by Iris Murdoch
‘Because he made me see. He made me feel different. I fell in love with Stuart. I’m still in love with him.’
Thomas looked at her carefully. He moved away from the wall, took off his glasses, took out his handkerchief, then stuffed the handkerchief away and put the glasses on again. ‘What does that mean, what can it mean? Have you told him?’
‘Yes. I love him. I went to him, I want to be with him. I want to work with him, I want to work for him, I want to change my life.’
‘So now you don’t want to live with Harry you want to live with Stuart?’
‘Yes, but — I must see Stuart again, I must — ’
‘Have you told Harry this?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d like Stuart to be your lover? What does Stuart think about it?’
‘He doesn’t want me, not like that. But later I might be with him in his work, I want to change, I want duties — ’
‘Duties — oh — my dear Midge — Anyway you want to leave me and Meredith?’
‘Not Meredith.’
‘But me?’
‘Only because you won’t want me now.’
‘Do you expect me to beg you to stay? I won’t do that. It would not be fair to you. You must decide what you want to do. You may well be happier without me. I don’t understand this Stuart thing. I don’t think it’s a deliberate deception, but it’s some kind of psychological device. Aren’t you relieved in a way that I know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Precisely. It must have been nervous work. You’re suffering from shock because Stuart knew and because he dared to judge you. To save yourself you had to embrace your executioner. I can imagine that Stuart was an obstacle, after your secret life had been working like a charm, something really hard at last. You’ll get over Stuart and run back to Harry. He’ll console you. Isn’t that what will happen — my dear — wife?’
‘No. I don’t think so. Oh you’re so cold. You never do anything natural — ’ She lifted her head with her wet mouth open a little. She had stopped crying.
‘What do you want me to do, shout and break things? I’ve only just, an hour ago, discovered what you and your lover have known for years. I’ve only just found out that my happy life has been based on a mistake. I’m just not inflicting my suffering on you in the form of rage.’
‘I don’t think you really care all that much.’
‘Of course I do, it will damage my practice! Who will take their troubles to a man who can’t even understand his wife? How do you imagine I feel about being made a public fool of? This sort of bespattering publicity changes people, and it’s only just beginning. Journalists will be on the telephone, photographers outside the door. It’ll be like the old days for you, only you won’t enjoy it this time.’
‘You are cold and detached, you think, now you are not even being serious, you don’t care. You have never really seen me at all.’
‘I may be a fool, and I may have been an imperfect husband, but I have loved you very much and I do love you very much. Only you must not expect me to bare my heart to you now, at this moment, in this situation. I find you with Harry, he runs away, he has nothing to say, you offer no excuse, there can be no excuse. I am confronted with the monumental fact of your passionate love for somebody else and your cold-blooded willingness to deceive me. Now I have to protect myself and I am beginning to do so at once. I am not going to let you and Harry maim my life. I am very deeply hurt. My conception of you, my thought of you, was so precious — ’
‘You took me for granted.’
‘Of course. I trusted you completely. My home, my marriage, was one place where I did not have to be suspicious. My love for you was an absolute resting place. Now I learn that you have been lying to me systematically, anxiously watching my plans in case they interfered with yours, arranging your timetable so as to be with your lover, longing for him, thinking about him, even as you spoke to me being with him.’
‘It didn’t feel like that,’ said Midge.
‘You mean you didn’t think of it as lying. Your sense of his presence made me unreal, so how could I be damaged! You resented my existence, you looked past me at him. You excused yourself because your love for him was live and real, and your love for me was old and withered.’
‘I was in love.’
‘That is supposed to let people off.’
‘I’m sorry — I didn’t expect it.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Thomas. ‘Having a scene now would be no use to either of us. I don’t want to stir things up to satisfy your emotions. You had better stay here and sort yourself out. I won’t be in the way. I’m going to Quitterne, when I’ve packed a case. You decide what you want and let me know later on. I won’t put any pressure on you, and I will help you to carry out any plan you make. You are free to make up your mind. One thing though. If we part company, or when we part company, Meredith stays with me.’
‘We’ll make civilised arrangements,’ said Midge, her tears beginning again. ‘But please don’t go away yet — you haven’t understood — ’
‘Civilised! We are far far beyond civilisation! How I wish it hadn’t been Harry.’
‘Thomas, please don’t be so angry — ’
‘Do you call this anger? I wish you well. I want you to be happy.’
