by Iris Murdoch
The telephone began to ring. Monty slowly got up and went to it. A man’s voice asked if that was Mr Small.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Fairhazel here – you know – er -Binkie.’
‘Binkie!’
‘I’m speaking from Bankhurst School.’
‘Binkie! After all these years!’
‘We were expecting you here this morning for interview.’
‘Oh heavens!’ said Monty. The whole matter had, since his conversation with Edgar, gone completely out of his head. It was not only the intervening emotion. When Edgar had said ‘I cannot write you a testimonial’ Monty had felt that the whole plan was automatically cancelled. But of course Edgar had not in fact cancelled Monty’s appointment! ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ said Monty. ‘I am afraid a rather urgent thing detained me here -a – er – a matter of a forced entry.’
‘Oh I’m sorry. I trust nothing was taken?’
‘Well, one thing of value was taken, but I think it’s going to be all right.’
‘You’re fully insured?’
‘I hope so,’ said Monty. ‘Time will show!’
‘Perhaps we can fix another day for you to come here?’
‘It turns out that I have to go away after all. So I think perhaps we’d better just leave it for the present. I’m so sorry to have been a nuisance – you’ve been very kind to be willing —’
‘Not at all. No doubt you’ll let me know later if – though of course —’
‘Yes, yes, thank you, thank you.’
Monty put the telephone down and began to laugh. Then he stopped laughing and began to calculate how long it was since he had last done so. The huge multi-coloured storm cloud clouds continued to sail in the clear open spaces of his mind.
Blaise turned the key and pressed the door but it would not open. He pushed it in a frenzy, then stopped. It must be bolted on the inside. Why? Fear seized his mind. He rang the bell and waited. Silence. He rang again at length. Nothing. He ran round the side of the house to the kitchen door, but this too was bolted, or at any rate locked and he had no key to it. He peared into the familiar empty kitchen into which the sun was shining, showing the red cloth, some papers on the table, cups not washed up on the old-fashioned sink. He tried the kitchen window, then all the other lower windows, but they were all locked. His mind raced, picturing to him Harriet lying upstairs with an empty bottle of sleeping pills beside her.
That’s nonsense thought Blaise. Harriet would never kill herself, that is not her nature. Of course she has simply bolted the door to keep me out. She is sitting upstairs listening silently waiting for me to go away. This image was nearly as frightening as the previous one. He seemed to see Harriet’s eyes glittering at him venomously, glittering in his mind in a way which he had never seen in life. He felt as if she could see him now, must be observing him from above. He stood back and looked up but could see no one, no vanishing head or twitching curtain in the upper storey. He ran back to the front door and called ‘Harriet! Harriet! Harriet!’ through the letter-box. Silence. The dogs who had gathered to watch his proceedings, now followed him snappishly, barking round his heels. He kicked at them and they withdrew snarling. ‘Harriet, Harriet!’
These desperate frightening cries seemed to him the awful climax of his day. The stupid quarrel with Emily about Kiki had gone on and on. They had continued it mechanically out of tiredness, neither having the creative energy to see how it could be ended. Then the telephone rang. It was a doctor whom he knew at a hospital in central London. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you. One of your patients was brought here. We couldn’t save him. He’s committed suicide.’ ‘Magnus Bowles?’ said Blaise stupidly. ‘No, Ainsley. Dr Horace Ainsley.’ Blaise laid down the phone. Betrayal of trust. He was to have that pain too, that cue for wounding self-accusation and remorse, he was to be spared nothing. God, he had troubles enough without that too. ‘What was it?’ said Emily. ‘Ainsley has killed himself.’ ‘I told you he rang, I told you to see him, I told you ‘Oh leave me alone!‘ Blaise screamed. ‘Can’t you see I’m nearly round the bend as it is?’ They went on fighting.
Blaise left her at last saying he had to go to the hospital to see about Dr Ainsley. He drove straight to Hood House. And as he drove along Western Avenue and came at last to the familiar turning and the familiar quiet roads with their confident capacious tree-surrounded houses, some consciousness in him which had not been told of recent events took form as a weary battered contentment, a relieved feeling of coming home. What he used to feel in the old days, when he returned from battling with Emily at Putney to the unconscious innocent untouched peace of Hood House.
