by Iris Murdoch
Already too Harriet was beginning to change her mind about ‘publicity’. At first it had seemed the ideal that they should all live in the open: only this, it seemed, would really confirm and make perfect Blaise’s return to the truth; and this had seemed at first practically the paramount thing. Also a total lack of concealment would, Harriet felt, help her in that necessary process of ‘swallowing’ Emily McHugh. And did not secrecy still lend to Emily a certain mysterious power? There were many considerations here, not all of them very clear ones, which later seemed to Harriet to have less force. There was David to consider. There was Blaise’s practice. There was poor Blaise himself, still too diffident to say so, but obviously detesting the idea of this exposure. What would it look like to an outsider? Could she ever sufficiently explain her conception here of a world redeemed? She pictured Adrian’s tongue-tied embarrassment, the pain it would cause him. He had never quite liked Blaise. Then there was the whole obscurity of the future. Even the idea of Blaise becoming a doctor seemed again disputable, though Harriet had felt combatively eager to expound it to Emily. Blaise, wrapped in the euphoria of his new innocence, seemed to have less grasp than ever upon his own arrangements. Harriet felt, with tender anxiety, his dependence upon her. She had spoken bravely of selling the house, but she had never felt less like doing so. The house had, as Harriet intended, impressed Emily. The house was, after all, the fortress and the symbol of their united family, Harriet and Blaise and David, as it had always been. Certainly it would be foolish now to do anything irrevocable in a hurry, and perhaps discretion was for the present the wisest course; and Emily was not the sort of woman Harriet would ever have wanted to be friends with, or even be acquainted with, of her own free wish.
As Emily, the tears jerked away, was leaving, Harriet on a sudden impulse had asked her to come over for a drink on Saturday about six. ‘And do bring your friend Constance Pinn.’ Blaise had several times mentioned this woman with whom Emily had so long shared her flat; and although she did not exactly conceive of her as a chaperon, Harriet had heard with some satisfaction of this sharer. She did not now want to assure herself of Miss Pinn’s existence, she did not doubt it. She wanted simply to feel the controls firmly in her hands. She wanted to be the recognizer, the authorizer, the welcomer-in, the one who made things respectable and made them real by her cognizance of them. The more she could ‘oversee’ the situation, the safer she would somehow feel. She had added, ‘I’ll ask Monty Small too, I’m sure you’d like to meet him. And David will probably be there.’ Harriet wanted Monty to see Emily because she wanted to be able to discuss her with him. And she intended to beg David to appear at least for a moment, to remove a little of that anxiety from her. For she now more and more saw that the really important and central person was Luca.
It was of course because of Luca that Blaise had a continuing obligation to Emily. If there were no Luca, Blaise would have a very different set of duties now, and in respect of Emily possibly none. But more than that. In a way that almost frightened her, Harriet was conscious of having given her heart. With the characteristic cunning of true love, she was already manipulating the future. David must ‘accept’ Emily because David must accept Luca. Harriet felt that unmistakable possessive yearning, a yearning whose great strength would now have to be a secret even from Blaise. She would have to be patient, to be enduring, to be ingenious. She wanted Luca.
It was Saturday morning. David had left the house early. Breakfast did not really take place any more now. The kitchen, centre of consciousness of Hood House, was now disordered. The cups hung differently or not at all. Homeless objects lay about in heaps. The dark woodwork of the dresser was unscrubbed and the red tablecloth was last week’s. His mother ate nothing and did not even sit down. Bright-eyed with her private anguish, she waited on his father who ate his eggs and bacon smiling and constantly looking up. David could not eat, but pretended to so as not to have the distress of being coaxed by his mother. He drank some coffee and tinkled his plate, then padded quietly out of the house and ran away down the road.
