The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  Lunch felt curiously artificial. No doubt it was he who was alienated and turned into an actor. Ilona was silent, avoiding his eye. Bettina and Mother May were both watching him and seemed to take it in turns to jolly him along with trivial remarks. There were silences. There was no wine. It struck Edward that no one had said a word about last night, not said any of the natural things such as: What an extraordinary business! Fancy his thinking she was Chloe! and so on. But of course these were just the things they would not say. Edward, partly to annoy them, said conversationally to Bettina, ‘So they all got away all right last night?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And Stuart went too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it difficult to move the car?’

  ‘No, it came out at once.’

  ‘Stuart didn’t stay long, did he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘I’m afraid I saw very little of him.’

  Edward subsided. After lunch he went up to his room. Now

  that he had time to think he began to wonder about the circum stances of his brother’s departure. He searched about to see if Stuart had left him a note, then went to Stuart’s room and searched. Nothing. He sat in a chair and looked at Jesse’s disaster picture of people sitting on chairs. Then it suddenly came to him like a poisoned dart. Is Jesse all right? Hadn’t he better go and see?

  Edward ran downstairs and out of the West Selden door. He ran round the outside of Selden and into the stable courtyard and in through the Interfectory door. He tried the tower door. It was unlocked. Leaving it wide open he ran up the flights of twisting steps. Panting, he reached Jesse’s door, knocked faintly, and thrust the door open. The room was empty, so was the bathroom. Jesse had gone.

  ‘But you didn’t see him go out?’

  ‘No.’

  Edward had searched the tower, then run through the rest of the house. He even went into East Selden, which was empty, and opened every door. He ran round the outside of the house. Then he began to shout. He had now gathered the three women together in the Interfectory.

  Mother May and Bettina were both sitting upon the sofa and had unconsciously adopted identical postures, their hands, with fingers spread, upon their knees. Their long brown working dresses, pulled firmly down, came near to the ground. Ilona stood by the fireplace, fidgeting, shifting her feet, touching her face, patting her hair. Edward was striding up and down the room in torment.

  ‘Who saw him last?’

  ‘I suppose I did?’ said Mother May, looking at Bettina. ‘You didn’t go in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Mother May, ‘fairly early — ’

  ‘And he was asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No. He sometimes pretends to be asleep so as not to have to talk.’

  ‘What do you mean by fairly early? That was after I went out?’

  ‘No, before. It was before breakfast some time.’

  ‘Before breakfast? But you saw him again after that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So when I asked you how he was and you said asleep you were referring to what you saw hours ago?’

  ‘Yes, I decided not to disturb him.’

  Edward closed his eyes and groaned. ‘Nobody saw him come down?’

  ‘No. As we’ve told you.’

  ‘Why did you leave the doors unlocked?’

  ‘Edward,’ said Mother May, ‘we’ve explained to you, Jesse is perfectly able to walk, he often goes out, he came downstairs last night, and you yourself met him that time beside the river. He is generally much better at present, as you must have noticed. We don’t always lock him in, if those doors were always locked he’d go berserk. We usually lock them at night, and at various other times, but not all the time. And we often forget. It’s not all that important.’

  ‘So both the doors were open.’

  ‘Yes, evidently.’

  ‘You didn’t go up at lunch time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Edward, he is an invalid. He had a very disturbed night. I stayed up with him for some time. I didn’t get much sleep myself. I looked in in the early morning and I thought I’d let him sleep on. He doesn’t depend on meal times! I was just going up to see him when you started shouting at us.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Bettina. ‘Why are you making such a fuss? He’ll turn up. Why are you in this state?’

  ‘You don’t think we should tell the police?’

  ‘The police? Are you mad?’

  ‘You say he was disturbed,’ said Edward. ‘He should have been looked after.’

  ‘We’ve been looking after him for years,’ said Mother May.

  ‘Perhaps he’s gone to London,’ said Ilona suddenly.

  ‘Most unlikely!’ said Mother May. ‘He’ll just walk in. Edward, do stop this. You’re just working yourself up. Go and rest. I told you to go to bed. You’ll be delirious again if you aren’t careful. Forget about Jesse for a while. Then you’ll find he’s back again. He’s not a prisoner. You’d be the first to complain if he was!’

  Bettina got up. She said to Edward, ‘I suppose you’re still upset about last night?’

  ‘Yes. He was upset.’

  ‘He was pleased with himself!’ said Mother May. She rose and went away through the door into the tower.

  Bettina, after staring curiously at Edward, went through the door into her carpentry room.

  Edward said to Ilona, ‘Do you really think he’s gone to London?’

  Ilona refused to look at him. She shrugged her shoulders and spread out her hands and pattered quickly away into the Atrium.

