The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

‘Forty – eight, Brad.’

  ‘You’re ten years luckier and wiser than I am.’

  ‘I’ve never had any luck, Brad. I don’t even hope for any any more. But I still love people. Not like Steve of course, but I love them. I love you, Brad.’

  ‘She will come back. The world hasn’t changed for nothing. It can’t change back now. The old world has gone forever. Oh how my life has gone from me, it has ebbed away. I cannot believe I am fifty – eight.’

  ‘Have you loved a lot of women, Brad?’

  ‘I never really loved anybody before Julian came.’

  ‘But there were women, after Chris I mean?’

  ‘Annie. Catharine. Louise. It’s odd how names remain, like skeletons with the flesh fallen away. They designate something that happened. They give an illusion of memory. But the people are gone as if they were dead. Perhaps they are dead. Dead as Priscilla, dead as Steve.’

  ‘Don’t say his name, Brad, please. I wish I hadn’t told you it.’

  ‘Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can’t be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn’t exactly a promise because you don’t need the future. I am happy now I think. I’ll write it all down, only not tonight.’

  ‘I envy you being a writer chap, Brad. You can say what you feel. I’m just eaten by feelings and I can’t even shout.’

  ‘Yes, I can shout, I can fill the galaxy with bellowings of pain. But you know, Francis, I’ve never ever really explained anything. I feel now as if at last I could explain. It’s as if all the matrix of my life which has been as hard and tight and small as a nut has become all luminous and spread out and huge. Everything’s magnified. At last I can see it all and visit it all. Francis, I can be a greater writer now, I know I can.’

  ‘Sure, you can, Brad. I always knew you had it in you. You were always like you were a great man.’

  ‘I’ve never given myself away before, Francis, never gambled myself absolutely. I’ve been a timid frightened man all my life. Now I know what it’s like to be beyond fear. I’m where greatness lives now. I’ve handed myself over. And yet it’s like being under discipline too. I haven’t any choice. I love, I worship and I shall be rewarded.’

  ‘Sure, Brad. She will come.’

  ‘Yes. He will come.’

  ‘Brad, I think you’d better go to bed.’

  ‘Yes, yes, to bed, to bed. Tomorrow we’ll make a plan.’

  ‘You stay here and I search.’

  ‘Yes. Happiness must exist. It can’t all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of? All right, all right, Francis, I’ll go to bed. What’s the worst image of suffering you can think of?’

  ‘A concentration camp.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll meditate on that. Good night. Perhaps she’ll come back in the morning.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be happy this time tomorrow.’

  ‘I think I can be happy now whatever happens. But oh if she would come back in the morning! What was it you said? A concentration camp. I’ll meditate on that. Good night. Thank you, thank you. Good night.’

  The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.

  ‘Wake up, wake up, Brad, here’s a letter.’

  I sat up in bed. Francis was thrusting at me a letter in an unfamiliar hand. It had a French stamp. I knew that it could only be from her. ‘Go, go, and close the door.’ He went. I opened the letter, shuddering, almost weeping with hope and fear. It read as follows.

