by Iris Murdoch
Edward woke up. There was a strange regular sound. He was lying sprawled in the armchair in Mrs Quaid’s big room, the television screen was blank. Mrs Quaid, sitting opposite to him, illumined by the lamp, was asleep. The sound he had heard, and which had perhaps awakened him, was her snoring. Edward sat up. There had been a film about Jesse. The television was switched off. He must have dreamt it. He stood up. Then a fear came to him, a terrible sickening suffocating fear like he had had out in the dark that night at Seegard. He made for the door, was unable to open it, twisted the slippery handle to and fro, then wrenched it open. He closed the door of the room behind him, got to the door of the flat and closed that behind him too and went leaping down the stairs. Out in the street he felt almost incredulous, amazed to find ordinary daylight and people walking about on the pavement. He began to walk too. He looked at his watch. It was after four o‘clock. He had slept for hours. Then he remembered. Brownie. He began helplessly to run, but he knew it was no use, the pub would be shut now. She would have waited and waited and then gone away. He had missed her, he had lost her.
In her first instalment of ‘memoirs’ Mrs Baltram treated us to a recent piece from her thrilling diary (upon which she tells us the ’memoirs’ are based), brought in as an example of the ‘electrical band’, to use her words, which she says surrounds her husband. Some might describe the goings-on at their country residence more simply as evidence of a disorderly life. Mrs Baltram seems to think that being a genius excuses every excess, and being married to one every indiscretion. One almost begins to be sorry for the poor man who is, we gather on other evidence, a sick and senile recluse who gave up working years ago. He appears nevertheless, as of now, as her ‘lord’, ‘a king in full beauty’, ‘a sorcerer upon a flying horse’ and so on. Mrs Baltram’s rather banal prose has its purple patches, spurred onward by hyperbole and sugared by sentimentality. She tells us she has ‘had to survive’, hints that she has ‘had her consolations’, there are ‘penalties attached to marrying a genius’. There certainly are, it seems. The second instalment now tells us in some detail how poor May stood aside while Jesse, ‘his eyes ablaze’, carried his model Chloe Warriston up to his room. (‘Of course to be Jesse’s “model” meant only one thing, there was a long line of tawdry maidens’ etc.) If they keep up this standard the ’memoirs’ promise to be, and are no doubt intended to be, an orgy of indiscretion and revenge. Every page glows with malice. Mrs Baltram is expert in the art, practised it must be admitted by almost every biographer, of seeming to utter warm assessments and even adulation while quietly and ruthlessly diminishing the object of attention. Perhaps we all want to diminish those whose stature accuses us of being small. Few however are able (or willing) to mount such a rich operation of belittlement. Mrs Baltram emerges as an obsessive diarist. The diaries from which her saga derives might indeed make more interesting, even more attractive, reading. Perhaps in due course we shall be treated to the diaries as well! As ‘literature’ Mrs Baltram’s complaint, judging by the first two extracts, seems likely to be worthless, but as a social document it may well be of value. ‘May Baltram knew everybody’, the effusive introduction tells us. I suppose scandals about the love affairs of clapped-out painters are good for some mileage. Just how good a painter Jesse Baltram was seems, judging from the controversy his wife’s writings has already stirred up, to be a matter of considerable dispute. She has certainly made publicity for her own hoard of pictures by enticing references to ‘late erotic works not yet known to the public’. The discerning sociologist, now and in the future, will no doubt treat these ramblings as a text for the psychology of women who imagine they are liberated and are emphatically not: a phenomenon of our age. Mrs Baltram has suffered no doubt many stings and arrows of jealous pain. She has clearly planned a plump revenge upon all those pretty models who warmed Jesse’s bed. (See the treatment of Chloe Warriston in the current offering.) What she suffered from even more bitterly however, and which she would be reluctant to admit although her epic seems to reek of it, is envy. She was a little woman married to, however one regards him, a considerable man. Her revenge on Jesse for being famous, attractive, talented, charismatic, everything she was not, is likely to be a thorough one. However we need not feel too sorry for Mrs Baltram. She is onto a good thing. After two more newspaper instalments to whet our appetite we are promised the publication of volume one of the memoirs. This book (and there are more to come) will be a best-seller. There is even talk of film rights.
