A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

‘Hilary is so mysterious.’

  ‘Hilary never tells the truth.’

  ‘Is that Directory enquiries? What number do I ring so as to have my telephone removed?’

  ‘Why do you want your telephone removed, Hilo?’

  ‘The girls won’t leave him alone.’

  ‘So as to have my telephone removed — ’

  ‘Fisch keeps ringing him and making improper suggestions.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Hilary, Hilaree , why do you want — ?’

  ‘I want to have my telephone removed — ’

  ‘Hilary, why — ’

  ‘A post office engineer will call tomorrow?’

  Skinker, the messenger, came in with the tea. Reggie Farbottom used to make the tea once, now of course no more. I could not prevent Arthur from making it sometimes, thereby bringing comfort to the Witcher interest. Arthur had no sense of status. Skinker was a gentle elongated creature who had been some sort of hero in a German prison camp and had later, or perhaps then, given himself to Christ. He was a lay preacher in an evangelical mission. He was the only person in the office who called me ‘Mr Burde’. The downstairs porters despised me and called me nothing. I was ‘Burde’ (or sometimes ‘Hilary’) for ordinary purposes. Skinker’s ‘Mr’ was a tender attention which I appreciated.

  Perhaps I ought to describe the appearance of Edith Witcher and Reggie Farbottom; not that they are important, but they were at that time my daily bread. In our daily bondage what can be more preoccupying and ultimately influential than the voices of our fellow captives? How they go on and on: nothing perhaps, in sheer quantity, so fills up the head. I suppose there are situations where idle chatter adds to the good stuff of the world. It may be so in happy families. I knew nothing of that. My daily chatter-ration was a daily sin, and I knew it well. That which religious orders are so right to forbid. I lived in the Room in a kind of moral sludge into which I could not prevent myself from sinking. Given the possibilities of rage, silence, or repartee I usually chose the latter. Edith was a stoutish smartish lady of about fifty with hair dyed brown and cunningly waved to look wind-blown. She had a slightly hooked nose which gave her an air of distinction, and may indeed have been the secret of her success. She had little education and spoke in a loud would-be grand voice. As far as manner went, she might just have been a would-be fashionable head mistress. I suppose there was no harm in her if one could pardon her mind. Reggie sometimes called her Dame Edith. I sometimes called her that myself. I had descended a long way in the Room and was still going down. Reggie spoke in a, possibly put on, slightly Cockney voice. He was slight and fair and quite good-looking in a perky way, with a self-consciously funny expression, as if he were always about to tip his hat on one side and strike up a comic song. He and Mrs Witcher used to make endless jokes about sex. Practically any observation about sex could send them into fits. They giggled at life like a music hall audience who will laugh at anything. About myself of course I misled them steadfastly, offering false incompatible accounts of my past. And Crystal’s existence I kept a dark secret from those gross intelligences. The fact that I had a sister would probably have seemed to them irresistibly amusing. At the idea that Arthur loved her they would never have stopped laughing. Another cue for dread.

  I was able to continue my daily work perfectly well amid the almost endless stream of Reggie and Edith’s ‘wit’. My tasks, as I have explained, were not exacting. I got through three cases before lunch. I had never made any attempt to redeem the lunch hour. It remained a period of unmitigated gloom. I ate late so as to have at least the interest of hunger, and took a ham roll and half a pint of beer in a Whitehall pub. Round about three o’clock in the office was the worst time. At four Skinker brought in tea. Today (Friday, now in the afternoon), while Reggie and Mrs Witcher were discussing whether or not Clifford Larr wore a wig, I was writing a minute about a complex back-dated pay award and thinking about Tommy. In fact I had been thinking about Tommy ever since lunch. Friday was Tommy’s day.

