by Iris Murdoch
Rose found that, as she continued slowly to undress, pulled off her brown corduroy dress and her white blouse, she was breathing deeply, almost sighing. She got into her long nightdress, settling it over her raised arms, seeking comfort in the familiar gesture. So there would be a future Crimond. If Gerard wrote, or even began to write, his book, if Rose was helping him, even if she were in any way, even as she had always been, close to him, she was bound to meet Crimond again. As she felt this she began, with the automatic swiftness of thought, to rewrite in her mind the letter of – what was it – apology, retrieval, reconciliation, which she had written to Crimond when he had just left the house on that amazing day after his proposal of marriage. My dear David, please forgive me for my graceless words. Your disclosure took me by surprise. Let me say now how grateful and how moved I am. I ran after you but you had gone. You said that we should meet again. Please let us do so, let us get to know each other. Perhaps I could love you after all. I am mad, thought Rose. Do I not remember how relieved I was, so soon after, that I had not sent that reckless compromising letter, a letter which, however little it said, would have brought Crimond back to me with every expectation? I would have had to send him away a second time, and how painful and significant that second parting would have been for both of us. Even the existence of that letter in Crimond’s hands would have bound me to him in some sort of terrified servitude as if he were to blackmail me with it. How much I would have feared that Gerard might find out that, however briefly, even for seconds, I had felt like that. So, these are the rights over me which I give to Gerard. But supposing… I assumed you to be unattainable, perhaps I was wrong. Rose, don’t be angry with me, please forgive me. Love has to be awakened, I want to awaken yours. You are capable of loving me. If I had written at once, she thought, I could have got him back, I could at least have erased that dreadful impression. By now he will have digested my arrogant words and decided to hate me. What treatment I gave to that proud man, and how I may yet be made by him to suffer for it.
Those thoughts, condensed into a moment of complex vision, flashed in Rose’s mind like some terrifying aerial explosion. She said aloud, ‘I don’t really think this.’ She began to carry the remains of the supper into the kitchen, throwing away the fragments on the plates, wrapping up the cheese, putting the cake into one tin and the biscuits into another. She remembered, then felt, her toothache, but it was less acute. She took two more aspirins. She was exhausted, her desire to sit and think all night had left her, she felt now, and was grateful for it, simply the need to become unconscious. She told herself, come back to reality. I did the only right thing, though I did it so ungraciously and badly. The hurt is to my vanity. We shall go on thinking about Jenkin and whether the impossible was possible. Gerard said that they would never be friends – but they are sure to meet, and one day I too shall see Crimond again, and we shall tremble with shock and then be cool and ordinary ever after; and he will never tell, never, even under torture would he tell, not only for his own sake, but for mine. So there is a strange sad bond between us that will always hurt us both.
She thought, I wonder if Gerard meant it about our sharing a house, and if it could ever happen? Somewhere perhaps there really is a house where Gerard and I will live together ever after as brother and sister. Then as she got into bed she began to wonder to herself where that house might be. Perhaps beside the river. She had always wanted to live by the river. She turned out the light and fell asleep and dreamt she was in Venice with Marcus Field.
Gerard, feeling unusually drunk, had decided to walk all the way back from Rose’s flat to the Goldhawk Road. The timid rain had ceased, and a fuzzy mad moon had risen. The east wind was moving steadily across London. He had brought no gloves and kept putting his hands into his pockets, finding this uncomfortable and taking them out again. The east wind was jerking his hair about and icily fingering his scalp.
What a state Rose had been in, so unusual, what language she had used, words like ‘unbearable’. Had they managed later to sort that out, had they sorted anything out, or just created some sort of superfluous unintelligible confusion? Of course they were friends, their friendship, their bond, was absolute, and she must know that as well as he. Had he somehow done wrong, been lacking in consideration, did she really need reassurance? Perhaps she did, she had less to think about than he had, more time to brood. He felt now that he had given Rose less than she wanted, said less than he was tempted to say, been ungenerous and cautious. Perhaps she had been struck by a difference between the pressing attentions of the Curtland gang and the way in which he, Gerard, ‘took her for granted’? ‘I’ve given you my life and you haven’t even noticed.’ That was a very extreme thing to say. But surely it expressed a mood and not any deep resentment? How could he not take her for granted, was not that in itself a proof of something absolute? How strange, almost embarrassing, that she had actually spoken of needing a ‘pact’, something like a promise. It only then occurred to him that Rose had been demanding from him exactly what he had demanded from Jenkin! Poor human beings, he thought, always wanting security, but unwilling to provide it! Jenkin had laughed. Rose had laughed too but, as it were, in the wrong place. Why had she laughed so when he suggested sharing a house, and then later said that this was just what she wanted? Rose was usually so rational and calm. Of course she was annoyed about the book, even jealous of it, but that was another thing. Had the bloody Curtlands been getting at her? Gerard recalled the cunning look on Neville’s face when he had said they were taking her to Yorkshire. Was that a thrust of some kind, a preliminary to a battle? There could be no battle. Rose belonged to him, she had always done. He was responsible to her and for her. Of course she could tend her Curtlands. But Gerard was her real family, there could be no doubt about that! He thought, I’ll reassure her, I’ll look after her, perhaps I haven’t tried enough to make her happy, but I will now.
