by Iris Murdoch
J. P. H. Leferrier
PS Do not misunderstand what I say above. Your mother and I view with horror and misery and a fear which rests upon but too much clear evidence, the consequence, to you of any direct confrontation with the law of this country. In prison here your very life could be in danger. I have, since writing this letter, talked yet again to Mr Livingstone. He says that it is now becoming a mercifully accepted thing that evidence from a psychiatrist can be offered to a tribunal. This evidence need not be of mental breakdown but may be very various, and can indeed amount simply to a careful restatement of the objector’s own opinions.
Little Karen,
you know how I feel that I feel about you and how I have been feeling that it was about time too, O Lord. But also I now thoroughly intuit and can face that you do not love me and what is more love another. You half told me and the rest I, Richard sleuth, discovered. I don’t feel deceived. Your tiny petulant soul has always been open to me really. All which being so I think I cannot bear that yachting trip, can you? In any case it was getting so overrun with Tisbournes and such it was hardly worth having, was it? I am going to pretend the yacht has broken down. Thus we can phase the thing out and save our faces. Why do we both have to live in this blaze of publicity instead of the decent obscurity of marriage? As for marriage, I doubt if I, Pargeter, am made for it. I have been so unhappy for so long I have become resigned. Do not do me the wrong of pitying me. In a way I enjoy it all, and for once am producing, I trust, a conclusion which is not fraught with lies and cries. That it was fun while it lasted is probably the best the likes of me can ever say, and in this case, it scarcely got going at all. I don’t think, after our last rather stormy interview and your flight to the country, that this letter will surprise you much, and I doubt if it will distress you much either. What, after all, were you up to? Fate and I are letting you off easily. I myself am a hopeless unworkable human being designed to be miserable and to cause misery. Better steer clear. Sorry, pretty Karen, sorry.
R.
Dear Andrew,
for reasons which I shall shortly explain to you I return your cheque. You shall not buy Kierkegaard. I may be a businessman but I am not a crook. And especially not in this context, about which I have been thinking. May I come and see you in Oxford on Thursday? Could I stay the night in college? I have something to say to you.
Yours
Oliver
Dear Mr Gibson Grey,
how awfully kind of you it was to spend so much time with poor Norman last week, he greatly appreciated it, or would you know if he could fully realize what you have done for him, I think your visits have done him a lot of good, he is much more alert and looking as if he was trying hard to remember things all the time. He is to leave hospital now and come home. The hospital thinks he may partially recover, anyway he can do some simple work. The welfare people are all very kind and will arrange his training for something. It is a change in our lives. It is a funny thing to say, but he is so much nicer now than he used to be. Do you think his novel could be published, we could use the money. Thank you for helping my poor husband,
Yours truly
Mary Monkley
Ann dear girl,
this is to tell you that such shadowy things as there were between me and Richard have been definitely broken off. I didn’t really intend anything, it was the yacht that brought it on! My flirting with R. had a purely Machiavellian purpose, as you know. (I only hope I haven’t overdone it.) And I don’t think Richard really intended anything either, honestly! It was all so stupid. I felt I should write at once and tell you that that coast was clear again. You’ve been so sweet about it, you are an ace-girl.
I am still down in the country and propose to stay for the present. I am seeing nobody. I have given up my temp typing job, it was awful. Even the pigs are great. You know you are welcome down here any time. Dad, who is as crazy about you as ever, adds his invitation! Thank God for female friends. All the warmth and sense of the world comes from women, I often think. Let me know your moves!
With much love
Karen
Dear Oliver,
thanks for the cheque back. Yes, do come Thurs. The college guest rooms are full, but you can stay in my rooms. Nice to see you.
Yours
Andrew
Dear Sebastian,
thank you for your letter. Yes, it would be nice to see you. I too value our friendship. I shall hope to have many men friends in my life and in that company you will always, I am sure, have an honoured place. I am rather busy at the moment and cannot manage lunch Wednesday. I think however there is a gap on Friday. Let me know when and where by postcard.
Yours
Karen
Dear Richard,
just a note out of the blue to say why not let’s have lunch or a drink one of these days? I suppose we are old friends by now. I seem not to have seen you for ages except at parties. I’ll probably ring up some morning.
