Henry and Cato

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘He thought you’d prevent her from coming.’

  ‘He should have known her better. She would have run through a fire to get to Cato once he’d summoned her like that. She’s the heroic one.’

  ‘The young knight, you said.’

  ‘Yes. Oh God, I can’t get over it. Any sort of ordinary manliness, the most ordinary sort of decency and courage, should have stopped Cato from writing those letters, should simply have stopped him in his tracks.’

  ‘I suppose it didn’t seem too bad to write to Henry about the ransom. After all it was only money and Henry has plenty. Then when he started writing the letters it was easier to go on. And he was hungry and confused—’

  ‘I wouldn’t have started.’

  ‘One could be very frightened in such a situation, threatened with a knife—’

  ‘By a puny boy.’

  ‘A violent person has psychological power. He can frighten the non-violent just by his will. This is a very dreadful fact.’

  ‘He can frighten sheep. I would have been so bloody angry. I’d have gone berserk. I can’t forgive Cato for taking it lying down, for not being aggressive. All right, you’ll say it’s better not to be aggressive—’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that. But it may be more prudent. I hope no one kidnaps you. You would get yourself murdered.’

  ‘It might be better to be dead than living with some memories.’

  ‘Oh, come—’

  ‘And the crazy awful thing about the whole business is that if he’d acted bravely and fought the boy the whole hoax would have collapsed at once. The boy must have been amazed, he probably started it half as a joke! And then suddenly there were thousands of pounds and a girl offering herself— I must say I blame Henry too.’

  ‘I think everyone acted fairly reasonably. It was a very obscure situation and evil confuses people. Joe might have killed Cato if Cato had fought.’

  ‘Cato was led like a lamb to the slaughter. If only he’d punched the boy’s face at the beginning he wouldn’t have had to smash his skull at the end. There’s a sort of feebleness in the modern young. With some of them it’s vicious idleness and something for nothing, with others it’s just an inability to resist evil.’

  ‘Gentleness perhaps. Cato is non-violent. Colette is far more violent than he is.’

  ‘Yes, at least she fought.’

  ‘Anyway it’s done now and Cato’s got to live with it and anything we can do to help him to recover—’

  ‘Oh he’ll be all right. He’ll go back to God. That bloody religion is so debilitating. Pat, darling, what have I done to deserve such children? Cato a Roman Catholic and Colette married to Henry Marshalson!’

  ‘She seems very happy.’

  ‘She could have had that clever young architect, Giles Gosling, he was mad about her.’

  ‘I thought you were so pleased with Henry’s building plans.’

  ‘They’re my building plans. Henry and Colette are just playing at it.’

  ‘Well, I think Henry’s a poppet.’

  ‘Pat—!’

  ‘I’m getting up.’

  ‘I bore you.’

  ‘Not exactly, but you understand so little.’ Patricia rolled out, stood up. She had been a flaming redhead when she was young. Now her abundant hair had faded to a still radiant speckled sandy ginger. Her skin was very pale and her eyes too were a pale blue. She had an air of innocence which could change imperceptibly into an air of fearful candid intelligence as she gazed with those lucid pale eyes. She frightened people. Her clear face was marked only by a faint puckered tiredness upon the brow. Now, dressed in a light brown Indian robe, she smoked a cigar. John Forbes watched her.

  ‘John, I must tell you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to have someone here to share the flat.’

  ‘No! Not a man?’

  ‘No, no, a girl.’

  ‘Oh hell. But what about me? I’ve got to be able to come here.’

  ‘Things will be so different.’

  ‘Oh no, Pat, don’t be obscene. I must be able to come. Who is this girl anyway?’

  ‘Miriam Shippel.’

  ‘God, not the girl who writes those books?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, Pat, you can’t, you must keep times for me—’

  ‘I’m going to retire and work in the Labour Party. Miriam is going to be a candidate. We’re going into politics. I’m tired of just fuming and writing letters to The Times.’