He was, as he came near to Jenkin’s house, beginning to feel very damp and cold. He had, in coming to live in the little house, intended something, perhaps symbolic but also marking some deep change in his mode of existence, some giving up of worldly goods, some kind of liberating simplification. He had indeed sold many of his possessions, while reflecting ironically that it is not exactly asceticism to sell what you have and put the money in the bank. He had lately begun to feel false in Jenkin’s house, as if he were playing at something. The neighbours knew it, perhaps the house knew it too. It was not even a part of his mourning, seeming sometimes even a desecration of it. There was a kind of futile unmanageable pain in living with Jenkin’s things when Jenkin was dead. He had not intended to speak to Rose of a house, though the idea had been for a short time in his head. Now he began to feel an interest in living, not where he had been before, but not here either. He needed to create some entirely new scene, and he did not have to play at austerity now he had suddenly acquired such an awesomely demanding aim in life. He did not think that he had overestimated Crimond’s book, but whether he had or not he now had to write his own. He could now, thanks to Crimond, see the book that he had to write. He thought, I may indeed be carried away, but I must try my damnedest to get it all clear. As he thought this he suddenly thought of Levquist, of what it had been like to get clear some appallingly difficult piece of Greek, and recalled, and felt now in his guts, that almost sexual shudder with which, arriving at Oxford, he had found himself confronted with an impossibly high standard. He recalled too some words of Valéry which Levquist used to quote: a difficulty is a light, an insuperable difficulty is a sun. Well, more often no doubt an insuperable difficulty is an insuperable difficulty. In attempting now to ‘answer’ Crimond he must be prepared for what he wrote to seem, perhaps even to be, merely a commentary on someone else’s book. Perhaps indeed all that awaited him was a long and final failure, a dreary fruitless toil, wasting his energy and his remaining time to produce something that was worthless. The words of Augustine quoted by Father McAlister came back to him: before the count
enance of God my soul shrivels like a moth. Perhaps he would have nothing in the end but a broken heart, not even contrite!
As he reached the little house it was beginning to rain again, and as he pressed the key into the lock he experienced a feeling of intrusion, as of making an unexpected and perhaps unwelcome visit. The house was extremely cold. Jenkin had never entertained the idea of central heating. Gerard turned on the lights and pulled the velveteen curtains and lit the gas fire in the sitting room. He decided he was still hungry, he had been too excited to eat properly with Rose, too anxious to tell her of something great. Of course he had quite failed to convey the book, how right it is, how wrong it is. He thought, it’s right because it’s about suffering, it’s wrong because it’s about being true to a future good society. That’s the main idea, what the book depends on really – but there’s no such thing. Truth can’t reach out into the future in that way, as Rose said, we can’t imagine the future – and there can never be a perfectly good society – there can only be a decent society, and that depends on freedom and order and circumstances and an endless tinkering which can’t be programmed from a distance. It’s all accidental, but the values are absolute. That’s the simple point about human life with the long explanation. Suppose Rose’s ‘cold water’ were just the beginning of a general dismissal of Crimond’s book? Of course nothing that happened to that book could affect his. But Gerard realised that though he would be annoyed if Crimond got only good reviews he would be dismayed if he got only bad ones! He went out to the kitchen and poured a tin of soup into a saucepan. He found some sliced bread and buttered it while the soup was heating, then brought soup and bread back into the sitting room where Crimond’s galley proofs were piled high on the sideboard guarded by the Staffordshire dogs. He put the plate and the mug of soup on the green tiles by the fire, and as he turned to close the door he saw some letters lying on the mat in the hall. He recognised Duncan’s writing. He brought the letters in, tearing open Duncan’s envelope.
