by Iris Murdoch
However, some eighteen months ago the Kastanic script had come once more to Peter Saward’s attention because of two apparently unconnected things: one was the discovery of a large cache of tablets bearing the script on the site of an ancient city near the Bosphorus which was of particular interest to Peter; and the other was the appearance, again in Syria, of a number of tablets written in the cuneiform script, not in the Babylonian language but in some unknown language. Immediately, for reasons which, he was well aware, hardly amounted yet to a historical argument, Peter Saward became convinced that the unknown cuneiform language and the language of the hieroglyphic script were one and the same. Further, the idea became lodged in him, and resisted all criticism, that the decipherment of the script, of which a very considerable number of items now existed, would bring him, and by the only available method, the solution of a number of problems which had troubled him for years. From that moment on he was lost.
Peter Saward knew very well that his intuitions about the script were exactly similar in type to those which he had, with pitying shakes of the head, observed to mislead and confound his fellow-historians in the past. And when he began himself to work seriously at the task he saw but too clearly how easy it was, in such a morass of imagination and conjecture, to attach oneself desperately to any idea which had even the faintest plausibility, to allow a conjecture, through mere familiarity and through the absence of rivals, to seem gradually more and more likely, and to become daily more in love with it because of the complete lack of even any rational starting-point to which one could return. Peter Saward was always fanatically systematic in his work. Although he knew how to invoke the darkness, he was rigorous in his criticism of his intuitions, and anything which could not fit into or modify the steady and continuous scheme of his work was ruthlessly discarded. In deciphering the script, however, the very problem was bow to be systematic. The only thing that seemed clear about it was that it contained too many signs to be an alphabetic script. It might be a syllabic or an ideographic script, or a mixture of the two. It was not even clear whether the language in question was Indo-European or not. Anything was possible. Peter Saward proceeded at last by two methods: that of selecting names of gods and kings which might perhaps be mentioned in the inscriptions and trying, in some way or other, to identify some of the signs with these names, and that of studying the signs themselves, attempting to group and classify them and so establish in some way the structure of the language. He also hoped to get some clues, he hardly knew how, from a study of the cuneiform tablets. How happy he would have been if these procedures had yielded absolutely no results! Unfortunately although they yielded no results worth speaking of, they did seem to provide a number of hints or possibilities which always seemed to be worth following, without as yet leading to anything in the least conclusive. So, cursing himself, Peter Saward went on, until the task of decipherment encroached more and more upon his working day, and the mystery of his sleep was resolved into a dance of nightmare hieroglyphics.
Winter and summer a stove was burning in his room, stoked by Peter Saward’s landlady, a Miss Glashan, who also brought him his meals and did the cleaning. In the course of time this lady had become expert in removing every speck of dust without disturbing the position of any object. She would dart about the room silently with the dexterity of a cat and the dirt would vanish as completely as if she had swallowed it. Miss Glashan never spoke, though she often smiled. She was in awe of Peter Saward, both because of those rather austere features of his character which inspired awe in most of the people who knew him and also for an extra reason of her own, because he was a sick man. Miss Glashan, who had never known a day’s illness, regarded sick people with a mixture of reverence and horror which was identical with her attitude towards death. Peter Saward had an advanced but quiescent tuberculosis. As Miss Glashan told her friends with emotion, he had only one lung. His illness had been successfully arrested, but the doctors had sentenced him to a quiet life. Since then he had grown plump. Of the fine silhouette of his earlier youth there remained only the profile of his face. He had also, his friends noticed, grown strangely gay; and very often, when he had company, he would stretch out his long legs and throw back his big head and laugh till the house rocked, and Miss Glashan in the kitchen would say to her neighbours, ‘Hear him laughing, the poor soul!’ Peter Saward was forty-four years of age.