  Edward went into the courtyard and began going round the house again in ever widening circles. He went to the greenhouses, the garages, the wood store, he looked into various half-rotting sheds which contained old rusty garden tools and decayed wooden wheelbarrows. He imagined what it would be like to find Jesse sitting and smiling mischievously in one of those sheds. The sun was warm now and the jumbled singing of many birds filled the air almost with an obstructive network. He ran panting through the poplar grove as far as the river, and walked along the river bank as far as the slatted wooden bridge. Here he looked down into the water and tried to remember what he had seen. The memory image was already contaminated, overlaid and oblivescent like a dream. The only clear impression was the sense of having touched something hard, Jesse’s ring. Edward leaned over seeing now the reflection of his own face. Was that perhaps what he had seen, and the rest imagined? He thrust his hand down into the cold brown water. His questing fingers touched something, a stone jutting out a little from the bank. He might have touched that. He began to walk back along the river, following its flow, and looking into all the reedy places. He skirted the celandine field where buttercups were now lifting their shiny buds like little hard yellow marbles. He came as far as the line of willows, then crossed the stone bridge and followed a path up a slope of wild grass toward the wood. He came into the shade of the trees where last year’s leaves were made golden here and there by the penetrating sun. Here the birdsong was almost deafening and so continuous that after a while he ceased to hear it. He reached the path which was so like a stairway made of the roots of trees, stepping upon the crackling brown fruitage of oak and ash and beech which lay before his feet like tiny sacrificial images of gods. When he could see the open light of the dromos ahead he slowed down. As he came cautiously between two trees into full sight of the space he saw what he now expected to see and knelt down as he had done before in the longer grass of the verge. Ilona was already there. She was standing near to the pair of huge yew trees at the far end. Surely she too was looking for Jesse. She stood quite still for some time with her back to him. Then she turned and walked back as far as the lingam stone, sat down on its base and put her head in her hands. Edward did not approac
h her. At that moment he feared any conversation which he and she might have together. He watched a little while, then rose and went back down the path and across the bridge. He began to wander about in the fen calling ‘Jesse! Jesse!’

  ‘He has metamorphosed himself,’ said Mother May, ‘he has taken on some other form to renew his strength. He is lying in the woods in a trance, he has become something brown and small like a chrysalis, imperceptibly stirring with the force of a new life. You might have stepped upon him as you were tramping around.’

  ‘Don’t try to be funny about it,’ said Edward.

  ‘He has removed himself into invisibility, he has entered another dimension, he is entranced, transformed. He knows the herb lore. He has gone into the wood like a dog to find and eat the herb that rejuvenates and heals.’

  ‘He may well have gone to London,’ said Bettina, ‘he did once before, to see his old painter cronies. He may have gone back to our old house in Chelsea, he sometimes thinks he’s still there.’

  ‘He’s gone to that woman,’ said Mother May, ‘that Chloe.’

  ‘Chloe?’

  ‘I mean that other Chloe, your aunt, Mrs Bentley.’

  ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘You’ve seen Jesse rather down, he can be almost normal, he can be manic, he’s certainly mobile — and he’s cunning, half the time he’s acting a part — ’

  ‘You mean he pretends to be helpless — ?’

  ‘Yes. He’s unpredictable. We told you he might suddenly go off somewhere. He’ll just turn up and wonder what the fuss was all about — your fuss that is, we aren’t making any!’

  ‘He’ll think he was only away for an afternoon,’ said Bettina. ‘He has a different sense of time.’

  ‘But where is he now? He can’t be out of time. He must be somewhere. And if he’s outside at night he could die of exposure.’

  ‘We have had exceptionally warm nights lately,’ said Mother May.

  ‘Can’t we do anything?’

  ‘Well, what? You’ve searched the countryside, we’ve told the tree men to look out for him — ’

  ‘We could enquire at the bus,’ said Bettina.

  ‘I’ve already done that,’ said Edward. ‘I saw a bus up the road and I asked the driver. He said he’d have heard at the depot if Jesse had taken a bus. Of course he may have got a lift, or walked to — ’

  ‘Oh do stop,’ said Mother May. ‘He’ll just come back. It’s as simple as that. It’s all happened before.’

  Edward of course had not told the women about what he imagined he had seen. It was too terrible. He felt he would never be able to tell anybody about it, even after Jesse came back. For he did, somehow, believe that Jesse would come back. He could not bear to imagine otherwise. But supposing Jesse had been there, down in that water? Perhaps he had been going up to that strange place, or coming back, and had fallen? And suppose he was not drowned but had just that moment fallen and could have been revived if Edward had pulled him out? Edward imagined the scene, how he would have stood in the water, holding up Jesse’s heavy head. Could he have got him out alone, would anyone have heard him calling? What was the use of these tormenting queries? The fact was that Edward had believed, had decided, that he was seeing something unreal, and he had gone away. Yet he had also returned; and had found nothing there. But that did not prove anything. Jesse’s body, or indeed Jesse, might have been swept away by the river a moment after he saw it. Yet that was most improbable. A large heavy body could not have been simply bundled away by that stream, it couldn’t just disappear, and he had searched carefully for it very soon afterwards. If only he had not been so obsessively preoccupied with Brownie, so very very much wanting to see Brownie. Had Jesse died because Edward wanted to see a girl? It was Mark all over again. And down that way of thought madness lay.

