by Iris Murdoch
‘It’s a lovely flat,’ said Patricia.
‘We want someone there anyway just to keep an eye on the place when we’re away, we wouldn’t charge you anything – wait, wait – this could be, if you like, an interim move while we all see what we want to do next – but while Tamar’s at Oxford –’
‘You come here and suggest burning my flat,’ said Violet, ‘well, you can burn it with me in it. I’d rather live in hell than in your house.’
‘Perhaps you are living in hell now,’ said Father McAlister.
‘If I am it is nothing to do with you, you loathsome hypocrite, I know your type, peering into people’s lives and trying to control them, breaking up families, smashing things you don’t understand! You all want to take my daughter away from me.’
‘No!’ said Gideon.
‘She’s all I’ve got and you want to steal her –’
‘No, no,’ said Father McAlister.
‘Well, you can have her! I ask her, I beg her, to stay here with me and do as I want – but if she doesn’t she can go and I’ll never see her again! I mean it! I hope you are pleased with your meddling now! Well, Tamar, what is it to be?’
‘Of course I’ve got to go,’ said Tamar in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘but what you say doesn’t follow.’
‘Oh yes it does. Go then, go – and pack your things!’
‘They are already packed,’ said Tamar. ‘You will change your mind.’
‘I see, it’s a conspiracy. It was all arranged beforehand. Wanting to help me was just a pretence!’
‘No.’
‘I am left to burn, I am left to die – you know that. For God’s sake, Tamar, don’t leave me, stay with me, tell those wicked wicked people to go away! What have they to do with us? You’re all I have – I’ve given you my life!’ The hysterical voice hit a ringing quivering piercing note which made everything in the room shudder. Patricia turned away from the door and hid her face.
Tamar did not flinch. She gave her mother a sad gentle look, almost of curiosity, and said in a low resigned tone, ‘Oh – don’t take on so – I’m going to Pat and Gideon – you’ll come later – I’m sorry about this. I’m afraid it’s the only way to do it.’
The original author of this scene, which as Gideon felt afterwards had a curiously brittle theatrical quality, was Father McAlister. Reflecting upon Tamar’s situation and her future he had had the excellent idea of appealing not to Gerard but to Gideon. The priest saw, rightly, in Gideon, the mixture of self-confidence, ruthlessness, stage-sense and shameless money required to carry off what might almost, in the end, amount to an abduction. He had however envisaged the plan as unfolding more slowly and under his own guidance. He had persuaded Tamar, more easily than he had expected, to play her part, emphasising that the great change would actually, also, constitute the rescue, perhaps even the salvation of her mother. Father McAlister’s very brief meetings with Violet had led him to a prognosis which was if anything grimmer than Tamar’s own.
Gideon expected Violet to scream, and for a moment she seemed likely to as she drew her breath in a savage gasp like a fierce dog. She clenched her fists and actually bared her teeth. She said in a low voice, ‘So you won’t do anything for me, any more?’
‘I am doing something for you,’ said Tamar, ‘as you will see later. But if you mean will I do whatever you want, no. I can’t do that – and at the moment probably I can’t do anything at all for you – I can do – nothing for you.’ Tamar then turned her head away, looking at the window where net curtains, grey with dirt, hung in tatters. Then she looked back, looking at Gideon with an alert prompting expression as if to say, can’t we end this scene now?
