A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  Much love,

  Laura.

  The third letter was from the headmaster of the _______ Grammar School. ( _______ was the town where I was born.) It read

  Dear Sir,

  Mr Osmand

  I have received your letter re Mr Osmand who has some years ago left this school. I write to inform you that your letter addressed to Mr Osmand has been redirected to the school where he taught after leaving here. (The address followed.) I have also taken the liberty of forwarding to the HM there a copy of your letter addressed to me. Mr Osmand has however to the best of my knowledge left that school also. Hopefully they will have a forwarding address.

  Yours faithfully,

  J. P. Bostock.

  The fourth letter was from Kitty.

  I understood your refusing to accept my letter, but this is another one. I must see you. Could we meet tomorrow Sunday morning at Peter Pan at eleven? I want to ask you something very special. It is most important. It is something for Gunnar not for me. I shall expect you.

  K.

  Kitty’s letter was delivered at about nine o’clock by Biscuit, after I had read the other three. The flat was strangely quiet and it had taken me a little while to realize that Christopher had already departed. I looked into his room. All his silly touching gear had disappeared. He had gone. I felt sad and a little frightened. An era was ending.

  There was now nothing to stop me inviting Biscuit in. We sat in the kitchen drinking cups of tea. The servants’ hall atmosphere was overwhelming, the air of idle menials gossiping about their betters.

  ‘Tell her I’ll come.’ My main feeling on receiving her letter was profound relief. My gesture of yesterday had been idle. I would have to see Kitty now even if the heavens fell.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Talk to me, Biscuit, tell me this and that. I wonder how much you really know about what’s going on? I bet you know plenty.’

  Biscuit had shed her duffle coat on the floor. She was wearing narrow serge trousers and a blue padded jacket, a more wintry version of what she had had on when I first saw her. Her long plait was inside the jacket. She looked tired, very little and thin, her face so narrow and frail. I put my hand upon the table as if coaxing a bird and she put her thin hand into it and let me caress her fingers.

  ‘I know some things.’

  ‘Really? Lady Kitty told you?’

  ‘No, not Kitty, Gunnar.’

  ‘Gunnar,’ I withdrew my hand hastily. The use of the names shocked almost as much as the information.

  ‘Why not? I have lived in his house for years. Do you think I am invisible?’

  To him, yes, I had. ‘But — ’

  ‘A man, two women. We have been everywhere together.’

  ‘Biscuit, you haven’t told him — ’

  ‘About you and her? Of course not! I would not hurt him with that.’

  ‘Be careful. If you know some things you must know that there is nothing bad here, it is all to help him. I may see her once again — ’

  ‘You and your onces. You be careful too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He wanted to kill you.’

  ‘You know why?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he doesn’t any more, he was kind to me yesterday, we are friends now.’

  ‘Why should you trust them?’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘People can pretend.’

  ‘What on earth?’

  ‘A plot, a trap, it would be a good way to finish you.’

  ‘Biscuit, you’re mad.’

  ‘I must go now.’

  ‘Will you kindly explain — ’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘You’re joking. A rather stupid joke. Good-bye then, until the next letter.’

  ‘I will bring no more letters, I am leaving them.’

  ‘Leaving Lady Kitty?’

  ‘Yes. Be careful. If you hurt him I curse you.’

  ‘I won’t hurt him! All right, off you go, I’m sick and tired of riddles.’

  She picked up her coat and was out of the door like a flying shadow.

  It was Saturday evening and I was with Crystal. (No Thomas of course, since I had not telephoned.) Outside the snow was falling steadily in big woolly flakes. We had had our supper: sausages and fried eggs and beans and tinned peaches and custard.

  ‘Don’t go to her,’ said Crystal, ‘don’t go.’

  I had spent the day at home alone in a prostrating agony of reflection. I lay on my bed and literally writhed with doubt and anguish.

  Biscuit’s extraordinary riddles had upset me profoundly and made me feel menaced and polluted as by a ghost. The spirit of revenge is not so easily exorcized. I was disturbed and muddled and could not afterwards remember exactly what Biscuit had said, let alone what she had intended. Had she hinted that the whole thing was an elaborate plot between the spouses to lure me on, and then, in a hideously appropriate situation, punish me? To make me re-enact my crime and to unmask me in it? Would I end up slaughtered by Gunnar at Kitty’s feet? Were there women who could use their wiles for such a purpose, find pleasure and excitement in such a drama? Of course there were. Could Kitty conceivably be one of them?

