The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was, I know. Never mind. Oh God, I mustn’t start—’

  ‘Rachel—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How’s — how’s – Julian — today?’

  ‘Oh much as usual.’

  ‘She’s not – by any chance – going to come round here – to get her Hamlet. — is she?’

  ‘No. She seems to be off Hamlet today. She’s down the road with a young couple who are digging a conversation pit in their garden playroom.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A conversation pit.’

  ‘Oh. Ah well. I see. Tell her – No. Well—’

  ‘Bradley, you do – never mind what it means – love me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Sorry to be so sort of – limp and wet – Thanks for listening—I’ll ring again – ‘Bye – ’

  I forgot Rachel. I decided I would go out and buy Julian a present. I still felt ill and rather faint and given to fits of trembling. At the idea of buying the present a lot of trembling came on. Present – buying is a fairly universal symptom of love. It is certainly a sine qua non. (If you don’t want to give her a present you don’t love her.) It is I suppose a method of touching the beloved.

  When I felt that I could walk all right I left the house and went as far as Oxford Street. Love transforms the world. It had transformed the big Oxford Street shops into diplays of possible presents for Julian. I bought a leather purse, a box of handkerchiefs, an enamel bracelet, a fancy sponge bag, a pair of lace gloves, a set of ballpoint pens, a key ring, and three scarves. Then I ate a sandwich and went home and laid all the presents out together with the six – volume London edition of Shakespeare upon the marquetry table and the mahogany night table, and contemplated them. Of course I could not give her all these things at once, it would look odd. But I could give her one now, another later: and meanwhile here they were and they were hers. I tied one of the scarves round my neck and felt giddy with physical desire. I was on a high building and wanted to hurl myself down, I was being burnt and nearly losing consciousness, I was in pain, pain.

  The telephone rang. I staggered to it and gasped into it.

  ‘Oh Brad. It’s Chris.’

  ‘Oh – Chris — hello, dear.’

  ‘I’m glad I’m still Chris today.’

  ‘Today — yes—’

  ‘Have you thought over my proposition?’

  ‘What proposition?’

  ‘Gee, Brad, you are a tease. Look, can I come over and see you right now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve got a bridge party.’

  ‘But you can’t play bridge.’

  ‘I learnt in the thirty or so years of your absence. I had to pass the time somehow.’

  ‘Brad, when can I see you, it’s kind of urgent?’

  ‘I’ll come round to see Priscilla — this evening – probably—’

  ‘OK, I’ll wait. Mind you come.’

  ‘And God bless you, Chris, God bless you, dear, God bless you.’

  I sat in the hall beside the telephone and fingered Julian’s scarf. Since I retained it with me, although it was hers, it was as if she had given me a present. I sat and looked through the open door of the sitting – room at Julian’s things arranged upon the tables. I listened to the silence of the flat in the midst of the murmur of London. Time passed. I waited. Being your slave what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire. I have no precious time at all to spend, nor services to do till you require.

  It now seemed to me incredible that I could have had the nerve to leave the house that morning. Suppose she had telephoned, suppose she had come, when I was away? She could not spend the whole day digging a conversation pit, whatever that was. She would surely come round soon to get her Hamlet. How good it was that I had that hostage. After a while I moved back into the sitting – room and picked up the shabby little book and sat caressing it in Hartbourne’s armchair. My eyelids drooped and the material world grew dim and I waited.

  I had not forgotten that I was soon going to start writing the greatest book of my I ife. I knew that the black Eros which had felled me was consubstantial with another and more secret god. If I could keep my silence and my nerve I would be rewarded with power. But for the moment writing was out of the question. I could only have committed to paper the scrawlings of the unconscious.

  The telephone rang and I ran to it, jolting the table and knocking the six volumes of Shakespeare off on to the floor.

  ‘Bradley. Arnold here.’

  ‘Oh God. It’s you.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Bradley, I hear – ’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Four o’clock. I hear you’re coming round this evening to see Priscilla.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, could I see you after that? There’s something important I want to tell you.’

  ‘Yes. Fine. What’s a conversation pit?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s a conversation pit?’

  ‘A sunken area in a room where you put cushions and people sit and converse.’

  ‘What’s the point of it?’

  ‘It has no point.’

  ‘Oh Arnold, Arnold—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll read your books. I’ll start to like them. Everything will be different.’

  ‘Have you got softening of the brain?’

  ‘Good – bye, good – bye – ’

  I returned to the sitting – room and I picked up the Shakespeares from the floor and I sat down in the armchair and I said to her in my heart, I will suffer, you will not. We will do each other no harm. You will cause me pain, it cannot be otherwise. But I shall cause you none. And I will feed upon my pain like one who feeds on kisses. (Oh God.) I am simply happy that you exist, happy in the absolute that is you, proud to live with you in the same city, in the same era, to see you occasionally, seldom ...

