by Iris Murdoch
‘So all you can say is that you’ve got to go?’
‘You’ll be on the telephone to them.’
‘Don’t be contemptible as well as cruel.’
‘Of course they are my friends too. I’m gambling the whole issue.’
‘I don’t like the gambling image either. To imply you just crave excitement does you less than justice. I suggest you get dressed and have some coffee and calm down.’
‘I’ll take a suitcase,’ said Jean, ‘and come back for the rest some time when you’re at the office. You can go to bed and to sleep, you’re reeling with sleep. When you wake up I’ll be gone and you can curse me.’
‘I shall never curse you. I just think you’re a bloody traitor.’
‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what the future holds, whether I’ll be alive even.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘To go near Crimond is to go near death, somehow. I don’t mean anything in particular by that – just, it’s danger. He doesn’t fear death, he’s a Kamikaze type, in a war he’d get a VC.’
‘He keeps guns and has a very nasty fantasy life, that’s all.’
‘Well, you used to keep guns when you belonged to that club, you fancied yourself as a marksman. You and Crimond were always messing with guns at Oxford. No, but if he ever stopped working he might be very desperate.’
‘And kill himself or you? You said he once proposed a suicide pact!’
‘Not really, he just likes taking risks. He’s brave, he doesn’t evade things, he tells the truth, he’s the most truthful person I’ve ever met.’
‘You mean brutal. You can’t be truthful without other virtues.’
‘He has other virtues! He’s dedicated, he’s an idealist, he cares about poor people and –’
‘He just wants to be admired by the young! You know what I think about Crimond’s “caring”!’
‘He’s a strong person. You and I connect through our weaknesses. Crimond and I connect through our strength.’
‘I don’t think that means anything, it’s vulgar rhetoric. Jean, on the day we got married you said, this is for happiness.’
‘Happiness. That’s one of our weaknesses.’
‘You certainly won’t find it there. But don’t think it will be death or glory this time. You are choosing a dull and dreary servitude with a mean cheap little tyrant.’
‘Ah – if I could only tell you how little I value my life –’
‘You are telling me, and it doesn’t mean anything except that you want to insult our marriage.’
‘I don’t,’ said Jean frowning. She was leaning back against the closed door and had kicked off the dusty slippers in which she had danced all night. ‘That’s not right. You mentioned happiness – I’m just trying to convey to you how little it matters to me –’
Duncan pulled himself up a little in his armchair. He said to himself, I’m trying to make her argue, I’m trying to keep her just a little longer, like asking the executioner for two minutes. He thought, so I have despaired already? Yes. Now it is as if I expected it. But, oh, the happiness, the happiness, which she now sees as nothing. He said, ‘Look, this love of yours for Crimond seems to me without substance, almost something stupid, it’s not to do with real life at all. You’re like two mad people who crave to be together but can’t communicate –’
‘Mad, yes,’ said Jean, ‘but – we communicate.’ Her eyes widened again and she sighed hugely, touching her breast and rolling her head.
‘My dear – when you chucked it last time it was for good reasons.’
‘I can’t remember the reasons, except that loving you must have been one, and I still love you – but, well, here we are –’
‘If only we’d had children, that would have anchored you in reality. I’ve never managed to make all this real for you. You’ve been like some kind of visitor.’
‘Don’t keep saying that about children.’
‘I haven’t said it for years.’
‘All right, we’ve never played the husband and wife game which you call real. That hasn’t stopped us from loving each other absolutely –’
‘“Absolutely”?!’
‘I’m sorry, everything I say now must seem gross and stupid, it’s part of how things have totally changed that I can’t speak to you properly. But you understand –’
‘You expect me to understand you so perfectly and love you so much that I won’t mind your going to another man, and for the second time!’
‘I’m sorry, my darling, I’m so so sorry. I know this wound won’t heal. But this has to be. And – this doesn’t make it any better for you – it isn’t, for me, really anything to do with the future – the future doesn’t in that sense exist one way or the other.’