Tamar had spoken so coldly, and now looked, as she ignored her mother and turned to Gideon, so ruthless, that a strange idea came into Father McAlister’s head. Supposing it were all somehow false, the emotional drama, the passion play of salvation in which he and Tamar had been taking part? It was not that he thought that Tamar had been lying or play-acting. Her misery had been genuine, her obsession terrible. But in her desperation had she not used him as he came to hand, carrying out his instruction, as a savage might those of a medicine man, or as a sick patient obeys a doctor? Or why not simply say it was like an analysis, neurosis, transference, liberation into ordinary life, an ordinary life in which the liberated patient could snap his fingers at the therapist, and go his way realising that what he took for moral values or categorical imperatives on even the devil and the eternal fire were simply quirkish mental ailments such as we all suffer from, a result of a messy childhood, from which one can now turn cheerfully and ruthlessly away. Tamar had faced the devil and the eternal fire, he had seen her face twist with terror, and later, when he had exorcised the spirit of the malignant child, seen it divinely calm and bathed with penitential tears. Now Tamar seemed endowed with an extraordinary authority. Even Gideon, he could see, was startled by it. She was authoritative and detached and able, in this crisis with her mother, to freeze her feelings. It was her freedom she had wanted, perhaps all along, and now she could smell its proximity she was ready to trample on anyone. In this ritual of dismissal and liberation which he had been there to sanction, it was as if she had cursed her mother. The priest’s ‘bright idea’ had envisaged a row, certainly, but with it an emergence of Tamar’s genuine love for her mother, which he imagined he had discerned deep within her. He had not wanted to release his penitent from one demon to see her seized by another. Tamar’s former obedience, the predominant importance she had given to her mother’s states and her will, had had something bad about it. He kept telling Tamar about a true and free love of her, a love in Christ, which could heal Violet as she, Tamar, had been healed. The priest had, in his brief meetings with Violet, made her out as a monster. He could see, he thought, her terrible unhappiness, an unhappiness which made his sympathetic sentimental (she had used that word) soul wince and cringe, a black unhappiness, deeper and darker and harder than her daughter’s, and he had seen too how her suffering had made her monstrous. He was not going to let his Tamar be any more this monster’s victim. But must not, and by both of them, the poor monster be helped too? Now, as he looked at Tamar, who was brushing crumbs off her skirt and making the restless unmistakable shrugging movements of someone who is about to rise and depart, he wondered: is this new energy, this detachment, this authority, not perhaps simply a metamorphosis of an old deep hatred, which has been for so many years obediently kept in check? Have I liberated her not into Christ, but into selfish uncaring power? Have I perhaps simply created another monster? (In the very process however of unrolling these awful thoughts Father McAlister, by a gesture familiar to him, handed the whole matter over to his Master, knowing that it would be handed back to him later in a more intelligible state.)
Violet, who had been glaring at Tamar open-mouthed, her eyes suddenly seeming like blazing rectangular holes, rose suddenly to her feet, rocking the table and making Gideon hastily shift his chair. She fumbled for her glasses in the pocket of her skirt. Taken by surprise by the intrusion, she was, Gideon could see now, pathetically untidy, her blouse crumpled, her cardigan spotted with holes through which the colours of her blouse and skirt showed accusingly. She was wearing down-at-heel slippers one of which had come off. She looked down, stabbing at it angrily with her foot. Gideon moved the table. Violet went forward to the door. As she did so she composed her face. Patricia, who was standing in the hall, stood hastily aside. Violet entered her bedroom, banged the door, and audibly locked it.
As soon as Violet’s departing back was turned to her, Tamar too rose, and saying, ‘Let’s go,’ darted to a cupboard and began pulling out her suitcases.
Gideon said, ‘Oh dear!’ and rose to his feet. Father McAlister automatically picked up one of the sugary cakes, a pink one, and stuffed it whole into his mouth. They moved into the hall.
‘Well,’ said Patricia, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Come on, let’s get out, get Tamar away before
she changes her mind.’
‘She won’t change her mind,’ said Gideon.
‘If only I’d got that sack out into the hall,’ said Patricia, ‘we could have taken it with us. I found such indescribable filth and mess in Violet’s room, awful hairy decaying things under the bed, I couldn’t even make out what they were.’
Patricia was putting her coat on. The priest picked up his. Tamar carried out three large suitcases and dumped them by the door. As she did so she looked at Father McAlister and an extraordinary glance passed between them. The priest thought, she has seen through me. Then: who has betrayed whom?
‘I’m afraid the car’s miles away,’ said Patricia. ‘Shall we all walk or shall I get it? We can carry the cases between us. I want to get out of here.’ She said to the priest, ‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘No, thanks, I’ve got to see someone who lives nearby.’
Gideon said, ‘You and Tamar get the car. There’s no point in carrying the cases. We’ll put them out on the landing. I’ll wait here. Violet might even emerge.’
‘She won’t. OK. Come on, Tamar.’
Gideon and the priest looked at each other. The priest, raising his eyebrows, motioned slightly with his head toward the closed bedroom door. Gideon, expressionless, continued to hold the door open onto the stairs. He said, ‘Thank you very much. We’ll talk again.’
‘Yes.’ Father McAlister sighed, then with a wave of his hand set off down the stairs and into the street.
