by Iris Murdoch
An hour later Gerda was still sitting beside the library fire in a small armchair pulled up so close that her little velvet slippers were right among the ashes. The fire had died down, there were no flames now, only a parade of red sparks upon a blackened log. The log subsided with a sigh and the sparks vanished.
Gertrude had thought: if he had really cared about me he would have seen to it that I went to bed instead of leaving me here. He would have waited like a dog. He thinks only of himself. But this was just a mechanical thought, the kind of thought that came every day. She had forgotten about Lucius, forgotten about their conversation, which although it reflected some of her deep concerns had been merely a way of prolonging his presence, of using it up. She would not appeal to him, and she so feared to be alone.
The house had changed. It had lived with Burke’s life and with Sandy’s life, and before Burke and before Sandy it had cast its ray upon Gerda’s childhood. Living nearby, she had loved the house before she had loved her husband; and when she came to it from her humbler home as a bride of nineteen it had seemed a symbol of eternity. The house had been her education and her profession, and the men, Burke’s widowed father, Burke, Sandy, had made it her shrine. But now, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she and the house were strangers. No one really cared about Sandy’s death, even the house did not care. It had its own purposes and its own future. Gerda had looked at her letters of condolence and seen a heap of bones. She had been an only child, so had Burke. Burke’s relations in the north were only concerned about their chances of a legacy. Her own relations in London, whom she never saw, had envied her grand marriage and were pleased at her misfortune. Her neighbours, Mrs Fontenay at the Grange, the curate Mr Westgate, the architect Giles Gosling, even the Forbeses, were not sincere. The only person who was really sad was the old rector, now retired, and he was thinking of his own death and not of Sandy’s. Gerda had set herself apart and was now an exile in her own home. Her wandering feet roused echoes which she had never heard before.
But it was not even of this that she was thinking as she went up the dim staircase and darkened the long landing behind her. Nor would she think at all of changeling Henry. The thought of Henry was like a door which instantly snapped open showing her beyond the hospital bed with Sandy lying there as she had last seen him, as she had insisted upon seeing him. And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.
At about the hour when Cato Forbes was walking to and fro on Hungerford Bridge and Henry Marshalson was awakening from his first sleep on the jumbo jet high above the Atlantic and Gerda Marshalson and Lucius Lamb were in conference in the library of Laxlinden Hall, John Forbes was sitting beside the big stove in his slate-flagged kitchen, re-reading a letter which he had received from his daughter Colette. The letter ran as follows.
Dearest Dad,
I think I must give up the college, I can save the fees for the term if I leave now, I just asked the office. I kept trying to tell you but you wouldn’t listen and when we argue you always muddle me and I don’t say what I think, please please forgive me. It is quite clear to me now, I have thought it over sincerely and I just don’t feel that my studies are relevant to anything worth while. I talked to Mr Tindall and he agreed, I think he heaved a sigh of relief! I feel I have been deceiving myself and deceiving you and passing myself off as something I am not. Please understand me, Dad, I’ve always wanted so much to please you, perhaps too much! I forced myself against my nature, and that can’t be right, can it. I feel very unhappy about it all. I feel I am a failure, but it is better to stop now and not waste your money any more. I think I never told you how unhappy I was all last year, I am not up to it. It has needed some nerve to be honest with myself and come through to this truth, though I know you will be hurt. At home when you say you must try I say yes I will try, but I’ve felt so wretched about it. You must think I’m spineless, but please please don’t be angry. I have faced up to it and now I know myself, like you were always quoting about Socrates. I want so much to come home. Please don’t try to telephone me, they can’t get me anyway, the hostel phone is out of order, and please don’t send a telegram or write, there won’t be time, just try to understand and don’t think it’s a tragedy, it’s not the end of the world! I’ll find my way in life but it must be my way. I have tried your way, truly I have. There are all kinds of growing up and getting educated which are not academic kinds. One has got to feel free to become oneself. I can learn things, but not in this way. I feel what I am doing now just lacks relevance, for me anyhow. You know I’m not just a ‘silly girl’ like the ones you despise. Please see I have to do my thing—and I don’t mean that in a silly way either. Make things easy for me. I could only explain this in a letter. I do rather dread coming home. I’m so terribly sorry I cost so much money for nothing, I want not to cost any more. I’ll get a job soon, only don’t be angry. I’ll pack my stuff and it can be picked up later. I’ll be home in a few days, I’ll let you know when. Dear Daddy, much much love to you from your loving
C.
