by Iris Murdoch
‘I don’t think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it’s a kind of malice.’
‘That’s what makes a writer, knowing the details.’
‘It may make your kind of writer. It doesn’t make mine.’
‘Here we go again,’ said Arnold.
‘Why pile up a jumble of “details”? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn’t the reproduction of oddments out of life.’
‘I never said it was!’ said Arnold. ‘I don’t draw direct from life.’
‘Your wife thinks you do.’
‘Oh that. Oh God.’
‘Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one’s spotted isn’t art.’
‘Of course it isn’t – ’
‘Vague romantic myth isn’t art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the other.’
‘Bradley, I know you – ’
‘Art isn’t chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silence.’
‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art! It’s people without creative gifts who say that more means worse!’
‘One should only complete something when one feels one’s bloody privileged to have it at all. Those who only do what’s easy will never be rewarded by – ’
‘Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That’s what being a professional writer is.’
‘Then thank God I’m not one.’
‘You’re such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You’re a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.’
‘It is continuously significant.’
‘Oh come, be humbler, let cheerfulness break in! I can’t think why you worry so. Thinking of yourself as a “writer” is part of your trouble. Why not just think of yourself as someone who very occasionally writes something, who may in the future write something? Why make a life drama out of it?’
‘I don’t think of myself as a writer, not like that. I know you do. You’re all “writer”. I don’t see myself in that way. I think of myself as an artist, that is as a dedicated person. And of course it’s a life drama. Are you suggesting that I’m some sort of amateur?’
‘No, no – ’
‘Because if you are – ’
‘Bradley, please let’s not have this silly old quarrel again, I don’t feel strong enough.’
‘All right. Sorry. Sorry.’
‘You get so worked up and flowery! You sound as if you were quoting something all the time!’
I felt a sizzling warmth in my coat pocket wherein I had thrust the folded manuscript of my review of Arnold’s novel. Arnold Baffin’s work was a congeries of amusing anecdotes loosely garbled into ‘racy stories’ with the help of half-baked unmeditated symbolism. The dark powers of imagination were conspicuous by their absence. Arnold Baffin wrote too much, too fast. Arnold Baffin was really just a talented journalist.
‘Let’s start up our Sundays again,’ said Arnold. ‘I so much enjoyed our talks. We must just keep out of those old rat runs. We’re both like mechanical toys when certain subjects are mentioned, we go whirring off. Come to lunch next Sunday, why not?’
‘I doubt if Rachel will want to see me next Sunday.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Anyway I’m going abroad.’
‘Of course, I’d forgotten. Where are you going to?’
‘Italy. I haven’t made detailed plans yet.’
‘Well, you aren’t going at once, are you? Come next Sunday. And let us know where you’ll be in Italy. We’re going there too, we might meet.’
‘I’ll ring up. Better go now, Arnold.’
‘All right. Thanks. And don’t worry about us. You know.’ He seemed ready to let me go now. In fact we were both of us exhausted.
He waved me off and closed the door quickly. By the time I reached the front gate I could hear his gramophone. He must have hared straight back into the drawing-room and put on a record, like a man racing for his fix. It sounded like Stravinsky or something. The action and the sound set my teeth on edge. I am, I fear, one of those who, according to Shakespeare, are ‘fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils’.
It was now, I was surprised to see from my watch, nearly eight o’clock in the evening. The sun was shining again, though a part of the sky was covered with dark metallic cloud which had been drawn across it like a curtain. There was a rather lurid light, such as these early summer evenings can produce, when a clear but strengthless sun shines at the approach of night. I noticed green leaves in the suburban gardens outlined with an awful clarity. The feathered songsters were still pouring forth their nonsense.
I felt very tired and a little muzzy and weak at the knees with fear and shock. A mixture of emotions raged. Partly, I still felt something of the sheer unholy excitement which I had experienced initially at the thought of a friend (especially this one) in trouble. I felt too that, as far as the trouble was concerned, I had acquitted myself quite well. However it was also possible that I might have to pay the penalty for this. Both Arnold and Rachel might resent my role and wish to punish me for it. This was a particularly irritating anxiety to develop just as I was proposing to go away and forget all about Arnold for a time. It was alarming to find myself suddenly so bound up by exasperation, irritation, affection. I resented and feared these ligatures. I wondered if I should not now delay my departure until after Sunday. On Sunday I could test the atmosphere, estimate the damage, make some sort of peace. Then I could depart in a suitable state of indifference. That they would both resent me as a witness seemed inevitable. However in so far as they were both decent rational people I could expect from them a conscious effort to inhibit resentment. This seemed a reason to see them again soon so as to allow them to make their effort before the thing became historically fixed. On the other hand I had, in that lurid evening light, a superstitious feeling that if I did not make my escape before Sunday something would grab me. I even wondered if I should take a taxi (one passed me at that moment), go back to my flat, pick up my luggage, and go straight on to the station, catching whatever train I could, even if it meant waiting there until the following morning. But this was obviously an absurd idea.