  ‘Pat, you aren’t serious—I mean, you’re not—ending this?’

  ‘Well, it’ll have to end, John, when Miriam’s here. Don’t take on. You know how I’ve always felt, how it’s always been.’

  ‘You’ve hated it.’

  ‘You know I haven’t! But I’ve done it out of love and friendship—’

  ‘I like “love and friendship”!’

  ‘I’ve done it to please you, since there wasn’t any reason not to. Now there’ll be a reason. Sorry.’

  ‘Pat, you know I’ve got to have someone—’

  ‘Of course you have, dear.’

  ‘You think I’m coarse.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why have you put up with me for so long?’

  ‘Oh well, I just happen to love you. And because of Ruth. I loved Ruth awfully.’

  ‘Yes—I know—’

  ‘Why don’t you take up with Gerda?’

  ‘Hell, no, I’d have to marry her! You aren’t jealous of Gerda by any chance? No, no such luck.’

  ‘Well, why not marry Gerda? It seems to me rather a good idea.’

  ‘No, no, out of the question. I say, Pat, is it marriage you want? I mean if it is I’d marry you—’ Patricia’s laughter echoed through the flat.

  ‘I’m done for,’ said John. ‘This is the first time in years that I’ve seen you really happy.’

  ‘You aren’t taking any books?’ said Cato.

  ‘No.’

  It was nine o’clock in the evening and Cato was in Brendan’s sitting-room. The contents of the drawers and bookshelves lay about on the floor. The little flat was being dismembered. Brendan was going to India.

  ‘I got it all out of that young policeman in the end.’

  ‘So you said.’

  ‘Sorry, am I drunk?’

  ‘No, no, have some more.’

  ‘Colette didn’t want me to know. If only I’d done anything, shouted, struggled, anything. God, he might have laughed. It’s as if—I didn’t give him a chance.’

  ‘You can’t know. Colette told the police that Joe was harmless, but he slashed her deliberately and in a horrible way. And it needn’t even have been true that he had no accomplices, that it was only him.’

  ‘Oh it was true—the police were convinced when they searched the place. My father thinks I’m a sort of sick coward. He can’t understand how a man could behave as I behaved. I can’t understand it now either.’

  ‘Don’t try to—in that way.’

  ‘Maybe I was right to choose a non-violent role, if only I’d stuck to it—I keep going over and over it all in my mind.’

  ‘At least you can see you oughtn’t to do that.’

  ‘He respected me once. When I destroyed that respect there was nothing to save him—’

  ‘Did you see his mother again?’

  ‘No. Father Thomas is dealing with her. She didn’t want to see me any more. I don’t blame her. She’s got away from that bloody man anyway. He respected me and loved me and I somehow brought God to him—if only—’

  ‘I hope you don’t inflict this on Colette.’

  ‘No, only on you. Colette doesn’t know I know. I don’t think Colette will ever forgive me for involving her in that horror. She despises me. So does my father, so does Henry.’

  ‘Colette loves you and her greatest need is to feel that she can help you. You must meet that need, even by pretence until the pretence becomes real. They all need you.’

  ‘I can’t mee
t anybody’s need, better to keep clear. Who am I, anyway? Perhaps now I shall start jumping on my pupils. A queer in a cord coat, he called me.’

  ‘Well, accept it. There’s nothing wrong with being queer. Only I don’t think you should jump on pupils, a teacher has so much power.’

  ‘I’ve lost my self-esteem and I didn’t ever know how much it mattered. It’s a great defence against temptation. Now it’s gone I feel every sin can tempt me, you name it, I’ll do it. Once that spiritual decor is stripped away there’s nothing but a demon left.’

  ‘I know you feel that.’

  ‘Oh not even that—I feel I’m nobody, nothing.’

  ‘You were always that, my dear, it’s what we all are.’

  ‘What will become of me?’

  ‘You might become an Anglican priest later on, I’m sure they’d have you.’

