by Iris Murdoch
It was nearly reading time. Would David come? Harriet stared so, he must speak to her. He must speak to David about giving up Greek. And he must talk to Monty about Magnus Bowles. Oh God, he had so many troubles. He had so much wanted a daughter.
‘“Where is Nastasia Philipovna?” asked the Prince breathlessly.
“She’s here,” replied Rogozhin slowly, after a slight pause.
“Where?”
Rogozhin raised his eyes and gazed intently at the Prince.
“Come,” he said.’
Blaise closed the book. Of course both Harriet and David knew the story, though Harriet usually claimed to have forgotten. But Blaise liked to finish at an exciting moment He read aloud well, with spirit but without too much emphasis. The reading aloud custom dated from David’s childhood. They had read most of Scott, Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens. Blaise loved it. There was an actor manqué somewhere inside him.
The reading took place in summer in what Blaise called the breakfast-room (though they never breakfasted there) and in winter in the kitchen. The breakfast room was really the sitting-room. The drawing-room was rarely sat in or withdrawn to. Harriet, ensconced in an armchair opposite to her husband with a box of chocolates at her side, was sewing. She always sewed at reading time because David as a small child had once said that he loved to see her sew. Did he still, or did it merely annoy him now, she wondered. This was the pattern of so many of her dilemmas about her son. Because of him, so many of the silly little rituals of a happy marriage were put in question. Harriet was (not very skilfully) blanket-stitching the frayed cuff of one of Blaise’s old jackets. The jacket smelt of Blaise, not a tobacco smell, as he was a nonsmoker, but a sweaty doggy thoughtful male odour. How much that smell expressed the difference between men and women. Harriet would have liked to embrace the jacket, now at this very moment, and bury her face in it, only she had learnt long ago to modify her transports in the company of either of her two men, let alone in the company of both.
David was sitting on the floor, not near Harriet (he used to lean against her knees once), one foot tucked under him, his head drooped, quietly grimacing and blinking as if the story were producing extraordinary trains of thought. His fair, now rather greasy, tangly hair, which was beginning to turn slightly upward at the ends, flopped around his face in a random and unintelligible chaos of criss-crossing locks. Does he never comb it, she wondered. Oh, if only he would let me. She felt his consciousness of her ardent look, and shifted her attention to his faded jeans, one slim boney ankle, one dirty sandalled foot, the carpet. She sighed deeply and laid aside her needle.
Blaise meanwhile was quietly reading through the next section of the book, half smiling with appreciation and pleasure, then suddenly frowning with thought. Harriet was a little older than her husband and she felt the age gap in these moments of contemplation. How young he still was. He was less handsome than her son, but he looked so strong and decisive and manly. He had straight faintly reddish hair, which he kept cut very short, a pink large square-jawed face, a long thin mouth, and long blue-grey winter sea eyes. David’s eyes were his father’s, only much bluer. Harriet’s eyes were a clear plain brown. The presence of both the men in this sort of quietness filled her with a kind of happiness which was also anguish, was terror. Life had been so terrifyingly generous to her. She sighed again and helped herself to another chocolate. At that moment she suddenly remembered the apparition of the intruding boy. She was about to tell Blaise about it, but then decided not to. Blaise would think it was one of her ‘night fears’, and he always thought that her fears meant something when in fact they meant nothing. Perhaps she had imagined the boy anyway.
David was feeling tense and miserable. The reading sessions had embarrassed him horribly ever since the days of The Wind in the Willows which were now some time ago. The silent will of both parents beseeching him, compelling him, to come made now a nightly drama. Once or twice lately he had just not turned up, and had sat alone in his room grinding his teeth. He gazed at a greasy food stain upon his father’s lapel and inhaled the smell of milk chocolate with which bis mother’s audible munching was polluting the atmosphere. If only his mother would not stare at him and sigh like a lovesick girl. Of course he loved his parents dearly, only now everything about them grated on his nerves until he could scream. Their self-conscious air of a happy home life made him want to go and starve in a garret. If only he had gone to a boarding school, then home might have been a treat. He rose and mumbled good night and went out quickly and silently. Later in his own room he listened to the murmurous sound, so rarely heard by an outsider, of spouses communing privately with each other. How much it had soothed him when, as a small child, he had fallen asleep night after night, lulled to security by that noise as by the murmur of a friendly brook.
