Henry and Cato

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Mrs Beckett, still staring at her glass which was now jolting in her hand. ‘Otherwise you’ll meet him. And don’t come back. If you want to be kind to me, don’t come back.’

  ‘About Joe—’

  ‘Don’t bother me with Joe. I hate Joe. I hate all my children, they hate me.’

  ‘Go to church. Just look at our Lord, just speak to Him. Or think about Him here. He is here too, at this table, in this wine. God bless you. Forgive me.’

  Cato blundered out into the dark corridor and out at the front door into the street, where the lamps had just been turned on. As he came out he ran into a burly man who was just about to enter the house. The man, who smelt of drink, made a vomiting noise, then spat onto the front of Cato’s cassock. The door banged.

  Cato hurried away down the blue darkening street under the lamplight. It was still raining. He turned the corner. There was an Anglican church a little distance away and he hurried to it and entered. He sat down at the back in the darkness, sensing the desolate empty feeling of the bare rather damp church. How quickly and easily the patter had all come out. But now he knew no other words of consolation and if these words were false then there was no consolation. He drew out Father Milsom’s letter to read it again, but it was too dark to see. He took the letter out of the envelope and held it to his face, pressing it against his mouth.

  Henry was awake in the early morning. Or perhaps it was not so early, as there was a long sparkle of sun at the top of the curtains. He could not look at his watch because his arm was around Stephanie Whitehouse who was still asleep. They must have lain like this embraced all night, how touching. And how unlike anything that had ever happened to him in his life before. Last night, or as it must have been, this morning, had been their third occasion of making love, but this was their first night together. Of course he had spent nights with women before, though not so very many. But he had never done so with such a quiet unanxious untalkative sense of inevitability and rightness. He knew that this lack of fear was partly brought about by Stephanie’s dependent status. She was the prisoner of his will, and in her humble little way she both exhibited and rejoiced in her captive state. Henry had often heard about women’s ‘intuition’, but he had never experienced it before. Perhaps in the case of Bella and those smart campus girls intuition had been eroded by intellect.

  But his unanxious satisfaction did not consist simply in his sense of ‘owning’ Stephanie. Sandy had spoken of her femme fatale charm. This seemed to Henry a coarse title for what he discerned in her. For him she was more like a mysterious silent woman encountered in a temple with whom it becomes quietly evident that by the god’s will you must couch. Never had Henry felt more blessedly devoid of alternatives. He felt himself curiously reminded of a picture of Max’s, in which a man is tied upside down to a beautiful lamp-bearing woman. What perfectly ridiculous images old Max could invent. The odd thing, it had earlier occurred to Henry, was that although the man has his hands bound and has perhaps been stabbed in the back, he appears to be quite comfortable in his unusual position! The woman presses one caressing hand to his thigh as she peers through the lamplit dark. Her face now reminded him very slightly of Stephanie’s. And he was now aware that he had always a little identified himself with the comfortable upside-down man. So it turned out that in an upside-down way he was her captive, not she his.

  Of course Stephanie was not beautiful and she was not young. How strangely and mysteriously evident was the ageing of the body. A weariness in the breasts, in the buttocks, a certain coarsening and staleness of the flesh, proclaim the years as much as lines and wrinkles can. Bella, who had always been very sensitive about her possible nineteen-year-old rivals, had talked a lot about this, only fastidious Henry had shut his ears. Now, holding Stephanie Whitehouse in his arms, he apprehended her lack of youthfulness with compassion and pleasure. He could see, looking carefully at the roots of her hair, that it was dyed. Her face, disfigured by the two harsh lines which framed her mouth and which sleep had failed to smooth, looked older now. Of course her make-up had been worn away by his kisses. A defensive seductive alertness which waking she wore as a mask was touchingly absent. She moved slightly, and one heavy soft breast nestled against him. He felt the sudden blazing warmth of her thigh against his leg. She murmured something and her face twitched. He wondered: does she think she is with Sandy now? The idea did not distress him, but on the contrary made him feel visionary, serene, full of mercy.

