A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘You know we can’t meet on Wednesdays.’

  ‘Why not? Just because you decree it? I’m sick and tired of living by your decrees. Wednesday isn’t a day. Why can’t I have Wednesday too?’

  ‘Wednesday is a day.’

  ‘How is Wednesday a day?’

  ‘Wednesday is my day for myself.’

  ‘You’re miserable by yourself, you just mope. Don’t you, don’t you?’

  ‘I enjoy misery and moping.’

  ‘Anyway I don’t believe you. You’re a proven liar. I don’t believe you see Mr Duncan on Mondays. And I don’t believe you’re alone on Wednesdays. There’s some other woman.’

  ‘Oh Thomas darling, don’t make things worse by being silly and vulgar and please please take that horrible aggressive look off your face. I’m so tired.’

  ‘Tired! Tired! I’m tired too.’

  ‘You’ve been doing nothing all day except trailing round the shops buying rubbish.’

  ‘I’ve been writing my lecture for Monday.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘And I’ve been making glove puppets.’

  ‘Glove puppets, God! We’re glove puppets.’

  ‘All right. You scorn what I do. I scorn what you do.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘And there is another woman. It’s Laura Impiatt. You see her on Wednesdays. I know her style, she collects men, she’s after you.’

  ‘Don’t be boringly catty about other women. It makes me feel your sex really is inferior.’

  ‘I’m not catty, and I’m not talking in general, I’m saying about an individual person!’

  ‘That’s not an argument, neither is shouting.’

  ‘You make me cross on purpose so as to muddle me.’

  ‘It’s not my fault if you think intuitively rather than logically. Women are supposed to be proud of that.’

  ‘If we met more we’d quarrel less. I must see more of you. I’ll come to the office.’

  ‘If you do it’ll be the last time you see me.’

  ‘When are we going to paint the flat like you said? You said a man was never more innocently engaged than in painting his flat.’

  ‘Tommy, we can’t go on like this.’

  ‘I don’t want to go on like this. I want to marry you. I want a baby. I’m thirty-four.’

  ‘I know you’re thirty-four! You mention it often enough!’

  ‘You’ve taken years of my life.’

  ‘Only three, dear.’

  ‘You owe it to me.’

  ‘No one owes anybody anything for that sort of reason.’

  ‘You came after me — ’

  ‘Be accurate. You came after me.’

  ‘I want a baby.’

  ‘Well, go and get yourself stuffed somewhere else.’

  ‘You talk in a coarse common way, you use hateful rude language, and you do it to hurt me. Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?’

  ‘Oh stop asking these maddening pointless questions!’

  ‘Who’s shouting now?’

  ‘You just keep evading my arguments, you won’t listen to anything you don’t like.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed any arguments. I love you. I don’t want just any baby. I want your baby.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want a bloody baby and I don’t want to get married and as you want both it follows that we must part.’

  ‘We can’t part.’

  ‘If I could make you believe that we could the thing would be as good as done.’

  ‘That is why I shall never believe it. We’re each other’s last chance.’

  ‘I may be yours. You’re certainly not mine, thank God! Look, Tommy, let me go. Let’s have a clean slice not a bloody massacre.’

  ‘You’re never nice to me now — ’

  ‘How can I be nice when I’m trapped?’

  ‘You aren’t trapped or else everyone is. We could have freedom together if — ’

  ‘Who said anything about freedom?’

  ‘You did, you said you were trapped.’

  ‘I don’t care a fuck about freedom, I don’t think there is such a thing, I just don’t like the sensation of being trussed.’

  ‘After all, most marriages are second best, and — ’

  ‘When I don’t want a marriage at all you hardly recommend this one by admitting it would be lousy!’

  ‘I didn’t say that, and it wouldn’t be second best for me because I love you — ’

  ‘I don’t want your love, Tomkins, so it gratifies not. I’m afraid this is not one of your clear-headed days.’

  ‘But what’s your reason for spoiling things?’

  ‘There isn’t a reason! Love can end. That’s just one of the horrors of human life. My interest in you was purely physical anyway.’

  ‘Oh you wicked liar! And there is a reason. It’s Crystal.’

  ‘It isn’t Crystal. Just be careful, Tommy.’

  ‘Is she going to marry Arthur Fisch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You won’t let her.’

  ‘Be careful. Do you want me to break something?’

  ‘You think you can always defeat me by violence, don’t you! Oh you should be so ashamed! I mended that little vase you broke. Look. Things can be mended.’

  ‘Don’t try and touch my heart, it isn’t within your reach. You talk as if there were just one or two difficulties and if they were fixed we could live happily ever after, but everything’s wrong here, everything! God, can’t you see the difference between big things and little things? Perhaps no woman can.’

  ‘Who’s generalizing now?’

