by Iris Murdoch
Crimond did not say no, he said nothing, but it later seemed to her that he had simply not heard, not listened, was wrapped up entirely inside himself, first into that vague, stunned rather uncanny cheerfulness, and now into a restless desperation.
The book was gone. Crimond’s big jersey, his pen and ink, his glasses, the shawl which he put over his knees when working, were all neatly in their places on his desk and chair. But the lamp was switched off, the piles of coloured notebooks had gone, carried off to Crimond’s typing agency who would now photocopy, then type, the entire work. Crimond took some care over these arrangements, but betrayed no anxiety when the numerous boxes were carried away up the stairs and put in a van. Since then he had not sat at the desk, but at a table in the front room upstairs, reading, or dealing with correspondence. He had also cleared out the cupboards in the playroom, destroyed a lot of manuscript, and also brought out and cleaned three of his guns, two revolvers and a pistol. He told Jean that he had sold the rest of his collection, and was now going to sell these. At least this, if he meant it, was a good sign, and Jean counted it, at first, as marking the beginning of their ‘new world’. She watched him anxiously during the first days, glad when he was quietly reading, quietly talking. She questioned him about the book, had he expected to end it, would the typescript need a lot of revision? He gave vague smiling replies. Sometimes he craved her company and even walked with her to some shops. She suggested that she should drive him somewhere, anywhere, in her car which needed exercise and he said, yes, perhaps, why not. Then the mood of despair came upon him and he began to talk about death.
At night, sleepless, and preventing her from sleeping, he held her, without love-making, exceedingly close as if his whole body were feeding upon hers. Jean was exhausted, frightened, worn out by an intensity of love, his love, her love, which sometimes seemed something so final that she found herself thinking, somehow or other we are done for. How will it end? Their condition seemed to be crowding on toward some disaster. Yet at other times, when Crimond seemed to be gripped by a kind of elation, she felt that the despair was just an understandable phase which was even now passing. Last night, clasped together, they had slept a little.
‘You did sleep, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes –’
The morning sun was shining into the little kitchen where they took their meals. Its neatness, its cleanness, about which Jean cared very much, made her feel that ordinary life was possible. If she could only stop Crimond from saying the extraordinary things with which he was wearing down her sanity.
‘Won’t you have some toast?’
‘No, just coffee.’
‘You are eating less and less.’
Crimond said nothing now but stared at her for a while, his face composed but his blue eyes extremely wide and rounded.
‘My darling, I’m sure you’ll sleep even better tonight, we must sleep, you’re suffering from lack of it, I’ll hold you, I’ll look after you, I’ll give you my life –’
‘There is no logic in fearing death,’ said Crimond, ‘I just don’t want to make a terrible mistake.’
‘Please stop this sort of talk.’
‘It’s not all that easy to shoot oneself, one could find oneself living on blinded or witless. It’s a terrible risk. I could be sure of killing you, but not so sure of killing myself. The hand can tremble, the bullet can find some freakish path, leaving one paralysed, still alive. Oh the horror of that –’ He spoke quite calmly, reflectively.
‘Fortunately you don’t have to shoot either yourself or me! Here’s your coffee.’
‘I don’t want to see you dead, my Jeanie, we must go together.’
‘Let us go to France together, let us go anywhere away from here. Let me take you away for a while. You’ll get over it all, this state of mind will pass.’
‘I don’t see how it can,’ said Crimond, in a reasonable tone as if some quite ordinary project were being discussed.
‘What about your father –’
‘He’s dead.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘He died at the end of October. I’m glad he’s gone. He was no longer himself. His being was anguish to me. Now he is at peace.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry.’
‘Oh my dear – you’ll write another book.’
‘I think my life’s work is over.’
‘Don’t you want to see this one published, to hear people discussing it?’
‘No. It will be misunderstood.’
‘Then shouldn’t you be there to explain it?’
‘Explain it? The idea is loathsome.’
