by Iris Murdoch
‘Thomas McCaskerville’s letter?’
‘Yes. Didn’t you know? He wrote to her about what had happened to you, saying you were depressed and needed a change. He suggested we invite you, so we did.’
‘You mean it wasn’t your idea at all?’
‘No. Did you imagine we suddenly felt we wanted you?’
‘Yes,’ said Edward, ‘I did. This rather changes things.’ So it was Thomas’s doing all along. Perhaps Thomas thought he would run away and wanted to be sure he knew where he’d run to. And Edward had so much needed, still so much needed, to feel that there was somewhere where he was longed for.
‘I don’t see why,’ said Bettina. ‘We could have said no. We welcomed you. We were glad to see you.’
‘Were we?’
‘Edward, why do you think I’m your enemy?’
‘I don’t. Yes, I do.’ He was afraid of her. Yet what could she do to him now that Jesse was dead?
Bettina did not repeat her question or deny that she was his enemy. She sighed and turned her head.
At least Jesse had wanted him. That couldn’t be taken away. ‘Jesse wanted to see me, he wanted to see me very much, he said so.’
‘He may have said anything. You probably didn’t realise how far away he was. He didn’t even know who you were. He kept saying, “Who is that boy?” and we’d tell him, and he’d forget again.’
‘No,’ said Edward, ‘he knew who I was all right. He said he wrote to me. I never got any letters. I expect someone destroyed them.’
‘He was rambling. He couldn’t have written a letter. He couldn’t paint, he couldn’t write. The only thing that really struck him was when he saw you with a girl. That upset him, it made him jealous.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told us. Of course. He told us everything. Who was the girl, by the way?’
‘Mark Wilsden’s sister.’
Bettina did not display any interest in this. ‘Why have you come here now?’
‘To see you. And about Jesse.’
‘What?’
‘About his death. I don’t understand it. Was it suicide?’
‘What do you think?’ Bettina got up and mounted onto the fluted plinth and stood holding onto the pillar with one hand.
‘Or was he murdered?’
‘You mean by us? Edward! Why not by you?’
Edward, beginning to get up too, paused on one knee. A slight breeze was blowing Bettina’s skirt and her hair. The sun was sinking behind the trees and the air was cooler. He wondered, could Bettina have seen him find drowned Jesse and pass on? If that was what happened. ‘Why me?’
‘You were the new factor in the situation, the dangerous newcomer, everything had been the same for a long time, it seemed nothing could shift it, then when you arrived a lot of things happened quickly. Probably it wasn’t your fault — any more than it was that your friend fell out of the window. Some people just bring disasters about.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Edward. ‘You wanted him to die. I didn’t.’
‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said Bettina, ‘it’s true we couldn’t bear to see him decaying in front of our eyes — ’
‘I remember now, May actually said that she’d written to me because she thought I could make things change!’
‘You call her May now, do you? His senility was spoiling all our lives, it went on so long. We hated to see him fading, we pitied him.’
‘Perhaps you destroyed him out of pity.’
Bettina looked down at Edward who was now standing near her. ‘You can be absolutely sure of one thing. Whatever happened it was what Jesse wanted to happen.’
‘That sounds like an excuse.’ But it was what Edward wanted to think too.
‘You disturbed him,’ said Bettina, ‘you talked about taking him to London. He had to die here.’
‘You’re sure you didn’t help him to die?’
‘You mean by leaving doors open? He couldn’t have died an ordinary death. Something came to fetch him.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Perhaps you were involved after all. Or rather your brother was. He was a portent, just a sign.’
‘Jesse said he was a dead man, a corpse.’
‘There was a collision of forces.’
‘You don’t mean Stuart did anything to Jesse?’
‘No, no, it was all happening in Jesse’s mind, an apprehension, an alien magic, your brother was something external, an unconscious manifestation, a symptom not a cause. Something quite accidental can seem to exorcise the gods one lives by when they are departing anyway.’
‘Are the poltergeists still there?’
‘They’ve gone. They were Jesse’s. Not anything to do with me and Ilona.’
‘You think Jesse gota — a message — that it was time to go? So it was suicide?’
‘You simplify everything!’
‘Was that why May invited Stuart? I hadn’t changed things enough, so she asked him.’
‘It’s just that a lot of things happened,’ said Bettina, ‘and I dare say a lot of other things made them happen.’
