The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Yes, I know. My darling.’

  ‘Well then — why prefer what’s hollow to what’s real? That’s hypocrisy, keeping up appearances, bowing to conventions, letting all the real love disappear out of life. Our love is the truth, the concrete, the real, what opposes it is abstract and false. We must follow our hearts, that’s what’s true, the truth of our whole being. Sex is true, Midge, you’ve recognised it and we’ve proved it.’

  ‘Yes. You don’t believe we should try and be good like Stuart thinks!’

  ‘You’re joking. What Stuart wants is not only false, it’s senseless, it’s an unintelligible fake, one can’t think in that degree of detail about morals. Life is a whole, it must be lived as a whole, abstract good and bad are just fictions. We must live in our own concrete realised truth and that’s got to include what we deeply desire, what fulfils us and gives us joy. That’s the good life, not everyone is capable of it, not everyone has the courage. We are, and we have.’

  ‘I think I’ll dress,’ said Midge. She looked at her watch, then squatted to find her shoes. She peeled off her silk robe and found her petticoat. Harry groaned. He put his whisky down carefully on the chest of drawers. She went on, ‘Yes, I know. But I — you spoke about a net that you lived in — what I live in is lies — wherever I reach out my hand I touch a network of lies.’

  ‘Well, don’t tell me that! You know what I want, openness and truth and you, absolutely and forever! You say this is wonderful now, just picture it without the lies! I hate lying and creeping about being afraid of being found out! I don’t want it to be like this, it’s contrary to my nature, you make me do things contrary to my nature and I hate it, I feel demeaned and demoralised, I want to be myself, with you, right out in the open. You want to have it all ways, to love and enjoy me and yet to torment me with abstract morality!’

  ‘I’m sorry — ’

  ‘And you’re the one who once said “my motto is anything goes”!’

  ‘I remember that. Perhaps I was trying to please you by saying your motto.’

  ‘You do me less than justice.’

  ‘I know, you have your philosophy.’

  ‘Midge, you drive me mad! What’s the problem? You said that when you’re with me Thomas doesn’t exist, so all you’ve got to do is be with me all the time.’

  ‘I had a bad dream.’

  ‘You said that this was the only genuine independent creative thing you’d ever done in your whole life, so why don’t you complete it? Why do you hack at it all the time? You know I won’t leave you, you are safe in my heart, it doesn’t matter what you do. So is it all just to hurt me?’

  ‘I saw a man on a white horse passing and looking so balefully towards me as if he would kill me. He looked into my eyes. Then he went on. I’ve had that dream before.’

  ‘You’d better ask your husband what it means. It was probably him:.He’s the cause of all the trouble!’

  ‘You used to like him, you used to admire him.’

  ‘I still do. Do you think I enjoy deceiving him, and finding myself cursing him? You have a talent for saying things which are both hurtful and ridiculous.’

  ‘I can’t think why you love me.’

  ‘Oh God! My life rests on your love. I love you deeply and tenderly as if we’ve long long been happily married.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Midge — !’

  ‘I know, my darling. But I can’t hear you say it often enough. Forgive my — forgive me. It’s time you went home. Look, the rain has stopped. I shall cry when you’re gone. Then I shall tidy this room and do my nails and make myself up a new face. Just give me your hand, your poor burnt hand, I’ll be gentle with it.’

  ‘What about my poor burnt heart? God how it hurts me to leave you. Kiss me and kiss me, there can never be enough kisses in the world, give me my food or I shall die of love.’

  ‘How beautiful you look, my lovely dear animal, my love — Harry in majesty!’

  ‘Cry God for Harry, England, and St George!’

  ‘There now, go. I wish I could help Edward. I’d so like to.’

  ‘Leave him alone. He’s got enough troubles without falling in love with you!’

