by Iris Murdoch
The walls of the boudoir were covered with paintings and photographs. The paintings were Harriet’s own (she had thought herself a painter once), pale splodgy water-colours, laboriously high-lighted oils whose paint seemed to have thinned with the years. The photographs were all of family; of her parents’ wedding, of Harriet’s wedding, of David as various children, of a younger slimmer hawkier Blaise, of her soldier father in uniform, of her soldier brother in uniform, of her disappointed pretty mother. Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt had been a tattered pilgrimage for Harriet’s mother. Harriet had been born in India when her father was Gunnery Instructor at the School of Artillery at Deolali. Harriet’s mother, doing an Indian season with a diplomatic cousin, had met and married the romantic Captain Derwent. A caparisoned elephant attended their wedding. (There was a photograph of the elephant too.) Soon after came a home posting and the war. Captain (now Major) Derwent became an instructor at Catterick, then commanded an anti-aircraft battery in Wales. Later on he was at Woolwich, later still in Germany. He never rose above the rank of Major. Harriet’s mother followed the camp, living in furnished lodgings (only she drew the line at Germany). There had been a Welsh mountain cottage which the children had liked. There had been too little money and no romance. The days of the elephant were far off now. As a widow Harriet’s mother had lived in Ireland. Harriet rarely saw her in the later years. The thought of her came tenderly back in connection with country things: blackberrying, sloes for sloe gin, quinces for jelly, ponies and heather, the smell of honeysuckle or damp hay, the vanilla taste of russet apples. Harriet cherished these intense yet shadowy almost pointless visitations. It was so important to think quiet loving thoughts about people in idle moments, especially perhaps about the dead, who being substanceless so desperately need our thoughts.
Harriet looked into her Dutch marquetry mirror (a Christmas gift from Blaise) and patted her very long intertwined coiled up golden tinged dark brown hair. Instinctively her broad calm face became even calmer. She was wearing the long spotted voile dress which Blaise said made her look so Victorian. She was always careful not to dress too young. Some of her friends simply never noticed when they put on weight. Harriet sat down at her desk and relaxed into a melancholy idleness. She felt at these times empty, floppy, disjointed, as if she covered a huge area quietly like a large limp suspended sea animal, like an immense uninhabited continent: and this was for her really a form of being happy. Each person doubtless has a sort of form or structure or schema (only that would not have been Harriet’s word) into which his consciousness lazily stretches itself out when uncoerced, and which is, however unglittering and inglorious, his happiness. Harriet was happy. The house around her felt happy too with the stored-up warmth of her anxious yet composed and unassertive temperament.
Of course she had her worries, especially David and sometimes the aching sense of a tiny lost talent, but she was loved and loving and had an untroubled conscience and that was quite enough, for one of her temper, for happiness, that deep confiding slow relationship to time. Hers was a sometimes sad but always smiling happiness. She loved her husband and her son and her brother and carried every discontent into the light of that love to be consumed. Sometimes she had a feeling of what she thought of as ‘littleness’ (‘small fryness’) when she thought: how I wish I were a great painter or a great something. She had been to art school and had had ambition. But early marriage, combined with the fact that Blaise never took her vocation seriously, had led her to lay aside her brush. She knew that she led a selfish life because all her otherness was so much a part of herself. There was no strain or distance really, even her charities were easy and pleasant and rich in the rewards of gratitude. I am a deeply selfish person, she told herself sometimes, and so I shall never be great, not like men are great, or touched by greatness.
Now however she was thinking about her son. Every mother has to endure it, I suppose, she thought. The marvellous intimacy could not last. He had withdrawn first from Blaise, now from her. Blaise said it was natural and proper. He had become untouchable; and Harriet, with her long habit of touching, was suddenly in a dilemma, in an anguish. She was visited by alarmingly precise ghostly yearnings. Feelings very like the torments of an unrequited love made her blush and tremble. It was indeed dreadfully like being in love. She wanted to hold him in her arms again, to cover him with kisses, to untangle with caressing fingers that untidy and now absurdly long golden hair. But nothing was less possible. He had become, as if further to confuse her, dauntingly good-looking in this last year. What Blaise called David’s ‘archaic smile’ haunted her like a sort of erotic enigma. He was so tall now and often so stern, and yet inside this dignified angel there was surely the same awkward adorable small boy. He had odd mannerisms, new ones, secret ones. There were so many things one could not talk about. Did he still lay out his penknife and his compass and all his other little treasures before he turned out the light? How happy it had made her once to think that David prayed nightly for herself and Blaise. The thought had soothed her own growing disbelief. Did he do so still? It was inconceivable to ask. She knew of mothers who flirted with their adolescent sons. It was impossible for her to do so. David, in his new grown-upness, had already a sort of authority, an absolute ability of veto. Harriet knew very well what she could and could not dare. I must pull out, she thought: it was like the ending of an affair, giving somebody up. Would one be thus condemned to break the links one by one? Of course it was simply natural change and not an ending, and of course her love could not end, could not in the faintest detail of its being diminish ever. The trouble was that she could not see at present how her love for David could change sufficiently for her not now and henceforth for ever to be in the position of concealing something which he would uneasily suspect. She leaned forward over her hands in sudden anguish. What was that quotation about love being ‘woman’s whole existence’? It was certainly true in her case, and how terrifying it was.
