‘Harry wants him to be some sort of top academic.’

  ‘Harry is a snob. Stuart has got a temporary fit of religious mania like boys have at fourteen. He thinks he was immaculately conceived because he can’t imagine his mother in bed with Harry. Chloe never liked Stuart. Classical bad stepmother, idealised absent mother, that’s his trouble. And Harry’s wild love life after Chloe died. Actually Stuart is a tough egg. He and Harry are as like as two pins, they’re both Boys’ Own Paper types, romantics who want to be tested, obsessed with courage, have they got it or not, they’d like to be war heroes, it’s as simple as that. They should have lived in the nineteenth century. Harry would have been an explorer building the Empire, Stuart would have been a fearless missionary or a controversial bishop.’

  ‘I rather see Harry in Berlin in the jazz age. I must say, I find Stuart exhausting. What did you think of his lecture on pornography?’

  ‘I liked it. What’s young Meredith doing now?’

  ‘Reading in bed.’

  ‘What’s he reading?’

  ‘Hydrogen-Propelled Airliners.’

  ‘He’ll be all right.’

  ‘He won’t play any of those expensive computer games Thomas got for him.’

  ‘Good child. Never mind them. I’m worried about Edward. At best he’ll be in for the dreary business of falling in love with Thomas and then having to fall out again.’

  ‘Harry’s afraid he’ll become homosexual through being so obsessed with Mark Wilsden.’

  ‘Yes. He’s in love with Mark now. Poor boy, oh poor poor boy.’

  ‘Harry was very nervy and nasty tonight, wasn’t he. I don’t think Thomas was pleased.’

  ‘Harry just uses his intellect to shred himself to pieces, the golden charmer who destroys himself. I can’t stand these prophets of doom, gloating over the collapse of civilisation, they’re always anti-women. I think Harry despises women, well I suppose most men do. Poor old planet all the same. No wonder Dirk Plowmain shot himself.’

  ‘I didn’t realise he shot himself,’ said Midge.

  ‘Yes, very stylish. He was a clinical depressive. They’re a funny pair, Harry and Thomas, they’re chalk and cheese, Thomas an oriental Celt and Harry some kind of archetypal Englishman, two men with absolutely different kinds of minds who fascinate each other.’

  ‘You think they really like each other? I’m never sure.’

  ‘I said “fascinate”, but yes, I expect they adore each other! What a pair of egoists! Willy’s another of course, in a different style. I must get back. Is Thomas really writing a book about that crazy patient of his, Mr Blinnet?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I think that Blinnet man is a fraud. It never seems to occur to humourless psychiatrists that their patients are having them on.’

  ‘Thomas isn’t humourless.’

  ‘He’s humourless by other means. He’s devious, he’s too deep. Funny finicky Thomas. You know how fond I am of him, and I do admire him. Quand même. Tell him to keep an eye on Edward. I’ll try to too of course. But it’s easier for Thomas. He only has four patients a day, I have dozens.’

  ‘Less than four now. He wants us to live more in the country now Meredith’s going to go to boarding school. It’s interesting. Harry prefers Edward. I think Thomas prefers Stuart.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ursula, ‘Thomas is far more interested in Stuart’s crisis than he is in Edward’s. I don’t mean he’s irresponsible. But quick crude science is what’s wanted here, not snail’s pace subtleties. Drugs are the solution, everything else is frivolous. Thomas is moving away from science, he’s a traitor, that stuff about all analysis being lay analysis, it’s a bad line of talk, and people listen to him. He was never much of a doctor anyway, he didn’t practise for long. I once heard him say he wanted to forget he’d ever been a doctor. He sees his function as priestly, it’s all those rabbinical ancestors. It’s a substitute for the religion his trendy parents deprived him of. Midge, I’m afraid for Edward.’

  ‘You mean you think he might commit suicide?’

  ‘Of course I think that. One mustn’t play with these depressions. I think — don’t tell Thomas I said this-I talked with him once about it — that Thomas wouldn’t mind a patient of his committing suicide if he were sure this was the deepest desire of his psyche! I stick to the old medical view that it’s our job to save life. Do look after Edward.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Midge.