  God, why do we have to suffer so, thought Harry, as he walked along holding up his handsome blond head with such an air of calm authority and pride that people turned to look after him. He looked like an ambassador. Why can’t we be happy as we ought to be and could be, it’s an inch away. I love her perfectly, she loves me perfectly, yet I’m in hell, and she’s in hell. Why does it have to be? Why can’t I make her strong enough? Yet she is strong, maddeningly so sometimes, when she uses her strength against me. And why do I have to play this part which I so detest, sitting at Thomas’s table and trying not to look at his wife? Harry was well aware, in these negative conversations with Midge, of the deliberate far-sighted cunning with which he diminished Thomas, Thomas as old, Thomas as cold, Thomas as joyless and dull, watching as he did so hawklike for the tiniest signs of her impatience with her husband, her spite against him as the cause of her woe and the obstacle to her happiness. He would unravel Midge from Thomas, deftly and patiently undo him from her world, invent for her a past in which Thomas did not exist. For her to be able to make the break contempt, even hatred of her husband would be needed, would at least certainly be helpful: a terrible truth at which Harry tried to look calmly. So I am capable of cruelty, he thought, as well as treachery. And then, he wondered as he often did, whatever would Thomas do if he knew, or rather, as he corrected himself, what will he do when he knows? The man was a bit fey. A fierce primitive Scotsman with a dirk? A masochistic Jew? A fierce unforgiving scheming Jew? With Midge, Harry always pictured Thomas as weak, kindly, likely to accept a fait accompli with resignation, even perhaps with relief. Midge was afraid of her husband. This was something they never discussed. Harry carefully concealed the fact that he was afraid of him too: an unpredictable and dangerous man whom, this was the turn of the screw, Harry admired and loved. It was a part of what he sometimes thought of as his punishment that he had to live with this incompatible esteem, and refrain from expressing it to his beloved in any terms of praise. Thus he moved like a dancer between a steadying assurance that their secret life could continue, and the envisaging of its felicitous and inevitable end in a liberation into happiness and truth, between calming her into present enjoyment, and working her, edging her, startling her into a grasp of the future. When would he force it all into the open and carry Midge away in his troika? When would the moment come when, if all else failed, he could make her his wife by threatening to leave her? It was still too early for that. But the pressure must be kept up. The weekend. The love nest. Step by step, and each step inevitable.

  PART TWO

  Seegard

  Seegard only, an almost illegible signpost said, pointing away down a muddy track where the country bus had deposited Edward Baltram.

  After his cry of ‘I’ve got to go’, Edward had had second thoughts. The idea had briefly seemed, after the intense emotions of the seance and his talk with Thomas, like an inspiration, a glowing indicator. He had thought, I’ll go to my father, I’ll confess to him and he will judge me. In the next day or two however the energy had faded and the project lost its point. It was not so much that Edward felt afraid of it, though indeed he did; it just seemed useless and worthless, as empty of sense as everything else in his miserable life. Why should he take the trouble to go to a place where he had no significance and was not wanted and would simply be rejected? Besides, how could he go? He could hardly arrive uninvited, and was incapable of writing a letter. He wished he had never told Thomas about the seance, telling about it had made it momentarily more real. That whole episode now seemed to belong to a kind of dull madness which belonged in his unhappy being like an alien ball of black rags which had some- how been stuffed in under his skin. Those were mean nasty small hallucinations, a sort of mental filth exuded by the soul. He once more occupied himself by lying on his bed rea
ding thrillers, and walking about London seeing ugly deformed people and obscene pictures. Even the dogs were hostile. They could smell him. He was afraid at first that the seance might haunt him and prompt new horrible experiences. But soon he began to forget it and returned to his endless familiar rehearsals of the old pain.

  One morning however Edward was amazed to receive the following letter.

  Seegard

  My dear Edward,

  If I may so call you, my husband and I have been thinking about you, and would so like to see you. I wonder if you would be so kind as to visit us? We would be delighted if you could come, even just for a few days, to renew acquaintance, it would be a great pleasure. Please write and say if you will come, any time soon would suit well.

  Yours sincerely,

  May Baltram.

  PS We read of your sad mishap in the paper.

