by Iris Murdoch
Did I push the car or did I just imagine that I pushed it? George had reached the canal, the place beside the iron Foot-bridge. He had already forgotten (though he would remember later) his humiliation at the Slipper House. Clouds of emotion which had hung about this place were there waiting for him; undiminished, they engulfed him in their stupefying fumes. He had been away, he had had to come back, it was all as before. What on earth happened, thought George, what did I do, what am I? It had been raining on that night; he remembered the rain surging to and fro on the windscreen and the way the yellow lights on the quay got mixed up with the rain. He remembered the cruel bumping of the fast-driven car upon the cobbles. He had turned the steering wheel and the car had plunged into the canal. He saw again the wet white top of the car looking so odd just above the dark disturbed waters whose waves were breaking against it. Somewhere in the sequence of events or dream events were his hands, slipping a little, spread out upon the rainy back window of the car and the slithering of his braced feet upon the stones. He seemed to recall now that he had moved his hands lower down to get a better leverage. Then he had fallen. If he fell, did that prove that he had pushed the car? He looked down at the square unevenly tilting granite cobbles and at the edge of the canal, all glittering with tiny sparks in the lamplight. He felt the cobbles springily with his feet, shifting back and forth and trying to remember.
The warm summer night was soft and quiet, and the three-quarter moon rising over the dark countryside beyond the wasteland made a private silver brilliance in the sky which seemed, as George stood under the yellow lamps, very remote from the earth. Beyond the iron bridge the fretty outline of the gas works rose in moon- Illumined silhouette. The lamplight showed a lurid green haze upon the quayside where tufts of grass were growing between the stones. Here Ennistone was asleep. There were no lights showing across the canal beyond the empty ragged rubbishy vegetation, which could not be called a field, which separated the canal from the houses. On this side, behind railings, a maze of partly derelict ‘light industry’ yards and sheds and one-storey brick buildings divided the canal from the road (known as ‘the Commercial Road’) which led toward Victoria Park. A dog was barking.
George closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and deeply. That awful giddiness was coming upon him, that physically announced loss of identity, a most intense sense of his body, of its bulky heavy solidity and of his various views of it, combined with the absolute disappearance of its inhabitant. This suddenly painful body-presence produced a kind of seasickness and a heavy metaphysical ache. He thought, hold on, it will pass. Then somewhere inside the sick weight where he no longer was came the thought, where is Stella, where is she? He thought, I know, but I’ve forgotten. She isn’t dead, that’s certain. Surely I know where she is? But she’s there in the form of a black hole, like not finding a word. I can’t remember anything about her, what happened to her after this, where she was, where she went. Fancy not knowing. I must find out, I must ask somebody. Perhaps it’s drink, I’m drinking more than I used to.
Did I push the car, he wondered as the giddiness receded. If I could only start up some sort of memory. He began weaving about on the cobbles, moving his hands, moving his feet, miming turning the car, stopping the car (did he stop it?), getting out of the car, coming round behind the car and pushing it with his hands spread out like stars. If he now imagined them ‘like stars’, did that mean that he had actually seen them like that as they slipped and strained upon the window? Or had he in a fantasy seen them ‘like stars’? Could he not hang on to something here as a clue? But the clue slipped away and returned him to a futile empty helpless feeling of blankness. If only someone else could tell him. If only there had been a witness. But surely there had been a witness, and he had even recognized the witness? But this idea too dissolved in his mind and disappeared.
He thought, I’m in a bad way, I must ask people, seek for help. I’ll go to John Robert. He must receive me in the end. This formulation gave comfort. He thought, I’ll write him a letter, I’ll explain everything. That’s what I’ll do, a letter will explain it all. He can’t really be so cruel, he hasn’t understood, it’s a mistake. I’ll write him a good letter, a clear honest letter, he’ll respect that. Then he’ll see me and be kind to me and oh how my heart will be relieved. Hope came back to George like a genial light of an opening door, quietly dispelling the dark and giving him back himself. Now there was a future. He felt gentle, intelligible, whole. He breathed calmly. He thought, that is how it will be. It will be all right. And I will be all right, I will be better. I’ll go home now and sleep. He began to walk along the quay in the direction of Druidsdale.
