The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I am not homosexual, I am not neurotic, I know myself – ’

  ‘Oh all right,’ said Francis, suddenly changing his posture and turning away from the fire. ‘All right. Have it your own way.’

  ‘You’re just inventing this out of spite – ’

  ‘Yes, I’m just inventing it. I am neurotic and I am homosexual and I’m bloody unhappy about it. Of course you don’t know yourself, lucky old you. I just know myself too bloody well.’ He began to cry.

  I have rarely seen a man crying and the sight inspires disgust and fear. Francis was whimpering loudly, producing suddenly a great many tears. I could see his fat reddened hands wet with them in the light of the gas fire.

  ‘Oh, cut it out!’

  ‘Sorry, Brad. I’m such a bloody sod – I’ve been so unhappy in my life – when they struck me off the register – I thought I’d die of unhappiness – and I’ve never had a happy relationship, never – I crave for love, everybody does, it’s as natural as pissing – and I’ve never had a bloody crumb of it – and I’ve given so much love to people – I really can love people, I can, I let them walk over me – but nobody’s ever loved me, even my bloody parents didn’t love me – and I haven’t a home, I’ll never have a home, everyone throws me out sooner or later, usually sooner. I’m a wanderer on the face of the earth – I thought Christian might be nice to me, Christ I’d sleep in the hallway – I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow – I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on, shitting with misery and fear – I’m so Christ awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end – ’

  ‘Stop talking this foul rubbish!’

  ‘All right, all right. Sorry, Brad. Forgive me. Please forgive me. I expect I just want to suffer. I’m a masochist. I must like pain or I wouldn’t go on living, I’d have taken my bottle of sleeping pills years ago, I’ve thought of it often enough. Oh Christ, now you’ll think I’m bad for Priscilla and boot me out – ’

  ‘Stop making that horrible noise, I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Forgive me, Brad. I’m just a – ’

  ‘Try to be a man, try to – ’

  ‘I can’t – Oh God – it’s just the bloody pain – I’m not like other people, my life just doesn’t work, it never has – and now you’ll throw me out, and, oh God, if you only knew –

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘Have you got your sleeping bag here – ’

  ‘Yes, it’s – ’

  ‘Well, get into it and shut up.’

  ‘I want to have a pee.’

  ‘Good night!’

  I left the room abruptly and went across the passage and listened outside Priscilla’s door. At first I thought she was crying too. No, she was snoring. After a while it began to sound like Chaine – Stokes respiration. I went on into the spare room, where I had still not remembered to make up the bed, and lay down clothed with the light on. The house was gently creaking with the footsteps of my upstairs neighbour, a shadowy youth called Rigby who sold ties in Jermyn Street. The heavy stealthy steps of another man followed him up. Whatever they did above they fortunately did it quietly. There was another sound, a kind of muffled knocking. It was my heart. I resolved to go and see Rachel early on the following morning.

  ‘Where’s Arnold?’

  ‘Gone to the library. So he says. And Julian’s gone to a pop festival.’

  ‘I sent Arnold that review. Did he say anything?’

  ‘I never see him reading his letters. He said nothing. Oh Bradley, thank God you’ve come!’

  I hugged Rachel in the hall, behind the stained glass of the front door, beside the hall stand, next to the coloured print of Mrs Siddons which I could see through the red haze of her hair. Still imprinted on my eyes was the vision of her broad pale face as she opened the door, crumpled into an ecstasy of relief. It is a privilege to be received in this way. There are human beings who have never been so welcomed. Something of Rachel’s age, of her being weary, no longer young, was visible too and touching.

  ‘Look, come upstairs.’

  ‘Rachel, I want to talk – ’

  ‘You can talk upstairs, I’m not going to eat you.’

  She led me by the hand, and in a moment we were in the bedroom where I had seen Rachel lying like a dead woman with the sheet over her face. As we came in Rachel pulled the curtains and then dragged the green silk counterpane off the bed.

  ‘Now, Bradley, sit down beside me.’