My dear Gerard,
You will have seen Levquist’s obituary in the Times. Whoever wrote it didn’t praise him enough. That kind of greatness is not the fashion these days I daresay! I felt extraordinarily sad and felt I must write to you. I know you saw him at that terrible dance last summer, and maybe you have seen him since. He was a kind of saint of scholarship, a special kind of example. Perhaps his life ending made me wonder what I’ve made of mine. What a mess it’s all been, and how short the business is really, a topic I’ve heard you mention. I conclude that what really matters is friendship, not that overrated love business, but one’s close friends, the really close people who are one’s comforters and one’s judges. You have always been both to me. May I express the hope that, in all the recent shambles, we haven’t lost each other. It seems, here, infinitely far from London. We have bought a house, but address at present is this hotel. I hope you are writing something. I’ve given up thought.
Yours
Duncan
Gerard had not seen the Times obituary. So Levquist was gone. He recalled the long room, the big desk covered with books, the window open to the summer night, Levquist’s great grotesque beautiful head, Levquist saying ‘Come again, come and see the old man.’ He had not been again. He had never kissed Levquist’s hands and said he loved him. Levquist saying, ‘I saw young Riderhood. He was quite stumped by that piece of Thucydides!’ ‘Oh God, oh God,’ said Gerard aloud, and sat down in one of the uncomfortable chairs by the fire and hid his face in his hands. A cloud, a presence, of dark unhappiness was suddenly beside him. That was the night when his father died. Levquist, who had also been his father, was dead too. And Jenkin was dead; and the presence in the room was that of Jenkin, Jenkin sad, Jenkin as sadness, Jenkin as incurable torturing grief. Why did you have to die, when I loved you so? Gerard said to Jenkin. And it was terrible, terrible to him, as if the shade of Jenkin were weeping and holding out its strengthless hands. It wasn’t my fault, said Gerard to the shade, forgive me, forgive me, I am bereaved, I am punished, I am poisoned. Why are you weeping these awful tears? Is it because you were murdered and I have befriended your murderer? Oh Jenkin, how can we have so lost each other, how can we be so changed, you an accuser and I paralysed by a poisonous drug!
Gerard stood up and actually looked around the room, searching for something, some little thing, for that was what the awful accusing shade had now become, something like a little box or a black mechanical toy. There was nothing but the room itself, awkward and graceless and accidental and empty. With a sudden gesture Gerard hit the pile of neatly stacked proofs knocking them onto the floor. As they fell they took one of the Staffordshire dogs with them. The dog was broken. Gerard picked up the pieces and put them on the sideboard.
He thought, I’m poisoned all right, I’m haunted, I’m cursed, I’m mad. The destruction of the dog had brought tears to his eyes at last. How can I write this book, he thought, when I can’t help thinking that Jenkin was murdered? What do Crimond’s thoughts matter? Why did I talk to Rose about a house or being together? Let her go to Yorkshire. I’m under a curse, I’m condemned to a haunted solitude. Crimond’s book made me feel I had some thoughts, but it was an illusion. Levquist said I had no hard core, Crimond said anything I wrote would be beautified and untrue, Rose said it was vanity. I haven’t got the energy to write a long book. I see now it’s not important. I’ll get out of here though. I don’t want company any more, whether it’s humans or ghosts. Oh God, I’m getting old. I’ve never felt this before. I’m old.
He picked up the plate and the mug from the tiles beside the fire and took them back to the kitchen. He put on the kettle for his hot water bottle. He had forgotten to switch on the electric fire in the bedroom and the room was icy. He switched it on and pulled the curtains. The wind, now filled with rain, was lashing at the window panes which were rattling and admitting cold streams of air which were agitating the curtains. He said to himself, of course I’m drunk, but that’s how it is. The curse I’m under is the one we’re all under. The Oxford colleges and Big Ben can’t buy us off now. The time when we could talk on this planet of controlling our destinies is finished for good – the short short time. Rose is right, it’s no use trying to think any more. The party’s over. Après nous le déluge.
