by Iris Murdoch
“What’s the matter, Sir?”
“Nothing,” said Ducane. He put the candle down on the nearest table. “I feel a little odd. It’s the lack of air.”
“Sit down a minute, Sir. Here’s a chair.”
“No, no. What are those odd marks on the wall behind you?”
“Oh just the usual things, Sir. Soldiers I’d say.”
Ducane leaned across the mattress and examined the white wall. It was a wall of whitewashed brick and the appearance of a wallpaper had been given to it by a dense covering of graffiti, reaching from the ceiling to the floor. The customary messages and remarks were followed here and there by dates—all wartime dates. There were representations of the male organ in a variety of contexts. The decorated wall behind the cross provided a backcloth which was suddenly friendly and human, almost good.
Then certain marks caught Ducane’s eye which seemed of more recent date, as if they had been put on with a blue felt pen. They overlaid the pencil scrawlings of the soldiers. There were several carefully drawn pentograms and hexograms. Then in Radeechy’s small pedantic hand was written Asmodeus, Astaroth, and below that Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of law. Directly above the cross was a large blue square which Ducane, moving the candle nearer, saw to be composed of capital letters. The letters read as follows:
“What does that mean?”
“Lord, Sir, I don’t know. It’s in some funny foreign language. Mr Radeechy wrote it up one day. He told me to be careful not to smudge it when I was dusting.”
Ducane took out his diary and copied the square of letters down into the back of it. “Let’s go,” he said to McGrath.
“Just a minute, Sir,” said McGrath.
They were both leaning against the trestle table with the cross upon it. Lit by the candles behind it, the multiple shadow of the reversed cross flickered upon their two hands, McGrath’s left and Ducane’s right, which were gripping the edge of the trestle. McGrath was still holding the whip in his right hand, drooping it now against his trouser leg. Stooping a little, and with a delicate almost fastidious gesture, Ducane took the whip out of McGrath’s hand and swinging it round behind him tossed it on to the mattress. As his fingers touched McGrath’s he saw McGrath’s head and shoulders very clearly as if inscribed in an oval of light, the red-golden hair, the narrow pale face, the unflecked blue eyes. The vision carried with it a sense of something novel. Ducane thought, I am seeing him for the first time as being young, no, no, I am seeing him for the first time as being beautiful. He tensed his hand upon the table, dragging his nails across the surface of the wood.
“Let’s not quarrel, Sir, shall we?”
“I wasn’t aware that we were—quarrelling,” said Ducane after a moment. He took a slow step backward.
“Well, there was that little business of ours, you know. You were kind enough to help me out with a little money, if you remember, Sir. And I was able to oblige you about the young ladies’ letters. I’d be most grateful, Sir, if we could now put this little matter on a proper business footing and then we can both forget all about it, see? I like you, Sir, I won’t make any secret of it, I like you, and I want us to be friends. Mr Radeechy and I were friends, like, and you and I could be friends, Mr Ducane, Sir, and that’s what I’d like best. There’s a lot I could do for you, Sir, if I was so minded, I’m a very useful man, Sir, and a jack of all trades if I may say so, and Mr Radeechy found me very useful indeed. I’d like to serve you, Sir, and that comes from the heart. But I think it would be nicer for us both if we just settled up the other little thing first of all. A matter of four pounds a week, say, not much, Sir, to you, I mean I wouldn’t want to charge you much. Just that, regular like—so perhaps, Sir, if you wouldn’t mind just filling in this banker’s order, I’ve always found that the easiest way—”
“A banker’s order?” said Ducane, staring at the apparition of McGrath flourishing a piece of paper in front of him. Then he began to tremble with laughter. One of the candles went out. “A banker’s order? No, no, McGrath. You’ve got it all wrong, I’m afraid. You’re a damnable villain but I’m not a total fool. I paid you a little because I needed you for this investigation. Now that you’ve done all you can for me I’m not paying you another penny.”
“In that case, Sir, I’m afraid I shall be forced to communicate with those young ladies. You realise that?”
“You can do what you like about the young ladies,” said Ducane. “I’m through with you, McGrath. The police will communicate with you about collecting up the stuff from here and you’ll be required to make a statement. You’ll be off my hands, thank God. And I never want to see or hear of you again. Now we’re going back.”
“But, Sir, Sir—”
“That’s enough, McGrath. Just hand me the torch, will you? Now lead the way. Quick march.”
The remaining candles were blown out. The black door opened and let in the dark fresher air of the tomb-like passage. McGrath faded through the doorway. Ducane followed, holding the torch so as to illuminate McGrath’s heels. As he began to mount the ramp he felt a curious taste upon his tongue. He realised that at some point he must have put the half walnut absently into his mouth and eaten it.
