by Iris Murdoch
Absently Jessica picked up the brown envelope from the table and began to tear it open. There seemed to be quite a lot inside it. She pulled out a piece of lined paper with a short letter upon it, and an envelope came out too and fell face upwards on top of one of her own letters. Jessica stared at it with a shock of amazement and premonitory fright. It was an envelope addressed to John Ducane Esquire, in another and different handwriting. Why had this been sent to her? Was she supposed to pass it on to John? But she saw that the envelope had already been opened and the postmark was of earlier this month. With fascinated horror Jessica unfolded the accompanying letter. It was brief and read as follows.
Dear Madam,
in view of your emotional feelings about Mr John Ducane I feel sure that it would be of interest to you to see the enclosed.
Yours faithfully,
A Well-Wisher
Trembling violently Jessica fumbled with the other envelope and plucked the letter out of it. The letter read thus:
Trescombe House
Trescombe
Dorset
Oh my darling John, how I miss you, it seems an age till our lovely weekend arrives. I hate to think of you all lonely in London, but it won’t be long until we are reunited. You are my property, you know, and I have a strong sense of property! I shall assert my rights! Don’t be long away from me, my sweet, haste the day and the hour. Oh how heavenly it is, John, to be able to speak love to you, and to know that you feel as I do! Love, love, love,
Your Kate
P.S. Willy Kost sends regards and hopes to see you too.
Jessica sat down on the floor and concentrated her attention upon not dying. She felt no impulse to weep or scream, but it was as if her flesh were being dragged apart. Shock was more evident than pain, or perhaps pain was so extreme that it had brought her to the brink of unconsciousness. She sat quite still for about five minutes with her eyes closed and every muscle contracted to keep herself in a single piece. Then she opened her eyes and read the letter again and examined the envelope.
There was of course not the slightest doubt that this was a letter to John from his mistress. Quite apart from the tone of the letter, the reference to the significantly underlined weekend put this beyond question. They seemed to be on very happy, indeed ecstatic, terms. It was not the letter of a woman who was uncertain whether she was loved. The letter moreover had been written less than three weeks ago. The date on the envelope showed clearly and the letter itself was dated with day, month and year. So at this very recent time the affair had been for some while in existence, was in full swing. This then meant that John had lied to her.
Jessica got up from the floor. She went to the drawer which contained all the letters which John had ever sent her, and took out the postcard which lay on the top.
Forgive this in haste, I am most terribly busy in the office with various rather preoccupying matters. I am sorry not to have written. Could we meet on Monday, not of next week but of the week following? I shall look forward to that. If I don’t hear otherwise I’ll come to your place at seven. Very good wishes.
J.
Various rather preoccupying matters, thought Jessica. Come to your place. How differently it read now. Of course she was not to visit him, she was never to visit him. Busy with his marvellous love affair he had coldly calculated what was the longest he could put her off for, what was the most he could make her put up with, without arousing suspicion. Monday, not of next week but of the week following. How carefully it was put so as to make a shabby offer sound less shabby. No doubt he would be just back from one of those lovely weekends. And he would look into her eyes, as he had done on the last occasion, and tell her in that grave sincere voice that he had no mistress.
Jessica began to walk up and down again, but very much more slowly. She debated, but very slowly, an impulse to lift the telephone at once and ring John’s office. She debated it slowly because she knew that it was not urgent since she would certainly not do it, and because she knew that something else, and something very important, was happening inside her. It must be given time to happen properly, to gain authority over her. So John, the conscientious puritanical John, the just and righteous John, the John-God, had coldly lied to her. She was not an object of concern to him at all, she was a person to be manipulated and deceived and put off the scent. She was perhaps, and this thought made Jessica pause for a moment in her slow perambulation, a positive danger to him, a danger to his new-found happiness, a nasty relic, a false note. I hate to think of you all lonely in London. Of course John would not have told the lovely lady about his obligations to poor Jessica. That would spoil things, that would never do. John had lied to the lovely lady as well.
Jessica said to herself aloud, “It is all over now with John. It is the end.” She paused again to watch herself. Still no screams, no tears, no tendency to fall down in a faint. There was a line of hardness in her, a rigid steely upright as thin as a wire but very strong. She was not going to die after all for John Ducane. She was his superior now. She knew, and he did not know she knew. She sat down on the bed. She felt very tired as if she had been for a long walk. She had been for a long walk, she had been walking for days up and down her room, thinking about John, waiting for him to write, waiting for him to telephone. And all this time … Jessica settled two cushions behind her and sat upright and comfortable upon the bed. She fell now into a total immobility, she sat like an idol, like a sphinx. Her eyes scarcely blinked, her breathing seemed suspended, it was as if the life had been withdrawn from her leaving an effigy of wax. An hour passed.
