The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Never.’

  ‘There’s no need to make such heavy weather of it. As for her being sickened, it’s far more likely that she’ll laugh.’

  ‘Laugh?’

  ‘Young people can’t take too seriously the feelings of oldies like us. She’ll be rather touched, but she’ll regard it as an absurd infatuation. She’ll be amused, fascinated. It’ll make her day.’

  ‘Oh get out,’ I said, ‘get out.’

  ‘Brad, you are cross with me, don’t be, it wasn’t my fault you told me.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘Brad, what about Priscilla?’

  ‘Do anything you think fit. I leave it to you.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming over to see her?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Later. Give her my love.’

  Francis got as far as the door. I was still sitting and rubbing my eyes. Francis’s funny bear face was all creased up with anxiety and concern and he suddenly resembled his sister, when she had become so absurd, looking at me tenderly in the indigo dark of our old drawing – room.

  ‘Brad, why don’t you make a thing of Priscilla?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Make her your life – line. Go all out to help her. Really make a job of it. Take your mind off this.’

  ‘You don’t know what this is like.’

  ‘Then do the other. Try and make her. Why not?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you have an affair with Julian Baffin? It wouldn’t do her any harm.’

  ‘You vile — thing – Oh why did I tell you, why did I tell you, I must have been insane – ’

  ‘Well, I’ll keep mum. All right, all right, I’m going.’

  When he was gone I simply ran berserk round the house. Why oh why oh why had I broken my silence. I had given away my only treasure and I had given it to a fool. Not that I was concerned about whether Francis would betray me. Some much more frightening things had been added to my pain. In my chess game with the dark lord I had made perhaps a fatally wrong move.

  Later on I sat down and began to think over what Francis had said to me. At least I thought over some of it. About Priscilla I did not think at all.

  My dear Bradley,

  I have lately got myself into the most terrible mess and I feel that I must lay the whole matter before you. Perhaps it won’t surprise you all that much. I have fallen desperately in love with Christian. I can imagine your dry irony at this announcement. ‘Falling in love ? At your age? Really!’ I know how much you despise what is ‘romantic’. This has been, hasn’t it, one of our old disagreements. Let me assure you that what I feel now has nothing to do with rosy dreaming or ‘the soppy’. I have never been in a grimmer mood in my life, nor I think in a more horribly realistic one. Bradley, this is the real thing, I’m afraid. I am completely floored by a force in which, I suspect, you simply do not believe! How can I convince you that I am in extremis? I hoped to see you on several occasions lately to try to explain, to show you, but perhaps a letter is better. Anyway, that’s point one. I am really in love and it’s a terrible experience. I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite like this before. I’m turned inside out, I’m living in a sort of myth, I’ve been depersonalized and made into somebody else. I feel sure, by the way, that I’ve been completely transformed as a writer. These things connect, they must do. I shall write much better harder stuff in future, as a result of this, whatever happens. God, I feel hard, hard, hard. I don’t know if you can understand.

  This brings me to point two. there are two women, one of whom I love, the other of whom I do not propose at all to abandon. Of course I care for Rachel. But there is alas such a thing as getting tired of somebody. Our marriage is there, but it is thoroughly tired, exhausted, the spirit has left it I fear for ever. I see this so clearly now. There is no deep enlivening connection any more. I have for some time had to look elsewhere for real love, and my affection for Rachel has become something so habitual as to be almost feigned. However I shall hold on to her, I shall hold on to them both because I’ve got to, to abandon either now would be some sort of death, so what must be will be, and that much is clear. And if it means running two establishments it means running two establishments. Other men have done this. Thank God I can afford it. Rachel guesses a bit (nothing like the shattering truth) but I have not spoken to her yet. I know that I can, in terms of my affections, hold them both. (Why should one fetl there’s only a limited amount of love to be distributed ?) It is only the first phase which will be difficult, I mean setting up. Habit will smooth ruffled feathers. I will hold them and give them both love. I know this is the sort of talk that disgusts you. (You are rather easily disgusted actually.) But believe me this is something I see with great clarity and purity, it is not anything romantic or ‘messy’. And I don’t think it’s easy, I just think it’s necessary.