John Forbes threw the letter onto the kitchen table which was covered with dirty plates and beer bottles. Earlier in the evening, George Bellamy, the Laxlinden gardener whose services John coveted, had come over to watch colour television and to bring the latest Hall news. John disliked everybody at the Hall, and since he had bought the Oak Meadow there had been a positive, though quite irrational, sense of feud. Gerda made such a muddle over the sale, and wrote afterwards implying that he had pressed her into it. Of course he had felt sorry for Gerda when Sandy died and had written her a carefully composed letter. He had never forgotten the cold letter which Gerda wrote when Ruth died. But then poor Gerda always envied Ruth her beauty and her talents. About his old friend Lucius Lamb, John often thought sadly. And now George Bellamy had brought news of the arrival, expected in a week or so, of the creep Henry. John Forbes disliked and disapproved of them all, but he was always interested in Bellamy’s bits of news.
Colette’s letter was a bolt from the blue, though he now told himself that of course the girl had obviously tried to prepare him for it, only he had refused to listen. He could not bear to think that a child of his was not an intellectual. He had pushed her and encouraged her and taught her himself and pulled strings and tried and failed to get her into a decent university (of course she was a bad examinee) and had had to accept that training college as a second best, not good enough for his daughter but still the best available and good of its kind. He had regularly interviewed her tutor, Mr Tindall, had explained exactly what courses he thought would suit Colette, and had even suggested certain changes in the college syllabus, to toughen it up a little. He had talked for hours with Colette herself about what she ought to do, what subjects she ought to choose, what she ought to concentrate upon, he had done the best he could to help her in the vacations. He had actually found the books for her and put them into her hands!
Perhaps he had used the wrong tactics, he thought now. Women are so odd. He abhorred bullying, and had often thought and said that the domination of men over women is the source of many of the world’s evils. He had always fought for women’s liberation, he had fought, to his best knowledge, for Colette’s liberation! But there was a kind of invincible stupidity in the other sex which simply asked for bullying. After all it had taken them practically the whole of recorded history to invent a simple idea like the brassière. Yes, he had bullied his clever darling wife, now so long dead, and he had bullied his daughter. Perhaps he had been thoroughly unwise and it was indeed just a matter of tactics. He recalled how much he had valued studying when he was Colette’s age. Colette was perfectly capable of enjoying her work and getting a college degree of some kind; then as a graduate student she was sure to do very much better. She was a late developer and a bit of a slow-coach. The trouble was her teachers never saw that, in her slow way, she was really thinking.
And now this half-baked half-witted letter. Somebody must have be
en getting at her. He would telephone Tindall tomorrow. Tindall was pretty flabby actually. John had resisted the impulse to send an angry telegram. Let her come home. He would argue rationally with her and send her back. He would explain to her everything that she would miss in life if she threw away her chances now. He could not let her give up her precious education and become a typist or a flower-arranging ninny or posturing mannequin like Gerda Marshalson. The young have got no backbone, he thought. They are not like we were. They can’t face anything difficult. They haven’t been taught the important difference between getting things right and getting things wrong. They just want to be themselves, but education is the process of extending and changing so as to understand what is alien. No wonder the lazy puling left-wing youth were drifting into pointless anarchism; always moaning, when there was so much good to do and so much to learn and to be cheerful about. Of course the trouble starts at school. And they are all so absolutely soaked in self-pity. I would never have told my father that I was unhappy at college!
It’s a shame that I never got into parliament, thought John. He had been an unsuccessful Labour candidate. Now he had been for many years a university lecturer. Still, we must go on and on trying to improve things, he thought. Anyone anywhere can do that and there is plenty that I can do. He had learnt his own limitations by the same dogged method that he used in the study of history. He came of a Quaker family. He had intended to spend his precious sabbatical leave, which was now just beginning, in writing a history of Quakerism; from a sociological, not a religious, point of view of course. John Forbes had no truck with superstition. As a small child he had soon realized that although his father still went to Meeting he did not believe in God. His father called himself an ‘agnostic’, but that was just a matter of generation. He and his sturdy truthful bright-eyed father had early understood each other. ‘There is no God, John, not like they think,’ his father had told him. His father had taught him never to lie and that the world was godless almost in one breath. Now that the time had come however for John to write his history, he found that he no longer wanted to. There were far too many books already by men who were middling clever like himself. What after all justified a man’s life? Certainly not a book. He would read and think and prepare new sets of lectures. He knew that he was a talented teacher. One must keep hope and sense in one’s life and go on striving. John Forbes had never found these things too difficult. He could still do plenty of good in the world. Only now this valuable time was going to be interrupted by his daughter’s vagaries.
John recalled his paternal grandparents, whom he had known well as a child, he recalled his splendid parents, his noble socially energetic father, his pure high-minded mother, his clever angelic wife who had died so senselessly of cancer. How could it turn out that the children of such a lineage were made of such rotten stuff? Cato had gone to the bad, and now Colette, indulged with every possibility of happiness and improvement, was whining about ‘relevance’ and finding her little simple tasks ‘too hard’! What had he done to deserve such children? Ruth had named the girl, he had named the boy. What a sad eclipse of all their bright hopes.
