by Iris Murdoch
‘These extremes are fictions,’ said Harry, ‘false opposites which invent each other, decent people don’t know about either. Your good and evil are bad dogs better left to lie. Evil has a right to exist quietly, it won’t do much harm if you don’t stir it up. Everywhere you go you’re an intruder. You’ll go through life making trouble, you’re dangerous — ’
‘Please stop — ’
‘You’ll come to grief in the end and the sooner the better. Midge’s simple life act is supposed to impress you, she thinks she’ll be worthy to help you in your work, then one day you’ll seize hold of her — ’
‘Oh Dad,’ said Stuart, ‘don’t keep talking like that, don’t keep trying to argue with me.’
‘I’m not trying to argue! We all have smutty thoughts, you have vile fantasies, don’t deny it, you’re repressed — ’
‘That’s a ridiculous word which I utterly reject.’
‘You’re getting angry.’
‘You’re trying to make me angry but you won’t succeed, listen — ’
‘Of course Midge will get over this rubbish and come to me, she’s mine — I just terribly resent your interference.’
‘Listen, I came to look for Edward — ’
‘What good have you ever done Edward? You never tried to communicate with him, you don’t know anything about him. You’re too self-satisfied and opinionated and bloody clumsy to communicate with anyone.’
‘But I wanted to say something else.’
‘What, for Christ’s sake?’
‘I want to come back here, to this house — may I?’
They were in the drawing room of the house in Bloomsbury. The evening sun was shining in upon the faded green panelling. Stuart was standing, still wearing his mackintosh, it had been raining earlier and he had been walking about for a long time before deciding to call on his father. Harry was sitting at his desk where, with the help of a bottle of whisky, he had been writing a letter to Midge. He had swivelled his chair round and was aware of looking, in the focus of Stuart’s cold stare, dishevelled, even drunk. He felt for a moment almost tearful with rage and unable to speak. He said, ‘It’s no accident that you’ve damaged me — ’
‘What?’
‘It’s no — Oh damn you, no, you can’t come back here, I hate the sight of you, that’s all, keep away! Hell is somewhere near here and you’re a devil — ’ Harry got up and stepped forward and steadied himself by moving his chair and holding onto the back of it. Stuart did not move. ‘Get away, don’t stand so near me — ’
‘Dad — please forgive me — I meant no harm — may I ask you — ’
‘Christ, have you understood nothing, don’t you know what hurts people — you’ve hurt me so much — you’ve hurt my life — deeply — get back, get out — ’
Harry lunged forward, swinging both his hands. He was almost as tall as Stuart. One hand pummelled the wet mackintosh and slid downward, the other clawed across Stuart’s face. Harry lurched and almost fell and Stuart retreated.
‘Sorry. I’m going.’ Stuart went quickly to the door and paused a moment, Harry inhibited an impulse to call him back. Stuart went out and closed the door. Harry picked up a glass paperweight and hurled it at the door where it cracked one of the wooden panels. He sat down, blundering, almost missing the chair, seized his letter and crumpled it up. He had, for the moment, no language, did not know how to address Midge at all. Her incomprehensible withdrawal from him, combined with some continued need of him, her acceptance of his presence, her maddening repetitive exclamations about her state of mind, aroused in him a terrible inexpressible violence; he was tormented by anger, by desire, by hope, by visions of her sudden return, the door opening, her outstretched arms, her loving face. He slid from the chair, knelt on the floor and then stretched himself out face downward on the floor. He said aloud into the carpet, ‘She must come to me, she will come to me, she has nowhere else to go.’
Stuart, going down the stairs, heard the paperweight hit the door and interpreted the sound. It reminded him of something. Oh yes. Edward throwing the Bible after him. People were always doing that it seemed. Once outside the door he had covered his face with his handkerchief, his nose appeared to be bleeding. He went into the cloakroom off the front hall and soaked his handkerchief with cold water and mopped his face. His nose was painful and he wondered if it was broken. How did one know whether one’s nose was broken? He touched it gingerly. Blood continued to drip into the basin. He washed out his handkerchief and, holding it wet in his hand, stepped out of the front door into the sunshine. Holding the handkerchief away from his side and occasionally mopping his nose with it, he walked as far as Tottenham Court Road and started along Oxford Street. His nose stopped bleeding and felt better. He squeezed the wet reddened handkerchief over the kerb and rubbed it over his nose and mouth, and put it in his pocket.