Connected now with my nagging anxiety about what the Baffins were going to think of me was the huge problem of Christian. Yet was it a problem? If Francis had not so intolerably turned up would I have felt my ex-wife’s return to London to be any concern of mine? There was no reason why we should ever meet by accident. And if she should call on me I could politely tell her to go away. Would this be worse than an annoyance? I was not sure. Francis had certainly raised ghosts, was himself a spectre of a particularly nasty kind. And why had I been such a perfect lunatic as to introduce him into the Baffin household ? It was the worst thing that I could have done. And I knew prophetically that it was the sort of stupid action which could madden me with remorse. Of course Arnold had immediately latched on to Francis. Arnold was a natural latcher-on. And now that he had learnt the fascinating news that Francis was my ex-brother-in-law and an unfrocked doctor he would be sure to pursue the acquaintance. That must not happen. I wondered if I could decently just ask him not to. I decided that, although undignified, that was perhaps the best and simplest thing to do. The prompt and absolute excision of Francis from my life was a necessity. Arnold would understand: all too well, but I was after all fairly used to running the gauntlet of Arnold’s understanding.
I then began to wonder what on earth was happening now back at the Baffins’ house? Was Rachel still lying like a disfigured corpse staring at the ceiling, while Arnold sat in the drawing-room drinking whisky and listening to The Firebird? Perhaps Rachel had drawn the sheet over her face again in that appalling way. Or was it all
quite different? Arnold was kneeling outside the door begging her to let him in, weeping and accusing himself. Or else, Rachel, who had been listening for my departure, had come quietly down the stairs and into her husband’s arms. Perhaps now they were in the kitchen together, cooking the supper and opening a special bottle of wine to celebrate. What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity. I felt at that moment so ‘curious’, in just Arnold’s sense of the word, that I almost turned back to snoop around the house and find out what had happened. But of course such an action was not in my character.
By this time I was not far from the underground station, and I had decided to commit no follies. There was no question of rushing out of London that night. I would make my way quietly homeward, eat a sandwich in my local pub, and go early to bed. I had had a hard evening, and this was one of the moments at which I felt myself no longer young. Tomorrow I would decide whatever by then seemed still to need decision, such as whether I should postpone my departure until after Sunday. I felt with some relief that at any rate today’s little dramas were now over. There was however one still to come.
I had crossed the main road and entered the little shopping street that led to the station. The evening had darkened though the pale lurid sun was still shining. Some of the shops had switched their lights on. There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed. The rather dream-like atmosphere was intensified, I suppose, by my own tiredness, by having drunk alcohol, by having eaten nothing. In this mood of rather doom-ridden spiritual lassitude I noticed with only a little surprise and interest the figure upon the other side of the road of a young man who was behaving rather oddly. He was standing upon the kerb and strewing flowers upon the roadway, as if casting them into a river. My first thought was that he was the adherent of some Hindu sect, not then uncommon in London, and that he was performing some religious rite. A few people paused to look at him, but Londoners were by now so accustomed to ‘weirdies’ of all kinds that his ritual aroused little interest.
The young fellow appeared to be chanting some sort of repetitive litany. I now saw that what he was strewing was not so much flowers as white petals. Where had I seen just such petals lately? The fragments of white paint which the violence of Arnold’s chisel had dislodged from the bedroom door. And the white petals were being cast, not at random, but in relation to the regular and constant passage of motor cars. As a car approached the young chap would take a handful of petals out of a bag and cast them into the path of the car, uttering the while his rhythmic chant. Then the frail whitenesses would race about, caught in the car’s motion, dash madly under the wheels, follow the whirlwind of the car’s wake, and dissipate themselves further along the road: so that the casting away of the petals seemed like a sacrifice or act of destruction, since that which was offered was being so instantly consumed and made to vanish.
The young man was slim, dressed in dark narrow trousers, a sort of dark velvet or corduroy jacket and a white shirt. He had a thickish mane of slightly wavy brown hair which grew well down on to his neck. I had paused and had been watching him for some moments and was about to set off again towards the station when, with one of those switches of gestalt which can be so unnerving, I realized that the light had deceived me and that this was in fact no young man but a girl. In the next moment I further realized that it was a girl whom I knew. It was Julian Baffin, Arnold and Rachel’s teenage daughter and only child. (So named, I need hardly explain, after Julian of Norwich.)
