A Fairly Honourable Defeat

by Iris Murdoch

  Hilda found that she had risen. She went down the stairs and out into the thickly darkly sunny garden. Long tongues of sunlight crossed the pavement, casting chamomile shadows, and the worn surface of the old brick wall glowed patchily with golden browns and rosy reds. Twilight was gathering in the shadowed places where green things glowed with a momentary intensity of colour. What does it mean, thought Hilda, and she clutched at her dress with fright.

  Then she saw, from the corner of her eye, that something round and brown was floating on the surface of the pool. She turned and looked quickly down. It was the hedgehog.

  Hilda knelt and plunged her arms into the pool. The hedgehog was floating half curled up, its brown prickly back uppermost. She put her hands underneath it and felt the soft wet fur, the little pendent feet. She lifted it out. It was quite dead. Hilda laid the little light rounded body down upon the pavement where the water made a dark stain. The little black tipped nose protruded towards her, the feet were limp and splayed, the eyes closed. Tears streamed down Hilda’s face. She thought, I must tell Rupert and he will comfort me. She half rose, then sat back with a moan. She thought, I must bury the hedgehog, but the task was beyond her. She picked it up quickly and dropped it down behind some plants. Then she ran into the house and up the stairs, blinded with tears.

  The letters, she thought, if only I could find the letters, where are they, are they safe somewhere near? He cannot have destroyed them? Is it possible that he wanted to see them somehow to comfort himself, to make him remember? She went into Rupert’s study. In there his absence was terrible. She wanted to tell him about the hedgehog and to weep in his arms. She opened his desk and began helplessly to turn things over. Rupert did not keep his desk very tidy. There was a row of little compartments where he stowed receipted bills, insurance papers, stubs of old cheque books, old diaries, oddments of photographs, references, pamphlets. Hilda took a mass of tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and stared more intently at the desk. What Julius had said about relieving her mind, that was not absurd. Supposing she could find some communication from Morgan, something completely innocent and ordinary, something which would give her the tone of their relationship? It was that mystery most of all which troubled her. And it might prove to be a harmless one after all. Oh how relieved she would feel! As for the letters Rupert might well have taken them just to look them over again. He would laugh at her terror.

  Hilda began methodically to search the desk. She leafed through the photographs. They were all old ones of Peter and herself. There were a few letters, from an antique dealer about mending a bookcase, from a bookseller about completing a series of periodicals. Her fingers passed over the insurance papers and the old cheque books. Then she paused. Rupert threw his old cheque book stubs into the end compartment. After a year he destroyed them. The latest one was always on the top. Hilda picked it up and opened it. The last entry was a week ago. She began to run through the entries. Here Rupert was meticulous. Bookshop, drink shop, Harrods, New and Lingwood, Fortnum and Mason, the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, the Postmaster General, the local builder. The next entry read simply ‘M. £400’. Hilda put the booklet back in its place. She sat down in Rupert’s chair.

  She began more hurriedly to search the rest of the desk. She looked into all the drawers, pulling them right out and examining their contents. There was nothing. The lowest drawer would not pull fully out, it seemed to be jammed. Hilda tugged at it, then thrust her fingers in and clawed its contents forward into the light. Only a saleroom catalogue and some stamps. Then she thought, the drawer is too short, there is a secret compartment behind it, just as in my desk. The desks were of similar date and style. Trembling now she pulled out the drawer above and felt far in behind the lower drawer. Her fingers touched a piece of folded paper. She drew out the secret box and lifted the paper out of it. She saw at once that it was something in Morgan’s handwriting. It was a letter and it began as follows.

  My angel, the ecstasy of your love makes me the happiest person in the world. Was it strange that I cried yesterday when I was in bed with you? I was crying with joy. Must we not soon, somehow, be properly together? …

  Hilda read the letter through to the end. Then she folded it and replaced it in the box and put the box back into its secret place. She closed the drawers and arranged the contents of the desk as they had been before and closed it up. She went slowly downstairs to the drawing room.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘I MUSTN’T STAY HERE ANY LONGER.’

