by Iris Murdoch
He stood again at the foot of the sage’s bed, and his heart moved within him, twisting and turning like a hooked fish. He saw now, not the familiar features, but, even more familiar, the perpetual lowering frown of purpose and dominating insight which seemed, even in sleep, to be hovering on guard above them; and he felt in the crammed blackness of his soul remorse, regret, resentment, loss, anger and terrible longing, that composition of love and hate which can be the most painful and degrading sensation in the world.
George turned at last to look at the table. Here, it seemed, John Robert had been at work. There were books: George noticed Plato, Kant, Heidegger; minds inside which John Robert had expended, perhaps wasted, his whole life. Hume’s Treatise was there too, and Schopenhauer’s Well als Wille und Vorstellung. There was also a number of thick notebooks, one of which was open at a page which was written in John Robert’s inky hand which looked so much like looking-glass writing. George thought, it’s the great book, it’s all here! He peered at the page, knowing well how to read John Robert’s scrawl.
If at a certain point it becomes impossible, for the sort of reasons suggested above, to maintain the conception of personal ownership of inner presentations, it is admittedly difficult to continue to attribute to these anything recognizable as ‘value’. The notion of the possibility of placing every perception (even) upon a moral scale was argued to be inseparable from the concept itself. But in what sense can value be asserted in the absence of the person? I must refer back at this point to my discussion of Husserl’s reduction, and to the peculiar sense in which his method denies transcendence.
George heard a faint sound behind him and swung round in fright; but all was well. John Robert had turned slightly on his side and was snoring less loudly. George stood a moment, while his senses whirled in a wild kaleidoscope, unable to focus upon the room after looking so intently at the white page. Then he tiptoed swiftly to the door and, without looking back, let himself quietly out into the corridor, where again he was blinded by the dimness after the subdued sunlight of the bedroom. He blinked and looked both ways. There was no one there. Yes, there was someone, a woman, standing against the wall down near the door marked PRIVATE through which he had come in. It was Diane.
Ever since the moment when she had started away ‘like an otter’ from the watery presence, and the so-forbidden touch, of Tom McCaffrey, Diane had been in a state near to madness. She could no longer sit patiently at home, taking modest trips abroad and returning like a soldier to her post, waiting for George to come. She had to go now and search for him, however fatally displeased he might be when she found him. The desire to see him, to be with him, made a dark sick pain which gradually assumed the aspect of fate. Within this great pain there was a tiny sparklet of joy, which joy was presumably hope. George was unhappy, outcast, alone. Only she really loved him and could save him from himself. Diane had, of course, heard (Mrs Belton had seen to that) the Institute rumour that George had killed Stella and hidden her body (some said in his back garden or on the Common, some said in the canal, some in the deep intestines of the Institute itself, where the old workings which went down to the source contained many abandoned chambers and old shafts, some going back perhaps as far as Roman times). The people who eagerly passed this rumour around less than half believed it, and Diane did not believe it at all. But what had made her leap away in anguish from Tom’s stupid, thoughtless jest was a deep and wretched desire that something like that might be true, that Stella might somehow be dead, even if this meant that George would go to prison for life. Then their parts would be reversed, he in prison and wanting to be visited, while she roamed mysterious and free. Out of this poisonous seed had grown the agony which drove her out to look for him.
Diane was so desperate that she set off at first for Druidsdale. She got no further however than the Roman bridge. Suppose Stella were at George’s house; suppose she had been there all the time, not in a shallow grave in the garden, but living there as part of some conspiracy, laughing with George at what the town might think? That this made no sense did not prevent Diane from supposing it. With George, anything was possible. She turned back and made her way up Burkestown High Road to 16 Hare Lane, where she knew Rozanov lived, because at least that was somewhere to go. She walked up and down a bit on the other side of the street watching the door and trying to believe that George might at any moment emerge. She had to cling to one hope after another, each bringing with it a delusive fading gleam, succeeded by the unmitigated pain. When it became as clear to her that George was not there as it had previously been that he might be, she ran to the Institute, arriving moaning with breathlessness and fatigue, and installed herself on the Promenade, close to the long window, whence, pacing about, she kept a restless watch, not caring whether people saw her and stared. At last she purchased a cup of tea and sat down in a daze of misery. She awoke from this to see quite plainly the figure of George passing quite close to her (he did not see her) and disappearing through the door into the Baptistry. It was now a slack time of the afternoon and no one saw George, silent as a fox, slink in through that partly open door, and no one saw Diane with equally wary little padding steps follow in after him. She passed the hot bronze doors of the source and came out into the long carpeted corridor which vibrated with water sound and smelt of water. She arrived in time to see George disappearing into one of the rooms. She tiptoed down a little, but did not dare to try to listen outside. She had never been inside the Ennistone Rooms and the mystery of them appalled her, together with the fear of George’s finding her, and the impossibility now of going away without seeing him. She retreated toward the door through which she had entered and stood there in aching indecision. She gazed and gazed until her eyes ached and flashed and she could almost believe that he could have gone away without her seeing him.
