The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Francis, hello. How did you know where I was?’

  ‘Oh Bradley – Bradley – ’

  ‘What’s the matter? Has Arnold found out? What sort of a mess have you made of things?’

  ‘Oh Bradley – ’

  ‘What is it, for God’s sake? What’s happened?’

  There was silence, then a high whining sound. At the other end of the line Francis was crying. I felt sick with fear.

  ‘What – ?’

  ‘Oh Bradley – it’s Priscilla – ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  I became suddenly and strangely conscious of the telephone box, the sunshine, somebody waiting outside, my own staring – eyed face in the mirror.

  ‘How – ?’

  ‘She killed herself – she took sleeping tablets – she must have had them hidden – I left her – I shouldn’t have done – we took her to hospital – but it was too late – oh Bradley, Bradley – ’

  ‘She is really – dead – ’ I said, and I felt that she simply couldn’t be, it was impossible, she was in hospital where people were helped to get better, she simply could not have killed herself, it was another false alarm. ‘Really – dead – Are you sure – ?’

  ‘Yes, yes – oh I am so – it was all my fault – she’s dead, Bradley – she was alive in the ambulance – but then they told me she wasn’t alive any more – I – oh Bradley, forgive me – ’

  Priscilla wasn’t alive any more. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said mechanically. ‘It’s my fault.’

  ‘Oh I’m so wretched – it’s all my fault – I want to kill myself – I can’t live after this, how can I – ’ More whining and crying.

  ‘Francis. Stop that whimpering. Listen. How did you find out where I was?’

  ‘I found a letter in your desk from the agent – I thought you might be there – I had to find you – Oh Bradley, I’ve been in hell, in hell, not knowing where you were – thinking this had happened and you didn’t even know – I sent the telegram late last night but they said it wouldn’t arrive till this morning.’

  ‘I’ve just got it. Hold on. Just keep quiet and hold on.’ I stood silent in the slanting ray of the sun, looking at the pitted concrete of the telephone box, and I wanted to cry out, she cannot be dead, has everything been done, everything? I wanted to take Priscilla in my arms and make her live again. I wanted desperately to console her and to make her happy. It would have been so easy.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God – ’ Francis was saying softly, repeating it again and again.

  ‘Listen, Francis. Does anyone else know I’m here, does Arnold know?’

  ‘No. No one knows. Arnold and Christian came over last night. They rang up and I had to tell them. But I hadn’t found the letter then and I told them I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘That’s good. Don’t tell anybody where I am.’

  ‘But, Brad, you’re coming back at once, aren’t you? You must come back.’

  ‘I’m coming back,’ I said, ‘but not at once. It was only chance you found that letter. You must consider that this telephone conversation didn’t happen.’

  ‘But, Brad, the funeral and – I haven’t done anything – she’s in the mortuary – ’

  ‘You haven’t told her husband, you know, Roger Saxe?’

  ‘No, I – ’

  ‘Well, let him know. You’ll find his address and phone number in my address book in the – ’

  'Yes, yes – ’

  ‘He’ll organize the funeral. If he won’t, organize it yourself – Start organizing it anyway – Do whatever you’d do if you really didn’t know where I was – I’ll come when I can.’

  ‘Oh Brad, I can’t do it – you must come, you must – they keep asking – she’s your sister – ’

  ‘I hired you to look after her. Why did you leave her?’

  ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God – ’

  ‘Do as I tell you. There’s nothing we can do for – Priscilla – she isn’t – there any more.’

  ‘Brad, please come, please – for my sake – Until I see you I’m in hell – I can’t tell you what it’s been like – I must see you, I must – ’

  ‘I can’t come now,’ I said. ‘I can’t – come – now. Get on with the arrangements – get hold of Roger Saxe – I leave it all to you. I’ll come when I can. Good – bye.’

  I put the receiver down quickly and came out of the box into the full sun. The man who had been waiting looked at me curiously and went in. I walked over to the car and stood beside it, touching the bonnet. The dry road had made it dusty. I made trails in the dust with my fingers. I looked along the quiet pretty village street, composed of eighteenth – century houses of different shapes and sizes. Then I got into the car and turned it and began to drive back very slowly past the church and on towards Patara.

  There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind. Sometimes no doubt one acts rightly in resisting these simple promptings, one acts rightly in bringing into being the terrible refinements which lie beyond. I was not in fact then troubled about duty. Perhaps I assumed that I was acting wrongly, but the assumption attracted little of my attention. Of course I was stricken with guilt and horror at my unforgivable failure to keep my dear sister alive. But as I drove along I was also employed in minute calculations about the immediate future. I was perhaps absurdly influenced by the idea that it was a pure accident, a mere contingent by – product of my carelessness, that Francis had known where to find me. And if that terrible telephone call had been so little determined, so casually caused, it made it seem that much less real, that much easier to obliterate from history. In acting as if it had not happened I was scarcely distorting the real course of events at all. It had, because it so absolutely needn’t and shouldn’t have occurred, but a very shadowy existence. And if that was so I need not torment myself yet further by agonizing over whether I ought not at once to set off for London. Anyway, there was nothing more I could do for Priscilla.

