by Iris Murdoch
‘My mother says will you come in to tea.’
For a moment Luca said nothing. He simply stared up at the stern unsmiling face. Then he said, ‘Would you like to see a toad?’
David, who had until now been simply hot with that confused boiling of misery and outrage, and who had uttered his mechanical words as ungraciously as possible, felt suddenly that characteristic cleavage of the soul which is the cold call of duty and, even in his anger against it, recognized it. He breathed deeply and said, ‘Yes.’
Luca, moving himself gingerly, knelt up and gently introduced both his hands into the pocket of his blazer. The hands emerged holding a small brown toad. The toad wriggled a little, and then settled into the supporting hands, looking upwards with its bright bulging eyes and an air of concentration which was oddly like a frown. Its dry dark spotted skin glimmered in the sunlight.
David looked at the toad. He knelt down on the grass.
‘They’re looking at something together,’ said Harriet.
Her voice was a little quavering but she was well in control. What had become plain to Emily at the moment of meeting had been as plain to Harriet as if she could have looked into Emily’s soul as into a box. Where Harriet had expected the terrifying challenge of hatred, suddenly there was none, there was only an object of pity. For Harriet had seen the guilt and the shame which Emily had so greatly wanted to hide from her; and all these things had been for Harriet a sort of searing consolation.
She had not attempted to describe their talk to Blaise, in fact she felt that any mundane description of it would simply mislead him. So much had passed between them which words did not then express and could not now explain. She felt that her meeting with Emily had been an achievement. She had done, against Blaise’s judgement, what she thought to be right, and she had behaved to Emily with all the self-assertive dignity and kindness which she had intended in her heart She had, in Emily’s territory, planted her own standard and with no censorious device upon it The vulgar brawl which Blaise had mutely feared could not have been more impossible, and this impossibility had been imposed by Harriet’s own firm gentle will. She had done the very best she could, she had been brave, and the little meeting with Luca, that had been a success too, something so mysteriously important and so curiously easy.
At the same time, Harriet knew that the shock wave had not yet really come. She was simply, before it arrived, carrying out as many quick sensible movements as she could, shoring up her place, her home, against the tornado. Awful grief and fear hovered somewhere near to her, hanging in the still atmosphere like a faintly restless black balloon which she would touch lightly with her hand and push gently further away. But she was in control of herself, and as she suddenly realized with an absolutely new feeling of energy, she was simply in control. All these people now depended upon her. She, and only she, could, if it were possible at all, help, heal and avert disaster. And now in the livid light before the storm she could see Blaise very clearly too. She could see him now and understand him perfectly, as he looked with amazement out into the garden where his two sons were kneeling on the lawn together, looking down at something and talking.
‘My God,’ said Blaise, ‘Oh my God.’ He felt from within his idiotic humble smirk. It was the best that he could do to hide a sort of stupid relieved joy, improper and insane. Harriet had said that her meeting with Emily had ‘gone well’. Clearly there had been no slanging match. Blaise had not returned to Emily. He had driven Harriet home to lunch. Lunch had been an empty ceremony since neither of them could eat at all. They had conversed awkwardly, gently, about Emily, then about their own past, the early days of their marriage. After lunch Blaise had slipped out and telephoned Emily from a call box. She said in that heavy way he knew so well. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ ‘Yes. Forgive me.’ ‘Fuck off.’ ‘You were kind to Mrs Placid.’ ‘There is no Mrs Placid.’ ‘You were kind to Harriet.’ ‘She was kind to me.’ ‘May I come and see you tomorrow morning?’ ‘Do what you bloody like.’ Emily rang off. It had been a very merciful conversation.
Blaise had returned to the house and tiptoed to his study. Harriet was lying down. He lay down too, relaxing upon the sofa, gazing at the ceiling, and letting relief lift him up like a tide. So far, so good. So far, they were both being kind to him. Had he, oh Christ, got away with it? Would God, in the form of two wonderful women, forgive him, grant him salvation after all? It was too early to know. But today there had been such mercy. I am unworthy, he said to himself, blinking and grinning at the wonder of it all. Was it conceivable that the worst was over? Blaise too saw the black balloon of grief and possible catastrophe and he tapped it away from him with a light touch. He felt love for Harriet and love for Emily welling up in his heart, and realized that he was experiencing this double love for the first time in his life as innocent.