Twenty-seven
DEAREST JOHN, forgive me for writing, I’ve just got to write. I’ve got to do something which connects me with you, really, and not just in thought, and this is all I can do. Thank you very much for your dear postcard. I am so glad to think that I shall see you the week after next. But it seems rather a long time to wait. And I thought perhaps you would be glad to know that I was thinking about you all the time. Is that wrong of me? I am so happy when I think that you have somehow accepted me. You have accepted me, haven’t you? I mean, you are letting me love you, aren’t you? And that is all that I want. At least it’s not all that I want but it’s all that I can ask and, John, it’s enough. I can be happy just thinking about you and seeing you now and then when you aren’t too busy. Love is such a good occupation, John, and I’m beginning to think that I’m clever at it! Be well, my dearest, and don’t work too hard, and if it is ever a refreshment to you to know that your Jessica is thinking loving thoughts about you, then know it indeed, because it will be true. Yours, yours, yours
Jessica
P.S. I wonder if you understand me when I say that I have a guilty conscience? And that I was so relieved to get your postcard and know that all was well? You are a forgiving man and I worship you for that too. (If all this is Greek to you never mind! I’ll explain one day!)
John my dear,
I am feeling wretched and I must write to you, and although I know you don’t want to be told that I love you, and that this just annoys you, I’ve still got to write and tell you because it’s a fact and one that I live with in hell. I know one averts one’s attention from unpleasant things and I have no doubt you think as little as possible about the problem of What To Do About Jessica; but the problem remains, and I have to press it on your notice now and then because you are the only person who can help me. I might say too that you are the person who ought to help me, since you do bear some responsibility for having awakened in me such an immense, such a truly monstrous degree of love. Of course I shall never recover from this illness. But you must just do a little more to help me to live with it.
I suppose you know, if you use your imagination at all about me (but perhaps you don’t?), that I expect a letter from you by every post. Idiotic, but I do; I can’t help it, it’s physical. I rush down as soon as I hear the postman. And when, as usual, there’s nothing, it’s like a kind of amputation. Do try to think about this, John, even for two seconds. You leave me without any news for nearly a week. Then you send me a postcard suggesting a meeting in ten days’ time. This just isn’t good enough, my dear. Are you really so busy that you can’t see me for half an hour sometime next week? I behave very well these days, as you know—you’ve trained me and I have to! Couldn’t you manage a short drink some evening? In fact, I could manage really
any time of day, anywhere. Why not telephone me? I’m in nearly all the time now.
It would give me a particular relief to see you just now because—well, I wonder if you know why? I can’t help wondering if you are not angry with me especially after getting your postcard. If you think I have done wrong you have got to forgive me. Because otherwise I shall die. John, please see me next week.
Jessica
John, as you may know by now, I went to bed with somebody last week. I expect you probably know all about it and either you are furious or you despise me utterly. I just couldn’t interpret your postcard. It had such a curious tone. What are you thinking about me? I don’t say ‘forgive me’ as I don’t feel penitent. You’ve made it so clear that you don’t want me, or rather you want me completely on your own terms. I’m supposed to love you but give no trouble. Well, I’m not as trouble-free as all that. And things happen to me too. However I suppose I should be grateful that at least you’ve always been totally truthful with me—and now I’m being totally truthful with you. It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction. You’ve just got to bear it. Please see me tomorrow. I’ll telephone you at the office.
J.
Jessica Bird had been wandering up and down her room for some time now. The three letters, which she had spent most of the previous night writing, were laid out on the table. Which letter should she send? Which was the sincere one? She felt all of the things in all of the letters. Which was the efficacious one? She knew in her heart that not one of them would be efficacious. Any one of them would annoy John and make him harden his heart against her. He would not see her tomorrow. He might see her for half an hour next week and then postpone the appointment he had made on the postcard. It was not likely that he was angry with her; she had just become a nuisance and anything that she did, any claim that she made on his attention, was an irritant. This is perhaps the saddest experience in the demise of love and the most difficult for the imagination to encompass: to come to know that someone who loved you once now regards you as boring and annoying and unimportant. Sheer hatred might even be preferred to this. Of course she was being very unjust to John. John was a conscientious man who did no doubt worry about her welfare and it was on principle and as a matter of duty that he had suggested to her such a far off date on a postcard. He was trying to cure her. But this was not the way to do it. And indeed there was no cure.
It had been a sort of relief to Jessica to feel a clear and definite jealousy. The beautiful woman entering John’s front door had been an indubitable percept, something novel, an occasion of quite new thoughts and hence a freshener of love; and as there is a joy of loving which lives even in extreme pain, there had been something invigorating and even cheering in this period of jealous love. However, the period of jealous love, though not exactly over, had suffered change. Jessica, amid all her other preoccupations, had been impressed in a quite factual way by her failure to find anything at all of a suggestive nature in John’s bedroom: not a pin, not a smell, no cosmetics, no contraceptives. nothing. As John could scarcely have imagined her bold and inventive enough actually to get herself inside his house, he would be unlikely to have kept his room in quite such an innocuous condition if something were really going on there. Jessica was particularly impressed by the absence of the least hint of perfume. A woman who looked like the woman she had seen would be certain to wear perfume. It was wonderful that there had been nothing to smell. Yet there had been, as large as life, this woman, and Jessica would have continued to devote her time to speculation about her were it not that she had been plunged into the most terrible anxiety by the extraordinary way in which her visit to Ducane’s house had terminated.