Standing near to her now, looking up at her sunburnt face and neck, Edward had an urge to seize hold of the skirt of her dress. The fear he had felt earlier had turned into a nervous excitement. He knew he must try to use this perhaps last chance to make Bettina talk. He had been clumsy, there was some better question, some key question, which he ought to ask, which would elicit the answer to the riddle. He could not find it. He asked instead, ‘Did you burn him, like your hair?’
‘No, we buried him.’
‘Where?’
‘Here.’ Bettina jumped down from the pedestal and strode past Edward toward the two big yew trees which made a cave of darkness at the end of the glade. Edward followed. At the very end of the grass something long and dark was lying on the ground, or rather was set in the ground so that the surrounding grasses leant over and covered its edges. It was a large slab of black slate. Edward peered down at it. There was something carved, a few letters. JESSE. Edward and Bettina looked at each other across the stone.
‘It’s a piece of slate which was left over from the floor of the Atrium.’
‘It must weigh a lot — ’
‘The tree men carried it. One of them is a stone mason, he carved the letters. As you see they’re not very regular. They carried Jesse too.’
‘So he’s — here.’
‘Yes.’
‘In a coffin.’
‘Yes. The tree men made the coffin, just a simple one. They are quite clever.’
They looked at each other. Then they looked down at the stone. After a few moments Edward said, ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. I was looking for him in the house.’ Already the earth had invaded the sides of the stone a little. Later on, if no one tended it, it would become covered with earth, overgrown with grass, lost. He said, ‘Does May think he’s dead, do you? Or do you think he’s lying in the earth like a chrysalis and will come back to life and return?’
‘He will not come back in our lifetime.’
Edward looked at Bettina who was still staring down, her face was very sad, yet with a beautiful relaxed repose. Taking in her words, which seemed so curiously appropriate, so quietly in place like words in a burial service, he wondered, is she mad, am I? Seeking something to say, he said, ‘Perhaps people put down stones like that to keep the dead from rising.’
‘If he came back now he’d be really mischievous, he’d be bad.’
‘He has to wait?’
‘To refill his being. I miss him terribly, agonisingly.’ It was the conventional words which sounded strange.
‘And May — how is she?’
‘I can’t measure her suffering. She is in a chaos of misery, she is degrading herself with grief.’
Edward recalled the typewriter. What did Bettina think about the ‘memoirs’? It was possible she knew nothing about them. ‘I miss him,’ said Edward, ‘I shall always miss him. I shall always
think about him and love him. Of course he knew who I was, he thought about me, he wanted me to come, he loved me.’ He thought, so they have buried the monster. With what rites did they lay him to rest?
Neither of them spoke for a while. Edward could no longer concentrate. The key question which would unlock the riddle had drifted away, no longer present even as an occluded something. He found himself glancing at his watch. ‘Well, I must go. I must get a train back to London. I have to look after my father.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
Edward wondered if he should say something about Ilona, but decided not to. He said, ‘Thank you — for talking to me — I hope — well, of course — we’ll meet again — I’ll come here — maybe — ’ But he could not find in his heart any wish or intention to come back. He searched for some suitable valediction. ‘Will you be all right?’
Bettina smiled. ‘You told Ilona we were elf maidens. Elf maidens look after after themselves!’
Edward raised his hand in a kind of salute, like a gesture of homage. As he began to move away Bettina, seeming to forget him, stepped onto the slate and turned her back, looking away into the darkness under the yew trees. The movement seemed to him deliberately sacrilegious. For a moment he thought that she was actually going to dance upon the stone. If so, that was a dance which he must not witness. He hurried across the grass and began to run as quickly as he could down the pathway.
An idea which had come to him earlier was now growing in his mind. Of course he ‘had to believe’ that Jesse had known him and loved him. But was there not perhaps a proof? He bounded quickly across the swaying bridge and ran through the poplar grove, leaping over the smooth trunks of the felled trees. He went round the back of the house to the stable yard so as to enter immediately into the Interfectory. Glancing towards the fen he saw that the celandine meadow was now in full bloom with buttercups and white clover and misty tinges of red sorrel. He hurried in through the Interfectory and through the door into the tower. Here he slowed down and mounted the spiral staircase panting for breath. In the studio and ‘nursery’ nothing had changed except that the ‘toys’, which had been lying randomly about, had been pushed into a heap against the wall, and in the studio one of the tantric pictures of the beginning, or end, of the world had been set up on the easel. He did not pause to look, but hurried on up the staircase into the quiet carpeted ‘flat’ above, which seemed such an utterly different place. The hall of the flat was as neat as before, the doors closed. Edward, determined not to stop or pay attention to his frightened heart, reached the bedroom. There was no key in the lock this time, the door was unlocked. As he opened the door he prepared himself to see Jesse still there, propped up in bed, gazing at him with those jelly-like round eyes, and he felt ready to faint. But of course the room was empty, tidy, clean, the bed covered with a patchwork bedspread. The bed, which had been made invisible before by the disordered bed-clothes and Jesse’s huge presence, now seemed so narrow and so small. It looked like a room in a country hotel, pretty but impersonal, where the last guest’s messy disorder had been tidied away in readiness for the next guest.