‘You did my Japanese bowl so beautifully.’
‘I’m glad David came.’
‘I wish he wouldn’t keep blinking like that.’
‘I wish he’d either cut his hair or wash it.’
‘He says he’s going to grow a beard as soon as he can.’
‘Oh God.’
‘What does the blinking mean?’
‘Adolescents are full of ticks.’
‘He ate no supper. Do you think he’s got anorexia nervosa!’
‘Dear girl, I do wish you wouldn’t read those Sunday supplement articles!’
‘Don’t worry him about Italian, leave it a while.’
‘I’m not going to let him give up Greek. He can do Italian in his spare time.’
‘By the way, the Andersons have asked us for tomorrow night.’
‘Tomorrow is Magnus Bowles night.’
‘Oh dear. Can’t you change Magnus for once?’
‘You know I can never change Magnus.’
‘I suppose he must be recovering after all these years. He doesn’t need you quite so often.’
‘It is hard to say,’ said Blaise, ‘what recovering would be in the case of a man like Magnus Bowles. He so much is his obsessions.’
‘If only he could paint again.’
‘He messes with paints.’
‘What was that horrible thing you said about paint?’
‘Paint equals shit.’
‘The unconscious is so coarse. Does he still go around his room on his knees touching things?’
‘He is surrounded by gods which he has to placate. Everything is holy. In another age he would have been revered as a saint.’
‘Poor crazy creature.’
‘Primitive man lived in a world of frightful small deities. Roman Catholics still do.’
‘I know you think all religion is just obsession!’
‘Dear girl, I don’t think anything so silly. Religion is very important. It’s just that it isn’t what it seems. Few things that are very important are.’
‘I’d love to meet Magnus one day. I feel sure I would help him to feel more normal.’
‘Women always think that about homosexuals.’
‘I don’t mean – I’d just tidy his room and talk to him about painting. He sometimes sends me his greetings after all. He must think about me a bit.’
‘Oh you quite exist for him. Perhaps you are the only woman who does. But your meeting him would simply destroy my ability to help him. So it’s impossible.’
‘A man it’s impossible to meet. How interesting. I just hate to think of him being all alone, seeing practically nobody but you, sleeping in the day and waking in the night, and terribly frightened of things that aren’t there.’
‘You’d be surprised, dearest girl, how many people have such fears, and most of them manage to lead quite ordinary lives.’
‘Well, he doesn’t. One is lucky not to be pursued by imaginary devils. He has quite a funny one, hasn’t he?’
‘A Bishop with a wooden leg who follows him like Hook’s crocodile.’
‘That’s rather nice. I can’t quite feel I’d be frightened. But those awful hallucinations about having
killed his mother and the corpse sprouting up like a young girl. And telling you he’d cut his finger off and not being convinced he hadn’t even when you were showing him his own hand! He’s much madder than the others. I’m sure he should be having electric shocks or something.’
‘I understand Magnus’s case, for God’s sake, Harriet.’
‘All right, all right. It’s just that he must be so unhappy.’
‘These acute anxiety states aren’t quite unhappiness. They are not quite believed in. Magnus feels he’s going to be punished for some crime which he can’t remember, and not being able to remember is part of the guilt. But this is quite an exciting condition, and all the bumping and touching keeps the punishment at bay.’
‘Is he as fat as ever?’
‘He’s a compulsive eater.’
‘How I sympathize. So am I. Pass the chocolates, darling. I think you should write his case history, he’s so picturesque. I wish you could persuade him to see you at a civilized time of day.’