  I was not long in deciding this to be impossible. However there were other possibilities. There was the ambiguity of Biscuit herself. Because Kitty trusted Biscuit I had trusted her blindly. Could both trusts be misplaced? What secret loves and jealousies lurked unsuspected here? How much did Biscuit really know anyway? She was capable of lying. The hazard of Biscuit had however to be accepted, now as it had been at the start, and I felt fatalistic and almost uninterested in what Biscuit might or might not do. There was perhaps more danger in other quarters. Kitty might, on some truthful impulse, tell Gunnar that she had seen me. What was the significance of her suddenly appearing in the drawing-room and interrupting our talk? Had she wanted somehow, in some incoherent and illogical way, to mitigate the falsehood by seeing me in his presence? She might be suffering some guilty discomfort by which she might be prompted to tell him everything. Or she might (foolishly, but she was foolish) come to feel that since after all she had been asking me to help Gunnar it did not matter all that much that we had met clandestinely. She might tell Gunnar, she might already have told him, not thinking he would mind, not realizing how, however carefully she described it, the thing might look. Had Gunnar then shaken the whole truth out of her, the kiss upon the jetty, her feelings, mine? Or had he perhaps led her on, and involved her without her knowledge in just such a plot as Biscuit had seemed to suggest?

  The strange thing was that after a while, after perhaps hours, I could look at this possibility with fairly calm eyes. Even if this was so I must see Kitty. It was almost as if, especially if this was so I must see her. I felt the forces of destiny quite sufficiently mustered round about me. Was I being lured on, fascinated, not by Kitty but by Gunnar himself, to make perfect his revenge? If there was a plot must I not connive, a trap must I not fall into it? Did I then want Gunnar to kill me? Of course I recognized these thoughts as half mad. They were, I suppose, a frenzied working over, in the interests of a resignation which did not divide me from Kitty, of the plausible terrors which Biscuit had conjured up. I must go to Kitty even if it were to my death, and even if she too had willed it.

  I seemed at last to come, in these matters, to some sort of conclusion, and I was able to set them aside. More important, deeper, were considerations which once more cast doubt upon what I ought to do tomorrow. No, I could not believe that Gunnar had been play-acting on Friday. Of course sincerity is not indivisible, he could have been sincere and not sincere. But that talk had been something real, something momentous and genuinely achieved. Surely something good; good at least if only I and he could maintain the peace of mind necessary to let it work. Gunnar had hated me, he had wanted to kill me. Then suddenly because of his indelible generosity, because there are righteous spirits in the world, we had been able to communicate in gentleness, to forgive oursel
ves and each other. It had all seemed to ‘come right’. And, I now realized as I lay there writhing on my bed, how happy all this would have made me if it had simply happened by itself, if it had simply existed between me and Gunnar without the shadow cast upon it by Kitty. And there were moments when I cursed this spoiling of my enjoyment of a perfect thing. If only Kitty had not meddled. Yet it was through her meddling that the thing had come about.

  I tossed my body and my thoughts to and fro, and as the hours passed it seemed more and more as if everything was taking place after all against a huge fated background which was, because so fated, somehow calm: my love for Kitty. Being in love has its own self-certifying universality, it informs and glorifies the world with an energy which, like a drug, becomes a necessity of consciousness. Without it the scene is dark, without that throbbing communication, dead. A mad state, perhaps an undesirable one, inimical to justice, benevolence, common sense. But, for its slaves, it justifies itself as, for the ordinary unsaintly man, nothing else ever does. Of course I would see Kitty again. My love for her was a great unexpected extra gratuitous good thing. It was good that I should be changed, shaken, my bones severed, my mind devastated by this experience. How could I wish it otherwise or unwish any suffering it would bring me? About her feelings for me I dared not think, about the future I did not think. I assumed there was none. I had no ‘hope’. There were, as I obscurely saw it, various ‘goods’. If I could only endure and keep them separate and hope nothing and plan nothing and be prepared for any degree of misery then at last somehow perhaps there would be some merciful dispensation and all would ultimately after all in some as yet undisclosed sense be well.

  ‘Don’t go to her,’ said Crystal. ‘I am so afraid. That woman will lure you to your doom.’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ I said. ‘You know nothing whatever about her.’

  We were drinking wine, at least I was. Crystal had brought her chair near to mine and was staring at me intently and urgently with her enlarged yellow eyes. I was feeling electric, restless, twitching with anxiety and desire for Kitty and love and the magnitude of recent events.

  ‘Darling, don’t see her. Leave well alone. I’m so terribly glad you saw Gunnar and it was all so good. Leave it there, leave it like that when you’ve got some good out of it all. Don’t see her, and don’t see him again either. Let’s escape now when we can. I’m so glad you’re leaving the office. Oh do let’s go away somewhere else.’