Edward went straight to the window. Yes, there was the sea, a dark glowing blue spotted with emerald. And, oh, upon the sea there were crowds and crowds of sailing boats with huge-bellied spinnaker sails, striped in all colours, reds and blues and yellows and greens and blacks, moving slowly in different directions, crossing and passing each other with the elegance of a slow dance in the bright evening light. He thought, it’s a sailing club, there’s going to be a race, or rather the race must be over now. And suddenly he thought, there are people out there in a totally other world, people laughing and joking and kissing each other, men and pretty girls opening bottles of champagne. He turned back to the room, seeming now so small and quiet and lonely and sad. He wondered if the women had made that patchwork quilt, working silently together in the winter evenings. The white radiator which Jesse had indicated, an old-fashioned square metal object, probably not in use for years, with no pipe connected to it, was bracketed onto the wall, and Edward noticed that it had been dusted. There was a very small space behind it, into which he inserted his fingers from above. Nothing. Probably there had never been anything except in Jesse’s mind. He knelt and pushed his fingers upward from below behind the cold metal. After some shifting to and fro his finger tips touched something which moved, but which it was impossible to grip. He was able to push it up a little and then, exploring from above with his other hand, he got two fingers onto it and drew it upward. It was a small folded sheet of cheap lined writing paper. He unfolded it. I, Jesse Aylwyn Baltram, hereby bequeath everything of which I die possessed to my dear much loved son, Edward Baltram. The will, written in a rather shaky Italic script, was dated about two years earlier. The witnesses, signing below with awkward hand, were Tom Dickey and Bob O‘Brien. Clearly these were tree men whom Jesse had called in secretly, perhaps one day when the women had gone to market, or met deep in the wood on one of his walks by himself.
Edward sat down on the bed and looked at the document. A great explosion of surprise and joy and horror opened out around him like a bomb cloud or doom-laden martyr’s aura. How wonderful, how terrible, how marvellously significant, how frightfully painful: what on earth was he to do? After having read the thing through several times concentrating on each word he folded it again and put it in his pocket and sat staring at the window where the sky had assumed a denser softer more velvety blue. He thought, well at least this proves that before I came Jesse was thinking about me — and loving me. I believe he did write to me, as he said, only they intercepted the letter. But the will — did he really mean it, or was it just a passing impulse, a momentary gesture of spite against his captors? Edward said aloud, ‘Jesse, what shall I do?’ As he spoke, he touched the ring, and wondered if he would, some time in the future, do this again. There was no revelation. He reflected that of course May, with her suspicious mind, might have imagined that Jesse would want to play this trick, and would have made him update his ‘proper’ will at intervals. Or perhaps she thought that no such ‘whimsical’ will could defeat her claim in a law court. Were there to be law courts then? Did Edward want to sneak in and disinherit May and his sisters? Of course not; though the idea of being fearfully rich formed itself for an instant like a little golden spark in Edward’s mind. But he didn’t need money, did he? He could earn his living, and he’d probably inherit something from Harry. What disgusting thoughts, all about lawyers and money. Of course he might make a generous arrangement, just keep a bit as a memento — but that was still about lawyers and money. Or just flourish the will in front of their noses and then tear it up? That would leave them with a moral dilemma — not that May and Bettina would stand much nonsense from a moral dilemma — well that was unfair, how little he knew them really, they had always been acting a part with him. Better to destroy it at once. What did Jesse want? Perhaps nothing in particular, perhaps just to send Edward a message, and he had done that. The will had performed its only good important task of reminding Edward, for he had always known it since the first moment when he had opened the bedroom door, that his father knew him and loved him.
He got up, straightened out the bed, and went to the door, he did not look back or go again to the window to see the coloured ships circling in the evening light. He closed the door behind him and went with orderly haste down the spiral stairs. In the Interfectory he found a box of matches on the chimneypiece and burnt the will in the fireplace. He instantly regretted that, without further reflection, he had performed so irrevocable an action.
