Henry and Cato

by Iris Murdoch

  After a few minutes there was a creaking sound and a fumbling noise and Lucius came in, stooping, wearing his dressing-gown.

  ‘Why are you up?’

  ‘Gerda, dearest, go to bed, don’t grieve over that bad boy.’

  ‘I hate the sort of words you use.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Don’t grieve.’

  ‘I’m not grieving.’

  ‘How was poor Stephanie, did she get off to sleep all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think she’s really ill?’

  ‘I think she’s working up for a nervous breakdown, but that’s Henry’s problem.’

  ‘Gerda, you mustn’t be against that girl because of Henry—’

  ‘Do you imagine I’m jealous?’

  ‘Well, it would be understandable—’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder whether you are just stupid or whether you are really being vindictive. All this is so much larger and more important than anything you seem able to imagine. You have a mean petty imagination. I am not “grieving” over a “bad boy”, I am not “jealous” of that wretched little neurotic girl! You understand nothing.’

  ‘Don’t cry—’

  ‘I am not crying!’

  ‘Gerda, forgive me, I know I annoy you sometimes, I can’t get anything right, but I do love you, you’re all I’ve got, we will be together in the future, won’t we—’

  There was a faint distant sound, the sound Gerda had been waiting for.

  ‘There’s the Volvo. It’s Henry. Go to bed, Lucius.’

  ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘Oh, you stupid stupid man. There. Go.’

  Lucius padded away. He climbed slowly, laboriously, upstairs to his room. His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him. He had always thought of himself as a muddler, a sufferer, a victim. But what a cosy protected victim he had been. Gerda’s irony, her little daily rejection of him, had hurt. But it had existed inside a kind of eternal safety, her continued tolerance and, however attenuated, her continued need. That Gerda really needed her last admirer had been his charter of survival. But now, in crisis, her gaze so easily passed beyond him.

  He sat down at his table and drew his paper and pen towards him.

  She looks into the mirror and sees her face.

  I look into the mirror and see her face. I look into the mirror and see empty space.

  Henry came through the front door like a whirlwind. He shut the door, not noisily but abruptly, clattering the latch. The light was on in the hall, and as he strode to the stairs he saw out of the corner of his eye his mother standing in the library doorway. He would have ignored her and gone racing on upstairs had she not said in a low voice ‘Henry!’

  He whirled round, paused a moment, then walked to the library door and, passing her, went in.

  ‘What do you want, Mother? It’s late.’

  She was staring at him with horror. ‘You’ve hurt yourself.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Your face is all over blood.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Henry. ‘I banged my knuckles on a wall, they bled a bit, I must have rubbed my face. It’s just a little cut.’

  ‘Show me. Where are you hurt?’

  Henry had wrapped his wounded hand in a handkerchief. He put it behind his back. ‘No.’

  ‘Henry. Show me.’

  ‘No.’

  They faced each other, suddenly raging.

  ‘Henry—’

  ‘Go to bed, Mother. How’s Stephanie?’

  ‘I expect she cried herself to sleep all right.’

  ‘Why were you waiting up for me?’

  ‘I wasn’t waiting up, I was thinking—’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to think.’

  ‘About the cottage at Dimmerstone.’

  ‘Did you go over and look at it like I asked you to? Giles Gosling says—’

  ‘I’ve decided not to live there.’

  ‘Oh. All right.’

  ‘I shall live elsewhere. Not here at all. In a flat.’

  ‘O.K. I thought you wanted a garden.’

  ‘I’m too old for gardening, as you pointed out yourself. I’ve decided—’

  ‘O.K. then. Do as you like. Good night.’

  ‘Henry, you have—’

  ‘Oh leave me alone!’

  He ran from her out of the door and she heard his light footsteps leaping up the stairs.

  Gerda stood for a moment gazing at the pale bare cobwebbed wall. Then she turned out the lamps, and the room was in darkness except for the golden jumpy light of the fire. She pushed the fire guard forward into the ashes. Hot tears of rage and fearful misery spilled to her cheeks and fell onto her bosom. She could destroy herself before his eyes and he would not even care.