Gideon waited until he heard the front door close. Then he carefully closed the flat door and went to Violet’s bedroom and knocked.
‘Violet! They’ve gone. Come out now.’
After a short time Violet emerged. She had changed her clothes, combed her hair, powdered her nose, removed her glasses. She had evidently been crying, and elaborate powdering round her eyes had made the wrinkled skin pale, dry and dusty. She peered, frowning, at Gideon and he saw over her shoulder the chaotic room which had defeated Pat. She walked across to Tamar’s tidy room, moved the table a little, then lifted the plate of cakes and offered it to Gideon. He took a cake. They both sat down on the bed. Gideon felt, for the first time for many years, a sudden physical affection for his old friend, a desire, to which he did not yield, to hug her and to laugh. He thought, somebody, a real strong person, a lovable, admirable person, has been lost here, ruined.
Violet’s hair, like her daughter’s, needed cutting but had been neatly combed and patted into shape. It was still brown, its lustre here and there embellished by single hairs of a pale luminous grey. Her nose was slightly red at the nostrils, whether from a cold or recent weeping. Her small mouth, now touched by lipstick, was at its sternest. She stroked down her fringe over her brow, over her indelible frown, moulding it into shape with a familiar gesture. She had, Gideon reflected, her higher civil servant look. She looked in no way like a defeated woman. In taking Father McAlister’s gamble Gideon had feared, perhaps wanted, something rather more weak and pliable. It was a moment for Violet to surrender to fate, but she looked now unlikely to surrender to anything.
They had both been thinking, and each allowed a space for the other to speak first.
‘They’ll be back,’ said Gideon, ‘at least Pat will ring the bell and I’ll carry down the cases. The car is a good way off. We’ve got ten minutes. But of course I’ll come in tomorrow.’
Violet said, ‘Why did you spring this loathsome charade on me? That creep McAlister was the last straw.’
‘It was his idea,’ said Gideon not entirely truthfully. The strategy had been the priest’s, the tactics certainly Gideon’s. ‘It was a device, you understand.’
‘To get Tamar away.’
‘Yes.’
‘But she could have gone any time, I wasn’t keeping her a prisoner!’
‘You know, in a way, you were. You had taken away her will. She had to have moral support –’
‘Moral support?’
‘To get out in a definite intelligible manner, with a reasonable explanation.’
‘You mean sponging on you?’
‘She couldn’t just cut and run. There had to be a raid by a respectable rescue party.’
‘It shows you think nothing of me, you think I’m not a person. That mob pushing their way in here without any warning! You wouldn’t do that to anyone else. You feel contempt for me.’
‘No, Violet –’
‘All of you acting well-rehearsed parts.’
‘You were acting too.’
‘You think so? It was designed to humiliate me. All right, it was clever. My reactions could have been predicted, all my lines could have been written beforehand. It was like – it was – an attempt on my life.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gideon, ‘but look, you don’t really mind my paying a bit for Tamar at Oxford?’
‘I don’t care a hang –’
‘Good, that’s out of the way –’
‘So long as I never see her again.’
‘Then there’s you.’
‘I don’t exist.’
‘Oh shut up, Violet, think, you can think. McAlister thinks that Tamar really deeply loves you and –’
‘She hates me. She’s always been cold as hell to me, even as a small child. Obedient, but icy cold. I don’t blame her. I hate her, if it comes to that.’
‘I don’t know about Tamar, I want to deal in certainties. Let’s say I’m a person, possibly the only person, who not only knows you, but loves you. OK so far?’
Violet this time, instead of returning a cynical reply, said, ‘Oh Gideon, thanks for loving me – not that I believe it actually – but it’s useless – it’s sour milk – only fit to be thrown away.’
‘I never throw anything away, that’s why everything I touch turns to gold. Let me help you. I can do anything. Just by sheer will power I drove Gerard out of that house in Notting Hill. Look, let’s sell this flat, Pat’s right, it’s awful, it’s haunted. Come and live at our place.’
‘With Tamar? Being the housemaid? No thanks.’
‘You and Tamar must make peace, you both need peace – never mind the details – you must live, you must be happy – what’s money for after all?’
‘It’s no good. You’re a happy person. Someone like you can’t just manufacture happiness for someone like me. I’m finished. You can look after Tamar. That’s what this is all about.’
The door bell rang.
‘I’ll come in tomorrow.’