  ‘Don’t madden me. I just don’t want to marry you, I don’t even want to go to bed with you any more, very few human arrangements can last long and this one has run its course. There’s nothing more to it, no secret motives, not even anything to argue about.’

  ‘Why are we arguing then?’

  ‘Because you won’t face facts.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why we’re arguing. Because we’re bound together. You can’t leave me. All you can do is talk about it. If you could go, you’d go. The arguing is instead, so that you can pretend to go and not go. Why don’t you face a fact or two?’

  ‘If you want to be shown what going is like — ’

  ‘All right. Do you mean that you won’t come next Friday?’

  After that there was silence, except for the wild west wind rather gently shaking the windows, as if afraid of its own strength, and pattering the panes with little ripples of rain. We had had, before dispute made eating impossible, the beginning of a supper (lamb cutlets and broccoli) and a good deal of wine. We were still drinking the wine. I had taught Tommy to drink. We were sitting at a round table covered by a pretty French table cloth, a brilliant red cloth thickly covered with tiny green leaves. The lamps glowed, perched among the bric-a-brac, it was like sitting in a shop. Tommy’s small hand, the fingers covered with little enamel and silver rings, began to crawl across the table towards me. Tommy’s question was a jerk of the noose. The situation had its own characteristic hopeless mechanical structure. A lot of what Tommy said was true. She had been a surprise package. After I had despaired of communication this soft-voiced clever little Scot had managed to get through. For she was clever. She argued quite well, she remembered things, one had to keep one’s wits sharp, there was even a pleasure in arguing with her about leaving her. There was even a sense in which the argument was, as she said, a surrogate for the parting, at least tonight. With her grammar school education and her extensive vocabulary and her sharp little mind she might have been somebody if the theatre had not done for her. She was gallant and intelligent, she tried to coerce me with her words, not with her tears. We did indeed understand each other and this was rare and now that we had given up the sex act I still enjoyed the word act with her, simply the unusual experience of communicating. Only nothing further followed from this. With relentless authority my own special personal aloneness was calling me away
, my own pain was calling me into its privacy, out of this irrelevant scene of minor gratifications. I wanted now to clean the whole business off myself and be done with it. It had become an idle nonsense. And yet: just tonight and because I was so tired I could not say that I was not coming next Friday. The achievement was beyond me.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘There you are! You see! You just like a skirmish!’ She pronounced it ‘skairmish’.

  ‘No I don’t. Think about what I said, will you. We’ve got to end this, Tommy. And it’s no good talking about just being friends either. So long as we meet you’ll go on loving me, and that’s what’s so hopeless, especially if you want a child. It’s unfair to you.’

  ‘You say that to pretend it’s altruism!’

  ‘What the hell does it matter what it is. We’re finished. Now I’m going home.’

  ‘You can’t go, it’s not ten yet.’

  ‘If I stay I’ll get angry and smash things. And you’ve got a cold.’

  ‘I haven’t. Go then. I’ll see you tomorrow… at Crystal’s… won’t I?’

  Once a month Crystal invited Tommy to a brief drink at six o’clock on a Saturday.

  ‘Maybe. Don’t you give that bloody cold to Crystal. If you find tomorrow morning — ’

  ‘Oh you do nothing but give orders and lay down rules!’

  ‘Good night!’

  I careered away down the stairs, pulling my mackintosh on as I went. Outside it was raining a small cold rain and the street lamps were spilling big blurry reflections onto the wet pavement. I set off walking north. I felt upset and alarmed. And tomorrow was Saturday. I was more connected with young Thomas than I had realized when I had decided, for such excellent reasons, to leave her. Had I ever considered marrying Tommy, stowing myself away as Tommy’s husband, an equivalent of the suicide which I could not commit because of Crystal? No. Life does not end even with the most desperate of marriages, it prolongs itself drearily: new occasions for cruelty, a life of crime. I was not as bad as that. Besides, my bonds with Crystal made death by marriage equally unthinkable. Of course I had lied to Tommy at the start. I had implied too many encouraging half-truths, to pave the way to bed. I had got myself into a false position and, I suspected, would not be able to get out until I felt so frenzied by the pain of it that I would be prepared to use an axe. I knew soberly that I had not yet reached the axe-using stage. Meanwhile I could not afford to sympathize with Tommy: that awful withdrawal of sympathy, like our refusal to sympathize with the dying. But I would have to wait a little while yet before I could finally dispose of Thomasina Uhlmeister. There was moreover another factor. For reasons which I shall explain shortly I did not want to break with Tommy until I could see more clearly what Crystal felt about Arthur Fisch.

  SATURDAY

  ‘I SAY, Hilary, that Indian girl was here again last night.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘A sort of long blue jacket and trousers with peacocks on.’