‘He’s incurably nocturnal. He even looks like a potto. He only comes alive in the evening.’
‘Then he takes half your night and exhausts you. Those patients are eating you.’
‘No, I eat them actually. Let’s get off Magnus, can we?’
‘Well, I’ll ring the Andersons. No, I don’t want to go without you, not there. Anderson just wants to talk shop with you. And she is so intense and odd. They asked Monty too, by the way. He refused.’
‘He needs to get out and see more people. Are you going over tomorrow?’
‘Yes. That’s unhappiness.’
‘He’s got to get through his mourning like a long illness. You are good for him.’
‘I hope so. You don’t think he’s likely to kill himself?’
‘Monty? No. No.’
‘He looks so pathetic and wretched, like a sort of lost Harlequin. And yet he looks so sort of pale and clerical too, like a mad priest in one of his stories. He only needs a black hat. If only he could start writing again.’
‘I suspect he’s sick to death of Milo Fane.’
‘All the same it must be wonderful to have invented a character that everybody knows about. There are even Milo Fane Detective Sets at the Supermarket.’
‘Old Monty must be coining money.’
‘I rather wish we had TV. There’s another Milo Fane series on. The papers say Richard Nailsworth is marvellous as Milo.’
‘No, girl, no. No television. Anyway you don’t like Monty’s books any more than I do.’
‘I’ve never said so to him.’
‘Don’t. Writers may know they’re bad, but there’s always a precious bit of vanity left. I’m afraid Monty’s books are all the same, at least the later ones are.’
‘I know, Milo has gone all moral and the victim turns out to be the murderer’s long lost mother or something. I wonder why Monty has never written a straight novel?’
‘He probably can’t. And there’s the cash. Earning those sums could become a habit.’
‘And then he marries a rich girl. Odd how money always finds money.’
‘Sophie might have been a better actress if she hadn’t been so confoundedly well off.’
‘B. darling, shall I ask Monty about – you know – lending us money?’
‘No, for God’s sake. Nothing’s decided yet.’
‘You keep saying that and I feel it’s because of me. You think I wouldn’t want to be married to a poor medical student. How wrong you are!’
‘I know, my darling,’ said Blaise, ‘that you’d stand by me in anything. You’d weather any crisis. I thank you and bless you. But it’s a big step and we must think —’
‘I’ve thought. I’m for it.’
‘You said it was mad.’
‘I just said that at first because I was surprised. And I only meant wonderful-mad. Let’s go straight ahead, and let Magnus Bowles and the rest of them find another trick-cyclist.’
‘You are so brave, girl darling.’
‘I’m not, dearest B. I’m not making any sacrifice. I don’t want to be anywhere else but right behind you, looking at the world through your eyes. I have no other being, no other vision.’
‘My own girl —’
‘Shall I say anything to Monty about the orchard?’
‘We can’t both borrow his money and buy his orchard!’
‘So I should say something about the money?’
‘Not yet, I’ve got to think —’
‘I’ve got those securities, and of course you might get a grant.’
‘Go to bed, girl dear, will you, go to bed.’
‘All right, all right, moody man. Don’t work too long on your book, will you. Why, it’s still quite light outside. How odd the garden looks.’
Montague Small was awakened suddenly by a curious sound inside the house. Or had he dreamt it? He sat up. The memory that Sophie was dead came the usual split-second after waking. As if one were to see the flash of the sword before it bit. The intensity of the pain took all his attention for the moment. He listened again. Silence. It must have been part of his dream. Then he remembered the dream.
On a huge empty plain, a large strange monster lay decapitated. Monty approached and saw the long iron-grey neck, scantily covered with black hairs, the dried blood, the gaping mouths of the severed blood vessels. The huge hideous head lay a little way away from the body, and he saw with fear and horror that something on the surface of the head was moving. Then he saw that a tiny monster, a baby replica of the slain beast, was clinging to the hair at the side and weeping piteously. He saw the falling tears like seed pearls. Suddenly he felt himself to be choking with wild grief, weeping and weeping.
