by Iris Murdoch
At a certain point surrender almost seemed a matter of logic. When so much had clearly happened to her, been done for her and to her, must she not acknowledge the reality of the source? These formalities were important as symbols and assertions and promises. This belongingness would express a real bond and a real freedom. It was time for citizenship, for the initiation into the mystery. Tamar was moved by gratitude, by the loving diligence of her mentor, and by a liberal carelessness which was, she sometimes thought, a fresh, perhaps better, form of her despair. Why not? Had she not come to believe in magic? She wanted even to brand herself as having moved away from those whose opinions she had once valued so much, moved into a different house, a different world, which they would condemn in terminology which now seemed to her shallow and banal. There was a way and she must go on moving forward, she was not yet safe. The rites of baptism and confirmation took place on the same day. A godmother and a godfather were necessary. Tamar found her godmother, a Miss Luckhurst, one of her school teachers now living in retirement. Father McAlister provided a hastily introduced godfather in the person of an almost speechless young curate. Immediately after the ceremony she took communion. The magic, for which she was now ready, exerted its power. Tamar could rest, her breath was quiet, her eyes serene. She put on the ‘sleekness’ of which Gerard had spoken and the tranquillity which had led him to say that she did not care about Jenkin’s death. She was able to pray. The priest had talked much to her about prayer, how it was simply a quietness, an attentive waiting, a space made for the presence of God. Tamar felt that she made the space and something filled it.
Tamar was perfectly aware of her cleverness, was even ready to accuse herself of ‘cheating’. She once used this word to her mentor who replied, ‘My child, you can’t cheat – here, and here alone, you cannot cheat. What you desire purely and with all your heart is of one substance with the desire.’ He said this was a truth which had to be ‘lived into’. Tamar did her best to live into it, at first simply in escaping from hell, later in practising what seemed an entirely new kind of calmness. Father McAlister was bold enough to speak of irreversible change. Tamar was not so sure. Was this religious magic or merely psychological magic? The priest dismissed this almost nonsensical doubt. Tamar could not believe in the old God and the old Christ. Did she really believe in the new God and the new Christ? Was she indeed one of the ‘young’ to whom belonged the ‘new revelation’, new, as revelation is renewed in every age? Were there many many people like herself, or was she alone with a mad priest? She had ‘joined’ because her teacher wanted her to ‘belong’. In an empty church in Islington her face had been touched with water, in a crowded church in Primrose Hill her head had been touched by a bishop’s hand. She now ‘went to church’ but as it were secretively, alone with God. She did not want to join a study group to discuss the Christian attitude. She was well aware of her teacher’s immense tact, and that he had spent his holiday talking to her and enjoying every moment of it. Indeed they were, she sometimes felt, on holiday together. She had been, with him, self-absorbed, looking after herself, learning a religious mythology as she discovered hitherto unknown regions of her own soul. She was, to use his words, ‘getting to know her Christ’. If Christ saves, Christ lives, he told her. That is the resurrection and the life. Tamar’s reflections on this mystery did not dismay her, indeed she looked forward to pursuing them. Obviously religion rested on something real; she let her reason sleep on that. She went on long walks through London and sat in churches. Obediently, she read the Bible, Kierkegaard, St John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich. She felt light and weightless and empty, as if she were indeed living on white wafers of bread and sips of sweet red wine. She was, for the moment, her mentor warned her, being carried upon spiritual storm wind which would one day cease to blow, just as, one day, her meetings with her priest must become much less frequent, and much less intense. Then, Tamar knew, she would be forced to test the ‘fitting together’ and the ‘having it every way’, by which she had been saved from death and hell.