He walked on, awkward, avoiding people who stared after him. His immediate objective was a certain church north of Oxford Street which he liked and where he could sit in quietness. He entered the high dark secret church with its musty spicy numinous smell and sat down, then knelt down. There was no one there. He breathed more slowly, more deeply, ceasing to hear the sound of the traffic, letting the intensity of the silence affect him. His heart, which had been racing after the distressing scene with his father, slowed down. The clouds of strong emotions began to disperse leaving a calmer sadness. Then this sadness was submerged in another deeper sad feeling. There was no one there. Of course he had never imagined there was, never in his life believed in God for a moment, it had never seemed to matter. There was no one to talk to, no one to give, in the last resort, perfect help, perfect love. Stuart had never especially expected people to love him, never depended on love. He had loved his father and known at the same time that his father loved Edward more. He had not minded that as much as they imagined, they, Harry, Thomas, Edward perhaps, anyone who bothered to think about it. Perhaps this separateness, this cutoffness, this determined notmindingness had to do with the absence of his mother, the earliest truth in his life, the absence of complete love together with the haunting idea of it not as a real possibility but as an abstract, an invisible sun giving light but no warmth. The notion of explaining himself, even of knowing himself, was alien to Stuart, and he had never framed any theory of the sort which was so natural to the mind of Thomas. Indeed he thoroughly disliked such theorising. He did not often think of his mother, he tended, not irritably but with a sad firm gesture, to banish her image. But now when it came to him in the empty church he somehow connected it, and knew then that he had done so before, with his conception of himself as a sort of ‘religious’ man with a dedicated destiny: that or nothing, that or smash, and since not smash or nothing, then that.
Stuart frowned. He did not care for this connection of ideas. What was the matter with him, was he becoming weak? It occurred to him to wonder if it mattered that there was no God. It had always seemed to him to be essential that there be none. He had never looked for a Him or a Thou, or tried to reconceptualise the old deity into some sort of nebulous quasi-personal spirit. ‘God’ was the proper name of a supernatural Person in whom Stuart did not believe. The quiet church, which he had often visited and from which, after the scene with his father, he had hoped for something, now seemed hollow, wrong, the wrong place. Am I giving way, thought Stuart, is it smash after all? Am I deeply troubled, daunted, by being told that I do nothing but harm? This place used to calm me and encourage me because it made everything that I wanted seem clean and innocent, as if it guaranteed the existence of holiness or goodness or something and connected me with it. But I don’t need that sort of connection, it’s a separation not a connection, it’s a romantic idea of myself, as if I imagined I was robed in white. It’s not that I thought I’d got anywhere or learnt anything or that people should notice me — but I did expect to be somehow immune from doing harm. I’ve lived with my own thing, with it, for a long time, longer than I’ve told anyone or really
measured myself. It can’t have gone wrong, I know that, it can’t change or stain. Perhaps I’m just realising, now that I’ve started, that if I do anything at all I can do evil. If I can’t communicate with people this isn’t just an innocent awkwardness it’s a fault I must overcome, but overcome in my own way which I haven’t yet found out. Oh, if I could only have a sign. I know I can’t, but I keep coming to places like this and kneeling down as if I expected something, some pleasure perhaps. (At this he rose from his knees and resumed his seat.) I must do without all this. That’s the sense of my idea of work, my problem of it, which I haven’t solved yet and which they think I’m wantonly putting off and perhaps I am. I’m enjoying an interim when I can feel that I have, in some ideal secret sense, achieved everything when I’ve really achieved nothing. I haven’t let myself take in that I’ve got to do it alone — I’m alone and will always be alone, not in a romantic way, but in that other way, which perhaps for me is an illusion, I can’t even know that yet. Because it is certain doesn’t mean that I can travel. I may be condemned not to be able to help people. I must learn to try, but that sounds wrong too. Do the nearest thing, refrain from stupidity and drama, not just be small and quiet, be nothing, and let the actions come right of themselves. Then he thought, I can’t make sense of it — oh how unhappy I am suddenly — like I wasn’t before.