He sat now dry-eyed. Odd that he had been crying so in his dream, but could not cry in real life, had not cried since. Oh, if only tears would come. How terrible all his dreams were now. The freshness and brightness of dream images, as he had once known them, was gone. His hand quested over the night table touching the glass of water, the bottle of sleeping-pills and tranquillizers which Dr Ainsley had given him, his watch, the base of the lamp. He switched the light on. Not yet four o’clock. He would not sleep again now. Dreams conspire with the sleeping consciousness, they feed each other and draw into forgetfulness. But now the thread was broken, the critical suffering mind hideously alert, not to be coaxed and charmed; switched on like clockwork, it raced in misery. It was no good turning the pillow over and pretending to start afresh. He put on his watch. If he wore it in bed it always somehow crept up beside bis ear and woke him with a deafening beat, the sound of eternity heard in a child’s delirium.
He got out of bed and put on a dressing-gown. His abandoned bed lay crumpled and terrible behind him, like snake skin, like a vile face. It smelt foul. He had dismissed the charwoman. How dreadful Sophie had been at the end, clawing at him savagely to share her terror and despair. He thought, she screamed horrors at me to help herself endure. She could not so have loaded any other being. It should have been a cue for compassion, even for pride. He ought to have accepted that suffering from her with profound gratitude as a proof of her love. Instead, when she spitefully attacked him, he shouted back. Their life together ended in a mess of stupid quarrels. They were quarrelling when she died. He would never forgive himself. After all that filth of suffering one might have felt that death was a clean agent: the vile rubble of consciousness cleared away for ever, the poor victim safe beyond the hooks and pulleys of pain, beyond the malignity of the world and of God. But he had made even this austere consolation impossible for himself. He felt that joy, which is a part of all essential things, had departed from his life for ever. Sickening terrors, which he had long wished to spurn away, fed by catastrophe now prowled again. There were moments when he could not see how he could go on living with his mind.
He pulled back the window curtains and switched off the lamp. The garden was already fully visible in cold white lightless dawn light, very quiet, very appalling. The long empty lawn rec
eded, colourless, textureless, like the sheet spread for a ceremonial disembowelling. The two big Douglas firs were motionless, brimful of alienated enigmatic being. The tall privet hedge was featureless as a wall, its chubby leafy roundness flattened by the white light. In the orchard, round the corner towards Hood House, a few birds were tentatively calling, with a compelled despairing clarity. Monty then remembered the boy whom he had seen on the previous evening, standing in the Hood House garden in the twilight and gazing so fixedly towards the house. At first he had imagined for a crazy moment that it was Sophie. He so constantly expected to see her. Could one think so intensely of someone and not be visited? Can ghosts decide to manifest themselves, he wondered.
It so often seemed to him that Sophie was in the house, a breathless quick presence whisking maliciously out of rooms just as he entered them. She travelled with him, already even now changing a little. Was she perhaps really travelling, receding, through some sort of dark echoing bardo? For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ... If she survived as a tormented dreamer did she dream of him, and could her dreaming mind now somehow doom him? Was she wasting in resentful suffering now in death as he had seen her waste in life? Perhaps our thoughts hold the dead captive as they do the living; and perhaps their thoughts can touch us too. ‘What are you thinking?’ she had cried. ‘Oh how it maddens me not to know!’ Or was it he who had said that? Alive, their love had been a mutual torment. Death, which might have imposed a merciful silence upon this dialogue, had not done so. He had so often wanted to silence her thoughts. Were they silent now, or were they still gabbling away just on the other side of his awareness? Could not the survivor end this wicked servitude and set at liberty the frenzied ghost? How was this to be done? They had loved each other. How little this seemed now to avail. Love was itself the madness.