Jessica moved and it was evening. She went to the window and looked out. A Siamese cat was walking slowly along the top of the railings. A West Indian newspaper boy was delivering the evening papers. A student was polishing his very old car. Two dogs who had just met were wagging their tails. She turned away from the window and went to the mirror and said to her image softly several times “Jessica, Jessica.…”
Then she turned back to the table and took up the letter again, but this time it was to scrutinise only the P.S. Willy Kost.
Twenty-eight
“I WAS wondering when you’d turn up,” murmured Ducane.
Richard Biranne was standing in Ducane’s drawing-room and had not yet taken the chair to which Ducane had invited him. Ducane was seated beside the empty fireplace. The lamps were lit and the curtains were drawn upon a dark blue evening. The room smelt of summer dust and roses.
Biranne stood fingering the edge of the mantelpiece, swaying his body restlessly and twitching his shoulders. His long head was thrown back and averted and his narrow blue eyes glanced quickly at Ducane, surveyed the room, and almost coquettishly glanced again. A lamp was behind him, shadowing his face and lighting up his fuzzy crest of fair hair. He had arrived on Ducane’s doorstep unannounced two minutes ago.
“Well?” said Ducane. He had adopted a cold almost lethargic composure to conceal his extreme satisfaction, indeed exhilaration, at Biranne’s arrival.
The inspection with McGrath of Radeechy’s ‘chapel’ had finally satisfied Ducane that Radeechy was, as far as the ‘security aspect’ was concerned, innocuous. He was certain that the necromantic activities were not a front. There was sincerity, there was evident faith, in Radeechy’s pathetic arrangements; and if Radeechy had been up to anything else he would scarcely have risked attracting attention by nocturnal visits with girls. The suicide itself remained unexplained. But the glimpse of the chapel had been enough to persuade Ducane that such a man might well have suicidal promptings. What had come to Ducane in the course of that candle-lit occasion was an intimation of the reality with which Radeechy had been meddling. Of course Ducane did not believe in ‘spirits’. But what had gone on in that room, upon that altar, when the blood of the pigeons dripped down on to the black mattress, was not childish mumming. It was a positive and effective meddling with the human mind. Ducane could not get the smell of it out of his nostrils and he knew that McGrath was right to s
ay that it was not only the smell of decomposing birds. Radeechy had discovered and had made to materialise about him a certain dreariness of evil, a minor evil no doubt, but his success might very well have set him on the road to suicide.
All this made sense, and would have made reasonably complete sense if it were not for the involvement of Biranne. Biranne had tampered with the body, he had concealed his visits to Radeechy’s house, he knew Judy McGrath. However Ducane was not now by any means so sure that Biranne held the key to Radeechy’s suicide or knew any more about it than Ducane had already been able to conjecture. It suddenly began to look to Ducane as if his enquiry was finished, or as finished as it would ever be, and that he could with a clear conscience write a report in which Biranne was not mentioned at all. Everything that connected Biranne with Radeechy, though so odd and suggestive, could have an innocent explanation. He might have touched the body out of curiosity or solicitude and then decided it was prudent not to mention it, his relationship with the McGraths might be quite fortuitous, his visits to Radeechy’s house might have had Judy as their object, and he might have concealed them precisely for this reason. In fact in so far as these things fitted together they did so in a way which tended to acquit Biranne of any sinister role.
All this was logical and rational, and Ducane should have been pleased to be convinced and to have his case thus cleanly ended. However he was not pleased, partly because he felt sure, on no very clear grounds, that there was some aspect of the matter which was still hidden and that Biranne knew about it, and partly because of what by now amounted almost to an emotional involvement with Biranne. He had become used to regarding Biranne as his quarry. He had developed a sharp curiosity about the man, a curiosity which had something of the quality of a form of affection. He very much wanted to ‘have it out’ with Biranne and the idea was exciting. Yet he had, in the two days which had passed since his underground journey with McGrath, hesitated to make any move. He had been delighted to find Biranne on his doorstep.
Biranne was in a state of emotion the nature of which was not easy to discern but which he could not conceal and did not attempt to conceal. He walked the length of the room and back and then stood staring down at Ducane.
“Sit down and have some whisky,” said Ducane. He had already placed a decanter and two glasses upon a low table beside the hearth. He motioned to the chair opposite.
“No thanks, I’ll stand,” said Biranne. “No whisky.”
Ducane, who had been thinking hard ever since he had seen Biranne’s tense face in the blue twilight of the doorway, said in a tone which was half persuasion, half command. “You’ve come to tell me something. What is it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you—”
“Look here,” said Ducane, “I’ll be quite straight with you and I want you to be quite straight with me. You’ve come to tell me something about Radeechy. I know a good deal about Radeechy and a good deal about you, but there are still one or two things that puzzle me. These may be perfectly innocent things and if you can give me a satisfactory explanation I’ll be the first to be pleased.”
Biranne, still staring, stroked his hair back. He said, “For a man who proposes to talk straight you’ve used a lot of words to say nothing. I want to know why you came to my house.”
“I wanted to question you.”
“What about?” Biranne’s high-pitched voice crackled with nerves.
