by Iris Murdoch
‘You said some pretty strong things.’
‘Nothing like what I felt like saying. I could see it was no use shouting at you. I abominate that bloody religion. It’s got the cunning of the devil in it. Wherever it flourishes it kills honesty and thought and freedom.’
‘Dad, I’m knocked out, I think I’ll go to bed.’
‘You’re still half in love with that foul rubbish.’
‘It’s not all rubbish.’
‘All right, go back to it then, I’m not stopping you. I thought you’d made up your mind.’
‘I have made it up. I don’t believe in God any more and that’s that. I’m through with the thing. Only please don’t be angry with me and talk in that sort of angry tone. I’m glad to be home and I’m glad you’re glad.’
‘Colette said I bullied you when you were children. I didn’t, did I?’
‘Yes, I think you did, but we loved you, and love is just as important as truth. I’m going to bed. Good night, Dad.’
‘I thought I was lecturing you. Now you’re lecturing me. I’m so happy that you’ve come home. All right, all right, good night then, sleep well. I shall sleep well. I feel there is peace in the house at last. Good night.’
Cato went upstairs to his room, the room which had been his ever since he could remember. The lamps were turned on. The patchwork coverlet on the well-designed light oak bed had been folded back by Colette. There was a hot-water bottle. The room had a sort of curious silence in it which Cato felt as an air wafted from his childhood, as if the room were still communing with the boy who had slept there and had read his books there night after night, and felt so happy and so quiet and so safe. The little neat landscapes of hillsides and cottages and trees which were obviously imaginary and obviously the product of innocent and artless minds hung still upon the walls in their shiny varnished frames. The dressing table was covered with a blue and brown folk-weave cloth, upon which the ivory brush and comb set with his initials upon it had been carefully laid out, together with a silver-backed mirror which had belonged to his mother. His father had spoken of peace in the house, and there was peace, Cato could feel it round about him. It was a kind of plain peace, a peace of the woods and fields, not pagan even, ancient and blameless and simple. He felt it, he recognized it, but it could not enter him, it could not fill him, as a lost vanished peace had once done. ‘May the peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God …’ He sat down on the bed. Time passed.
Then he heard a little sound, a surreptitious sound like the sound of a mouse moving. His eyes became wide and alert and he listened. It came again. He puzzled, then recognized it as the sound of stifled sobbing. Colette was crying in the next room. After a moment Cato got up and tiptoed to the door.
His father’s room was at the other end of the house, down a few stairs and up again. This end had always been the children’s domain. Old memories came again to Cato as he scratched on Colette’s door in a special way, then opened it noiselessly.
‘Colette—dear—what is it?’
‘Don’t put the light on.’
‘I won’t—what is it? Budge up, I want to sit on the bed.’
‘I thought you were asleep—you must be so tired—I’m so sorry—’
‘Little Bear, don’t grieve—’
‘Big Bear, I’m so glad you’re home. Oh I’m so stupid, so stupid—’
‘So am I. Why are you?’
‘I fell in love with somebody—he doesn’t love me—it was a silly idea—I even sort of did it on purpose—but oh it hurts so—’
‘Someone at the college, I suppose?’
‘Well—someone I met—’
‘But it’s no good?’
‘No, no, it’s finished, he’s going to marry somebody else.’
‘I bet he wasn’t worthy of you.’
‘Of course he wasn’t worthy of me, he’s a perfectly silly man, but I just want him so, I want him more than anything in the world, I pine for him, all day, every minute, it’s so stupid—’
‘Did you go to bed together?’
‘How calmly you say it. I suppose it’s the confessional. No, of course not. I’m a virgin, I’m going to wait till I marry—only now I’ll never marry because I just want him and no one else will do—I think I’d better become a nun after all—Oh Cato, I’m sorry you’re not a priest any more.’
‘So you don’t share Dad’s glee at the end of this aberration. Why are you sorry?’
