The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  Arnold said, ‘I’m sorry I got so excited.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Everything’s got much clearer now.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m sorry I said all those ludicrous things – about lawyers and so on.’

  ‘So ’m I.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized how little had happened.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, I hadn’t got the time scheme. I somehow gathered from what Julian said this afternoon that this whatever it is had been going on for some time. But now I understand it’s only been going on since yesterday evening.’

  ‘A lot has happened since yesterday evening,’ I said. ‘You should understand, you seem to have been fairly busy lately yourself.’

  ‘You must have thought Rachel and I were being ridiculously solemn this afternoon about very little.’

  ‘I see you’re playing it differently now,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Now Julian has explained everything to us and it’s all perfectly clear.’

  ‘And what does it look like?’

  ‘Of course she was upset and touched. She felt pity for you, she said.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. But go on.’

  ‘And of course she was flattered – ’

  ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘Now? Lying on her bed and crying her eyes out.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘But don’t worry about her, Bradley.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t.’

  ‘I wanted to explain – She has now told us everything, and we can see that this is really nothing at all, just a storm in a teacup, and she agrees.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘She asks you to forgive her for being so emotional and silly, and she says will you please not try to see her just now.’

  ‘Arnold, did she really say this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I gripped him by the shoulders and pulled him with me a few steps so that the lamplight fell on to his face. He reacted convulsively for a moment, then stood still in my hold. ‘Arnold, did she say that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I let go of him, and we both moved instinctively back into the shadow. His face leered at me, twisted up with will and anxiety and deep intention. It was not the pink angry hostile face of earlier. It was a hard determined face which told me nothing.

  ‘Bradley, try to be decent here. If you just shut up and clear off for a while this will all simply blow away, and later on you can meet each other again in the old style. This nonsense simply rests on two meetings. You can’t have got permanently attached to each other in two meetings! It’s all a fantasy. Come back into the real world. The fact is Julian’s very embarrassed by this stupid business—’

  ‘Embarrassed?’

  ‘Yes, and it will be most considerate of you to sheer off. Be kind to the child. Let her recover her dignity. Dignity matters so much to a young girl. She feels she’s lost face by taking it all so seriously and she feels she’s made a bit of an exhibition of herself. If you saw her now she’d just giggle and blush and feel sorry for you and ashamed of herself. She sees now it was silly to take it all so seriously and make a drama of it. She admits that she was flattered, it turned her head a bit, and it was an exciting surprise. But when she saw we weren’t amused she sobered up. She understands now that it’s all an impossible nonsense, well, she understands , in practical matters she’s an intelligent girl. Do use enough imagination to see how she must feel now! She’s not such a fool as to imagine you’re suffering from any great passion either. She says she’s very sorry and will you please not try to see her for a while yet. It’s better to have a bit of an interval. We’re going on holiday soon anyway, the day after tomorrow, in fact. I’ve decided to take her to Venice. She’s always wanted to go. We’ve been to Rome and Florence, but never there, and she’s got a thing about it. So we’re going to take a flat, probably spend the rest of the summer. Julian’s absolutely thrilled. I think a change of scene would help my book too. So there we are. I’m awfully sorry I got so worked up this afternoon. You must have thought me a solemn idiot. I hope you aren’t angry with me now?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  ‘I’m just trying to act rightly. Well, we all are. Fathers have duties. Please, please try to understand. It’s kindest to Julian to play this quite cool. You will sheer off and keep quiet, please? She won’t want any heavy letters or anything. Leave the kid alone and let her begin to enjoy herself again. You don’t want to haunt her like a ghost, do you? You will leave her alone now, won’t you, Bradley?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can rely on you?’

  ‘I’m not a complete fool, I do see. I was rather solemn as well this afternoon. The whole sort of flare – up took me by surprise and I was damnably upset. But now I see that – it’s probably better for all concerned to play it cool and regard it as a storm in a teacup. All right, all right. Now perhaps I’d better retire and recover my dignity too.’

  ‘Bradley, you do relieve my mind. I knew you’d act decently, for the child’s sake. Thank you, thank you. God, I’m relieved. I‘ll run back to Rachel. She sends her love, by the way.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘Rachel.’

  ‘Give her mine. Good night. I hope you have a good time in Venice.’

  He called me back. ‘By the way, you did really destroy that letter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I made my way home thinking the thoughts which I will describe in the next section. When I got back I found a note from Francis asking me to call on Priscilla.