The little man, Willy, had told her that he would not tell John; but could she believe him? Did men tell each other such things? Of course they did. It would be only human if Willy told her he would not tell, and even meant it, and then told. How would John take it, how had he taken it? What did the postcard mean? What should she do? Should she confess and risk his not knowing, or not confess and risk his knowing? Would he be angry, would he be, oh beautiful thought, jealous, would he decide to write her off altogether? This lapse might provide him with just that little extra ounce of resentment needed to make him decide to stop seeing her. Was that the meaning of the postcard? He would nurse his anger, humiliate her by the delay, and then announce to her that it was their last meeting? Or did he know and just feel utterly indifferent? Or did he not know, and was really becoming grateful for her love, ready to accept it, comforted to know that she was eternally there?
Jessica paused facing the window pane but she did not look out. The window pane might have been entirely opaque, she herself might have been wearing a black veil, for all she could see of the cars and the people and the dogs and the cats passing by in the street. Her thoughts and images enclosed her head in a field of forces which literally rendered the world invisible. The only relief from endless speculation was fantasy, and of this she only allowed herself a very little. John did not really know his own heart. He was a hopeless puritan who could not have a love affair without feeling guilty. He had broken things off because he felt too guilty to be happy. But he was gradually discovering that without Jessica his life was empty. He had made conscientious efforts to reduce their love into a friendship, but he could not stop thinking about her. One day he would realise that he could not cease to love her; and then the idea would come to him that the way to stop feeling guilty with somebody is to marry them. He would write her a long letter about it in his pedantic official style, full of careful explanations of his state of mind, asking if after all the pain he had caused her she still loved him enough to be willing to become his wife.
Jessica had also devoted quite a lot of thought to Willy. Any event is welcome to those who are unhappily in love, and Willy had certainly been an event. For a short while, before her own reflections, together with John’s curious postcard, had begun to frighten her, she had even felt a sort of exhilaration about Willy. There was an odd sacrilegious pleasure in the unfaithfulness itself. But she had also noticed Willy, and although she was scarcely aware of this, simply being forced to see something in the world other than John Ducane had done her good. Willy had intrigued and moved her, and before the old tyranny of love had again incarcerated her poor incurious heart she had felt a very definite desire to see him again. He had never revealed his surname or told her who he was. However, her curiosity about him, which did she but know it was a little spark of virtue in her, had by now been completely quenched by her guilt and indecision about John.
Jessica looked at herself in the long mirror which hung at one end of the room. She could no longer decide whether she was beautiful. Her face had no significance now except seen-by-John, her body no meaning except touched-by-John. But what did he see, what did he touch? That he could see her as clearly as she now saw herself was a thought which terrified her. Perhaps he looked upon her now with secret disgust, noticing those hairs upon her upper lip and the enlargement of the pores about her nose. She had shortened her skirt for the new fashion, and her long legs were visible now from well above the knee, clad in lacy cream-coloured stockings. But did her long legs please him any more or was he merely annoyed that she should dress in this juvenile way and led to notice, what he had never noticed before, the bulkiness of her knees? Jessica drew back her long straggle of fair hair with one hand and put her face close to the mirror. There was no doubt about it. She was beginning to look old.
She returned again to her pacing of the room and to contemplation of the three letters on the table. The room was empty and echoing and white. She had destroyed all her objects and had not had the heart to construct any new ones. As the term was over at her school, Jessica could now devote the whole of every day to walking up and down her room and thinking about John Ducane. She did not dare to leave the house in case he telephoned.
There was a slight sound downst
airs and Jessica darted to the door. The post. She sprang down the stairs three at a time and swept up the envelopes which were lying on the mat. She longed for a thick letter from John, but she also dreaded it. It might contain his long and careful explanation of why he had decided to see her no more.
There was no letter from John. The particular pain of this, the pain she had described as being like an amputation, flared through her body. No, it was not like an amputation. It was a jerking pain, more like being on the rack. She felt dislocated from head to foot. She put the envelopes on the table. In fact there was one letter for her, in a brown envelope, addressed in an unknown rather uneducated-looking hand. She walked heavily up the stairs and two tears went very slowly, as if they too were weary and discouraged, over the curve of her cheek. She wished the post did not come three times a day.
She put the brown envelope down on the table. Should she send one of those letters to John? She just had to see him soon. The agony of not knowing whether he knew and what he thought was becoming just physically too much. Some inner organ would give way, her heart would literally break, if she did not see him soon. Dare she ring him at the office? He had asked her never to do that. But the last time she had telephoned his house the servant had said he was not in, and she could not endure again the special unique pain of imagining that he had told the servant that he was not in to a young lady who might ring him up.