‘It made a kind of place, an otherness. I can’t explain. Not like magic exactly—but something precious and holy—even though I didn’t believe—I wish you’d stayed there.’
‘I wish I could have done. Now stop crying and go to sleep. You know you’ll get over this chap, you can even see he’s not worth grieving over. Pull yourself together, Colette.’ ‘You sound just like Daddy.’
‘I expect I’ll get more like him every day now that I’ve left the Church. I could do worse. Think how lucky you are in a world full of misery, and how young and free you are in a world full of people whose lives are done for. Just try to let cheerfulness break in. We’ll talk of this tomorrow if you like. Now go to sleep. Think quiet thoughts. Go to sleep.’
‘ “Think quiet thoughts.” That’s what Daddy said Mummy used to say.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘Give me a blessing. I know you can’t now, but give me some sort of blessing.’
‘May the spirit of love and truth and peace make its home in your heart, now and always.’ ‘That’s nice. What is it?’ ‘I just made it up. Will you go to sleep now?’ ‘Yes. Good night, Cato. I’ll think: Cato’s home, and go to sleep on that.’
‘Good night, Little Bear.’
Cato went back to his room and sat down again upon his bed. He felt sympathy for Colette, then envy. How simple, how clean her pain was, and how soon she would recover. She would find a good husband and live at Pennwood and bring up healthy clever children who would become doctors and lawyers and teachers. She would achieve the central goals of humanity, a paragon of nature. And in the time to come he would be proud of her and glad of her and he would visit her happy home and feel envious and comforted and sad.
The new world, he thought, the new life, and how sad it is. I suppose I should be congratulating myself, it may even be that later I shall look back on this as heaven. I have escaped, I have got off scot free from a stupid erotic entanglement and a big intellectual illusion. I am home again with my kind good father and my sweet loving sister. I have even got a job. But how worthless it all seems now. And in a great void he saw the face of Beautiful Joe beaming at him through those bright hexagonal glasses, with that deceptive air of untouched childish innocence, that utterly enchanting, utterly desirable boy-girl charm, that energy of life which shed its light upon all things. I shall never see him again, thought Cato, I must take that in as a certainty, perhaps my only certainty and the beginning of my truth. I could not help him, and perhaps I always knew this; he simply, completely baffled me, he defeated me with a graceful demonic brilliance. He made a fool of me in the worst sense. Lucifer, bearer of light. And Cato remembered how he had once thought of Joe as a symbol of breakdown in his life, as a significant temptation, even an emissary of the devil. And he thought, no, that was just a consoling dream, a last attempt to give sense to what in the end had none. Beautiful Joe is just a passer-by, a little unimportant delinquent boy who will lead a mean unhappy swindling sort of life, who will go to prison, on some day when I am teaching a class somewhere in the north or somewhere in America, and I shall never even know. I loved him, but my love was a self-deception and a vanity, it had no meaning and no saving strength. Men cannot help each other, they cannot even see each other, nobody can be changed or saved even by the most extreme of loves. While I was gazing at Joe in a dream it was all taken away, the high edifices of my faith were dismantled: the three-personed God, the Fall and the Redemption, the life of the world to come, in s
aecula saeculorum. Now there is only sin and woe and no saviour. Jesus was not the Son of God, he was just a victim, just a good witty man with a delusion. And so my life has become tiny and mean and incomplete and I must begin it again without comfort and without magic. It is the end of the story, and what follows will be quiet and dull, and I am fortunate that it is so and that I am not crippled and I will not even be miserable for ever.
Part Two
THE GREAT TEACHER
‘It’s a very little diamond,’ said Stephanie.
‘It’s a very pretty ring,’ said Henry. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘It’s a very mingy little diamond.’
‘Well, it’s all you’ll get. You’re lucky to get a diamond at all.’
‘Every bride gets a diamond these days.’
‘O.K., you’ve got one. Now shut up.’
‘I want to buy some more clothes.’
