A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  FRIDAY

  IT WAS Friday morning and I was just leaving for the office. Darkness had not yet really given way to day. There might have been some sort of yellow murk outside, but I did not pull back the curtains to look at it. I had swallowed two cups of tea and was my usual hateful early morning self. I emerged from the flat onto the bright electrically lit landing and closed the door behind me. The curious smell was still there. Then I stopped dead.

  On the opposite side of the landing, not far from the lift, a girl was standing. I saw at once that she was, wholly or partly, Indian. She had a thin light-brown transparent spiritual face, a long thin fastidious mouth, an aquiline nose: surely the most beautiful race in the world, blending delicate frailty and power into human animal grace. She was not wearing a sari, but an indefinably oriental get-up consisting of a high-necked many-buttoned padded cotton jacket over multi-coloured cotton trousers. She was not tall, but in her gracefulness did not look short. Her black hair in a very long very thick plait was drawn forward over one shoulder. She stood perfectly still, her thin hands hanging down, and her large almost black eyes regarding me intently.

  I felt shock, pleasure, surprise, alarm. Then I recalled Christopher’s words, completely forgotten since, about a coloured girl looking for me. Fear. For me surely no one could search with an amiable motive. I was about to speak to her when the fact of the silence having lasted, as it seemed, so long made speech impossible. How after all could this girl, such a girl, concern me? There were other flats on the corridor behind her, containing shifting populations of which I took care to know nothing. She was doubtless somebody’s girl friend going home. Lucky somebody. I unfixed myself from the door handle and walked to the lift and pressed the button, turning my back upon the apparition. As the lift arrived and the automatic doors opened I heard a soft footstep. The Indian girl entered the lift after me. She stood beside me, staring up at me with an unsmiling expression of dazed puzzled interest. I could see and hear and only not quite feel her breathing. She was wearing a black woollen sweater, visible at neck and sleeves, underneath the jacket. I looked at the reflection of her back in the mirror. The long thick unsilky plait, which she had evidently tossed back over her shoulder as she entered, fell straight to the buttocks where it arched out and ended in a fanlike brush like a lion’s tail. The slightly frayed sleeve of the jacket moved and came into contact with the sleeve of my mackintosh. I felt my features stiffen as a current of electricity, generated by the contact, passed on into my flesh. The lift had creaked its way to the ground floor and the doors opened. She stepped out first. I went past her to the street door and out into the street. It was a dark morning, a little rain riding upon the wind, the street lamps still on. I reached the corner resolving not to turn round. The electrical connection still held. I turned round. She was standing upon the steps of the flats and staring after me.

  I really did once upon a time run round the park every morning. The goal of keeping perfectly fit was a goal, the gift of a strong and healthy body was a gift. Running was a method of death, of life in death, not the saint’s marvel of living in the present, but a desperate man’s little version. There was a kind of sleeping or half-sleeping which I sometimes tried to achieve (especially at weekends) when I lay like a floating turtle, just breaking the surface of consciousness, aware and yet not self-aware, not yet tormented by being a particular person. So too with the running. I ran, and was cleansed of myself. I was a heart pumping, a body moving. I had cleaned a piece of the world of the filth of my consciousness. I was not even capable of dreaming. If I could always so have slept and so have waked I would have achieved my own modest beatification. I stopped running not (I think) because of a warning tap from the finger of age, but just out of sinful degenerate laziness of soul: the same laziness and failure of hope which still prevented me from starting to learn Chinese. I would, however, on a good morning when time allowed, walk briskly across the park to Gloucester Road station and proceed to Westminster from there. On bad mornings when I was late I took the Inner Circle from Bayswater. This morning (Friday) was a bad morning.

  As I now cram myself into the rush hour train at Bayswater station perhaps I should pause again to describe myself a little more. I have spoken of the cult of my body. I still was very much that body. It had defended me in childhood and I had always identified myself with it as with one of my chief assets. I was (am) just over six feet tall, sturdy, dark, clean-shaven against a fierce beard, with a head of thick greasy crinkly dark hair descending to my collar. A similar mat of thick hair furs my body to the navel. I have hazel eyes not unlike Crystal’s, only not so golden and not so big. (Aunt Bill also, I regret to say, had hazel eyes only hers were very small and distinctly greenish.) It is difficult to describe my face. It satisfies no canon of beauty, not even that of a gangster. My wide nose, like Crystal’s, turns up a little at the end. If I valued my physique it was certainly not for its charm. Because of my hair I was called ‘Nigger’ at school and for a time I did in some curious way think of myself as being black. A boy once told me that I had a black penis, and convinced me of it in spite of the visual evidence. Intended to wound, these taunts did not altogether displease me. I liked (though I expected no one else to) my copious fur, my blackness, my secret being as a black animal. Of other uses of my body, in acts of love, I knew nothing, even when I became a student. I knew that I was unattractive and that I radiated a paralysing awkwardness; moreover a ferocious puritanism, doubtless purveyed to me by my Christian mentors, made me feel that sex was unclean.