‘I won’t be here.’
‘Don’t terrify me, Violet. You know I care for you –’
‘Don’t make me sick.’ She went out into the hall, opened the flat door, then disappeared once more into her bedroom and locked herself in.
Gideon, hearing Pat call below, lifted the cases out onto the landing. He closed the door of the flat. He said to himself, she won’t kill herself. I’m glad I said all those things to her. She’ll think about those things.
In fact, although it was not tonight that Violet would kill herself, she was nearer to the edge than Gideon surmised. She had been frightened by Tamar’s mysterious illness, not so much on her behalf as her own. She had seen in Tamar’s death pallor and face wrenched by misery the picture of her own fate – her death, since she would never recover, whereas Tamar would recover, to dance on her grave. She was shaken by the new cruel self-willed Tamar, so unlike the cool but submissive child she was used to, and now dismayed by Tamar’s departure, which she had not at all expected. After all she had needed, she had replied upon, Tamar’s presence. She felt hideously lonely. Her sense of her own vileness, together with her chronic resentment, made any attempt at human society increasingly difficult. Soon it would be impossible. There were no pleasures. She hated all the plump glittering giggling people she saw on television. Even solitary drinking, which now occupied more of her time, was not a relief, more like a method of suicide. A sense of the unreality, the sheer artificiality, of individual existence had begun to possess her. What was it after all to
be ‘a person’, able to speak, to remember, to have purposes, to inhibit screams? What was this weird unclean ever-present body, of which she was always seeing parts? Why did not her ‘personality’ simply cease to be continuous and disintegrate into a cloud of ghosts, blown about by the wind?
Later on, over the gin bottle, she thought, perhaps I will go to their place, to that flat. Tamar will move out. But they’ll never get me out! I’ll stay there and make their lives a misery.
Father McAlister, who had of course no one living nearby to see, was now concerned with getting back to his parish. He was sitting, in an unhappy state of mind, in an underground train. It was easier to set people free, as the world knows it, than to teach them to love. He often uttered the word ‘love’, he had uttered it often to Tamar. In the thick emotional atmosphere generated by frequent meetings between priest and penitent Tamar had declared that ‘really’ she loved her mother, and ‘really’ her mother loved her. It was what he expected, and induced, her to say. Was he however so much influenced by, so much immured with, images of the power of love that he could miss and underestimate the genuine presence of ordinary genuine hate? Was he too tolerantly aware of himself as a magician, pitting against an infinite variety of demonic evils a power, not his own, which must be ultimately insuperable? The case of Tamar had excited him because so much was at stake. He was sadly aware that much of his work in the confessional (and he was a popular confessor) consisted in relieving the minds of hardened sinners who departed cheerfully to sin again. At least they came back. But with Tamar it had seemed like life and death; if he could free her she would be free indeed. After so much experience he could still be so naive. Oh she had been brave, but what had made her brave? Had all that awful travail simply provided her with the strength required to leave her mother? Was there in the end nothing but breakage, liberty from obsession and nothing enduring of the spirit?
The priest recalled, as a sacred charm, the innocence of the children who had acted, under his direction, in the Nativity Play, always put on in the village church at Christmas time, the delight of the little children dressed up as Joseph and Mary and the Three Kings, and the Ox and the Ass (always favourite parts), the pride of their parents, the tears of joy shed by their mothers as they watched the little ones, with such natural tenderness and reverence, enact the Christmas Story. The crib containing the Child, the Saviour of the World, of the Cosmos, of all that is, became in that little cold church a glowing radiant object so holy that at a certain moment those who watched spontaneously fell on their knees. Could this be mummery, superstition? No, but it was also something of which he was not worthy, from which he was separated, because he was a liar, because a line of falsity ran all the way through him and tainted what he did. He said to himself, I don’t believe in God or the Divinity of Christ or the Life Everlasting, but I continually say so, I have to. Why? In order to carry on with the life which I have chosen and which I love. The power which I derive from my Christ is debased by its passage through me. It reaches me as love, it leaves me as magic. That is why I make serious mistakes. In fact, in spite of his self-laceration, a ritual in which he indulged at intervals, the priest felt, in a yet deeper deep self, a sense of security and peace. Behind doubt there was truth, and behind the doubt that doubted that truth there was truth… He was a sinner, but he knew that his Redeemer lived.