The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Oh don’t be silly!’ said Stuart. ‘Go home.’

  Midge rose and flew to the bed and sat beside him, and for an instant her skirted leg touched him and she felt the warmth of his thick body through his shirt. Stuart leapt up and retired to the window, jostling the table and knocking his papers to the floor.

  ‘Midge, don’t talk such absurd nonsense — ’

  ‘Stuart, listen, don’t say anything hasty, I know it sounds mad, I know it’s a surprise, but it’s something real — don’t just reject me, think — I know you want to live your special life and have no sex and never marry, I respect that, I love that, I only want to be with you sometimes, I only want you to accept my love, think of me as a friend or a servant, I could be useful to you. You want to do good things, good works, so do I, my life has been so idle, so useless, so full of vanity, that’s why you mean so much to me, if you understand that you must let me be with you — I could be your helper, your secretary, I’d cook for you, do anything, it’s not impossible, please just realise how little I ask, I only must be connected with you, not separated, not utterly sent away, I simply want to give you my love — ’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Stuart. ‘You don’t really believe or feel any of this, you don’t even understand it, it’s just emotional babbling-you’ re having a nervous crisis, you’re suffering from shock, from finding me and Edward at that place — naturally you resent my having been there, and this is just a peculiar way of attacking me — you’ll see that tomorrow, you’ll feel different — of course I wish you well, I hope you’ll make the right decisions and be happy, but what you’ve been saying is simply senseless — you’re not yourself -go away and rest — go, please — I’m going to open the door now.’

  Midge slithered off the bed and was at the door before him, keeping it closed. ‘You’ve killed my love for Harry. It’s over. Aren’t you glad? I’m alone now, I’m yours, you must take responsibility for me, you must know what I feel, you must recognise me and acknowledge me. I have to exist for you and be in your life, this has to happen. It’s your doing, you provoked it all, you have these feelings too, I can sense them. It all happened in the car, I could feel you drawing me, you must have been desiring me then, in the car.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Stuart. ‘I did not desire you then or at any time, I have no such feeling. Please don’t delude yourself. Now go home and take an aspirin and go to bed. I can’t do anything for you. Even listening to you rave is doing you harm.’

  ‘You are moved, you are excited, you care about me. It can’t be all on my side, something so strong, so vast. Falling in love is a miracle, it’s a renewal of life — you must feel something — you made me love you — I shall have to tell them all — Harry, Thomas, Meredith — ’

  ‘Midge, please, please, don’t tell more lies and hurt more people. All this stuff is false, what you speak of isn’t there, I am not there. If you want to change your life go back to Thomas, if you want a miracle and a renewal look for it there. If you just stop telling lies and go home you’ll find that you’re really happy at last, you can’t have been happy in a deception. I don’t believe what you just said about your love for my father, but if things are somehow changing that’s a good thing, you’ll feel free — ’

  ‘Free! Don’t mock me. Can’t you see how much I’m suffering, are you human or not? Oh — you don’t see, you don’t understand — I’ll write to you, I’ll explain it all — ’

  ‘Please don’t write, I won’t read your letter, I won’t reply, please don’t start anything — ’

  ‘Start anything! It’s started. You have the key of my will. Only you can stop this terrible pain. Please, will you just touch me, your touch can heal — don’t refuse it, don’t deny your gift — hold my hand, I beg you, if you don’t it will wither and drop off — I’ll burn it, I’m burning, all my body is burning — oh for Christ’s sake save me, comfort me, touch me — ’ With that Midge stretched out her hand. It hung in front of him, near his unbuttoned shirt, poised like a motionless hovering bird.

  Stuart took hold of her hot hand and felt how her fingers clasped, her nails pulling his skin, her hot palm caressing his knuckles, as if a warm feathery bird of prey had pounced upon him. He closed his eyes so as not to see her flushed excited face and moist lips and eyes. He pulled his hand quickly away and stepped back. Tears came streaming from her eyes and fell onto her white blouse and down between her breasts.