  Upstairs in his bathroom Henry stared at himself in the glass. His face was streaked, almost as if striped, with blood. He turned away and began inspecting his hand. The handkerchief was stuck to the wound, stiff and dark with blood. His whole hand was swollen up to the wrist, hot and throbbing violently. A line of pain lay across it, a fierce probing pain as if nails had been driven through into his palm. Helplessly Henry put his hand under the tap. Hot water gushed over it and the pain stabbed fiercely, raced right up into his armpit. He turned off the tap, sat down on the edge of the bath and began vainly plucking at the handkerchief. It was stuck fast and the pluckings produced more pain. What was he to do? He could not go to bed in this condition. He must find a doctor, be seen to, comforted, looked after. He considered going to Stephanie, but she would be asleep, and besides she would simply be appalled. She would be, in his affliction, sorry for herself.

  Under the bright light Henry sat there uncomfortably, nursing his hand and wondering what on earth was going to happen to him now. Had he really had any choice in the matter, had he chosen? Of course he had to try to save Cato’s life, but was that what he was doing? He could not have ignored the letter, could not have failed to go to the rendezvous. Now he had in his head forever the idea of being ‘listed’, the idea that if he were guilty of betrayal, even of failure, he would fear every strange man, every strange sound, for the rest of his life. Running to America would be no good, these people were everywhere. Fear had entered his life and would now be with him for ever. How easy it was for the violent to win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had never really known this before when he had lived free and without it. Even unreasoning fear could cripple a man forever. Perhaps unreasoning fear was worst of all. How here could he calculate, how defend himself in his mind? Perhaps if he went to the police he would survive, but he would never know, never be sure, never stop waiting for the blow. How well he understood now how dictators flourished. The little grain of fear in each life was enough to keep millions quiet. And he remembered a picture of Max’s in which a kindly-looking business-like torturer twists the arm of a screaming half-throttled victim while a figure resembling Lenin quietly pulls down the blind against the night. That was what it was like, essentially, in the background, in the end.

  But what will happen, he thought, what will they do to poor Cato? If they get the money will they set him free? Will they not rather then kill him? With despair Henry realized he had already passed beyond this stage in the argument. No calculation and no act of Henry’s could, in any light by which he could now see, affect Cato’s fate one way or the other. Yet was it not for this that he had entered this dreadful machine? He was simply caught himself. And recalling the torch-lighted profile of the pretty boy Henry felt a vast miserable anger against Cato for having so stupidly made himself the victim of this vile little rat, the slave no doubt of other rats. Yes, I am simply caught, he thought, nursing the hot throbbing pain of his slashed hand. I will bring them the money, I will have to. But why should they stop there? They will want more, in the end they will want everything, everything I possess, everything my mother possesses. And I will give it to them, simply simply simply because I am afraid.

  The darkness was
total. Cato’s eyes had not ‘got used’ to it. Rather they had been filled with it, rinsed with it, so as to feel finally without the capacity of light. He kept his eyes open as he moved in the darkness, out of habit, rather than because they were any sensible help. Other senses however had become more informative and he had now a fairly complete idea of his surroundings. He had spent long periods listening and had twice heard again the strange voices, a murmur as of conversation taking place behind closed doors several rooms away. It still seemed to him, though he could make out no words, that the voices were not talking English. Apart from this there had been no sound except for the very faint noise or vibration which he took to be the underground railway, and an even more faint noise which it seemed to him that he had began to hear as his ears, in the dark, became keener. This was a kind of scraping noise, as of digging happening a long way off. A very distant bulldozer, vibrating in the earth?