  But how occasionally, how seldom? When would she communicate with me again ? How soon could I communicate with her? I had already worked it out that if she wrote or telephoned I would make an appointment with her for several days later. Everything must be as usual, the world for all that it was utterly changed must remain utterly the same, just as it was, as it would have been, in every detail. I would make not the tiniest haste nor hint at the faintest urgency nor by any slightest gesture depart from what I once was, what I would have been. Yes, I would even put off seeing her, and devote, like a holy man, the precious deprived time to meditation; and so the world would be the same yet different, as it is for the sage who has returned from the mountain and lives an ordinary life in the village though seeing all with the eyes of vision, a god – head that resembles a peasant, that resembles an inspector of taxes: and so we would be saved.

  The telephone rang. I reached it. This time it was Julian.

  ‘Oh Bradley, hello, it’s me.’

  I made some sort of sound.

  ‘Bradley — sorry – it’s me – you know, Julian Baffin.’

  I said, ‘Hold on a minute, would you?’ I covered the mouthpiece and closed my eyes tightly, groped for a chair, panting, trying to control my breath. In a few moments I said, coughing a little to disguise the tremor, ‘Sorry. The kettle was just boiling.’

  ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, Bradley. I promise I won’t become a pest, always ringing up and coming round.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I just wondered if I could pick up my Hamlet whenever you’ve finished with it.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘But there’s no hurry at all – any time in the next fortnight would do. I’m not working on that at the moment. And there’s one or two more questions I’ve thought of. If you like I could send them by post, and you could post me the book. I don’t want to interrupt your work.’

  ‘In the next – fortnight –
’

  ‘Or month. I may be going to the country actually. My school has still got the measles.’

  ‘Perhaps you could drop in some time next week,’ I said.

  ‘Fine. How about Thursday morning about ten?’

  ‘Yes. That’s — fine.’

  ‘Thank you so much. I won’t keep you. I know you’re so busy. Good – bye, Bradley, and thanks.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said.

  There was silence.

  ‘Julian,’ I said, ‘are you free this evening?’

  The restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower revolves very slowly. Slow as a dial hand. Majestic trope of lion – blunting time.

  How swiftly did it move that night while London crept behind the beloved head ? Was it quite immobile, made still by thought, a mere fantasy of motion in a world beyond duration? Or was it spinning like a top, whirling away into invisibility, and pinning me against the outer wall, kitten – limbed and crucified by centrifugal force?

  Concerning absence love has always been eloquent. The subject admits of an explicit melancholy, though doubtless there are certain pains which cannot be fully rendered. But has it ever sufficiently hymned presence? Can it do so? The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.

  To speak more crudely, what I experienced that evening on the Post Office Tower was a kind of blinding joy. It was as if stars were exploding in front of my eyes so that I literally could not see. Breathing was fast and difficult, not unpleasant. I was conscious of a certain satisfaction in being able to go on pumping myself full of oxygen. A quiet and perhaps outwardly imperceptible shuddering possessed my whole frame. My hands vibrated, my legs ached and throbbed, my knees were in the condition described by the Greek poetess. This dérèglement was completed by a sense of giddiness produced by the sheer conception of being so high above the ground and yet still connected to it. Giddiness of this kind in any case locates itself in the genitals.

  These are the merest physical symptoms. They can readily be sketched in words. But how to convey the rapture of the mind, as it mingles with the body, draws apart into itself, and mingles again, in a wild and yet graceful dance ? The sense of being absolutely in the right and longed – for place is fixed and guaranteed by every ray in the universe. The beatific vision would be a similar experience if one also was what one saw. (Perhaps that is indeed the meaning of the beatific vision ?) Consciousness half swoons with its sense of humble delighted privilege while keen sight, in between the explosions of the stars, devours every detail of the real presence. I am here now, you are here now, we are here now. To see her among others, straying like a divine form among mortals, is to become faint with secret knowledge. There is also a gleeful calm as one realizes that these passing seconds are the fullest and most perfect, not even excluding sexual union, which can be allotted to human beings.

  All this, and further hues and saturations of bliss which I cannot describe at all, I felt on that evening as I sat with Julian in the Post Office Tower restaurant. We talked, and our communion was so perfect that it might have been telepathic for all I could make out afterwards about how it actually occurred. The evening had darkened to an intense blue, but it was not yet night. The forms of London, some already chequered with yellow light, glided onward through a dim shimmering corpuscular haze. The Albert Hall, the Science Museums, Centre Point, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Festival Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Albert Memorial. The precious and beloved skyline of my own Jerusalem processed incessantly behind that dear mysterious head. Only the royal parks were already places of darkness, growing inkily purple with night – time and its silence.

  Mysterious head. Oh the tormenting strangeness of our ignorance of other minds, the privileged comfort of the secrecy of our own! In fact on that night what I felt most in her was her lucidity, her transparency almost. That purity and unmuddied simplicity of the young, after the anxious self – guarding deviousness of later ages. Her clear eyes looked at me and she was with me and spoke to me with a directness which I had never received before. To say that there was no element of flirting is to speak with a totally inappropriate grossness. We conversed as angels might converse, not through a glass darkly but face to face. And yet: I was – again to say that I was playing a part is a barbarism. I was blazing with secrecy. As my eyes and my thoughts caressed and possessed her and as I smiled into her open attentive gaze with a passion and even with a tenderness which she could not see, I felt ready to fall to the ground fainting, perhaps dying, with the enormity of what I knew and she did not.