Thomas McCaskerville was sitting in his study at Quitterne reading an article on May Baltram’s memoirs by Elspeth Macran. He had also read the second instalment of May’s ‘ramblings’. He had been alone at Quitterne now for two days. A journalist had rung up on the first day, after that he had silenced the telephone. He had however made some calls, to the clinic to postpone his patients, and to the boarding school where Meredith was to go in the autumn to ask if he could be admitted now. (They said he could.) He had written and received no letters concerning what had happened. He had sent no signal to them. He wondered when Harry would come to see him. Harry would have to come to see him; Thomas willed him to come and had only to continue his punishing silence to compel him to do so. Thomas wanted to see Harry here at Quitterne, he wanted Harry to come to him under a nervous compulsion as, what — a suppliant, a penitent, an enemy? Whatever it was, Harry would be tormented into coming by an agonising increasing anxiety about Thomas. Thomas had planned no strategy for this encounter. He knew that when the time came he would find the right tone, the words, the mask. Until then Thomas would not move in the matter of Meredith. He must, till Harry came, till he could thus find out something, be simply silent and absent. Of course there could be no question of speaking to anybody else. When he had received information, then he could begin to act. He wanted to get Meredith out of that house. He wanted him to be somewhere absolutely else, on neutral territory, where he could be attended to without — it seemed incredible how much had changed — having to treat with alien powers. It was hard on Meredith to translate him so rapidly. But it was hard on Meredith anyway. The idea that his son had ‘surprised’ Midge and her lover in Thomas’s house was detestable to him, his wounded imagination kept returning to it to supply an endless variety of detail, and this alone could make him feel that he would never again have clean thoughts. He had always been quietly strict with Meredith, Midge had sometimes accused him of being too severe, but this regime was contained within a deep wordless understanding between himself and the boy who was so like him. Thomas respected the laconic dignity of his son and gestureless love passed between them. Against this bond, against the possibility of either silence or speech, an obscene offence had been committed. However Thomas did not conceive of any loss of the boy; in the face of whatever might be, he and Meredith were one.
Thomas was able, now, to think about Meredith, and about Harry. He was able to ‘take up positions’. About Stuart he decided not to speculate, content for the present to regard him as an aberration which would pass leaving Harry in possession. He could not think about Midge, in relation to her he was a raw mass of suffering. His mind, unable to sustain coherent understanding, fell apart into craven incredulity, bleeding deprivation, sobbing childish misery, tragic attitudinising, cold cruel curiosity, and rage. He was astounded to discover how much anger he was capable of. Of course ‘anyone could have told’ Thomas, and indeed he told himself that it was likely that his young wife would attract admirers. She was so pretty, so animated, so well-dressed, so unlike the person whom younger Thomas had expected and wanted to marry. She was, for him, an improbable wife, a marvellous visitation, a strange juxtaposition, and that had been for him a source of joy never of uneasiness. Her falling in love with him, and she had indubitably been in love with him, was a proof of the abundant unpredictable richness of life, an over-plus of quite surprising delight. She gave him a happiness which he had imagined to be unattainable, even alien. Within him now his love, intact, even his happiness, his
ignorant incredulous happiness, remained to torment him, a huge trembling sensibility which could suffer but not diminish or die. I love her, I love her, he said to himself, sometimes covering his face and moaning. Why cannot that be enough to be the whole of reality?
He accused himself, and tried ingeniously to accuse himself more and more. Why had he not, somehow, defended her, kept her safe? Why had he, with his professional knowledge of so many surprising secrets, never conjectured that his wife might look elsewhere? He was perfectly aware that she had acquaintances about whom he knew little, about whom indeed he never even questioned her. He had been inattentive, self-absorbed, his love had been sleepy, he had not only taken her for granted, he had taken his love for her for granted too. No doubt it was also a kind of vanity, a sense of his superiority to any possible rival, a prevailing consciousness that people were always a bit afraid of him and would never dare to cross him. But then, in his defence, his love, his happiness would cry out that he had trusted her so perfectly, with a perfect childlike simplicity which reigned here, and here alone, inside the achievement of his marriage. And then his terrible anger would conjure up the hateful pdir, the tormenting they who had so utterly destroyed his joy and poisoned his mind and crippled him with pain. He could, he felt, have so much better borne an honest loss, a truthful departure. And how much easier too with another man, a stranger, any man but that man whom he had so full-heartedly liked and trusted.
He pictured his wife’s face, so radiantly full of lively sympathetic self-satisfaction, of what he had read as absolutely innocent joie de vivre. Had he regarded her too much as a happy dependent child? That Midge, his own dear loving private Midge, could have planned and executed a long cold-blooded deception … He reflected upon the details of it. He did not dare to doubt the passionate need which had even led his wife to deceive him in his own house. Two years, and how they must have longed for each other. The loving telephone call as soon as Thomas had left the house. The anxious careful planning of timetables. The casual questions about when Thomas would be away, where and how long. The fine calculation, the ruthless scheming which went on behind those familiar smiles. The different face that looked beyond his shoulder as he embraced her. Yes, the ruthless will that made him into nothing. The whole full-blooded flow of another life happening in the interstices of his presence to her. So rather he himself, his claim upon her, represented the dull lifeless interval, the tedious and hateful routine to which she returned unwillingly from a bright place of passion and tenderness, with its own private language, its luxuriant mythology and secret codes of love. Thomas saw it now, that other place, as a tented camp, full of activity and joyous bustle, rippling pennants and high silken canopies and stirring trumpet calls and drums. All the colour of life was there, while here had been drained down to a monotonous grey. Two years; and he had not even noticed, not seen or felt, the relentless process which had been depriving him of what he so utterly relied upon and so much loved.