  I had not noticed the peacocks, but it was clearly the same girl.

  ‘Did she ring the bell?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. She didn’t the other time either. She was just hanging about.’

  ‘But she said she wanted me?’

  ‘She did the other time, because I asked her if I could do anything.’

  ‘And this time?’

  ‘I said hello and she just smiled.’

  ‘Mysterious. Did you remember to buy those candles?’

  ‘Hell, no, I forgot again. I’m sorry.’

  It was Saturday morning. I was in the kitchen ironing handkerchiefs. To avoid the torment of social life at the launderette I had bought a washing machine. I would not let Christopher use it. Of course Crystal would gladly have come over and washed and cleaned, and of course I would not let her. The flat was my private hell. It was only moderately filthy. Handkerchiefs were the only things which I ironed. Unironed handkerchiefs could lead to madness. Before that I had been browsing in a Danish dictionary over my toast and tea. (On week-days I breakfasted on two cups of tea. Toast was a week-end treat.) Before that I had attempted to shave, after having absently, while thinking about the past, squeezed all the shaving cream out into the basin and screwed the tube up into a twisted ball. It was now only nine-thirty. Sweet Christ help me until opening time.

  Christopher had paid me some rent, not much, but it had improved our relations. He was sitting on the kitchen table swinging his legs and brushing his long golden hair, pausing every now and then to extract balls of glittering fuzz from the brush and drop them with care upon the floor. Brushing of hair always set my teeth on edge since experience at the orphanage but I said nothing because of the rent. We now, after the interlude recorded above, reverted to the sort of conversation we usually had on Saturdays. I had admired one of his mandalas and said he ought to have been a painter. He had idiotically taken this seriously and said yes perhaps he ought. I had told him he had not enough industry and self-discipline to make himself anything. He said with revolting humility that indeed he would never be a saint. I said hang saint, he would never do anything properly. He said how true, except live, which he implied I could not do. He said I was a typical anxiety-ridden product of a competitive society and ought to practise meditation to calm my nerves. I said I would rather be anxious than drug myself with a lot of false lying oriental mumbo-jumbo. He denied it was mumbo-jumbo. I said if it were not mumbo-jumbo how was it he had never been able to explain it to me in ordinary words.

  ‘It’s beyond words.’

  ‘Pshaw!’

  ‘I mean, it’s like an experience, not a sort of belief.’

  ‘What’s it an experience of?’

  ‘It’s like mind is everything.’

  ‘Is this electric iron mind and this handkerchief and this gas stove?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All part of the same mind?’

  ‘Well, ultimately — ’

  ‘So the mental and the physical are really one?’

  ‘Yes, you see — ’

  ‘And the difference between one mind and another is merely apparent?’

  ‘Well, yes, and — ’

  ‘So really nothing exists at all except one big mind?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s — ’

  ‘And you tell me that’s not mumbo-jumbo?’

  ‘But it’s not like ordinary abstract thought — ’

  ‘I’ll say. A man on the wireless last week was saying everything in the universe was determined in the first hundred seconds after the Big Bang. He was lucid by comparison.’

  ‘I know you dig concepts — ’

  ‘There’s nothing else to dig.’

  ‘But you see, the basis of all being is mental, I mean it’s got to be, so you are sort of in all things right from the start. You see, I make that iron exist, I mean it looks different to a spider, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But a spider is part of your mind too.’

  ‘Yes, of course, and what the spider sees is part of my mind and then I realize that I don’t really exist at all as me, I’m really everything and I have to try to experience everything as me — ’

  ‘I don’t see why. Is this supposed to be moral? Why is it moral not to believe in a lot of separate things? Why is it moral only to believe in oneself? I thought morality was forgetting yourself and making careful distinctions and respecting the existence of other people.’

  ‘But this is forgetting yourself and when you realize you are everything then you love everything and you’re good automatically — ’

  ‘And even if we are all thoughts in the mind of God or whatever why should you be able to become God?’

  ‘What’s stopping me? You see God isn’t a big person, you see it isn’t personal at all, that’s the point.’

  ‘But we are persons.’

  ‘No, we’re not, that’s just the old Christian nonsense, personality is an illusion.’

  ‘Unless other people have definite structures they can’t have
definite rights. No wonder you don’t want to vote. If nobody exists why bother.’

  ‘You see, Christianity gets it wrong because of a personal God, it’s the most anti-religious idea ever. The idea of God looking at you makes you feel you’re a little real thing, a nitty gritty, whereas you must think that you are God, that you’re universal mind, you see it’s just the other way round, it’s the female principle, you see Christianity is such a male-oriented religion, it’s all about father, that’s why unisex is so important, you see we in the West with our Jewish father figure civilization, I mean — How did you get on with your father, Hilary?’