  ‘Cocoa after wine?’

  ‘Cocoa might do you good. You were always a bit of a drunk, you know.’

  ‘Drunk with Christ, yes.’

  ‘The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all. Sometimes the first elan carries a man right through to the end. Well, that’s one way.’

  ‘And you? Did you “fall in love”?’

  ‘Oh well. I had the advantage of growing up with a saint.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘My mother. She was the sort of saint that no one ever notices or sees, she was almost invisible.’

  ‘And that somehow defused the drama?’

  ‘I never conceived of not being a priest. For you, there was a coup de foudre.’

  ‘I wish I believed that Joe was in purgatory.’

  ‘If you believed it you would not know what you were believing. I wish you would pray for him. I wish you would go on praying. Prayer is the most essential of all human activities, it should be like breathing. You must still feel it yourself, the need to pray, like the need to breathe.’

  ‘I feel it. But what does breathing prove? You know, when I was there in the dark in that place I realized at last and quite certainly that there was no God. I had imagined that I had thought this before, but I hadn’t. It’s as if I experienced the non-existence of God as something absolutely positive. Now, don’t look like that. You keep trying to pull every experience, every testimony back inside the being of God. It won’t do! I know all that, after all I’ve been years in the game.’

  ‘You say you’ve been years in the game. It seems to me you don’t know what the game is.’

  ‘All right, you tell me.’

  ‘I’ve told you. You fell in love. That’s a start, but it’s only a start. Falling in love is egoism, it’s being obsessed by images and being consoled by them, images of the beloved, images of oneself. It’s the greatest pain and the greatest paradox of all that personal love has to break at some point, the ego has to break, something absolutely natural and seemingly good, seemingly perhaps the only good, has to be given up. After that there’s darkness and silence and space. And God is there. Remember St John of the Gross. Where the images end you fall into the abyss, but it is the abyss of faith. When you have nothing left you have nothing left but hope.’

  ‘El abismo de la fé. Brendan, I’ve heard all this so often. I’ve even said it so often!’

  ‘Try at least to use it now in relation to yourself. You keep going over and over what happened and picturing it and imagining it otherwise. You mustn’t. Repentance isn’t a bit like obsessive guilt. Think how often you’ve said that, in one form or another, in the confessional.’

  ‘I can’t say it to myself.’

  ‘Your guilt is vanity, it’s to do with that self-esteem you were talking about, which you haven’t really lost at all, it’s only wounded. Repent, and let these things pass from you.’

  ‘Without Christ I can’t. Without the bloody machinery I can’t. I thought you might be able to do it for me, but even you can’t. I feel damned, I loved that boy and I led him astray and I killed him.’

  ‘We live by redemptive death. Anyone can stand in for Christ.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Death is what instructs us most of all, and then only when it is present. When it is absent it is totally forgotten. Those who can live with death can live in the truth, only this is almost unendurable. It is not the drama of death that teaches—when you are there facing it there is no drama. That’s why it’s so hard to write tragedy. Death is the great destroyer of all images and all stories, and human beings will do anything rather than envisage it. Their last resource is to rely on suffering, to try to cheat death by suffering instead. And suffering we know breeds images, it breeds the most beautiful images of all.’

  Cato put down his glass. He looked up at Brendan who while he talked had been moving, sorting books, and now stood beside the empty shelves trailing his fingers to and fro in the dust.

  Cato said, ‘Christ cheated death by suffering instead.’

  Brendan looked at Cato for a moment, then was silent, leaning back against the shelves and gazing dreamily ahead of him.

  Cato said, ‘Oh no—’

  Brendan smiled and flashed his blue eyes and sat down, knocking over a tall pile of books with his foot. Then he actually laughed.