  I relied upon routine, had done so perhaps ever since I realized that grammatical rules were to be my salvation; and since I had despaired of salvation, even more so. Routine, in my case at least, discouraged thought. Your exercise of free choice is a prodigious stirrer up of your reflection. The patterned sameness of the days of the week gave a comforting sense of absolute subjection to history and time, perhaps a comforting sense of mortality. I could not consider suicide because of Crystal, but I wanted to have my death always beside me. My ‘days’ were a routine, and in the office I conceived of myself as far as possible as a man on an assembly line. Weekends and holidays were hells of freedom. I took my leave for fear of comment and simply hid (if possible slept). I used once to attempt holidays with Crystal, but it was too much. She cried all the time. It was true that, as Freddie Impiatt had said to me, I liked to live in other people’s worlds and have none of my own.

  None of this entirely describes what I ‘lived by’. By what after all does a man live? Art meant little to me, I carried a few odd pieces of literature like lucky charms. Someone once said of me, and it was not entirely unjust, that I read poetry for the grammar. As I have said, I never wanted to be a writer. I loved words, but I was not a word-user, rather a word-watcher, in the way that some people are bird-watchers. I loved languages but I knew by now that I would never speak the languages that I read. I was one for whom the spoken and the written word are themselves different languages. I had no religion and no substitute for it. My ‘days’ gave me identity, a sort of ecto-skeleton. Beyond my routine chaos began and without routine my life (perhaps any life?) was a phantasmagoria. Religion, and indeed art too, I conceived of as human activities, but not for me. Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. Only I was not inventive. I did not want to play this play or dance this dance, and apart from the activity of playing or dancing there was nothing at all. I early saw that the nature of words and their relationship to reality made metaphysical systems impossible. History was a slaughterhouse, human life was a slaughterhouse. Mortality itself was my philosophical robe. Even the stars are not ageless and our breaths are numbered.

  Let us now get on to the office. Very little of my story actually takes place in the office, but as the office was so much a part of my mind it is necessary to describe it. I existed, as I have explained, near to the bottom of the power structure which rose above the clerical and steno
graphical level. I dealt with ‘cases’ concerning pay, little individual problems, not always unamusing. (Should this man’s ‘danger money’ affect his pension? Should that man’s paid sick-leave be extended in these circumstances? Should another man’s pay-rise be backdated in those?) I did not invent rules, I merely applied rules made by others. Sometimes the rules did not quite fit the cases, and there was a tiny occasion for thought. Usually no thought was necessary. I wrote out my view in the form of a ‘minute’, which I sent to Duncan, who sent it to Mrs Frederickson, who sent it to Freddie Impiatt, who sent it to Clifford Larr, and after that, or even before that, I did not really know or care what happened to it or whether it survived. Arthur Fisch, who devilled for me, wrote no minutes so there was someone to be superior to.

  I worked in a room with two other people. This Room and these people have a certain tiny importance because, as so often, the physical world figured the mental world. The two people who shared my room were Mrs Witcher (Edith) and Reggie Farbottom. Arthur worked in a cupboard (almost literally), a little room partitioned off from the corridor, with a corridor window as its only source of light. I regretted that I had not installed Arthur long ago in the Room, but it was too late now, and Arthur liked his cupboard. Mrs Witcher, it was said, had once been a shorthand typist who had risen to power through being someone’s Personal Assistant. When I first knew her she was a self-styled ‘head’ of the Registry, the vast complex where the files were stored. This might have been an important job but in her case it was certainly a standing up job and not a sitting down job; and could one actually say that such a one as Mrs Witcher was ‘head’ of the Registry? There was in fact another head, a man, who sat down, called Middledale, who really ran the Registry, while Mrs Witcher was just one of the more important of the filing clerks. There was some uncertainty about this even at the time. Later Mrs Witcher received a promotion and a desk, first in the Registry itself, and then in an adjoining room (not Middledale’s room, which had by then been converted to another purpose). During a period of office redecoration she moved into my room (the Room) which I then shared with a man called Perry (who afterwards emigrated to Canada). Mrs Witcher came in as a temporary and junior third, but somehow managed to stay, partly because Perry and I were too polite to turn her out, later because it had become a custom. What Mrs Witcher’s work was at first supposed to be I never understood, or tried to understand, as I regarded her presence as ephemeral. She had some task concerned with the checking of classifications, doubtless a routine matter of seeing that papers were being filed correctly. Later on however Mrs Witcher set herself up (or was set up by some superior authority) as a sort of watchdog over the classifications themselves, not only checking the files but controlling the divisions and sub-divisions into which they were separated: a task which raised very fundamental questions with which Mrs Witcher was patently not qualified to deal.