  Cato had lost all count of time. Some while ago he had lain down on the bed and covered himself with the blanket, thinking he had better rest since there was nothing else to do, not imagining that he would be able to sleep. However he did sleep, and then did not know whether he had done so for minutes or for hours. And he had slept again since then, perhaps because of the drug, or because of some effect of the awful total darkness which seemed to be clouding his mind and taking away his sense of his own identity. He had never before realized how necessary the senses are to the whole business of thinking. Plunged in continuous darkness he felt strangely muddled and had to try hard to keep the most ordinary processes of thought from wandering aside into fantasy. It was not exactly like going mad, it was more like a gentle disintegration of a tentacular thought stuff which had never, it now seemed, had much cohesion, and which now floated quietly away into the dark, into a sightless haze of wavering and dissolving connections.

  When Cato felt the strange possibility of such a disintegration he tried with most deliberate will power to arrest it. He had never, he felt, really experienced his will in such a positive way before. And it was, to some extent, efficacious. His sense of touch, he found, now became a sort of lifeline of significance. He explored his quarters again and again in the dark, feeling up and down the walls and along the floor. His cell seemed to be impenetrably smooth like a chamber cut out of polished rock. The only irregularity or point of interest, and Cato’s fingers dwelt upon this, was the metal piping in the lavatory, which was a little more extensive than had seemed to him on his first inspection. A pipe emerged from the smooth crannyless wall, proceeded a little way, then divided in two at a joint. One section ran downwards and ceased just short of the floor. The other continued, then at another joint turned abruptly upwards and ended in a broken twist about the length of a hand. Fingering this twisted end it occurred to Cato that if he could somehow remove this last section of the pipe he would have a useful tool. He did not think of it as a weapon. He had no clear idea of what he might do with such a tool, but it might be worth possessing. The notion of tapping an SOS message on the pipe which entered the wall had already occurred to him, but with his bare hand he could produce no resonance. After all, pipes went somewhere and might carry a vibration a long way, if he could knock metal against metal. Or he might sometime use his tool to try to prise open the door. But more immediately, the twisted pipe, being the only oddity in the room, attracted Cato’s attention because fiddling with it was something to do, a defence against the horrors.

  He had already tried to break it off but this proved impossible. His arms were without strength and the fruitless effort brought bursts of pain in his head until he swayed giddy against the wall. He touched the joint gently trying to determine whether or not it was screwed on, but his finger-tips, when so urgently interrogated, sent contradictory messages and then became insensible. He swayed the pipe, tried to twist it, but was unsure whether, if it was a screw, he were not screwing it tighter rather than unscrewing it. Which way did screws screw? Without vision this instinctive knowledge was lost. After a while he gave up and went back exhausted to his bed and to the misery of remorse and the fear of death.

  Sitting on his bed he fumbled for his trousers and pulled them on. Having been unable to devise any way of keeping them up, he had to take them off if he wanted to walk. For the hundredth time he searched his empty pockets, then slid his hands automatically down his trouser legs. His fingers touched the turn-ups of the trousers, his fingernails explored the fluff and dust inside the turn-ups. Then suddenly there was something else. His fingers, excited, sensitive, touched something, pinned it, grasped it. A match. Holding the match safely in one hand, he quickly explored for other ones. No. Only one match. But a match. Was it the kind that he could strike without a box? If so how could he use it? Should he preserve it for some future chance, or should he use it now to solve the riddle of the pipe in the lavatory? After reflecting he got up again and, holding the match very carefully, took off his trousers. He stood listening for a moment, then went back to the invisible pipe, thrusting the now reeking bucket aside with his foot. He felt the position of the twisted pipe, then began to touch the wall above it. The wall was dreadfully smooth, but at last his fingers found a very slight granular roughness. After a moment’s hesitation and with a violent heart beat he drew the precious match firmly down the wall.