The previous evening his mother had given him a long talk. He had at first, at very first, feared that she would break down and weep tears upon him. He had pictured himself holding her in his arms and gazing steady-eyed at his father over her heaving shoulder. That had seemed an awful vision then. Now it was an image of an impossible consolation. Most horrible, most obscene of all, was his mother’s courage, her compassion, her grip: his father’s pink humble relieved face. Better the dignity of cries and fierceness. Besides, this dreadful tolerance was giving a sort of guaranteed continuity to the situation. David had received a very horrifying shock, but with the immediate sense that although everything was broken and could not be mended, at least the pieces would be quickly cleared away. His father had been ‘found out’ and would have now to put an end to his foul double life. The nightmare news was that the double life was to go on.
Last night David had dreamed that a mermaid with the face of his mother was holding a live fish in her hand. First she caressed the fish, then began, looking intently at David, to squeeze it David tried to speak, to say ‘Don’t hurt the fish,’ but he could utter no sound. He reached out his arms to her, pleadingly. But now the fish was dead, squeezed into a horrible nauseating pulp. David tried to scream and woke himself with the utterance of a tiny sound. He felt for a moment relief, the security of his room, then remembrance. He turned the light on. Upon his bedside table lay his Swiss penknife, his compass, a killer whale’s tooth which Uncle Adrian had brought him from Singapore, a speckled granite pebble from a Scottish stream, a Georgian penny and a very small teddy bear called Wilson, whom he always kept carefully hidden during the day. He now suddenly swept them all off with a crash on to the floor; and in the silence after the crash knew mat they would never again accompany him upon the journey of the night.
He lay awake remembering the talk he had had in the late evening with his mother. She had come to his room and sat upon his bed, her face tremulous and coaxing, strained into that awful bright brave expression. She was explaining to him the inevitability of it all. His father could not abandon this woman and her child. They had to be supported and visited, they could not be just ignored. And since they were there, in his father’s life, in her life, in David’s, was it not better to pity them and to help them, rather than to regard them as enemies or objects of horror? ‘They are – you see – poor things – like prisoners – like refugees -’ his mother had said, trying to find the right words, trying to unlock, for her extremity, his gentleness.
David, expressionless, rigid, understood perfectly. He understood, as if he could physically see it, his mother’s desperate need to dominate the situation, to as it were encircle it. In so far as his father still cherished this other woman, he must do so authorized, motivated, powered by his wife. Harriet was reaching out urgent tentacles to grasp it all and hold it by her own force together. And David read in his father’s humble obedient look the present success of this holding. David did not try to explain to his mother how impossible any such acceptance was for him. These aliens were for him destroyers, defilers, foes, and could never be anything else. They had murdered his joy and could threaten his sanity. He hated them, he hated the faces of his parents as they struggled and shifted to survive, to manage, to forgive. He felt crammed to the gills with the violence of his hate.
And as he sat staring at his mother, who now seemed like an actress, he saw yet more terrible things. She cared for the little boy, his foul nightmare brother. He was to have a bedroom at Hood House. He would keep his things in that room. He would be there at night, Luca the vile toad boy, inside David’s very own sacred place. His mother would go to him at night and kiss him. She was filled with a private excited tenderness which she attempted to conceal from David, but his ruthless judging eye saw all. This, in her anguish, was her strange unexpected and chief consolation. She had always wanted another child. David had felt himself burdened by her too exclusive lo
ve. But he had, even as he thrust her petulantly from him, rested too in the absolute infallible earth-guaranteeing certainty that she thought about him all the time and that he was the goal and centre of her life. Now looking at her coaxing quivering lying face he realized that what he had thought of as troubles in that world had been idle discontents of the dweller in paradise. Suddenly, as if by the fiat of a wicked fairy, he had been utterly dispossessed.