“I wanted to know why you had told me certain lies,” said Ducane carefully. He found that he was now leaning forward, and with deliberation settled himself back again into his chair.
“What lies did I tell you?”
“You pretended not to know Radeechy when in fact you knew him well.”
“What else?”
“Why did you tamper with Radeechy’s body?” said Ducane.
“I didn’t tamper with Radeechy’s body, I didn’t touch him.”
“Then how did your finger-prints get on to his collar?”
Biranne stared steadily down at Ducane. He chewed his knuckles thoughtfully. Then he walked along the room and back. “Do you mind if I have some whisky after all? May I sit down?”
“Please. Well?”
Biranne sat down and poured out some whisky, taking his time. He looked into the glass, sipped it cautiously. He said, “Perhaps it was silly of me to mislead you, but it was just that I didn’t want to be involved. You understand. Maybe I ought to have told the police that I touched the body, only it seemed both unimportant and rather absurd. It was just an impulse. He was lying forward and I pulled him up a little, I suppose to see if he was still alive, and I pushed the gun out of the way at the same time. Then I put everything back the way it was before. Whatever made you test his collar for my finger-prints?”
“You didn’t put everything back the way it was before” said Ducane. “You evidently didn’t know that Radeechy was left-handed. You put the gun on the wrong side.”
Biranne smiled faintly. The whisky had done him good. “You’re wasting your talents. You ought to be in Scotland Yard.”
“Why did you lock the door?”
“You are well informed. That was an impulse too. I intended in the first moment to ring up Octavian and keep the door locked until he appeared. Then I changed my mind.”
“I’ll tell you in a minute what I think of these explanations,” said Ducane. “Now tell me why you pretended not to know Radeechy.”
“That was just general discretion,” said Biranne, pouring out some more whisky. “One has a certain right to defend oneself against impertinent curiosities. I don’t know why the fellow killed himself. It might have had something to do with girls, it might have been anything. I didn’t want to be questioned about him or called in as a witness. You’d have done the same in my place.”
“I wouldn’t, and I couldn’t be in your place,” said Ducane with a vehemence which shot him forward again in his chair.
Biranne stared at his questioner steadily, almost sternly, and then transferred his attention ostentatiously to the whisky which he was rolling round and round in his glass. He was silent.
A banging door and a snatch of The Bonny Earl of Murray announced the return home of Fivey after his evening out. Ducane frowned, sat back again, and said to himself, Oh Christ, he’s going to get away with it.
“What about Helen of Troy?” said Ducane.
Biranne smiled cunningly and then with a raised eyebrow looked confiding. “Young Judy, yes. I gather you had an encounter with Judy. She seems to be in all our lives.”
“She’s not in my life!” said Ducane. He realised that he was beginning to get angry. The interview was going wrong. Biranne was already patently less anxious, and it was he himself who was being taunted and was answering defensively. He sat up and poured himself out some whisky. They stared at each other.
“Come, come, Biranne,” said Ducane. It sounded almost coaxing.
“What do you mean ‘come, come’? I don’t deny that I know Judy McGrath and that Radeechy knew her too. She is a versatile lady with a wide acquaintance.”
“Did you get to know her through Radeechy?”
Biranne looked cautious. “No. I got to know her through her husband. McGrath knows how to exploit a saleable piece of goods. Radeechy got to know her the same way.”
“Is McGrath blackmailing you as well?”
“How do you mean as well? Is he blackmailing you?”
“No, he isn’t! He was blackmailing Radeechy.”
“Was he? Oh yes, I remember. Interesting. Perhaps that accounts for the suicide.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I don’t think I allow your right to question me, my dear Ducane.”
“Then why did you come here tonight?”
“Because you were, shall we say, getting on my nerves. Well, if you really want to know, I came here to ask you some questions.”
“What about?”
“About how well you know Judy McGrath.�
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“Really!” said Ducane. He got up, jarring his chair back and almost overturning a lamp. He walked quickly to the other end of the room and back. He stared down at Biranne and then realised that they had exchanged positions. Biranne lounged in his chair, and Ducane stood before him. There was no doubt that Biranne was a clever man. He will get away with it, Ducane thought. Why was he increasingly sure that there was something here to get away with?
“Well?” said Biranne. He seemed quite relaxed now, his hand on his glass, his legs extended in front of him, his long narrow head lolling on the cushions.
Ducane thought, he came here to find out how much I know, and I have virtually informed him that I know nothing! Damn, damn, damn. With this Ducane felt a final certainty that Biranne was guilty, guilty of something, perhaps guilty of something serious. He thought, I must frighten him somehow.
Ducane said, thinking hard, “As you are perfectly well aware, I scarcely know Mrs McGrath.”
“You kissed her,” said Biranne. “But of course dark horses like you often tend to be fast workers.” He laughed shortly and poured out some more whisky.
“She kissed me,” said Ducane. “I confess her professional ease took me by surprise. You know perfectly well that I have no interest of that sort in Mrs McGrath.”
“Why should I believe you?”