  Edward had not again suggested calling in the police. This was for a particular self-regarding reason. If the police came he would feel bound to help them by telling what he had ‘seen’. Then he would also have to say that he had taken it to be something he had imagined. He could picture the laborious conversation which would follow in the course of which all that awful past would come out, drugs, violent death, everything. They would take him to the police station and keep him there and question him again and again. It would end with a hospital, with a psychiatrist, with a mental home, with electric shocks.

  Edward had of course been over to Railway Cottage. Jesse might have gone there. Edward had broken one of the windows with a stone and climbed in. He searched the cottage, even the loft. What did he expect to find? He inspected the beds including the double bed where, according to Elspeth Macran, he had been conceived: the bed where, if he had not run away on that dreadful day, he might have lain with Brownie. But no, how could he have imagined such a thing, she would never have gone to bed with him suddenly like that. He told himself it was impossible. He had to comfort himself somehow.

  It was now four days since Jesse’s disappearance. Even the weather was strange, sunny and very still, with a golden-yellow moon at night. Before the moon came up the heavens were full of stardust, dim comets, falling stars. Then the moonlight was making the birds sing. Birds which Bettina said were not nightingales but sedge warblers sang loudly in the fen. And even before dawn the swallows poured out their rackety crazy song just under Edward’s window. He had decided to go; to leave Seegard and return to London. He had even packed his bag, rolling up Jesse’s sketch of Ilona in one sock and concealing her necklace in another. Yet every day he put off going because he thought: by the end of this day Jesse will have come home. He stood at his bedroom window, as he had done in the first days, looking down the drive, expecting to see his father appear. Oh my father — my father — he moaned to himself in the night, listening to the sweet forlorn singing of the birds. Oh my father, found and lost, come back to me. Edward was beginning to want to go to London to get, at least temporarily, away from Seegard. But he certainly thought it possible that Jesse had actually gone to London and that he, Edward, might discover him there. He recalled Jesse’s saying to him about London, ‘I wouldn’t go for that,’ that is to see a doctor. Did this not imply that he might go for something else? Here, he had searched and searched and walked and walked; in London there would be new things to do about it all, places to go to, people to ask, even people he could talk to. As he found himself thinking almost with yearning of Harry and Stuart and Thomas, he remembered ‘Mr and Mrs Bentley’ and wondered what on earth had happened to them. He also wondered whether Jesse might not indeed have gone to London after ‘Chloe’.

  It was now about ten o‘clock in the morning. During the last four days the old Seegard routine had been largely resumed, as if they all had to take refuge in it. There was no more wine drinking. In intervals of his task of searching for Jesse, Edward washed up, swept floors, cleaned vegetables, fetched wood, and carried plates and laundry from place to place. He even, in silence, helped Bettina to pull down some rotten old shelves, full of woodworm, in a damp recess in Transition, and put up some new shelves which she had made. Soon, as he passed by, he saw that Ilona was painting the shelves. It seemed somehow incredible that they were carrying on. Yet what else could they do? He and Ilona had been avoiding each other. Edward argued with the other two, not with her. When such arguments began Ilona went away; and Edward did not seek her out because he did not want to hear her say what she was afraid of. Also he felt anguish and guilt because he was going to leave her behind, he didn’t know how he could tell her this, and could not endure, either, to run away without telling. Of course there was no real question of taking her with him, even if she were willing to come. Even the idea of ’coming back to fetch her‘ had, at present, no reality. But I must tell her I’m going, he thought, I can’t just slink away. Besides, I’ve got to know when Jesse comes back, and I can’t trust anyone else to tell me. So he was, now, going?

  He left the kitchen and went upstairs to his room, carrying some sheets which had been left
outside the washroom, up as far as the airing cupboard on the landing. He looked out of the window to see if Jesse was coming. Then he quickly took off Jesse’s boots and socks which he had got so used to wearing, and Jesse’s pullover. He put on his own things and left Jesse’s laid out neatly. He packed his belongings in his small suitcase and laid his mackintosh over the top of it. Then he ran down to look for Ilona.

  He found her in the Atrium laying the table for lunch. She looked at him, then sat down. He sat beside her.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ilona.’

  ‘Goodbye, then.’

  ‘Will you let me know about Jesse?’

  ‘I don’t know where you live, I don’t know anything about you.’

  Edward wrote his address on a scrap of paper from his wallet. ‘Will you let me know if — when Jesse comes back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence. Ilona, sitting stiffly with folded hands, stared down at the table.