  ‘But you told Hilda you’d be working late at the office. You don’t have to go yet.’

  ‘You persuaded me to do that. I shouldn’t have let you.’

  ‘You’re such a coward, Rupert! She’s not likely to go round to the office to look for you, is she! And even if she did you could invent some story. I think it’s much more imprudent of you to have left your car outside the door.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I just drove it from Earls Court station, I didn’t think—’

  ‘Rupert, don’t be so jittery! Just rest on me.’

  ‘I wish I could. I feel I just don’t know what I’m doing at the moment. I hate telling lies to Hilda.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t always tell you the truth, you know.’

  ‘Yes she does!’

  ‘For instance, she’s never told you that she’s been financing Peter lavishly ever since he chucked Cambridge. All the time you were making such a thing of making him live on two pounds a week or whatever it was!’

  ‘Really? Is that true?’

  ‘Do you doubt my word? Ask Hilda. I dare say there are other little things like that too. There are in any marriage. Why should yours be so special?’

  ‘It was special,’ said Rupert. ‘ “Was”. Oh God.’

  ‘Well, don’t whinge about it for heaven’s sake. You decided to break out. You didn’t have to. Yet I suppose you obviously needed to. Men do after a while.’

  ‘I haven’t “broken out”,’ said Rupert. ‘I’m married to Hilda. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten. I thought you had.’

  ‘I think we’re both behaving rottenly.’

  ‘Come, come, we’re scarcely behaving at all! Anyway it was your idea!’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea, it was your idea!’

  ‘Well, never mind whose idea it was, we’re both in it now and everything would be perfectly all right if only you wouldn’t make so much fuss. You were the one who said we could sail through it all and build a marvellous relationship. I wouldn’t have started anything if you hadn’t been so confident and starry-eyed about it. You said you wouldn’t let go. I thought you were damn brave. Now you’re wrecking the whole thing because you haven’t got a bit of sense and resolution. Decide what you want to do and do it, for God’s sake. Or do you want me to go away or what?’

  ‘I don’t want you to go away,’ said Rupert miserably. ‘I couldn’t just blankly send you off. I knew that from the start. But I can’t carry on with this on a basis of deceiving Hilda. It’s poisoning my life.’

  ‘If you tell Hilda, everything will be utterly different.’

  ‘Well, it’d better be!’

  ‘All right then, tell Hilda!’

  Morgan and Rupert were sitting opposite to each other in Morgan’s sitting room on upright chairs. They were huge-eyed and stiff, like a pair of Egyptian figures. They had both by now drunk a good deal of gin. The sun, sloping towards evening, was gilding a white wall across the street and the room was full of soft intense reflected light. The traffic was humming steadily in the Fulham Road.

  ‘Oh Rupert, don’t let’s quarrel,’ said Morgan. ‘There must be some rational way of looking at this peculiar situation. I was so much wanting you to come this evening and now we’re quarrelling. ’

  ‘I was so much wanting to come too.’ He stretched out his hand and she gripped it hard. Then they resumed their stiff positions face to face.

  ‘It’s not that I’m against telling Hilda,
’ said Morgan. ‘I just think there’s no point in telling her now. This is the moment of maximum chaos. We wouldn’t even know what to say to Hilda, and anything we said would be likely to mislead her and make her think there was more to the thing than there is. So in a way it’s really more truthful not to tell her. I mean—’

  ‘I’m afraid there is a great deal to the thing,’ said Rupert. ‘That’s the trouble!’ He got up and began to pace the room.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Morgan. ‘I feel that too. Of course. But we have kept our heads. Quaint phrase!’ She laughed and poured out more gin.