He was staring at the hieroglyphics; but it was now some time since they had become invisible. At last he thrust them aside. He was expecting Rosa. Peter could not endure the wasting of time. He would read a book while he ate his meals and even while he was shaving, with the result that he was usually as covered with scars as a Sicilian bandit. There were other special tasks which he saved up for times when he knew that he would be disturbed. While Miss Glashan was cleaning the room, he would work on his bibliography, sorting and indexing the innumerable scraps of paper on which he had written references to books and articles. But even this was too exacting for the times during which he was waiting for Rosa. After various experiments he had decided that the only thing he was fit for just then was cutting the pages of books. He deplored this irrational and continually renewed agitation, but was by now resigned to it. He stacked up the sheets of hieroglyphics, and reached out for the pile of volumes which he had been keeping ready for this moment. The soft hiss of the paper-knife made an accompaniment to his thoughts.
There was a knock at the door. Peter Saward lived on the ground floor, and as the front door of the house was always open, his visitors could come straight to his room. He dropped the knife and called out. But it was not Rosa.
The person who entered was a man called John Rainborough, an old friend of Peter Saward, but now a rare caller. Peter did his best to look pleased to see him, and succeeded. ‘Come in, John,’ he said. ‘This is an unexpected treat. Sit down.’
‘May I?’ said Rainborough. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you. I just thought I’d drop in on the way back to the office.’
Rainborough held an important post in the Special European Labour Immigration Board, better known as SELIB, a body which had started life as a charitable organization supported mainly by American contributions and which now received a certain financial assistance from the British Government. He had the reputation of being a very clever man, though those who described him in this way would always add, ‘Of course, he hasn’t yet found his niche.’
Although Rainborough was younger than Saward by several years, he looked older. He had lost his hair almost to the crown of his head, which gave him the appearance of having an enormous forehead which was divided into two halves, a lower half covered with deep wrinkles and an upper half which was smooth and shining. He fidgeted continually and had restless brown eyes. He was embarrassed by his partial baldness and never ceased to envy Peter Saward, in whose great bush of brown hair, every time that he came to see him, he would look in vain for some traces of daylight. Saward was fond of him, although at that moment he wished him at the devil.
Rainborough sat down, screwing himself into the chair. ‘How’s the work?’ he asked.
‘At a standstill,’ said Peter Saward.
‘Oh, that language thing,’ said Rainborough. ‘Yes, I saw in The Times they’d found a bilingual.’
‘It’s not true,’ said Saward. ‘At least, it was only a seal with a single name on it, together with what may be, but probably isn’t, one of my hieroglyphs.’
‘I can’t think why you bother,’ said Rainborough.
Peter Saward shrugged his shoulders. ‘A bilingual might turn up next week, or it might never turn up.’ He suppressed the irritation he felt against Rainborough for expressing what he himself also felt, that he was wasting his time.
Rainborough was shifting in his seat and fiddling nervously with the edge of the chair. It was some time now since he had ceased to think of Peter Saward as a master from whom he might learn important truths, but he still bore him a slight grudge for having ever appeared, even mome
ntarily, in that role. Rainborough respected and envied Saward’s learning, which extended far beyond the bounds of the ancient world, and he disliked, and was impressed by the simplicity of his life. He also and especially admired the way in which Saward was able to harness all the resources of his intellect to a single task. This was a thing which Rainborough had never been able to do; on the contrary, each project in which he interested himself would regularly turn out, after a while, to have ‘nothing in it’. He gained, however, a certain relief from reflecting on the peculiar pointlessness of the studies in which his friend specialized. Wherein, he asked himself, lay the interest or importance of the rise and fall of empires whose very existence rested upon a few unprepossessing stones and a disputed reference in the Book of Kings? Whole dynasties of princes with barbarous names and pantheons of gods dubiously identified with more respectable and better known deities, appeared to be supported only by the vigorous imagination of Peter Saward and his colleagues. And if Saward had in fact gone slowly mad and were inventing it all, Rainborough reflected, it would be years before anyone found out, even, he thought spitefully, his fellow-historians; and it wouldn’t make any difference to anything.