I can’t do it, he thought to himself, I can’t do it, I must be let off this hook, and Harriet must let me off it. Yes, it all depends on Harriet, and if once she sees that she will help me. She helped me before, at the start, when she saw that only her help would avail. How did things go so wrong? I made a mistake, yes, it was just a mistake, and I now see it and can undo it. I was stupidly offensive to Harriet about loving Emily and going away. I should have been much vaguer and less direct. How do I know what I’m going to do even now? There was no need to offend Harriet in that way, I should have been much more careful. Of course she couldn’t stand it, no woman could. She felt she’d been cut right out and that I didn’t need her any more. A woman needs a man to need her. And by Christ I do need Harriet. She is the key. Why didn’t I see it all along, it seems so clear now. Only Harriet can make the situation bearable at all. Of course I’m committed to Emily, whatever that means. Harriet must at least understand that, so perhaps it’s just as well I was a bit brutal and got it across. But now I must try and calm her down, coax her, stop her from being offended and hurt, make her see how much I want her to help me. I can’t live without Harriet’s forgiveness and without Harriet there in my life somehow just like she used to be. Harriet can’t change, she’s not the sort of woman who changes, that’s what’s so wonderful about her. She was only pretending in that letter, angry and trying to hurt me, making me feel I might lose her so as to force me to corne back. Yes, that was it. She was just provoking me to come back. It won’t be easy, she’ll need to be wooed a little, but my really needing her so is the essential thing. Once she understands again that she has real power and isn’t just being put on the rubbish dump she’ll come round and be kind and merciful again. I’ve got to have that quiet place to come to still where Harriet is sitting and sewing and David is doing his homework. I may not be able to be there all the time, but the place has got to exist. ‘You have destroyed that place for ever.’ No, no, said Blaise to the voice in his mind. Harriet can make it exist for me and even now she will.
As he drove along, coming nearer and nearer to Hood House, he felt more and more that he had the solution. He could be saved after all, sanity, honour, peace of mind, the lot. Amidst all the muddle and horrors one thing, for his remaining sense of his integrity, had stayed clear. He was committed to Emily, to live with her mainly, properly, somehow. It was a new phase, yes, a new phase. These words too brought him comfort. It had all happened to him as automatically as the turning of the seasons. He had to stay with Emily and ride out the storm of circumstance without abandoning her. Of course they quarrelled and shouted as they had always done even in the days of perfection. But at nights as he lay exhausted by emotion and distress, quiet at last in Emily’s arms, he had a deep sense of being in the right place. He said this to her more than once, and although she made a sarcastic reply, he felt her joy purring silently up against him and he thought to himself what a wonderful thing it was to make a woman happy.
I ran through it, with Harriet, he thought. There was a sort of cycle. That was good too, but utterly different. And now a new cycle begins. It’s natural somehow. Only I must have Harriet too, absolutely there in the background. She must see that without her nothing can work for me. It’s a lot to expect, it comes to asking her to sacrifice herself, but she’s the sacrificing type and in the
end she’ll see it as her duty. She couldn’t be happy really without that sacrifice. In fact it is probably the thing that will make her happiest to feel that she has saved me. That stuff about throwing herself at Monty was obviously false. Why on earth did I believe anything Pinn said? Harriet couldn’t possibly love anybody but me.
I must see her, thought Blaise, standing once again outside the kitchen door with the intermittently yapping dogs in a group behind him. I must see her and explain it all while it’s so clear in my mind. And he yearned now for his dear wife, to hold her again in his arms and see the light of forgiveness in her face. He rattled the door, trying to estimate whether it was only locked or also bolted. It seemed to be only locked, and the key would be there in the lock on the inside. If he broke the glass panel of the door he could reach in and turn the key. He looked about to find a stone or something with which to shatter the glass. There was a broken piece of paving stone lying on the terrace and Blaise picked it up, weighing it in his hand. As he did this Ajax, in whose mind (already disturbed by hunger: Harriet had forgotten to feed the dogs before leaving and they had been fasting for nearly two days) this action revived some awful puppyhood memory, set up a quick high-pitched hysterical scream, rather like the continuous loud crying of a human being in shock. ‘Oh shut up!’ said Blaise, menacing the dog with the stone. He moved to the door and struck the glass violently, shattering the lower part of the panel. The other dogs had begun to bark too, uttering an unnatural frenzied clamorous yell.