  ‘It’ll give you something to do. You do nothing. It’s bad for you.’

  ‘I shop, I cook, all right, I have a char, but she only comes some mornings. I don’t do nothing!’

  ‘You know what I mean. I wish you’d get yourself some education. You always complain about being ignorant. Why don’t you take a college course, there are all sorts. At least it would get you out of the house.’

  ‘No college that would admit me would be worth going to!’

  ‘Then go and help Stuart look after people. I’m serious!’

  ‘Go home, dear Ursula, go home!’

  They rose. Ursula’s stiff skirt, now liberally covered with particles of Midge’s perfume, made its dry sawing noise. They looked at each other. Their clothes were crumpled and their faces, in the bright light which Midge had now switched on, weary, no longer young.

  ‘You look even more beautiful when you’re tired,’ said Ursula, ‘how do you do it? I wish you’d tell Thomas that malt whisky is better for us than those sugary alcohols. Say goodnight to him from me.’

  ‘You can’t face him.’

  ‘He’s withdrawn. God knows what he’s thinking about now. Goodnight, angel.’

  When Ursula had gone Midge went into the dining-room where, as she expected, Thomas was sitting in exactly the same attitude in front of the decanter of claret. He liked his wine but was a moderate drinker. He had taken off his glasses and had a milder and more vulnerable face. Without looking at her he stretched out his hand.

  The dining-room was on the ground floor, and now that the noisy conversation no longer filled it, the sound of traffic rising and falling like gusts of wind was audible, and at moments the faint shaking of the windows. Midge, standing beside her husband, took hold of his hand which was becoming wrinkled and spotted, older than its owner. As she still held it, his hand quested beyond the touch and stroked her silk dress. She released him and went round the table, leaning across to look at him with her own amazement, like to that with which he sometimes regarded her. Thomas often startled her as if his appearance were subtly changing, and she were married to several men who happened never to arrive together. He looked sad. She gazed at his fox terrier head and blinking narrowed light blue eyes.

  ‘How tidy your hair is,’ said Midge.

  ‘How untidy yours is.’

  ‘Did you just comb it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It looks like a wig.’

  ‘Sit down, darling, for a minute.’

  ‘You’re tired.’

  ‘Yes. Sit down.’

  Midge sat down opposite to him. ‘Ursula is very worried about Edward.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’
ll do something.’

  Thomas was silent for a moment, rubbing his eyes. He said, ‘It’s like a chemical process, Edward has got to change and we have to be, for a time, spectators of that change.’

  ‘Tonight wasn’t much good,’ said Midge.

  ‘It was an exercise, artificial as exercises often are, a formal gesture, perhaps not without value.’

  ‘Oh — !’ Midge poured herself out some claret into Harry’s glass. ‘I think you could make Edward hate you if you seem to ignore him now.’

  ‘He’s not ready for me yet. If I tried to corner him now he’d reject me and make it all more difficult later. Anything I said to him now would be an order. People in this sort of shock enact a mythical drama, and circumstances may conspire with them in an almost uncanny fashion. It’s a search for solitude and purification. The thing is that he will run away — but he won’t do so without seeing me first. That is a structure which must be allowed to develop.’

  ‘Run away?’

  ‘Yes. I must tell Harry.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know. But soon, when he’s collected enough energy, he’ll run, he’ll disappear. And I want to know where he’s going. That’s what he’ll tell me when he comes to see me.’

  Harry in a black silk dressing gown was seated. Stuart was standing before him. They had just returned from the McCaskerville dinner party.

  ‘I was a fool when I was your age,’ Harry was saying, ‘I was some sort of crazy absolutist, fortunately I didn’t do anything irrevocable about it. I was a romantic, I am a romantic, I was working out my nature, I wasn’t in a state of total illusion. You seem to be trapped inside a purely theoretical notion of yourself as good or holy or something, I can’t think where you got it from, you weren’t religious at school, to which you’re sacrificing the precious time in which you could be learning something useful. Why can’t you go on studying something worthwhile, you could study and help the poor? You’re running away from something difficult to something easy, that’s what it comes to. You’re a defeatist, you’re bogus. You’re giving up the world because you realise you can’t rule it, you can’t succeed, you’d like to be a grand professor, a powerful physicist, a great philosopher, you’re funking it all, you’re throwing it all away, you’d like to know how to blow up the world, but you never will, so the only way you can destroy it is to pretend to give it up. Isn’t that it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Stuart.

