The Good Apprentice

by Iris Murdoch

  And now Meredith had appeared, materialising in front of the line of riders, the soldierly boy, neat, solemn, compact, dandyish in his dark clothes.

  ‘There was an exhibition for blind people in the Museum,’ said Meredith.

  They were walking, perhaps aimlessly, perhaps led by the boy, and had crossed Tottenham Court Road. This took them out of Bloomsbury, both the area and the concept. The Museum was different of course, that was a palace of light and wisdom, floating like a great liner on that dark sea. Stuart did not like the handsome gloomy streets, full of memories of all those smart know-alls, people who had patronised his grandfather and his great-grandfather, and whom even Harry doffed his cap to. How Stuart resented that uncritical obeisance. Across the road was north Soho, reeking with sin of course, but also, in all those messy streets and real little shops, murmurous with humanity.

  ‘There was this exhibition for blind people, sculptures of animals for them to touch, old stuff you know, Greek and Egyptian and Chinese, lovely animals. Anyone could come and touch them. I did, I touched them and stroked them, and a lot of people did, but not the blind people, they weren’t there. I’d have liked to see the blind people touching the animals. But they weren’t there. If I was blind I wouldn’t go about, I’d stay at home. I wouldn’t come to exhibitions for the blind. I’d be too shy — I’d be too proud, too ashamed — ’

  ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Stuart. But he knew what Meredith meant. How would he act if he were blind?

  ‘People look down on cripples, they can’t help it. I’d hide.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Stuart. ‘You’d be a different person, a braver one.’

  ‘You think courage is a product of circumstances?’ said Meredith in his harsh prim childish Scottish voice.

  ‘Partly. But courage isn’t just a thing on its own, it’s part of your whole attitude to the world. With something awful like being blind you can’t know beforehand how brave you’d be or what you’d do — ’

  ‘You might fail.’

  ‘Yes, but one’s always failing, there are infinite ways of doing that. Our courage and our desire to be good are tested every day — ’ Stuart was about to add ‘every moment’, but he refrained.

  ‘You don’t fail, do you? I can’t see that you fail. You’re the only person I know who’s not all messy.’

  Stuart wondered how to answer this. He said, ‘I’m messy, only you can’t see.’ He thought, yet I do believe I’m different. What is this idea? Is it a good or bad idea? He also thought, I mustn’t ever disappoint Meredith.

  ‘Well, if it doesn’t show that’s everything, isn’t it? Thoughts don’t matter.’

  ‘Oh yes they do!’ said Stuart. ‘They matter a lot. They make it easier or harder to do things. And anyway they matter in them-serves -’

  ‘Because God sees them? I don’t believe in God. Neither do you.’

  ‘They matter. They exist. And bad thoughts are better not existing.’

  ‘I don’t see how anyone can get rid of bad ones, they just come. I have awful thoughts. You’ve no notion!’

  Stuart resisted the temptation to ask what they were. The boy was simply wanting to shock him, to make a little exciting emotional drama by eliciting a reproof. Stuart was increasingly wary of such ‘advances’ in his relation with Meredith. In any case filth is better not uttered, utterance gives it more reality and an easier lodgement. Stuart did not want to reflect about Meredith’s bad thoughts, he even felt afraid to hear them. ’People used to pray,‘ he said, ’to get rid of bad thoughts, I’ve said this to you before. You should sit quietly every night and let them all fade away. See how unreal they are, based on false ideas and selfish attitudes.‘

  ‘I don’t see how they can be unreal if they’re there. You think I mean thoughts about sex. Some people say they don’t matter, they’re healthy.’

  ‘You said they were awful. One has to judge one’s thoughts. It’s not all that difficult. Anyway you can try. Sitting still helps, get some distance and quietness in your mind, think of good things, perhaps.’

  ‘Good things. Are there any?’

  ‘Meredith, you know there are, and all sorts.’