Suddenly George erupted from the room, stood a moment, then began to run towards her. This dreadful running made Diane utter a little bird-cry of helpless terror. She flattened herself against the wall. George approached her like a terrible huge deadly animal, not like a lion so much as a towering gorilla, a huge ape with immense swinging arms. As he approached her he raised an arm as if with one blow he would sweep her from his way. Diane sank to her knees and closed her eyes.
‘Kid, kid, get up, don’t be frightened.’
In a moment he had lifted her and held her sobbing against him.
‘Stop it, don’t make a noise, let’s see if that door’s still open, yes it is, good, go now, go home — ’
‘I’ll go - I’m sorry - I’ll go.’
‘Look, you go on first - I’ll come after - I’ll be with you in half an hour - go, go, stop crying, you silly baby!’
Sobbing now with joy, Diane made her way home.
Clothed again, Diane lay upon her sofa in the elegant (though not entirely comfortable) pose which George liked. She had put on her black silky dress and her glittering metallic necklace with the long teeth which George called her ‘slave’s collar’. George in his light-grey check trousers and his pale blue (finely striped with dark blue) shirt, which he still wore unbuttoned and untucked, walked about the room, picking his way, kicking the stuff on the floor out of his path. He walked fast in the small area as a man might walk in a large area, or as a strong wild animal might move in a small cage, walking with unnecessary energy, turning round abruptly, jerkily, at the end of every few steps. Diane looked up at him anxiously, her brief joy still smouldering, fear and panic again at hand. His movements made her feel tired and full of foreboding.
George, having reached the piano, picked up a little black metal monkey, very small, which Diane had had with her in her wanderings since before she could remember. The little things, her substitute children as the man had unkindly said, were, like magical charms which survive into another scene to prove that one did not dream the previous one, proofs to Diane’s unconscious mind that innocence existed, her innocence and no one else’s. George too responded unconsciously in much the sa
me way to the presence of the little things, old and new, which were a visible extension of Diane’s soul. He respected them. Now, however, he frowned at the little monkey because it reminded him of one of Stella’s netsuke.
He put the monkey down and opened the piano and struck two notes. (He could not play the piano any more than Diane could.) ‘The call of destiny’. He turned and looked at her and smiled showing his little square teeth. His eyes, so wide apart, looked rather mad. It had never occurred to Diane that wide apart eyes looked mad. His eyes glowed and gleamed with imminent laughter, but the laughter did not come. He seemed to be in extremely high spirits.
‘Hello, kid.’
‘Hello, darling. Long time no see.’
‘Hey nonny nonny. No? OK?’
‘OK.’
‘Thank God you’re here.’
‘I’m always here. I wish you were always here.’
‘Oh me - the plough has passed over my back and I have survived. But it is no matter.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Anything, everything. However, it’s going to be all right.’
‘What is?’
‘Anything. Everything.’
‘I wish I thought so. Do sit down and hold my hand.’
‘I see my way through, I see the light shining beyond, Eternity’s sunrise.’
‘Am I there - in the light?’
‘You? Why are you so self-centred?’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes. But it’s your job not to be. What are you for but to be the eternal forgiver? You are God in my life.’
‘A powerless God.’
‘God must be powerless. Christ was powerless. He didn’t save himself.’
‘You don’t believe in religion, you’re making fun of it.’
‘I believe in something, but I’ve forgotten its name. Pure cognition. What happens when you unlock the subject from the object? Then there’s no more subject. That’s when all is permitted, and why it is.’
‘Oh what nonsense - come and sit beside me and hold my hand.’
‘I can’t, I’m too restless, tiger, tiger, burning bright — ’
‘George, I do want to be with you in the sunlight one day, in the open, not secret and sort of shameful. I’m prepared to wait, I could wait and wait and be happy so long as I could really hope that one day we could be properly together …’
‘Aren’t you prepared to wait anyway?’
‘Without hope? Oh - but do say — ’
‘Say what?’
‘Oh - George - you know — ’
‘The clock struck one, the mouse ran down. It’s nearly one.’
‘George, I know I’m not supposed to - but now we’re together again - you must let me talk and say what’s in my heart — ’
‘Talk, talk, talk, it’s a free country.’
‘George, you’re not going back to Stella, are you?’
‘Have I been away? She has.’
‘George, where is she?’
‘How do I know?’
‘You haven’t done anything to her, have you, I mean you haven’t hurt her —?’
‘Why ever should I?’
‘Oh - I don’t know - because of - well, maybe because of me - or — ’
‘Hurt Stella, because of you?’ George paused, making his brown eyes round in his round face and opening his mouth in an O.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that, I just wondered about Stella, everybody’s wondering — ’
‘Fuck everybody.’
‘Do stop moving about like that, you’re manic. I mean, you might want a change, anybody might, you might want someone else.’
‘I saw that girl, Harriet Meynell, Hattie they call her.’
‘Professor’s Rozanov’s grand-daughter?’