‘You leave the future to me, now that you’ve utterly desolated and defiled it. But you will have to live your own foul enslaved future day by day and minute by minute – quite apart from anything else, your stupidity amazes me.’ Duncan, with some difficulty, hauled himself up out of his armchair. ‘Everything about this infatuation, everything that I imagine about you and Crimond being together, fills me with loathing and horror and disgust.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s terrible. It’s carnage, it’s the slaughter-house. I’m sorry.’ She opened the door. ‘Look – do stop drinking – don’t take to drink now, cut it down a bit.’
Duncan said nothing, he moved away towards the window, turning his back on her. Jean watched him for a moment, looking at his broad back and hunched shoulders and pendant shirt. Then she left the room and closed the door. She ran to her bedroom and began cramming things into a suitcase in desperate haste. She slipped out of the kimono and stepped into a skirt. She made up her face carefully, simply. Her face with Duncan had been stern and calm, the face of what had to be. Now in the mirror she saw a mad scattered convulsed face. All the time, as she packed and dressed and dealt with her face, she was shuddering and trembling, her lower jaw moving compulsively, a faint growling in her throat. She put on her coat, found her handbag, stood still for a moment controlling her breath. Then walked out to the front door and out of the flat.
Duncan, who had been looking down through the leafy branches of the tall plane trees at the garden in the square, heard the soft click of the closing door and turned round. He saw on the carpet the dusty discarded slippers and picked them up. He did not want to be moved by them either to anger or to tears, and he dropped them into a waste paper basket and went through into his bedroom. He and Jean occupied separate rooms now. Not that that had any great significance in the huge peculiar apparatus of their marriage, their unity, their love, which had lasted so long and survived so much and was now perhaps finally over. Something cosmic and crucial had occurred, his whole body knew it and he panted for breath. It had happened again, the impossible, the unbelievable had occurred, it had happened again. Why had he not wept, screamed, fallen to his knees, beseeched, raged, seized Jean by the throat? He had coldly despaired. Hope would have been death by torture. He had never for a moment conjectured that Jean might be mistaken, never conceived of saying: ‘It’s all in your mind, if you turn up he’ll be dismayed and embarrassed.’ He entirely believed that in all that long night they had not exchanged a word. That bore the unmistakable mark of Crimond’s style. Duncan knew that Crimond now expected her to come with the same certainty that she had in coming.
It was in the despair and the finality that he sought refuge. He could not have endured speculation. The suddenness of the thing made it now seem so like death. Jean’s abrupt vanishing, the unspeakable reappearance of Crimond, the dreadful fall into the river. It was all one absolute cosmic universal smash. How wrong Jean had been to imagine that he would now telephone the others. He felt at that moment that in losing her he had forfeited all his relation to the world, and had no desire left for any human contact. He supposed that later he would be discredited in front of his friends, humiliated and disgraced, ashamed of this second defeat
, of the fatal ‘bungling’ of which his wife had accused him. Now his misery made no account of shame. Of course, he would ‘take her back’ if she came, but she would not come, would not want to return to what was left of him after this laceration. She would have to assume that he hated her. If Crimond ditched her, whether this happened tomorrow or years from now, she would go right away into an aloneness and a freedom which she had perhaps yearned for during all the time when she had put so much energy into keeping faith with Duncan and with her idea of their mutual love. She would go away and work and think, take counsel with her powerful father in America, discover some world to conquer, go to India or Africa, run some large enterprise, use up elsewhere all that restless clever power which, as his wife, she had wasted on happiness. Yes, they had done it for happiness, and Jean might be right to see this as weakness.
Of course she had, as Jean Cambus, done all kinds of things, but not the one great thing of which Jean Kowitz had dreamed. She had been a secretary to an MP, edited a magazine, served on numerous committees, written a book on feminism. As a diplomatic wife she had run a house and servants and a whole busy social world which was also a valuable information service. She would have been an excellent diplomat herself, and no doubt imagined how she might, had things been otherwise, have been by now an ambassador, a minister, the editor of The Times. How could she not now, he thought, whatever happened about Crimond, be ready to bolt for freedom? Perhaps Crimond would prove to be a stepping-stone? Would it comfort him to think so? He groaned, feeling, smelling, as it came bubbling to the surface, all that old murderous jealousy and hate which had been packed away, a dangerous atomic capsule, submerged for so long in the darkest sea caverns of his mind. It had been easy then, in the interim, which had now, declared as such, begun already to be part of history, to reflect in a lofty way upon the unworthiness of jealousy, its senselessness and lack of substance. Within the last twelve hours an era had ended and could already be seen, alien and complete. Jealousy now was his teacher and in its light he saw the truth, that Jean really loved Crimond with an extreme love, a love as absolute at death, and in comparison with which her freedom was as nothing. She would, if he would have her, indeed be Crimond’s slave; and in this context, in this picture, she had not exaggerated in speaking of the approach to him as something mortally dangerous. What a futile mess it had all been, all the striving of his life, everything he had done and hoped for. Now she was being given, and by Crimond himself, a second chance. For Duncan did not doubt for a moment that Crimond had come to the dance in order to appropriate her.