  ‘You aren’t unselfish and humble, you’re power-mad, a sort of moral Hitler. If you were some kind of artist I could understand it, I went on with my studies, I did well, but in the end I was only interested in what I could invent entirely by myself. That’s what makes an artist, wanting to be God. You want to be God, perhaps we aren’t so unlike after all, but you’re not an artist, you lack imagination, and that’s a recipe for disaster. Perhaps you want to be persecuted — but you don’t want to end up as a pitiful neurotic, do you?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Stuart.

  ‘And as for giving up sex, you can’t, all you can do is put it off and get neurotic about it! People will think you’re impotent or abnormal or a repressed homosexual. Or perhaps you’re waiting for the perfect romance, the pure knight who’ll deserve the princess, some sort of virginal Valkyrie! Your religious fantasy is just a sexual fantasy in disguise. You can’t take a vow of celibacy all by yourself, there’s no such thing, you’ll just come to grief, you’ll end up leaping on somebody and then feeling guilty and the whole business will be mucked up forever. You are like me, Stuart, you’re full of sex, it’s running out of your ears, you’re being insincere, you haven’t really examined yourself.’

  ‘I know about sex,’ said Stuart, ‘I mean about it being in my nature, but for me there’s just another pattern of living.’

  ‘You can’t do it.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Many people do, like going straight from school into a religious seminary, never entering into — all that — at all.’

  ‘All that! You see it as a black pit of pollution and degradation! You want to stay innocent, not to be like the rest of us. I suppose that’s aimed at me, you want to be as unlike me as possible. I suppose you see me as some sort of sex maniac. I couldn’t conceal things from you when you were a child, I can remember your little white face, judging me. You’ve just held onto your childish picture of things you can’t understand. This fantasy of yours hurts me so much. Do you realise that?’

  ‘Look, Dad,’ said Stuart. ‘Look, it’s not against you. I know what you mean about when I was a child — but it isn’t anything to do with you, and I couldn’t will to hurt you.’

  ‘You could unconsciously.’

  ‘I don’t believe in that. I do try to understand myself. But in a way that’s not important. It’s something else, something ultimate and absolute — ’

  ‘But this is simply superstition, as bad as believing in God, which you say you don’t! Anyway what’s fundamental could be evil, or chaos.’

  ‘That can’t be so,’ said Stuart.

  ‘I admire your confidence! You ought to have persevered with philosophy. You just want to be admired and revered! Why publish the fact that you’ve given up sex, or rather never had it, if that’s true? You can’t claim that you’ll live forever without it, that amounts to a lie, it’s empty pretentious boasting, why at least couldn’t you keep your mouth shut?’

  ‘I didn’t publicise it,’ said Stuart. ‘Other people did. I regret this. But someone asked me a direct question and I answered it.’

  ‘Cannot tell a lie. It’s the lie in the soul that counts. Don’t you see you can’t do all this alone? Human nature needs institutions. You talk about people entering seminaries. Why don’t you do that then, become a priest, join the holy brigade? I’d hate it, but at least it would make some sense. Why not go to the church, to some church, ask for help, ask to be directed?’

  ‘That’s just what I can’t do,’ said Stuart. ‘I can’t go there. I don’t hold their beliefs.’

  ‘Neither do most of them now. They might shake some sense into you, knock your pride about a bit. You can’t do it by yourself, without a general theory or an organisation or God or other people. A religious man has to have an object, you haven’t one.’