  On the back of the letter there was a map showing how to reach Seegard from the bus route and a note:I am afraid after the recent rainfall we cannot get the car up the track, but just let us know roughly when to expect you and we’ll be waiting for you at the house.

  Edward wrote at once saying he would come. He sent a note to Thomas, announcing his departure and asking him not to tell anyone. Then, without a word to either Stuart or Harry, he packed a small bag and melted away. And now the little bus, which had smelt of human company and things not yet irrevocable, had left him, and the sound of its engine had faded away and the countryside, in the cold cloudy light of the late afternoon, was silent and empty.

  It was not, in Edward’s eyes, an attractive scene. Having been brought up in a city, he looked instinctively for ‘charm’ in ‘the country’, but could see none here. The land was exceedingly flat. The recent rainfall referred to by Mrs Baltram had turned the track into a dark muddy rivulet winding between water-logged fields where some greenish crop was rising a little above the surface. A watery ditch running on one side of the track reflected a little light. Above in the huge sky, a larger sky than Edward had ever seen, some brown clouds were being slowly conveyed along by the steady east wind, their activity and altering colour contrasting with the drab earth which so meagrely depended from the round horizon. The atlas, at which Edward had hastily glanced before leaving London, indicated the proximity of the sea, but nothing of that interesting feature was to be seen. A few isolated trees alone gave definition to the mournful expanse where no human habitation was visible. Mrs Baltram’s map had announced a walk of ‘about two miles’. Edward’s town shoes were engulfed in mud as soon as he left the tarmac. He set off walking into the wind.

  In his farewells to Edward after their talk, Thomas had asked him to write. He had also said, ‘Look, if it’s awful, return at once and come straight to me.’ Edward had not tried to imagine in any detail what ‘it’ would be like, he had simply tried to hold onto his idea of it as ‘compulsory’. Now it was too late for speculation, his thinking paralysed by the appalled sense of time which attends the approach of a crucial but invisible event: the exam paper, the doctor’s verdict, the news from the scene of the crash. He was accompanied by, almost as if he relied upon it, his old familiar grief, his wound, a part of his body, a blackness in the stomach, a weary sense of futility as he lifted his feet heavy with mud. The invigorating sense of fate, which he had briefly felt in Thomas’s presence and for a short time after, had left him. ‘I will arise and go to my father …’ Seegard had seemed like a significant destiny, at least a novelty, perhaps a refuge. Mrs Baltram’s letter had reinforced the hand of fate, but in making the project more real, made it at the same time more frightening, and thereby in a sense irrelevant. Why should he, in his present condition, submit to being frightened by something else? Yet to deny her summons was also unthinkable, and Edward did not try to work out any significant relation between it and his wounded state. His exclamation to Thomas, that they ‘must connect’, expressed simply his sense of being eaten up by a single obsession.

  So now he was to meet his father: that enormous dark figure concealed behind the curtain of the future to which by every step he was coming closer. Mrs Baltram’s letter had spoken of ‘her husband and herself’ as inviting him and wanting to see him. But this might be inexact. Perhaps, after reading about his ‘mishap’, she had written on her own compassionate impulse without consulting her husband, or just taking his assent for granted? Or perhaps she had written out of some idle morbid curiosity such as attracts spectators to afflicted people, as it attracts them to any catastrophe? This, in the light of his vague memories of his stepmother, seemed more likely. He could attribute such coldness to her which, he noticed, he refrained from attributing to his father. The term ‘stepmother’, occurring to his mind now for the first time, had an unpleasant ring. Stepmothers were traditionally cruel and unjust. Also, for some reason, he could not imagine his father as bothering to be idly curious about him, as if this distinguished man would be above such petty concerns. Was this a good thing or not? Did he want his father to feel strong emotions about him? Would he be terribly disappointed if his father, absorbed in his important work, were uninterested in him? Yes, of course. Yet would that not be safer? What, here, would ‘safe’ be? Suppose his father were longing to see him, expecting from him, perhaps, something remarkable? Suppose the mention of his name in an unpleasant, indeed frightful, context in ‘the papers’ had served as a pretext to recall the child who might earlier have seemed lost forever? Well, he would know soon.

