by Iris Murdoch
Patricia Fairfax opened the door. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked. Then, seeing the question was ridiculous, said, ‘Have you been here long? I was asleep.’
‘Not long,’ said Gerard, mopping his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘Come downstairs. Why have you no shoes on? There are your shoes. Put them on. Have you looked at him?’
‘Yes.’
Patricia stared at the shrouded figure, then turned and hurried down the stairs. Gerard followed, closing the door.
‘Would you like some coffee, something to eat?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘I suppose you’ve been up all night.’
‘Yes.’
They went into the kitchen, Gerard sat at the scrubbed wooden table, Patricia turned on the electric stove. Gerard had felt, he still felt, irritated at the calm way she had taken over his kitchen. He had felt bound to invite Pat and Gideon for what was to have been a short interval after the lease of their flat was unexpectedly terminated, now they behaved as if they owned the place. He felt extremely tired. ‘Pat, dear, don’t worry about eggs or anything, just give me some bread.’
‘Don’t you want toast?’
‘Toast. Yes, no, it doesn’t matter. Have you eaten anything?’
‘I can’t eat.’
Gerard felt ashamed that he could. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘He was all right last night.’
‘He was all right in the afternoon when I left him, he seemed better.’
‘I settled him down and went to bed. Then about one o’clock I heard him moaning and moving, making those little noises, you know, you said like a restless bird – and I got up and went to him and he was awake, but – he wasn’t making much sense –’
‘Rambling a bit?’
‘Yes, that happened before – but really, now – he was different –’
‘Different – how – do you think he knew?’
‘He was – he was – frightened.’
‘Oh God –’ Oh the pity of it, he thought, how terrible, how I pity him, oh the pity, oh the grief. ‘Pat, I’m sorry I wasn’t there.’
‘You would have been if you hadn’t regarded that dance as so absolutely important.’
‘Was he in pain?’
‘I don’t think so. I’d given him the usual stuff. But he had such a – a terrible urgent look in his eyes, and he couldn’t keep still, as if all his body were wrong and intolerable.’
‘An urgent look. Did he say anything clear?’
‘He said several times, “Help me.”’
‘Oh – dear – Did he ask for me?’
‘No. He talked about Uncle Ben.’ Benjamin Hernshaw had been Matthew Hernshaw’s ‘disreputable’ younger brother, Violet’s father, Tamar’s grandfather.
‘He always loved Ben. Have you telephoned Violet?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Why of course?’
‘I wasn’t going to ring her in the middle of the night, was I? She never liked Dad, she isn’t interested, she knows there’s nothing for her in the will.’
‘How does she know?’
‘I told her.’
‘Was that necessary?’
‘She asked me.’
‘We must give her something.’
‘Oh for God’s sake don’t start on that, we’ve got enough to worry about.’
‘Dad didn’t mention her because he assumed we’d look after her.’
‘Just you try, she’d bite your hand off, she hates everybody!’
‘She did accept money from Dad, I know – we must tell her he talked about Ben. What did he say about him?’
‘I don’t know, he was mumbling – remember Ben, or remember Ben’s something or other –’
‘Well, there you are –’
‘Look, Gerry, we must decide –’
‘Pat, wait – Did you know he was going to – to die?’
‘Only just before the end – then suddenly it was – so clear – as if he’d explained it –’
‘Ah – and you saw him go?’
‘Yes. He was lying there and twisting and turning and talking about Ben. Then suddenly he sat up straight and looked at me – with that awful puzzled frightened look – and he looked all about the room – and he said – he said –’
‘What?’
‘He said slowly, and quite clearly, “I’m – so – sorry.” Then he leaned back onto the pillow, not falling, but slowly, as if he were going to sleep again – he made a little tiny odd sound, like – like a – mew – and I saw it was over.’
Gerard wanted to ask, what did you see, how did you know, he felt, later on I won’t be able to, everything must be said now, but he did not ask. He would have time later to think about that dreadful pitiful ‘I’m sorry’. He thought, he was looking for me at that moment.
Patricia was dry-eyed and controlled, her emotion evident in her hesitations and in the hard clipped exasperated tone in which she answered Gerard’s questions. She now made coffee. She opened a drawer, chose a clean red and green check table cloth and spread it on the table, then set out plate, cup, saucer, knife, spoons, butter, marmalade, sugar, milk in a blue jug, sliced bread aligned in a bowl. She set the coffee pot on a tile.
‘Do you want hot milk?’
‘No, thanks. Aren’t you having coffee?’
‘No.’
She gave him a paper napkin. The paper napkins represented her regime, used in preference to Gerard’s linen ones. She sat down opposite to him and closed her eyes.