‘I saw her in her petticoat with her hair streaming.’
‘Where, how —?’
‘I saw her through binoculars at Belmont. You know she’s at the Slipper House. She looked - oh — ’
‘What?’
‘Pale. Undamaged.’
‘Ah - not like me. You’re not falling in love with her?’
George paused beside Diane. ‘No. But I’d like to — ’
‘You leave her alone — ’
‘I have my duties.’
‘You mean to Stella?’
‘There are duties in the world. Kinds you don’t dream of.’
‘You’ve got me. I suit you. I love you. No one else does.’
‘Every woman in Ennistone loves me, I could have any woman I wanted. I could have Gabriel McCaffrey, tomorrow, this evening, I’d just have to wink, she’d come running.’
‘She wouldn’t!’
‘She would. Oh never mind, as if I cared. Sometimes I feel so tired. But it will be all right, kid.’
‘For us two?’
‘You don’t know what it’s like to think of one person, one thing, day and night.’
‘I do know! I think of you day and night.’
‘That’s just subjective. I mean something - metaphysical.’
‘Between us it’s not metaphysical, is it?’
‘You are a rest from metaphysics. But you aren’t real either.’
‘Why am I not real? Oh George, I want to be real. Is Stella real?’
‘Leave Stella. I told you.’
‘I wish you would.’
‘Shut up. Don’t talk to me like that.’
‘Don’t let me be utterly cast away and lost, I don’t want to be lost — ’
‘Lost, stolen or strayed, a girl no longer a maid, I had her and I paid, I bought her and she stayed, so goes it in the trade.’
‘Oh George, be serious, be quiet with me — ’
‘Don’t forget you’re my slave. Aren’t you, kid, dear?’ He sat down at last beside the sofa and took hold of her little brown hand.
‘Yes, George. I sometimes wonder whether you won’t kill me in the end.’
‘Just look at your hand. You’re like a Pakistani girl. When will you give up smoking?’
‘When you marry me.’
‘This place stinks, your hand stinks, your hand is stained, your hand is brown and dry, my heart is brown and dry, it’s like an old dry smelly leather bag. And yet - all will be well - I must go — ’
‘When will you come again?’
‘I don’t know. In a hundred years. Watch and pray.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the cinema.’
‘Good morning, Pearl.’
‘Good morning, Sir.’
Pearl, who had opened the Slipper House door to John Robert’s ring, curtseyed. Only for him did she curtsey. It was part of the playacting which was not play-acting which she put on for John Robert.
‘How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you. Why, you’re all wet!’
The philosopher was indeed all wet and did not need to be reminded of it. He frowned.
He had dressed with some care for his visit, putting on a clean shirt and a dark suit which he kept for best. He had shaved carefully, sliding his razor (not electric) into all the folds of his jowl and of his dry saurian neck and removing the old man’s grey stubble which had so fascinated George. He had combed his crisp frizzy hair making it stand up on end, and he had put on his overcoat. It was not until he had proceeded a little way along Ennistone High Street, and passed Bowcocks, that he perceived that it was raining, and he then deemed it too late to return to fetch his umbrella, hat and scarf. The rain was not much. However, it increased, and he arrived at Forum Way with his head and neck thoroughly soaked and, in spite of having put up his coat collar, water running down his chest and back. He felt uncomfortable and undignified and chilly. He disliked getting his hair wet.
Of course the girls, alerted by his telephone call earlier that morning, had been expecting him for some time (it was now almost noon), peering out of the window to see him come along the muddy path between the trees. Before that they had been busy, rushing about the hou
se to put it to tiptop rights. (Pearl jealously prevented Ruby from cleaning. She did it herself with help from Hattie.) They also had to decide how to array themselves, whether Hattie should wear her new pretty summer dress and put her hair up. Hattie decided against the new dress which would look out of place on such a dismal wet morning, but she allowed Pearl to help her to stack up her hair. She wore a cinnamon-brown light woollen dress with dark brown stripes and a high collar which made her look older, and, after consultation, knotted a silk scarf round her neck in a way they thought to be sophisticated. Pearl had got herself up to look like a servant in an opera, with a navy blue dress and a rather smart striped pinafore.
When Pearl opened the door, Hattie remained standing in the sitting-room where they had turned on the gas fire. She did not run to the door to welcome her grandfather. She waited and smoothed her dress and fluffed up her scarf and patted her hair and breathed fast. Pearl had taken John Robert’s coat away to the kitchen to dry. She had omitted to indicate where Hattie was. John Robert, who had not entered the Slipper House since he kissed Linda Brent in an upper room during a Methodist fete at Belmont over fifty years ago, looked about, then peered in through the sitting-room door to see Hattie standing there. At that moment Pearl ran back holding a towel.
‘What’s this?’
‘To dry your hair.’
‘Oh.’ Standing in the doorway he vigorously rubbed his hair and face and neck, then threw the towel back to Pearl without looking at her, entered the room and closed the door behind him.