by Iris Murdoch
It was a simple casement window with one catch halfway up the frame and a perforated bar at the bottom which regulated the aperture. I unpinned the window and undid the catch, opening the window an inch or two, so that the catch rested against the glass on the outside. I didn’t want the window to look as if it were undone; and on the other hand I wanted to be certain that I should be able to pull it open from the outside when the time came. It took me some minutes to satisfy myself that both these conditions were met. Then I marked the position of the window carefully in relation to the rows of trees. After that I went back and listened at the door until I was sure that there was no one in the corridor. I emerged, closed the door, and walked back towards Corelli. No one had seen me. A moment later I was leaving the building.
Eighteen
THE first thing I did after that was to take a stiff drink. My heart was beating like an army on the march. I would never do to enroll in a conspiracy. Then I went back to the flat and fetched Mars. I took him on a bus to Barnes, had beer and sandwiches at the Red Lion, and then walked with him on the Common until the light was failing. By the time we got back to Goldhawk Road it was nearly dark. I left Mars at the flat; there was no sign of Dave. He was out at some meeting. Then I started walking at random in the direction of Hammersmith. I just wanted the hours to pass and be quick about it. The pubs were just closing, and I put down as much whisky as I could in the last ten minutes. I walked until I was nearly at the river. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular during this period, but my mind was simply dominated by Hugo. It was as if from his bed in the hospital Hugo were holding the end of a cord to which I was attached, and from time to time I could feel it twitching. Or else it was as if Hugo brooded over me like a great bird; and I took no pleasure in the prospect of our imminent encounter, save a sort of blind satisfaction at the down-rush of the inevitable.
I looked at my watch. It was after midnight, and I was standing on Hammersmith Bridge, not far from the place where we had released Mars from his cage. I looked up stream and tried to make out where in the mass of buildings on the north bank the Mime Theatre lay. But it was too dark to see. Then a panic overtook me in case I should arrive back at the Hospital too late. I set off walking briskly and hailed a taxi at Hammersmith Broadway which took me back to the Goldhawk Road. But now it was still too early. I walked up and down the street several times, passing the Hospital. It was not yet one o‘clock, and I had resolved not to try to enter before two. I kept walking away from the Hospital, but something kept drawing me back again. I had to set myself little tasks: this time I would walk as far as the Seven Stars before I came back again; this time I would stand under the railway bridge as long as it took me to smoke a cigarette. I was in anguish.
At about twenty past one I could bear it no longer. I decided to go in. But this time, as I approached, the whole scene appeared to be most damnably exposed. The street lamps were blazing and the building seemed to be covered in lights. As I came near I could see people standing in the entrance hall, and there were lights in the windows of all the stairways, and lights too in some of the wards. I had not foreseen this degree of nocturnal illumination. The Transept gardens, it is true, were plunged in darkness, and as far as I could see there were no lights in Corelli, except for one glimmer which doubtless came from the room of the Night Sister. To reach the Transept gardens, however, meant crossing the wide gravel walk and the lawn which ran the whole length of the Hospital on either side of the courtyard, and all this area was lit up by the indefatigable street lamps. Low posts with chains swinging between them divided the gravel walk from the street. The darkness seemed a long way away.
I chose a point as far from the main entrance as possible and I looked carefully both ways along the street. The scene was deserted. Then I took a quick run and sprang over the chains and darted straight across the gravel and diagonally across the main lawn. I ran very lightly, my toes hardly touching the ground; and in a moment I had reached the darkness of the Transept garden. I stopped running and stood still on the grass to get my breath. I looked back. No one. A great silence surrounded me. I looked up at Corelli. There was only that one light burning on the first floor. I began to walk along the grass, touching the cherry trees one by one as I passed. Now that I was away from the glare of the street lamps it occurred to me that it was a very light night. From the road the garden had looked pitch black; but in the garden itself the darkness was not dense but diffused, and as I walked quietly along I felt that I must be clearly visible from all the windows, and I expected at any moment to hear a voice challenging me from above. But no one spoke.
From outside everything looked very different, and it took me some time to identify the window of the store room. When I did find it I was surprised to discover how high it was from the ground. I pulled at the window very gently, holding my breath. To my relief it came open without any check and without a sound. I looked about me. The garden was empty and motionless, the cherry trees turned towards me, quiet as dancers in a tableau. There was still no one on the road. I opened the casement wide, and then hooked my fingers firmly on to the steel frame of the opening on each side. But the foot of the window was just too high for me to reach it with my knee. There was no sill on the outside. I stood back. I hesitated to spring up for fear of making a noise. Then I thought that I heard footsteps approaching along the road. Quick as a flash, I put one hand into the opening and sprang. The steel edge of the frame caught me at the hip, and next moment I was heeling over gently on to the sill on the inside, and drawing my legs after me. I stood dead still on the floor of the store room. There was a silence into which it seemed to me that I had just let loose a vast quantity of sound. But the silence continued.