Cato Forbes, hidden underneath a black umbrella, was walking along Ladbroke Grove with long strides. He passed under the railway bridge and continued for some distance, then turned down a side street. It had been raining all day. Now it was late evening and dark. Cato usually went back after dark. He spent the day wandering about or sitting in library reading-rooms or churches or public houses. He had a decision to make but he could not make it; and the time which passed fruitlessly in this way made the decision more urgent but made the making of it more difficult. Last night he had been sleepless. Tonight he had an appointment.
Ladbroke Grove is a long and very strange street. At the south end of it there are grand houses, some of the smartest houses in town. At the north end, and especially beyond the railway bridge, the street becomes seedy and poor, there are areas of slum property, a considerable coloured population, a mass of decrepit houses let out in single rooms. A small terrace house in this melancholy labyrinth off the Grove was Cato Forbes’s destination. The house itself had been condemned and some of its neighbours had already been pulled down, so that the street ended in a waste land of strewn rubble where the citizens had already started to deposit their rubbish. The area had, particularly in warm weather, an obscure characteristic smell mingled of dust and spicy cooking and rats and urine and deep black dirt. A Sikh friend once told Cato that it smelt like India.
The surviving row of houses backed onto a narrow alley, separated from it by a small back yard and a brick wall. Beyond the alley were other houses, also condemned. Cato swung into the alleyway, putting down his umbrella for which there was now no room. His macintosh brushed walls thick with growths of vegetable filth. He fell over a dustbin. The doorways into the yards, which had once had doors, gaped darkly. Some of the houses were still inhabited. Stepping carefully in the mud, he passed through a hole into a cluttered backyard and up to the back door of a house. He quietly and accurately fitted his key into the keyhole, pressed the door open and moved noiselessly inside. He closed the door and locked it after him.
Before turning on the light he checked with experienced hands that the thick black curtain which covered the window, and which had evidently been hanging there since the blitz, was pulled well across and tucked in at the sides. Then he turned the switch and a feeble naked light bulb, darkened with grease, revealed the kitchen, just as he had left it in the morning twilight, his enamel mug half full of cold tea, a ragged piece of bread, and butter in a paper packet. He took off his macintosh and propped his streaming umbrella in a corner, whence a rivulet proceeded across the floor making pools in the cracked tiles and disturbing a gathering of the semi-transparent beetles who were now shameless inhabitants of the kitchen.
The dim light showed, immediately outside the door, the steep stairs which Cato now mounted to the room above where he once more checked the window which had been partially boarded up and more recently covered by a blanket hung from two nails. All being well he turned on the light, which here was slightly brighter. He ran down again to switch off the kitchen light, then came up more slowly. The little room was dingy and shabby but not totally comfortless. There was a chest of drawers with the drawers standing open and empty, a divan bed with a dirty flimsy green coverlet drawn up over disorderly bedclothes, and a small metal crucifix nailed to the wall above. The speckled linoleum was worn into holes, but there was a cheap newish brown rug. A washstand with a brightly tiled back and a grey marble top was strewn with Cato’s shaving tackle. On the floor was his suitcase, packed, unpacked, packed, now once more disgorging its contents conspicuous among which was a bottle of whisky. The dusty wainscot was decorated here and there by eccentric forms of flattened soup tins which a previous tenant had nailed over the mouse holes. There were two upright chairs and a number of overflowing ash trays. The room smelt of damp and tobacco and the lavatory next door. Cato switched on a one-bar electric fire which stood in the corner, the element emitted a shower of sparks, then settled to a dull glow. He sat down on the divan and lit a cigarette. He was trying to give up smoking again, though really now it scarcely mattered.
After the first few heavenly puffs the cigarette began to lose its charm. He leaned forward covering his face with one hand and letting the hand holding the cigarette drop down until his knuckles touched the floor. He sat there waiting, trembling a little with a kind of excitement which was a kind of misery; and the despair which had surrounded him like a cloud all day, and from which he had sometimes literally run, hoping to leave it behind like a swarm of flies, settled quietly upon him. The surface of his body crawled and twitched all over, his mouth twitched, his teeth clicked noiselessly together, his breathing was like that of a deep sleeper, his eyes, wide with apprehension, moved slightly as if surveying the room, though he saw nothing. He waited.
Cato was a tall man, broad shouldered and now a little stout, with a
big head, thick pouting lips and plump cheeks, large brown eyes, and thick straight brown hair which, since he had become a priest, he hacked jaggedly short. Because of his plump cheeks and rather rubbery nose he had been called Fat Face Forbes at school, or sometimes just Funny Face Forbes or ‘old pudgie’. It was now three years since he had been ordained. Much of that time had been given over to theology. The elite order to which Cato belonged worshipped God also with the intellect. The ‘Mission’, now failed and defunct, had been his first attempt at full-time pastoral work.
There was a faint click downstairs, the sound of a key cautiously inserted in a lock. Cato sprang up. A door opened and closed. Cato moved across the room. A boy of about seventeen was coming quietly up the stairs.