Blaise Gavender had enjoyed his supper. He enjoyed his food. There had been asparagus, which so deliciously scented the urine. Harriet was an untidy slovenly housewife but a decent cook. Earlier he had been upset because he had been rude to a man who came to read the electric meter. The man had been a little casual. Blaise had suddenly acted the country squire. Why? These little outbursts would have interested him once. Now he let the incident fade, efficiently digested like the asparagus. Perhaps he thought of all ‘callers at the house’ as patients, and so as properly obsequious. At this moment, while desultorily mending with glue and Sellotape a broken Japanese bowl of Harriet’s, he was trying with fair success to keep his mind strictly on his patients. Sometimes he hated his patients. That was bad. His sort of healer could only operate through a love relationship. Of course that could be bad too. Monty had once said to him that all curiosity divorced from love or science was necessarily malign. Monty had been talking about a writer and his characters. But the phrase had struck Blaise in relation to his own work. He enjoyed his work, but why? That he had long ago seen through his motives did not tell him what to do next. It did not even mean that he could not help people. He could and did.
The thought of Monty always caused irritation, though Blaise was fond of his interesting talented neighbour. He had talked too much to Monty. In other parts of the animal kingdom males instinctively threatened each other in a mechanical and meaningless manner. The blackbirds on the lawn were doing it every day. Of course he had been a fool ever to accept Monty as a patient, though that interlude had been mercifully brief. Had he ever understood Monty’s motives? Blaise quickly terminated the relation when he realized that the healer was in danger of being taken over by the sufferer.
Fiddling with the jigsaw puzzle of the Japanese bowl (was a piece missing?) he recalled a dream which he had had last night. He was standing in the garden beside the acacia tree when he saw that part of the trunk appeared to be moving. A huge snake was gradually descending the tree towards him. He watched with horror and a kind of joy
the approach of the snake. Only it was not exactly a snake, since it had a pair of large wings folded upon its back, in the way in which a beetle’s wings are folded. As it came near to him it reared its head and the wings spread out and began to buffet him on either side, half suffocating him in their strong soft violence. Meanwhile the creature’s large tail, tapering to a point finer than a pencil, had wound itself round one of his legs. He was a woman in the dream. He had no difficulty in interpretation. He knew the muck heap of other people’s minds. He knew the muck heap of his own.
How dull and unmagical his own dreams seemed to have become, he thought, as if he were stolidly interpreting them even as he dreamed. And how rarely did a patient’s dream astonish or move him now. Well, it was not his business to be astonished or moved. The patients had become, for him, a grubby grey contingent of predictable people. Whereas for Harriet they remained objects of reverence and mystery. Since they mostly came to the house, she knew them a little bit at a saying ‘Good morning’ level. But Harriet, who would have been an excellent wife for a headmaster, had always yearned for a closer relation, a more positive kind of service. Not that she wished in any way to encroach upon Blaise’s priestly function. She would have liked to mend their clothes. Of course there should have been six children, not just David. They had hoped for more. Blaise had been sad about that. But Harriet positively and half-consciously suffered from a sheer excess of undistributed love, like having too much milk in the breasts. She suffered from having these huge resources by which she could directly benefit only her husband and her son.
Some of the patients indeed had been with him for years and could almost have played the role of children. In a way they did people the house. They were not easy to get rid of. He had lately begun to take them in groups as a way of preparing them for the end, the parting, the severing of the umbilical cord, their cure. Also this meant that he could, and not only for financial reasons, take on new patients. There was, alas, no substitute for the unravished chastity of the new patient. The existing ones were in fact wonderfully various. Each had his idee fixe, something which he took to be his ‘reason’ for consulting Blaise, although this ‘reason’ often concealed a complex of other lesions. Stanley Tumbelholme had an obsessional fear of his sister. Angelica Mendelssohn suffered paralysing jealousy through being in love with members of the Royal Family. Maurice Guimarron thought he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. Septimus Leech was a blocked writer. Penelope Biggers was insomniac because she feared to ‘die’ in her sleep and be buried alive. Horace Ainsley (who had once been Blaise’s doctor and was still Monty’s) exhibited chronic indecision caused by irrational guilt. Miriam Lister had a daughter with homicidal tendencies whom Blaise was treating by treating the mother. Jeannie Batwood simply wanted to save her marriage. Not that Blaise necessarily discounted or even radically reinterpreted what his patients said they thought. He received an early lesson from a patient who always wore gloves because she said she had the stigmata. It was a little while before it occurred to Blaise to ask her to remove the gloves. She had the stigmata, and was later successfully treated for hysteria.