  The scene with his mother, after which he had, without seeing her again, driven to London, had shaken him in unexpected ways. He was not of course deceived by his mother’s sarcastic show of acceptance. He knew that he had struck her a terrible blow and that he must, for this, bear a heavy responsibility. He knew too that he was only at the beginning of learning what it was exactly that he was up to. He had no doubts about the Tightness of his plan. That he had no doubts was the absolute prerequisite of a drastic move. He was committing a sort of murder. Matricide, in fact. But he was saved and justified by, again, the absence of alternatives. Henry felt like a man into whose hands a huge crippling weight had suddenly been put. He had to drop it, however much damage that would cause. (Max could have painted that.) He could not, morally, spiritually, psychologically become the person into which that odious ownership would make him. He had always hated possessions, always wanted to travel light and live a stripped life, and was he now to be crippled by a sentiment about an ancestral home? Giving away the money would be easy. It was, admittedly, the traditional part of the picture which threatened to hold him, and not just because it sometimes seemed monstrous to ask his mother to live in Dimmerstone. Yet after all he could coldly judge the irrationality of the bond which still tied him to Laxlinden; and could he not make a similar judgement for her? She had enjoyed the Hall; but most elderly people have to accept some diminution in their lives. His mother was old enough for such a change and certainly young enough not to be slaughtered by it. In the longer run the challenge might even do her good. She would be so determined to show her son that she was undamaged that she would perhaps discover, in her diminished scene, quite new sources of the joy of life.

  Henry had felt, after the revelation had been made, relief; and he was duly grateful to his mother for her enacted stoicism. He felt an almost affectionate admiration for her toughness. Of course it must have been a terrible shock, especially as she had quite evidently had the intelligence to discern at once that he was serious. Nor had it been easy for him to take the plunge; he had not in fact, at that moment, particularly intended to. What had precipitated his revelation had perhaps been the inconceivably irritating reference to Colette Forbes. His statement about Stephanie had then constituted the bridge passage. He would, in any case, have had to be somehow angry with Gerda in order unambiguously to bring it all out. An important stage had been passed and Henry felt himself after it a new man, even a more merciful man. He had had to ‘totalize’ the thing to make it thinkable, to make it, for purposes of an announced decision, portable. Now that the announcement was over he could consider, more coolly and at length, the details.

  When Henry had told Gerda that he was engaged to Stephanie Whitehouse he had done so very nearly as a joke. Of course it had been a cruel joke whose purpose was to shock. And Henry in saying it had not really ‘meant it’, though equally he had not been producing a ‘pure fiction’. Somehow the idea had come up with a certain naturalness and Henry had only twisted it into a spiteful joke by announcing Stephanie at once as a prostitute. That his mother should become sentimental about a friend of Sandy’s was the last thing that Henry wanted. Stephanie had to be instantly announced as ‘impossible’ and the impulse to torment his mother with her had seemed momentary. But when he saw Stephanie again he found that he had already been changed by his ‘absurd’ idea. For of course it was by no means absurd. There was no reason why he should not marry Stephanie Whitehouse. He loved her. She loved him.

  Am I mad? thought Henry. No.
I feel more absolutely real than I have ever done in my life. My action in being here with this woman is more absolutely mine than anything I have ever done, though also it is more involuntary, more destined. Only now I see that this is exactly why it is more mine. I am deep in my own destiny at last, I am up to the neck in it, and this is, is it not, where happiness resides. It all somehow mysteriously hangs together, selling the estate, finding Stephanie. Only in just this way, it occurred to him, could I get married! What a miracle, what perfect luck; and how sweet and strange that I am lying here in bed with my arms round Sandy’s tart, and there isn’t a grain of resentment or malice left in me at all. She has performed this miracle of reconciliation, she with her humility, her truthfulness, her deep unconscious intuitive beingness. She is all here, all woman, I can possess her totally, nothing of her will escape from me. Also, he thought, it is only by marrying her that I can have her at all. This has suddenly become clear. I cannot ‘keep’ her as Sandy kept her, that is not a moral possibility. And if I set her ‘free’ she will return to— No. I cannot set her free, I will not, she is mine. It comes to this: that I cannot not marry her!

