The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Who’s “we”? Ach – I have nobody in the world. I’ll kill myself. That’s best. Everyone will say, it’s for the best that she killed herself, she’s better off dead. I hate you, I hate Christian, I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it, oh Roger, Roger, Roger, the pain of it – ’

  She had turned on her side and was sobbing quietly, rather breathlessly, her mouth shuddering, her eyes awash with tears. I had never seen anyone so inaccessibly miserable. I felt an urge to put her to sleep, not for good of course, but if only one could have given her a shot of something just to stop this awful weeping, to give some intermission to the tormented consciousness.

  The door opened and Christian came in. Gazing at Priscilla she greeted me inattentively with a sort of ‘holding’ gesture which, it occurred to me, was the height of intimacy. ‘What is it now?’ she said to Priscilla sternly.

  ‘I’ve just told her about Roger and Marigold,’ I said.

  ‘Oh God, did you have to?’

  Priscilla suddenly started to scream quietly. ‘Scream quietly’ may sound like an oxymoron, but I mean to indicate the curiously controlled rhythmic screaming which goes with a certain kind of hysterics. Hysterics is terrifying because of its willed and yet not willed quality. It has the frightfulness of a deliberate assault on the spectators, yet it is also, with its apparently unstoppable rhythm, like the setting going of a machine. It is no use asking someone in hysterics to ‘control themselves’. By ‘choosing’ to become hysterical they have put themselves beyond ordinary communication. Priscilla, now sitting upright in bed, gave a gasping ‘Uuuh!’ then a screamed ‘aah!’ ending in a sort of bubbling sob, then the gasp again and the scream and so on. It was an appalling sound, both tortured and cruel. I have four times heard a woman in hysterics, once my mother when my father hit her, once Priscilla when she was pregnant, once another woman (would that I could forget that occasion) and now Priscilla again. I turned to Christian raising my hands distractedly.

  Francis Marloe came in grinning.

  Christian said, ‘Out you go, Brad, wait downstairs.’

  I ran down the first flight, then went more slowly down the second flight. By the time I reached the door of the dark brown and indigo drawing – room the house had become entirely silent. I went in and stood with my feet well apart, breathing.

  Christian entered.

  ‘She’s stopped,’ I said. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I slapped her.’

  I said, ‘I think I’m going to faint.’ I sat down on the sofa and covered my face with my hand.

  ‘Brad! Quick, here, some brandy – ’

  ‘Could I have some biscuits or something? I haven’t eaten all day. Or yesterday.’

  I really did feel, for that moment, faint: that odd absolutely unique sensation of a black baldacchino being lowered like an extinguisher over one’s head. And now, as brandy, bread, biscuits, cheese, plumcake became available, I also knew that I was going to cry. It was many many years since I had wept. What a very strange phenomenon it is, little perhaps they realize who use it much. I recalled the dismay of the wolves when Mowgli sheds tears, in the Jungle Book. Or rather, it is Mowgli who is dismayed, and thinks he is dying. The wolves are better informed, dignified, faintly disgusted. I held the glass of brandy in both hands and stared at Christian and felt the warm water quietly rising into my eyes. The quiet inevitability of the sensation gave satisfaction. It was an achievement. Perhaps all tears are an achievement. Oh precious gift.

  ‘Brad, dear, don’t – ’

  ‘I hate violence,’ I said.

  ‘It’s no good letting her go on and on, she tires herself so, she did it for half an hour yesterday – ’

  ‘All right, yes, all right – ’

  ‘Why, you poor pet! I’m doing my best, honest. It’s no fun having a near – crazy in the house. I’m doing it for you, Brad.’

  I had managed to shallow a piece of cheese, but it felt like eating soap. The brandy did good though. I was terribly upset by this glimpse of Priscilla, it was such a vista of hopelessness. But the precious tears, what were they? They were, they could not but be, tears of pure joy, a miraculous portent of my changed state. All of me, material and spiritual, all my substance, all my humours, was composed of the ecstasy of love. I stared ahead of me through the warm silvery veil of my tears and saw Julian’s face, eager and intent, like a bird – mask, hanging there in space, like a vision of the Saviour come to console some starving and crazed ascetic in a desert cave.

  ‘Brad, what is it, you look extraordinary, something’s happened to you, you’re beautiful, you look like a saint or something, you look like some goddam picture, you look all young again—’

  ‘You won’t abandon Priscilla, will you, Chris?’ I said, and I mopped the tears away with my hand.

  ‘Did you just notice something, Brad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You called me “Chris”.’

  ‘Did I? Like old days. Well, but you won’t? I’ll pay you—’

  ‘Oh never mind the dough. I’ll look after her. I got on to a new doc. There’s a treatment with injections she can have.’

  ‘Good. Julian.’

  ‘What was that?’

  I had just uttered Julian’s name aloud. I got up, ‘Chris, do you mind, I must go. I’ve got something very important to do.’ Think about Julian.