  ‘Do I know? I think everything in the world is covered with a sort of grey dust. Anyway, I can’t see the point if there’s no God. Is it true that Newton would have discovered relativity if he hadn’t believed in God?’

  ‘Who put that into your head?’

  ‘Ursula. She said so at that dinner party, you were there, I was listening at the door, I always do.’

  ‘I don’t think so — ’

  ‘You’ll say listening at doors is wrong.’

  ‘Shut up. I don’t think so. Mathematics is — ’

  ‘Stronger than God?’

  ‘Such a powerful self-generating force. I doubt if the notion of explanation by deity would have stopped Newton if he had been capable of conceiving of relativity. It just wasn’t possible for him to because of the whole intellectual context.’

  ‘Is that why you gave up mathematics?’

  ‘Because it’s stronger than God? No.’

  ‘Ought I to give up maths, history, Latin?’

  ‘Of course not. Whatever can you mean? You must study as hard as you can!’

  ‘I don’t see — oh never mind — I won’t be able to get a job anyway — except I will because Dad will wangle me one — it’s nice to belong to the establishment. Dad told me you didn’t like those posters in my room, so I took them down.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘The ones of girls, and chimps on loos.’

  ‘I can’t think what you saw in that muck. And so unkind to poor animals to insult them with our human vulgarity.’

  ‘There were such nice animals in that exhibition. Is that what’s wrong then, vulgarity?’

  ‘I hope you haven’t been looking at any more of those filthy pornographic videos.’

  ‘Dad told me not to. I told him I wouldn’t.’

  ‘But have you been looking at them?’

  ‘Yes. All the others do. And I don’t think Dad really minds.’

  ‘I mind.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me not to look at that Greek vase in the Museum, with those satyrs chasing those nymphs.’

  ‘That’s a work of art.’

  ‘I don’t see why it’s different.’

  ‘It’s beautiful, and — ’

  ‘You didn’t like my looking actually, you pulled me.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘So it is just vulgarity after all, not good and bad. It’s whether something’s beautiful or elegant not what it’s about.’

  ‘It is good and bad — it’s how the thing is — presented sort of — it’s the thought — ’ Stuart was not able to explain very clearly. ‘And anyway, things connect. You not only looked at that muck, you lied to your father.’

  ‘Is that worse?’

  ‘It’s deep. Don’t start to lie, Meredith. Just don’t start.’

  ‘Oh I’ve started. I’m well on the way. I don’t suppose he believed me anyway. He doesn’t expect me to tell him the truth.’

  ‘I’m sure he does. Don’t talk about your father in that way.’

  ‘Sorry. Of course I don’t lie to you.’

  ‘I’m glad of that.’

  ‘But that’s partly because I can predict you. I know what you’ll say. I know you won’t be really angry.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ said Stuart. ‘But — oh heavens — one can’t win!’ He laughed. He looked down at the boy, at the neatly combed fair hair disturbed by the breeze, the heavy silky locks, the evenly cut fringe, the birthmark, like the mark of a blow, glowing a little. Meredith looked up with his composed shrewd look, perhaps not sure what to make of Stuart’s exclamation. He kicked a crushed Coca-Cola tin off the pavement into a pile of rotting cabbages whose odour mingled with the spicy smell of a little Greek shop. The Post Office Tower had come into view. As they talked they had been walking along
crowded pavements, avoiding people, pausing, touching shoulders, crossing roads, hearing several languages being spoken, private in the middle of the human stream. Meredith stopped at a shop window.

  ‘I say, look at that!’

  Stuart saw what kind of shop it was, what sort of pictures were exhibited in the window. ‘Come on, Meredith!’

  They began to walk again.

  ‘You looked,’ said Meredith. ‘I saw you look. You were interested.’

  Stuart had indeed looked; and had, in passing such shops, looked before, for seconds only. The unnerving discovery was that he had instantly known which pictures were, for him, the ‘interesting’ ones!