  The third point is about you. How do you come in? Well, you just are absolutely in. I wish you weren’t, but you can in fact be useful. Excuse this cold directness. Perhaps now you can see what I mean by ‘hard’, ‘pure’ and the rest. Briefly, I have got to have your help. I know in the past we have feuded, we have loved. We are old friends and old enemies, but much more friends, or rather the friend includes the enemy and not vice versa. You understand. You are connected with both of these women. If I say that I want you to release the one and console the other I am saying very roughly and boorishly what I want from you. Rachel cares for you very much, I know that. What there may have been, lately or at some stage, ‘between you’, I do not ask. I am not a jealous man and I know that Rachel has had, at various times and of course especially now, a good deal to put up with. I think that, in this unavoidable tribulation, you can be a great support to her. It will do her good to have a friend to whom she can complain about me! I want you, and this is the immediate specific thing, to see her and to tell her about me and Chris. I think it is psychologically right that you should tell her and that will sort of set the scene for what follows. Tell her this really is ‘something big’, not just momentary like things in the past. Tell her about ‘two establishments’ and so on. Break it to her and make her both see the worst and see how it can all work and be not too bad. This sounds awful on paper. But I have, I suppose, become through the power of love, awful, relentless. I am sure that if you will speak to Rachel frankly about this (and I mean soon, today, tomorrow) she will become at once resigned to it. It will also of course create a very special bond between you and her. As to whether this will please you I do not inquire.

  About Christian, there is a problem too which concerns you. I have not yet said, though of course I have implied, how she feels. Well, she loves me. A lot has happened in the last few days. They have been probably the most eventful days of my whole life. What Christian was saying to you the last time you saw her was of course a sort of joke, a mere result of high spirits, as I imagine you realized. She is such a gay affectionate person. However she is not indifferent to you and she wants something from you now which is rather hard to name: a sort of ratification of the arrangement I have been describing, a sort of final reconciliation and settling of old scores and also the assurance, which I’m sure you can give, that you will still be her friend when she is living with me. I might add that Christian, who is a very scrupulous person, is extremely concerned about Rachel’s rights and whether Rachel will be able to ‘manage’. I hope that here too you can give some reassurance. Rachel is strong too. They are really two marvellous women. Bradley, do you follow all this? I feel such a mixture of joy and fear and sheer hard will, I’m not sure if I’m expressing myself clearly.

  I shall deliver this by hand and will not try to see you at once. But soon, I mean later today or tomorrow I would like to talk to you. You will be coming to see Priscilla of course, and we could meet then. There is no need to delay your talk with Rachel till you’ve seen me. The sooner that happens the better. But I’d like to see you before you see Chris alone. God, does this make sense? It is an appeal, and that sh
ould tickle your vanity. You are in a strong position for once. Please help me. I ask in the name of our friendship.

  Arnold.

  PS If you hate all this for God’s sake be at least kind and don’t give me any sort of hell about it. I may sound rational but I’m feeling terribly crazy and upset. I so much don’t want to hurt Rachel. And please don’t rush round to Chris and upset her, just when some things have become clear. And don’t see Rachel either unless you can do it quietly and like I asked. Sorry, sorry.

  I received this curious missive on the following morning. A little while ago it would have caused me a mixture of strong emotions. As it was, love can so deaden one to external matters that I might as well have been perusing the laundry bill. I read it through once and then put it away and forgot it. The only difference it made was that it established the impossibility now of my going to see Priscilla. I went to a flower shop and gave them a cheque to send her flowers every day.

  I will not attempt to describe how I got through the next few days. There are desolations of the spirit which can only be hinted at. I sat there huge – eyed in the wreck of myself. At the same time there was an awful crescendo of excitement as Wednesday approached, and the idea of simply being with her began to shed a lurid joy, a demonic version of the joy which I had felt upon the Post Office Tower. Then I had been in innocence. Now I felt both guilty and doomed. And, in a way that concerned myself alone, savage, extreme, rude, cruel ... Yet: to be with her again. Wednesday.