  ‘Brad, please – Oh, all right, I won’t keep you. But I want you to say something to me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh that you forgive me or something. That there’s peace between us or something. You know I just loved you, Brad. You saw my love as a sort of crushing force or a will to power or something but I just wanted to hold you. And I did really truly come back here to you and for you. I thought about you out there and what a fool I’d been. Of course I’m not a romantic crazy. I know our thing couldn’t work then, we were so young and God we were stupid with each other. But there was something I saw in you which didn’t leave me alone. I used to dream we were reconciled, you know in dreams at night, real dreams.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘Oh God! And it was such a dream of happiness. And then I’d wake up and remember the way we parted in such hatred and there’d be Evans’s silly old face beside me, we shared a bed almost right up to the end. I say, I said some mean things about poor Evans to you, I wished I hadn’t afterwards, I must have made a pretty poor impression – I didn’t really despise Evans or hate him or want him to die, it wasn’t like that at all, I was just so bored with him and with the whole place. The only thing that kept me going out there was making money. Not painting or breathing exercises or deep analysis. I even took up pottery, Christ, I tried everything. In the end only money was real. But I always felt that there was another world, a sort of spiritual world, I guess, waiting for me somewhere. And I just hoped when I came back here that I was coming to a sort of home, a sort of home right in your heart – ’

  ‘What tosh, my dearest dearest Chris.’

  ‘Oh sure, but all the same – you know something, suddenly I feel you’re open to me, right open to me – I can walk straight in and there’s welcome written on the mat – Brad, say those good words, will you, say you forgive me, say we’re really reconciled and friends again at last.’

  ‘Of course I forgive you, Chris, of course we’re reconciled. You must forgive me too, I wasn’t a patient man – ’

  ‘Sure I do. Now thank God we can talk at last, talk all about how things were and about the bloody fools we used to be, make it all good again, buy it back, that’s what “redeem” means, doesn’t it, what happens in the pawn shop. When I saw you crying for Priscilla I knew it was possible. You’re a good man, Bradley Pearson, we can make it together if only we open our hearts – ’

  ‘Chris, dear. Please!’

  ‘Brad, you know in a way you are my husband, I’ve never really stopped thinking of you that way, after all
we were married in church, with my body I thee worship and the whole sacred caboodle, we were pure in heart once, we meant well by each other, we really cared, didn’t we, didn’t we care?’

  ‘Possibly, but—’

  ‘When it went wrong I thought I’d become a cynic forever – I married Evans for his money. Well, that was a real action anyway, I never left him, he died holding my hand, the poor old bugger. But now I feel as if the past has all fallen away. I came back to you to say this, Brad, to find this, and now we’re older and wiser and sorry for what we did, why don’t we try again ?’

  ‘Chris darling, you’re dotty,’ I said. ‘But I’m very touched.’

  ‘Gee, Brad, you look so young. You look all dewy and spiritual like a cat with kittens.’

  ‘I’m going. Good – bye.’

  ‘You can’t go just when we’ve established a new deal. I wanted to say all this to you before only I couldn’t because you were sort of different, sort of closed, I couldn’t sort of see you properly, but now you’re all here, every bit of you, and so am I, it’s the real thing, we must have another go, Brad, we must. Of course you don’t have to decide at once, think it over peacefully at your leisure – we could live anywhere you like and you could get on with your work quietly, we could get a house in France or Italy, anywhere you like – ’

  ‘Chris – ’

  ‘Switzerland.’

  ‘Not Switzerland. I hate mountains.’

  ‘Well, then – ’

  ‘Look, I must – ’

  ‘Kiss me, Bradley.’

  A woman’s face changes in tenderness. It may become scarcely recognizable. Christian en tendresse looked older, more animal – like and absurd, her features all squashed up and rubbery. She was wearing an open – necked cotton dress of rich Chinese red and a gold chain round her neck. The flesh of her neck was stained and dry behind the fresh gold of the chain. Her dyed hair was glossy and animal – sleek. She was looking at me in the cool north indigo duskiness of the room with such a humble pleading diffident rueful tender look upon her face, and her drooping hands were opened to me in a sort of Oriental gesture of abandonment and homage. I stepped forward and took her in my arms.

  At the same time I laughed, and holding her, not kissing her, continued to laugh. I saw over her shoulder a quite other face of happiness. But IPheld her very consciously and laughed, and then she began to laugh too, her forehead moving to and fro against my shoulder.

  Arnold came in.

  I released Christian slowly and she looked at Arnold and went on laughing in a weary almost contented sort of way, ‘Oh dear, oh dear – ’

  ‘I’m just off,’ I said to Arnold.

  He had sat down quietly immediately on entering, like a man in a waiting – room. He had his wet look (his drenched albino aspect) as if he had been in the rain, his colourless hair darkened with grease, his face shiny, his nose pointing like a greased pin. His very pale blue eyes, washed almost to whiteness, were cool as water. I had seen, before he had time to smooth it, the expression of chagrin with which he had greeted our little scene.

  ‘You will think it over, Brad, won’t you, dear?’

  ‘Think what over?’

  ‘Oh, he’s priceless, he’s forgotten it already! I just proposed to Brad and he’s forgotten it!’

  ‘Christian has taken leave of her senses,’ I said in a kindly tone to Arnold. ‘I’ve just ordered all your books.’