Stationed in different hiding-places, four persons were watching George. Valerie had gone through a gate into a factory yard and was watching him through the railings. Diane was on the quay behind a big elder bush which was growing between the stones. Father Bernard was a little way behind Diane, relying on a curve in the quay for shelter, and peeping and peering so as to keep both Diane and beyond her George in view. I had made a circuit, since I knew what George’s objective was, by the Commercial Road and had come out on the quay beyond the iron bridge, where I had mounted on top of a pile of household junk which someone had illicitly dumped. From here I could see George clearly and also command a view of my fellow watchers.
The evening had no dramatic climax, it faded away rather into a kind of melancholy elegiac peace. From my vantage point, lying concealed behind a crest of old mattresses, I could see, for she was close to me, Valerie Cossom’s grave beautiful face, looking with such sadness and such anxiety toward George as he performed on the quayside what must have seemed to her mad unintelligible antics. (I had of course realized at once that George was re-enacting his drama.) And I thought how fortunate George was to be loved by this beautiful intelligent girl, and how little his ‘fortune’ was worth to him. More distantly I could discern poor Diane uncomfortably crouched between her bushy tree and the railings and beyond the dark shape of Father Bernard, his long skirt swinging as he bobbed to and fro, looking, then hiding. There was something ridiculous in the scene, and yet something moving too. We had all presumably come to ‘look after’ George, though Father Bernard had also doubtless come to protect Diane. The idea that George might suddenly hurl himself into the canal, simply as a crazy act of violence, was certainly in my mind. I did not see him as about to commit suicide. (In any case no Ennistonian would choose to attempt death by drowning.) I was relieved when George turned away from the fatal place and began to tramp off home. The crisis appeared to be over. (I may say that I discussed this scene much later with two of the participants.) As George passed her, Diane crouched down into a little dark ball behind her tree. It is just possible that George saw her and ignored her. Father Bernard, in absurd haste, squeezed himself back through a gap in the railings. Valerie, safe where she was, did not move. I could not help wanting to laugh as I saw the scene dissolve.
Father Bernard emerged and helped Diane out from behind the tree. He put his arm round her and led her away. Valerie, coming through the gate on to the quay, now saw the other two and watched them depart. Then she turned the other way and walked past my place of concealment. I saw her face as she passed. She wore a strange expression, very sad, weary, grave, even stern, and yet with a twist in the mouth which was almost like a smile, though it might have presaged tears. It struck me at the time that this expression very well expressed what, at the end, the very end, if that can be imagined, someone, perhaps God, might feel about George.
At a distance, for I knew where she lived, I followed Valerie to see her home safely. As she walked she seemed to lose a certain tragic exaltation which had possessed her. Her head drooped, she stumbled over her long besmirched white dress and picked up the skirt impatiently in one hand, drawing it upwards with a graceless movement. Now the comfortless tears would be coming. She began to hurry. I followed her until I saw her put her key into the door of her father’s house, one of the ‘bet
ter’ detached houses in Leafy Ridge, and disappear inside. The most beautiful girl in Ennistone.
‘Well, how are the old sinuses?’ said Mr Hanway.
‘All right, sir,’ said Emma.
‘I trust you have been practising as much as you should?’
‘No. Not as much. Some.’
‘Why? You can use the college music rooms? And I’ve told you you can come here.’
‘Yes, well, I do use the college music rooms and I sing in my digs when there’s no one else there, but somehow — ’
‘I sometimes feel,’ said Mr Hanway, ‘that you are ashamed of your great gift and want to keep it a secret.’
‘No, no — ’
‘Perhaps you feel that you counter-tenors have still to make your way in the world and fight to be accepted?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘You’re not troubled by foolish worries?’ Mr Hanway had a prudish delicacy which Emma greatly liked.
‘No, of course not.’
‘You seem so timid about it all.’