Thomas left the room, Midge sat moaning into her handkerchief. A few minutes later his steps came quickly down the stairs and the front door opened and closed. Midge sank to the floor beside her chair and abandoned herself to sobbing.
Brownie had not said yes to Edward’s question. But she had not said no either. They had not made love. Not there upon the bed where Mark had lain in his happy drugged ecstasy before he got up and floated out of the window. They had sat and talked about Mark. Though neither of them exactly said so, his presence in the room quietly contradicted any pleasure they might have had in each other’s company, at the same time constituting that strange ambivalent bond. ‘It’s because of Mark.’ ‘Yes,’ Edward had said, ‘but it’s not just because of Mark.’ ‘It might be, that might be its deep meaning.’ ‘Well, if it’s deep enough — that wouldn’t be bad, would it?’ ‘It would be — if we were just substitute Marks for each other — blotting him out.’ ‘But we couldn’t blot him out.’ ‘No, so perhaps he’s a barrier.’ ‘What would he have wanted?’ ‘We can’t make sense of that question.’ This discussion, whose logic eluded them, began to frighten them both, and they stopped it. They talked more simply about Mark, Edward talked about the college, Brownie about their childhood.
Now Edward was going to see her again. They did not want to meet in that room a second time. They could not go to Mrs Wilsden’s house, or to Elspeth Macran’s, and Edward could not envisage bringing Brownie to his own home. He and Brownie both felt secretive about their painful necessary extraordinary relationship. They did not want yet to expose it to the scrutiny of the world, not yet, until they had themselves riddled out what it was. They were secret homeless lovers, not even yet lovers, and that homelessness and deprivation was somehow too a part of their relation, their pact, something which made it for the moment in an essential way provisional and innocent.
Today they were to meet for lunch in a pub suggested by Brownie in Bayswater, not far from, but not dangerously near, Elspeth Macran’s house. Edward did not want to suggest anything. He wanted to come where she said, and there was a soothing charm in the idea of their both making their way through big indifferent anonymous London to that meeting place where they would sit as invisible people in their private corner. The idea of meeting in a pub was good too, it suggested, perhaps, a new phase, a beginning of ordinariness, wherein their relation, less strained, would become more full. Edward, much too early for the rendezvous, was walking through Soho. He liked long walks through London, the action of walking dulled and calmed his too active mind. He had not entirely given up hope of finding Mrs Quaid, though he thought it most likely that she had simply moved on. He could hardly, in memory,
now believe she was absolutely real. It was more like remembering a dream. He decided to walk to Bayswater through the back streets north of Oxford Street, passing near to Fitzroy Square on the way.
Edward had not told Brownie about Jesse, at least he had not told her about his ‘hallucination’, or about Jesse’s disappearance and the London search. He had spoken vaguely about his stay at Seegard. Brownie had expressed no curiosity about it. There were other things to talk of. There had been no letter from Ilona. He did not now expect one. How could Ilona write him a letter? It was almost as if he now believed her to be illiterate. If she ever did write, Mother May would censor the letter and would stop any note saying, ‘Don’t worry, he is back.’ As long as Edward did not know, Edward would be bound to return to Seegard. The place was by now becoming grotesque and dark in his imagination and he feared the idea that he must go back to it. Everything changes so in one’s mind, he thought, and there was so much that was irreducibly awful in his own. Sometimes he imagined how things, some things at least, might turn out well. He would suddenly find Jesse, perhaps meet him in the street. That would be somehow typical of what happened with Jesse, it would be right. So Edward as he walked along looked at the people he passed, often seeing false Jesses and experiencing the sharp stab of a quenched hope. Or else Ilona would write after all, saying casually, ‘Of course he’s here’, sending Jesse’s love. Or else Edward would go back to Seegard and, as he imagined it, creep in, unlock the tower door and run up the stairs and into Jesse’s room and into his arms. He lacked Jesse, he missed him, he longed for him. And then came back the awful fear, the guilt, the secret which only Thomas knew. Would he ever, in some happy future, sit with Brownie and tell her all about it? In that telling the hallucination would become something almost trivial, something seen at once as an illusion. Then as his hunted mind came back again to Brownie, he felt: but there is no future. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing nothing there.