Now as he saw David and Luca so impossibly together he wanted to yell out to the universe in gratitude. He turned to Harriet and saw how tenderly, how perfectly, she understood all that he was feeling. ‘Oh – you -’ she said, in her way; and took him into her arms and pressed his beaming head down against her shoulder.
‘Isn’t it funny,’ said Harriet. ‘The only person he told was Magnus Bowles.’
‘Really,’ said Monty.
‘I feel I’m living in a myth,’ she said. ‘I feel the pain itself is giving me the energy to bear it. Is that crazy?’
‘No.’
‘Of course there’ll be shock later. Secondary shock, or whatever they call it. People die of that.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I feel so talkative, as if I were drunk all the time. I feel as if I were seeing myself all the time, and admiring myself for standing it’
‘You are wonderful.’
‘Did you tell Edgar?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He wanted to punch Blaise.’
‘How sweet of him. Oh Monty, it’s all so extraordinary. I woke up in the morning and – oh it was such pain – just for a moment I thought it was all a bad dream.’
‘Yes.’
‘I feel I’m living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.’
‘So you’re on top of it.’
‘Yes. Now. It’s odd, but I feel so full of power, I’ve never felt this before, I’ve always depended on other people, on the strong people, my father, Adrian, then Blaise, even David. Now suddenly I feel – everybody depends on me. She depends on me. Oh Monty, the little boy is so enchanting.’
‘You don’t resent him?’
‘No, how could one, how could any woman resent a child —’
‘I suspect some women could,’ said Monty. He was not sure. How much did he really know about women? Were they different from men? Somehow he had never quite classified Sophie as a woman. He was annoyed with himself because he found Harriet’s state of mind so difficult to imagine and because he was disconcerted by her reactions.
‘Luca likes me too – it’s quite a thing – it’s like a sudden new love in the middle of it all – like a —’
‘Spring in the desert. Blossom in the wilderness.’
‘You’re laughing at me! Monty, you are doing me good!’
‘I haven’t said anything.’
‘You don’t need to. I feel – you see, you’re the only person I can talk to, and I feel now for the first time that I can talk to you perfectly. There’s perfect understanding between us, I can say anything and be understood.’
It was true. Harriet’s amazing exhilaration, there was no other word for it, had swept away all the old barriers of her nervousness, his coldness. She was suddenly able, with a strong instinctive deftness, to run the conversation. She was, probably for the first time in her life, utterly obsessed with herself, interested in herself, pleased with herself, with her ablity to endure pain, with what she had called her ‘power’. This great flowering of self-pleasure gave warmth, gave light.
‘I took Blaise for better or worse. Suppose he had cancer o
r were disfigured or blind or lost his mind? I’d nurse him, I’d look after him. Of course I never conceived of this sort of trial, but how could I fail it? I mustn’t, I can’t. Really, Blaise and I have never felt closer to each other, never more perfectly in love, it’s made us both so much more alive, like being shipwrecked together.’
‘You are very good.’
‘No, no. You see, he’s so relieved, it’s like being a priest and giving somebody absolution, seeing the burden drop off. His relief is so wonderful. I’ve never been able to give someone I loved something they wanted so much. It’s pure hedonism.’
‘Goodness is finding pleasure in right acts.’
‘He’s so humble, and oh he is so relieved, not to have to lie any more, to have all that awful fear and deceit swept right away. And he really is sorry, and so frank about it all, not sparing himself at all, he really is contrite, I’ve never seen him like that, I’ve never seen anybody like that I just want to hug him and hug him and tell him that it’s all right’.
‘Well I’m glad it is all right,’ said Monty.
Misfortune had crushed him like a worm, deprived him nearly of life. The woman seemed to thrive on it. Her eyes were all dazed and glowing, her dark goldeny-brown hair, tumbling in a thick involved braid down her neck, seemed to be done in a new way, or perhaps it was just a felicitious accident She looked younger. As she talked, making vigorous gestures with her plump arms, her long blue and white striped dress swept the floor. He could smell the newly-washed cotton material, Harriet’s face powder, warm flesh, roses.