  The sudden bright light was for a second almost an agony and he closed his eyes against it and nearly dropped the match. Then when he opened his eyes he seemed to be looking into a weird picture. The wall, very close to him, was a dark but rather radiant green, and Cato felt that he had never in his life seen such a wonderful colour. Then he saw that the wall was not plain, but was covered with the strange all-over design which he had noticed before in the light of Beautiful Joe’s candle, and was also irregularly dotted, with weird pinkish spots. Cato’s eyes, struggling with the picture suddenly placed so close before them, found themselves reading. There was a name, Jeff Mitchell, and a date. A crude drawing. Other names. Tommy Hicks, Peter the Wolf. Other dates. 15 July 1942. 3.8.43. 20 January 1940. 17 April 1944, 11.4.41. The whole wall was covered with names and dates.

  The match burnt Cato’s fingers and he dropped it, but just as it fell he looked down and saw the pipe and interpreted the puzzle which his fingers had failed to understand. There was a screw and he instantly knew which way it should turn. He leaned against the wall for a moment, breathing deeply. Then he took hold of the pipe and tried to turn it. It would not yield. He returned again to his bed. The match had revealed at least two other things. His cell was part of an old wartime air raid shelter. There were many such underground warrens, underneath government offices, or under buildings that had once been offices, some of which had disappeared during the war itself. He might be anywhere in central London, in some blocked abandoned honeycomb the entrance to which was a lost secret. He had read of such places. He had also, in his vivid flash of light, solved another problem, the origin of the sound which was so like a distant bulldozer. It was the tiny crepitation of hundreds of pinkish beetles, slightly larger relations of the ones in his kitchen at the Mission, which had made the place their own. He shuddered, stretching out his hands and seeming now to feel them everywhere, walking upon the bed, upon his shirt and naked arm.

  He must not give way, he must take initiatives and try to save himself. It was a soldier’s duty, if taken prisoner, to escape. But it all seemed so hopeless. If he was indeed in an air raid shelter the pipe on which he had intended to tap would not lead anywhere, to any neighbouring house or place of rescue. He would try to detach his ‘tool’ because it was something to do. But he had no plan and no prospect of release, he was effectively buried. No one would miss him or look for him. His father would grieve over his absence but with proud arrogance would never seek for him, would assume he had run back to his ‘religious friends’. Colette would be uneasy but would do nothing. What would Henry do? Would he, after that letter, go to the police? No. Could Henry easily be intimidated? Yes. Oh if only I had not written that l
etter, thought Cato, lying in the dark. It was such a dishonourable awful thing to do. I will write no more letters for these people. I would not have written it if I had not been so dazed. I must not let them drug me.

  Some time ago (hours ago?) Beautiful Joe had come with some food. He had only stayed a moment, long enough to put the food on the table, and had then vanished in a flash of torch light. Joe had seemed agitated, excited, nervous, angry or frightened. Cato reflected fruitlessly on this enigma. The food, at which he groped, consisted of water, in a cardboard cup, two slices of bread and some sort of mashed up fish (sardines?) which had been turned out onto a sheet of paper. He was very hungry. He decided that if the food was drugged the drug would be in the fish. He ate the bread and drank the water and rather reluctantly put the fish into the bucket. He now felt weak, hungry, but clear-headed. But what did he hope to achieve by keeping his wits about him? Did he really imagine that, even if he could achieve it physically, he would have the courage to charge out of the door into those awful rooms beyond where he would be killed like an escaping rat?

  His eyes still boiled strangely from the shock of the sudden light, and lying in the blackness his head swarmed with images. He saw again and again, as if it had been printed on his vision, the green wall and the names and the wartime dates and the big pink beetles, moving quietly. He saw Colette in her green overall and the garden at Pennwood. He saw his mother, an almost imaginary figure composed out of now inaccessible memories. He saw Father Milsom saying mass, and Brendan’s Spanish crucifix. He seemed to see somewhere, as a great black hump, his own death, and the fear of death turned and twisted in him with an anguish which was like the whining blubbering misery of a child. He pictured the face of Christ and wondered if he could pray. Strange words came to his lips. ‘Lord Christ, whoever you may be, if it please you to be called by this name, by this name I call upon you …’