He had now spent two nights in his old room. There had been an efficacy, what Thomas believed in, but it was over, had done what it could, perhaps only in the meeting with Brownie there. It afforded him no more wholesome thoughts. There were evil spirits there, spirits of guilt and terror. Most of all, Edward was now afraid that in the end he might begin to hate Mark, to see him as a demon who had ruined his life. An evil Mark was sometimes in the room at night, standing beside Edward’s bed. Why should not Mark desire revenge? He had ruined Edward’s life, but Edward had taken his life away entirely. This was a new and dreadful idea, emerging from the mass of poisonous spiders with which he had told Brownie his head was crammed. He must find somewhere else to live. He thought of returning home, but he felt afraid of Harry. He could imagine, from the automatic workings of his own imagination, how much Harry might, simply because of what he knew, hate the sight of him. Harry would bitterly resent any ‘loss of face’ and any witnesses thereof. Edward wondered, but without any lively speculation on the matter, what had happened to Midge and Harry. Living isolated in a world of his own, Edward had not seen any newspapers or ‘naming of names’. He thought about Midge and about how he ought perhaps to go and see her, but he reflected that she too might find him hateful, and he did not feel strong enough to risk it. If he were rebuffed now he would weep.
So Edward walked along, watching the people pass, suffering a vivid phantasmagoria of hope and fear which moved faster and faster through his exhausted mind. Because of the evil spirits he had been unable to sleep. He saw Jesse at Seegard, sitting up in bed waiting for him to come. He saw Brownie in the pub telling him that she would no longer see him, that she had realised that she could never forgive him. He saw Ilona dancing upon the tips of the grass. Then he saw her drowned in the river, rapidly swept along towards the sea, her long hair dark like river weed. He saw Harry leaning forward and saying, ‘You are ill, it is an illness, you will receive help, you will recover.’ He saw Thomas’s gleaming spectacles and his neat fringe and heard Thomas’s Scottish voice saying, ‘In every grain of dust there are innumerable Jesses.’ He saw Stuart’s yellow eyes full of love and judgment.
Edward walked on and on; then he stopped. He had seen something which he had passed by and which had registered in a violent flash upon his mind, not understood at first. He turned back and walked slowly, looking at the houses. Then he saw it, quite small, a little yellow card pinned onto the wood at the side of a door. Mrs D. M. Quaid, Medium. Below it another card exibited the reverse side. DO THE DEAD WISH TO SPEAK TO YOU? Edward put his hand to his throat. He had been looking for Mrs Quaid, but now he felt afraid, he trembled. Had he been led here, and if so for some evil purpose? If he saw her again would he go mad? It seemed to him now that he had simply forgotten how awful, how weirdly unsavoury, it had been up in that room, what Mrs Quaid did and what she was. How could it be a good thing to see her again? Had he not better go on, ignore the little yellow card, take to his heels and run? He had in his imaginings thought of Mrs Quaid as a tool, a means to an end, a method of finding Jesse. What Mrs Quaid might really do and say, what terrible thing she might reveal, or seem to reveal, what lie or sickening image she might plant in his mind forever, was now vivid in his imagination. Mrs Quaid was dangerous. But of course it was now impossible to go away. He pushed the door. It was open. He went in.
When he came to the door of the flat it was closed and, he tried it, locked. There was no notice on it. It was not a seance day. There was no bell, so he tapped on the door, first softly, then loudly. After a long time the door was opened on a chain and someone peered through the slit. ‘Yes?’
‘I wanted to see Mrs Quaid,’ said Edward.
‘She’s not here.’
The door started to close, but Edward had put his foot against it. ‘Mrs Quaid, please let me in, please. I’m a client of yours. I came to a seance. You helped me a lot. I know it’s not the right day, but I must see you.’
Mrs Quaid undid the chain and Edward pushed the door. He had recognised her voice with its slight Irish tone. Her appearance had changed. She was much thinner. She was not wearing her turban and straggling grey hair clung to her neck and strayed over her hunched shoulders. She stood in the hallway, stooping, the neck of her dress hanging open and her beads hanging free and swinging. She looked sideways at Edward, then shuffled away along the corridor. He closed the door and followed her into the large room where the seance had been held. The curtains were partly pulled and the room was obscure. The chairs, no longer arranged in a semicircle, had been pushed away, some on top of each other, into a corner. Two armchairs stood beside the fireplace where a small lamp was alight and an electric fire occupied the empty grate. The television set, unveiled, stood opposite one of the chairs. Mrs Quaid, stooping, shuffled along, trundling forward like a hedgehog, picked up a bottle which was standing on a small nearby table, and after some hesitation put it into a coal scuttle. She sat down in an armchair, and stared up at Edward, twisting a strand of grey hair round and round her finger. He fetched an upright chair from the other side of the room and set it near her and sat down. He did not fancy the other armchair. During his excursion Mrs Quaid’s eyes had closed.