  We sat down rather awkwardly side by side and stared at each other. I felt the roughness of the blankets under my limp hand. The welcoming image had faded and I was rigid with confusion and anxiety.

  ‘I just want to touch you,’ she said. And she did touch me with her finger tips, lightly touching my face and neck and hair, as if I were a holy image.

  ‘Rachel, we must know what we’re doing, I don’t want to behave badly.’

  ‘Guilt would interfere with your work.’ She lightly closed my eyes with her finger tips.

  I jerked away from her. ‘Rachel, you aren’t just doing this to spite Arnold?’

  ‘No. I think I started thinking about it, somehow out of self defence, and then that awful time, you know, in this room, you were here, you were inside the barrier as it were, and I’ve known you so long, it’s as if you had a special role, like a knight with a charge laid upon him, my knight, so necessary and precious, and I’ve always seen you a little as a wise man, a sort of hermit or ascetic – ’

  ‘And it always gives ladies particular pleasure to seduce ascetics.’

  ‘Perhaps. Am I seducing you? Anyway, I’ve got to perform an act of will. Otherwise I shall die of humiliation or something. I feel it’s a holy time.’

  ‘This could be a pretty unholy idea.’

  ‘It’s your idea too, Bradley. Look where you are!’

  ‘We are both conventional middle – aged people.’

  ‘I’m not conventional.’

  ‘well, I am. I’m pre – permissive. And you are my best friend’s wife. And one doesn’t with one’s best friend’s wife – ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Start anything.’

  ‘But it’s started, it’s here, the only question is what we do with it. Bradley, I’m afraid I do rather enjoy arguing with you.’

  ‘You know where arguments like this end.’

  ‘Between the sheets.’

  ‘God, we might as well be eighteen.’

  ‘Look, is all this because Arnold is having an affair with Christian? Is he having an affair with Christian?’

  ‘I don’t know and it no longer matters.’

  ‘You still love Arnold, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, yes, but that doesn’t matter either. He’s just played the tyrant for too long. I must have new love, I must have love outside the Arnold – cage – ’

  ‘I suppose women of your age – ’

  ‘Oh don’t start that, Bradley.’

  ‘I just mean, naturally one might want a change, but let’s not do anything – ’

  ‘Bradley, with all your philosophy, surely you know that it doesn’t really matter what we do.’

  ‘It does. You were saying we wouldn’t deceive Arnold. It matters if we do, it matters if we don’t.’

  ‘Are you afraid of Arnold?’

  I reflected. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you must stop being. Oh my dear, don’t you see that this is somehow the point? I must see you unafraid. This is what being my knight is. That will really let me out. And it will do something great for you too. Why can’t you write ? Because you’re all timid and repressed and tied up. I mean in a spiritual way.’

  This was close to what I had thought myself. ‘Then are we to love each other in a spiritual way?’

  ‘Oh Bradley, look, enough of this argument, let’s undress.’

  All this time we had been sitting sideways facing each other, not touchi
ng, except when the tips of her fingers lightly tapped my face, then the lapels of my jacket, my shoulders and arms, as if she were putting a spell upon me.

  Rachel turned away, and in a single quick contorted movement peeled off her blouse and brassière. Naked to the waist she now regarded me. This was a very different matter.

  She was blushing and her face had become suddenly more tentative. She had very full round breasts with huge brown mandalas. The unclothed body wears a very different head from the clothed body. The blush extended down her neck and faded into the deep V of mottled sunburn which stained the flesh between her breasts. Her body had an air of unexhibited chasteness. I knew that this was a most unwonted gesture. And indeed it was a long time since I had seen a woman’s breasts. I looked but did not move.

  ‘Rachel,’ I said. ‘I am very touched and moved, but I really think this is most unwise.’

  ‘Oh stop it.’ She suddenly clasped my neck and rolled me back on the bed. There was a pushing and a scrambling and in a moment she was entirely naked beside me. Her body was hot. She was panting and her lips were against my cheek. She said, ‘Oh God.’