‘You’ve already bought enough to last you through a major war. The spare room is crammed with garments.’
‘I still need things, I need another coat and—’
‘Oh all right, but this is the last instalment.’
‘A bus conductor would be kinder—’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Nice ordinary men are interested in their wives’ clothes, they make sacrifices so that they can have—’
‘I’m quite interested in your hats.’
‘And you’re rich and you won’t even—’
‘I’m not rich, that’s the point, I don’t want to start living like a rich man just when I’m going to become a poor one.’
‘You said we wouldn’t be poor.’
‘Well, poorer.’
‘I so much want smart clothes. I’ve never had—’
‘I’m not going to get my wife up like a society doll.’
‘I want to live at the Hall.’
‘Don’t start that again.’
‘If only you’d wait a year, just see—’
‘I can’t wait, it’s become an agony, Stephanie, can’t you understand—’
‘That’s because you don’t really want to sell, you don’t really—’
‘I do want to sell! I can’t tell you how passionately I want to drop it all, to smash it all to pieces. I want it to be done and over with and then we can get away. I want to get home to America more than I’ve ever wanted anything.’
‘More than you want me.’
‘Take that look off your face. We’re getting married and you’re coming with me. We are getting married, aren’t we, Steph?’
‘Yes,’ said Stephanie, staring at him.
‘You’re not changing your mind, are you? I’ll look after you, you’ll like America. It’s not like this crummy island—’
‘I want to live at the Hall.’
‘Stop trying to madden me. The whole estate will be up for sale in a few weeks. We don’t have to stay. When I’ve fixed all the details I’ll leave it to Merriman. We can escape, fly the Atlantic and be free. We’ll have fun when we’re married, Steph. I’ll see to that. We’ll have lots of fun. We’ll travel, my pay isn’t bad. Bloody sight better than what I’d get here for being a mediocre hack. Cheer up. Aren’t you ever merry and bright? You’ve got to be my fun girl now. Do stop looking the picture of misery because you can’t have that bloody house. Shall I get you a mirror so you can see how disgustingly wretched you look?’
‘No-oo—’
‘Remember what I said I’d do to you if you started crying again? You do love me, don’t you?’
‘Ye-es—’
‘Oh stop! You’re making me into a sort of tyrannical monster, I don’t want to be like that, you make me like it.’
‘I do love you,’ said Stephanie, staunching her tears with a paper table napkin. ‘That’s what’s so funny.’
‘Awfully funny—yes—’
‘But it’s all so odd and I’m so frightened—’
‘What are you frightened of, for God’s sake?’
‘I’ve never had anybody. I’ve never had a place or any family, and now you want us to be all alone in America just when I’ve seen how nice it could be here.’
‘Christ, do you want to live with my mother!’
‘Well, I like her. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Oh God!’
It was breakfast time. Half an hour ago they had been making love. Now the usual quarrel had started. Did Henry enjoy the quarrel? He was not sure. He got up and went to the window and looked out at the rain-washed dome of Harrods glistening in the sun. He did indeed feel that somehow against his will he was turning into a sort of bully. He had never thought of himself as a bully. Invariably he had been bullied. Russ and Bella had bullied him all the time. His pupils had bullied him. His father and his mother and his brother had bullied him. Was his curious passion for Stephanie, for it was a curious passion, something to do with her unique attribute of bullyability? Was that what he had always wanted, a bullyee?
‘It’s odd,’ he said. ‘You said it was funny that you loved me. I feel it’s funny that I love you. You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met before.’
‘You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met before—’
‘I don’t even know much about you. I don’t want you to talk about Sandy. And you won’t talk about what went on earlier.’
‘It was hateful—’
‘Well, maybe you will talk later. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I’ve lived in America with people who say every damn thing. Maybe a silent relationship will be more restful.’
