The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  I ought never to have let you go away, I regret this and ask your forgiveness on my knees for this and any other fault which I have unwittingly committed. Once it was known I ought never to have left your side. The crazy thing about Stuart came like a cloud between us at the crucial moment, as if some devil, perhaps out of Thomas’s deep mind, had come to confuse us. If it had not been for that you would have run to me the moment, the second, that Thomas found out. Your weird obsession with my son, so uniquely hurtful, upset me too much, as I now see, impressed me too much, I should not have believed it. It was a neurotic fancy that you ran into rather than face the immediate task of breaking with Thomas. Come to me — and let us live, where you always wanted to live, in the truth and the light. Oh God how much I love you. There is nothing in me but that love. Do not destroy me, Midge.

  H.

  Midge read the letter again, with tears in her eyes. It moved her terribly. How it conjured him up, with his sweetness, his beauty, the authority of his love, his absolute charm. He was right, they were perfectly suited to each other. But it did not follow that they could ever be happy together, and happiness was so much the point. Rightness and goodness of course; but happiness … that was essential … And even now, while she was still so ill with it all, she had tasted it a little, witnessing the joy of Thomas and Meredith. She and Harry had deceived themselves about their future, as they had deceived themselves about the importance of Thomas and Meredith. She read between the lines of the letter, so touching and so ardent, that perhaps Harry realised too that something, he could not tell exactly what, had broken their compact. Midge was not sure exactly what it was either, and when the break had come. Was it to do with Stuart, that cloud which had arrived so strangely at just that time, and had not left her as she was? Surely Stuart was a symptom or a sign, not a cause. What Harry said about Meredith was wrong, almost a lie, something which he wanted to believe. Tears fell from her eyes, tears for something wonderful which had had to end and was gone into the past where it would fade and not be remembered as she remembered it now. How could one resist such a lover, how could one have resisted him? She was fortunate to be, when it ended, in another place, a real place, a place which she had really never left, inside an innocent love. Poor Harry, he had gambled everything, while she had always kept something back. But then that was part of how she had failed and made him fail too. It was hard to think about.

  The letter had arrived three days ago and she had intended to destroy it at once, for fear of Thomas finding it, and for fear of being tempted to read it again, but she could not. She had now read it several times. Yesterday, with a terribly beating heart, she had run out to post a note which just said, No, I am sorry. No. As she did this she was pierced by the thought: he will find someone else, and I shall have such a terrible long pain of jealousy. My pains are not ending, they are beginning. Her hand nearly failed her and turned traitor as she reached the letter out to the pillar box — and imagined Harry opening it, and what different letter she might have written. Yet when it was done she felt better, more free, as she had not felt free for two years, more completely herself. Harry’s letter must now be destroyed. The idea of keeping it and reading it at intervals was horrible to her. It was already dead. She had killed it.

  She took it downstairs and burnt it in the grate. She had just finished crushing the ashes with her foot and was standing looking down when Thomas entered, and she moved quickly away.

  Thomas, who had of course found and read the letter soon after its arrival, guessed what she was doing, saw the traces of tears and gazed upon her with particular tenderness and pride.

  ‘Thomas — ’

  ‘Yes, my darling — ’

  ‘Now you’re retiring would we have enough money to go to India with Meredith?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ (Thomas, perhaps it was a Scottish characteristic, was in fact far better off than he had ever let on to anybody, even his wife.)

  Thomas was in an extraordinary state of mind. When he was alone he gazed at himself in the mirror and even made faces. He had spied on his wife, watching her through a window he had seen a look of touching animal pleasure on her face as she ate a cheesecake. He tracked her, like a keeper tracking a sick animal. He watched her for symptoms of health. He felt that his general understanding of human psychology had broken down. Where the individual mind is concerned the light of science could reveal so little; and the mishmash of scientific ideas and mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and intuition and love and appetite for power which was known as psychoanalysis, and which of course did sometimes ‘help people’, could make the most extraordinary mistakes when it left the paths of the obvious. Wild guesses, propelled by the secret wishes of the guesser, could initiate long journeys down wrong tracks. The person he found most puzzling was himself. Why had it seemed so essential to run out of the house after he had confronted his wife with the proofs of her infidelity? He had left her with cold words. He seemed instantly concerned with his dignity. He even talked about damage to his practice, not because he cared about it or even thought it would occur, but because he wanted to set up an instant barrier of ironical coolness and ‘practical considerations’, not only to protect himself but to hurt her. He could not have stayed and argued, produced a ‘natural response’ with shouts, commands and prayers, that would have been painfully out of character, he did not want to be forced to become another person. He had been incapable of any direct response also perhaps because he needed to despair at once. The shock of discovering what another man (less orderly, less trustful, less self-confident, less self-absorbed) might have found out sooner had been so intense, an utterly new kind of shock which paralysed distant and unpractised regions of his being. He felt he had to be alone to recover himself, and to make himself capable of sustaining with dignity and rational calm the total collapse of his marriage.