‘Mrs Quaid — ’
‘Oh — yes — what did you want?’
‘I want — ’ What did he want? Edward had not prepared the necessary speech. He said, ‘Last time I was here you said something about a man with two fathers. Well, that was me. Do you remember?’
‘Of course not,’ said Mrs Quaid. ‘I am but the vehicle. The spirits speak, not I.’
‘Well, a voice spoke to me, it spoke my name and told me to come home. I think that was my father. Well, I went to him, I went home, but now I’ve lost him again. I don’t know where he is, he may be dead only I don’t think so, and I thought you might help me.’
‘There’s no seance this week,’ said Mrs Quaid, ‘and anyway they only talk with the dead, so unless he’s dead there’ll be no communication.’
‘But there was a communication and he was alive. If yo
u could only get in touch with him again — ’
‘I don’t know anything about that. People imagine all sorts of things, they hear what they want to hear, they see what they want to see, it’s not my fault. Not everyone is able to understand the voices that come from the other side, not everyone is worthy.’
Edward saw that Mrs Quaid was shuddering. She had put the shawl which had been on the television set round her shoulders and pulled it close up to her neck. Her face was thinner and her white scalp showed through the scanty limp grey locks. Her head, bowed forward so that her eyes, turned up, could barely see him, was nodding compulsively, her long glittering earrings scraping her gaunt neck. With a fussy movement she released the shawl and pulled out the beads which had disappeared inside her dress. She arranged the shawl underneath the beads, tried to tie its corners in a knot but failed, and peered up at Edward with an old cross sad thin-lipped face. It occurred to him that he had not really seen her face on the last occasion, it had been a blank underneath the big jewelled turban.
‘Are you ill, Mrs Quaid?’ said Edward. ‘Can I help you?’ He stood up and moved nearer to her.
‘Of course I’m ill. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not catching. What did you say you wanted?’
‘About my father. I can’t find him. He’s lost. His name is Jesse — ’
‘I can’t help you. It’s not what I do. You have to wait for the spirits. They decide. It’s no use saying to them find the boy’s father.’
Edward sat down in the armchair. He said, ‘If you could just try — I could come to a seance next week — ’
Mrs Quaid had closed her eyes and now lay back in the chair her head ‘lolling a little. Her breathing became audible. Edward thought, hell, she’s fallen asleep. And how dim the lamp is, she must have put something over it. And the television is on, only I never noticed, there’s a picture but no sound. Edward lay back in the chair, breathing in the dust which his movement had raised. He began to look at the television screen. The set was badly adjusted and some shadowy things, perhaps branches of trees, were jigging about. Then the light became brighter, a strong grey light composing a steadier image. There was a line across the screen which Edward soon interpreted as the horizon. He was looking at the sea. He thought, it’s a monochrome set, they look awfully dull after colour, or perhaps it’s an old film. But there’s a lot of light, like a rainy afternoon when the sun’s coming through the clouds. The picture changed, showing the edge of the sea, small waves silently breaking, drawing pebbles back after them. The camera moved along the beach, showing sand dunes with wispy grass waving in the wind. Edward thought, it’s very soporific, this sort of picture, how slowly it moves, with silent waves breaking and silent wind blowing. Now there was an estuary, the mouth of a river, land on the other side, poplar trees, reeds, birds rising, some big geese heavily getting themselves up, their wings beating on the water. I’d like to hear that sound, thought Edward. The camera was moving inland following the river bank, passing a little stony beach, the river was becoming less wide. Then there was a group of graceful willow trees reflected in the smooth water, and beyond them something jutted out, a wall, like a broken jetty, reaching out into the stream. Then suddenly the camera became still and there was a man. He was standing a little way from the bank, with his back to Edward, a tall man in dark clothes. Then he moved and turned round and the camera focused on his face, a young man with straight dark hair falling across his brow. Edward did not move except that his finger nails dug into the arms of the chair. As the face came closer Edward thought, but that’s me. Then he thought, no it isn’t, it’s Jesse. But what’s happening, they must be showing some old film about Jesse, what a coincidence, how strange, how awful. Jesse was pushing back his lock of hair with one hand, and now walking away toward the river bank. He paused at the bank looking down into the water. Then he turned round again and smiled at Edward.