  When we try, especially in times of pain and crisis, to penetrate the mystery of another mind, we are inclined to picture it as being, not a shadowy mass of contradictions like our own, but a casket containing entities which are clear – cut and definite but hidden. So at this time it never occurred to me to think of Julian as being in a state of total confusion. About one per cent of my speculations veered towards the idea of her being roughly in the frame of mind depicted by Arnold: rueful, embarrassed, giggling, feeling she had made a silly bloomer. Ninety – nine per cent of my thought favoured another view. Arnold was lying. He was certainly lying about Rachel ‘sending her love’. One sure thing was that I had now earned Rachel’s undying hate. Rachel was not a forgiver. He was lying about Julian too. His account was not even consistent. If she was crying her eyes out she was not, at that moment at any rate, in a giggling mood or feeling thrilled about Venice. And why this frantic haste to leave England? No. There had been no illusion. I loved her and she returned my love. I could as soon doubt the ordinary reports and evidences of my senses as doubt that what that girl had affirmed both last night and with such triumphant certainty this morning was indeed the truth.

  But then what had happened? Probably they had locked her in her room. I pictured her lying there and crying, a tumbled figure of despair with her shoes off and her hair all tangled. (The vision filled me with pain, but it was rather beautiful too.) There was no doubt that she had thoroughly alarmed her parents by the naive violence of her declaration. What a mistake that had been. And they had reacted first with unbridled fury and then with devious slyness. Of course they did not think that she had changed her mind. They had changed their tactics. Had Arnold believed in my renunciation of his daughter? Probably not. I am not a good liar.

  I had so much loved and trusted Julian’s instinct for frankness that I had not even had the sense to advise her to tone it all down a bit. I had not even, fool that I was, really foreseen how awful the thing would look to her parents. I had been far too absorbed in the sacredness of my own feelings to make the cold effort to be objective here. And what an idiot I had been, to go farther back, not to tone it all down myself! I could have broken it to her slowly, moved in on her gradually, wooed her quietly, hinted, insinuated, whispered. There could have been chaste and then less chaste kisses. Why did I have to sick it up all at once
like that and put her in a frenzy? But of course this slow motion idea was only tolerable in retrospect in the light of the knowledge that I now had of her love for me. If I had started to tell her anything at all I could not have stopped myself from telling her everything straightaway. The anxiety would have been too terrible. I did not now meditate upon, or even entertain, the thought that I might have been and ought to have been silent. I did not reject this idea. Only it seemed to belong to some very remote period of the past. For better or worse, that was no longer in question, and guilt about it did not form part of my distress.

  During the night I was, sleeping and waking, concerned with Venice. If they took her there I would of course follow. It is difficult to hide a girl in Venice. Yet how elusive my lion – darling was that night. I endlessly pursued her along black and white moonlit quays, quiet as etchings beside their glossy waters. Now she had gone into Florian’s only I could not open the door. When I got the door open I was in the Accademia and she had gone on into Tintoretto’s picture of Saint Mark and was walking across the squared pavement. We were back again in the Piazza San Marco which had become an enormous chess board. She was a pawn moving steadily forward and I was a knight leaping crookedly after her but always having to turn away to left or to right when I had almost caught her up. Now she had reached the other end and become a queen and turned about to face me. No, she was Saint Ursula’s angel, very august and tall, standing at the foot of my bed. I stretched out my arms towards her but she receded down a long path and through the west door of Inigo Jones’s church, which had become the Rialto bridge. She was in a gondola, dressed in a red robe, holding a tiger lily, receding, receding, while behind me a terrible drumming of hooves became louder and louder until I turned about and saw that Bartolomeo Colleoni with the face of Arnold Baffin was about to ride me to the ground. The terrible plunging hooves descended on my head and my skull cracked like an egg shell.

  I woke to the sound of dustbin lids being clattered by Greeks at the end of the court. I rose quickly into a world which had become, even since last night, much more frightful. Last night there had been horrors, but there had been a sense of drama, a feeling of obstacles to be overcome, and beyond it all the uplifting certainty of her love. Today I felt crazy with doubt and fear. She was only a young girl after all. Could she, against such fierce parental opposition, hold to her faith and keep her vision clear? And if they had lied to me about her was it not likely that they had lied to her about me? They would tell her that I had said I would give her up. And I had said it. Would she understand? Would she be strong enough to go on believing in me? How strong was she? How little in fact I knew her. Was it really all in my mind? And supposing they took her away? Supposing I really could not find her? Surely she would write to me. But supposing she did not? Perhaps, although she did love me, she had decided that the whole thing was a mistake? That would, after all, be a thoroughly rational decision.

  The telephone rang but it was only Francis asking me to come and see Priscilla. I said I would come later. I asked to talk to her but she would not come to the telephone. About ten Christian rang and I put the receiver back at once. I rang the Ealing number but got ‘number unobtainable’ again. Arnold must have somehow put the telephone out of action during that period of panic in the afternoon. I prowled about the house wondering how long I could put off the moment when it would be impossible not to go to Ealing. My head was aching terribly. I did try quite hard during this time to put my thoughts in order. I speculated about my intentions and her feelings. I sketched plans for a dozen or so different turns of events. I even tried to feign imagining what it would be like really to despair: that is, to believe that she did not love me, had never loved me, and that all I could decently do was to vanish from her life. Then I realized that I did despair, I was in despair, nothing could be worse than this experience of her absence and her silence. And yesterday she had been in my arms and we had looked forward into a huge quiet abyss of time, and we had kissed each other without frenzy and without terror, with thoughtful temperate quiet joy. And I had even sent her away when she did not want to go. I had been insane. Perhaps that was the only time which we should ever, ever have together. Perhaps it was something which would never, never, never come again.

  Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations. The wife at the pit head. The prisoner awaiting interrogation. The shipwrecked man on the raft in the empty sea. The sheer extension of time is felt then as physical anguish. The minutes, each of which might bring relief, or at least certainty, pass fruitlessly and manufacture an increase of horror. As the minutes of that morning passed away I felt a cold deadly increase of my conviction that all was lost. This was how it would be from now on and for ever. She would never communicate with me again. I endured this until half past eleven and then I decided I must go to Ealing and try to see her by force if necessary. I even thought of arming myself with some weapon. But suppose she was already gone?

  It had begun to rain. I had put on my macintosh and was standing in the hall wondering if tears would help. I imagined pushing Arnold violently aside and leaping up the stairs. But what then?

  The telephone rang and I lifted it. The voice of an operator said, ‘Miss Baffin is calling you from an Ealing call box, will you pay for the call?’

  ‘What? Is that—?’

  ‘Miss Baffin is calling you—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll pay, yes – ’

  ‘Bradley. It’s me.’

  ‘Oh darling — Oh thank God – ’

  ‘Bradley, quickly, I must see you, I’ve run away.’

  ‘Oh good, oh my darling, I’ve been in such a—’

  ‘Me too. Look, I’m in a telephone box near Ealing Broadway station, I haven’t any money.’

  ‘I’ll come and fetch you in a taxi.’

  ‘I’ll hide in a shop, I’m so terrified of – ’

  ‘Oh my darling girl – ’

  ‘Tell the taxi to drive slowly past the station, I’ll see you.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘But, Bradley, we can’t be at your place, that’s where they’ll go.’

  ‘Never mind them. I’m coming to fetch you.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, Bradley, it’s been such a nightmare – ’

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘I was an absolute idiot, I told them all about it in a sort of triumphant aggressive way, I felt so happy, I couldn’t conceal it or muffle it, and they were livid, at least at first they simply couldn’t believe it, and then they rushed off to see you, and I should have run away then, only I was feeling sort of combative and I wanted another session and then when they came back they were much worse. I’ve never seen my father so upset and angry, he was quite violent.’

  ‘God, he didn’t beat you?’

  ‘No, no, but he shook me till I was quite giddy and he broke a lot of things in my room – ’

  ‘Oh my sweet – ’

  ‘Then I started to cry and couldn’t stop.’

  ‘Yes, when I came round—’

  ‘You came round?’

  ‘They didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Dad said later on that he’d seen you again. He said you’d agreed to give it all up. I didn’t believe him of course.’

  ‘Oh my brave dear! He told me you didn’t want to see me. Of course I didn’t believe him either.’

  I was holding her two hands in both of mine. We were conversing in soft voices and sitting in a church. (Saint Cuthbert’s Philbeach Gardens, to be exact.) Pale green angelica – coloured light entering through Victorian stained glass failed to dissipate the magnificent and soothing gloom of the place. Framing an elaborate reredos apparently made of milk chocolate, a huge melancholy rood screen which looked as if it had been rescued from a fire at the last moment announced that Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis. Behind a sturdy iron railing at the west end a murky dove – pinnacled shrine protected the font, or perhaps the cave of some doom –
obsessed sibyl or of one of the more terrible forms of Aphrodite. Powers older than Christ seemed to have casually entered and made the place their own. High above us a black – clad figure paced along a gallery and disappeared. We were alone again.

  She said, ‘I love my parents. I suppose. Well, of course I do. Especially my father. Anyway, I’ve never doubted it. But there are things one can’t forgive. It’s the end of something. And the beginning of something.’ She turned to me with gravity, her face very tired, a little puffy and battered and creased with much crying, and grim too. One saw what she would look like when she was fifty. And for an instant her unforgiving face reminded me of Rachel in the terrible room.

  ‘Oh Julian, I’ve brought irrevocable things to you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I haven’t wrecked your life, have I, you aren’t angry with me for having involved you in such trouble?’

  ‘That’s your silliest remark yet. Anyway, the row went on for hours, mainly between me and my father, and then when my mother started in he shouted that she was jealous of me, and she shouted that he was in love with me, and then she started to cry and I screamed, and, oh Bradley, I didn’t know ordinary educated middle – class English people could behave the way we behaved last night.’

  ‘That shows how young you are.’

  ‘At last they went off downstairs and I could hear them going on rowing down there, and my mother crying terribly, and I decided I’d had enough and I’d clear out, and then I found they’d locked me in! I’d never been locked in anywhere, even when I was small, I can’t tell you how – it was a sort of moment of – illumination – like when people suddenly know – they’ve got to have a revolution. I was just eternally not going to stand for being locked in.’