I drew the window to, leaving it unlatched as it had been before. Then I walked down the middle of the room, feeling rather than seeing in the dark bulks of the iron bedsteads on each side. Here it really was pitch black, with a dense darkness which seemed to coat the eyeballs. I fumbled for the handle of the door, listened for a moment, and then stepped into the corridor. The bright lights and the white walls broke through the door and dazzled me. My eyes, laid open by the dark, winced at this inrush of light, and I covered them. Then I turned in the direction of Corelli, my feet padding dully on the rubber composition floor. Here concealment was impossible. I simply had to hope that some kindly deity would see to it that I met nobody.
The Hospital was deserted, yet strangely alive. I could hear it purring and murmuring like a sleeping beast, and even when at times there came as it were a wave of silence I could still sense within it its great heart beating. As I passed the Transept Kitchen I averted my head; for I feared that if I encountered any human eye my guilt would write itself so plainly on my face as to cry ‘Shame!’ upon itself of its own accord. I came to the main stairs. They were glittering, deserted, immense. The small sound of my footfalls echoed up far above me into the great well of the staircase, and looking up I saw the superimposed rectangles of the banisters diminishing almost to a point many floors above. By now there was no thought in my head at all, not even the most general notion of Hugo, and if anyone had stopped me I would have gibbered like an idiot. I came to the door of Corelli III.
Here I paused. I had no very clear conception of how the ward was organized at night. If there were any nurses sleeping in the ward they would be downstairs. In Corelli III there would probably be nobody over and above the patients, except the Night Sister. Of this person I knew only by report, and she had figured in my mind, even before I had planned this escapade, as a sort of nocturnal goddess, a Piddingham of the underworld. Now as I thought of her, with my hand upon the door, I was taken with a fit of trembling, like a postulant approaching the cave of the Sibyl. I opened the door quietly and stepped into the familiar corridor of the ward.
One or two lights were burning in the corridor, but the patients’ rooms were all in darkness. The kitchen and the Administration Rooms were dark too, except for the Sister’s Room, and fr
om this a light was streaming through the door, the upper half of which was made of frosted glass. Through this semi-transparent medium I feared that the Night Sister, to whom I was ready to attribute supernatural powers, let alone any ordinary human acuteness, might see me passing by; so I manoeuvred the first part of the corridor on my hands and knees. When I was well past her door I stood up and glided on, and as I went I could not hear myself making a sound. An uncanny stillness was drinking me up. I was now at the door of Hugo’s room. I took hold of the handle, which consisted of a sloping steel bar which had to be depressed in order to open the door. I wrapped it firmly in my hand as if to master it into silence and I depressed it with a strong smooth movement. Holding it well down I pushed the door. It opened like a dream door as quietly as if it were giving way to my thought. I held the handle until I was well through the doorway and then took hold of the handle on the inside with my other hand. I closed the door firmly behind me and released the handle. There had been no noise.
I was in semi-darkness. In the door at about the level of the human head there was a small rectangular window about eighteen inches square through which some light came from the corridor. I could see the red of the blankets and a humped shape upon the high bed. An instinct of caution made me fall on one knee. Then the shape stirred, and Hugo’s voice said sharply, ‘Who is it?’
I said, ‘Sssh!’ and added, ‘It’s Jake Donaghue.’
There was a moment’s silence and then Hugo said, ‘My God!’
I wanted to get out of the light. I swivelled to a sitting position and propelled myself upon my buttocks through underneath Hugo’s bed. I had thoroughly cleaned the floor of this room on the previous afternoon before Hugo’s arrival, and I slid upon it now as smoothly as a jack on the ice. I came to rest on the other side of the bed, where I sat against the wall with my knees drawn up. I felt completely calm.
Hugo’s eyes looked for me in the dark and found me. I smiled, inclining my head.
‘This is a bit much!’ said Hugo. ‘I was asleep.’
‘Don’t speak so loudly,’ I told him, ‘or the Night Sister will hear.’
He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep following me about!’
This annoyed me. ‘I’m not following you!’ I whispered back. ‘I work here. The last thing I expected was that you’d be brought in.’
‘You work here?’ said Hugo. ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m an orderly.’
‘Good heavens!’ said Hugo. ‘Still, you might have waited till tomorrow.’
‘It would have been very hard to see you during the day when I’m on duty,’ I said.
‘So you’re not on duty now?’ said Hugo.
‘No.’
‘So you are following me.’
‘Oh, go to hell!’ I told him. ‘Look, Hugo, I want to talk to you about a number of things.’
‘Well, I can’t get away this time, can I?’ he said.
He settled back into the bed and for a few moments we looked at each other in the way that people look when they cannot see each other’s eyes.
‘What are you so upset about, Jake?’ Hugo asked. ‘I felt it at the studio. For years you make no attempt to see me, and then suddenly you start chasing me about like a mad thing.’
I felt I had to be truthful. ‘I’ve seen Sadie and Anna and this reminded me of you,’ I said.
I could see Hugo closing up like a sea anemone. ‘How did you meet those two again?’ he asked in a cautious voice.
I felt I had to be desperately truthful. ‘The girl I was staying with threw me out, so I looked for Anna and she passed me on to Sadie.’