  Stephanie woke up. Her eyes flew wide, rounded, dark, moist with sleep. Her lips parted in a moue of surprise which at once became a smile. She pulled Henry’s head towards her by the hair. ‘You’re so young!’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Henry. ‘I often feel a hundred. But not today.’

  ‘Do you like tea or coffee for your breakfast?’

  ‘You want to serve me as soon as you are conscious. Why not stay here and enjoy the view.’

  ‘Stay with one who loves you, look no farther, dear.’

  ‘Is that a poem?’

  ‘A song.’

  ‘I like it. Isn’t this fun, Stephanie, you and me. It is fun, isn’t it? I feel happy. Do you feel happy?’

  ‘Yes.’ She thrust him away and smiled at him. Then her smile clouded. ‘I must get up.’ Eluding Henry’s grab she slipped out and ran to the bathroom.

  Henry got lazily out of bed and put on his dressing-gown. He had brought a few things with him in his flight from Laxlinden. I suppose I live here now, thought Henry. Well, I do, don’t I? He strolled into the kitchen and drank some water. They had both become fairly drunk on white wine the night before.

  The sun was shining into the room and making its sprightly cleanliness glisten. There was a pleasant smell of some kind of soap. Tingling with health and well-being Henry stood there, rising gently onto his toes, and looking out at the gilded dome of Harrods and the blue sky overflowing with spring sunshine.

  Stephanie, in an exceedingly frilled and flowery négligé, came noiselessly into the room.

  ‘Why, you silly goose, you’ve made up your face, you’ve combed your hair!’

  ‘I must have looked awful.’

  ‘You looked lovely. We’ve passed that stage, you know.’

  ‘What stage?’

  ‘Where we look critically at each other’s appearance. We’re just together now, like two happy good animals in a pen.’

  ‘That’s nice. You say such nice things.’

  ‘Is there any orange juice?’

  ‘Yes, here. You didn’t say about tea or coffee.’

  ‘Coffee. And toast and some of that honey. Stephanie, you do like me, don’t you, you do like me as me, it isn’t just—I mean—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do. You know I do. I do.’

  ‘Good.’ He sat down at the little clean white table. ‘Stephanie, I do like your wrists, they’re so plump, like a baby’s.’

  ‘Like—yes—Oh dear, it’s so strange—’ She paused, staring at him.

  ‘Yes. And yet I feel I’ve known you for years.’

  ‘I feel that too.’

  ‘Stephanie, tell me one thing. Did Sandy ever give you a ring?’

  ‘A ring? No. Of course not.’ She turned to the coffee pot, then with a sudden little whining sound began to cry.

  Henry jumped up and seized her by the shoulders, then pulled her to sit on a chair beside him.

  ‘What’s the matter, dear little one, what is it?’

  ‘I’m so happy—and I’ve never been—happy before ever.’

  ‘Well, that’s nothing to cry about. Here, take my hankie.’

  ‘But, you see, it’s all a lie—’

  ‘It’s not a lie, Stephanie, how can it be, we’re here, we’re us, it’s real.’

  She mopped her eyes, then gritted her teeth for a second in a sort of snarl. ‘You’ll go away.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘And I’ll go away. Oh I’m so grateful to you, you’ve been so kind, ever since you called me ‘Miss Whitehouse’ in that wonderful way. But I’m so stupid and ignorant, I’m nobody, I know nothing. You don’t know what I’m like. This is—it’s all untrue—it’s—Oh forgive me, forgive me.’ She seized his hand and kissed it, pressing it against her hot wet cheek, shiny now with tears.

  Henry pulled her more closely up against him. ‘What was your song? “Stay with the one who loves you, look no farther, dear”.’

  ‘But it’s just a—silly—song.’

  ‘Stephanie, let’s get married, shall we? Would you like that?’