The house felt terrible, disjointed, gutted. Sitting quietly in it at last, Gerard felt his body aching with grief and fear, with grief which was fear, an exhausted denatured sensation, a loss of being. He concentrated on Patricia. It was possible, he knew, to esteem and admire people and enjoy their company and dislike them heartily. It was also possible to be irritated, maddened and bored by people whom one loves. He had thus loved his mother and Pat. Through time and custom, simply by enduring, this love had grown stronger. This was no doubt a proof that ‘family’ meant something to him, or perhaps that he had got used to putting up with them for his father’s sake; though for his father’s sake too he had resented their separatism, their little league against ‘the men’, critical, mocking, secretive. He had never liked their laughter, had been enraged as a child by his mother’s jesting at his father’s expense, had resented his father’s humble surrender of his authority and his dignity. Yet they had had a harmonious time on the whole and, apart from that one terrible episode and its reverberations, he could not claim an unhappy childhood. His father had been too old for the second war, Gerard too young. He had continued to love them all, and much later to see, with sympathy, his mother and sister as strong frustrated women. Patricia had wilfully thrown away her education and was now irked with excesses of energy for which she could find no use. She was a loving and business-like mother and wife but yearned for some indefinable larger scene, more status, more power. He looked at her now, her face relaxed in tiredness, perhaps in sleep, her lips parted, her mouth, as in a tragic mask, drooping heavily into long harsh lines. She was a striking woman, inheriting her mother’s long smooth face, her stern and noble look and perpetual frown, a brave powerful face whose owner would no doubt be a valuable companion on a desert island. The idea of ‘putting a brave face on it’ suited Patricia, she had ‘nerve’, and had been a tomboyish child. Her shortish fair hair, a little streaked with grey, well cut at intervals, usually tousled, often patted into shape by its owner, looked youthful, was still shaggy and boyish. In recent years she had put on weight. Even now in repose her shoulders were back, her prominent chin well tucked in, her bust set forward under a flowery apron which Gerard was noticing for the first time. It was only lately that Gerard had realised that his sister had begun to envy her younger cousin’s trim figure and enduring good looks. Patricia, once handsome, could never have been called beautiful; but Violet Hernshaw’s face had that enduring structure which can comm
and esteem at any age. Of course Pat was established as ‘successful’, her husband wealthy, her son ‘brilliant’, whereas Violet, as Pat now often sympathetically observed, had made a complete mess of her life, and her charms had brought her only bad luck. Ben had abandoned his mistress and his little daughter, he had been a crazy fellow who took to drugs and died young. Matthew, had tried to ‘save’ him, had been deeply grieved by his failure; perhaps he felt guilty as well. Matthew had been sober, conscientious, gentle. Now he was gone too. Gerard was aware of laying his head down on the table. He recalled, then saw with the eyes of dream, how his staid father, who rarely touched alcohol, used sometimes to startle them all by singing slightly risqué music-hall songs, his grave face transformed by a lunatic jollity. They found his occasional crazy merriment childish, touching, and embarrassing.
‘You’d better go to bed,’ said Pat’s voice.
Gerard lifted his head. He had been dreaming about Sinclair and Rose. He had been young in the dream. It took him a second or two to remember that he was no longer young and Sinclair was dead. ‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Some time.’
‘You go to bed. I’ll fix things. We must ring up the undertaker –’
‘I’ve done that,’ said Patricia, ‘and I’ve rung the doctor about the death certificate.’
‘I’ll ring Violet.’
‘I’ve done that too. Look, Gerard, we were talking the other day about the house in Bristol, why don’t you go and live there? You said you loved that house. You don’t have to live in London now.
Gerard became wide awake. Typical Pat. ‘Don’t be silly, why should I live in Bristol, I live here!’
‘This house is far too big for you, it doesn’t suit you, you’re only here by accident. I’ve just been talking to Gideon on the telephone. We’ll buy it off you. You’ll like Bristol, you need a change.’
‘Oh shut up, Pat,’ said Gerard, ‘you’re crazy. I’m going to bed.’
‘And another thing, now Dad’s gone I want to be on that committee.’
‘What committee?’
‘The book committee. He was on it, to represent the family. Now I should be.’
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ said Gerard.
‘It’s our money you’re spending.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘That’s how Dad saw it.’
Gerard went upstairs into his bedroom. The sun was blazing in. He pulled the curtains and dragged the bed clothes aside and began to undress. As he lay down he began to remember the strange events of the night which were now confused, ugly and sinister, with his sister’s words into a cloud of fantasy which seemed to be hanging above the heavy weight of that dead body which lay so still and so close, its face blinded. Oh my poor dead father, he thought, and it was as if his father were in terrible pain, the pain of death itself. He turned on his face and groaned and shed some tears of misery into the pillow.
‘Well, what do you propose to do?’ said Duncan Cambus.
‘I’m going,’ said Jean.
‘You’re going back to him.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘Did you arrange to meet him?’
‘No!’
‘So you decided this with him last night?’
‘Last night – it is last night, isn’t it – or this morning. We didn’t say anything to each other last night. We didn’t exchange a single word.’ Jean Cambus’s eyes widened and glowed as she said this.
‘You think he’ll expect you?’
‘I don’t think anything – I’m going. I’ve got to. I’m very sorry. Now.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ said Duncan, ‘and I advise you to do the same. I advise you, I ask you, not to go. Stay, wait, please.’