Frightened by his thoughts Stuart jumped up and hurried out of the church without looking back. Behind him he heard some footsteps, perhaps of a priest who had emerged from the vestry. He hurried back to Oxford Street and went on walking in the direction of Oxford Circus, walking, a tall man, among the people, swerving and tacking to avoid touching them, looking over their heads, walking like (he suddenly felt, and it was a terrible image) a man seen in a film, when the star is seen walking alone in the crowded streets of New York (it had to be New York) filled with the magical significance of his role, happy or unhappy, an image of power, of the envied life, surrounded by other actors who are, by contrast, devoid of being; and it is all false. When he reached Oxford Circus, Stuart went down the steps into the Underground station. He wanted to get back to his new digs and shut the door. He wondered, am I simply ill, is it ‘flu? Am I seriously ill, will I die young, is that the solution? What idiotic thoughts. Perhaps I’m just hungry.
He began once more, as now often, too often, to relive those extraordinary final hours at Seegard, his father looking so white and wretched, averting his eyes and pretending to be calm, calling Stuart ‘son’, then Jesse with his big shaggy head and glowing eyes like a witch-doctor in a superhuman mask, shouting, ‘That man’s dead, take him away!’ And all this time Stuart had sat at the table silently watching it all; no, he had risen for Jesse. He was the passive hated witness, a corpse sitting there, everywhere an intruder, as his father had said. This was the condition for which work was the cure, but would he ever really achieve it? He thought, I sat quietly at the table, I sat quietly in the back of the car and I felt terrible and small like a vile bacillus. No, I didn’t feel that at the time, I was just paralysed, I was very frightened of him, in the car I was thinking more about him than about them, as if he were really powerful and dangerous. And now he is dead. Poor Edward.
As Stuart stood upon the platform waiting for the train he felt a new and dreadful feeling of shame, a shameful loneliness and sadness and grief, as if he were both banished from the human race and condemned for eternity to be a useless and detested witness of its sufferings. This was what he had felt and foreseen when he had found the church so repugnant and so empty, and with this he returned to the scene with Harry, Harry’s rejection of him, Harry’s misery and hatred, the blow in the face which would be remembered forever.
As he thought these thoughts, standing upon the station platform, feeling a little giddy as with hunger, he was looking down into the black space below him, the vault underneath the rails. Stuart had sometimes imagined how, if someone were to fall down there, he would jump down after them and pull them up just as the train was roaring into the station. Now, without any image, he gazed down onto the black sunken concrete floor of the track. Then he saw that there right down at the bottom something was moving, as if alive. He frowned and focused his eyes. He stared. It was a mouse, a live mouse. The mouse ran a little way along beside the wall of the pit, then stopped and sat up. It was eating something. Then it came back again, casting about. It was in no hurry. It was not trapped. It lived there.
This revelation was taken in by Stuart in a moment. It entered him like a bullet. It exploded inside him. He felt about to fall. He stepped back from the edge of the platform. He found a seat and sat down, leaning his head against the tiled wall. What had happened, was he having some sort of fit? He gasped for breath, feeling his whole body change. An extraordinarily peaceful joy ran through him, a thrilling consciousness of the warmth and pace of his blood, running through all his veins and arteries down to the minutest vibrating threads in his finger tips. A light shone in his eyes, not painful, not like a flash, but like a shrouded sun which warmed his body until it glowed as if it too were all radiantly alight. He rolled his head to and fro against the tiles, half closing his eyes and sighing with joy.
‘Are you all right, son?’ A burly figure in overalls was leaning over him.
‘Yes — ’ said Stuart.
‘You got blood on your face. Have a fall or something?’
‘No — thank you so much — I’m all right — I’m really — all right.’