He now urgently wanted to get away without any more encounters. As he finished breaking up the papery ashes with a poker he saw, staring into the corner of his eye, the photo of Jesse, Jesse as Edward, Edward as Jesse, hanging on its nail low down on the wall. He lifted it off, looked at it, and decided to take it with him. I am here, do not forget me. In the Atrium he hesitated, then went over to the corner where the poor plants had be
en so roughly crowded together and felt one or two of the dried-up pots. He had an impulse to fetch water for them, but the urge to escape was too great. He picked up the cup of liquid which was on the table and smelt it. It was one of May’s herbal brews. He poured it into the pot of his plant, the one that seemed to be dead. He thought, either this will cure it, or else put it out of its misery.
As he made his way out he saw that something which had not been there before was lying on one of the two chairs by the door. It was his jacket, cleaned and folded, which he had last seen covering Jesse’s dead face. Edward picked it up and went out banging the door behind him. As he did so a piece of stone the size of his hand leapt out of the wall beside him. The enchanter’s palace was already beginning to fall to pieces.
I am on a golden chain, thought Midge. I have been taken back into history. I have allowed myself to be trapped by morality. Her captors were her husband and her son.
It was high summer at Quitterne. Midge was sitting upstairs at the bedroom window watching Thomas mowing the lawn. Head down, grey hair flopping forward, without his glasses, he appeared to be propelling the big yellow machine which in fact propelled itself, making great play with it when at the end of each journey it had to be turned. Neat stripes of darker and lighter green were appearing upon the already sleek turf which was now half covered by the shadow of the copper beech. Thomas, dressed in old corduroy trousers and a sloppy open-necked blue shirt, looked younger, altogether more impromptu. He paused at intervals to wipe the sweat off his glowing sun-reddened face. Beyond him red and white roses posed in the quiet sunny air against the tall shaggy box hedge where intensely blue delphiniums with black eyes were also in flower. Thomas, pausing in his toil, looked up and waved. Midge waved back. She had cooked a splendid lunch. She had washed up. She had rested. She had put on a different dress.
Midge had made her decision. She had made it, when it came, so quickly that looking back it sometimes seemed as if it must have been a matter of chance. Supposing that confident key in the door had been Harry’s and not Thomas’s? It was all chance or else the opposite, something arranged by God. Edward’s arrival for instance. The talk with Edward, so quiet, so sensible, had itself been a necessary event. Edward had been the new ingredient, the mediator. No one else could have done it. He was the closest person who was not horribly involved, a candid intelligent well-intentioned on-looker, an old friend, he was unique. Talking to him about Stuart she felt she was telling the story for the first time. Telling Harry, telling Thomas, had not been, could riot be, truthful narration, but a form of warfare. Taking it in, Edward had, quickly and intuitively, touched her state of mind, pressing its structure at vulnerable and unstable points. His cry ‘it’s mad, it’s daft, it must be false!’ about her love for Stuart had startled her like the war cry of a new force. It was possible to see ‘the event’ in a different light, not losing faith in it, but receiving in relation to it, more space, more play. Stuart had seemed so authoritative, so complete, something lethal making all her previous existence worthless, inspiring that terrible craving, that pain, which could only be alleviated by his presence and feared like death itself the possibility of banishment. Edward, who had been suffering so terribly himself (this fact only occurred to Midge later) appeared here on the side of the ordinary world where absolute choices between life and death did not take place, where reason, gentleness, compassion, compromise brought about viable ways of life. Of course she would see Stuart again, of course he would not reject her with loathing. From this point she could see her sudden passion not as false, not as a ‘psychological device’, but as an impersonal happening which was not quite what it had seemed, but something to be reflected on, worked on, compatible with other things. Of course she could never live with Stuart, work with him, do good with him as she had intended, all that was a dream, not an empty lying dream, but a pointer of some kind. Well, there was always plenty of good she could do if she wanted to. And when she was this far along Midge was already imagining how Stuart might be her friend, perhaps laugh at her, and by then — he wasn’t God after all. The intense relief of not facing death, as if Stuart by rejecting her could decree her end, filling her with gratitude to Edward, made the image of Stuart less huge, less final, more human. Edward had said Stuart was something external, something bumped into. It was all in her own mind, something she was doing to herself. So she could do things — even make use of what had happened?