  Harry had pretended to think that he was cold, uninterested in his wife, prepared to give her up. Midge was supposed to have said he was humourless, untender and boring, Prompted by Harry, Midge probably had said those things. He could imagine how instinctively they must have connived together to protect themselves by belittling him. Thomas was resolutely concerned not to imagine the details of those ‘two years’. There was no need for that, and here he could truthfully tell himself that there were mysteries which could not be fathomed and must be left alone, in the old parlance, ‘left to God’. His imaginings, when not vulgarly obvious, would be wild, and in either case falsities. It was a kindness to Midge not to pursue her in his thoughts into that place, so frightful to him, so painful to her. Surely he would meet Harry again. Their lives were bound together by other lives: Edward was Midge’s nephew, Meredith’s cousin. Besides, he did not want altogether to lose Harry. He allowed himself to imagine how agonisingly intolerable Harry must have found his mistress’s sudden ‘fancy’ for his son. Would Thomas one day, perhaps soon, be helping Midge to construct some easy, friendly relation with Stuart? Could they all meet, and let it not be seen in any of their brows … ? He hoped so. The future, that must be endured, and meanwhile left quiet in the dark.

  Thomas was not afraid. He was allowing himself to feel happy, sometimes he wanted to shout with it. Such positive self-conscious happiness was rare in his life. Patiently, without pressure, largely without speech, he would rework his relationship with Midge, his love and her love, and feel at times her questing fingers seeking for his in the same dark. He had confidence in her return, and for a time would have to be the quiet tactful spectator of her unhappiness and slow recovery, letting his happiness teach and tend her. In this task Meredith would be his wordless telepathically close accomplice. Thus they would heal her, Meredith’s joy and relief, imaged in the crazy friskings of the puppy, was a constant source of reassurance, almost a proof. Meredith liked his school, he was growing up, he was clever and wise. This too was the future. Thomas felt that, through no merit of his own, he had escaped a terrible shipwreck, and was now a
ble to sail on, more securely as every day passed with its interests and events which were not connected with the alarms of the recent past. So, other things could happen, ordinary life could go on. But something far from ordinary had taken place which would have totally obsessed Thomas had he not been otherwise concerned, and which even as it was caused him much anxiety. It concerned Mr Blinnet.

  Mr Blinnet’s unscheduled arrival at Quitterne had been immediately prompted by Thomas’s unprecedentedly abrupt cancellation of their next session together. This shock to Mr Blinnet’s system occasioned changes in his state of mind which might have come about anyway or might perhaps never have come about at all. When Thomas had rushed forward to Mr Blinnet’s car he had at once tried to persuade his patient to return to London, promising to see him as usual in a few days. Mr Blinnet would have none of this. Thomas then asked him into the house and gave him a cup of tea, hoping that he would soon calm down and go away. For it was clear that Mr Blinnet was very upset, he even took his hat off. Thomas was very upset too, and had to go upstairs to comb his hair. Then Thomas, who wanted a drink, offered one to Mr Blinnet. Soon after this Mr Blinnet began to reminisce about his life in terms which he had never previously used. It emerged from these, and Thomas gradually became convinced, that Mr Blinnet had actually committed a serious crime, and that the more detailed part of his story of mental aberration was fictitious. Thomas could see, as in a film, the pale round face of his erstwhile patient changing before his eyes until he was confronted with an entirely different person: someone clever and determined enough to succeed, in a long relation with an experienced therapist, in simulating mental disorder. (When Thomas expressed surprise Mr Blinnet said impatiently, ‘It’s all in the books after all!’) In fact, and this rescued Thomas from complete dismay by interesting him a lot, Mr Blinnet’s sane fantasy had been so wholehearted that it had become a compulsive addiction; and in this sense, to some small extent, Mr Blinnet was ‘genuine’. This was worthy of study.