  Of course I had to answer the telephone in case it. was her. Every time it sounded was like a severe electric shock. Christian rang, Arnold rang. I put the receiver down at once. Let them make what they liked of it. Arnold and Francis both came and rang the bell, but I could see them through the frosted glass of the door and did not let them in. I did not know if they could see me, I was indifferent to that. Francis dropped a note in to say that Priscilla was having shock treatment and seemed better. Rachel called, but I hid. Later she telephoned in some state of emotion. I spoke briefly and said I would ring her later. Thus I beguiled the time. I also started several letters to Julian. My dear Julian, I have lately got myself into the most terrible mess and I feel that I must lay the whole matter before you. Dear Julian, I am sorry that I must leave London and cannot join you on Wednesday. Dearest Julian, I love you, I am in anguish, oh my darling. Of course I tore up all these letters, they were just for private self – expression. At last, after centuries of sick emotion, Wednesday came.

  Julian was holding my arm. I had made no attempt to take hers. She had taken mine and was squeezing it convulsively, probably unconsciously, out of excitement. We were jostling our way through a lot of noisy people in the foyer of the Royal Opera House, having just come in out of the evening sunshine into this brilliantly lit crowd scene. Julian was wearing a red silk dress, rather long, covered with an art nouveau design of blue tulips. Her hair, which she had been combing carefully and surreptitiously when I first caught sight of her, was unusually casque – like, glowing softly like long slightly dulled strips of flattened metal. Her face was unfocused, joyfully distrait, laughing with pleasure. I was feeling a sick delighted anguish of desire, as if I had been ripped by a dagger from the groin to the throat. I also felt frightened. I fear crowds. We got into the auditorium, Julian now pulling me, and found our seats, half – way back in the stalls. People stood up to let us in. I hate this. I hate theatres. There was an intense subdued din of human chatter, the self – satisfied yap of a civilized audience awaiting its ‘show’: the frivolous speech of vanity speaking to vanity. And now there began to be heard in the background that awful and inimitably menacing sound of an orchestra tuning up.

  How I feel about music is another thing. I am not actually tone deaf, though it might be better if I were. Music can touch me, it can get at me, it can torment. It just, as it were, reaches me, like a sinister gabbling in a language one can almost understand, a gabbling which is horribly, one suspects, about oneself. When I was younger I had even listened to music deliberately, stunning myself with disorderly emotion and imagining that I was having a great experience. True pleasure in art is a cold fire. I do not wish to deny that there are some people – though fewer than one might think from the talk of our self – styled experts – who derive a pure and mathematically clarified pleasure from these medleys of sound. All I can say is that ‘music’ for me was simply an occasion for personal fantasy, the outrush of hot muddled emotions, the muck of my mind made audible.

  Julian had let go of my arm but was sitting now leaning towards me, so that the whole length of her right arm from the shoulder to the elbow was lightly touching my left arm. I sat stiffly in possession of this contact. At the same time I very cautiously advanced my left shoe up against her right shoe in such a way that the shoes were contiguous without any pressure being exerted on the foot. As if one had secretly sent one’s servant to suborn the servant of the beloved. I was breathing very short in I hoped not audible pants or gasps. The orchestra was continuing its jumbled keening of crazed birds. I felt a void the size of an opera house where my stomach might have been and through the middle of it travelled the great scar of desire. I felt a cringing fear of which I could not determine whether it was physical or mental, and a sense that soon I might somehow lose control of myself, shout, vomit, faint. I felt the heavenly continued steady light pressure of Julian’s arm upon mine. I smelt the clean rapier smell of the silk of her dress. I felt, delicately, delicately, as if I were touching an egg shell, her shoe.