  Stuart said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He pulled at the door handle, moving the door to thrust her aside, and ran away down the stairs. Once out in the road he walked fast with long paces until he came to a place where there were bushes and a few trees and a seat. Partly concealed he sat down, looking back along the road. He wanted to see Midge leave.

  After about five minutes she came out of the door. She looked up and down the road. Stuart was not sure whether she saw him. She turned away in the other direction. When she was out of sight he waited a while, then walked back slowly to his lodgings.

  Edward pushed up the sash window as far as he could, then placed a chair under it and mounted on the chair. He looked obliquely down, then, stooping and holding the sides of the window, leaned out. He saw the pavement, the railings, the darker rectangle of the basement area. On that night the light had been on in the basement flat. Why had they not heard? Perhaps they were in the back room with the television on. Now it was afternoon and the sun was shining. The bottom of the open window was only a little above his knees. He had always pictured Mark walking out of the window; perhaps because he wanted to think of him as feeling, at that last moment, happy and all-powerful. He wanted to think of him as somehow, somewhere, really walking on air. It would not be easy to walk out, one would have to bend down, to clamber onto the sill, then straighten up, outside the window, leaning forward and stepping outward … What had it felt like at that moment, and when had Mark realised, had he ever realised — ? What sense did it make to wonder what he had intended? One might leap forward into the air. Or simply crumple up and tumble head first. Had he screamed as he fell? How had he missed the railings? Smiling, he walked, sailed out like Peter Pan. That was the first play Edward ever saw, and it still held for him the greatest moment of all theatre, Peter’s appearance at that loft nursery window, looking in out of the dark night at the sleeping children, alien, excluded, sinister. No ghost whichever later walked in Edward’s shuddering imagination had been more terrible than that flying boy. Edward found himself suddenly swaying. He got down hastily from the chair. The idea came to him: supposing tonight, after I fall asleep, Mark comes flying through the darkness and lands upon the window sill and very quietly pushes up the sash …

  Edward felt so sick with fright and yearning and the old misery that he had to sit down, not upon the chair but upon the bed: the very bed that Mark had lain on that night, relaxed and happy, talking such sweet nonsense and smiling up at Edward. He bent forward over the pain which was changing now into an appalling love urge, an agonising ‘if only’. If only it had all been a bad dream, if only Mark could come to him now, real, not dead, not a ghost, laughing, happy, beautiful, making silly jokes in French. God, how happy they had been, both of them, and they didn’t know. In paradise and not knowing. Oh how love tugs and pulls, beams itself, shapes and embraces, so certain of the reality of its object, as if it could create it out of nothing. But when its object is — nothing? To love the void. Edward, to distract himself with a different mode of grief, pulled from his pocket several letters from Mark’s mother which he had found waiting at home but had not yet looked at. He had taken them away because he felt he ought to read them and had not yet nerved himself to do so, but also because he did not want to leave them where anyone else might be tempted to look at them and see therein Edward’s blackness, his utter irrevocable disgrace and shame. Edward told himself that Mrs Wilsden was half out of her mind, needed help, should be pitied, but her hatred came to him all the same, just as she seemed to wish, in pure shafts of crippling torturing accusation. Mr
s Wilsden’s tone and style had changed slightly but the content was much the same.

  Why have you come intruding into my life, why do I have to think about you all the time, why is my mind blackened by ,your hateful image? I am in hell and my grief will never end. To my last day I will think every moment of this death, picture it, live it, this wanton wilful death, this theft of a whole life, a whole good sweet life of joy and loving, leaving a hole in the world, a bleeding gash. I saw his body, broken by you, broken. You have left him behind, left him and forgotten him, as you did upon that night. I hope you fall out of a window. If only my hate could kill you — or better that you should lose what you love most and feel what I feel, be where I am.

