by Iris Murdoch
Barney, who had been feeling scared before, was now terrified. He was in a state of total confusion concerning the nature and consequences of his discovery, and he had just made a colossal moral judgment which he was still entirely unable to assimilate. With Pat’s arrival Barney became suddenly sensitive to another aspect of the matter, his own guilt as an eavesdropper, a guilt vastly potentiated by the magnitude of what he had overheard. If they were to find him there listening to them in the dark there could be no forgiveness then. Pat, moreover, was the last person in the world before whom Barney could have endured to feel that particular shame.
He did not speculate about Pat’s visit or attempt to overhear any more. He tiptoed down the stairs and stood at the back of the hall wondering if it was safe to leave the house. As he was still hesitating Pat came running down the stairs and out of the front door. A moment later the door reopened and Pat, as it seemed to Barney, came back into the house again. Barney waited no longer but slid away into the kitchen quarters and out into the paved yard, where he waited a while until the moon was again obscured and then went to rejoin his bicycle.
The next morning the pattern of his feelings had shifted. His indignation against Andrew was more extreme, while his indignation against Millie was tempered by a kind of pity which made him feel for the first time superior to her. He felt also a kind of triumphant relief at having found out so much and escaped with impunity. His jealousy had diminished, merging into a tender sense of responsibility for Millie, and a sober recognition that he now held a very powerful weapon against her. His previous temptation, to reveal Christopher’s intentions to Frances, now seemed a feeble pointless affair. It was, it remained, unclear what could be the result of this revelation. But now Barney had at his disposal an infallible method of achieving both his objects, the separation of Millie from Christopher and the separation of Frances from Andrew. Would he employ this method?
Perhaps it was better not to meddle. Since that had happened and would presumably be happening again it was unlikely that the two marriages that he feared would come off anyway. The apple cart was sure to be upset without his intervention. If by any chance, however, Frances or Millie did marry, not only would Barney never be able to forgive himself for not having spoken sooner, he knew that he would be irresistibly impelled to make the revelation later on when it was too late to do anything but damage. So was it not, considering all the facts including his own weakness, his plain duty to write to Frances?
Barney went to the Easter Mass like a sleep walker. He had decided on the previous day to go and now went automatically. Then quite suddenly, as if someone had come into the room and lightly touched him as he sat absent-mindedly, he was reminded of where he was and what occasion was being honoured. He recalled his good resolutions of three days ago when he had decided to simplify his life and make peace with Kathleen. Had that been mere meaningless emotion or had it been truly the pressure of another world upon his darkness? He remembered how he had felt sunk in himself beyond the possibility of change. Then when this freedom had suddenly been breathed upon him he had jerked up, he had certainly moved; but he had moved still in the old way, projecting his stale self in a new direction; and as soon as there was any check to his fantasy he had despaired at once. He had wanted a formal punishment. But perhaps his penance was simply informality. The terrible thought occurred to him that possibly he ought simply to act rightly and expect no one even to notice it.
The mass impressed him with the notion of an event, a change. Attending to it, he began to feel an obscure distress, a pang as at the loss of something. He never really liked the ending of Lent. He was never quite ready to finish with mourning when the great peal of joy rang out. Suddenly now it occurred to him why.
Dic nobis, Maria,
Quid vidisti in via?
Sepulcrum Christi viventis
Et gloriam vidi resurgentis.
Mary Magdalene might indeed have glimpsed Him in the garden somewhere, but for the rest of us there remained only the empty tomb. ‘He is not here.’ The Christ who travels towards Jerusalem and suffers there can be made into a familiar. The risen Christ is something suddenly unknown. This metamorphosis had always in the past represented for Barney simply a disappointment, like the ending of a play. He had never thought of it as a starting point. He thought of it so now for the first time; and, with this shift of view, it became clear to him, with a sudden authoritative clarity, that it was the risen Christ and not the suffering Christ who must be his saviour: the absent Christ hidden in God and not that all too recognizable victim. He was too horribly, too intimately connected with his own degraded image of the Christ of Good Friday. Easter must purge that imagery now. The scourged tormented flesh appealed to something in him that was too grossly human since he had not the gift of compassion. These sufferings ended for him in self-pity and further on and shamefully in pleasure. This could not alter him a jot though he contemplated it forever. What was required of him was something which lay quite outside the deeply worked pattern of suffering, the plain possibility of change without drama and even without punishment. Perhaps after all that was the message of Easter. Absence not pain would be the rite of his salvation.