Since Saward’s illness, Rainborough had also been made uneasy by a change which he imagined to have taken place in his friend and which he found it difficult to diagnose. After he had been near to death he had become a jester. Rainborough had the impression that Saward had become deeply melancholy, and yet the only expression of this melancholy was a completely unforced cheerfulness. His personality had become in some profound way looser, less rigid; and yet the deep crack which Rainborough suspected had the strange effect of making Saward not weaker but more powerful. This change distressed Rainborough because in some sense it put the man even more beyond his reach than he had been before. He often wondered to himself, as he listened to Saward’s frequent laughter, what it was that made him so conscious of the presence of something sad. It was only occasionally that Saward said something that revealed what Rainborough took, contrary to the evidence, to be the reality of the matter: as when he said once on a winter evening, ‘When it is so cold I think often of those who sleep out of doors,’ and it took Rainborough a moment to realize that he meant the dead.
‘In fact, I’m making a little progress,’ Peter Saward was saying. ‘I’m almost sure now that certain signs represent grammatical suffixes — ’
Rainborough, who had only made his inquiry out of politeness, hastened to interrupt him. ‘Look, Peter,’ he said, ‘never mind that. I’ve got a piece of news for you. Mischa Fox is in England.’
‘I know,’ said Saward.
‘You know?’ said Rainborough, disappointed. ‘How?’
‘He called on me last week,’ said Saward.
Rainborough looked annoyed. ‘You’re favoured!’ he said. ‘He hasn’t condescended to call on me. I inferred that he was around when I saw that unspeakable man Calvin Blick in Oxford Street. I crossed the road to avoid him. Then I saw it in the Evening News. As you never read the papers, I thought you mightn’t know.’
‘Ah, well!’ said Saward. His bush of brown hair had fallen over his eyes.
‘It’s all the more maddening,’ said Rainborough, ‘because I have the reputation of being Mischa’s friend, and the ten thousand people who want to see him will all start calling on me. I’m never so popular as when Mischa Fox is in England. Did he say anything about me?’
‘No,’ said Peter Saward.
Rainborough sat silent, frowning, his lower brow wrinkled up into a knot of lines. He would have said sincerely, and with a sort of pride, that Mischa Fox was one of his best friends; yet in his heart he now felt fear and almost hatred of the man. He never felt easy in his mind so long as Fox was in the country.
‘I’m expecting Rosa,’ said Peter Saward. ‘You must stay and say hello to her.’ He hoped that this indicated politely but clearly to Rainborough that he was not expected to stay longer than that.
‘Rosa! Oh, good!’ said Rainborough. A light gleamed in his eyes which was almost, but not quite, pleasure. Rainborough had known Rosa for more years than Saward had; and in the matter of Rosa he felt a certain resentment. Rainborough would have liked to play the role of being unhappily in love with Rosa, but it had been Saward who had set his heart upon her, meeting her after Rainborough had already known her for some time. Indeed, it was probably Saward’s passion which had first revealed Rosa’s charms to Rainborough. But it would have seemed to him absurd to love Rosa vainly, since his friend already did so.
Rainborough was not averse to being unhappily in love; indeed, an arrangement of this kind would have suited him very well. But he was reluctant to undertake the drudgery of an unrequited attachment if he was not also to have the satisfaction of being, in the eyes of the world and of the object of his love, a solitary figure. As a lonely and unfortunate admirer Rainborough could, he thought, have found in the tension of such a relationship a mode of being both apart from and together with the beloved: such a combination, in short, of security, yearning and rapture, as had now become his ideal conception of partnership with a woman. That Rosa could ever have returned his love did not enter his head, any more than it entered his head to imagine that she might ever return that of Peter Saward. It seemed to Rainborough now very unlikely that Rosa, who was a year older than himself, would ever get married. The beautiful possibilities of the situation had been spoilt by the unexpected and tireless way in which Saward had elected to love Rosa. Rainborough had no wish to be one of two people inspired by the same fruitless passion. In such a role he would have felt merely ridiculous. For such reasons he was not in love with Rosa. He had, all the same, a certain inclination for her. He admired what he took to be an ascetic trait in her character, and he liked her sulky pessimism, her sarcasm, even her rudeness, and her extremely long black hair.