  As I drove along the road at about fifteen miles an hour I realized what an ambiguous and suspended state I had been in since our arrival, so long ago, at Patara. I had of course been prepared to occupy myself simply with being happy, simply with the miracle of her continued presence. This was right surely. These days of paradise, rescued from the slow anxious mastication of time, should not be marred by pusillanimous fears of the future, or by that despair which Julian called my ‘abstraction’. On the other hand, as I now saw, some deep reflection had been at work, must have been at work, within that seemingly thoughtless joy – of – presence. I had, half hidden from myself, terrible purposes. My problem was simply how to keep Julian forever. And although I had said, to myself and to her, it is impossible, I knew at the same time that having once been with her in this way I could not now surrender her. The problem of keeping her had once, inconceivably long ago, seemed like the problem of persuading myself that it would, in spite of everything clearly to be said against this, be right to accept her generosity and take every possible advantage of it. But by now the problem had become, within the quiet self – concealed flow of my relentlessly purposive ratiocination, something much more blackly primitive, something which was scarcely problem or scarcely thought any more, but more like a sort of growth in my mind.

  It may seem ridiculous or monstrous that after that telephone call I was obsessed not less but even more with the necessity of making love properly to Julian. That failure, of which she made so little, had come to seem to me a symbol of the whole dilemma. It was at any rate the next obstacle. After that I could think, after that I would see my way. Until then I could wait and not be accused. And I had perhaps begun quietly to feel that if I could only get that right I should emerge at last into the bright light of certainty; and then it seemed to my dark purposing mind that I was now only an inch away from being able to say to myself with a radiantly clear intent: why
should I not marry this girl? Miraculously we love each other. There is nothing, but nothing, except a difference in our ages to prevent us from marrying. And if we simply erase this difficulty then it will no longer exist. How can such loves as ours be wasted? It cannot be. We can marry: and as between such loves only marriage will serve. I could, I can, possess Julian forever. But I was not yet at this point and my puritanical conscience was still darkening counsel and I had not even fully realized before the telephone call what the form of my indecision was.

  I had of course already decided not to tell Julian about Priscilla’s death. If I told her I would have to go back to London at once. And I felt that if we left our refuge now, if we parted now, with our flight unconsummated, the process which would ensure our liberation from doubt and our eternal betrothal might never take place at all. It was something which, for both of us, I had to do, it was my destined ordeal to keep silent in order to bring us both through this darkness. And it must be done now in unbroken continuity with what had happened. The love – making was part of this. I could not and would not chill Julian’s young blood now with this tale of suicide. Of course I would have to ‘discover’ it soon, we would have to go back soon, but not yet, not without my having reached that point of decision which seemed so close and which would enable me and make me worthy to keep her forever. There was nothing more I could do for Priscilla. My duty henceforth was to Julian. The sheer pain of the concealment was itself part of the ordeal. I wanted to tell Julian at once. I needed her consolation and her precious forgiveness. But for both our sakes I had for the moment to do without this.

  ‘What ages you’ve been. I say, look at me and guess who!’

  I came in through the porch and blinked in the comparative obscurity of the sitting – room. At first I could not see Julian at all, could only hear her voice coming to me out of darkness. Then I saw her face, the rest obscure. Then I saw what she had done.

  She was dressed in black tights, black shoes, she wore a black velvet jerkin and a white shirt and a gold chain with a cross about her neck. She had posed herself in the doorway of the kitchen, holding the sheep’s skull up in one hand.

  ‘I thought I’d surprise you! I bought them in Oxford Street with your money, the cross is a sort of hippy cross, I got it from one of those men, it cost fifty pence. All I needed was a skull, and then we found this lovely one. Don’t you think it suits me? Alas, poor Yorick – What’s the matter, darling?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘You’re staring so. Don’t I look princely? Bradley, you’re frightening me. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ll take them off now. We’ll have lunch. I got the watercress.’

  ‘We won’t have lunch,’ I said. ‘We’re going to bed.’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed. The sheep’s skull fell to the floor. I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt. ‘Wait, wait, you’re tearing it!’ She began hastily undoing the buttons and fumbling with the jerkin. I pulled the whole bundle up and over her head, but the chain and cross impeded them. ‘Wait, Bradley, please, the chain’s got round my throat, please.’ I dug in the snowy whiteness of the shirt and the silky tangle of her hair for the chain and found it and snapped it. The clothes came away Julian was desperately undoing her brassière. I began hauling down the black tights, dragging them over her thighs as she arched her body to help me. For a moment, still fully dressed, I surveyed her naked. Then I began to tear my clothes off.

