by Iris Murdoch
It was Monty, with his sophistical detective story mind, who pointed out to Blaise how poor his ‘cover’ was and how easily he might be ‘blown’. ‘You need a consistent story,’ said Monty, ‘and one with a built-in safeguard against investigation.’ Thus ‘Magnus Bowles’ came into being, invented and kept going as a changing person by Monty. Blaise could not have invented such an elaborate lie: at the start because this degree of deliberation seemed a sacrilege against his love (‘I must just take my chance,’ he had said to Monty), later because he was so drained of energy and spirit by the whole business, he could invent nothing. He found that he could not even, given Magnus as an accepted fiction, keep him going without Monty’s continual help, which was increasingly necessary after Harriet began to take such an unfortunately passionate interest in the poor fellow. Indeed by now Monty had crazed Magnus up to a point where Harriet was thoroughly distressed about him. The deception involved weekly conferences with Monty, during which the latter continued Magnus’s history and produced fresh ‘Bowlesisms’ for the consumption of Harriet.
This dependence on Monty irked Blaise, though of course he trusted Monty’s discretion absolutely. He never introduced Monty to Emily, though Monty occasionally dropped hints on the subject. Magnus Bowles was indeed a great convenience, ensuring regular unquestioned unalterable absences. The earlier panics, when Harriet had innocently contested her husband’s determination to be absent on a certain day, had reduced Blaise to nervous frenzy. And Magnus could also be relied upon as a device to cover any sudden emergency. Harriet, who regarded Blaise’s relationship with his patients as something sacred, would not, of course, have dreamt of ‘investigating’ Magnus on her own account. She was now entirely used to Blaise’s regular absences with his nocturnal patient. Only, as it seemed to Blaise, Harriet’s curious and more frequent night fears attested some unconscious feeling in his wife that all was not well. Hence the increasing regiment of dogs, hated symbol to Blaise of his own secret depravity.
And now the whole situation had existed for nine years. Luca’s sturdy growth was evidence of its longevity and of its solidity. Blaise’s relation with his second son had never been a happy one. He had been in every ordinary and natural way connected with David’s upbringing and he felt, even when David became ‘difficult’, that he and David belonged to each other. He had no such connection with Luca, though when Luca was a very small child Blaise had been there often enough to play the father, and indeed had felt a frenzy of tender confused love for the hapless creature. He had often put his arms round Emily and Luca and felt how unfortunate they were all three, and how desperately he wanted to protect his little second family and ensure their happiness. Their somewhat derelict and deprived condition, compared with the arrangements at Hood House, even gave him a sort of pleasure, and spurred his possessive love. Inevitably however he had, and especially as he began to turn up at Putney less often, to leave Luca’s nurture and the decisions concerning his daily life to Emily. Luca naturally became Emily’s child, although there was a time when Luca was about five, when his mother seemed positively to hate him. She used to hit the child, though she denied this to Blaise. Blaise felt guilty and helpless. Luca was backward, a bed-wetter, beginning to look like a problem. Blaise was relieved that Emily took it for granted that the child should go to the local state school, although she knew that David went to a public school. Later she used to raise the matter, but only to taunt Blaise. ‘Mrs Placid’s boy’s at a posh school, but that hell-hole is good enough for my son!’ Also later she used to say, ‘You’d have left me long ago if it wasn’t for Luca.’ Was this true, Blaise wondered. Possibly. And ‘I hate that child. If it wasn’t for him I’d be able to ditch you and have a proper life! I love Little Bilham more than I love Luca.’ Emily did deeply love her son, however, only she could not help constantly using him as a weapon against her lover.
There were frequent quarrels about the boy of course, including some rather unexpected ones about religion. Blaise had no religious beliefs, although he had been a devout Anglican as a youth. He had plenty of religious ‘feelings’, but he knew perfectly well what they were all about. His religion had been based on he knew what and had gone to he knew where. He had had however no impulse to resist Harriet’s wish that David should be brought up as a Christian. Harriet introduced David to Jesus Christ at the earliest possible moment, in fact very soon after David had revealed a dawning consciousness of herself and Blaise. Harriet taught David to pray as soon as he could speak. Blaise not only did not object, but actually approved, since he felt that it was very much better for a child’s mental health to be a vague Christian and to drift out than to be a deliberately protected atheist constantly wondering what the mystery is from which one has been excluded. (By ‘vague Christianity’ Blaise meant of course the Church of England. More enthusiastic creeds were another matter.) Besides, a little mild devotion was a painless introduction to the history of Europe.