Love
Ann
My dear Father,
I begin to despair of our understanding each other. I am not ‘evading the issue by hiding in Europe’. The point is that, given the whole situation, my opinions, my character, my talents, it emerges as being not only my interest but my duty to stay here. Perhaps I have not said this before strongly enough. I leave Gracie out here because she is not a necessary determining factor. Even without her I would stay. Please believe this. You say that the search for good must be total giving and not calculation. But total giving, if it is to be right giving, is not a blind smashing of oneself against fate. If I conceived such self-destruction to be my duty I trust that I would not shirk it. But I do not. To choose such immolation would, in my view, be mere masochism, or the nervous stupid fear of being thought a coward or truant. A dutiful disposal of oneself must be based upon calculation, since one is an individual soul, and individual souls have different paths. I have reflected deeply and seriously about my own path and about this I can say no more. What you suggest in your postscript I accept as evidence of the degree of your distress. I cannot imagine that you mean it seriously. How much to this your ‘harshness’ is to be preferred! I know what you have always thought, and what you know I think, about ‘psychiatrists’. I would regard with utter abhorrence the idea of seeking such aid, or feigning mental weakness in relation to what should most of all manifest mental strength.
As for Gracie, there is little point in arguing. You have not met her, and if you do not cross the Atlantic, which I beg you to do, you will not meet her. I love her and she loves me and we are both, I assure you, well aware that marriage is a life-long partnership. This is our decision and we have made it. Please, I beg you most humbly and fervently, come to the wedding. Do not think any more that you can dissuade me. In this situation, if we are not to become strangers, which is unthinkable, one of us must yield, and it will not be me. Begging your forgiveness, and with so much love to my mother, ever your loving son
Ludwig
Charlotte opened her eyes. She felt pain. Her mind scrabbled in a jolting jigsaw hurly-burly, trying to conceptualize the present, to connect it to some sort of past, even to make out who she was. Something was tied about her neck and shoulders. She was lying on a bed, in a bed, with stiff sheets pulled up to her chin. The sun was shining. Some whiteness dazzled in her vision. The sun was shining horribly and she felt terrible. She closed her eyes. Her throat was hurting, something hurt deep inside her, she felt sick. Her head ached. She fought in the jumble for clarity of mind and for remembrance.
She opened her eyes again and the sun seared them. She peered into the light and saw another bed opposite to her. She was in a room like her dormitory at school and for a moment this memory dazed her. No, it was a hospital ward. There were several beds. There was a young woman in a blue overall and a white cap who was undoubtedly a nurse. Charlotte remembered having taken the tablets, dozens and dozens of them. Why then was she still alive? She tested herself with slight movements. Her limbs
, her face, obeyed her will. This was being alive. Thought, surprise, fear made her breathe quickly. She felt sudden overwhelming fear of the death which had evaded her. She had truly wished to die. This awakening brought her life and death as twin terrors.
‘I say, you’re awake, good! Nurse, look, she’s awake.’
The nurse became large and near. She was red-headed, snub-nosed, vaguely familiar. ‘That’s right, how are we feeling? Remember me?’
Charlotte remembered nothing except the dormitory at school, the tablets, the fear, and now Nurse Mahony, and Alison looking through the closing door with one eye open as Charlotte asked the doctor to kill her with a fatal shot.
‘I’m Rose Mahony. I nursed your mother. Remember?’
‘Yes.’ A sound had come.
‘You’re all right, you’re as right as rain, sure. You haven’t hurt yourself at all. Just lie quiet now and the doctor’ll be coming to you, lie quiet and be good now.’
‘Isn’t it funny that she nursed your mother,’ said the first voice.
The sun was in Charlotte’s eyes. The sun closed her eyes. She drowsed again, trying with little groping movements of thought to discover herself. She hung suspended in water reaching out her thought-limbs like tentacles. Why had she taken the tablets? What awful misery had that been? Vaguely memory was present, the whole of her available self gradually present. Matthew. Yes, she was revived and assembled and ready for more torture. Back again in the old suffering. Tears.
‘You remember me?’
‘You nursed my mother.’
‘No, me. No the other one. Sorry, I mustn’t fuss you. Would you like some lemonade? I’ve got some, and real lemons too. We’re allowed lemonade. The girl who went out this morning had some sherry, only I think she wasn’t supposed to, half a bottle, she kept it in her sponge bag. There’s only you and me and Mrs Baxter in the ward now, and Mrs Baxter isn’t really with us, poor soul.’
Charlotte struggled up a little on her pillows. A huge form in a red dressing-gown confronted her, casting an even larger shadow. A big smiling face surrounded by short clipped fair hair, now jaggedly tousled. Big arms crossed on the chest.
‘Miss Ricardo, I believe,’ said Charlotte.
‘Jolly well done,’ said Mitzi. ‘We only met twice, I think. We met in the street. I was with that fool Austin. You were very polite. And we met once ages ago at Austin’s flat, just to nod. You brought a basket of goodies from Clara. Austin kicked it down the stairs once you’d gone.’