  The original idea had been the one which Thomas had long ago mooted and rejected: the refined elaboration of a legal defence to be used if the crime ever came to light. It would probably have worked too, thought Thomas. What, to the eye of a jury, could be madder than Mr Blinnet? He imagined his own ardent defence of his patient in the witness box. Yet had Mr Blinnet been quite clever enough, had he simulated just the right kind of madness for this particular crime? A psychiatrist acting for the other side might have caught him out in some crucial error, some revealing slip. Thomas was already conjecturing what such a slip might be. He was fascinated by his own credulity. What a pity, he recollected, that he would never be able to publish a paper on the subject. As it was, that afternoon’s work left them both in a serious quandary. It was not that Thomas felt a duty to telephone the police. His professional secrecy could remain unbleached. The nature of Mr Blinnet’s crime was such that it was not in the least likely to be repeated, in fact strictly speaking could not be repeated. Mr Blinnet was not a public menace, and Thomas did not believe in retributive justice. It was just that their relationship, whose intimacy had been sterilised and confined by the ethics and atmosphere of therapy, was now suddenly set up in the middle of ordinary life, engendering new obligations, new problems, new emotions. There could be no talk now of ‘transference’. Mr Blinnet was in love with Thomas. Thomas had acquired a new friend, a close friend, whom he could not abandon. Now that the mask of crazed obsession, originally simulated, later habitual, had been removed, Mr Blinnet’s face expressed a refined intelligence. What am I to do with him? Thomas wondered. Announce he is cured and introduce him to everybody? Mr Blinnet had no plans for reducing his dependence upon his healer. Whatever am I to do? thought Thomas. Well, that too was the future and another story.

  It doesn’t add up, thought Edward. Ilona said it was telepathy, not that that explains anything. Mrs Quaid could have ‘read’ that I was worrying about Jesse — except that then I wasn’t. So it’s independent of time, is it? And of course she knew Seegard so it was in her mind too. But then the television? That could have been just a coincidence, there was an old programme about Jesse, perhaps Mrs Quaid had a tape of it, and I imagined the background, the sea, the estuary, places I’d thought about and wanted to get to, just as I was falling asleep? I did go to sleep, didn’t I? As for finding Jesse’s body, the mouth of the river was a pretty obvious place to look. There’s a funny feeling about all that business, he thought, it’s all very intense and brightly coloured, yet difficult to recall, like a dream, I mustn’t worry about it. I worry because I want to feel that Jesse arranged it all, and that’s a sort of nonsense.

  ‘By the way, Ed,’ said Stuart, ‘there are some letters for you upstairs, Harry put them in a drawer in your bedroom. Sorry, we forgot yesterday.’

  Edward and Stuart were home again, back with Harry at the house in Bloomsbury. Edward had arrived the previous night, letting himself in quietly with his key, hearing Stuart and Harry talking in the kitchen. They had been glad to see him and had asked no questions. They fed him. He went to bed early and fell asleep at once, vaguely aware of Stuart looking at him and turning out the light. When he woke up in the morning he felt that he had never slept so long and so deeply. He recalled no dreams but seemed to experience his sleep in memory, as if he could remember having lain in a deep black warm pit. The sense of home-coming, which he had not expected, touched his heart. The kind surprised faces of his father and his brother made him, in his relief, realise that he had imagined that they would be angry with him. Why? Because he had run away, disappeared, refused their help, quarrelled with them, killed somebody. He had fled to Thomas, then to — But now all that was over. He was starting again, with nothing in the world left to do except to find Brownie and be with her — tell her everything and lay all his burdens down at her feet. So he had felt as he crawled up the stairs to his room and fell into the pit of sleep.

  After his return from Seegard Edward had spent two more nights at his lodging, in that room, in case Brownie should come there. The passing hours and her not coming made him feel sick and mad, and when it grew dark he began to think about Jesse lying there alone underneath his stone between the yew trees. He imagined Jesse lying there with his eyes open, breathing quietly. Then he thought about Mark Wilsden’s mutilated body which had been burnt. He went to bed exhausted but could not sleep. Late the next day he went home. The familiar house, the old familiar sound of his father and his elder brother talking, downstairs, in another room, about other things, made him, with an instinct he constantly checked, feel secure as he had felt in childhood. The azalea which Midge had given him ‘to cheer him up’ so long ago was back in his bedroom, no longer in flower, a little green tree. He woke feeling stronger, able to decide things. He decided that he would go to Mrs Wilsden’s house and ask for Brownie. Nothing was left now except Brownie, that was all that remained of his task, his ordeal, his penitence, that was all and everything, for everything depended on that.

  ‘Where’s Harry?’ said Edward. He had made himself some coffee in the kitchen, then discovered Stuart sitting reading in the drawing room. The sun shone into the green room, paling the green panelling as if one could actually see it fading, sparkling upon the gilded cupids who were holding up Romula’s mirror. Stuart was sitting in the box-like armchair beside the piano reading a book. The atmosphere shot Edward straight back into the past. It was the first day of the summer holidays. Free, nothing to do.

  ‘He’s in his study,’ said Stuart, ‘telephoning his publisher.’

  ‘His publisher?’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it splendid? He’s written a novel and it’s to be published! He’s ringing up Italy, the publisher’s got a villa on the bay of Naples with a view of Vesuvius.’

  ‘I shall write a novel one day,’ said Edward, ‘and I shall have a villa in Italy, or at least know someone who has.’