  ‘But you believe in the resurrection and the life,’ said Cato. ‘If I really did now I’d be laughing too. I’m not sure that I ever did believe. You do, which is why what you’ve just said must be, for you a kind of nonsense, a magic spell, made up, oh I know, for my benefit, like things one says in the confessional, only of course much more sophisticated. After all you believe in a personal God—’

  Brendan was silent.

  ‘Well, you do, don’t you?’

  After a moment Brendan said, ‘That’s another picture. We deal in the idea of persons, we have to. But God is unimaginable and incomprehensible and nameless. Dysphrastos and thaumastos. Oh all this is the old “game”, I know. But one lives with the game and things change. You’ve never really lived with it, you’ve been a provisional priest right from the start. You’ve been doing the thing on your own terms. Now when at last you might cease to be provisional—’

  ‘And fall into the abyss.’

  ‘You talk of giving up.’

  ‘I don’t just talk of it, I am giving up.’

  ‘Are you? Time will show. I don’t mean about your being laicized. You can’t escape from God just by going through a few formalities.’

  ‘But Brendan, do you believe in God or not? I mean, I’m not accusing you of being a fake, you’re real, and because of you something else is real—but this doesn’t add up to God, I mean even you can’t invent Him! Do you believe in God?’

  ‘It’s impossible to answer a question truly unless you know what the question means to the questioner.’

  ‘Oh do stop being subtle. If you don’t know whether God is a person what happens to your Christology?’

  ‘I let Christ look after my Christology.’

  ‘You should have been a lawyer. I remember Father Bell saying that you were the best theologian we had.’

  ‘That was years ago, my dear.’

  ‘Have you given it up then? Have you given up thinking, you who were so good at it?’

  Brendan pushed the books around on the floor with a slippered foot. ‘One can get so far but no farther.’

  ‘What about people in the past? After all, we’ve all been thinking about it for a long time.’

  ‘What can we really know about people in the past? We understand so little of minds we only meet in books. Our whole range of understanding and vision is tiny.’

  ‘The New Testament?’

  ‘That’s unusual. It’s unusualness is one of the few clear things.’

  ‘Your friend Plato?’

  ‘Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously. We are puppets in the hands of
God.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘We can only see Plato through the haze of his ingenious invention, European philosophy.’

  ‘And all that brilliant thinking that went to make the doctrine of the Trinity?’

  ‘Brilliant, I agree. Oh we must think, at least some people must. But thinking, in that way, is simply a matter of keeping oneself from slipping back into all sorts of illusions, it’s a way of keeping near the truth, even when, especially when, the truth cannot be formulated.’

  ‘Maybe I’m more like my father than I used to realize. He thinks religion is pure mumbo-jumbo. I’m beginning to think that most of it is.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. But, Cato, never mind about reason and intelligence. Just hold onto Christ, the Christ that the Church cannot take away from you.’

  ‘Now you sound like a fundamentalist preacher. But Brendan, is that why you’re going to India, to stop thinking?’

  ‘No, not like that.’

  ‘Like what then?’

  ‘It was time for a change.’

  ‘Too comfy here?’

  ‘No, no, one can do Christ’s work anywhere. No-many things—’

  ‘Tell me one.’

  ‘I was getting too addicted to speculation. I sometimes felt that if I could hang on just a little longer I would receive some perfect illumination about everything.’

  ‘Why don’t you hang on?’

  ‘Because I know that if it did come it would be an illusion—one of the most, oh, splendid. The original felix culpa is thought itself.’

  ‘That sounds to me like despair.’

  ‘The point is, one will never get to the end of it, never get to the bottom of it, never, never, never. And that never, never, never is what you must take for your hope and your shield and your most glorious promise. Everything that we concoct about God is an illusion.’

  ‘But God is not an illusion?’

  ‘Whosoever he be of you who forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.’

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve given up theology at all. Theology is magic. Beware.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I must go and catch my train to Leeds, it leaves at midnight. When shall I see you again?’

  Brendan got up and turned on another lamp. ‘I’m going into retreat next week and I’m leaving England immediately after that.’