Blaise had put his hand through the jagged hole when suddenly the most agonizing physical pain he had ever felt shot upward through his whole body, and he stumbled, tearing his wrist upon the sharp glass. For a moment, in agony and amazement, he could not think what had happened, it was like a heart attack or being shot. Then he realized that Ajax had bitten him deeply behind the ankle, completely severing the tendon like a cut string. Blaise screamed and turned, grasping at the door for support and again bringing his hand down on to the broken glass. Ajax, snarling and baring his teeth, confronted him, and Blaise saw in a clear awful flash of vision blood, his blood, upon the animal’s muzzle. The hysterically barking dogs were all about him now. He felt a tug and a grab at his trouser leg and Panda’s strong jaws nipping his calf. Then Ajax sprang and Blaise’s fist caught a glancing blow upon the blood-stained mouth, knuckles grating along teeth. I must run, thought Blaise, only I can’t run, I can’t. He tried to run, trying to overcome the agony in his foot, trying to be winged by fear to hop and leap his way out of the frenzied circle of yapping snapping dogs. Seagull had jumped up to bite his swinging hand. Blaise saw the blood flowing freely from his cut wrist and his gashed palm and complete panic overwhelmed him. He saw far off as if it were a refuge, a gap in the fence leading into Monty’s garden and he tried to run, hopping on his sound leg and dragging the other. He must just manage to make himself run. For a few steps he simulated the familiar motion, while the maddened dogs tore at his clothing. Then he stumbled and fell and Ajax’s strong white teeth came for his throat.
Harriet was not used to travelling alone. Of course she was not alone since Luca was with her, but she was responsible for him, he could not protect her from the brusque demands of officials, made now in a language she could not understand. Luca had done well however. He had brought his passport (of which he was very proud) along with him in a little bag of treasures from Fulham. He had even reminded Harriet that she would need her passport. He had held her hand all the time on the aeroplane. Though extremely excited, he was the more composed of the two. Harriet was distraught, tending to tremble and drop things. When she fumbled for passports, tickets, money everything seemed to come jumping out of her bag at once and falling on the ground. She felt clumsy and hot with embarrassment and anxiety. I suppose I ought to change some pounds into marks now, she said to herself, but she had no will to leave the seat in the Hanover airport lounge where she had taken refuge with Luca while they waited for their luggage to come through from the aeroplane. She snuggled the child against her side, drawing her arm around his shoulder, while he looked up at her with his shining calm dark eyes. He was hugging in his arms the mirrorwork elephant and also a small teddy bear in a tartan uniform which he and Harriet had selected at Heathrow.
Harriet was already regretting her flight, though she felt too that it was somehow an inevitable path which must now be trodden to the end. She had sent a wire to Adrian to say that she was coming, but had had no reply from him. Perhaps there had been no time for a reply. She had been incapable of counting up the hours. Perhaps he was away on an exercise or had been moved from Hohne since his last letter. Adrian, once a great letter-writer, did not write often now. Doubtless he had had nothing pleasant to tell of his life and prospects since he had failed the staff college exam. Hohne, though she had never visited it, was not a stranger to Harriet’s imagination since her father had ended his career as Range Liaison Officer there. Adrian had pitied his father’s fate. Now he was at Hohne himself, commanding the HQ battery, another unsuccessful Major Derwent. He had described to Harriet the bare sandy tank-ravaged ranges and the desert of Luneburg beyond. An end-of-the-world destination for an end-of-the-world journey.