How much the world was changed he experienced and tested as he ran, or now loped, along a way which he had made his own, down the leafy road, past the massive brick houses behind their wide lawns, under their big trees, along beside the high wall of the park, then on to a footpath which led into real country, tame but real, farmers’ lands where black and white cows grazed upon a humpy green hill. Beyond the hill, now just visible, raising a huge unnatural brown flank above the fields was the new motorway. Blaise and Harriet had greatly bemoaned and vigorously petitioned against the coming of the motorway along their quiet valley, but David had rather liked it, had at any rate adopted it, having seen it grow from a few wandering men with flags, lost among the trees, to the huge juggernaut it now was, raised high up above the irrational little lanes and the winding hawthorn hedges, crazily out of scale with the rounded hillside and the black and white cows, sweeping onward with its white concrete surface glittering in the sun, almost now finished but still huge and silent as any abandoned lonely monument in the midst of that quiet country.
David in hisflight had reached the place where, so dramatically it had lately seemed to him, the chaotic brown tumbled earth of the embankment, the great curving side of the thing, rolled like volcanic lava, like a strange immobilized sea, out on to the ordinary grass of the ordinary meadow: a meadow which David had known before the coming of the motorway, where he had searched for mushrooms in previous autumns, in lost quiet golden hazes. But now already the arrested volcanic sea seemed that much less strange, seemed a little to belong to the country. The big brown flank was no longer quite brown, was misted over with patches of grass and little white daisies and red poppies and starry clumps of red and yellow pimpernel and sky-blue bird’s-eye. A large pipe which passed under the roadway already carried a captive stream which debouched as a sandy rivulet looking as if nothing odd had happened to it and it had been running along that pipe all its life. David paused automatically at the pipe which he usually shouted into (there was a weird echo) but then realized that the happy time of shouting into pipes was over for him for ever. He began to climb up the side of the embankment. I am only a child, he thought as he climbed, I am only a child. How can they do this to me?
On the thick concrete surface of the road he was alone. In the distance a few lorries and figures of men marked the further progress of the monster, soon now to link up with another monster and become a humming lifeline of the New Britain, banishing silence for ever, day and night, from that peaceful valley. These were the last days of the silence. David walked into the middle of one of the carriageways and lay down on his back, the sun dazzling into his eyes, a huge blue quiet heaven above him traced over by white trails of high soundless aeroplanes. And as with the pipe into which he had wanted to shout, he felt again the physical automatic memories of a lost happiness in the familiar feel of the warm gridded concrete touching his back through the thin cotton of his shirt. He felt too, as he lay down in the sun, something else which was now automatic, sexual desire, gripping him like a teasing tormenting hand reaching down from the blue vault of the sky.
How irrevocably spoilt, down to its minutest detail, his world was now. Even the countryside was spoilt, the animals, the birds, the flowers. There was nowhere to run to. Poor innocent toads had been desecrated for ever. The rest would follow, all his secret private things. He had heard his mother say how much Luca cared for animals and how greatly he would enjoy exploring all the fields and woods around Hood House. How can I bear it, he wondered, and how can I bear it alone? His status of only child, which he had sometimes idly complained of, had been really the foundation of his life. He, his father and his mother had made one indivisible being, a trinity of scarcely separable persons where love circulated in a ceaseless life-giving flow. This had never ceased to be for him, even when he had of late become so sulky and so restless. He had still felt himself the invulnerable absolute focus of loving thoughts.Now suddenly this composite being was no more. He saw with panic the faces of his parents changed into unrecognizable masks by guilt, by revolting humility, by false lying compassion, by vicious disloyal tenderness, by preoccupied alienated secrecy. His father, whom he had, even during his recent sulks, so unquestioningly admired, who had been a secure colossus in his life, was suddenly pitiful, guilty, tiny, found out and pathetically asking favour, while at the same time complacently continuing his crime. They do not know how I feel, he said to himself, they just do not know how complicated I am, they think I am simple and can be talked to simply. Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go on and on and nothing would stop it. And no one from now on for ever would know how much he suffered and what it was really like to be him.