  Dearest Bradley, I am in France with my father. We are driving to Italy. I am very very sorry that I went away without leaving a note, only 1 couldn’t find anything to write with. I am so sorry. I got into a terrible state. My father didn’t come back and take me away like he says you think. I just felt I had to be alone and I couldn’t talk any more. Suddenly everything became dark and awful inside me and I had to get away by myself. Forgive me. Everything seemed suddenly so muddled as if all the pieces were shifting. It was my fault, I ought not to have come with you to the country, I ought to have thought a bit. Then everything happened so fast I felt as if my life was suddenly bursting and I had to get away, please understand. I didn’t want to leave you, I didn’t change my feelings, it wasn’t that at all, it was just like having to breathe. I have been very stupid and regret everything I have done lately. When you said you loved me it seemed like a dream come true. If only I had been a little older I would have known what to do for the best for both of us. There was something beautiful which I feel I have spoilt, but I didn’t know what to do and everything seemed right at the time. Oh I am so sorry and miserable. (I can’t write very clearly here in this hotel, people keep coming into the room. There is no proper table in the bedroom.) I’ve had long talks about it all with my father and I think I understand myself a little better now. I hope so very much that you are not angry with me and don’t hate me and have forgiven me for going away like that. I value you so much and always will. I still feel so confused and almost as if I had forgotten things, like after a car crash. I feel I’ve had a bad dream, but the badness is all my own stupidity and muddle and not understanding my own emotions. My father says really no one understands these things, everyone says things they don’t mean. I don’t regret anything though and I hope you don’t. You were wonderful to me, you are a wonderful person. You talked so wonderfully about love. My father says I am too young to know about love and perhaps he is right. I can’t now feel that I could possibly have been adequate to you or that it was me that you needed. You had certain needs and perhaps another person would have done better. I mean, I wasn’t the, or the only, person. Sorry, I am not explaining this properly. I am so stupidly young and without any character, I feel I am just a blank page. You deserve someone much better and more mature. Perhaps you feel relieved. Now I think of you intensely, it’s terrible not to know what you feel. Oh do please love me though, I need love, I’ve never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy. But it was all crazy and I feel I’ve come out of a dream. Sorry, I think I said that before, I can’t concentrate. Father knows I’m writing to you and will give me a stamp. I hope you get this soon. I would have written sooner only my mind was all torn up. I am so unhappy at having been so stupid and I do hope I haven’t hurt you and that you don’t hate me. Of course you were right to tell me of your feelings, though they were so new. Often one gets rid of feelings by telling them. I feel I was just a second – best though. I felt that night before I went away that it couldn’t be me you wanted. And oh I felt such pain, Bradley. There is nothing to me. It was partly the shock of your telling me that made me so much feel I responded. Of course I wasn’t lying. I’m sorry, I can’t explain clearly, I can’t think. I feel I’ve had an enormous experience, but something which can’t fit into ordinary time and space at all.

  I will try now to write a more ordinary letter, like the letters I used to write to you years ago when I was a child. Father is quite relaxed now about it all and sends you his best wishes by the way. (Everyone at the hotel thinks we are lovers!) He has just gone off to take the car to the garage, there is something wrong with the bonnet, it won’t shut properly. I think I never made it clear enough to you how much I love my father. (Perhaps he is the man in my life!) I wish he hadn’t come down to the bungalow though. That banging on the door was a terrible shock, I still feel I’m trembling and I start crying at anything. It didn’t really matter though, as between us. I mean, he didn’t make me come away. It was something quite general, it wasn’t him or anything to do with Priscilla or finding out your age or finding out anything else at all. Nothing anyone told me made any real difference. I suppose continual shocks can alter one’s state of mind and make one feel one has to take decisions or something. It was a shock about Priscilla, I am so sorry about that. I feel I ought to have gone to see her more. It’s awful when people get old and abandoned, especially a woman. I was crying about that this morning, sometimes I can’t stop cr
ying. I am going to stay with a fan of my father’s in Italy and he is coming home and leaving me there, and they hardly speak any English so I shall have to speak Italian all the time! I did learn a little last year, I know some words anyway. The Signora will teach me. They live in a quite remote village, a little place in the mountains amid the ‘snow and ice’, so there won’t be any other English speakers around. I think I may start a novel when I’m in Italy too, I’ve been talking about that with my father, I feel I now really have something to say.