Of course Harriet knew from her general experience of the Army that even if Adrian were away his brother-officers (she repeated this comforting term to herself) would assist her. But she did not know how, without a word of German, she was to get to Hohne. She must get money, she must ask somebody. But oh, she felt so hungry (unlike Luca she had been unable to eat on the aeroplane) and so tired and so bewildered and frightened. Blaise had always looked after her on journeys. The desire to reach the shelter of her brother’s protection was at the moment her overwhelming urge. She needed to be where she would be quietly controlled and looked after. She pictured the near haven where she could put Luca to bed and then cry at last. And Adrian would say, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ and she would say ‘I don’t know’ and even that would be a comfort. Her brother was the mildest and gentlest of men. Perhaps he ought not to have been a soldier, only father pushed him into Sandhurst.
Exactly why Harriet had fled was now, in her weakness and her tiredness, obscure to her. It had seemed like a matter of principle. But what was the principle? She could remember saying to herself: I will not be Blaise’s slave. I will not be their slave. Was that the principle? Was that what principles were like? Were not these just feelings? As feelings she could still re-enact and reinhabit them. She thought, it was somehow right to come away. If I had stayed it would have been impossible not to fall into a role of acquiescence. I know what Blaise is like. I have found out what he is like, he would make me pity him, he would make it a matter of rescue. I am not the good person I used to think that I was. If I were forced to be their victim I could not do it with clear eyes and a humble loving mind. I would do it with secret resentment and hatred. Not even that, for resentment and hatred are forms of strength. I would become weak and spiteful and demoralized and crazed with humiliation. I would writhe like a half-killed worm and would have no way of thinking about myself. And Harriet recalled with anguish that wonderful calm self-possession which had seemed so invincible and would never now come again.
Yes, she could rehearse these feelings still, but her mind and her heart were already changing. She regretted bitterly having gone away without David. She had booked the flight for the afternoon leaving no interval in London, so great had been her haste to escape, her fear of some new appeal from Blaise. She had simply not had the will to change her plan. Here were the aeroplane tickets, like authentic messages from fate, and in default of other ideas about what to do she had simply obeyed them. She needed Adrian’s support and counsel, not least because he seemed now to be the last person left. Blaise, Monty, Edgar, Magnus, all gone, and now David too had rejected her. The cruelty of his disappearance was an awful just judgement. That too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her ‘feelings’ and her ‘principles’, the spirit or the courag
e really to escape.
Indeed, what made Harriet, as she sat paralysed, waiting for the luggage to arrive from the aeroplane, feel now most desperate of all was the slow automatic realization that running away had altered nothing. It was an empty gesture. It was not a life-giving leap into freedom. What after all could she do? In the end she had nobody but Blaise. Adrian would be very sympathetic, very rational, very kind, but he would soon want her to go away, to go home. There was no solution, it all came back to Blaise in the end. No one else needs me, she thought, except the children, and they can’t save me. Blaise needs me terribly, he needs my forgiveness to perfect his happiness with Emily. He needs Hood House and a pretence that it can go on and on as before. Perhaps David needs that too. It is certainly what Blaise needs and wants. He cannot confront what he has done. He will beg to be let off and not to be punished. He will pester me for a token pardon and then he will treat me as he used to treat Emily, only it will be easier because I am so much less aggressive and Hood House is there. I can revive Hood House and turn on the heaters and pack up Blaise’s clothes if he wants them and be there to be visited. And he will visit me and grovel and accuse himself and speak slightingly of Emily and indulge his emotions and his guilt and return to her feeling stronger and cleaner. And he will bless me sincerely and think I am good and tell Emily I am ‘wonderful’ and they will laugh together about me.. And I shall be alone. This kindness to him, which is just weakness really, is my only and my last resource. I shall come to it, I am coming to it, I am thinking exactly what he wants me to think, and the only escape from this is a kind of violence of which I am not capable. There is no great calm space elsewhere, thought Harriet, where a tree stands between two saints and raises its pure significant head into a golden sky. What had seemed to be an intuition of freedom and virtue was for her simply a trivial enigma, an occasion for little meaningless emotions. She was caught in her own mind and condemned by her own being.