  ‘Why?’ said Arnold, now affecting a friendly gloomy detachment and still sitting sedately on his chair, while Christian, chuckling to herself, was reeling or dancing in little steps about the room.

  ‘I’d like to make a reappraisal. I feel I may have been unjust to you, completely wrong in fact.’

  ‘Decent of you.’

  ‘Not at all. I want to be – at peace with everybody – at this time—’

  ‘Is it Christmas?’ said Arnold.

  ‘No, just – I’ll read your books, Arnold – I’ll do it – humbly and without prejudice – please believe that – and please forgive me for – all my – shortcomings and – ’

  ‘Brad’s become a saint.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Bradley?’

  ‘Just look at him. I guess it’s the transfiguration!’

  ‘I must go – good – bye, good – bye – and – be well – be well – ’ waving rather awkwardly to them both and eluding the hand which Christian stretched out to me I got to the door and swung myself through the tiny hall and out into the street. It appeared to be evening. What had happened to the day?

  As I neared the corner of the street I heard running steps behind me. It was Francis.

  ‘Brad, I just wanted to say – Wait, please, wait – I wanted to say I’ll stick by her whatever happens, I’ll—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Priscilla.’

  ‘Oh yes. How is she?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Thank you for helping poor Priscilla.’

  ‘Brad, I wanted to make sure you weren’t angry with me.’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘Not sick with me after all the things I said and crying on you and all, some people it just sickens them if you throw up all your woes like that, and I’m afraid I – ’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘And Brad. I wanted to say, just one more thing – I just wanted to say – whatever happens – I’m on your side.’

  I stopped and looked at him and he smirked and bit his fat lower lip and the little eyes came questing slyly up. ‘In the coming – great – battle,’ I said, ‘whatever it – may turn out – to be – thank you, Francis Marloe.’

  He looked a little surprised. I gave a sort of military salute and walked on. He ran after me again.

  ‘I’m very fond of you, Brad, you know that.’

  ‘Bugger off!’

  ‘Brad, please could I have some more cash – I’m sorry to bother you but Christian keeps me so short – ’

  I gave him five pounds.

  The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon – tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvellously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm – infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.

  The next morning – it was another sunny day – I woke early to an exact perception of my state; yet knowing too that something had changed. I was not quite as I had been the day before. I lay, testing myself, as someone after an accident might test himself for broken limbs. I certainly still felt very happy, with that curious sense of the face as waxen, dissolving into bliss, the eyes swimming with it. Desire, still cosmic, was perhaps more like physical pain, like something one could die of quite privately in a corner. But I was not dismayed. I got up and shaved and dressed with care and looked at my new face in the mirror. I looked so young it was almost uncanny. Then I drank a little tea and went to sit in the sitting – room, with my hands folded, looking through the window at the wall. I sat as still as a Buddhist and experienced myself.

  After the initial revelation, love does demand a strategy: that this is often the beginning of the end makes it no less imperative. I knew that today, and presumably every other day forever, I would have to busy myself concerning Julian. Yesterday this had not seemed so precisely necessary. Yesterday what had happened was simply that, through no merit of my own, I had become virtuous. And yesterday that had been enough. I loved, and the joy of love made a void in me where my self had been. I was purge
d of resentment and of hate, purged of all the mean anxious fears that compose the vile ego. It was enough that she existed and that she could never be mine. I had to live and love alone, and the sense that I could do so had almost made me a god. Today I was no less virtuous, no more illusioned, but my will was just a trifle busier and fussier. Of course I could never tell her, of course silence and work would felicitously absorb the great power with which I was endowed. But all the same I felt a new need for some rather more localized Julian – directed activity.

  I sat motionless for I am not sure how long. Perhaps I really went into some sort of trance. Then the telephone rang and my heart went off in a black explosion as I was instantly certain that it was Julian. I ran to the instrument and fumbled and dropped it twice before I got it to my ear. It was Grey – Pelham, ringing up to say that since his wife was indisposed he had an extra ticket for Glyndebourne and would I like it? I would not! Glyndebourne forsooth! When I had politely got rid of him I rang Notting Hill. Francis answered and told me that Priscilla was calmer this morning and had agreed to see a psychiatrist. After that I sat and wondered if I would ring Ealing. Not to talk to Julian of course. Perhaps I ought to ring Rachel? But supposing Julian were to answer?

  As I was scorching and freezing my mind with this possibility the phone rang again and again my heart exploded, and this time it was Rachel. Our conversation was as follows:

  ‘Hello, Bradley. It’s dreary old me.’

  ‘Rachel — dear – nice – happy – you – so glad – ’

  ‘You can’t be drunk at this hour of the morning.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven – thirty.’

  ‘I thought it was about nine.’

  ‘You’ll be glad to hear that I’m not coming round to see you.’

  ‘But I’d love you to.’

  ‘No, I’ve got to get hold of myself. It’s so – below me – to persecute my old friends.’

  ‘We are friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Oh Bradley, I mustn’t start — I’m glad you’re there, I won’t bother you more than I can help. Bradley, was Arnold at Christian’s place yesterday?’