Emma, not used to regarding himself as ‘timid’, engaged indeed in the not less than heroic operation of sacrificing one of his gifts to the other, flushed with annoyance. ‘I’m not timid, I’m just embarrassed. One can’t always be forcing people to hear a loud resonant piercing rather unusual noise!’
‘My dear Scarlett-Taylor, what a way to describe your exceptionally beautiful voice!’
Emma thought, I ought to tell him now that I’m going to give up singing. I’m going to give up serious singing, and that is for him, and for me, the same as giving up singing. But looking into Mr Han way’s gentle diffident grey eyes it seemed impossible to utter. Also, in a yet more terrible way, even the touch of Mr Hanway’s fingers on the piano (he was an excellent pianist) struck a resonance deep in Emma’s soul which made him wonder: am I not irrevocably bound to music?
‘I think it is time for you to come out.’
‘I’m not ready.’
‘Have you heard of Joshua Bayfield?’
‘Vaguely. He plays the guitar.’
‘He plays the lute, also the guitar. He asked me if you would perform with him. The B B C are interested and there is a possibility of making a record. And there is that flautist I told you of - you know how well your voice accords with the flute — ’
‘Oh I don’t think anything like that yet - I do occasionally perform after all. I’ve been asked to sing in the college Messiah -’ Emma did not add that he had refused.
‘You sound quite panic-stricken! You mustn’t be so modest. Shall I ask Bayfield to write to you?’
‘Please, no.’
Emma, who had just arrived, was sitting beside the piano which his teacher was idly touching as an accompaniment to his admonitions. Mr Hanway, once a moderately well-known operatic tenor, was a corpulent man of over fifty, with coarse straight grey hair and grey eyes. He looked like a teacher, more like an economics don than a musical man, but without self-assertion. His face, not wrinkled, had a greyish sad used look, drooping under the eyes and chin. Something vastly poetic and romantic seemed to stray lost and grieving within him. He had been married, but his wife had left him childless and long ago, and his once promising career as a singer was over. He lived in a dark little flat high up in a red brick mansion block in Knightsbridge. Emma liked the flat which reminded him (perhaps partly because of the particular sound of the piano) of his mother’s flat in Brussels, though her flat was large and full of big Belgian furniture which Emma’s ‘I like it!’ when they first arrived there many years ago had kept unchanged.
Emma felt no retrospective satisfaction about his two musical triumphs at the Slipper House. He was ashamed at having got so drunk. He had not wanted to go out with Tom and Tom’s old friends, of whom he felt jealous. He had seriously proposed to himself an evening of study. But after Tom had gone he felt so depressed that he decided to have a shot of whisky. After that it was necessary to continue drinking. Then he had gone to look at Judy’s clothes, and had found the long-haired wig in her cupboard and tried it on. Then it seemed a shame not to try on a dress or two. The effect was so funny and so charming, the transformation so complete, that he felt bound to share the joke and, emboldened by whisky, set off for the Green Man where Tom had said he would be after the rehearsal. In Burkestown he had been told about the ‘Slipper House party’. He could not clearly remember the whole of the evening, particularly the later part which seemed to be full of black patches; but once back at Travancore Avenue he had realized that Ju’s pretty dress was torn completely apart at the shoulders and irrevocably stained with red wine.
He did remember putting his arms around Tom, and then, not at all long afterwards, around Pearl. This was the effect of drink. It was not how he usually behaved. Yet it was not false or unreal. Had he just transferred the kiss he could not give to Tom to Pearl, who looked so bisexually angelic with her hard straight profile and her thin upright grace? No, that was Pearl’s kiss, not Tom’s; and he recalled with a kind of guilty gloomy pleasure her quiet acceptance, at least tolerance, of the kiss. He recalled how positively he had noticed Pearl on the first occasion when he saw her. But how stupid and pointless it all was. Tom appeared to be half in love with Anthea Eastcote, and was in any case framed by God for women’s joy. And this ambiguous ‘maidservant’ figure, what did he know about her? He had only had one conversation with her in his life. In any case, what was this about except his capacity to get drunk? It would end, if it had not already ended, in muddle, and he hated muddle, and in rejection, and he hated and feared rejection. He was frightened too by his inability to remember the evening, and ashamed to ask Tom about it. Supposing something disgraceful and absurd had happened? Supposing he were to become an alcoholic? He had seen terrible alcoholics in Dublin. His father, a moderate drinker, had always warned him against alcohol. Had his father, for himself, feared this fate? Had Emma’s grandfather, whom Emma could scarcely remember, been an alcoholic? Was it not hereditary?