However when Blaise propounded this reasonable doctrine in relation to Luca, he met with ferocious opposition from Emily, who regarded religion as not only false but (and this was perhaps even worse) ‘bourgeois’. ‘I will not have my child bowing and bobbing and mumbling prayers. Thank God he’s not at a posh school where that farce still goes on.’ Blaise was annoyed, but he was in no position to resist. Luca’s school did profess to teach ‘scripture’, but Luca seemed to gain no contaminating insights from these sessions. Once, quite recently, in Blaise’s presence, he had pointed questioningly to a picture of a crucifix. Emily had replied, ‘A religious idol.’ Luca seemed to know as little about religion as about anything else. And yet: what did Luca know? When he was five he had asked why his Daddy was going away again so soon. ‘To his work,’ Emily said, and laughed nastily. Later the child stopped asking questions. Of course neither of them had ‘said anything’ to Luca, but Blaise saw sometimes in those very dark round eyes suspicion, hostility, perhaps some kind of knowledge. Blaise suffered very much, and with a sort of hopelessness, as he saw that consciousness, with its inevitable condemnation, beginning to take form.
A philosopher said that the spiritualization of sensuality is called love. Blaise had certainly felt his early love for Emily to be all sense, all spirit. The absolute interpenetration of the two gave him, together with experiences of pleasure which he never previously knew existed, a sort of certainty about the whole thing which seemed to create its own truth and its own morality. In the light of this truth his relations with Harriet seemed hopelessly insincere, not only in this situation now, but fundamentally and always. Emily told him that he had married Harriet for snobbish social reasons, and he did not deny this, because although it was not true, something rather like it, it then seemed to him, was. He had loved Harriet. But he had married her in a muddled compromising impure deliberately blinded state, thinking this to be the best possible. He had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost (which so much troubled Maurice Guimarron) by wilfully excluding the possibility of perfection.
All this he saw in the illumination of the dark rays of his glinting girl. Could one doubt the absolutely incarnate truth when confronted by it, as by God? He felt like a disciple in the presence of Christ. So in leading Emily to think that Harriet was unattractive and ageing (he even exaggerated her age for Emily’s benefit) and that his relations with Harriet had become empty, in letting Emily picture Harriet as a stupid fat cow and a snob, he had again not exactly been lying, for these images in Emily represented something which was true in him, though not exactly true of Harriet. In any case were these in any sense lies? There is a level (not necessarily the deepest one) in any marriage where love fails. Emily was a chemical which showed up what had been previously concealed, not making the rest false, but completing the picture.
How Blaise came gradually to change views which he had held to with such certainty was never entirely clear to him. Were the causes of change simple, even vulgar ones, he sometimes wondered? An irregular liaison is always likely to be und
er strain. He had mad periods of suspecting her fidelity, and used to turn up unannounced. There was never any trace of another man, though Emily often threatened him with a rival just to torment him. There were so many strains upon his relation with Emily, strains which began as soon as she started to suspect that he was not going to leave Harriet immediately or even soon. At that time, when Emily’s suspicions were beginning, Blaise was going through a phase of alternating exasperation and euphoria. He realized obscurely that he and Emily had somehow missed the boat, at any rate they had missed the first boat. He could not so easily set himself ‘free’ (a word with which Emily was constantly beating him). But why after all should he be expected to go through the disagreeable and murderous business of becoming ‘free’, if that was what the state was rightly called?
Men in other ages and societies had been able to have two, or many more, women whom they kept incarcerated in separate places and visited when they felt in the mood. An elderly less-loved wife could be retained as an amiable companion, or simply out of pity, and should feel no resentment at that. A man, any man, surely needed various women, there were so many possibilities and styles of love and affection and habit. Why should some of them automatically exclude the others? He led a double life. Did that make him a liar? He did not feel a liar. He was a man of two truths, since both these lives were valuable and true. Thus went his exasperation. His slightly crazy euphoria consisted of a feeling of ‘Well, I’m getting away with it anyway!’ There seemed to be something noble in this, an heroic exercise of power as if he were a sort of interiorized Atlas, holding the two ends of the earth apart by sheer strength. Unfortunately this image in turn suggested that of Samson. And his dilemma now sometimes expressed itself in the feeling that he could only end it all by ending himself.
The ‘vulgar’ causes of change included of course the question of money. Emily omitted no chance of telling him how second-rate, how second-best her own establishment was. She endlessly complained about her lack of independence, while refusing to take a full-time job and tormenting him with her needs. ‘Luca is the iron ball tied to my foot, Luca is my iron foot,’ she sometimes used to say. ‘Surely you wouldn’t leave me if there was no Luca?’ was what he was supposed to reply. (Their conversations were becoming increasingly mechanical.) ‘You wouldn’t see me for dust!’ Emily would then answer. Emily was remarkably, given her character, resigned really to her iron foot, but there were many ways in which she could still make war on Blaise, putting on him a pressure, sometimes intelligently designed to persuade him at last to make what they referred to as the move, and sometimes (it seemed to him) designed in a purely vengeful spirit to reduce them both to misery and spoil their time together.