How can I bear it, he thought, how can I go on bearing it without becoming something savage and awful? There seemed a requirement of violence, something he had never known before. The mild image of Jesus, never far from his mind, rose quietly over the horizon of his grief. Help me, Lord, he prayed, oh help me. Let me not die of misery and hate. So was he not alone? Was he then thoroughly and into his bitter depths known by Someone? Had he a benign Companion who could judge and console, and turn what was evil somehow into good? Was there even here some positive good thing which he and he only could perform? Was there invincible Good in the world after all? He gazed upon the calm pastel-shaded image of the Redeemer which hovered like a ghost within the sun-reddened cave of his now closed eyelids. And he knew, with a return of even deeper agony, that this appealing vision was only an empty fantasm after all.
‘Your resemblance to the Old Man of the Sea is becoming tedious to me.’ Monty’s voice.
‘Who was that on the telephone? Your mother?’ A strange voice.
‘That was Harriet asking me to come over at once. Emily’s there. As I told you, you’re invited.’
‘I’m not sure that I want to come,’ said Edgar, for it was he.
‘Do as you please. If you stay here you’d better not drink any more of that whisky. Good-bye.’
Edgar and Monty were sitting on the verandah. David who, unseen, was listening, was standing in the Moorish drawing-room, beside the purple sofa, near to the de Morgan-tiled bookcase which had been a fountain in Mr Lockett’s time. He had spent the whole day wandering about on or near the motorway. A haze of hunger and faintness travelled with him, buzzing lightly. He felt disembodied and mad as if he had become some sort of demon. No, not disembodied: the great hand of physical desire, descending from those heavens where his friend Jesus had once lived, had been twisting him all day. Vague images of girls floated around him, battering him like malevolent butterflies.
After five o’clock he had begun intensely to need to talk to Monty. The idea of talking to Monty suddenly, in a world without solace, presented itself as a refuge. He ran, sometimes staggering a little under the hunger and giddiness haze, back across the fields, along the lane, beside the wall and through the leafy roads as far as Locketts. And now Monty was not alone and was just going to go out to meet that dreadful woman.
Standing in the half-shuttered room, David decided to wait to see if Monty would leave the house by himself, and then to pursue him.
A book lay open upon the table. Poetry. In Greek. David’s mind, switched like a well-trained engine, read the words, which he knew well,
Then swift-footed Achilles answered him. ‘Why, oh beloved head, are you come here to tell me what things I should do? Indeed, Patroclus, I will fulfil them all and be obedient to your bidding. But please come nearer to me, and even for a little while
let us embrace each other and satisfy our hearts with grieving.’ So saying he reached out his hands, but could not clasp him. The spirit like a vapour fled away beneath the earth, gibbering faintly.
The terrible image of bereavement and loss, winged by beauty, seized on him like an eagle and he cried aloud. He sat down upon the purple sofa and wept, putting his face in his hands.
‘What’s that?’ said Edgar, jumping up in alarm.
Monty threw back the shutter and the weeping boy was revealed. ‘It’s David. Harriet’s son.’
Monty was in a mood of irritation and self-dissatisfaction almost amounting to anger. He had intended to spend the morning in meditation and to bring his mind into a state of absolute calm. He was becoming now almost frightened by his mental condition. Other men suffered bereavements and did not seem to drift away into this state of almost unliveable consciousness. The idea of killing himself was now more real to him than it had ever been, and he understood for the first time how it is that men can prefer extinction to the continuation of agonizing mental pain. He simply must somehow stop himself from suffering in this way. A guilt about Sophie roved sharply inside him and a cinematograph in his head re-enacted and re-enacted certain scenes. He must, he thought, now somehow switch himself off or else move on into some new and even more awful mode of being. But even as he composed himself into slit-eyed immobility and called upon the stillness beyond the stillness where the fretful struggle of self and other is eternally laid at rest, he knew that he could not thus achieve what was needful. Such wisdom as he owned had told him that he could only survive his grief by giving in to it entirely, and though that way might seem to lead into madness there still appeared to be no alternative.