  He felt her stiffen in his embrace, then say. ‘What? What did you say?’ Her voice was harsh.

  ‘I said, “Let us get married”. Or if you prefer it in a more traditional form, Stephanie, will you marry me?’

  She stared at him with her big tear-filled eyes and he could feel her grip tightening on the flesh of his arm until she was pinching him violently. Then she began to laugh. He saw, as he now struggled to hold her, her wet lips and the red interior of her mouth. Hysterical laughter poured from her in a seemingly involuntary stream. Her high-heeled slipper kicked his ankle and he let go of her and she fled from the room.

  ‘Stephanie, Stephanie, stop!’

  Still laughing crazily she ran, losing a slipper, into the bedroom, slamming the door in Henry’s face. He dragged the door open and sprang after her, half falling on top of her where she lay upon the bed drumming her feet and shaking with the terrible mirth.

  ‘Stephanie, be quiet, stop that dreadful noise.’

  They struggled for a moment then lay embraced in silence. After nearly a minute she said, murmuring into his shoulder. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  Henry lay with eyes closed, triumphant, appalled. He lay prostrate in a great red grotto which was like the inside of Stephanie’s mouth, and he shuddered with achievement and joy and fear and the vast sense of an irrevocable destiny.

  ‘This is the first time we’ve ever got drunk together, Father.’ ‘Dear me,’ said Cato. ‘Is that what we’re doing?’ They were sitting by candle light in Cato’s bedroom. The electricity had been turned off. Soon the bull-dozers would be coming and the street would be demolished. The house, knowing its end was near, was strangely rickety and frail tonight, a kind of swaying cardboard house inside which Cato sat gazing at the boy. The wind was rattling the window panes and the closed doors were shifting and tapping. Cato sat on the bed and Beautiful Joe close to him upon the chair. The big jar of wine which Joe had brought was on the floor. There were two candles, one upon the chest of drawers and one upon the window ledge. The candle flames wavered in the strong draught. Cato had spent a crazy day. It had started with an almost sleepless night. His bed was damp, the house was suddenly very cold. He had dreamt about Mrs Beckett. In the morning he wondered if he ought to go and see her again but decided it would be pointless. He began a letter to Brendan but tore it up. He went out intending to ring up Father Milsom but all the telephone boxes in the area had been vandalized and were out of order. He became extremely hungry and then realized that he had no money left. Hunger at last drove him reluctantly to Father Thomas’s house where he borrowed a pound. Father Thomas had the advantage of being a comparative stranger. However some rumour must have circulated. Father Thomas looked at him with kind and pitying eyes, asked him to stay to lunch, suggested that he should stay the night. Cat
o fled. He ate some bacon and eggs in a small cafe, then began to feel sick. Walking back to the house the world was suddenly full of signs. Activate Kundalini he saw written upon a wall. And once again, Trouserama. Only now the word was no longer ludicrous but sinister.

  He came back and lay down on his damp bed and instantly fell asleep. He dreamt that Father Milsom was opening a door with one hand while with the other he was gripping Cato’s wrist and Cato was struggling to be free. He awoke in the twilight to find Beautiful Joe standing beside his bed, holding the wine jar and looking down at him with a strange intent unsmiling stare.

  ‘You’re like a jack in the box, Father. Now we see you, now we don’t.’

  It was late. They had drunk nearly all the flagon of wine.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Cato. ‘My life is—well you must know by now—in a muddle, in a mess—I don’t know what to do—’

  ‘You’re a tease, Father, that’s what you are, a tease.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be,’ said Cato. ‘I want to be sincere. I’d like to talk to you about everything, to tell you everything.’ Am I drunk, he wondered. I can’t be on that amount of wine, can I?

  ‘Well, tell me then. You know I’m your friend.’

  ‘How nice of you to say that, Joe, to say just that. Yes, we are friends, aren’t we.’

  ‘That’s it, Father. Now tell me something and let’s have another drink on it.’

  ‘I went to see your mother yesterday.’

  ‘Ah now—why did you do that?’