  Rupert was thoroughly miserable. The loss of contact with Hilda made him feel reduced and mutilated. He hated telling Hilda lies and was in a state of abject fear in case his lies were discovered. At the same time, he craved for Morgan’s company, even quarrelling with Morgan had become something necessary. They had endlessly discussed the situation and only succeeded in tangling it up to a mysterious degree. They had rationed their kisses. But he felt her passion and knew by now that she felt his.

  At first it had seemed very clear to Rupert that he must talk to Morgan and not send her away, simply because the idea of sending her away in that peculiar state of wretchedness seemed so appalling. She had had a very unhappy time, she was seriously confused about her life, and she needed him. All this seemed to add up to some kind of duty. She had taken the responsibility of telling her love. He must take the responsibility of leading them both through to sanity.

  Now it all seemed considerably less clear and somehow dreadful, yet he could not quite see what was the wrong step which he had taken. To deceive Hilda, temporarily of course, had seemed simply an essential part of doing his duty to Morgan. Of course he was well aware how fond he was of Morgan. Indeed it was on this fondness that he was prepared to build. Only love will do, thought Rupert, real love, real caring. He would not send Morgan away into bitterness and wretchedness. She needed love, as all human beings did. He would give her love, wise steady strong love, and this, he honestly believed, would set her free at last of the whole tangle. Tallis, Julius, himself. She would find then that she knew what to do about Tallis. She would become once more, or indeed perhaps for the first time, a whole person.

  Rupert had been supported in this resolution by his deep age-old confidence in the power of goodness. Not that he located this goodness in himself. It was something very much exterior to him, but fairly near and very real. Rupert did not believe in God, in fact he even disapproved of belief in God, which he felt to be a weakener of the moral sinews. But in this he did believe, and under this star he would care for Morgan. He had loved people in this way before, though never anyone so close to him, and as far as he knew nothing but good had resulted. The top of the moral structure was no dream, and he had proved this by exercises in loving attention: loving people, loving art, loving work, loving paving stones and leaves on trees. This had been his happiness. This freedom had also been the keystone of his marriage. It was something, oddly, about which he had never talked to Hilda. He did not believe that she would understand. He had written about it, in a formal half disguised way, as if it were a secret, in his philosophy book. When it was in typescript Hilda would read the book. And still she would not understand. And it would not matter. He loved his wife the more deeply because he felt he could love everything else in the world without depriving her at all. In fact this secret love enriched his marriage.

  So it was that it had seemed to Rupert that it would be quite easy to control the situation with Morgan. Of course he would come to care for her more, but there would be no danger in that, only salvation. What was it that he had failed somehow to take into account? He had not realized how his life would be envenomed by the telling of one or two small necessary lies. He had not expected this curious breakdown of communications with Hilda. He had been quite prepared to be moved physically by Morgan, to be moved by her more, and in a new way. All Rupert’s affections had their physical side: and this was true also of his attachments to men, though he would never have confessed this to Axel. These were secret things over which he smiled. But he had not been prepared for the nervous craving for Morgan’s company which was afflicting him now, nor for the precise temporarily located urges to seize the girl in his arms. He had not foreseen the confusion, the arguments, the clouded sense of involvement and muddle. He had not foreseen that his own estimation of himself would seem suddenly in jeopardy.

  ‘I think I’ve been a fool,’ said Rupert. ‘Maybe you’d better go away after all. I should have been tougher with you. Go away for six months. You know you can’t lose me or my love. There’s nothing to worry about. But I think we both need to calm down about this situation. While you’re away I’ll tell Hilda. I won’t let it seem more important than it is.’

  ‘Where the hell am I to go for six months?’

  ‘Anywhere. France, Italy. I’ll pay for it. Let me do that anyway, now that we know each other better.’