  Tommy, as I should have perhaps explained earlier, was my mistress; though this awkward word scarcely conveys the odd relation in which she stood to me. ‘Ex-mistress’ would be more accurate in some ways, less truly descriptive in others. Tommy was a major phenomenon in my life. Tommy was, now, a crisis. Her name was of course Thomasina, and her whole name, which had struck me very much when I had first seen it on a theatre programme, was Thomasina Uhlmeister. Indeed I first became interested simply in the name. Uhlmeister was however an interloper who had married Tommy (née Forbes) when she was eighteen and abandoned her when she was twenty. (Uhlmeister is not part of this story. Only his name got left behind.) Tommy was now thirty-four. She was Scottish. She spoke Scottish, she even contrived somehow to look Scottish. Her father, never visible, was a dispensing chemist in Fife. Tommy, in referring to him, always mentioned that he was a ‘gentleman’: presumably a Scotticism. Tommy’s mother was dead and her elder brother had been killed in the war. Tommy herself was one of those casualties of a stage-struck childhood. (Ex-husband Uhlmeister had been an actor, I bet a rotten one.) She had originally, in a small provincial way, been trained as a dancer, but nothing came of that. She was a failed dancer, failed minor actress, failed deputy stage-manager, failed assistant scene-painter, failed unpaid typist, failed extra and Green Room dogsbody. She had been the sort of young person who would do anything at all for no money so as to go on living in that tawdry magic cave and breathing that stuffy perfumed air and racketing along with all that brittle gaudy caravanserai. Now no longer young, she earned a pittance by teaching ‘drama’ two days a week at a teachers’ training college somewhere near King’s Lynn.

  Thomasina Uhlmeister was on the programme as assistant stage-manager. I met her at a party after the play. The play was a piece of Soviet Russian nonsense which had been translated into a piece of English nonsense and put on at a tiny Stalinist theatre, and I came into the picture because I had been asked to help with difficult points of the translation. So I appeared at the party garbed in a tiny bit of prestige, and there was long-legged Tommy. She had grey eyes. I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy’s were clear and empty like light smoke. Their hue was transparent, as the hue of a clear sky. The purity of the pigment, a washed apotheosis of grey, was most unusual, a colour sample straight from God.

  I cannot exactly say that I fell in love with Tommy immediately or indeed that I ever really fell in love with her at all. This was a subject for argument later. I noticed her eyes, her legs. My heart, in so far as, for these purposes, I had one, was in strict seclusion with another lady. And my more recent experiences of ‘girls’ had been mucky and brief and had persuaded me that I was indeed, as I had been early taught, unlovable. That Crystal loved me must be enough for my life, I often thought. It was not that I was in any way homosexual, though I sometimes attracted men. I liked girls all right, there were reactions. But as soon as I got anywhere near I began to fed nausea and they began to fed fright. It is only in books that a violent nature is attractive. (Not that I often behaved violently, but they could smell it.) I could never develop a language of tenderness. It was a matter of organs, and I wanted to get into bed and get it over with; and as I had not the temperament for this either I disgusted myself. So in practice there was not much of that, and for a while pre-Tommy, none.

  Tommy, darling girl, was not only remarkable for her name and her legs and her lucid Cairngorms misty eyes. (Mist is perhaps a better image than smoke. Smoke suggests coils and movement, and although mist too can move it is more blandly uniform in colour; and there was not even the ghost of blue in Tommy’s grey.) She was also exceptional in her heroic determination to love me. I suggested in the last
paragraph that it was my rude and rugged nature that put women off, but there is more than a hint of self-protective romance in this explanation. Probably it was my face rather than my soul which repelled them. Alas how important this salient surface is, this notice board which the world looks at, and usually does not penetrate beyond. I had a charmless face. Nothing could redeem that nose (except I suppose plastic surgery). This is a singularly depressing fact to have to admit, and I would not have admitted it except out of justice to Tommy and to what I have called her heroism. I shall try to be just in telling the story, however unjust I am in the story told.