It had all started a long time ago. Jean denied (but how could he be sure, how could she be sure?) that she had loved Crimond then, when they were all young together, when Sinclair Curtland had been the one who had taken her to dances, when they had all been so hopeful and so free. Of course Crimond impressed her, he impressed them all, he perhaps even more than Gerard was the one of whom everything was expected. How little they had done, all of them, any of them, compared with the marvels which they had then hoped and intended! Crimond had failed too, at any rate had not yet succeeded. They had, at a certain period, all talked too much about Crimond, partly because he was the only one of their group who retained the extreme left-wing idealism which they had once shared. Something happened to them all when Sinclair was killed. He was the golden boy, the youngest, the pet, the jester, loved by Gerard who was (since Crimond somehow clearly was not) the ‘leader’; only of course there was no leader since they were all such remarkable individuals and thought so well of themselves! After Sinclair died they seemed for a while to scatter, their opinions changed, they were busy with new careers, with travel, with searches for partners. Duncan and Robin lingered in Oxford for a while, but then came to London, Robin to University College Hospital, Duncan to the Foreign Office. Time passed, and Duncan married Jean and spoke to her of happiness, being so entirely happy himself at possessing this beautiful admired woman whom he had quietly adored during years when she was so much in the company of others. Crimond was becoming a well-known figure in left-wing politics, a respected, or notorious, theorist, a writer of ‘controversial’ books, a candidate for parliament. He was, and had since remained, the most famous member of their original set. Crimond came of, and boasted of, modest origins, born in a village in Galloway, son of a postman. He made sure that he was not to be regarded as a pampered cloistered intellectual. Jean, whose opinions were now perceptibly to the left of Duncan’s, was for a time a declared supporter of Crimond and even became one of his research assistants. She wrote a pamphlet for him on the position of women in the Trade Unions. When he contested a parliamentary seat (unsuccessfully) she was secretary to his agent. Something must have started then, at that time when Crimond was so important, so well known, a star, the darling of the young. Later on, after the debacle, when she came back, she told Duncan that at that early period she had fought against her feelings, finally ran away from his proximity. She had said (but was this true?) that she was never then his mistress. Again times changed. Duncan had given up the academic world and was now in the diplomatic service, Robin (who later returned to London) was in America at Johns Hopkins University, Gerard was in the Treasury, Marcus Field (after his shocking conversion) was in a seminary, Jenkin was a school teacher in Wales, Rose was a journalist in York, living with her northern relations. Less was heard of Crimond, he was said to be ‘calming down’, becoming more reflective and less extreme, even considering an academic post.