Blaise knew perfectly well that he was not really qualified to do what he professed to do. He was by now very experienced and no longer feared making radical mistakes. However, though he never said this except jokingly to Harriet (who hotly denied it) he knew that he was some sort of charlatan. He had never taken a medical degree. He had studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge, he had done a thesis on psychoanalysis, and later taught psychology, at Reading University. (It was during his first year at Reading that he had met Harriet at a dance.) He had started to practise his own sort of therapy first of all as a temporary and risky experiment, and also because what he saw of others in the field led him to think that he could do better. He had probably not been wrong. Of course he enjoyed power, all meddlers with the mind enjoy that. And of course he was aware that this absorption in other people’s misery had more to do with sex than with either altruism or science. He had passed far beyond worrying about that either. The fact was that he could indeed like a priest make to cease the biting mental pain which, in the interstices of ‘real’ tragedy, so needlessly erodes the lives of men. He had the gift. He had the nerve. He was a strong and thoroughly able person. Why now this absolute crisis of confidence? Surely he was not such a fool as to grow sick of the thing simply because it had become so easy and so lucrative.
When the idea that he ought to throw up his practice and take a medical degree had first occurred to Blaise, he had rejected it out of hand as an irrational fantasm, a project of self-punishment generated by some quite differently located sense of guilt. To surrender his steady income, to run, at his age, the gauntlet of tedious and possibly difficult exams, to accept alien judgement and hard work: no. This was just the (so familiar among his patients) disingenuous craving of a middle-aged man for a cleansing spiritual test. Also, as his father had been a successful doctor, bis motives were even more miserably transparent. However the idea inconveniently persisted so that he began positively to fear it. Of course there were plenty of facts about the brain and nervous system which, wielding the power he did, he ought to know and did not. He was surrounded by mysteries. But as time passed his painful idea presented itself less as a desire for specialized professional improvement and more as a desire for absolute change. For many reasons, he had ceased reading, ceased thinking, of late. He needed radical intellectual change.
His fascination with the enchanted enchanting curiously self-determining world of psychoanalytical theory had now begun to seem, in his own case at any rate, to be a form of self-indulgence. The different ‘schools’ were like so many magical gardens, each with its own flora and its own design, and each surrounded by its own high wall. As a practitioner Blaise was pragmatic, ‘empirical’ in the simplest sense of the word. He simply tried to see what would ‘work’, and was prepared to take a fairly ad hoc common-sense view of what constituted ‘working’. He had long ago stopped worrying about which school he belonged to, nor did he feel this resignation as a failure of science. He had intended to write a big book about it all once, but had given that up. The discriminations no longer seemed to be worth making. He occasionally recorded an idea for an article, and let Harriet continue to believe in the existence of the book, since she seemed to care about it. His present malaise was more profound. As a result of experience, of his patients and of himself, he had begun to lose faith in all ‘deep’ theories of the mind. He could quiet his patients by telling them that it was a ‘long haul’, by telling them to ‘accept themselves’. He could prevent them from being crippled by guilt. But what he had once, theoretically at least, regarded as ‘surface phenomena’ of morality and freedom retained, for him, their unassimilable awkwardness in a way which made him sometimes feel that he lived with his patients in a world, for all its horrors, of comfortable illusion. The torment which he tried to spare his patients he could not escape from himself: the pain of irrevocable decisions taken in the old-fashioned blindfolded responsible way. Perhaps he was just sick to death of the human mind, sick of himself and his habits and bis doings, and as some men tire of the world and turn to God, he was turning to science.
He had talked to Harriet about it of course. She only partly understood, but she was all sympathy, all support. He knew that Harriet would feel sad if they had to sell Hood House and live for a time more modestly. She would feel lonely during the long hours when he would be a hospital slave. (Yes, it did seem like a punishment.) But she wanted his happiness and his fulfilment more than anything, she willed his will, she willed him. Already she saw herself as ‘the doctor’s wife’. God, he was lucky. He had never when young imagined that he would marry a woman so totally non-intellectual. But her intuitive attention to him was so shrewd, he could do without intellectual chat. She was never tedious, always fresh, intent, intense, but with a sort of immediate graceful animal intensity, quite unlike the cunning reflective shifts and transports of
his patients. Harriet’s intensity did not exclude, what Napoleon valued most in a woman, repose. Even her vague Christianity, which he had taken care not to uproot but had hoped to see quietly wither, now seemed something he could not do without, any more than he could forego the special way she stretched out her hands to him when he entered a room where she was. There was no doubt that she had influenced him, and not only by making him kinder to spiders.
As Blaise sat thinking these, and now other, thoughts the twilight had come, and he had set aside the completed Japanese bowl. He got up and went to the window, standing there in the dark and looking down at the paved terrace. He saw the pale form of his wife who was just outside the kitchen door, gazing away down the garden. Her motionless figure seemed brimful of the stillness of the evening, her quietness made the garden more quiet. She still had much of that ‘story book’ beauty which had once seemed to him like a vision of another mortal world. He loved those silly flowing girdled robes which a more critical eye would have wished to see upon a slimmer woman. He looked away down the garden at the tall poised silhouette of the acacia tree and the denser darkness of the orchard beyond. Monty Small was talking of leaving Locketts. Would he consent to sell the orchard? Yet, really, was this a moment for buying orchards! Harriet had moved away down the garden and now there were her neurotic dogs swirling about her like little black ghosts. Blaise pulled the curtains and turned on the light.