  ‘I can’t get a university job now, Crystal, that’s just a dream.’

  ‘Well, any job, we can both work, we’ve always been poor, I want to go away.’

  ‘Where to, dear?’

  ‘We could go back to _______. I heard from — ’

  ‘Crystal, I will not go back to ------ ! You know that! Don’t be insane.’

  ‘Please let’s break away now before something happens, Hilary. I wish we could change our lives.’

  ‘So do I. It’s not so easy.’

  ‘We’ve been so unhappy all these years and it hasn’t been necessary, it’s been bad, we’ve been unhappy in a bad way.’

  ‘You may be right,’ I said, ‘but it’s a bit late to change that.’

  ‘It isn’t too late. I blame myself, I’ve let you decide everything — ’

  ‘That was pretty daft of you, wasn’t it!’

  ‘I’ve let you brood and worry about — that — without end, and I should have told you to stop. We should have tried to be happy.’

  ‘Maybe. But this is all vague stuff. Human minds are relentless things and strong. You can’t just turn a switch and decree merriment.’

  ‘Now that you’ve had this wonderful talk with Gunnar — it’s time to go — please, please, for my sake, I’ve never said this before, never begged you before — I do now — please don’t see her — you needn’t go to the office any more — let’s go away on holiday, go away anywhere — ’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Crystal, anyway we haven’t got any money. Where do you want to go, the South of France?’

  ‘I’d love to go to France,’ said Crystal, ‘I’d love to. It seems to me now I’ve been stupid. I shouldn’t have let us get like this. I’ve lived all these years like a mouse — ’

  ‘The dearest goodest little mouse that ever was!’

  ‘In a hole, just sitting here and waiting for you to come and see me, that’s what it comes to, it isn’t a life — ’

  ‘I know, I know, I know, don’t tell me, don’t torment me with it! I wanted to make you happy, when we were young I thought of nothing else, I wanted to succeed for you, I wanted to be rich for you — and look what it’s all come to.’

  ‘I’ve never complained — ’

  ‘Maybe you should have done, if you feel like this!’

  ‘Maybe I should have done. Sometimes it’s wicked to be unhappy. Please let’s go on holiday. I’ll make myself some dresses. I’d like to stay in a hotel. I’ve never stayed in a hotel.’

  ‘Crystal, darling, stop it, you’ll make us both cry, like you used to do in the caravan! We can’t go on holiday, (a) because we’ve got no cash, (b) because I’ve got to stay here and finish various things. I’ve got to work my month at the office, I need the time, I need the bloody money. Gunnar may want to see me again. I — ’

  ‘You want to see her. That’s the only thing that’s keeping you.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody spiteful.’

  ‘I’m not spiteful, I’m terrified. I think I shall see Arthur again.’

  ‘See Arthur? I thought we’d finished with Arthur.’

  ‘Dearest, I so much want a child. I’ve got nothing in my life. Of course I’ve got you —’

  ‘I agree that amounts to nothing.’

  ‘I want a child. A child could change everything for me. You don’t want me to sit here forever becoming bitter and old? I’ve never complained, but I’m complaining now. Perhaps that’s the beginning of being bitter and old. I must have things different — ’

  ‘Things could be different and worse.’

  ‘I know you don’t like Arthur — ’

  ‘I don’t mind Arthur. I just think he’s a nonentity.’

  ‘Well, I’m a nonentity — ’

  ‘Crystal, you’re not, you’re my sister. Now stop moaning.’

  ‘We could all go away — I’d so much like to live in the country — ’

  ‘You mean you and I and Arthur? Count me out. I’m not going anywhere with you and Arthur. He was all set to follow us to Australia!’

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘Oh never mind. He still loves you, he’s still waiting. I suggest you and Arthur go to Australia and have six children.’

  ‘Hilary, don’t be angry — ’

  ‘I’m not angry, or if I am I ought to be shot. Crystal, don’t bother me with these things just now, will you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Just don’t torment me at present, you torment me! I’ve got so much to think about, so much to decide, so much to do. I’ve got to bloody find a job apart from everything else. Probably the best thing for me to do is to commit suicide. Then you can live happily ever after with Arthur.’

  ‘Oh darling — don’t speak like that — you know Arthur doesn’t matter — you’re the only thing that matters to me — ’

  ‘My dear heart, I know it’s awful, and I know we’ve lived stupidly. You’re absolutely right, it’s a sort of moral cowardice, pure obsession, there has been nothing good in it. I see that now, but what am I to do? I think I mixed up some idea of expiation with a sort of self-destructive disappointed anger against everything — Christ, I even made you suffer — it was probably something to do with the ghastly revengeful sort of religion we were brought up in.’