The kettle boiled and he filled the bottle and put it in the bed which seemed to be inhabited by some cold damp fungus. He took his pyjamas and went back to the sitting room to undress before the fire. Crimond’s galley proofs were all over the floor and he thrust them into a heap with his foot. He took off his tie which he had put on hours ago to go to the Fairfaxs’ party, where he knew he would see Rose, and where he had arrived late because he had been unable to tear himself away from that damnable book.
As he unbuttoned his shirt he saw Duncan’s letter open upon the chair. He would reply of course, but he felt no urgent desire to see Duncan. Later perhaps. I feel discredited, he thought, these deaths have knocked the stuffing out of me. I’d be ashamed before Duncan. It’s all right for him to have a woman and a house. Duncan could manage his life, even his bad luck, he was never ‘high-minded’, like Jenkin, like Gerard, like Crimond. Gerard remembered that he had used that term to Rose to describe Crimond’s book. But Jenkin’s high-mindedness was not like Gerard’s or like Crimond’s. Gerard recalled how Levquist had snubbed him when he had suggested that Jenkin hadn’t ‘got anywhere’. ‘Riderhood doesn’t need to get anywhere. He walks the path, he exists where he is. Whereas you –’ Yes, thought Gerard, Jenkin always walked the path, with others, wholly engaged in wherever he happened to be, fully existing, fully real at every point, looking about him with friendly curiosity. Whereas I have always felt reality was elsewhere, exalted and indifferent and alone, upon some misty mountain peak which I, among the very few, could actually see, though of course never reach, and whose magnetism thrilled in my bowels (that was Levquist’s phrase) while I enjoyed my superior vision, my consciousness of height and distance, the gulf below, the heig
ht above, and a sense of pleasurable unworthiness shared only by the elect – self-satisfied Platonism, Augustinian masochism, Levquist called it. Why didn’t I go back and see him and talk about all that, I could have gone any time. Now I feel, I feel at last alone – and the mountain and the mountain peak, that hanging on, that looking up, was it all an illusion? Can I live without thinking of myself, and of it, in just that way? Perhaps it was the loss of it which I felt just now when I realised how poisoned I am by that murderous doubt, when I thought it’s too high, it’s too far. Just when I meet with the insuperable difficulty which I’ve so much desired I find I have no strength left. I shall shrink and shrink and creep into a crevice. What I thought was the top of the mountain was a false summit after all – the summit is far higher up and hidden in cloud and as far as I’m concerned it might as well not exist, my endurance is at an end.
He thought, I’ll go right away and hide somewhere. I’ll buy a flat and lock it up and go. I won’t tell anyone where I am. Who cares anyway, except Rose, and she’s got her own family now. What a lot of nonsense I talked to her tonight, it was probably the drink, I’m not used to it. I’ll tell her not to tell anyone I had that daft idea. Well, she won’t tell anyone, she wants it to go away, she probably knows it’s bound to. How I wish I could talk to Jenkin. Perhaps this visitation of awfulness is really knowing at last that Jenkin is dead and isn’t anywhere. He put Duncan’s letter back in its envelope and put it on the mantelpiece, and began to glance at the other letters which he had dropped on the floor. There were two letters for Jenkin. There had been many of those to begin with, now there were fewer. These two were advertisements and he put them in the wastepaper basket. One was the gas bill which he put in his pocket. Then he suddenly felt something like a massive electric shock, a jolt, which for a moment he could not account for and imagined he had actually been touched by some stray wire which had sent a current through him. Or perhaps he was ill, something had given way in his brain. He found he was looking down at the last of the letters which was lying on the floor at his feet. It was the writing on the envelope which, darting its message into his unconscious mind, had produced this strange shock, and even now, after Gerard had realised that this writing was portentous, perhaps terrible, he did not immediately recognise whose writing it was. Handwriting can tell a tale of joy or of fear well before it is connected with a name. It was Crimond’s writing. It was many years since Gerard had received a letter from Crimond, but the script somehow, like a sinister hieroglyph revealed by torchlight in a tomb, took him back many more years, to Oxford, to something, some event, some feeling, too deep now to be uncovered, far away in the dark depths of his mind, and from which the frightening portent derived its original power. Even as Gerard was returned to his present self he felt a sick terror at the sight, a disgusted loathing, and was tempted to tear the unopened letter up into small pieces. He even turned his back upon it and went out to tidy the kitchen, to wash his mug and plate under the hot tap and turn off the light. Then he returned to the sitting room and picked up the letter and opened it. At any rate it was not a long letter. It consisted of only one line. It was an accident. D.