by Iris Murdoch
Cato felt he had already travelled a long way and spent a long time in doing it. His body retained no sense of the enclosing space. He had not expected the table there and had now no notion where the bed was. He explored the surface of the table, then, on all fours, the floor beneath, wondering if the candle and matches had been left behind, but there was nothing. He pulled himself up and bumped his head on the next wall. His outstretched hand encountered the lavatory door. He crawled round it and felt about thoroughly inside the lavatory. Occasionally he touched a soft elusive excresence, perhaps an insect. The walls were cold, dry, smooth, without issue. He emerged, then moved on, knocking his questing knuckles at once against another wall. He slithered along it, then fell against the bed. He knelt down to explore under the bed. His hand searched for his shoes, but they were not there. He rose and after some fumbling about resumed his trousers and lay down again. He listened, hearing at first only his own breath. Then he thought he heard a faint brief distant rumbling, perhaps simply a vibration. A machine? The underground? The distant sound brought no comfort. It suddenly brought home to him that he was somewhere, hidden, caught, somewhere in London, in some fantastic, perhaps huge and labyrinthine hideout, in somebody’s terrible private prison. Whoever had made this room had made it, for its purpose, thoroughly. A windowless room, perhaps soundproof, without a cranny into which he could even insert his fingers.
He lay looking upwards into the thick stifling dark and trying to control a moaning terror in his mind. He thought, when they have got Henry’s money they will kill me and Beautiful Joe as well. He thought, I have reached the end of my road, and no one will ever know what happened to me or what it was like at the end. All I can do, my only duty now, is to hold onto myself, to keep a sort of fruitless dignity, something that relates only to me. And he thought, now there is only me left in the world, me and my relation to me.
And his thoughts began to swirl as if his mind were revolving and casting great coloured images onto the screen of the dark, and he saw with extreme clarity Brendan Craddock in his dressing gown, sitting against the door and trying to prevent him from going away. And he saw, as if in a vision, his father sitting in his study at Pennwood, turning over papers underneath a lamp. And he felt a pure awful pity for his father. For those two days he had made his father so happy.
It was dark in the alleyway. Henry nudged the door with his foot and it jolted noisily back, making him jump. Sick with anxiety and fear and the explosive flutter of his heart, Henry stood still. Nervously he ran his finger along the top of the suitcase. He had tied it up with rope, but constantly feared it would somehow open, spilling bank notes. There was silence except for distant traffic. He stepped forward into the yard, feeling muddy earth and rubble under foot. He did not try to close the gate but shuffled forward in the darkness. There was no light in the line of abandoned houses which rose above him against the reddish London sky.
He could now see the shed, its open door a darker darkness. It was just before one o’clock. Henry felt so sick with anguish he felt he might vomit. He did not dare to set the suitcase down. Throughout the journey he had felt certain he would be stopped by the police or else robbed by some quite unconnected criminal. He had taken two taxis, then walked, carrying the big self-evidently guilty man. But no one questioned him, no one stopped him.
Desperate for help, living his life now as a hideous dream, he had told nobody. He went back to Laxlinden with Stephanie, enduring her puzzlement and her fear. ‘It’s that girl Colette, you want to see her.’ Henry, morose with fright, was not able to console. ‘Well, think what you like, if you won’t believe what I say!’ Stephanie cried during the journey: and he, unable to speak to her, thought with an aching heart: I have made myself responsible for her and I will make her happy—but oh God how difficult and how dreadful my life has now become. How happy he had been a few days ago when he imagined he had problems! On arrival at the Hall Stephanie retired to her room with a headache.
It was of course impossible to conceal his distressed condition from his mother, only, seeing Stephanie’s red-rimmed eyes, Gerda attributed it to a quarrel and asked no questions. Her bright pleased curiosity made Henry grind his teeth. Meanwhile, he had to see Merriman and inform that faithful discreet servitor that a large quantity of money must be produced in the form of bank notes, secretly and at once. Merriman, obviously amazed but asking no questions, settled to the task with fussy exactitude. He made telephone calls, explained, exhibited papers. Henry did not even try to understand. At last he took in that the money would be available for him in London tomorrow. He went back to the Hall. Stephanie was still upstairs and had asked for supper in bed. Henry went up to her.