They were sitting in a couple of the white basket chairs on the small tiled verandah, whose glass roof was supported by formalized teak caryatids, now the worse for wear and splitting a little like old ships’ figureheads. The sun blazed on the glass, making a flower of light at one corner, and the hot thick perfumed air shifted slightly about in big perceptible polleny bundles. Monty, his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal thin white black-furred arms, was sweating. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. He was drinking the gin and lemon and parsley mixture. Harriet, drunk with her own survival, was drinking nothing. Monty felt restless to screaming with a strange irritation. Had he hoped, like a vampire, to batten on his neighbours’ trouble, and to be helped in his catastrophe by surveying theirs, and was he now disappointed to find a triumph of courage and decency where he had expected a shambles of resentment and grief, a holocaust of rage and hate? Had he really wanted to console a broken Harriet?
‘All the same,’ he said, ‘your troubles are only beginning. Emily McHugh exists, and —’
‘Yes, yes, I know she exists, I know it. Blaise is with her now, I sent him to her. Monty, you must meet her. I pitied her. I liked her, and she didn’t hate me. I want her to come here, I want her to see it all, a real family, a real home. I want her to accept it and not to feel condemned or excluded. Monty, do you think I’m mad? I thought at first I’d die of grief and shock. But now – you see it’s got to be all right, so it will be all right. And I feel so crammed full of will power, I think I could make the universe obey me.’
‘You are wonderful,’ Monty said again. In her own way she will make the other woman suffer, he thought, she will punish her; and he felt less annoyed.
‘And I think I shall adopt Luca.’
‘But Luca has a perfectly good mother of his own! He even has a perfectly good father of his own!’
‘No, I don’t mean literally. I’m not as mad as that. Of course he must live with Emily, but I want him to come here a lot, I want him to have his own room here. The poor child could do with a second mother. We’ve decided to move him to a better school.’
‘We?’
‘Blaise and I. I’m going to see Emily again tomorrow. Blaise is sure she won’t refuse. Of course it will all take time.’
‘But don’t you feel any ordinary jealousy?’ said Monty. Was it possible that those apparently automatic torments which had crippled his own marriage could be cured after all by simple magnanimity, if that was what it was?
‘Yes, of course I do,’ said Harriet, picking up the skirt of her striped dress and tucking it under her. ‘Monty, I think I will have a little of that mixture after all. I’m talking big to make myself feel that I can manage, because if I can’t manage we’re all smashed up. You don’t know how brave I’m having to be not to become a screaming mess.’
‘I sorry,’ he said. I am stupid, he thought She is really brave and intelligent. I keep wanting to imagine it isn’t genuine, but it is genuine.
‘I feel such idiotic jealousy about the past, as if that mattered, it’s gone, it doesn’t exist any more. But he was in love with her, and he did sleep with her.’
‘Doesn’t he now?’ said Monty. Blaise had always been a bit vague on this point.
‘No, of course not! That’s what it’s all about. She’s a remnant, a duty –’
Was Blaise lying, Monty wondered. And then he thought sadly, I shall never know. Blaise will not forgive me for being the calm spectator, he will not forgive me for sitting here with Harriet and hearing her describe his contrition.
‘Oh I feel jealousy, yes,’ said Harriet, gazing with her big vague eyes down the garden, where Panda and Babu and Seagull were lying panting in the sun. ‘Only I’m determined not to go mad with it I’ve got to be in control of myself and of them. They expect it of me, even Emily expects it, Blaise says. I’ve got to save them all. Of course it’s a wreck, a crash. Many marriages would simply break. Only mine isn’t going to. All claims will be met It’s like being bankrupt but determined to pay. We shall make a place for Emily in our lives, we shall have to. I won’t enjoy it, I shall often hate it But as you said, she’s a fact, the boy is a fact. Of course if it hadn’t been for the boy, Blaise would have left her long ago, she knows that But given that the boy is here he may even help, he may make us all behave better. An innocent can help.’