  To lie fully clothed, with one’s shoes on, beside a panting naked woman is not perhaps very gentlemanly. I raised myself on one elbow so that I could see her face. I did not want to be submerged by this warm gale. I looked intently down at her face. There was a grimace upon it which reminded me of certain Japanese pictures, a mingling of pain and joy, the eyes narrowed, the mouth squared. I touched her breasts, moving my hand over them very lightly, scrutinizing them with my touch. I looked down and regarded her body, which was plump, fleshy. I drew my hand down over her stomach which contracted under my fingers. I felt excited, stunned, but this was not quite desire. I seemed to be outside, seeing myself as in a picture, a fully dressed elderly man in a dark suit and a blue tie lying beside a pink naked pear – shaped lady.

  ‘Bradley, undress.’

  ‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘I am, as I say, moved. I am very grateful But I cannot make love to you. I don’t mean I don’t want to, I cannot. The machinery will not work.’

  ‘Do you always – have – difficulties?’

  ‘ “Always” has no force here. I haven’t been with a woman for many years. This privilege is unwonted and unexpected. And I cannot rise to it.’

  ‘Undress. I just want to hold you.’

  I felt appallingly cool, still seeing myself. I took off my shoes and socks, my trousers, pants and tie. Some sort of self – protective instinct made me retain my shirt, but I let Rachel with hot trembling fingers undo the buttons. As I lay in her arms quite still and physically chilled, and her hands moved timidly about me, I saw above the haze of her hair through a gap in the curtains the leaves of a tree moving about in the breeze, and I felt that I was in hell.

  ‘You’re icy cold, Bradley. You look as if you’re going to cry. Don’t worry, my darling, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does matter.’

  ‘It’ll be better next time.’

  There won’t be a next time, I thought. And then I felt so overpoweringly sorry for Rachel that I really put my arms round her and drew her up against me. She gave an excited little sigh.

  Then. ‘Rachel! Hey, where are you?’ Arnold’s voice below.

  Like spirits of the damned pricked by the devil’s fork we bounded up. I began scrabbling for my clothes which had got into a tangle on the floor. They appeared to be plaited into each other. Rachel had pulled on her blouse and skirt with no underclothes. She leaned on me as my hands still plucked vainly at inside – out trousers and her breath tickled my ear. ‘I’ll take him down the garden.’ Then she was gone, closing the door behind her. I heard voices below.

  Of course it took me many minutes to get dressed. My trousers seemed to be knotted up at the ends and something tore as I eventually drove my foot through. I put on my shoes without socks, began to take them off again, then changed my mind. My braces were a tangled ball. I stuffed my tie and socks and pants into my pockets. When at last I tiptoed to the window and peered through the slit in the curtain I saw Arnold and Rachel down at the bottom of the garden. Rachel had got her hand on Arnold’s shoulder and she was pointing to a plant. They looked pastoral.

  I glided out and down the stairs and opened the front door. I pulled it to very softly after me but it would not close. I pulled it harder and it banged. I ran down the path and slipped upon some moss and came down with a crash. I staggered up and began to run away down the road.

  At the end of the next road I was slowing down to a quick walk when, just as I rounded the corner, I cannoned straight into somebody. It was a girl dressed in a very short striped garment, she had bare legs and bare feet, she was Julian.

  ‘So sorry. Oh Bradley, how super. You’ve been visiting the parents. What a shame I missed you. Are you going to the station? May I walk along with you?’ She turned and we walked on together.

  ‘I thought you were at a pop festival,’ I said, breathless, frantic with emotion, but concealing it.

  ‘I couldn’t get on the train. At least I could have done if I didn’t mind being squashed, but I do, I’m a bit of a claustrophobe.’

  ‘So am I. Pop festivals are no places for us claustrophobes.’ I was speaking calmly, but now I was thinking: she will tell Arnold that she met me.

  ‘I suppose not. I’ve never been to one. Now you’re going to lecture me about drugs, aren’t you?’