  ‘That’s my problem,’ said Stuart. ‘Except that it isn’t a problem.’ Now as he walked on he was conscious of himself and of human obstacles, the hostile looks, the cacophony, aware of himself as a fleshy pillar moving, as a tall thick man with a pale staring face and a little mouth and yellow animal eyes, a big ungainly animal lurching and obstructing people as he went.

  ‘All this about what’s good and what’s bad,’ said Meredith, ‘what you go on about, it’s just your thing. Other people don’t think it’s important. They don’t think you can tell. They don’t think it’s the main thing in life.’

  ‘And what do you think, Meredith?’

  ‘Oh I don’t matter — what I think — doesn’t matter — ’

  ‘Because you’re a child?’

  ‘Because nothing matters.’

  ‘Some things don’t matter too much,’ said Stuart. ‘Other things matter absolutely. You’ll find that out. In fact you know it already.’

  ‘Shall I tell you how I know that nothing matters?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Because my mother is having a secret love affair. So all is permitted.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She told me not to tell my father, and I haven’t. So you see, all is permitted and nothing matters. QED.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ said Stuart. As he looked down now he saw the boy’s face disfigured by an expression he had never seen on it before. He repeated, ‘Meredith, it’s impossible.’

  Harry Cuno was awakened suddenly from sleep by, as it seemed to him, a bright light shining on his face. He sat up in bed thinking that this must have been the light of the moon shining through a gap in the curtains. But now he could see no light; and as he sat there rigid he became convinced that he had been awakened by a bright electric torch shone for a moment upon his closed eyes. He felt extremely frightened. He waited a while in the dark room; no sound, no light. Then he heard a faint sound, a soft dark sound, then a clink, seemingly downstairs inside the house. He crept out of the bed and stood shuddering beside it. The sound, repeated, now seemed to come from the garden. With tiny movements he edged to the window and parted the curtains a little and peered down. A very dim fuzzy light, it must be the first grey light of dawn, revealed the garden, and in it two figures. They were doing something very odd, they were stooping; as Harry watched with terror he realised they were digging, and had already dug quite a long deep hole in the lawn. He heard again the small clinking sound as one spade touched the other. He strained his eyes against the grey veil of the light. The alien awful intruders terrified him, what could they be doing in his garden in the dawn, strange people dressed in whitish robes, and with, he now saw, scarcely to be distinguished from the robes, long trailing beards. They were old men. And what they were doing, Harry suddenly now realised, was digging his grave. At the same moment he recognised the stooping bearded pair. They were his father and Thomas McCaskerville.

  This of course was a dream upon which Harry was reflecting as he sat in a pretty little armchair which he had just bought in an antiques shop. He was sitting in a small flat, lately acquired, the small flat, to which he was going to bring Midge, the ‘love nest’ against which she had protested but to which she would now certainly come; just as certainly as she would come with him next weekend on the little trip (so brief, so little, as he constantly pointed out) which was to coincide with Thomas’s conference in Geneva and Meredith’s half-term with a school friend in Wales. Harry had not yet revealed to his beloved the existence of this flat. He had not yet furnished it properly, and hewanted it, when he showed it to her, to look so lovely, so perfect, so irresistibly enticing. And in any case one step at a time was the way. Midge would come on his weekend and they would be, for the first time ever, absolutely alone together, not in his or her house crammed with hostile ghosts, but in their private room, their new room, cleaned and burnished for them, a hotel room where they would be as a married pair, prefiguring their house, their home, their absolute being-together. That weekend would change her, as every little concession, and there had by now been so many, had changed her, moments in her long but so thorough metamorphosis from Thomas’s woman into Harry’s woman. His touch of a transforming god was making her other, endowing her with new being, atom by atom remaking her, oh younger, lovelier, more alive. After the weekend she would accept the flat, it would seem natural, it would be desired. Harry knew that Midge, though she was absolutely in love, did not yet feel her need for him in the terrible imperative agonising way that he needed her. She did not feel her need; perhaps she took his enslavement too much for granted, perhaps he should frighten her a little? That tactic might come. He needed her as a drug addict needs his fix, without her he constantly fidgeted and groaned with longing. She was still held away, short of absolute surrender, by little threads of pusillanimous convention and by residual habitual unreflective scraps of affection for her husband. Thinking of this residue Harry clenched his fists and bit his lip. That too must be transformed, changed gradually into indifference, preferably into aversion, into hate. Lately she had said that she could imagine Thomas, but not Harry, being happy without her. That was progress. By hating Thomas himself he must make Midge do so. Already she did a bit. He must perfect her hate. Not that Harry desired this hatred upon which he brooded so for its own sake, as a trophy for himself or an adornment for her. It was simply a necessary part of the mechanism or chemistry of the change; a spreading stain perhaps, or a lever. And in this sense it might even be said that Harry hated Thomas without personal animosity.