‘Has she seen him?’ he asked Saward. ‘Does she know he’s in England?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Saward. ‘Rosa hasn’t been here for ten days.’
‘Did Fox mention her?’ asked Rainborough.
‘No.’
‘Well, what the hell did you talk about? Never mind, don’t tell me. I wonder ought we to mention to Rosa that Fox is here?’
‘She’ll certainly already know,’ said Peter Saward.
‘I don’t see why she should,’ said Rainborough. ‘She might miss it in the papers, and, after all, the heavens don’t turn red when Mischa Fox lands; comets don’t burn in the sky, whatever some people may think.’
‘She’ll know,’ said Saward, ‘and it’s better not to say anything.’
‘Her kid brother never got over Rosa’s turning Mischa down,’ said Rainborough.
‘Yes,’ said Peter Saward. ‘He was certainly fond of Mischa. Of course, Hunter was very young at the time.’
‘The interesting question,’ said Rainborough, studying his friend, ‘is whether Rosa ever got over it.’
‘Ah —’ said Peter Saward. He had put the books aside, and was examining the paper-knife.
‘It was a good thing she didn’t marry him,’ said Rainborough. ‘He is a man capable of enormous cruelty.’
Peter Saward only replied by staring at the paper-knife and shaking his head slowly to and fro, and twisting his long legs into knots under the desk. ‘How’s the office, John?’ he asked.
As Rainborough looked at him he felt a pang of pain and annoyance at his vulnerability. No man, he thought, had any right to be so vulnerable. He was letting the side down. All males have a right to a certain brutality, a certain insensibility. Without this, Rainborough thought, we can be charged with anything. But Saward had foregone his right, perhaps never knew that he had it. Here was a personality without frontiers. Saward did not defend himself by placing others. He did not defend himself. It was, Rainborough thought, a scandal. He accepted the change of subject.
‘The office,’ he said, ‘is appalling. The place is paralysed with boredom and inactivity. It isn’t that t
here aren’t plenty of things that need doing: half the staff needs to be sacked to start with. But it’s partly that no one has enough real authority to do anything drastic, and partly that we’re all so pleased at being in safe seats with large salaries that we daren’t start rocking the boat for fear we fall out ourselves.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ asked Peter Saward.
Rainborough laughed nastily. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that I’m waiting until my own seat is made so impeccably safe that I can start making it hot for other people without needing to be afraid of the reprisals!’
‘But you don’t need the money, John,’ said Peter Saward.
‘I know,’ said Rainborough. ‘It isn’t the money. It’s just that one would have to be so bold and make oneself so unpleasant in order to get anything done. It’s easier to sit still and hope for one’s position to improve.’
‘You hope to be Director when Sir Edward retires?’
‘Yes,’ said Rainborough shortly. He always found himself making damaging admissions to Peter Saward, and could not decide whether it was the manner of his friend’s questions, or his own desire to strip himself before Saward, which brought this about.
Rosa came in. She knocked and entered in the same moment. Rainborough leapt up, took a step back, and stumbled over a pile of books. Rosa looked surprised to see him, and displeased. ‘John,’ she said, uttering the syllable in a colourless way which was neither an exclamation nor a greeting. It was as if she noticed his presence and murmured the word to herself. She paid no attention to Peter Saward, but sat down on a chair beside the door. Saward did not look at her, but bent his head lower over his desk.
‘Don’t mind me,’ said Rosa. ‘Go on talking.’
Rainborough sat down, kicking books away to right and left. ‘Don’t be absurd, Rosa!’ he said. ‘How can we ignore you?’