‘Why am I here?’ said Charlotte. ‘Why am I still alive?’
‘Garth Gibson Grey found you, you must have only just fallen asleep. He listened outside the door and heard you breathing.’
‘He must have very good hearing.’
‘You were breathing loudly in a funny way. So he broke open the door.’
‘Interfering boy.’
‘I’m so terribly pleased that you remembered me, I didn’t think you would. You were so nice that time we met in the street.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Which?’
‘About Garth.’
‘Oh, they told me.’
‘They?’
‘They all came along at visiting hour to view the body.’
‘Who came?’
‘Oh the lot of them, you know, Sir Matthew and Mr and Mrs Tisbourne, and Garth, and Lady Somebody-or-other and some other old party with grey hair. They were thrilled, I can tell you, quite pop-eyed with excitement. Everyone came except Austin.’
‘You mean they all came and looked at me when I was unconscious.’
‘Yes. I showed you to them. They weren’t half knocked to see me here. I told them not to worry, you’d be all right, the doctor said so.’
‘Oh God!’ said Charlotte. She shrank down in the pillows. Tears of weariness and impotent rage and empty lurking fear overflowed her eyes.
‘Oh don’t cry now, don’t!’ said Mitzi. She sat down on the edge of the bed and shyly pawed at Charlotte’s limp hand. ‘You feel jolly funny now I expect, I did when I woke up, but you’ll soon feel fine, really, I do. I can’t tell you how well I feel, it’s like being born again, the world is all wonderful and bright and new, you’ll see.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Charlotte. She wiped away the tears with her hand.
‘Here, have a paper hanky, I’ve got lots. I cried awfully when I woke up too. Wouldn’t you like some lemonade? I could squeeze real lemons into it.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You haven’t asked me why I’m here, why I’m not dead.’
‘You mean you too —’
‘Yes, I took an overdose. So did the girl who went out this morning. We’re quite a little set of delinquents in here. Not Mrs Baxter, though, she’s got something else, she was took bad before you woke, poor old soul. The milkman found me. He wanted his bill paid and he came up. I hadn’t taken too much, you know, not like you. I got dizzy and stopped taking them. You really did it properly, they had an awful time with you, Rose told me.’
‘Rose?’
‘Rose Mahoney, the nurse. I say, it’s nearly visiting hour again, they’ll all be trooping back, I wonder if Austin will come this time, of course he wouldn’t know about me, unless they told him, would he.’
‘Can one refuse to be visited?’ said Charlotte.
‘Visitors, Miss Ledgard,’ said Nurse Mahoney, opening the door.
‘Charlotte, don’t worry,’ said Matthew. He was sitting on her bed, weighing one side of it down considerably. Clara and George had drawn up chairs. Garth was standing. Hester was arranging the flowers.
‘What have I got to worry about?’ said Charlotte. She lay back relaxed and floppy, conscious of her unkempt hair and naked face, yet suddenly not caring.
‘Exactly,’ said Clara.
‘I mean, don’t worry about what you did,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s nothing to feel ashamed of and it may even be a good thing, it may lead you to —’
‘I’m not ashamed of it,’ said Charlotte. She was very present to the scene yet giddy with detachment. They were all so solemn, yet of course enjoying themselves like mad, one could see the muted glow in their faces, curiosity, superiority, joy. How she had delighted them.
‘It was very naughty of you, of course,’ said Clara.
‘You gave us an awful fright,’ said George. ‘You did, you know. Dear Charlotte!’ He impetuously squeezed her hand and dropped it again. He wore an anguished sentimental smile intended as a special private communication to Charlotte.
‘It had nothing to do with you,’ said Charlotte, ‘with any of you. It was a private action of mine, of my own.’
‘But you belong to us!’ cried Clara.
‘They’ll probably want you to see a psychiatrist,’ said Matthew, ‘and if —’
‘A psychiatrist? Pouf! Any psychiatrist I ever met would have done well to see me.’
‘My dear Charlotte, indeed,’ said Matthew, ‘I thought you would feel like this. But if later on you should want to talk things over with anyone, I should be very glad to —’
‘Why ever did you do it, Char?’ said Clara. ‘We were flabbergasted.’
‘Talk to you,’ said Charlotte to Matthew. ‘But I scarcely know you. This is the first time we’ve met for years.’
‘All the same —’
‘I regard your suggestion as an impertinence.’
‘I’m sorry —’
‘Char, don’t be cross —’
‘I am not cross. Hester, it is kind of you to have come. And, Garth, I suppose I should thank you for what you did.’