A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  Crystal of course was perfect. It was for a little while unclear whether I would live. I lived and completely recovered. Crystal sat by me for weeks and months. I did not tell her everything at once, but in the end I did tell her everything. She knew we were both done for. She was perfect. I could not work for a year, not because of my bodily health but because I was in despair. I suffered an agony of remorse about Anne which bit me physically, doubling me up for whole parts of the day. I had a problem about responsibility for the past which became a problem of identity. I mourned and mourned about the destruction of my hopes. The loss of Oxford, of learning and scholarship and improvement, the loss of Crystal’s metamorphosis and Crystal’s happiness. I went back to the north and lived for a year with Crystal in one room in the town where I was born. People who had known me and envied me came to survey with satisfaction the wreckage of clever ambitious fortunate Hilary Burde. (A pity Aunt Bill missed that. She would have loved it.) Mr Osmand had already left the town. I hoped he never heard. I wept over Crystal. She wept over me. She supported me by returning to work in the chocolate factory. To this day the smell of chocolate brings back the horror of that time.

  It would of course have been possible to recover and to set out once more on the quest of all the things I wanted and had so largely got when I met Anne. Oxford would be impossible of course, but there were other universities where I could have set myself up, where I could have educated Crystal and lived something like the sort of life which I had coveted. It would have been possible to do this in the sense that someone else in similar circumstances might have been able to do it. I was not able. At any rate I did not do it. Paradoxically, I might have survived better alone. It was the thought of Crystal’s suffering, her loss, her disappointment that was my chief millstone; and grief itself sapped the will to find any remedy. I just wanted to die, at least that was my mood. I could not loll myself because of Crystal. I wanted to hide. After the year in the north I went to London, as criminals and destroyed people do, because it is the best place to hide. And I hid. And Crystal came and hid with me. I got a job as a clerk in a car hire firm. I lost the job when I was required to do some driving. I had been banned from driving for life after the accident. I got a little job with an estate agent, then a little job in a local government office. At last I gravitated into the civil service, at the humble level at which I had remained ever since until I almost began to think of myself as an old man.

  Gunnar had vanished from my life, as I imagined forever. As he became more important and successful I began to hear of him, to read about him in the newspapers, but though these reminders jabbed like daggers it was news of a stranger. Gunnar was a big international man, someone existing in Brussels, in Geneva, in Washington, in New York, never to cross my path again. I only saw him once after the accident. He came to see me in the hospital as soon as I was able to talk. (My jaw was smashed and speech was impossible for some time.) He was cold and civil and asked me, as if he were a police officer investigating some minor offence, to tell him about the accident. I told him; at least I told him the mechanical details, the speed of the car, the way it somersaulted. The crash had deprived me of consciousness and I did not see Anne after the moment of impact. He asked nothing more. He went away without any show of emotion, without any remark or look which could establish a connection between us. And at his cue I was equally cold. Later I went over and over this last meeting in my mind thinking of things I might have said. ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me.’ Yet how could I, without help from him, have said that? If only he had shown a flicker of emotion I could have burst out to him. But there was no emotion and no outburst. I thought later of writing to him, but I never wrote. Tristram committed suicide at the age of sixteen.

  SATURDAY

  IT WAS Saturday morning. It was a cold day with a lot of low scurrying brown clouds and a bitterly cold wind and a few flashes of watery sun which simply showed up how wet and muddy London was. I had had bad dreams, most of which I had forgotten, the atmosphere of horror only remaining. Would that our sins had built-in qualities of oblivescence such as our dreams have. One dream I remembered. I was in a quiet awful place beside some water where some huge crime either had been committed in the past or would be committed in the future. Not knowing which was part of the dreadfulness of the dream.

  This morning I heartily regretted having told Arthur. At the time I had felt relieved to tell. There had been an almost orgiastic satisfaction in doing so. I had sent Arthur out to get some wine, and I had drunk a great deal. This morning I felt terrible, sick and giddy and disgusted with myself. I ate three aspirins and drank a great deal of water. It was not that I doubted Arthur’s discretion or that I minded his knowing. This knowledge, which would have been intolerable inside almost anyone else’s head, was harmless in Arthur’s. It just now seemed a terrible mistake to have relived it all. All that immodest spewing talk, all those eloquent emotional drunken words, had made the whole thing hideously more vivid. Even my dull stripped flat gave back the dreadful resonance. I had stripped the flat as I had stripped my life in a vain attempt to remove from it anything which could remind me of Anne. Today, opening my Polish dictionary, I found a pressed flower, a white violet, which she had espied in her garden and given me during that charmed and innocent time when I loved her and she did not yet know it.

  The day began with a letter from Tommy.