  Stuart was struck by this remark and considered it. He said, ‘It depends what you mean by an object — ’

  ‘All because you’ve realised you’ll never be a great thinker, I suppose hurt vanity makes people do daft things. Or perhaps it’s not so daft. You’ve chosen the higher hedonism, you’ll be the false good man, I’ve met a few, they’re a secret brotherhood. Giving up the world, holy poverty, except that somehow or other all the material goods are provided, living on their rich friends — Damn it, I’m supporting you now, and that’s just a start. And it works, people regard them as superior, defer to them, run to them, look after them, spoil them, they’re gentlemen of course — while they trip round with saintly smiles and lofty words and unctuous advice, enjoying everybody’s troubles, living at ease, having the hell of a good time, admired and loved, oh so high above us ordinary sinners. I tell you they enjoy life, that’s what they’ve aimed at, they have an object all right, cherishing themselves, and they’re intelligent too. God, how they smile, those selfless vulnerable touching sympathetic smiles!’

  Stuart smiled, then laughed. ‘One has to take some risks,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the only human thing you’ve said!’

  ‘I’m sorry I’m living on you now, I’ll move out soon.’

  ‘Christ, that doesn’t matter. Well, it’s a nuisance, but that doesn’t matter. It’ll all end in tears, you’ll waste your precious best years, come running after education when it’s too late, God you’ll regret it. Surely you don’t want to be an ordinary little man with a tiny wage, or a sort of tramp living in a tent when you’re forty? You’ll be a nobody, you won’t get back, don’t imagine you can! I just wish I could make you put it off a bit. Why no
t travel? Anything that would give you a few more ideas. See the world, I’d pay. Don’t you want to go to Nepal, don’t you want to go to Kyoto, visit the monasteries in Thailand?’

  ‘No. Why should I?’

  ‘That’s what young people with religious delusions do nowadays, you can’t even conform to that pattern. At least it would be exotic, you might learn something. You just seem to want to live a life of brutish simplicity. But you can’t. Later on you’ll break out. And then you might be capable of any crime.’

  ‘I don’t think that means anything,’ said Stuart, ‘you’re just expressing emotion.’

  ‘Your religious plan is simply a sexual plan, it’s sex by other means.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ said Stuart.

  ‘You’re a — What did you say? Why is it all right?‘

  ‘I don’t mind if people call it sex, the question is can I do it, not what it’s called.’

  ‘You’ll drive me mad. Damn you, you’re young. I wish I was your age. It’s just because you’re young and physically fit, you feel you’re pure — it’s an illusion, Stuart! It’s all abstract. I can’t stand by and watch you throwing it all away, throwing away what I so much want and can’t have, youth, youth. Oh damn. And you make such a self-righteous fuss about it all.’

  ‘I think you’re making the fuss, not me.’

  ‘You might at least make yourself useful by saying something, anything to poor Edward.’

  Stuart flushed. ‘I will tonight — ’

  ‘Thomas said once that those in extreme pain are shunned by all. He should know. He hasn’t been near the boy. On second thoughts, don’t talk to Edward, you’d only feel it your duty to load him with guilt. Go away, go to bed.’

  ‘Dad, don’t be cross with me.’

  ‘I’m not, yes I am, but it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, just clear off.’

  When Stuart had gone Harry banged around the drawing room finding some whisky and pouring it out, splashing it roughly onto the leather top of the desk. He went to the fireplace where the remains of the fire on which he had burnt himself earlier in the day were murmurously collapsing. Illumined by a lamp, he looked at himself in a mirror framed by gilded cupids which Casimir Cuno had bought for his wife as a wedding present. Harry associated this mirror with his mother, a frail gentle pretty woman, daughter of a Cambridge don, who had sacrificed her talent as a pianist to the heavy task of being her husband’s secretary. She made the sacrifice gladly, convinced, as indeed Casimir was himself, that he was a genius. Romula was her name. She lived long enough to know ‘the girl from far away’ (Casimir had died earlier), but not long enough to meet Chloe or to witness the eclipse of her husband’s reputation. Her piano, never played now, indeed untouched since Edward had strummed on it as a child, was in the drawing room, which was still the room which Harry’s grandfather had created, and Casimir and Romula had added to a little, and Harry and Chloe and the girl from far away had left almost entirely unaltered.