  ‘But I am there!’ Edward cried out aloud, crumpling up the letter. He glanced at the others, not reading them carefully, just to make sure that no miracle had occurred, no letter that began, ‘Dear Edward, my anger against you is over, it has run its course, I realise you have suffered too, you have suffered enough, I forgive you.’ There was no such letter, those healing words would never come.

  Edward had heeded Thomas’s command and returned to the terrible room, had moved in with a suitcase and rucksack containing books, though he was sure he would never work there, and could not yet see how he would ever work again. The landlady had been pleased to see him. She referred to the room as ‘the death room’ and said she had had difficulty in letting it because people thought it unlucky. It had even already acquired a reputation of being haunted. Edward had gone in order to obey Thomas, because it was something to do, a move to make, a part of the ‘work’ which he now did instead of that which he would never do again; and also so as to get away from Harry, who evidently wanted him out of the house. Of course nothing was said between them. But Edward, observing Harry’s irritable unhappiness, felt awkward and guilty before him because of what he had witnessed at Seegard. But now, as he sat on the bed with the crumpled letters at his feet, it seemed such a terrible mistake to come here all alone, where he would die, or go mad in the night struggling with a ghost which was trying to lead him to the window.

  And everything was jumbled up together, a cramming of grief and fear together in his heart, for there was still no news of Jesse. Ilona had not written. Edward had found no trace of him in London, could think of nowhere else to look, so even this task which had filled his time was coming to an end. He still wanted to find the medium, Mrs Quaid, feeling blankly that she might help him somehow, but the house where she had lived seemed to have been simply removed from the map. She had probably moved elsewhere and he would never trace her. Or perhaps all that had been a dream, a spirit that came to him in a dream? Much worse, there was no way of finding Brownie. He almost began to wish that she had gone back to America and that somebody would tell him so. He could not go to her mother’s house. He sent a letter to her Cambridge college but there was no reply. He must try to conclude that she did not want to see him, she had got what she wanted from him and did not want to follow up her impulse of pity, perhaps now judged it would be no kindness to him since really she felt so little. She might well regret that strange display of emotion. And he had left her so brusquely, almost rudely, without even asking her for an address. She may have decided that her company simply caused him too much pain. It seemed that there was nothing now for him to do except to suffer. Had Thomas intended that? Did Thomas know what he was up to, or was he just trying out random ploys like shaking a faulty machine? He was not God after all. Edward resolved to stick it out for one night, perhaps two, and then if he was still alive, go elsewhere. But where? He could not go to stay with friends, he had no friends, now, he was too ashamed. He would have to tramp looking for lodgings or go to a cheap hotel. He would have to keep going home just to see if there was a letter from Brownie or Ilona, but he dared not believe that these longed-for letters would ever come. Sooner or later, as he was beginning to realise, he would have to go back to Seegard. Sometimes he saw, in lightning flashes of hope, Jesse alive, Jesse at Seegard, where he had been all the time, the women laughing at Edward’s relief, cherishing him, welcoming him, as at his first coming. But now more often, as he conceived the inevitability of his journey, he saw the return to Seegard as something awful, some final sally into the dark.

  Edward had been sitting on the bed for some time, shuddering and trying to cry or to resolve to do something ordinary like going out to eat something, when Stuart came in.

  ‘Hello, Ed, are you all right?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Why did you come back here?’

  ‘Thomas suggested it.’

  ‘Oh. I see why.’

  ‘I don’t. I’m going mad.’

  ‘Then it’s just as well I came.’

  ‘How’s Harry? Of course you’ve left home too.’

  ‘Very morose. I went to see him.’

  ‘I can imagine your lack of conversation.’

  ‘Yes. He told me you were here. I put that plant back in your room.’

  ‘What plant? Oh, thanks.’

  ‘I’m worried about Midge. She’s in a bad way.’

  ‘How long do you think that business has been going on?’

  ‘You mean — ?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Bentley.’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think Thomas knows?’

  ‘I can’t imagine he does.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’d do something.’

  They were silent a moment, picturing what Thomas might do.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Stuart, ‘Thomas might just wait.’