  Dear heart, I am sorry I was so useless last night and please forgive what I said about Laura Impiatt, I know that was just stupid. You know I love you and I want to marry you, but I want most of all to take pain away from you and I’m sure if you would only share your woes with me you would feel better. I can’t believe that you ever did anything really bad, but even if you did I feel that you ought to forgive yourself. Guilt does no good to anyone, does it? Anyway I forgive you, on behalf of God. Won’t you take that from me as a Christmas present? I feel I love you so much that I am able (and so on and so on)

  I thought it was rather touching of Tommy to offer me God’s forgiveness for Christmas, especially as she did not know what I had done, and I realized that I was lucky to be loved by a girl as intelligent and nice as Tommy, but she was simply no use to me at all and I wished her at the devil.

  The electricity was still off. The flat was extremely cold. I was wearing a jersey and an overcoat and felt awkward and bulky and still frozen. I burnt myself lighting a spirit stove to boil a kettle. Mr Pellow knocked on the door, asking if we could spare him a candle. I told him we could not. Later I caught Christopher sneaking out with a candle for Mr Pellow. I confiscated it. Christopher told me that Mick Ladderslow had been arrested in connection with the Steal for Chairman Mao Campaign, and would I perhaps put up some money to bail him out of prison? I would not. Christopher went away and started practising his tabla. I told him to shut up. He came back into the kitchen and broke the spirit stove by turning the handle too hard. I told him I had had enough of him and he could clear out, but he took no notice as I often said this. Jimbo Davis arrived looking spiritual and carrying some evergreen branches. He took my hand in an (or did I imagine it?) especially sympathetic way, murmuring ‘yes, yes — ’ He and Christopher retired into Christopher’s room where they laughed a lot, doubtless at my expense.

  Laura Impiatt arrived. I passionately did not want to see her, but had not the spirit to invent an immediate lie. (‘Oh what a shame, I am just this moment leaving for Hounslow.’) Today, although it was not raining, she was wearing a huge yellow sou’wester tied under the chin, a quilted mackintosh coat and blue serge trousers pulled in above her ankles with bicycle clips. She did not take her coat off. We sat at the kitchen table, two bulky cold muffled up objects with red noses. She wanted coffee but there was now no way of boiling a kettle. We peered at each other in the gloom.

  ‘Hilary, will you be able to bear it if Crystal marries Arthur?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Laura, just don’t be silly, there’s a dear.’

  ‘I know how close you are to
Crystal.’

  ‘I want her to marry Arthur.’

  ‘Then why were you almost mad with misery on Thursday?’

  ‘I wasn’t, I had toothache. Arthur is a splendid chap.’

  ‘Arthur is not exactly a catch.’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Crystal is not exactly an English Rose.’

  ‘I’m surprised to hear you talk like that about Crystal.’

  ‘I can see what’s obvious, even about my sister. She’s lucky to have a suitor at all.’

  ‘I would have expected you to be more sort of fastidious.’

  ‘Who am I to be sort of fastidious.’

  ‘But don’t you care? And you can’t be serious about marrying Tommy.’

  ‘Who said I was marrying Tommy?’

  ‘You did, on Thursday.’

  ‘I was just saying anything that came into my head to shut you up.’

  ‘How nice of you! You know, Hilary, you don’t value yourself enough. There’s so much of you and you make so little of it. It’s as if you’d lost all your courage, just absolutely lost your nerve.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But why? Hilary, you must tell me. It would do you good to tell it all to somebody. I know there’s something. Hilary, let me help you. I love you, my dear, let me help. Don’t just throw yourself away. I know you need a home, and you’ll need it all the more if Crystal marries. Lean on me, use me. You know you have a home with us at Queen’s Gate Terrace. It could be much more to you if only you’d open yourself a little. We are childless. Freddie’s very fond of you — ’

  ‘Laura, I shall be sick.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, I know you so well. I do. Just relax, you’re all tense, you’re so physically tense, relax, see, your hands are all knotted up — ’

  ‘It’s so bloody cold.’

  Laura had taken one of my hands and was kneading it enthusiastically between her own. Her hands in fact were so cold that the process, even if I had cared for it in general, would have brought little relief. I closed my eyes in an absolute gesture of despair. I wanted to scream at Laura, to terrify her. Anne’s face appeared with a hallucinatory clarity in the domed darkness, as if cast by a magic lantern onto the London night sky. I must write my letter of resignation. I must do it this morning. I must be gone before he arrived. The ‘I’m sorry’ which I could not say to him had been said often enough since, but it did no good, there was no one to listen.

  At that moment the electricity suddenly came on and the kitchen leapt into bright light. The boys cheered. I removed my hand from Laura’s cold clasp.

  The front door bell rang. I went to the door. It was the telephone engineer. I stared at him stupidly.

  ‘It’s the boss in person. Hello.’