I could see Hugo shiver. ‘Did Sadie say anything about me?’ he asked.
‘Nothing in particular,’ I said, uttering the first lie. ‘But I got some news of you from Anna.’ I wanted to get back to the subject of Anna.
‘Yes,’ said Hugo, ‘Anna told me she’d seen you. You came to the theatre one night, didn’t you? I wanted to see you afterwards. I was sorry when Anna said you’d gone. You evidently weren’t very anxious to see me then.’
I felt unable to comment on this in detail. ‘I was afraid to see you, Hugo,’ I said.
‘I can’t understand you, Jake,’ said Hugo. ‘I don’t see how anyone could be afraid of me. I never could see why you cleared off like that before. I wanted to talk to you very much then. There was never anyone I could discuss with like you. We might have discussed that stuff of yours.’
‘What stuff?’ I asked.
‘That book of yours,’ said Hugo. ‘I forget when it came out, but it must have been some time after you cleared off from Battersea, or else we would have talked about it, and I don’t remember talking of it with you.’
I leaned my head back and pressed it hard against the wall, as one might do to ease a crisis of drunkenness.
‘Do you mean The Silencer?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that thing,’ said Hugo. ‘Of course, I found it terribly hard in parts. Wherever did you get all those ideas from?’
‘From you, Hugo,’ I said weakly.
‘Well,’ said Hugo, ‘of course I could see that it was about some of the things we’d talked of. But it sounded so different.’
‘I know!’ I said.
‘So much better, I mean,’ said Hugo. ‘I forget really what we talked about then, but it was a terrible muddle, wasn’t it? Your thing was so clear. I learnt an awful lot from it.’
I stared at Hugo. His bandaged head was silhouetted in the light from the little window; I could not see his expression. ‘I was ashamed about that thing, Hugo,’ I said.
‘I suppose one always is, about what one writes,’ said Hugo. ‘I’ve never had the nerve to write anything. I hope you made some money out of it anyway. Did it sell well?’
‘Not very,’ I said. I wondered for a moment if he were mocking me; but it was impossible. Hugo was incapable of mockery.
‘Too highbrow, I suppose,’ said Hugo. ‘People never like original stuff when they first see it. I hope you weren’t put off. Are you writing another dialogue?’
‘No!’ I said, and added, just to keep the conversation going while I collected my wits, ‘I thought of looking the thing over lately and developing one or two of the ideas, but I couldn’t get hold of a copy.’
‘A pity! You could have borrowed mine,’ said Hugo. ‘I keep one in the drawer of my desk and look at it sometimes. It reminds me a bit of our talks. I used to enjoy them so much. My brain’s quite gone to seed since then.’
‘I came to your flat one night last week,’ I said, ‘and you’d left a note saying Gone to the pub, and I went round the pubs looking for you.’
‘You can’t have gone far,’ said Hugo. ‘I was in the King Lud.’
‘I went eastward,’ I said. ‘I met Lefty Todd that night.’
‘Of course, you know Lefty, don’t you,’ said Hugo. ‘I saw him today at the meeting, before someone chucked the brick at me.’
‘How is your head, by the way?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ said Hugo. ‘I’ve just got a raging headache — which but for you would be raging in my sleep. But, Jake, you haven’t told me why you cleared off. Did I do something to offend you?’
‘No,’ I said patiently, ‘I did something to offend you. But I see now there was a misunderstanding. Let’s skip it.’
I could see Hugo looking at me intently. The bulky bandage gave him an enormous head. ‘The trouble with you, Jake,’ said Hugo, ‘is that you’re far too impressed by people. You were far too impressed by me.’
I was surprised. ‘I was impressed,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t know you knew.’
‘Everyone must go his own way, Jake,’ said Hugo. ‘Things don’t matter as much as you think.’
I felt exasperated with Hugo. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. ‘You thought something mattered enough when you took so much trouble with that theatre in Hammersmith.’ I wanted to draw him on the subject of Anna.
‘Oh, that ...’ said Hugo, and was silent for a moment. ‘I did that to please Anna, but it was a foolish thing.’
I held my breath. I had to step carefully now if I was to get out of him the full confession for which I thirsted; and as I inhaled slowly I could smell Hugo’s thoughts.
‘You mean, it didn’t really please her,’ I asked coaxingly.
‘Well, it pleased her, of course, yes,’ said Hugo, ‘but what was the use? Lies don’t get one anywhere. Not that this was exactly a lie. After all, we both understood the situation. Yet it was a sort of a lie.’
I felt a little out of my depth here. ‘You mean that she wasn’t really interested in it, that she was somehow imprisoned in it?’ I asked.
‘No, she was interested all right,’ said Hugo, ‘but I wasn’t really interested. And then she would introduce all that oriental junk, heaven knows where she got it from!’
‘She got it from you!’ I said with as much incisiveness as I could put into a whisper.
‘That’s nonsense!’ said Hugo. ‘She may have picked up some vague notions from me, but they didn’t add up to that.’
‘Why did you act in the mimes then if you thought the whole thing was bad?’ I asked.