  ‘Bradley, I think it’s swaying.’

  ‘It can’t be. I believe it does sway a little in the wind. But there’s no wind tonight.’

  ‘There might be a wind up here.’

  ‘Well, there might be. Yes, I think it is swaying.’ How could I tell ? Everything was swaying.

  Of course I had merely pretended to eat. 1 had drunk very little wine. Alcohol still seemed a complete irrelevancy. I was drunk with love. Julian had both eaten and drunk a good deal, indiscriminately praising everything that passed her lips. We had talked about the view, about her college, about her school with the measles, about how soon one could tell whether one was a poet, about whether the novel, about why the theatre. I had never talked so easily to anyone. Oh blessed weightlessness, oh blessed space.

  ‘Bradley, I wish I’d understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet.’

  ‘Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he’s so divine but because he’s so human. Even great art is jumble in the end.’

  ‘So the critics are just stupid?’

  ‘It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.’

  ‘Like you now trying to like what my father writes?’

  ‘That’s more special. I feel I’ve been unjust. He has huge vitality and he tells a good story. Stories are art too, you know.’

  ‘His stuff is awfully ingenious, but it’s as dead as a door nail.’

  ‘So young and so untender.’

  ‘So young, my lord, but true.’

  I was nearly on the floor at that moment. I also thought, in so far as thinking occurred, that she was probably right. Only I was not going to utter any harsh things that evening. I was mainly now, since I had realized that I could not keep her with me for much longer, wondering about whether and if so how I could kiss her on parting. Kissing had never been customary between us, even when she was a child. Briefly, I had never kissed her. Never. And now tonight perhaps I would.

  ‘Bradley, you aren’t listening.’

  She constantly used my name. I could not use hers. She had no name.

  ‘Sorry, my dear, what were you saying?’ I was slipping little endearments in slyly. This was no breach of security. Would she notice anything? Certainly not. But the pleasure was mine.

  ‘Ought I to read Wittgenstein?’

  What I wanted to do was to kiss her in the lift going down should we chance to have that momentary love nest to ourselves. But of course that was out of the question. There must be no, absolutely no, show of marked interest. She had, as young people with their charming egoism and their impromptu modes so felicitously do, taken it quite calmly for granted that I should suddenly have felt like dining on the Post Office Tower and should, since she had happened to ring up, have happened to ask her to come too.

  ‘No. I shouldn’t bother.’

  ‘You think I wouldn’t understand him?’

  ‘yes.’

  ‘Yes, I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Yes. He never thought of you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m quoting again. Never mind.’

  ‘We are full of quotations tonight, aren’t we. When I’m with you I feel as if the whole of English
literature were inside me like a warm stew and coming out of my ears. I say, what an inelegant metaphor! Oh Bradley, what fun that we’re here. Bradley, I do feel so happy!’

  ‘Good.’ I asked for the bill. I did not want to ruin what was perfect by any hint of anxious hanging – on. An over – stayed welcome would have been torture afterwards. I did not want to see her looking at her watch.

  She looked at her watch. ‘Oh dear, I must go soon.’

  ‘I’ll see you to the tube.’

  We had the lift to ourselves going down. I did not kiss her. I did not suggest that she should come back to my flat. As we walked along Goodge Street I did not touch her, even ‘accidentally’. I was beginning to wonder how in the world it would be possible to part from her.

  Outside Goodge Street station I stopped and casually cornered her against a wall. I did not put my two hands on the wall on either side of her shoulders as I wanted to do. She looked up at me smiling and tossing back her lion mane, so utterly confident, so utterly trusting. She was dressed tonight in a black cotton dress with sort of yellow mandalas on it, Indian I suppose. She looked like a court page. The lamplight shone down on to her tender true face and the V of her throat which I had so intensely wanted during dinner to reach across and touch. I was still in a state of total and now utterly agonizing indecision about the kiss.

  ‘Well, then — Well, then—’

  ‘Bradley, you’ve been sweet, thank you, I’ve so much enjoyed it.’

  ‘Oh, I quite forgot to bring your Hamlet.’ I had of course done no such thing.

  ‘Never mind, I’ll get it another time. Good night, Bradley, and thanks.’

  ‘Yes, I — let me see—’

  ‘I must run.’

  ‘Won’t you – Shall we fix a time for you to come – You said you had some – I’m so often out – Or shallI – Will you – ’

  ‘I’ll ring you. Good night, and thank you so much.’

  It was now or never. With a sense of moving very slowly, of executing some sort of precise figure in a minuet, I stepped a little in front of Julian, who was turning away, took her left wrist lightly in my right hand, thereby halting her, and then leaned down and pressed my judiciously parted lips against her cheek. The effect could not be casual. I straightened up and we stood for a moment looking at each other.