‘Please try to get out of this awful mood. We must just go on, we’ll go on together, we love each other, just be brave enough – I’ll do everything you want. I’ll make your happiness, I’ll invent it, I’ll go out shopping now and buy you a honeycomb, I know how much you like that –’
‘Oh my sweet being! You’ll get me a honeycomb! Ah, if it was only as simple as that –!’
‘But, Crimond, it is.’ Jean, leaning across the table, tried to take his hand, but he drew it back, still staring at her with his calm face.
‘Jean, do you want to go back to your husband, back to Duncan, you love him, don’t you?’
‘Oh my God – you think I’ll go back to Duncan one day and you want to kill me before it happens! Don’t be crazy and drive me crazy! You know I don’t love him, I love you. Look at me, I’m sane, I’m steady as a rock, I love you and I’ll look after you forever.’
‘You could go back to him and live.’
‘And leave you to shoot yourself. Just stop romancing, you’re just doing it to torment me, to say it’s all my fault. If I wasn’t here would you be talking about death?’
‘No, but that’s your gift to me – you are the motive, the blessing, the gift from heaven, the best the gods ever sent me. You make death possible.’
‘I don’t understand you. You are being perfectly hateful today.’
‘You are my weakness. Now that the book is gone there is nothing left but our love, our vulnerability to each other, if we go on we shall destroy each other in some small unworthy way – I want it to be something glorious, worthy of our love, that is courage, that is eternal life.’
‘This is sickening romantic nonsense,’ she said, ‘and you don’t believe a word of it! If you just want to get rid of me, say so! Is it a sort of trial, if I pass the test I die, if I fail you leave me? Surely there are simpler solutions!’
‘Why be the slaves of time? Jeanie, it’s a short walk, this life. Why do people value it so? We have our great love, it is something timeless, let us die in our love, inside it, together, as if we were going to bed –’
‘Stop, my darling,’ said Jean, who felt the tears coming to her eyes. ‘You are tiring me out. I’ve been trying – so hard – to be sane and strong for you –’
‘It’s best to choose one’s exit.’
‘I’m not in a fit state to decide to die, and neither are you!’
‘Jeanie, I want us to die together.’
‘Oh, fine – but how –?’
‘On the Roman Road.’
‘What?’
‘You know, down at Boyars. Oh Jeanie, my love, don’t fail me –’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a long straight road – at a high speed – two cars could meet…’
Gerard, leaving the British Museum at lunch time, rang up Jenkin and learnt from him that Tamar was upset about something and was at present at Lily’s place and said to be ‘all right’. Jenkin, just back from his visit to Violet, saw no point, since the situation seemed so obscure, in alarming Gerard. Gerard, with other things on his mind, was not alarmed. He arranged to come round to Jenkin’s place about eight thirty that evening for a drink. He had lunch in a pub, and then went into St James’s Park and sat down on a seat near the lake to think. He felt very strange, excited, frightened. He found himself trembling. H
e was not sure whether or not he liked this state of mind, or whether or not he approved of it. The two scenes with Crimond, his own private confrontation and Crimond’s counter-attack on the Gesellschaft, had not yet exhausted their shock waves, and he found himself dwelling on remembered details in both scenes which inspired a disturbing mixture of emotions. Sitting bolt upright on the seat in the park he smiled, then frowned, then bit his lip, then shook his head, then shuddered. An acquaintance, Peter Manson’s sister, passed by and recognised him but did not greet him because (as she explained when her brother rang up from Athens) ‘he looked so peculiar’. The sun was shining. There had been a heavy frost and many of the more shaded places still carried a thick sugary crystalline sprinkling upon leaves and grass. The seat was wet and Gerard was sitting on his copy of The Times. The air was very cold. The sun was already declining and lights had come on in the pinnacled and turreted offices in Whitehall which looked in the glowing light like fairy palaces. The excitements, pleasant, unpleasant, interesting, stirred up in Gerard’s mind by Crimond’s antics, were curiously mixing with his thoughts, or more evidently his feelings, about Jenkin. He had confronted Crimond and certainly not come off best. Now, in a very different way, he was proposing to confront Jenkin. He would clarify things, he would ask awkward questions, he would have it all out at last; and again the rather unnerving idea occurred to him that although he had known Jenkin long and knew him well, he did not really know him very well.