  ‘No. Do you want a lecture?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind one from you. But I’d rather it was on Hamlet. Bradley, do you think Gertrude was in league with Claudius to kill the king?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think she was having an affair with Claudius before her husband died?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too conventional,’ I said. ‘Not enough courage. It would have needed tremendous courage.’

  ‘Claudius could have persuaded her, he was very powerful.’

  ‘So was her husband.’

  ‘We only see him through Hamlet’s eyes.’

  ‘No. The ghost was a real ghost.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘Then the king must have been an awful bore.’

  ‘That’s another point.’

  ‘I think some women have a nervous urge to commit adultery, especially when they reach a certain age.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Do you think the king and Claudius ever liked each other?’

  ‘There’s a theory that they were in love. Gertrude killed her husband because he was having a love affair with Claudius. Hamlet knew of course. No wonder he was neurotic. There are lots of veiled references to buggery. “A mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother.” Ear is phallic and wholesome is a pun – ’

  ‘I say! Where can I read about it?’

  ‘I’m teasing you. They haven’t thought of that yet, even in Oxford.’

  I was walking fast and Julian had to give a little run every now and then to keep up. She kept turning towards me as she did so, performing a sort of dance beside me. I looked down at her bare brown very dirty feet executing these hops, skips and jumps.

  We had nearly reached the place where I had seen her in the twilight tearing up the love letters, when I had at first taken her for a boy. I said, ‘How is Mr Belling?’

  ‘Please, Bradley – ’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, you know you can say anything you like to me. All that’s over and done, thank God.’

  ‘Your balloon didn’t come sailing back to you? You didn’t wake up one morning and find it tied to your window?’

  ‘No!’

  Her face, turning to mine, with the sun and shade dappling over it, looked very young, almost that of a child, with the anxious focused seriousness of the young. How very whole and unspoilt she seemed to me at that moment with her silly bare feet and her naïve preoccupations about her ‘set book’. And I felt a regret which w
as really a sort of shame before her. What had I just been doing and why? A man’s life should be simple and lived in the open. It is very much more rarely worth lying, even for hedonistic purposes, than is generally supposed in sophisticated circles. I felt entangled and ashamed, and frightened about it. At the same time, I felt a loving pity for Rachel, mingled with a memory of the smell of her warm plump body. Of course I would not abandon her in her need. Some formula must be available. But oh what infernally bad luck it was to have run into Julian. Could I conceivably ask her not to tell her father that she had met me? Could I think of some ingenious reason for this request which would not make me look unutterably shabby? I could not simply ask her and let her guess. The mean words would dirty me forever in her eyes. Yet was I not already soiled enough and did it really matter at all what Julian thought? It mattered very much more what Arnold knew.

  At that moment Julian stopped outside the same shoe shop where I had parted from her on the previous occasion. ‘Oh I adore those boots, the purple ones, I do wish they weren’t so expensive!’

  On impulse I said, ‘I’ll buy them for you.’ I wanted to gain a little time to think of a suitably plausible way of asking her to keep quiet.

  ‘Oh Bradley, you can’t, they’re far too much, how awfully kind of you but you can’t – ’

  ‘Why not ? It’s ages since I gave you a present. I used to when you were little. Come on, be brave.’

  ‘Oh Bradley, I’d love it, and you’re so kind, which is even better than the boots, but I can’t – ’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I haven’t any stockings. I can’t try them on with my feet like this.’

  ‘I see. I think incidentally that this barefoot cult is perfectly idiotic. Suppose you step on some glass?’

  ‘I know. I think it’s idiotic too, I won’t do it again, it was just for the festival, it’s terribly uncomfortable, my feet are hurting like anything already. Oh dear, what a shame though.’

  ‘Can’t you buy some stockings!’

  ‘There isn’t a shop near – ’

  I had been fumbling in my pocket looking for my wallet. Suddenly as my hand emerged a pile of stuff fell out on to the pavement: my tie, underpants and socks. My face blazing with guilt, I swooped on them.