  I put out a few mechanical lures to Mrs Uhlmeister, not meaning very much by them, and to my great surprise she began to love me and continued to do so. We became lovers. This was quite good. She made me trust her, and this trust set loose a lion of desire. There was a short time when I felt that I was, not cured, that could never be, but somehow soothed, somehow housed. Tenderness and gentleness and a loyal woman in one’s bed. Tommy became a part of my life. She visited Crystal, she met Arthur; the Impiatts (until I put a stop to it) occasionally invited her out of curiosity. Then it all began, for me, to blow over, not for any particular reason. Perhaps I was just too puritanical to put up with an extramarital relationship for long. She had proposed marriage. I just laughed. I could not marry anyone because of Crystal.

  This too was complicated and had become hideously more complicated since two things had happened, Crystal had passed her thirtieth year, and Arthur Fisch had come to love her. Crystal wanted a child. (So did Tommy. I shall come to that.) When she told me this or when (she never exactly told me) I realized it by means of the kind of telepathy which we used for communication, I was appalled. Of course the idea had been around that Crystal might marry. Why not? At Oxford I had even looked about a little for suitable paragons. But later, when it came to it, although I kept telling her she should marry, she could read my eyes, she could read those thought waves. This did not matter so much when we were still young and life was provisional. The notion that there was, for her, a time limit, filled me with anguish and with a kind of irritated disgust, and produced a quite different kind of problem. And then, so unfortunately, there was Arthur. In act Crystal had hardly ever had any serious beaux and was still a virgin. She was sweet, she was pure-hearted, but she was not in the least pretty. And she had always, all of her life, waited and waited and waited upon me.

  ‘You’ve got a cold.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘You have. You’ve got a cold and you’re concealing it.’

  ‘What makes you think I’ve got a cold?’

  ‘It’s obvious. Your cheek is hot. Your nose is red. Your lip is inflamed. You keep surreptitiously dabbing with that filthy handkerchief.’

  ‘It isn’t filthy!’

  ‘Don’t wave it at me. You know the rule about colds. I never see people with colds.’

  ‘You and your stupid rules!’

  ‘You’ve got a streaming cold. I’m going home.’

  ‘Go then, go!’

  Tommy lived in a lost region on the confines of Fulham and Chelsea, with distant hints of Putney, not far from the New King’s Road, uncheered by the proximity of any tube station, in a little neat flat in a little neat house in a terrace of little neat houses, each with its tiny ornate portico and its tiny cracking flight of steps and its smelly basement full of dustbin litter. I usually reached her by walking from Parson’s Green. I got to her place after seven, sometimes well after seven, as I had something to do before. This was another part of my routine. After leaving the office I would travel either to Sloane Square or to Liverpool Street to have a drink in the station buffet. In the whole extension of the Underground system those two stations are, as far as I’ve been able to discover, the only ones which have bars actually upon the platform. The concept of the tube station platform bar excited me. In fact the whole Underground region moved me, I felt as if it were in some sense my natural home. These two bars were not just a cosy after-the-office treat, they were the source of a dark excitement, places of profound communication with London, with the sources of life, with the caverns of resignation to grief and to mortality. Drinking there between six and seven in the shifting crowd of rush-hour travellers, one could feel on one’s shoulders as a curiously soothing yoke the weariness of toiling London, that blank released tiredness after work which can somehow console even the bored, even the frenzied. The coming and departing rattle of the trains, the drifting movement of the travellers, their arrival, their waiting, their vanishing forever presented a mesmeric and indeed symbolic fresco: so many little moments of decision, so many little finalities, the constant wrenching of texture, the constant destruction of cells which shifts and ages the lives of men and of universes. The uncertainty of the order of the trains. The dangerousness of the platforms. (Trains as lethal weapons.) The resolution of a given moment (but which?) to lay down your glass and mount the next train. (But why? There will be another in two minutes.) Ah qu’ils sont beaux les trains manqués! as I especially had cause to know. Then once upon the train that sense of its thrusting life, its intent and purposive turning which conveys itself so subtly to the traveller’s body, its leanings and veerings to points of irrevocable change and partings of the ways. The tram of consciousness, the present moment, the little lighted tube moving in the long dark tunnel. The inevitability of it all and yet its endless variety: the awful daylight glimpses, the blessed plunges back into the dark; the stations, each unique, the sinister brightness of Charing Cross, the mysterious gloom of Regent’s Park, the dereliction of Mornington Crescent, the futuristic melancholy of Moorgate, the monumental ironwork of Liverpool Street, the twining art nouveau of Gloucester Road, the Barbican sunk in a baroque hole, fit subject for Piranesi. And in summer, like an excursion into the country, the flowering banks of the Westbound District Line. I preferred the dark however. Emergence was like a worm pulled from its hole. I loved the Inner Circle best. Twenty-seven stations for fivepence. Indeed, for fivepence as many stations as you cared to achieve. Sometimes I rode the whole Circle (just under an hour) before deciding whether to have my evening drink at Liverpool Street or at Sloane Square. I was not the only Circle rider. There were others, especially in winter. Homeless people, lonely people, alcoholics, people on drugs, people in despair. We recognized each other. It was a fit place for me, I was indeed an Undergrounder. (I thought of calling this story The Memoirs of an Underground Man or just simply The Inner Circle.)