  ‘For it to be over? No. Oh hell, I don’t care, I feel so bloody miserable, I feel like killing myself.’

  Stuart went to the window and closed it and removed the chair to the other end of the room and sat on it.

  ‘Not that way. I’m not suicidal really, I wish I was, then I could see an end to it all. God, how unhappy everyone is, why can’t people be happy. Are you happy? Yes, I suppose you are. Why shouldn’t you be? You’re innocent.’

  Stuart considered. He said, ‘I think that at some level, deep down, I’m something like happy, I’m not sure if that’s the word — but at another level I’m awfully bothered.’

  ‘Bothered! Christ, I wish I was bothered!’

  Stuart got up, took off his black mackintosh and the scarf of his now-abandoned college, threw them on the floor, and sat down again. He was wearing a dark corduroy jacket over the neck of which the open collar of his not-too-clean shirt rambled a little. His short blond hair stood raggedly on end. Sitting with booted feet apart he looked robust and sturdy, almost monumental, by contrast with Edward’s thin twisted figure. Edward’s shoulders were hunched, his legs entwined, his hands restlessly rising to push back his dark lock, then returning to clasp and wring each other.

  ‘Ed, I wish you’d go and see Midge, she likes you.’

  ‘Did you come to tell me that?’

  ‘Not just. You could help her and — ’

  ‘Thereby help myself, by thinking creatively about somebody else. I know. It’s no good, I hate everybody. Well, I don’t hate you, you’re a phenomenon. Christ, you’re my brother. But what’s the use of my seeing Midge? Have you seen her, did you call sympathetically with a bunch of flowers? No. I’m no use. I’m sick, I have no being, all my substance has been slashed to bits, I’m a rag, a piece of screwed up paper, a bit of black muck in a drain, I wouldn’t exist enough for Midge to notice me.’

  ‘You’re existing now.’

  ‘You’re making me exist. Thomas can do it too. Otherwise I’m a whingeing shadow. What do you want me to do anyway? Take Midge’s attention off Harry by making her fall in love with me?’

  Stuart looked startled. ‘Oh. Do you think that might happen?’

  ‘Midge is wild. She might suddenly hate Harry for the Seegard business. She might do anything. Even confess to Thomas. But I don’t know, it’s no use my going near her, I’ve got too bloody much to cope with in my own soul, such as this for insta
nce — ’ Edward picked up several of Mrs Wilsden’s letters and threw them at Stuart’s feet.

  Stuart looked at one of the letters, then at another. ‘Poor thing, how awful for her, how terribly she must be suffering.’

  ‘I knew you’d say that! What about me?’

  ‘I mean, how dreadful to suffer through hating. But she’ll recover, she’ll see it differently, she’ll suffer differently. It doesn’t make any difference to you, I mean so long as you wish her well and don’t hate her back.’

  ‘How do you mean, no difference?’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t give you any new information about what actually happened. You have to think about that in your way, not in her way. She’s not the voice of God or justice of anything. She can’t touch you or harm you. She’s an unhappy person reacting in a violent manner. Of course you’re connected with her, you have duties, to think of her, pity her, help her if you could-you’re connected forever. But that doesn’t mean she’s your judge. You don’t hate her, do you?’

  ‘No, of course not, but — ’ Stuart’s reply muddled Edward. He felt dissatisfied with it. ‘What those letters say-it’s a menace; it’s a curse — ’

  ‘She can’t curse you, Ed. That sort of power doesn’t exist. The destructive bit is all in your own mind. Or do you think she’ll arrive with a gun?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But hatred can kill all the same. She can make me hate myself. I could accidentally fall under a bus because I thought she wanted me to and because I agreed with her, I could curse myself.’

  Stuart gazed at him, frowning. ‘You shouldn’t be alone here. It’s one of Thomas’s bright ideas, but he’s not always right. He thinks about things in a dramatic way. Don’t see it all as a drama or a riddle. There isn’t any riddle.’