As Barney walked home from mass he also recalled to his mind events of yesterday which his visit to Rathblane had made him totally forget. For a short time, a period perhaps of two hours, he had believed that the Volunteers were about to start an armed rising. Even though he had so incomprehensibly, and it now seemed to him stupidly, surrendered his rifle, a sacrifice not to God but to his own vanity, he was nevertheless an Irish Volunteer. He was a careless, lax, muddle-headed one, but still he was a Volunteer, and he had pledged himself to fight for Ireland should the moment ever come. Then by a connection of thought which led him back through what seemed to him the best moments of his life, he recalled Clonmacnoise, and the little roofless chapel and the abandoned stones and the great empty sweep of the Shannon. Numen inerat. And the presence there had been not only God but Ireland. Tears sprang into his eyes.
Barney had joined the Volunteers partly but not entirely to please Pat. He had joined too because he loved Ireland and pitied that history of suffering and because he knew that it might in the end be necessary to fight for rights which had been too long withheld. Barney had a strong sense of history but very little sense of politics, and he acted here by intuition. He had expected everything from Ireland, from her darkness and her beauty, he had run to her as to a mother and a place of shriving. And although his life had been a disappointment and a muddle, it did not occur to him to blame Ireland for this. He had abandoned his book on the saints. It was he who was the traitor. That dark perfection remained near him and untouched, and he loved it. He owed Ireland that service. He had thought so when he joined the Volunteers and he had ineluctably thought so again during the dreadful two hours of yesterday. He had been intensely relieved to learn that he had not got to fight after all.
Barney now sat in his room and looked at the letters to Frances which he had begun earlier in the morning before he went to mass. He could still not think quite clearly about the problem, but it seemed to him that the letters were unworthy. Perhaps Frances ought to know, and perhaps Christopher ought to know, what had happened, but this did not yield the result that he ought to tell them. Any meddling of his here would be evil. He could not, just automatically could not, act with a pure interest, and he ought not to cause fear, misery and hatred without one. Andrew, Millie, Frances and Christopher must take their chance and work out the design of their fate without interference from him. It must be as if he had never known, never seen, that which he knew and saw, or as if he must for ever admit that he could not understand it. Inaction, agnosticism were for him the lessons of the empty tomb. And then it had come to him that with Kathleen too it must be the same. He must not expect to understand Kathleen or to be understood by her. He must not expect her to help him to make a tidy drama out of his infidelities or to make him suffer in exactly the way he
wanted. He must just do the right thing simply, even surreptitiously, and let what would follow follow mechanically.
Barney, having come through this maze of speculation, now felt himself brought up with a jerk like a horse that has browsed its way to the end of its tether. So he had come to the same conclusion again but by a different route. Now that the working out was different could the act be done? Could he really surrender Millie? He leaned his head forward on the table, closing his eyes, resting, and then realized that he was praying.
* * * *
‘Barney, I’m so sorry, I’ve wakened you up. There was no answer when I knocked so I just came in to leave a note.’
Frances was there.
Barney sat up abruptly.
‘Oh, Frances, come in. I must have been asleep for a moment. I’m so glad to see you. I’ve been so wanting to see you.’
He got up, fussing round about her, murmuring, touching her, and her presence in the room made him intensely happy. He felt as if somehow while he slept a problem had been solved, a burden lifted.
‘Here, let me help you off with your wet things. Your umbrella will be all right there in the corner, let it drip, it won’t hurt. Would you like some tea? But oh, my dear, what is it?’
Barney, now that Frances had taken off her hood, saw her face and that she must have been crying. She sat down beside the table, flattening the damp streaky hair back against her head.
‘I’ve just come to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye? But are you going away?’
‘Yes, I’m going to England. I’m going to be a V.A.D. I’m going to the war.’ She did not look at him but stared across the little heaped-up table at the lines of faded cottage gardens upon the powdery dry wallpaper. Her mouth drooped.
‘But why ever—?’
‘Why not? One ought to do one’s bit. I may be totally uneducated, but at least I can cut bread and butter.’
‘But what about, what about—Andrew?’ Barney felt as if his guilty knowledge must all come tumbling out of his mouth attached to the name.
‘Oh, that. That’s all over. I’m not going to marry Andrew, you know. We’ve decided not to get married after all.’
Barney circled the room, rebounding from the walls in his excitement. He longed to question Frances, but could not think how to do it. ‘Not marry Andrew. All over. Well, fancy. Oh dear. I’m so sorry. What a surprise though. I do hope you’re not sad about it. I do wish you weren’t going away.’
‘I’m sorry to go, Barney, and I’m specially sorry to leave you. I’ll miss you. But it’ll do me good to get out of Ireland. With the war and so on, Ireland is a bit of a hole. And I have been in such a stupid mood lately. I won’t stay more than a minute now. I see you’re working. Is it Saint Brigid?’