  That Reggie Farbottom had (as some people said) originally been a messenger was very unlikely. He had probably started life as some sort of trotting boy clerk. How he ceased being a standing man and became a sitting man I do not know. This was perhaps Mrs Witcher’s doing: he had long been her creature. The relation between them was mysterious. Mrs Witcher was immemorially divorced. (Of old Witcher nothing was known.) Reggie Farbottom was considerably younger, unmarried, much given to boasting of ‘conquests’. He was foul-mouthed into the bargain. Perhaps Mrs Witcher liked that. At any rate Reggie was soon to be found occupying the desk which Mrs Witcher had invented for herself in the Registry, and later, on Perry’s departure occupying Mrs Witcher’s desk in the Room, while Mrs Witcher occupied that of Perry. My conception of the matter was that Reggie did what Mrs Witcher ought to have been doing (whatever that was), while Mrs Witcher pretended to do a job which she had invented for herself and in reality did nothing. On Perry’s departure, as I realized later, I ought instantly to have installed Arthur in Perry’s desk. Only Arthur was sentimental about his cupboard, and the true significance of Farbottom only dawned on me when it was too late.

  As office rooms go, the Room was not unattractive, though it was lit by the sort of neon lighting which recreates a lurid winter afternoon. It was quite large and had a sort of bay window from which, through a cleft in an inner courtyard, one could see Big Ben, and above him a slice of sky which could be felt to be hanging over the river. In this bay window, on the far side of the room, I sat. My desk, moreover, rested upon a strip of brown carpet which reached from the door to the window and made my side of the room, which also boasted a print of Whitehall in 1780, quite elegant. The desks of Reggie and Mrs Witcher were both nearer to the door, facing the wall in the uncarpeted half of the room. So certain fundamental distinctions were at least preserved.

  I always attempted to arrive at the office before nine, This was not required, but there were advantages in being first. I could get quite a lot of work done in the blessed interval before the others arrived. The old joke about civil servants being like the fountains in Trafalgar Square because they played from ten to five had no application as far as I was concerned, or indeed in the department generally, except for a few freaks such as Edith Witcher. There was always far more to do than I had time for, though on the other hand nothing was urgent. This suited me. If I had ever finished I would have felt in danger of going mad. I sometimes had nightmares in which I had no more cases, my in-tray was empty, and as I had no more work to do I was there under false pretences. On this particular day (we are still on Friday morning) a hold-up in the tube made me later than usual. The irritation of this hold-up (jammed breast to breast and back to back in ominous silence) drove from my mind any further speculation concerning the Indian girl. She probably had nothing whatever to do with me. As I entered the building I met Clifford Larr. I was making for the lift, he for the stairs. He worked on the first floor, what one might call the piano nobile. I worked a good deal nearer to the attics. We said good morning. He paused. ‘A pleasant gathering last night, was it not?’ ‘Very pleasant,’ I replied. He passed on.

  When I reached our corridor I saw at once that the light was on in Arthur’s cupboard. I did not stop, though I saw that the door was ajar. Arthur, shy of the Room, perhaps wished to trap me. He was easy to elude however, as I had trained him never to talk to me in the office except about work. I did not want any sort of tête-à-tête with Arthur just now. I went on into the Room. Reggie and Mrs Witcher were both there. They had already set up an ‘atmosphere’. This was another reason why I usually came in early.

  ‘Good afternoon, Hilary!’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘I said, good afternoon!’

  ‘He was beating it up last night with the Impiatts,’ said Reggie.

  ‘It’s not Impiatts on Thursday, it’s his girl friend.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, it’s his girl friend tonight.’

  ‘It’s his girl friend on Thursday!’

  ‘Hilary — Hilary — listen — isn’t it your girl friend tonight?’

  ‘I have no girl friend,’ I said, settling down with my back to them and spreading out a case.

  ‘Oh fib, fib, coy, coy!’

  ‘Hilary’s a mystery man, aren’t you, Hilary?’

  ‘He means it’s his lady friend,’ said Reggie. ‘ “Hello, hello, who’s your lady friend” —’

  ‘That’s no lady, that’s my — ’

  ‘Do shut up, there’s good darlings,’ I said.

  ‘Oh good, it’s one of Hilary’s soft soap days.’

  ‘No flying ink pots today.’

  ‘Hilary, Hilaree, did Freddikins tell you about the panto?’

  ‘Yes. You are to be Smee.’

  ‘Hilary is to be the crocodile, only they haven’t told him!’

  ‘Hilary should just play himself, it would bring the house down!’

  ‘I gather Edith is to be Wendy,’ I said.

  ‘Oh witty, witty, clever, clever!’

  ‘No call to be sarky, Hilary, making inferred allusions to a lady
’s age!’

  ‘Jenny Searle in Registry is to be Wendy, one of Reggie’s numerous ex’s.’

  ‘No wonder they call me Divan the Terrible.’

  ‘Reggie is feeling bronzed and fit after a plunge into the typing pool!’

  ‘They haven’t chosen Peter yet.’

  ‘Fischy would make a good Peter, he hasn’t reached puberty.’

  ‘Isn’t Peter usually played by a girl?’ I said.

  ‘Exactly! Fischy for Peter!’

  ‘Shall we go and examine his organs?’

  ‘Edith, you are awful!’

  ‘We mustn’t be nasty, after all Hilary and Fisch are sort of — aren’t they?’

  ‘That’s no lady, that’s my Fisch.’

  ‘That’s no lady, that’s my Burde!’ (Screams)