  ‘Oh Bradley, please, don’t be so rough, please, Bradley, you’re hurting me.’

  Later on, she was crying. There had been no doubt about this love – making. I lay exhausted and let her cry. Then I turned her round and let her tears mingle with the sweat which had darkened the thick grey hairs of my chest and made them cling to my hot flesh in flattened curls. I held her in a kind of horrified trance of triumph and felt between my hands the adorable racked sobbing of her body.

  ‘Stop crying.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry I broke the chain. I’ll mend it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’ve frightened you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I love you. We’ll be married.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We will, won’t we, Julian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please stop crying.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Later on still we made love again. Then somehow it was the evening.

  ‘What made you like that, Bradley?’

  ‘The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.’

  We were exhausted and very hungry and I needed alcohol. We ate our lunch of liver sausage and bread and cheese and watercress without ceremony by lamplight with the windows open to the blue salty night, I drank up all the rest of the wine.

  What had made me like that? Had I suddenly felt that Julian had killed Priscilla? No. The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian. Or directed against fate through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. 'It was love,’ I said to her.

  'Yes, yes.’

  I had removed, at any rate, my next obstacle, though the world beyond it looked different again, not what I had expected. I had prefigured the proximity of some simplifying intellectual certainty. What there was now was my relationship to Julian, stretching away still into the obscurity of the future, urgent and puzzling and historically dynamic, changing it seemed even from second to second. The girl looked different, I looked different. Was that the body which I had worshipped every part of? It was as if the terrible abstraction had been carried by the rush of divine power right into the centre of our passion. I found myself, at moments, trembling, and saw Julian trembling. And the touching thing was that we were comforting each other, like people who had just escaped from a fire.

  'I will mend your chain, I will.’

  ‘There’s no need to mend it, I can just knot it.’

  ‘And I’ll mend the sheep’s skull too.’

  ‘It’s in too many pieces.’

  'I’ll mend it.’

  ‘Let’s draw the curtains. I feel bad spirits are looking in at us.’

  ‘We are surrounded by spirits. Curtains won’t keep them out.’ But I pulled the curtains and came round behind her chair, touching her neck very lightly with my finger. Her flesh was cool, almost cold, and she shuddered, arching her neck. She made no other response, but I felt that our bodies were rapt in a communion with each other which passed our understanding. Meanwhile it was a time for quiet communication by words, for speech of a new sort, arcane prophetic speech.

  'I know,’ she said. ‘Swarms of them. I’ve never felt like this before. Listen to the sea. It sounds so close. Though there’s no wind.’

  We listened.

  'Bradley, would you go and lock the front door?’

  I went and locked it and then sat down again facing her. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No, it’s not – coldness.’

  'I know.’

  She was wearing the blue dress with the white willow – spray pattern which she had been wearing when she fled and a light woollen rug off our bed around her shoulders. She was staring at me with big eyes and every now and then a spasm passed across her face. There had been a lot of tears but none now. She looked so much, and beautifully, older, not the child I had known at all, but some wonderful holy woman, a prophetess, a temple prostitute. She had combed her hair down smoothly and pressed it back and her face had the nakedness, the solitude, the ambiguous staring eloquence of a mask. She had the dazed empty look of a great statue.

  ‘Oh you wonderful, wonderful thing.’

  'I feel so odd,’ she said, ‘quite impersonal, I’ve never felt like this before at all.’<
br />
  'It is the power of love.’

  ‘Does love do that? I thought yesterday, the day before yesterday, that I loved you. It wasn’t like this.’

  'It is the god, the black Eros. Don’t be afraid.’

  ‘Oh I’m not – afraid – I just feel shattered and empty. I’m in a place where I’ve never been before.’

  ‘I’m there too.’

  ‘Yes. It’s funny. When we were just tender and quiet together, you know, I felt you were there, more there than anybody ever. Now I feel as if I were alone – and yet I’m not – I’m – I’m you – I’ m both of us.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘You even resemble me. I feel I’m looking into a mirror.’

  I had the strange feeling that I was speaking these words. I was speaking through her, through the pure echoing emptiness of her being, hollowed by love.

  ‘Then I looked into your eyes and thought: Bradley! Now you have no name.’

  ‘We are possessed.’

  ‘I feel we are joined forever. Sort of – dedicated.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen to that train, how clear it sounds.’

  We listened to it passing, far off.

  ‘Is it like this in inspiration, I mean when you write?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I knew it was, though I had never yet experienced it, never yet. But now, empowered, I would be able to create. Though still in the dark, I had come through my ordeal.

  'It it the same thing really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The desire of the human heart for love and for knowledge is infinite. But most people only realize this when they are in love, when the conception of this desire being actually fulfilled is present to them.’

  ‘And art too – ’

  ‘Is this desire – purified – in the presence of – it’s possibility – in the divine presence.’