Henry studied her. She was wearing a glossy expensive neglige with a black and gold lozenge design and a collar which seemed to be made entirely of black feathers. Since leaving the bed she had made her face up carefully, more skilfully, she was learning something every day. She looked handsomer, older, better kept. The lines beside the mouth seemed less haggard. Good make-up, good food, happiness? Was she happy? Was he? She was fated, necessary; happiness was neither here nor there. There was no doubt that money suited her. She had spent hundreds of pounds in a few days. Henry had felt pity, generosity, a childish pleasure in her pleasure, then annoyance. She could not see when enough was enough. On the other hand, he thought, she might as well kit herself out for her journey through life as Mrs Marshalson junior. He remembered her saying that Sandy had called her ‘the femme fatale type.’ It occurred to him that she was the most sensuous woman that he had ever seen, or was he going mad? Of course Bella was sensuous, but she was so clever and talkative and had such a piercing voice. And the girls had all been skinny with little breasts and glasses. He looked at the heavy jaw and the big round chin, the full mouth and the wide nostrils, the fine smudge of hair on the upper lip. Nothing fragile there, no intellectual pretensions, thank God. He looked at the large anxious moist eyes, a kind of blue with stripes of darkness. ‘You’ve got striped eyes,’ he said to her, approaching. What a painting Max could have made of that heavy sulky head. ‘Hello, Columbine.’
Stephanie, reading his look, began to smile. ‘You haven’t read your letters, darling. And there’s a telegram.’ Her lightly accented voice was soft, pleasantly inaudible.
He sat down at the table and reached one hand across, pressing it down between the large breasts. She leaned on his hand, her pouting lips smiling. ‘I know what’s in the telegram and the letters aren’t important.’ He sighed, withdrew his hand and pulled his mail towards him. ‘Make us some more coffee, Steph.’
There was the telegram and three letters. One letter was from Merriman, the second, forwarded from the Hall, looked as if it was from Cato, the third, also forwarded, was in an immature round hand with a Laxlinden post mark. Henry knew who that was from. He opened the telegram.
Got your long letter we are right behind you kiddo Russell and Bella.
‘Was that what you thought?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, ‘it’s from some friends of mine in America. They’re glad I’m marrying you.’
‘They don’t know me.
’
‘They’re intuitive.’
‘Can I see?’
He handed her the telegram. He opened Merriman’s letter. It was full of technical details about the sale. Mrs Fontenay wanted to buy the copse that was adjacent to her farm. Giles Gosling had had a row with the borough engineer about extending the main drainage. A wall had fallen down. Henry skimmed through. Already it had all begun to seem blessedly unreal.
‘Who are Russell and Bella?’
‘Teachers at my school.’
‘School? I thought—’
‘College. They’re marvellously warm-hearted people. We’ll all be warm-hearted together.’ He hastily opened another letter and glanced at it quickly.
My dear Henry,
Your answer to my letter was ungenerous and thoughtless. I am not a child. I think you think I am just because I’m a virgin. I don’t think you understand me at all. Please see me and let us at least talk about this. I’ve known you forever and I love you so much. I feel, so strangely and so deeply, that just for you I am precious and mustn’t be mislaid. Think about me. Don’t just lose me out of carelessness. I feel so certain about this. I beg you to see me soon. You will marry me, yes, yes, you will.
Completely yours.
Colette
P.S. Of course I want the Hall, who wouldn’t, and I want to be married in Dimmerstone Church, not Laxlinden.
Henry laughed and crumpled the letter up.
‘Who’s that from?’
‘That mad girl.’
‘Let me see.’
‘It’s just a schoolgirl rant.’
‘Let me see.’
Henry handed it over and began to open the third letter. He watched Stephanie.
‘Steph, now then—’
‘Don’t you see, she’s a witch.’
‘She’s a child.’
‘She’s so young, and she says she’s a virgin.’
‘So what, I hate virgins.’
‘You won’t see her, will you?’
‘Of course not, you dope!’
‘She’s put magic on you, you’ll have to go to her, she says she’ll marry you, she says she’s certain—’