As Gerard sat so upright looking out across the water some children were feeding the ducks. Some big Canada geese had come along too, lumbering out of the water and raising their great powerful beaks for bits of bread. The feet of the children and the feet of the birds left tracks in the thin frost which still coated the asphalt pathway. The forecast was rain but the weather was very quiet and relentlessly cold as if it could never change. Gerard felt frightened. He was afraid, when he saw Jenkin, of talking too much. In such a situation a few ill-chosen words, words which could never be recalled, could be remembered for a long time. I must be cool and clear-headed, thought Gerard, I must try to concentrate upon some central point which is incapable of being misunderstood. The idea of a sort of reassurance. Just not to go away. But really – what could be more ambiguous and indeed ridiculous? Jenkin would be surprised and embarrassed, as he would be by anything resembling an affirmation of love; and then perhaps, later on, feel annoyed, disgusted, alienated. It might all seem to him weird, even creepy, certainly uncalled-for. Then Gerard would be biting his hands off with remorse, while Jenkin gallantly tried to pretend that ‘nothing had happened’. The risks were terrible – but they were terrible either way. How dreadfully he might accuse himself later of having done nothing. Over a long time love-and-friendship love can be so taken for granted that it becomes almost invisible. Its substance thins and needs to be renewed, it must at intervals be reasserted. Suppose Jenkin were to go away (and, awful thought, find someone else, a woman, or a man) partly because he had never really understood how highly Gerard valued him? I wish I’d said something earlier, thought Gerard, something spontaneous and intuitive. Now it’s all become so damned abstract and formal and solemn – I’ll scare him stiff while I’m fumbling to begin.
It was nine o’clock. The promised rain had come. Gerard, taken unawares, had got his hair wet, which annoyed him. He had arrived punctually. Jenkin had put the gas fire on earlier and closed the window in the sitting room and pulled the curtains and turned on the lamp and remembered to turn off the centre light. He had brought in from the kitchen window sill a brown mug with a single twig of viburnum fragrans which Mrs Marchment had given him out of her front garden when he had been to see Marchment about a letter to the Guardian and to gossip about Crimond. He had put a plate of arrowroot biscuits upon the small table on which Gerard had now set down his glass. Jenkin was drinking tea. He was, he told Gerard (which much disturbed the latter) ‘cutting down on drink’. Gerard was drinking the wine which he had brought along himself as usual. They had been talking about Crimond’s book.
‘It’s being typed now, Marchment says. He’s still on speaking terms with Crimond. Hardly anyone else is.’
‘You haven’t seen Crimond?’
‘No. Do sit down, Gerard.’
‘I wonder who will publish it.’
‘I don’t know. We might get hold of a proof copy. I’m dying with curiosity.’
‘What’s that plant? It smells so.’
‘Viburnum something.’
‘It’s got no business being in flower at this time of year.’
‘It always is, I’m told. Shall I take it away?’
‘No. Where did you get this stone?’
‘I told you, Rose gave it to me.’
‘I remember.’ Gerard replaced the stone, which he had been holding in his hand, upon the mantelpiece. The stone was curiously cold. He sat down. He said to Jenkin, ‘I’ve been thinking about you.’
‘Oh – jolly good –’
‘Are you going away?’
‘Yes, I’m going to Spain for Christmas, on a package tour, I told you at Boyars.’
‘I thought you’d be with us. Now it’s possible for the first time, with my father gone.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘But I mean – are you really going away, far away, for a long time? You’ve seemed so restless, not yourself.’ Gerard thought, what am I saying, it’s I who am restless and not myself. He added, ‘Not that I’ve any reason to think – after all why should you –’
‘Oh, I’m thinking of it,’ said Jenkin, as if this was obvious.
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know, really – Africa, South America – I sort of think – after all – I want to get out of England and do something else, something different.’
‘What you sort of think sounds to me like running away,’ said Gerard. ‘It’s sentimental, it’s romantic. You’re just feeling a bit fed up with schoolmastering. It’s too late for you to take on the African mess or the South American mess, it’s a lifetime job. You can’t be serious!’