And now he had to tell Mr Hanway that he was going to give up singing and would come no more. The end of singing would be the end of Mr Hanway. They were only close in this place, in these roles, in the benign and sacred presence of music. He would never see Mr Hanway again. Could that be, was it needful? Yes. He could not divide his life, he could not divide his time. He was between two absolutes and he knew which one he loved best. His history tutor, Mr Winstock, who cared little about music, and to whom Emma had once vaguely spoken about ‘giving up the singing’, could not understand his hesitation; and when he was with Mr Winstock Emma could not understand it either. But now he was with Mr Hanway.
The sun never shone into Mr Hanway’s flat, but it sometimes slanted across the window illuminating the white window sills and reflecting on to the gauze curtains which, never drawn back, concealed Mr Hanway’s life from windows opposite. It shone so now, reminding Emma of sunrise in Brussels illuminating lace. He thought, and will I sing no more for my mother, who so loves to hear me sing? Could I get used to singing less than very well? That would be impossible.
‘It’s not that I want to tempt you with visions of fame,’ Mr Hanway went on, ‘I know I can’t and wouldn’t anyway! Fame will undoubtedly come to you, but that does not concern us now. It is time for you to move to another shelf, to face new challenges. As a teacher I have always encouraged your natural modesty. But it is time for you to realize, to acknowledge to yourself, what a remarkable instrument you possess. You must not neglect what God has been pleased to give you, the voice for which Purcell wrote. Your counter-tenor must be heard, the music must be heard that was written especially for you!’
‘There isn’t much of it,’ said Emma gloomily. He was sitting on an upright chair beside the piano. There had been no singing yet. Perhaps there would not be any.
‘Bach, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Cavalli, to say nothing of Handel and Purcell and some of the divinest songsters who ever wrote, and you say that isn’t much! In any case a l
ittle of what is perfect should suffice a purist! You have the most austerely beautiful, most purely musical of all voices, like no other sound in music, to honour which the most beautiful words were wedded to the most perfect music by a century of geniuses. Besides, you owe it to music now to let your talent speak. More composers will write for the counter-tenor voice. A contrived voice they may call it, but art itself is a contrivance. We are already witnessing a musical revolution. An old voice, a new voice, wherewith to sing unto the Lord a new song!’ (Here Mr Hanway raised his arms.) ‘You must give more time, Scarlett-Taylor, more time, time is the fuel. Of course you will soon have finished your university studies and be able to concentrate on music, but you should now be singing with a group, and having experience of working with old instruments - you must stop playing the lone wolf. Well, we will talk of these things - now let us sing. What shall we limber-up with, something playful? A folk song, a love song, some Shakespeare?’
Automatically Emma stood up. He blew his nose (an essential preliminary to singing). Mr Hanway touched the piano, suggesting several songs. He sang three of Mr Hanway’s favourites, Take, oh take those Lips Away, Woeful Heart with Grief Oppressed and Sing Willow. (‘What a gloomy unsuccessful lot they were, to be sure!’ said Mr Hanway.) After that they sang together. Mr Hanway’s famous Glee Club, flourishing when Emma first made his acquaintance, had, like many pleasant things in the teacher’s life, ceased to be, but Mr Hanway retained, together with all his musicological pedantry, a strong sense of music as fun. They sang Fie, nay, prithee John in round, then The Silver Swan with Mr Hanway producing a remarkable soprano, then Lure, Falconers, Lure, then the Agincourt Song, then The Ash Grove in improvised parts. And as soon as Emma began to sing he could not prevent himself from feeling very happy.