‘Steph, darling, what is it, are you really ill?’
‘It’s that girl, she’s doing it.’
‘Oh rubbish! Look, Stephanie, you’ve got to be tough and brave and help me through life. I’m frightened too, every damn thing frightens me! We must help each other, you’re fretting yourself into a fever.’
‘Will you come tonight?’
‘No, it’s impossible here. I won’t be far off. I’ll think about you. I’ll try to dream about you.’
‘Oh darling—we will be married, won’t we?’
‘Yes, and I’ll look after you forever. Only don’t fuss stupidly about nothing. Tomorrow we’ll go back to London.’
Only when the morrow came Stephanie did not want to go with him, she said she wanted to stay at the Hall. Faint with fear before the day’s programme Henry did not argue. He said he would come back. Gerda, taking charge, made Stephanie stay in bed, produced a thermometer, spoke of calling the doctor. Henry fled.
The business of actually acquiring the money proved, thanks to Merriman’s labours, simpler than Henry had expected. In fact what Henry had picked up, and what the large suitcase now contained, was only twenty thousand pounds. This more modest sum was the outcome of such deliberate policy as Henry, fighting against his paralysis of fear, had been able to formulate during the morning. Obviously he must somehow, intelligently, bargain. It would be foolish to hand over the full sum at once. He must give enough to prove his seriousness, not so much as to make his further cooperation of no interest. He must ask for proof that Cato was alive. He had to insist that the rest of the money would be forthcoming only when Cato was free. But how could he insist, how could he bargain, with such people?
At Laxlinden Henry had discovered in his waste paper basket the fragments of Cato’s previous communication. There could be no doubt about the authenticity of the handwriting. Henry had not in fact ever doubted the genuineness of the ransom letter. He had got to act. Nor did it seriously occur to him to inform the police. Henry’s timid imagination had quickly grasped the imperatives in Cato’s missive. He could not blindly put his friend’s life at risk. Even more plainly he could not condemn himself to a lifetime of fearing some frightful revenge. In a way he could not earlier have conceived of, fear had taken over Henry’s world and made him its slave.
Standing in the dark and looking at the silent black opening of the door of the shed he felt that he had been mad not to bring all the money. If he had only brought it all he could simply speechlessly have given it and then gone away having done all he could. A fear which was like guilt gripped him by the throat, a terrible sense of the present moment, poised on the brink of some hideously unimaginable future. Now he was perhaps inches, minutes, away from death.
He took another step forward. The silence seemed peopled, intolerable with menace. He stood rigid near the black doorway and tried to whisper something, but could not speak. He uttered a tiny noise. Then a torch flashed in his face. Henry dropped the suitcase and his hands flew to his neck.
‘Come into the house,’ said a soft almost inaudible voice.
Henry reached down for the suitcase but jumped abruptly back when his hand encountered another hand. The torch drew a quick line upon the ground then went out. Henry followed the line and stumbled up a step and through a doo
r. The door closed behind him.
The torch came on again, shaded by fingers, casting a little light. Henry saw the kitchen, the black curtains drawn, a single tall figure standing before him.
Then he recognized Beautiful Joe. He recognized the hexagonal spectacles, the limp fine girlish bobbed hair, the long thin delicate mouth. He made a noise in his throat.
‘Sit down there.’
Henry sat down.
‘Keep quiet now, Mr Marshalson. I have a gun and a knife, and a rather violent and impatient friend waiting outside.’ The torch flashed for a moment, showing a knife blade, then shifted to the suitcase which was now open on the table. ‘Is all the money here?’
Henry thought, I have got to be brave like other men are. Oh why did I come here, why didn’t I go to the police! I won’t even be able to speak for terror. He said in a high shaky voice. ‘No—only—twenty thousand—’
The torch and one long hand scanned the contents of the suitcase. ‘Why?’