  Today, Friday, I had been at Sloane Square. The two stations are dissimilar, indeed in a sense opposites. Sloane Square has a simple bright modest up-to-date air which can cheer in a homely way, whereas Liverpool Street is menacing and metaphysical and vast. The bars differ too, in that at Liverpool Street you can actually stand on the platform with your drink, whereas at Sloane Square you watch the trains through a window. I had had the needful refreshment in the cosy bright retreat, and had arrived chez Tommy at half past seven. Tommy had a bit more sense of style than Crystal and her flat was comfortable and pretty in a muddled sort of way. She had a television set but covered it with a Cashmere shawl when I came. (I detest television. I am told that the average person now spends twelve years of his life watching it. No wonder the planet is done for.) Tommy childishly collected ‘pretty things’, cheap stuff from Japan and Hong Kong, Victoriana, junk shop sub-antiques, vases, plates, scrolls, fans, figurines, model animals, quaint unclassifiable entities which no one else wanted. Anything cheap and gaudy attracted her. (Hence the passion for the theatre.) The flat was crammed. (It was also speckless, spotless.) Perhaps, as for many unhappy women, simply shopping had become an addiction. She continually bought cheap jewellery, cheap clothes, never a serious garment which looked like anything, just a mish-mash of togs which she put on in random variations. Her hands were always covered in rings. I do not think that she possessed a dress. This evening she was wearing a garish yellow kilt and green tights and a long dark blue sweater with a leath
er belt and a necklace of black glass beads with a jet locket. She was slim and graceful but not especially good looking apart from her eyes and her legs. Her eyes were long and faintly almondesque, unlike Crystal’s which were large and round like a cat’s. Her legs were long and shapely. A woman’s legs can be perfect: Tommy’s were. I never told her so. I had to keep any advantage I could. Her face had lost the freshness of youth and the cheeks were slightly pockmarked. I found this quite attractive, though again I never told her so. Her hair was a mousy brown and hung about her in limp unravelling natural ringlets. She spoke with a mincing precision in a lightweight slightly Scottish voice. She had a fastidious little nose and a fastidious little mouth, features which could express a remarkable amount of sulky stubbornness and become thoroughly repulsive when they did so.

  ‘Well, why aren’t you going then? Why are you sitting there drinking when you’ve had enough to drink already judging by the smell of you? You do plague me, but you don’t mean anything by it, do you? We’re still us, aren’t we, darling? Aren’t we?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we are.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather be in here with a woman that loves you than out there in the rain and the storm? Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t you? Oh you do hurt me so with your vague threatening talk, you’re as bad as a gangster, you deliberately spoil our days, you sit here and drink and sulk and spoil, and you won’t give me another day, why can’t we meet on Wednesdays?’