  ‘Oh, Rupert—your sweetness just cracks my heart. But my dear, I can’t go away now. Even a week ago, it would have been possible. Now it just isn’t. I need to see you and talk to you. Seeing you is the only thing I’ve got to hold onto now. You took on this responsibility, Rupert, and you’ve got to see it through. If I went away I’d go mad with worry. You don’t know what you’re saying. Imagine me all alone in some ghastly hotel in Antibes! I’d go crazy. I’ve got to talk to somebody, that’s the only cure, Rupert, talk, talk, talk. God, there are so many things bedevilling my mind, things I want to talk to you about, things I can only talk to you about.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Rupert. He stopped in front of her and resumed his glass. ‘I’m being selfish and unimaginative. Yes, we must go on.’

  ‘I haven’t told you about the child.’

  ‘The child?’

  ‘I became pregnant by Julius.’

  ‘Oh Morgan—’ Rupert sat down, pulling his chair closer, and took her hand. ‘Tell me, my dear.’

  ‘I had an abortion of course. I was by myself, I’d left Julius—or rather he’d somehow driven me out. I was all alone on the West Coast. It was a nightmare.’

  ‘Poor child—I am so sorry.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about it sometime—soon maybe. I need to tell somebody the details. I didn’t know how to find a doctor. I went to one at random and he was just rude to me and charged a huge fee. Then I went to another and he was insinuating and beastly but said he’d do it and insisted on being paid beforehand and I thought he wouldn’t do it and I was crying all the time and it was so utterly humiliating—’

  ‘It’s all over now, Morgan, don’t cry now, my dear. Yes. I think you had better tell me the details.’

  ‘And it isn’t only that, Rupert. I feel so guilty about it now, it haunts me, and I regret it so much. I want that child, I want that child—’

  ‘Morgan, Morgan, don’t upset yourself, here, have another drink. We will talk of all these things at great length, whenever you will. And of course you shan’t go away. I’ll manage, I’ll manage.’

  ‘Thank you, my darling—’

  Suddenly very close to them there was a sound so loud that they could not at first understand what it was. Rupert leapt to his feet. He looked round the room expecting to see that some large object had fallen heavily to the ground. Morgan was looking up at him with big startled eyes. The sound came again and Rupert realized that someone outside on the landing was hitting the door. It was not like knocking. It was more like an attempt to break in the door panels. Bang! Bang! Bang! Morgan rose and instinctively they both withdrew towards Morgan’s bedroom, clutching at each other in panic.

  ‘Who is it?’ whispered Rupert.

  ‘I don’t know. It couldn’t be Hilda. Sssh. Shall we just not answer it?’

  They stood clasping hands, questioning each other’s eyes.

  ‘It must be some mistake,’ whispered Morgan. ‘It can’t be for me.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better answer it before the whole house
comes to look.’

  The terrible banging sound had been resumed. Someone was thundering on the door panel with a closed fist.

  ‘You go in here,’ breathed Morgan. ‘Keep quiet. I’ll see who it is and send them away.’ She pushed Rupert into the bedroom and closed the door. Then she went to her front door and opened it.

  Peter pushed past her into the sitting room. He looked round and then immediately opened the door of the bedroom and looked in. Rupert emerged. He felt suddenly sick to fainting and sat down on a chair. Morgan closed the front door. They looked at each other.

  ‘That’s a very odd way to knock, Peter,’ said Morgan.

  Peter seemed for the moment incapable of speech. Rupert knew that he could not utter any word himself. He gasped for breath and put his hand to his throat.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Morgan. ‘Have a drink.’

  Peter said something. It sounded like ‘late at the office’.

  ‘What’s that? Do sit down, Peter,’ said Morgan. ‘What is all this agitation?’

  Peter continued to stand. He ignored his father. He said to Morgan, ‘So it is true.’

  ‘So what is true?’ Morgan sat down and regarded him. She was blushing, but her expression was hard and calm.

  ‘You are having a love affair with my father.’

  ‘I am not having a love affair with your father, you silly boy. Now calm down and—’

  ‘Then why didn’t you open the door at once?’ said Peter. ‘And why were you in the bedroom and why is the bed all undone and why is he looking like that and—’