‘I’m not thinking of being an expert or a leader or anything –’
‘Of course not, you see yourself as a servant, the lowest of the low! But an untrained servant not in his first youth is not likely to be much use. You just enjoy picturing yourself in some scene of awful suffering! Aren’t I right?’
‘Why are you being so nasty?’ said Jenkin amiably. ‘I can dream, can’t I? But I am serious about it – somehow – not because I think I’d be terribly good at it –’
‘Then why?’
‘Just because I want to. Of course there’s something in your idea of the “picture”, but that’s peripheral, I can’t be bothered with motives.’
‘I know, you want to be out on the edge of things, you want to live outside Europe in some sort of hell.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you think that isn’t romantic nonsense?’
‘Precisely. I mean, I think it isn’t romantic nonsense!’
‘I ask you not to go.’
‘Why? I just said I was thinking about it!’
‘We need you. I need you.’
‘Oh, well – you can all rub along without me, I should think – anyway it’s an idea I’ve got – it’s time for a change – I can always come back I suppose. I think I’ll have a drink after all.’ Jenkin disappeared to the kitchen, humming nervously to himself.
Gerard, seeing his back, the set of his shoulders, the particular way that the tail of his jacket was always so hopelessly crumpled, felt a wave of emotion which almost made him exclaim. He thought, this is no good, I’m not getting anywhere. I’ve bothered him already, and I hate that. He’ll refuse to be serious now about anything I suggest, he’ll just shuffle it off.
Jenkin returned with a glass and a can of beer. Gerard said, ‘Let’s go on holiday together, just you and me, it’s ages since we did that.’ And why is it ages, he wondered, I could have asked him anytime, I could have i
nsisted.
‘You mean a walking tour in the Lake District, sharing a tent in the rain?’
‘No. I was rather thinking of a good hotel in Florence.’ But the tent idea was not unattractive.
‘OK, if I’m still around in the spring. But I somehow think I won’t be. I’ve got that now-or-never feeling.’
‘We could travel together. Go to Australia. Go to Africa if you like, or Brazil. I noticed that Portuguese grammar at Boyars. If you’re determined to go I might come too.’
‘Very kind of you, but you’d hate it, you know! I mean if we went where I want. Anyway, I have to go alone, that’s part of the deal.’
‘What deal, who with?’
‘Oh, not with anyone – with myself – with fate if you like – or God, only he doesn’t exist.’
‘So it’s a pilgrimage. That’s pure sentimentality, it’s playacting.’
‘You’re making me say silly things. I just don’t want to be too blunt!’
‘Oh, be as blunt as you like!’
What is happening, thought Gerard, are we going to quarrel, or have I been imagining how fond he was of me, have I been quite mistaken? I can’t say the things I meant to say now, they’ve been spoiled, ruined. He’ll think ill of me now, and I can’t bear that, in a moment I shall be pathetic! Or in order not to be pathetic, I shall seem resentful. Which is worse?
‘I don’t think you lot need me all that much,’ said Jenkin in a tentative tone. ‘I’ve always felt like the odd man out.’ He had never said anything like that before.
‘What perfect nonsense!’ said Gerard, regaining a little confidence. ‘You’re central, you’re essential, even Crimond saw this. He said you were the best!’
‘Oh – Crimond –’ They both laughed, though a little nervously.
‘It’s not true that I’m essential,’ said Jenkin, ‘Duncan has never altogether liked me, Robin was always impatient with me, so is Gull, Rose laughs at me, Crimond thinks I’m a fool. Don’t interrupt me, Gerard. Of course this is a stupid way to talk, but you’re forcing me into it. This stuff about being needed is part of an illusion we’ve kept up all these years. I know I’m talking nonsense and making you angry, because of course there is something close, something unique, and perhaps such things are always partly illusion, partly real. It’s just that I’ve felt the illusion bit more lately, that’s part of wanting to go away. I haven’t been alone enough, and that’s because I’ve had to play – that game – which of course wasn’t a game, but – You see, I must be alone in the way one can be in what you called hell.’