Duncan had never entirely liked Crimond in those young days, he thought him conceited, and was irritated by his prestige with the others. He suppressed his dislike because he was a friend of his friends, and because Duncan was, even then, intuitively nervous of him. They were both Scottish, but Duncan’s Highland ancestors had long ago taken the road to London. When Jean took to admiring Crimond and even working for him Duncan began to be quietly a little jealous, but without any undue alarm. He was glad when Crimond disappeared from London and was said to be in America, then in Australia. Time passed. Duncan was posted to Madrid, then to Geneva. After this he was sent, on a temporary posting, to Dublin, before proceeding (as he was promised) to a coveted and lofty position in eastern Europe. Jean was disappointed at being despatched to Ireland, which she regarded as a backwater, but she soon found Dublin quite amusing enough; in fact both Duncan and Jean rather fell in love with the country, and went as far as to buy a tower in County Wicklow. Property was still at that time remarkably inexpensive in Ireland, and the tower (brought to their attention by a writer friend called Dominic Moranty) was an ‘impulse buy’ of Jean’s who discovered it, loved it, and thought she might as well buy it as it was so cheap. Duncan chided her, then when he saw what they had acquired, praised her. The tower, described in the prospectus as ‘probably very old’, made of old stones culled from some ruin or ruins, was, as various architectural features suggested, no doubt set up in the late nineteenth century. It had been at some point, perhaps in its original construction, attached by a rough stone and brick arched passage to a closely adjacent, indefinitely ancient, stone-built cottage or cabin. The wooden floors and cast-iron spiral staircase in the tower were sound, and both buildings had been sufficiently ‘modernised’. There was no electricity (which delighted Jean), but there was good ‘soak-away’ sewage with a septic tank. A pump, easily repaired, brought water up from the old well in the cottage. The previous occupant, now deceased, said to have been a ‘painter man’, had used the tower at intervals until fairly recently and the interior, though primitive and now unfurnished, was in reasonable shape. There were fireplaces, turf for sale at an accessible village, and plenty of wood lying around for free. Jean envisaged a lamp-lit fire-lit life of elegant romantic simplicity, and set about looking for suitably rural furniture. The tower had a fine view of the two sugarloaf mountains and, from its upper room, the bedroom, a glimpse of the sea. Its living accommodation consisted of only two floors, but above those a round hollow crown rose to a suitably impos
ing height. Duncan was delighted with the place, and glad too that Jean should have this plaything to distract her attention from a proposed campaign in favour of contraception and abortion which had seemed likely to conflict with the niceties of their diplomatic position.
It was summertime, a dry warm Irish summer for once, and they took to spending their weekends at the tower, tinkering with its arrangements, sometimes travelling to buy furniture at local auctions. It was a happy time. The tower standing in its own miniature valley, now also their property, was surrounded by sheep-nibbled grass. There was a small stream and a grove of poplar trees, and a scattering of wild fuchsia and veronica. They had of course already done a good deal of pleasant rambling round the small beautiful country which they had hardly ever visited before, and Jean had already decided that they must write their own guide book to Ireland, all available guides being declared ‘hopeless’. They had visited Joyce’s tower and Yeats’s tower. Now they too had a tower which Jean said should be called Duncan’s tower. They were not however destined to enjoy Duncan’s tower for long. At a dinner party, Crimond’s name was suddenly mentioned. He was jocularly said to be ‘coming over to solve the Irish question’. He was going to write some long piece about Ireland and was proposing to take up residence in Dublin for the rest of the summer. Duncan never forgot how, on receiving this news, his wife’s face became positively contorted with pleasure.
Duncan was amazed at how miserable he was at once made by the idea of Crimond’s presence in Dublin. He felt almost childishly that all his pleasures had been suddenly stolen and there were no treats any more. When, shortly afterwards, Crimond arrived, and settled himself in a flat in Upper Gardiner Street, Duncan put on a gallant, almost excessive, show of being delighted to see this old college pal. He introduced Crimond to all his favourite Irish people (including Moranty) and saw him warmly welcomed and instantly privileged as the dearest friend of already popular Duncan and Jean. Duncan had been finding his diplomatic post a difficult and taxing one. The ambassador was in hospital. He was virtually in charge. Relations between Dublin and London, never peaceful, were going through a particularly ‘delicate’ phase. The two prime ministers, plotting something (or planning an ‘initiative’ as these usually futile plots were euphemistically called), were under attack not only by opposition parties but by elements in their own parties. Duncan had to make visits to London. He was extremely busy and ought to have been thinking hard about what he was doing instead of having to think all the time about Crimond. Crimond had meanwhile moved to a flat in Dun Laoghaire, with a view of Dublin Bay, and had given a party to which he invited Jean and Duncan, and to which, Duncan being engaged, Jean went alone. He had already become an object of interest and seemed to be getting on very well with the Irish. His political views, in so far as those concerned Ireland, were declared to be ‘sound’; and the smallness and gossipy closeness of intellectual Dublin made it impossible for Duncan not to hear his name frequently mentioned.