‘I couldn’t—get it all—I will soon—I promise—’
There was a silence as the quick deft hands sorted the packets of notes. ‘This is bad. My people don’t like delays. They want to finish with this business. You must bring the rest tomorrow.’
With a tremendous effort Henry, croaking, said. ‘I can’t—I need more time to get it—I’ll bring it Thursday or Friday—I swear I will—but I must know that Cato is—will be—all right—if I—’ The words trailed into silence. Henry sat with his hands crisscrossed on his throat.
‘We will let your friend go when you bring the money. If you don’t bring the money, we shall send you a token. Your friend’s ears perhaps or his fingers. But you will bring the money. Because otherwise he will suffer and die. And you too will suffer and die. And you know this. If you fail you will be listed, written down to be killed. A listed man might live a month, a year, not longer. If you fail you will never sleep at ease again. But you will not fail. We give you until Friday, here, at this time, and you must then bring the rest of the money. Then your friend will be released. We are not afraid of your speaking. Oh no, we are not afraid. Only bring the money and everything will be well. If you fail, or speak a word to any other person you will die and so will he. You cannot escape from us. Now I am going. You are to stay here for half an hour. My friend outside will stay here watching, so don’t try to leave for half an hour from now. Good night. Wait one moment, though, I have something to give you. Hold your hand out towards me.’
Henry stood up and extended his hand across the table. The room was so dark he seemed to be breathing darkness, indeed he could hear the staccato sound of his own gasps for breath. He felt Beautiful Joe take hold of his hand in a gentle firm grip, turning it slightly. Then a sharp searing pain ran across the back of his hand, just behind the knuckles. He could feel the quick agonizing jolt as the sharp knife blade crossed the bones.
Henry gave a loud smothered whimper and sat down, jerking the chair back, clutching his wounded hand with his other hand and pressing it against his chest. He heard the scrape of the suitcase pulled from the table, then the door opening and closing quietly.
Henry sat in the dark and tears of terror and frustration and anger and pain burst from his eyes. He could not see his watch. He sat there trembling for nearly an hour.
Gerda, dressed in her checkered blue and green robe, was standing motionless beside the log fire in the library. Since Henry’s long absences in London she and Lucius had re-occupied the room. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Henry had not returned. She could not now remember exactly what he had said. But she had understood that he was coming back that day. Stephanie had certainly thought so, and ‘doing her sick child act’ as Gerda put it to herself, had kept on asking for him. Gerda gave her two sleeping pills, saw her take them, and said good night. Stephanie had no temperature.
It seemed to Gerda that Henry did not understand his future wife, was indeed quite unable to see her at all. This was not unusual and did not mean that the marriage would necessarily be a failure. About that Gerda felt quite open-minded. It could be that Henry, dominated by his mother, needed a woman whom he could dominate and look after. How much looking after Stephanie would need perhaps Henry did not yet realize. Gerda felt pity for Stephanie, and guessed that pity, together with some weird feeling about her relation to Sandy, had been at least the beginning of Henry’s interest. But then Henry was so strange. He seemed to Gerda like a little hard ball of implacable destructiveness and hostility. She had given up hope of reaching any understanding with him. He was destined simply to destroy her world and then disappear forever to America.
Gerda felt sorry for Stephanie, Henry had pitied her. Sandy doubtless had pitied her too. Gerda had talked to Stephanie a little about Sandy, but with none of the intimacy which Henry had suspected and resented. She had done this, not curiously, but out of some compassionate sense of propriety. She did not, confronted with Stephanie and with Stephanie’s utterances, feel curiosity. She shuddered rather. That voice could tell her nothing about the real Sandy, but was capable of saying something that she would remember forever. Silence was better. And Stephanie, after her first outburst over the photographs, seemed to think this too. Gerda, ageing, realized that there were things in the world which she would never understand, and how Sandy could have cuddled that girl was certainly one of them. Gerda coolly suspected that Sandy had not cared about her very much. She would have forgiven Sandy anything and had no difficulty in forgiving him a certain callousness where Stephanie was concerned. She felt that, far above Stephanie’s head, far above everything else, she met the calm eyes of her elder son, and they understood each other. No one knew, no one would ever know how perfect that relationship had been, although he scarcely spoke to her except about trivialities, and told her nothing of his life. Gerda had hoped, since she was resolved that he must marry, for an orderly respectable daughter-in-law, someone a little on the dull side. Later she suspected Sandy of being homosexual. It did not matter. She was joined to Sandy, now eternally silent, in a union which made nothing of these matters. So much so, that she could even be fairly objective about poor Stephanie.