Thomas recalled that he had indeed noticed and reflected on Midge’s recent ‘moods’, and had decided not to worry! He decided now that he should not review the intimate details of their marriage seeking for ‘causes’ of what had happened. The causes were no doubt multiform, probably deeply hidden, at any rate not to be probed or brooded over at present. Not everything is improved and clarified by being dug up. Thomas had left his own puritanical shyness undisturbed. He valued chaste instincts and held them, in himself and others, apt to promote happiness and the strong orderly passion of real loving. He had always felt, between himself and Midge, a deep and authoritative sexual flow which mocked the vulgarity of text books. She had loved him, needed him, teased his solemnity, clung to his strength, admired, esteemed and trusted him, given him her lively beauty and the entirety of her physical presence. Or so he had imagined; how far back should he now dare to look and see it all as false?
Thomas was not used to misery, his deep grief at his parents’ deaths had not been like this. It was as if there were a great void where his love for Midge had been, and yet how could that possibly be — it was just that he was suffering in a new and dreadful way, like the invention of a new torture, real suffering, his love transmuted into absolute pain. How could he, Thomas, suffer so? He was also not used to uncontrollable anger. He felt at times a rage, which might become obsessive, against the conniving pair, amazement and shock at their treachery, and against Harry sometimes a violent disgust amounting to hatred. Thomas was aware that he must soon check and dissolve these destructive emotions; but he lacked any compelling vision of the territory beyond. His pride, his dignity, deeply wounded, demanded aid, redress. A resigned forgiving surrender which the world would interpret as weakness? (So he cared about the world?) A solitary meditative ‘generous’ understanding, likely to be indefinitely prolonged? A cool plan of campaign to destroy his rival? And regain a sulky hostile consort? There seemed to be no solution. No good would come of rushing to London, he had, for now, to wait upon events, hope for miracles, discipline his mind. His love for Midge, twisting and turning, grown violent and wild, tormented him at times with visions of happiness and joy which were proffered by his craven imagination as a cheating solace, how it would all somehow painlessly ’come right‘ in the end. I love her, I want her, he cried again and again. But he could not have what he desired so desperately and, above all else, his dear wife back as she once was, tender and true.
These repetitive thoughts, already forming themselves into the mechanical patterns which Thomas recognised and dreaded, were halted by a sound from outside the house, coming to him through the open window, the sound for which he had been waiting of car tyres upon the gravel. Thomas rose and watched from the window as Harry alighted. The car door closed with a discreet click. As Thomas waited for the bell to ring he combed his hair.
‘I believe you don’t care,’ said Harry.
‘It would be convenient for you to think so.’
‘You don’t want a divorce?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So you don’t mind?’
‘I now know you are a callous liar,’ said Thomas, ‘am I also to put you down as a fool?’
The emotional shock of the meeting for both of them had been even greater than they expected, so that they had spent the first twenty minutes talking almost at random to conceal their agitation. Both were determined to keep calm, to reveal no weakness, to dominate, to win. They had not expected to be overcome by a kind of floundering confusion which landed them in sudden moments of blankness and anti-climax. So far from being too dramatic, the scene was proving, from the point of view of any progress it was likely to make, not dramatic enough. Thomas had an advantage in being less dependent on alcohol, which he was resolutely not offering to Harry, whose need for it in a crisis was even visible in his restless gestures and roving eyes.
‘We’ve got to be calm about this,’ said Harry, ‘be sane and destroy as little as possible. I hope we can remain friends.’
‘Of course we can’t,’ said Thomas, ‘you seem to be incapable of thinking. What did you want anyway?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You came here uninvited, presumably to say something. Could you get on with saying it?’
‘God, you are a cold fish,’ said Harry. ‘Why pretend that you’re surprised that I came, didn’t you expect me, didn’t you want some explanation, some account of it all, or did you just intend to get on with your work and ignore it?’
‘Why have you come running to me? Do you want me to comfort you?’
‘Hell no! I should have thought you were the one in need of comfort.’
‘My wife informed me, and I believe her, that she no longer loves you. She does not want a divorce. I should have thought this leaves you with no alternative but to get out of our lives. I certainly don’t want to go over the details of your defunct love affair. Since you appear to have nothing to say I suggest you go. I see no need to talk to you and I don’t want to see you again. I’ve fini
shed with you.’