  And after this, he thought, we’ll have a house in France, in Italy perhaps. This became so real in his mind, so immediately mixed with the warm spicy intoxicating smell of happiness, that he made an instinctive gesture of impatience. Why then this flat, this chair, these curtains, this television set, even a saucepan which he had bought and been so pleased with himself about, when they could surely now, so soon, go straight on to the house in France? How maddening her slowness was. After this weekend would not Midge do anything? Yet he had to perfect every step of the way to be sure there would be no relapse. Steady does it. And then he shivered as the thought of his terrible dream came back. He could not remember having ever thought of his father, his handsome happy loving father, or dreamt of him, as a hostile figure. How could his deep mind contrive to conjure up so vividly this ancient murderous apparition? How could he recognise such a being? Could ghosts be spiteful, must they not envy and detest the living? I’d be a spiteful ghost, he thought. Could they perhaps, metamorphosed into evil wraiths, do harm to those who had survived them? But of course the dream was not really about his father. It was his frightful animated image of Thomas as dangerous and old which had horribly clasped to itself the appearance of a father. Well, he did so at his peril, fathers must beware. But oh how crazy the mind is, ingenious, histrionic, wicked and deep. There were dangers, some visible, some hidden, and he was ready sword in hand to defend the woman he loved.

  Harry felt now, and was conscious of feeling, as he had done in the past when at many moments he had believed in his power and his luck, when he had played cricket for his university, when he had stood for Parliament, when he had married Chloe knowing whose son she carried. All this, whatever the outcome, had been the stuff of heroism. About the girl from far away he felt differently; not t
hat it had been a mistake, but it was just something natural, part of an ordinary life. If she had lived would he now be a very different man? Or would he have left her long ago? Piously he put away this bad thought, associating her image with that of his mother. Romula, he always thought of her as Romula, had liked Teresa. They were quiet women. Chloe belonged to the genuine stuff of Harry’s life; as Midge even more imperiously did. Teresa was dead and Chloe was dead. Midge was alive, was life itself, making him in turn young, young as a young knight and as pure. On the previous evening Harry had done something very strange. He had gone through his desk, searched various old chests and drawers, found all the letters he had ever received from his two wives, and hastily and without perusal burnt them all, putting matches to them in the empty hearth of his study. He then carefully collected up the frail ashes, still bearing traces of those two so different hands, put them in a bag and took the bag to the dustbin. He did not feel it was a crime. The past was erased, making the present and the future more to be. Midge deserved no less than everything, so far as he could give it, the whole of space, the whole of time. This was indeed a duty. He had lately remade his will, leaving adequate resources for the two boys, and the rest, including the house, to Midge. Thus did he capture and ensure the future. Harry always felt himself near to death; and supposing, as he and Midge were driving together, perhaps to that house in France, he were to be killed in an accident? Would she not feel pain when she found those letters, a particular extra unnecessary pain? This he would spare her, looking even beyond his own grave to care for her so tenderly with absolute devotion. The thought of Midge returning home alone and not finding the letters almost brought tears to Harry’s eyes.