‘I wonder if Henry has got a mental case on his hands,’ Gerda said earlier to Lucius. ‘Oh surely not!’ shocked Lucius had replied. ‘Well, it’s his business,’ said Gerda. She did not really think of Stephanie in this way, but she saw with exasperation the signs of a kind of weakness. Burke, Sandy, had been strong people. She was a strong person herself. How strange it now seemed that she had expected the home-coming Henry to exhibit weakness. He had been such a feeble weakly little boy. Perhaps the desire to expunge this image lay behind his present aggression. Her true strong ones had departed, and she was left with loyal spineless Lucius. With John Forbes, a tough sensible man whom she used to respect, she had quarrelled. And Henry’s strength was mustered against her with, she increasingly felt, a kind of virulence which was poisoning her own soul with resentment.
One touching thing about Stephanie, and Gerda was touched, was that Stephanie, perhaps to her own surprise, had accepted Gerda as a mother. And Gerda had played mother. Of course she was able to do so more easily because the relation was temporary. Whether or not the marriage ‘worked’ Stephanie would disappear, she would be elsewhere with Henry, in America, gone. Gerda had hated America. It seemed to her raw, ugly, vulgar, frightening, and curiously empty. She would certainly never go there again. She was prepared now to tend Stephanie, but physically she shrunk from her. The moral weakness which Gerda sensed in her future daughter-in-law expressed itself in more corporeal ways. Stephanie had a lazy idle body. Henry had landed himself with a wife who would lie in bed till noon. She smelt of fat flesh and cheap cosmetics. Gerda did not like her attitudes or her underwear. She suspected her of being older than the age she had admitted to Henry. She felt, as a physical aura about this now helpless and pathetic being, a kind of cunning.
Gerda had promptly despaired of using Stephanie to persuade Henry not
to sell the house. Stephanie could weep, but she would never persuade Henry of anything. Henry was a force of nature. Gerda recalled with detached amazement how she had once secretly hoped to tame returning Henry, to train him to love her, to be some shadowy feeble inadequate consolation for her loss. She had had, it seemed, some plan of redeeming Henry; but now Henry was clear as being unredeemable and one result of this was that she no longer cared whom he married. She just wished that it was all over and that they were gone. The scene that she loved was already being dismantled, and she was willy-nilly withdrawing her attachment. Bellamy had arranged to work for Mrs Fontenay and John Forbes. In a few weeks time the house would be up for sale.
Gerda stooped and put another log onto the fire. The bare untapestried wall behind her was like a chill opening into the void. She shivered. She was waiting up for Henry not out of anxiety for him but out of a compulsive desire to exhibit her suffering. She pulled the skirt of the blue and green woollen gown back out of the hearth where the hem had become smudged with ashes. She shook it. She thought, even now I am far more beautiful than that girl, I am strong and clean. But what does it matter any more? An owl hooted from the big trees, with a repeated hollow fluting cry. The door opened quietly and bird-headed Rhoda came in, wearing her dark blue dress which looked so much like a uniform yet was not. In reply to her question Gerda said, no, she wanted no coffee, nothing to eat, nothing. She told Rhoda to go to bed. Her gesture of dismissal indicated, in the sign language of two women who had lived together for many years without ever speaking of anything except domestic trivia, her affection for Rhoda. She looked fleetingly into the huge eyes. She had not yet told Rhoda that she would have to go. No one indeed had told Rhoda anything, Gerda did not know whether Rhoda knew that the house was to be sold.