Edward was back in London. He had waited, standing in the avenue, long enough to see the body of Jesse, together with its bearers and mourners, enter into the house. Mother May and Bettina, both weeping, entered last. Then he ran away down the drive and along the track to the road. It was only when he reached the road and stopped hurrying that he realised that his jacket was left behind. By now they, wailing beside the body, would have lifted it to look on Jesse’s face. Fortunately Edward’s keys and money were in his trouser pocket. He began to feel cold. There was distant thunder and it started to rain. He set off walking toward the station, but the bus picked him up when he had gone a mile. He wondered briefly whether it was his duty to telephone the police and decided it was not. A train had been cancelled and he had to sit for a long time, in wet clothes in a cheerless waiting room, his body aching with restless misery. It took tediously, agonisingly, long to get back to London, to his room, or rather to Mark’s room as he now thought of it. He considered going back to Bloomsbury, but he was afraid to miss any message there might be from Brownie. There was none. It was evening. He had eaten nothing.
He wondered whether he ought to have stayed at Seegard. His desire to get away at once had been intense and imperative and he later wondered what it was: simply fear? He did not want to have to see that thing again. There is primitive fear of dead people, the ugly unnatural dead, the polluted dead who spread sickening vapours, the envious dead who drag the living down and smother them. Edward remembered the terror he had felt when touching that wet humped weight. But it was not just fear which made him run, it was a curious painful sense ofpropriety. It was not for him to stand by and watch the women crying. He did not belong to that scene. He had been a visitor at Seegard, not a part of its substance. And he felt too with an intensity that was almost comforting that he had said his final farewell to Jesse down at the river by the willow trees. There was no other farewell to be said. He had done his duty, completed his appointed task, his last service to the ladies of Seegard. He had performed the rite which, evidently, was to be performed by the son for the father. He had found Jesse in his secret place. Standing around with the tree men while the wife and daughters did things to the corpse, sent messages, made arrangements, made a meal perhaps, he would have gone mad with misery. Nor did he want to witness Ilona’s grief, or risk being the one who had to tell her. But he was sorry not to have seen her, and this alone he regretted.
On the evening of his return, although it seemed shocking to be hungry, Edward had gone out to a pub and
eaten sandwiches and drunk a lot of whisky. Then he came back to the room which smelt of emptiness and absence and went early to bed and into a deep sleep. He awoke next morning to a frightful new form of unhappiness. His father whom he had sought and found and sought again was dead. In his crazy searching round London he had, he now realised, hoped and somehow believed that his father was alive. Now Jesse was dead and there was nothing to do, the story was over. Mark was dead and Jesse was dead too. They had made a pact together against Edward. It was, he suddenly felt, almost a comfort to return to the old familiar pain of Mark’s death, as a distraction from the new awful pain of Jesse’s. Am I getting used to Mark being dead, he wondered. Then he looked about the room, at the bed, at the chair, at the window, and the old horror rose up afresh. He thought, I must find Brownie. He had left London on the day after his failure at their rendezvous. Surely she would write or come to see him, she must have known that only some terrible accident could have stopped him from arriving. He decided to wait all day in the room in case she came, but the agony of waiting was too intense. He went out, leaving a note on the door of the room, another on the front door, and a message with his landlady. He walked the streets of London, and could not help still looking for Jesse among the people who passed by. He went to the pub where they had arranged to meet and stayed there, getting drunk, till closing time. He went round to Mrs Wilsden’s house, he remembered her address from her numerous letters. Of course he did not dare to ring the bell, but he hung around at a distance watching the door. He sat in a café which commanded one end of the road and watched till his eyes glazed. Of course Brownie had said she was staying with Sarah, but she might well have gone back to her mother. He considered going round to Sarah’s house, but could not make up his mind to, he felt too ashamed. He went back to his rooms, then to the nearby pub and then to bed. A note left with his landlady turned out to be from Stuart giving his new address. He did the same on the next day and on the next. Then he thought of Mrs Quaid. Mrs Quaid had found Jesse. Might she not find Brownie?