All this time Tamar carried around with her the horrors which had, in Father McAlister’s words, ‘driven her into the arms of the Almighty’: the dead child, her faithlessness to Duncan, her cruelty to Jean, the shock of Jenkin’s death in which she had felt so mysteriously involved, her awful relationship with her mother. Tamar, out of her old bitter godless strength, had been capable of saying nothing to Violet, on that evening, about Jenkin’s death. She was also capable, in the ruthless reticence necessary for her ‘recovery’, of telling Violet nothing about what was happening to her and how she was spending her time. Relations between Tamar and her mother gradually and almost entirely broke down. Violet kept asking Tamar when she was going back to work, Tamar kept saying she was on leave. Violet said Tamar would lose her job, Tamar said she didn’t care. Tamar tried to say ‘kind things’ to her mother, but it was as if, here, she simply did not know the language of kindness. Everything she said irritated Violet into spiteful replies. Later on they simply stopped addressing each other and lived in the house as strangers. Tamar was out all day, in churches, in libraries, or in the clergy house in Islington where her meetings with her teacher took place. Father McAlister, to whom she reported everything, kept saying that that problem would be solved later on; Tamar suspected that he had, at present, no idea how. About the other things she had gradually, as part of other changes in her reviving heart, begun to feel better, though not yet without fear of relapse. At times the old horrors still seemed like unassimilable matter, stones, darts, the poisoned heads of broken arrows. She had been able to rid herself of the insane irrational superstitious indeed wicked thought that she had ‘brought about’ Jenkin’s death. She was able to feel a natural grief. Many frightful pains grew less, repentant regret, like a kind of knowledge, gradually replaced self-destructive self-hating remorseful misery and despair. There were differences and she understood the differences. She went on tormenting herself about Jean and Duncan, had Duncan told Jean about Tamar, had Jean told Duncan about the child? I gave away his secret, I cursed her. I must be hated and despised. Father McAlister said wise things about not worrying about other people’s thoughts. Where one could see no way to mend matters, one must just keep them in mind, surround them with good reflections. The desire to mend was often a nervous selfish urge to justify oneself, and not a vision of how anything could be made better. He told her to wait patiently, to make abstention from action into a penance, not to meddle, to leave it to God. But Tamar doubted her patience and wanted very much to write a long emotional letter to Jean.
About the dead child Father McAlister, to his great satisfaction, was at last able to do something definitive. He had said all sorts of things to Tamar, he told her to keep the child with her, not touched, not agonised about, as a sad presence, lived with, not hated, not feared, not frenziedly yearned for. He told her to think of the child as the Christ child. Tamar found this difficult, the priest said it was a spiritual exercise. Then at last Father McAlister, alone with Tamar in a church in north London, performed a rite which he had never performed before, and which indeed he had largely invented, a kind of burial or blessing of the dead child, a formal affirmation of love and farewell, containing an act of contrition. He did not say so to Tamar, but he also thought of this performance as an exorcism, a propitiation of a potentially dangerous spirit: for he was not without his superstitions and had seen, in his time, very terrible demons emerging from the unconscious minds of his flock, or from whatever the places are where demons live.
Tamar murmured that she acknowledged her transgressions and her sins were ever before her, that she had been poured out like water and all her bones were out of joint, that she desired to be washed and to be whiter than snow, that a broken and contrite spirit might not be despised, that broken bones might after all rejoice, and she might put off her sackcloth and be girded in gladness. Father McAlister then blessed the poor nameless vanished embryo, desired it to repose in peace and be receive
d by God into those heavenly habitations where the souls of them that sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity, and that God might look upon Tamar’s contrition, accept her tears and assuage her pain. Then was He to bless her and keep her, make His face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her, lift up the light of His countenance upon her, and give her peace. This rite, a mixture of old familiar words and his own pastiche, and thought of by the priest as a most holy farrago, gave him intense pleasure; and he was rewarded too by the sight of Tamar’s face, tear-stained and radiant.
‘You know what today is?’ said Rose.
‘Of course,’ said Gerard.
They said no more. It was Sinclair’s birthday. He would have been fifty-three.