  The softly cacophonous red and gold scene swung in my vision, beginning to swirl gently like something out of Blake: it was a huge coloured ball, a sort of immense Christmas decoration, a glittering shining twittering globe of dim rosy light in the midst of which Julian and I were suspended, rotating, held together by a swooning intensity of precarious feather – touch. Somewhere above us a bright blue heaven blazed with stars and round about us half – naked women lifted ruddy torches up. My arm was on fire, my foot was on fire, my knee was trembling with the effort of keeping still. I was in a golden scarlet jungle full of the chattering of apes and the whistling of birds. A scimitar of sweet sounds sliced the air and entered into the red scar and became pain. I was that sword of agony, I was that pain. I was in an arena, surrounded by thousands of grimacing nodding faces, where I had been condemned to death by pure sound. I was to be killed by the whistling of birds and buried in a pit of velvet. I was to be gilded and then flayed.

  ‘Bradley, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You weren’t listening.’

  ‘Were you talking?’

  ‘I was asking you if you knew the story.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Of Rosenkavalier.’

  ‘Of course I don’t know the story of Rosenkavalier.’

  ‘Well, quick, you’d better read your programme—’

  ‘No, you tell me.’

  ‘Oh well, it’s quite simple really, it’s about this young man, Octavian, and the Marschallin loves him, and they’re lovers, only she’s much older than he is and she’s afraid she’ll lose him because he’s bound to fall in love with somebody his own age—’

  ‘How old is he and how old is she?’

  ‘Oh I suppose he’s about twenty and she’s about thirty.’

  ‘Thirty?’

  ‘Yes, I think, anyway quite old, and she realizes that he just regards her as a sort of mother – figure and there can’t be any real lasting relations between them, and it begins with them in bed together and of course she’s very happy because she’s with him but she’s also very unhappy because she knows she’s sure to lose him and – ’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what happens next?’

  ‘No.’

  At that moment there was a pattering noise of clapping, rising to a rattling crescendo, the deadly sound of a dry sea, the light banging of many bones in a tempest.

  The stars faded and the red to
rches began to dim and a terrifying packed silence slowly fell as the conductor lifted up his rod. Silence. Darkness. Then a rush of wind and a flurry of sweet pulsating anguish has been set free to stream through the dark. I closed my eyes and bowed my head before it. Could I transform all this extraneous sweetness into a river of pure love? Or would I be somehow undone by it, choked, dismembered, disgraced? I felt now almost at once a pang of relief as, after the first few moments, tears began to flow freely out of my eyes. The gift of tears which had been given and then withdrawn again had come back to bless me. I wept with a marvellous facility, quietly relaxing my arm and my leg. Perhaps if I wept copiously throughout I could bear it after all. I was not listening to the music, I was undergoing it, and the full yearning of my heart was flowing automatically out of my eyes and soaking my waistcoat, as I hung, so easily now, together with Julian, fluttering, hovering like a double hawk, like a double angel, in the dark void pierced by sorties of fire. I only wondered if it would soon prove impossible to cry quietly, and whether I should then begin to sob.

  The curtain suddenly fled away to reveal an enormous double bed surrounded by a cavern of looped – up blood – red hangings. This consoled me for a moment because it reminded me of Carpaccio’s Dream of Saint Ursula. I even murmured ‘Carpaccio’ to myself as a protective charm. But these cooling comparisons were soon put to flight and even Carpaccio could not rescue me from what happened next. Not on the bed but upon some cushions near the front of the stage two girls were lying in a close embrace. (At least I suppose one of them was enacting a young man.) Then they began to sing.

  The sound of women’s voices singing is one of the bitter – sweetest noises in the world, the most humanly piercing, the most terribly significant and yet contentless of all sounds: and a duet is more than twice as bad as a single voice. (Perhaps boys’ voices are worst of all : I am not sure.) The two women were conversing in pure sound, their voices circling, replying, blending, creating a trembling silver cage of an almost obscene sweetness. I did not know what language they were singing in, and the words were inaudible anyway, there was no need of words, these were not words but the highest coinage of human speech melted down, become pure song, something vilely almost murderously gorgeous. No doubt she is crying for the inevitable loss of her young lover. The lovely boy protests but his heart is free. Only it has all been changed into a sort of plump luscious heart – piercing cascade of sugary agony. Oh God, not much more of this can be endured.