Frances picked up a sheet of paper from the table.
‘Wait, not that!’ Too late Barney jumped. She was already reading the letter.
There was a moment’s silence as she read it, put it down, then rested her head in her hand with an almost inaudible ‘Oh’.
After another moment she said in a tired, spiritless voice, ‘How did you know this, Barney?’
Interpreting her tone he said quickly, ‘So you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘First tell me how you did?’
‘I was there last night, at Rathblane. I went to see Millie and found—’
‘Pat and Andrew. Yes. You didn’t see my father. He was there too. There was quite a gathering. Just like comic opera.’
‘Christopher—so he knows—’
‘Yes, and he told me this morning.’
‘And then you broke things off with Andrew.’
‘No, no. I’d refused Andrew days ago, I mean we’d decided not to marry. That was nothing to do with Millie. Millie’s not a monster. She didn’t grab Andrew until after I’d dropped him. And he still thinks no one knows about his little adventure.’
Barney held his head. It was complicated. But was it not now all right, utterly all right? Christopher knew, and Millie was innocent. Well, not quite but almost. So everything would be all right. He would not have to lose Millie after all. But what was he saying?
Frances’ voice interrupted him. ‘I’m reading the other letter now. I like the bit about your tragic duty. You must have enjoyed writing that. Which one were you going to send?’
Barney suddenly became aware of a different Frances, a Frances with a new vocabulary, a Frances who could talk in a cynical way, who could assess and sentence him. He felt hurt, then appallingly guilty. His instinct had been right. One could not so intrude one’s abominable knowledge. He deserved to be hated for what he knew.
‘Frances, darling, I was not going to send either of those letters, honest. It would have been utterly wrong and I’d decided not to. I was just going to tear them up.’
‘Oh.’ She did not believe him.
Barney jerked himself about, jostling the table and spilling the greater part of the Memoir on to the floor. He trampled the pages underfoot. He felt frantic. He was not going to get the credit for anything with anybody. And now she would never forgive him simply for knowing. ‘Frances, I swear I was not going to send those letters. I know I ought never to have written them—’
‘Don’t shout, Barney. It doesn’t matter, I knew anyway, it doesn’t matter. I really must go now. I’ve got so much to do.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Tuesday or Wednesday.’
‘So you’ll be on the mail boat after all. Frances, you do believe me—?’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
There was a sudden loud bang on the door and they both jumped. The door swung wide open to reveal the large form of Pat Dumay.
‘I must be off,’ said Frances. She whipped her things together and was gone, fading thinly away under Pat’s right arm.
Barney stared at where she had been, and then formed the face of Pat, huge, excited, grinning. ‘What is it, Pat?’
‘Sit down. I want to ask you two questions.’
Barney sat by the table and Pat closed the door carefully and sat beside him, placing his large hand on Barney’s shoulder.
Barney sat open-mouthed staring up at his stepson. He felt he was being apprehended for some fault. But the pressure of the hand was affectionate. Pat seemed to be in a state of anxious rapture. His left hand, which was bandaged, kneaded Barney’s shoulder with a rhythmic clutch and caress, while he pressed his other hand flat upon the table as if he were about to vault. He leant over his stepfather.
‘Listen now. You know the plan that you heard of yesterday? Well, we are going to carry it out tomorrow.’
‘You mean you’re going to fight after all, the Volunteers, just like—?’
‘Yes. It’s for tomorrow. I want to ask you first, do you want to join us, or would you rather be left out? No one will think the worse of you.’
‘I’ll come with you of course,’ said Barney.
There was silence between them for a moment. Then Pat released him and stood up. ‘You mean you’re willing to fight?’
‘Yes.’
Pat stared at him doubtfully. Then he gave a grunt which might have been a sigh or a laugh. ‘Good for you.’
‘When is it to be tomorrow?’
‘Twelve noon at the first stroke of the angelus. I’ll give you full instructions.’
‘What was the other thing you wanted to ask me?’
‘It doesn’t arise now. It was something about Cathal. But it would only have come up if you’d said no to the first question. I’m afraid I thought that you would. I apologize.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Barney. ‘By the way, you’ll have to issue me with another rifle.’
When Pat was gone, Barney stood beside his cluttered table and stared at the powdery cottage gardens deep in the old wallpaper. He was extremely frightened. He had too, in a way that was not entirely disagreeable, a sense of being finally cornered. Whatever the
state of his soul might be, his old existence was over, a life beyond his own had taken charge of him.
Would he have sent those letters to Frances in the end? Would he really have managed to give up Millie? He would get no credit. He was justly judged. Or rather it did not much matter now how he was judged. That was not so very important after all.