Two nights ago Rose had woken in the night, hearing a dog scratching at the door of the flat. She had woken up thinking at once: It’s Regent! He’s come back! She put on the lamp beside her bed. The house was silent. Of course it was not Regent, it was a dream. All the same she got up and turned on all the lights in the flat, opened the door and turned on the lights on the stairs. She even went down and opened the door into the street in case there had been, somewhere, some poor dog, some real dog. But there was nothing. After that she could not sleep.
She recalled this now, sitting in the little sitting room of Jenkin’s house, having tea with Gerard. This having tea together was a custom which they kept up intermittently, though the ‘spread’ had grown steadily smaller and less sumptuous as the passing years had somehow removed the substance from the idea of ‘tea time’. At Boyars it retained some of its majesty for the sake of Annushka. But today, with Gerard, there had been no scones, no sandwiches, no bread, butter or jam, just some rather old biscuits and a fruit cake. Neither of them had eaten much. This was partly because Reeve was coming to pick Rose up and take her out to dinner at his hotel. This picking up had been Reeve’s idea, he said he wanted to see Gerard, they had not met for so long; Rose rang Gerard, it seemed inevitable.
Gerard was angry that Rose had thought it conceivable that Reeve should come and pick her up. Of course he had said that he would be delighted to see Reeve, and he was concealing his annoyance from Rose, or trying to, but he could see her sad look, and cursed himself for not having vetoed the rotten idea, or at least now evidently not managing to dissemble enough to be a pleasant companion.
This living at Jenkin’s place was not working, it had been a bad plan, based on an illusion. Whatever did I expect, Gerard wondered, that I could live a better life here as an ascetic hermit, that I could somehow become Jenkin? Did I think that? Or was I just trying to get away from Gideon and Pat? The house resisted him. At first he had tried not to alter it, then as that seemed wrong he made a few changes, a new sink in the kitchen, a larger refrigerator, a few of his watercolours brought over from the house in Notting Hill. Some of his furniture was still there, relegated to the upper flat, some was in store, some had been purchased by Gideon. His books were all over the place, at Notting Hill, with Rose, or here, not unpacked, as he had been unable to decide to touch Jenkin’s books which still occupied the shelves. The house felt dead, it was senseless, it was becoming dusty and untidy. Rose had said she would come and clean it, but he had told her not to bother and she had not pursued the matter.
The tea things, Jenkin’s teapot, Jenkin’s milk jug, the cake on too small a plate, the biscuits on too large a one, were perched on a small folding table upon which Gerard had spread a flowery linen drying-up cloth, imagining it to be a table cloth. The cake, awkwardly cut, had spread its large moist crumbs upon the cloth, the biscuits, broken anyway, had deposited their smaller drier crumbs, and some crumbling mess upon the carpet was now being absently pushed by Gerard’s foot onto the green tiles in front of the gas fire. Gerard was wearing slippers. He looked, Rose thought, tired and older.
Gerard was irritably aware of Rose’s sympathetic stare. He felt tired and older. He had looked that morning, when shaving, for his familiar handsome face, so humorous, so ironic, so finely carved and glowing with intelligence, and it was not there. What he saw was a heavy fleshy surly unhappy face, dark-ringed wrinkle-rounded eyes, dulled extinguished skin, limp greasy hair. Rose had asked, tiresomely, as usual, whether he was writing. He was not. He was not reading either, although he sometimes gazed at the pages of some of Jenkin’s books. He thought obsessively about Jenkin, about Jenkin’s death, about Crimond. He kept imagining scenes in which Crimond shot Jenkin through the forehead. Through the forehead, was what Marchment had said. Gerard could have done without that picture. Crimond had lured Jenkin there and murdered him. Why? As a substitute for murdering Gerard, as a revenge on Gerard for some crime, some slight, some contemptuous remark which Gerard had made to him and instantly forgotten, thirty or more years ago? So I am to blame for Jenkin’s death, thought Gerard. My fault, my sin, brought it about. I can’t live with this, I’m being poisoned, I’m being destroyed, and Crimond intended that too. He thought daily of going to see Crimond, but daily decided that it was impossible. When he was at his most obsessed he sought for help by recalling Jenkin laughing at him, and this sometimes worked, though it made him so deadly sad, and more often returned him to his loss and to the hell which he was inhabiting with Crimond. They were in hell together, he and Crimond, and sooner or later must destroy each other.