  ‘But the telephone,’ I said. ‘You’ve done all that, haven’t you? There’s nothing more to do, is there? It’s all gone away.’

  ‘Telephone? What’s that? I’m not on duty.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is a social call, man. I’m here as Len, not for Her Majesty.’

  ‘You want Christopher.’

  ‘This is where we came in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just said “you want Christopher”. That’s what you said to me the first time.’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘I think it’s an indelicate question.’

  I called ‘Christopher!’ and went back to the kitchen leaving the front door open. Christopher emerged. Laura said to me, ‘I must have a word with Christopher. Freddie wants him to write some music for It is later than you think.’

  ‘It is later than you think. Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Why, hello, Len, how nice! Len and I are old friends!’

  ‘Are you, Laura?’

  Christopher and Len and Laura were filling the kitchen with chatter. Jimbo, still in Christopher’s room, was arranging the green branches in a vase. Through the still open front door I saw Biscuit standing on the landing wearing a sari.

  I went out to her slowly, pulling the door to behind me.

  The sari was a plain bluish-purple with a wide golden border. She had been wearing a coat over it but had removed the coat. It was folded up neatly beside her on the floor. Her hair had been put up into an intricately woven glossy ball suspended somehow at the back of her head. This made her look older. And the sari gave her, in an odd way, a look of being in uniform, on duty. With the great erection of the hair the pale brown face looked thinner, the eyes huger, reflecting in their depths the bluish-purple tints of the gorgeous sari.

  ‘Hello, mystery girl.’

  ‘Hello, Hilary.’

  ‘I’m Hilary today, am I? Why did you run away?’

  I took her wrist lightly between my fingers. The bony feel of the wrist was already familiar. I moved my hand, caressing the wrist, taking her small hand, still lightly, in a full grasp. Her hand was moist and warm. It moved inside my hand like a snuggling animal.

  ‘It’s full up in there,’ I said, motioning over my shoulder at the flat.

  ‘I’m sorry. Then will you come with me? Will you come with me to a café? I have got something to give you.’ The way she said ‘to a café’ sounded curiously foreign and the phrase had a ridiculously improper ring about it.

  I looked down at her. Her hand had reminded me of Anne’s hand. Or rather, her hand had reminded my hand. My hand did not know that Anne was dead and that twenty years had passed and that I was a murderer. Gunnar must have seen Anne in the hospital before she died. What had happened to her face? Did he hold her in his arms when she was dying?

  ‘Will you come with me, please?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m busy. I’ve got to write an important letter. I can’t play games of will you won’t you with mystery girls. Just fuck off and leave me alone, will you? I’ve got enough trouble without being persecuted by bloody tarts.’

  I went back into the flat and slammed the door. Laura and the boys were making some coffee.

  I was with Crystal. She was holding my hand. It seemed to be my day for holding hands with women. I now regretted having sent Biscuit away. I would like to have gone to bed with her. Presumably that was what it was all about. It would have distracted my mind. I wondered if she would ever come back again. She had looked very beautiful in her sari. And at least she was a little separate piece of possible future. I was rather short of future at present.

  The electricity, much reduced in power, had remained on all day, and was still on, although further cuts were threatened.

  I had eaten a little supper and drunk a great deal of the litre bottle of Spanish burgundy. Supper had consisted of steak and kidney pudding, out of a tin, brussels sprouts and mince pies. The white lace tablecloth was on, and I had spilt wine on it again. Crystal washed it snow-white every week.

  ‘Do you still want to see the Christ Child in Regent Street?’

  ‘Oh — dearest — have you sent that letter yet?’

  ‘I haven’t written it yet.’

  ‘Must you leave the office?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You needn’t see him.’

  ‘He’d be there. And he’d know I was there.’ How awful for Gunnar, it occurred to me, to find me infesting the place as a low form of life, a sort of loathsome beetle. ‘The least I can do is be gone before he comes, not remind him that I exist.’

  Crystal’s rather square podgy face was all wrinkled up with anxiety and grief and love. Her frizzy orangy hair was tangled as she had been twisting it between her fingers earlier in the evening. She was wearing her glasses, gazing across the room with her enlarged golden eyes, staring at the row of ebony elephants that marched upon the sideboard and holding my hand in both of hers. Laura had kneaded, Biscuit had nuzzled. Crystal held steady, firm, the way you might hold someone’s hand if he were going to be shot.

  ‘I’ll soon get another job,’ I said. ‘And if I can’t, you and Arthur can support me! I won’t starve.’

  ‘If it would help if
I stopped going with Arthur — ’

  ‘Oh don’t be idiotic, Crystal! If I could only be sure you were happy and looked after I’d — ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh not kill myself or anything. Not even emigrate. I might marry Tommy.’