  How soon was now appalling him as he walked on, slowly because of the muddy ground, along the track leading to Seegard. To Seegard only. The wind was sharper and he felt cold in his thin mackintosh. The watery ditch had by now wandered away into a reedy marshy wilderness which had appeared on the left, wherein, as the clouds were parting, small puddles or pools were being touched by the evening sun. On a very slight eminence on the other side, not considerable enough to be called a hill, there was a mass of fuzzy darkness which Edward took to be a wood. Soon the sky above him had become clear, not blue but a sort of pale lightless green, while the horizon was streaked with burning tongues of gold. His attention was now caught by some portent rising into the air above the wood, a kind of large dark substance like a fast-moving balloon, which kept changing its shape as it moved towards him. He stopped, then realised that it was an immense flock of birds which was executing a very rapid complex dance as it extended, contracted, folded over itself, changed direction and passed with a faint whirring of wings directly over his head. Watching it vanish he realised how dark the landscape had become, though the sky still had light, and how silent it was. He listened to the silence, then detected in it a faint distant murmur, perhaps of a river. The track, already hard to distinguish from its surroundings, was marked by a line of small tormented thorn trees with pallid whitish flowers, and wild rose bushes still bearing a few blackened hips. There was still no sign of any house, and he wondered whether he had missed a turning, a parting of the ways, and were perhaps now heading away into the marshy wilderness to be lost in the dark. He hurried on, looking about him and trying to walk faster. His surroundings were becoming flickering and insubstantial, his eyes failing in what was now certainly twilight. There was a pale presence of mist over the marsh. Then, as if emerging suddenly from behind a curtain of invisibility, there was ahead of him, already not far off, a house, or rather a substantial building, outlined against the fading sky, a humpy mass with a tower at one end. It looked to him, at that first moment, upon that flat land, huge, like a cathedral, or a great ship. He hurried now, gasping with emotion, conscious of time as that edge over which he was about to fall, that window out of which he was about to walk … The image of Mark came to him vividly, almost like a ghost, a reminder of his, in all possible scenes, accursed condition; and he felt suddenly that he was the thing which was so frightening, he the figure approaching out of the dark, a bringer to that lonely quiet place of some catastrophe or pestilence.

  The house was near now and clearer, the twilight haze be
coming clarified as if it were dawn not dusk. Edward had, he now realised, seen pictures of Seegard in some newspaper or journal long ago, but had blotted them out of his memory. It was a weird-looking object, indeed very big, consisting of a long high almost windowless building with a pitched roof, looking like a hall, with what appeared to be an eighteenth-century house attached to one end of it by a high corniced wall. At the other end was the tower, a tall thick hexagon of concrete with an irregular dotting of windows. His feet now informed him that he was no longer walking upon muddy earth, but upon a stone pavement, and he was aware of being enclosed on either side by trees, comprising a wide avenue, not impeding but framing his view of the house. He could now see, in the middle of the high central building, a large door standing open and a light coming from within. And then he saw, near to the door, and flattened against the twilit wall, painted there as a frieze or set up as statues, three women.

  Edward stopped, then moved on. The women, motionless a moment longer, stepped forward upon the pavement together. Seeing them so suddenly in the light from the open door Edward was at once aware of their beauty, their youth, and their resemblance to each other. They wore long full-skirted dresses of some multicoloured material, approaching the ankle, pulled in at the waist, there were jewels at their necks and their long hair was piled up in heavy crowns. They smiled upon Edward and as if in shyness were silent, so that Edward, feeling that he should speak first, uttered an inarticulate sound.

  ‘Edward, welcome to Seegard.’ A hand was outstretched, then another. Edward shook two hands, then three.

  ‘Come inside,’ said a voice, ‘it’s cold.’

  ‘Welcome to Seegard,’ another voice said.