Of course Gerard did not reveal these thoughts to anybody, certainly not to Rose who still sometimes tried to draw him into speculations. In conversation with her he now quickly dismissed as unthinkable any notion that Jenkin’s death could have been other than a simple accident. Nor did he reveal to her another obsessive pain which left him no peace and made of his present life a fruitless interim. His acquaintance at the Oxford Press had said that he would soon, he hoped, be able to lay hands on a proof of Crimond’s book, and would send it to Gerard at once by special messenger. Gerard dreaded the arrival of this thing. He did not want to read Crimond’s hateful book, he would want rather to tear it up, but he was condemned to it, he would have to read it. If it was bad he would feel a sickening degrading satisfaction, if it was good he would feel hatred.
Rose was looking older too, or perhaps it was just that, since he felt disturbed and irritated by her, he was at last looking at her, instead of regarding her as a nebulous extension of himself, a mist presence, a cloud companion. He was suddenly able to see the parts not the whole. She had had her hair cut too close and too short, revealing her cheeks, the tips of her ears, her face looked unprotected and strained, her lightless hair was not grey but deprived of hue, like a darkened plant. Her lips looked dry and parched and scored with little lines, and she had dabbed too much powder on her pretty nose. Only her dark blue eyes, so like her brother’s, her courageous eyes as someone had called them, were undimmed, looking at him now with some silent appeal from which he turned away. She was wearing a green silkish dress, very simple, very smart, with an amethyst necklace. It reminded him of the dress she had worn at the midsummer dance, when they had waltzed together, he even suddenly remembered the music and his arm round her waist and the stars over the deer park. Then he thought, she has dressed herself up for Reeve.
‘Gerard, don’t crush the crumbs into the rug.’
‘Sorry.’
Rose straightened the rug. ‘It’s such a pretty rug.’
‘I gave it to him.’
‘I’ll take these things away. Reeve will be here soon.’
So she’s tidying the place up for Reeve. ‘I suppose he’ll want a drink. I’ll get the sherry.’
‘Reeve likes gin and tonic.’
‘I’ll get the gin and tonic. Don’t fuss with the tea things.’
‘We can’t have them here. It won’t take a moment.’ Rose found the tray propped against the wall and started loading it.
‘I haven’t finished!’
The door bell rang.
‘I’ll let him in,’ said Rose. She went into the hall, leaving the tray on the table. Gerard stood in the doorway of the sitting roo
m holding his tea cup. Reeve came in, was welcomed, took off his coat, said there was an east wind blowing, that it was starting to rain, and was it all right to leave his car just outside the house. Gerard retreated with his cup, picked up the tray, sidled past Reeve who was entering the room, and searching for the gin in the kitchen heard Rose asking her cousin for news of the children.
Holding drinks, gin and tonic for Reeve and Gerard, sherry for Rose, they stood together awkwardly beside the fire like people at a party.
‘Reeve says we mustn’t stay long because of our table.’
Reeve, in an expensive dark suit, looked burly, broad-shouldered, his face weathered, ruddy, rosy-cheeked, his skin rough. The big broad nails upon his large practical uneasy hands were clean but jagged. He wore a wedding ring. His brown hair was carefully combed. He had probably combed it in the car, even standing at the door, before he came in. He peered up from under his softly lined brow and his projecting eyebrows at Gerard, expressing a sort of determined wariness. Of course they had often met over the years, they knew each other reasonably well, they liked each other reasonably well. Rose found herself for the first time anxious in case Gerard should seem to patronise Reeve, to condescend. So that was what he usually did, and she had never noticed it before?