  Please, please don’t feel badly about me, don’t be too sad or cross with me either. Forgive my ignorance of myself, forgive my worthless empty selfish youth. I can’t quite now believe that you absolutely loved me, how could you have done. A mature woman would attract you much more deeply. I think that men like ‘youthful bloom’ and so on but perhaps they don’t really distinguish young girls much from one another and quite rightly, one is so unformed. I hope you don’t think I behaved like a ‘loose woman’. I felt great feelings and at every moment I did what seemed unavoidable. I don’t regret anything unless I hurt you and you won’t forgive me. I must stop this letter, I keep saying the same things over and over again, you must be quite fed up. I am so very sorry that I went without saying good – bye. (I got a lift back to London quite easily, by the way. I’d never hitch – hiked before.) I felt I had to go, though I didn’t think anything else just then, and since then it has seemed more sensible to keep on with that course rather than make more muddle and misery for everybody, though I terribly, terribly want to see you. We will meet again, won’t we, later on perhaps, after some time, and try to be friends, when I am a little more mature. That will be something new and valuable too. I feel now, especially as we go farther and farther south, that life is full of all kinds of possibilities. I do hope I shall manage with the Italian! Oh forgive me, Bradley, forgive me. I expect by now you just feel that you have had an odd dream. I hope it has been a good dream. Mine was. Oh I do feel so unhappy though, I feel all topsy turvy. I don’t know when I’ve cried so much. I have been so stupid and thoughtless. I love you with real love. It was a revelation. I don’t unsay anything. But it wasn’t part of any life we could have lived.

  I can’t end this letter, I feel I haven’t said anything properly, and there’s something else I should say. (Like sort of ‘thank you for having me’ or something!) (Sorry I didn’t mean that awful pun.) I really can’t concentrate, there’s a lot of noise. A Frenchman is staring at me, they do stare so. Bradley, I hope we can be real friends later on, that would be so valuable. And we couldn’t have managed, we really couldn’t. It wasn’t anything special. Just that we couldn’t have. But I am so glad that you told me of your love. (I will not put it all into my novel, which I expect you are thinking!) I expect you feel relieved and set free though. Thank you. And don’t be sad at all. And forgive me for being young and dilly and making muddles. Oh I can’t end this letter, but I must. Oh my sear, my dear, good – bye, and lots and lots and lots of love.

  Julian

  ‘Brad, may I come in?’

  I was dressing.

  ‘Is it good news, Brad?’

  ‘She’s in Italy,’ I said. ‘I’m going after her. She’s in Venice.’

  The letter had, of course, been written for Arnold’s eye. The bit about his ‘providing the stamp’ made that plain. The girl was being supervised, virtually a prisoner. Of course she couldn’t, as she said, ‘explain clearly’. She had continued writing a vague repetitive effusion, in the hope of being able to put in a real message at the last moment, hence the references to ‘not being able to end’. That had proved impossible. Doubtless Arnold arrived, read the letter and told her to complete it. Then he took it away and posted it. He would see to it that she had no money to buy stamps herself. However she had managed to tell me that she was writing under duress. She had also managed to convey her destination. ‘Snow and ice’, to which she had drawn attention, patently meant Venice. The Italian for ‘snow’ is ‘neve’, and together with the reference to ‘Italian words’, the anagram was obvious. And in ‘topsy turvy’ language a little place in the mountains clearly meant a large place by the sea. And Arnold had mentioned Venice, though then to mislead me. Names are not uttered at random.

  ‘Are you going to Venice today?’ said Francis, as I was getting into my trousers.

  ‘Yes. At once.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No. The letter’s in code. She’s staying with a fan of Arnold’s, I don’t know who.’

  ‘What can I do, Brad? I say, may I come with you? I could help, I could search and hold forts and so on. Let me come, sort of as your Sancho Panza!’

  I thought for a moment. ‘All right. You might be useful.’

  ‘Oh good! Shall I go now and get the tickets! You should stay here, you know. She might telephone or you might get a message or something.’

  ‘All right.’ That made sense. I sat down on the bed. I was feeling rather faint again.

  ‘And ’I say, Brad, shall I do some detective work ? I could go to Arnold’s publisher and find out who his Venice admirer is.’

  ‘How?’ I said. The flashing lights were coming back and I saw Francis’s face, all plumped out with eagerness, surrounded by a cascade of stars, like a divine visitation in a picture.

  ‘I’ll pretend to be writing a book about how different nationalities see Arnold’s work. I’ll ask if they can put me in touch with his Italian admirers. They might have the address, it’s worth trying.’

  ‘It’s a brainwave,’ I said. ‘It’s an idea of genius.’