She ceased to attend to the appearance of either herself or the flat. Both were untidy, slovenly, even dirty. The flat smelt abominably of cats and, during Luca’s prolonged bed-wetting, of urine. The colourful love-nest had become a slum, and Emily seemed to preside with a certain satisfaction over its decline. Money which Blaise gave her to buy a new gas stove was spent on drink. Emily drank more and so did Blaise when he was with her. They quarrelled noisily, careless whether Luca heard them. And lately Emily had taken to waking Blaise up at night, when weary with drink and strife he had fallen into a deep slumber, to continue reproaching him or to announce that she and Luca proposed to emigrate to Australia. Their spiritualized sensuality could scarcely now even serve them as an anaesthetic. The old ambiguities of physical pain had merged into the truly maiming horror of mental pain. The cruelties of their situation could no longer be transformed into its glories. Their quarrels, which had been sham fights, with the image of the bed where they ended, became real fights involving real hurts. The raucous hard-edged voice which he had loved so much, now telling him that he was weak and cowardly and contemptible, filled him with a self-lacerating rage which could gain no sexual release.
Shame, which had once been entirely absent, became the atmosphere of his life. He felt ashamed and venomously angry before Emily, ashamed and obscurely frightened before Luca. When he thought of David he felt a sort of absolutely pure shame which was more piercing than any other. Whereas Blaise experienced his fatherhood of Luca as an obscure form of punishment, he experienced his fatherhood of David, still in spite of everything, in a deep ordinary almost happy way; and it was this defeated happiness which produced the pure and particularly poignant suffering. It was as if David’s father had never been told and could not but be happy. He loved David so much and was so proud of him, and could not help completing this picture by filling in David’s love for i him and David’s pride in him. Any boy wants and needs to admire his father. In earlier and more rational discussions with Emily, Blaise had argued that the shock to David should be postponed to an age when it would do less damage. Emily asked why she was supposed to be concerned about the welfare of Mrs Placid’s boy. But she seemed sometimes to accept the consideration as an argument; perhaps because she needed to feel that there were reasons for the delay in making ‘the move’ which were not simply Blaise’s uncertainty about the absolute value of their love.
Meanwhile David passed in protected ignorance the various milestones of his life, while the tormented lovers continued to argue. How, Blaise constantly wondered, could he bring this desolation and this misery into the serene innocent lives of his wife and son? Of course the desolation was already there, right in the middle of the scene, making Harriet fear burglars and collect dogs, making David’s eyes contract and turn away. For David too, in the black depths of his adolescent distress, unconsciously ‘knew’. Yet this knowledge was infinitely more merciful and less harmful than that unimaginably awful real knowledge which ‘the move’ would involve. How could Blaise, after that, look into David’s face again? He would earn his son’s lifelong contempt, perhaps hatred. Harriet and David had done nothing to deserve those horrors. However much one suffered from the pain of conscience had one not a duty to keep quiet and digest one’s own scandals? Was it not perhaps right that he and Emily, the guilty ones, should continue to hug the poison to themselves, perhaps for ever? Oh, if only he could set it all to himself simply as a task, however wearying, however difficult, however long! How he envied ordinary men their innocent problems, their jobs, their mortgages, their overdrafts! How he envied the bereaved Monty his clean pain!
Blaise felt shame before Emily, before David, before Luca. Where Harriet was concerned something much stronger had been happening which was now his chief and most awful preoccupation. As one mystery wound its way on into deeper defiles of horror, the other mystery, though without thereby bringing him any hope or release, had emerged into a new brightness. At one time Blaise had scarcely recalled Harriet when he was with Emily. Now he scarcely recalled Emily when he was with Harriet. Once Emily had seemed real and Harriet a dream. Now Harriet seemed real and Emily a dream. He had told Emily that he had no sexual relations with Harriet. This had been true. It was true no longer. Harriet had of course silently, perfectly, waited. How much, if only it were not for the devils, he would have enjoyed, and somehow in spite of them did enjoy, being once more with his chaste modest virginal dear wife. How much more satisfying this was than ‘doing things’ with Emily. Harriet had once seemed to lack what Emily possessed in such abundance, ‘seductive vitality’. But now his wife drew him with quiet power, rousing in him mixed intensities of reverence and desire. He had never felt any such emotion in his life before, and he regarded himself with awe. His ‘spy’ life became, in a terrible deprived way, simpler, as a function of these changes which made his whole existence more precarious by supplying him with a new but equally baffling set of motives.
Of course memory falsifies to conceal disagreeable causal connections. But the shift was becoming increasingly clear. It had been anguish to experience the continued maiming of his great love for Emily. It was an even greater anguish to discover that his love for Harriet, which had been obscured and gone underground like a river, was not only intact but was emerging into
the light stronger and deeper and purer than it had ever been before. After all, his innocent love for Harriet, as if unaware of his badness, had simply gone on growing in the natural way in which married love grows. And he instinctively longed for Harriet’s sympathy in his sufferings. If he hurt his finger she sympathized, so why not now? To see the vision of healing love, but no longer to be able to profit by it: is this perhaps the worst suffering of the damned in hell? The fruits of virtue and evil are automatic; he saw that now. But surely, surely, he repeated to himself, there must be a best moral choice, some decent and not too painful, not annihilating, way out, some salvation which could expunge his fault? Could not gentleness and patient imagination somehow unviolently unravel this, or was he condemned to die like a rat in a storm drain? If someone suffers terribly, surely at last it can be said: let there be forgiveness, he has suffered enough. But who could utter these releasing words?