‘I must go now,’ said Jean, ‘I can’t wait. To wait would be – impossible – all wrong.’
‘An error of taste, a lapse of style?’
These were the first words exchanged by Duncan and his wife since their departure from Levquist’s rooms. The walk to the car, the drive to London, during most of which Duncan had slept, had been accomplished in silence. Now they were home, back in the sitting room of their flat in Kensington. On arrival there both of them had felt it imperative to step out of their crumpled evening clothes, and had, in different rooms, hastily, as if arming for battle, put on more sober gear. Duncan, seated, had taken off his damp and muddy evening trousers and put on some old corduroys, with a voluminous blue shirt, not buttoned, not tucked in. Jean, standing before him, had covered her black petticoat and black stockings with a yellow and white kimono, pulled in fiercely at the waist. Duncan was no longer flushed with alcohol, but his tired face looked disintegrated, wrecked, a senseless massive face, pale and flabby, covered in soft pencilled-in lines. He sat very still, staring at his wife, leaning forward a little, his big hands pendant from the arms of the chair. He had washed his face and his hands and cleaned his teeth. Jean had washed off her elaborate make-up and brushed her thick dark straight hair, which stayed where it was put, back over the crown of her head. She had been a striking beauty when, in another era, in that now so remote, so dream-like past, she had flirted with Sinclair Curtland. Jean had known Sinclair, through Rose, when they were all children. He and she had been ‘close’ before Sinclair went up to Oxford, they had somehow, inconclusively, remained so, after, always, in spite of Gerard. Had they ever seriously considered that match which everyone seemed so anxious to bring about? Jean’s older face was beautiful too, a little sulkier, still delicately china-pale, wilful and keen, often now recalling that of her Jewish father, so obsessively devout, so obsessively successful. Her mother, also Jewish, had been a talented pianist. They had observed the festivals. Jean had cared for none of these things, not synagogue or music, or the romance of business in which her father had tried to interest her, his only child. She had been obsessively intellectual. Some wondered why she married Duncan, others why she married at all. Her parents had loved her, though they had wanted a boy. Her mother was dead, her father flourishing in New York. He had dreamed of a Jewish son-in-law, but Sinclair was special.
Duncan rubbed his eyes, he found himself swaying slightly, a desire to sleep could be imperative even now. ‘When will you come back?’ he said. He had taken in the situation, he did not mean tomorrow or next week. He added, ‘You pulled it off last time, coming back I mean.’
‘You wouldn’t stand it a second time,’ said Jean. ‘And yet – who knows what you might stand. I love you, but this is different.’
‘Evidently.’
‘I love you forever – but this is – Anyway they won’t be able to stand it, and that will affect you.’
‘Who’s “they”?’, as if he didn’t know.
‘Gerard, Jenkin, Rose. Married people shouldn’t have best friends. Maybe we’d always have been better off if we hadn’t always been continually watched, oh how closely they watch. And they’ll stick with you, like they did last time. It’s you they care about, not me.’
Duncan did not dispute this. ‘They’re not against you, they won’t be, Rose won’t be, you have an eternal pact with Rose.’
‘You think women too have life-long friendships sealed in blood. It isn’t so.’ Yet it was true that she had an eternal pact with Rose. ‘The two princesses’ Sinclair had called them. ‘Why the hell did you let Crimond throw you into the Cher, why did you tolerate it!’
‘I didn’t have much choice.’
‘Don’t play the fool now!’
‘Jean –!’
‘All right, all right. What happened?’
‘I can’t remember very clearly,’ said Duncan. ‘I wasn’t after him. I mean I wasn’t looking for him. We met suddenly in the dark. I don’t think I said anything. I think I hit him, or tried to. We-were just beside the water. He pushed me in.’
‘God. It was just like – it was just like the other time. Why are you so weak, why can’t you get things right?’
‘You mean kill him?’ said Dunca
n.
‘It’s as if you enjoyed it – of course I know you don’t, you just bungle everything. Did you hit him with your fist or with your open hand?’
‘I can’t remember,’ said Duncan. In fact he could remember very well; and reflected how often, how interminably, he would relive that scene, just as he did the other one, the Urszene. Retiring to relieve himself, he had come face to face with Crimond in the dark. It only now occurred to him that Crimond must have been watching him, trailing him, and had engineered the sudden meeting. It was the kind of unexpected encounter where one would be shocked into doing something, clasping an extended hand, offering an impromptu kiss or a blow. Duncan had moved his right hand, deciding, he remembered, not to close it into a fist. He had intended to slap Crimond on the side of the head, but had again, evidently, decided not to, but had hit him on the shoulder, quite hard it seemed since Crimond had jolted back a pace. Then Crimond had seized him, holding him by his clothes, and swung him round toward the edge of the river. Duncan lost his balance and fell down the bank. Yes, he remembered it all. He wondered whether, if it had been the other way round and he had pushed Crimond into the Cherwell, Jean would now be leaving.