  ‘And Brad, I’ll need some money. I’ll book us to Venice then.’

  ‘There may be no direct flight at once, if there isn’t book us through Milan.’

  ‘And I’ll get some maps and guide books, we’ll need a map of the city, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Make me a cheque then, Brad. Here’s your cheque book. Make it out to “bearer” and I can take it to your bank. Make it a big one, Brad, so I can book us the best way. And, Brad, would you mind, I haven’t any clothes, it’ll be hot there, won’t it, do you mind if I buy some summer clothes, I haven’t a thing?’

  ‘Yes. Buy anything. Buy the guides and a map, that’s a good idea. And go to the publisher. Yes, yes.’

  ‘Can I buy you some things, you know, a sunhat or a dictionary or anything?’

  ‘No. Go quickly. Here.’ I gave him a large cheque.

  ‘Oh thanks, Brad! You stay here and rest. I’ll be back. Oh how exciting! Brad, do you know, I’ve never been to Italy, ever at all!’

  When he had gone I went into the sitting – room. I had a blessed purpose now, an objective, a place in the world where she might be. I ought to be packing a suitcase. I felt incapable of doing so. Francis would pack my case. I felt faint with longing for Julian. I still held her letter in my hand.

  In the bureau bookcase opposite to me were the love poems of Dante. I pulled them out. And as I touched the book I felt, so strange is the chemistry of love, that my embroiled heart was furthering its history. I felt love now in the form of a sort of divine anger. What I was suffering for that girl. Of course I would love my pain. But there is a rich anger which is bred so, and which is of the purest stuff that love is ever made of. Dante, who spoke his name so often and suffered so at his hands, knew that.

  S’io avessi le belle trecce prese,

  che fatte son per me scudiscio e ferza,

  pigliandole anzi terza,

  con esse passerei vespero e squille:

  e non sarei pietoso nè cortese,

  anzi farei com’orso quando scherza;

  e se Amor me ne sferza,

  io mi vendicherei di più di mille.

  Ancor ne li occhi, ond’ escon le faville

  che m’infiammono il cor, ch’io porto anciso,

  guarderei presso e fiso,

  per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face:

  e poi le renderei con amor pace.<
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  I was lying face downwards on the floor, holding Julian’s letter and the Rime together against my heart, when the telephone rang. I staggered up amid black constellations and got to the instrument. I heard Julian’s voice.

  No, it was not her voice, it was Rachel’s. Only Rachel’s voice, in emotion, horribly recalling that of her daughter.

  ‘Oh’ – I said, ‘Oh – ’, holding the telephone away from me. I saw Julian in that second in a jagged explosion of vision, in her black tights and her black jerkin and her white shirt, holding the sheep’s skull up before my face.

  ‘What is it, Rachel, I can’t hear.’

  ‘Bradley, could you come round at once.’

  ‘I’m just leaving London.’

  ‘Please could you come round at once, it’s very, very urgent.’

  ‘Can’t you come here!’

  ‘No. Bradley, you must come, I beg you. Please come, it’s something about Julian.’

  ‘Rachel, she is in Venice, isn’t she? Do you know her address? I’ve had a letter from her. She’s staying with a fan of Arnold’s. Do you know? Have you got an address book of Arnold’s you could look it up in?’

  ‘Bradley, come round here at once. It’s very – important. I’ll tell you everything – you want to know – only come – ’

  ‘What is it, Rachel? Rachel, is Julian all right? You haven’t heard anything awful? Oh God, have they had a car accident?’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything. Just come here. Come, come, at once, in a taxi, every moment matters.’

  ‘Rachel, is Julian all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, just come – ’

  I paid the taxi with trembling hands, dropping the money all over the place, and ran up the path and began banging on the knocker. Rachel opened the door at once.

  I hardly recognized her. Or rather, I recognized her as a portentous revenant, the weeping distraught figure of the beginning of the story, her face grossly swollen with tears and, it seemed, again bruised, or perhaps just dirtied as a child’s may be after much rubbing away of tears.