I describe Julian here as teenage because that was how I still thought of her, though at this period she was I suppose in her earliest twenties. Arnold had been a young father. I had felt a modest avuncular interest in the fairy-like little girl. (I had never wanted children of my own. Many artists do not.) With the approach of puberty however she lost her looks and developed an awkward sulky aggressive attitude to the world in general which considerably diminished her charm. She was always fretting and complaining, and her little face, as it hardened into adult lines, grew discontented and secretive. That was as I recalled her. I had not in fact seen her for some while. Her parents adored her, yet were at the same time disappointed in her. They had wanted a boy. They had both assumed, as parents do, that Julian would be clever, but this appeared not to be the case. Julian took a long time growing up, she took little part in the self-conscious tribalism of the ‘teenage’ world, and still preferred dressing her dolls to dressing herself at an age when most girls are beginning, even pardonably, to interest themselves in war paint.
Not notably successful in exams and certainly not in the least bookish, Julian had left school at sixteen. She had spent a year in France, more at Arnold’s insistence than out of her own sense of adventure, or so it had seemed to me at the time. She returned from France unimpressed by that country and speaking very bad French which she promptly forgot, and went on to a typist’s training course. Fledged as a typist she took a job in the ‘typing pool’ at a Government office. When she was about nineteen she decided that she was a painter, and Arnold eagerly wangled her into an art school, which she left after a year. After that she had entered a teachers’ training college somewhere in the Midlands where she had been, I think, for a year or perhaps two when I saw her on that evening strewing the white petals in the path of the oncoming motor cars.
Only now I realized, with yet another shift of gestalt, that the whirling white blobs were not petals at all, but fragments of paper. The wind of a passing vehicle carried one of these fragments right to my feet and I picked it up. It was part of a handwritten document whereon I could decipher, amid scrawl, the word ‘love’. Perhaps this eccentric ceremonial had indeed some sort of religious purpose ? I crossed the road and began to walk along the pavement behind Julian. I wanted to hear what it was that she was chanting, and would not have been surprised to find that it was in an unknown tongue. As I came close to her the murmured words sounded like the same constantly repeated phrase. There’s no telling? Masquerading? Are you ailing? He’s compelling?
‘Hello, Bradley.’
Owing to her absence at college and the demise of our Sundays I had not seen Julian for nearly a year, and before that indeed infrequently. I found her older, the face still sulky but with more of a brooding expression, suggestive of the occurrence of thought. She had a rather bad complexion, or perhaps it was just that Arnold’s ‘greasy’ look looked less healthy on a woman. She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother’s, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel’s large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blonde colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. I did not mind the dourness. I dislike girls who are skittish.
‘Hello, Julian. Whatever are you doing?’
‘Have you been to see Daddy?’
‘Yes.’ I reflected that it was just as well Julian was out this evening.
‘Good. I thought you’d quarrelled.’
‘Certainly not!’
‘You don’t come any more.’
‘I do. Only you’re away.’
‘Not now. I’m doing teaching practice in London. What was happening when you left?’
‘Where? At home? Oh – nothing special – ’
‘They were quarrelling so I left the house. Have they calmed down?’
‘Yes, of course – ’
‘Don’t you think they quarrel more than they used to?’
‘No, I – How smart you are, Julian. Quite a dandy.’
‘I’m so glad you’ve come, I was just thinking about you. I wanted to ask you something, I was going to write – ’
&nb
sp; ‘Julian, what are you doing, with all that paper you’re scattering ?’
‘It’s an exorcism. These are love letters.’
‘Love letters?’
‘From my ex-boy-friend.’
I remembered that Arnold had mentioned rather unenthusiastically a ‘hairy swain’, an art student or something.
‘Have you parted company?’
‘Yes. I’ve torn them into the smallest possible pieces. When I’ve got rid of them all I’ll be free. Here goes the last, I think.’
Taking from her neck the receptacle rather like a nose-bag which had contained the dismembered missives she turned it inside out. A few more white petals flew with the passing wind and were gone.
‘But what were you saying, you were chanting something, a spell or such.’
‘ “Oscar Belling”.’
‘What?’
‘That was his name. Look, I’m using the past tense! It’s all over!’
‘Did you abandon him or did he – ?’
‘I’d rather not talk about it. Bradley, I wanted to ask you something.’
It was quite dark now, a bluish night gauzed over by the yellow street lamps, and reminding me irrelevantly of Rachel’s reddish golden hair adhering to the front of Francis’s shabby blue suit. We walked slowly along the street.
‘Look, Bradley, it’s this. I’ve decided to be a writer.’
My heart sank. ‘That’s fine.’
‘And I want you to help me.’
‘It’s not easy to help someone to be a writer, it may not even be possible.’
‘The thing is, I don’t want to be a writer like Daddy, I want to be a writer like you.’
My heart warmed to the girl. But my answer had to be ironical. ‘My dear Julian, don’t emulate me! I constantly try and hardly ever succeed!’
‘That’s just it. Daddy writes too much, don’t you think? He hardly ever revises. He writes something, then he “gets rid of it” by publishing it, I’ve heard him actually say that, and then he writes something else. He’s always in such a hurry, it’s neurotic. I see no point in being an artist unless you try all the time to be perfect.’