‘How about David?’ said Monty. It was not that he wanted to needle her, he just wanted to be sure that she had seen everything, that they had looked at it together.
Harriet, still gazing, frowned with pain. ‘’He’s very hurt and he won’t say anything to Blaise. He may be – no, I won’t say the most damaged, for I won’t let him be damaged, I won’t let him. And he’s old enough and wise enough to carry it I’ll help him. He’s not a child. But it will be a long task and we’re only at the beginning, it will be a long daily task. It’s like having been free all one’s life, and then suddenly being conscripted. Oh Monty, you will help me, won’t you?‘ Without turning, she stretched out her hand and Monty took it and held it Ajax appeared from the orchard. He smiled briefly at his mistress and then lay down and panted with the others. ‘Monty, tell me more about what Edgar said when you told him.’
Monty released her hand. ‘He said he was sorry he wouldn’t be able to talk to you any more.’
‘Oh, but tell him he can talk to me! I don’t want it to be taboo. The more people I can talk to about it the better I’ll feel. It’s got to be public, like marriage itself, otherwise it will be a nightmare.’
‘Have you discussed this with Blaise,’ said Monty. ‘I mean about it being public?’
‘No, not exactly – we haven’t decided – Anyway, do tell Edgar he can come and talk to me.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Monty. His irritation returned. Harriet’s exalté mood had something ridiculous about it. No good would come of all these fine intentions.
‘I’d like to talk to Magnus about it too,’ said Harriet.
‘I doubt if that will be possible,’ said Monty.
‘Isn’t it strange how one gets extra strength to cope with something like this? I feel I’m out in the open, out in the truth, like an open field with the wind blowing. I thought at first I should never be able to stop crying and I felt so weak and crushed. Then somehow I saw that only loving Blaise much more would help us all out, and then I found I simply had that much more to give!’
‘Suppose Emily McHugh won’t p
lay?’ said Monty.
‘She will play,’ said Harriet. ‘She’ll have to. We’re both in a new country where we’ve got to live. That sounds grim but you see, I know she didn’t hate me – I’ll get Emily to play.’
‘So you’re the boss.’
‘You’re laughing at me again. And you’re looking at your watch. I must go. Come, boys, good boys. Monty, help me to keep it up. You will, won’t you? And don’t forget to tell Edgar. Oh, Monty, you really mustn’t give me another Lockett’s thing! That cup must be quite valuable, look at all the gold leaf or whatever it is! Whatever will your mother say?’
When Harriet was gone Monty went into his study, which he kept dark on these bright days. Locketts had dark red wooden shutters, decorated with stiff pointed tulips with blue girls’ heads for flowers. These he kept pulled to across the open window, and the room was full of garden smells but fairly cool, the marbled wallpaper dimly swirling, the coffered ceiling studded with shadows, the narrow stained-glass cupboards, designed for tall vases and willowy madonnas, gleaming dully, their jewelled foliage extinguished. Monty fell on his knees in the accustomed attitude, but could not clear his mind of thoughts. He felt himself tensely seeking a healing blank which his anxious mind in the same movement rejected. Imagery of above and beyond was of no use now. He felt caught and full of unclassified resentment After a while he sank down sideways, holding one ankle, and stared at the thin blurry line of gold between the shutters. What had he expected and wanted? To hear Harriet cry out, to feel needed by her, to see that marriage in ruins?
How readily, how naturally, one makes a home inside the misfortunes of others. If this was still an instinct for him he had achieved nothing. He felt an old hatred for himself which he knew to be the most fruitless thing of all. I must get away, he thought. But where to? Soon his mother would be arriving. Sitting there he grew gradually quiet. The image of Sophie reasserted itself, painful but with a sense of the accustomed. He saw her glinting spectacles, her little well-shod feet, her perky avid head, her small air of begging for attention, which betokened all that was, after all, so touching and defenceless about her. He recalled a dream he had had last night. He had been a big blinded animal, and Sophie, naked except for a huge floral hat, was leading him upon a chain. Such small breasts she had. He wished desperately now to weep, but there were still no tears.
