by Iris Murdoch
‘Of course I am!’
‘She’s hysterical now.’
‘Sorry not to be able to run you back,’ said Blaise to Monty. ‘If you walk towards Putney Hill you’ll get a taxi. See you later. Thanks for coming.’ He turned-away along the road, leaving Pinn and Monty together.
‘I want to see you again,’ said Pinn. Her eyes behind her jaunty glasses were sombre, and she uttered the words expressionlessly, the way some purists read poetry.
‘Sorry –’ said Monty vaguely. He was upset by the scene that had just ended. He felt that he had been made a fool of.
‘I want to see you again,’ she said. ‘It is important to me. Things are not often important to me, but this is. I don’t want you to say anything now. I mean, you needn’t even answer this remark. You are Montague Small. I am nobody. A cat may look at a king. I will come and see you sometime. Just don’t say that I can’t. That is all I ask of you. Good-bye.’ She turned sharply and walked away and her heels clicked off with a slightly echoing moist sucking noise along the still damp pavements.
Monty loosened his tie. His umbrella was locked inside the Volkswagen and it was beginning to rain. He felt irritably dissatisfied with himself. Then his old huge familiar misery gradually returned like an old friend.
My darling Harriet and my dear wife. I am too cowardly to tell you what follows face to face, so I am telling it to you in a letter. I shall try to explain clearly because clarity and truthfulness are of the utmost importance here. You will be surprised, shocked, horrified at what I have to tell you, but I must tell you, not least because I love you absolutely, and lying to you has become ultimately intolerable to me. Some years ago (over nine years ago to be precise) I took a mistress. Her name is Emily McHugh and she is now over thirty. I was physically attracted and I succumbed to temptation. This, I know, is indefensible. But I did not intend to continue this brief unworthy liaison, and I should certainly then have confessed it to you had Emily not become pregnant. A child now exists, a boy, aged eight, and my duty to this innocent being is a reason why I have to tell you the truth, and should have told it long ago only I was a hopeless coward and did not want to shatter your and David’s peace and destroy your respect for me. I put this down simply and perhaps crudely but you may imagine the suffering and the shame which lie behind these words. I have to tell you now, to lay it all before you for judgement. I was never really ‘in love’ with Emily and have long ago ceased finding her attractive. I wish heartily that all this had never happened, not only because of the shameful and damaging consequences, but because it was so evidently from the start a complete mistake. There was and has been no real love, only a dreadful bondage, an involvement tormenting to me and exasperating to her. We would have separated years ago, in fact very soon after the start, had it not been for the child’s existence. I have during these long years visited her at intervals and have of course financed her and the child. This was a responsibility which I could not shirk however much I yearned to be rid of the whole matter and to be what I seemed, and what in a deep way I feel I have indeed been, utterly yours. The rich reality of my life with you has inevitably filled me with joy, though with a corresponding separated pain, as the years have passed and I have been living a lie. I am profoundly ashamed, and in now confessing this can only cast myself onto your love as a religious person casts himself onto God. Harriet, if ever I needed your love I need it now. I need it to continue to breathe, I would die without it, and I ask you for it on my knees. As you know, I love and have loved only you. I deserve punishment, but I ask for grace. Please, my darling, my sweet dear girl, forgive me and help me to deal with this awful situation. Let me at last share this trouble too with you and let us look at it together. I dare to ask you this, having in mind not only my own fault and my own suffering, but also the sufferings of a wretched woman whom I have also wronged, and a little innocent child whose father I am. Emily has long known (ever since, as I say, almost the start) that I do not love her, and resent her as a burden and as the spoiler of my perfect happiness with you. She is a very deprived and unhappy person, full of vexation, and having lost the charm of her physical good looks. I do not belittle this crime which I have committed against you and against her. But I ask you, madly perhaps, for your love as the only instrument of salvation. Can you, dare you, wretched and miserable and unworthy as I am, love me more? I know that by making this confession I am thrusting us both out into the unknown. I do not know how you will feel, and you yourself perhaps do not know, even as you (oh God, I can hardly bear to think of it) read these words, how you will react Time will be needed to show us this. But I do with utter humility and full consciousness of my fault beg and beseech you to pity me and not to stop loving me. If you love me all can somehow be, if not retrieved, at any rate compassionately ordered, and the value of truth itself may cast a little light on the desolation which I have so unwittingly wrought. I am very very sorry and I feel I could die of shame and misery of loss, only if you will love me I shall live. I feel, as I write this, that I have never loved you more or valued you more. You are all that matters here, you and your saving love. Oh do not abandon me in my pain. It is, even though I am so frightened at what you may feel or do, a blessed relief to tell you the truth at last. It has needed something little short of heroism to do so. I so long felt that this, which I am doing now, was impossible and beyond my powers. Pity me and succour me and do not, I beg you, let me wait long for your judgement. I deserve anger, but give me love, or if anger, anger with love. The extra power which will save the world can only come from your perfect love, my angel and my wife.
I will put out this letter for you after breakfast, and I will leave the house until about noon. Then I will return to throw myself upon your loving mercy. Needing you oh so desperately my darling, and hoping that you will not abandon me – your devoted husband.
B.
Blaise wrote this letter late at night Of course it had proved impossible to use Monty’s clever draft, though it had given him one or two ideas. In fact when he began to write he found himself unexpectedly inspired. A kind of weird excitement rendered him eloquent He moved himself.
He had spent most of the afternoon with Emily. (He told Harriet later he was with Maurice Guimarron.) Emily had wept and stormed and Blaise had held her in his arms feeling a strange calm blank open-eyed sort of emotion rather like a strange pride. For he had now really decided to tell and he fully measured the perils into the midst of which he was going to launch them all. He said little to Emily and his silence eventually impressed her. ‘You’ve got a funny look, sweetikin,’ she said at last ‘It suits you.’ They drank a lot together and finished the rest of the sandwiches and Blaise felt, in a crazy way, a bit cheered up.
When he had got home, talked to Harriet, had supper, sent her to bed, the terror returned. He began the letter dripping with perspiration and gasping with fear. As he went on writing however a sort of calmness, almost of hope, returned to him. The eloquence came, and a sense of having gripped the situation in his own way, and this feeling of an initiative gave him energy. He did not exactly enjoy writing the letter, but there was a zest in it, as of a man fighting for his life. He was glad that he had made some sort of peace with Emily. And he felt, as he now told the truth to Harriet, his love for his wife miraculously strengthened and refreshed simply by the act of truth-telling. To feel Harriet’s power and to cast himself down before it was somehow invigorating and exciting. What a fool he had been not to tell the truth long ago now that suddenly it seemed possible, almost easy. And, as he begged and begged for Harriet’s love he felt sure that it could not be withheld.
The next morning he awoke sick with terror and with the unspeakable thought that still nothing irrevocable had occurred. He could still tear up the letter. Everything could still go on quietly as before. He left the letter conspicuously on the table in the hall and ran out of the house. He spent the morning walking at random in the near-by roads, staring at the houses and reading out their na
mes.
Harriet held the letter crumpled in her hand. She had read it. When she saw the envelope she already felt a pang of fear. Now she sat in her little room, panting. Simply breathing was a task. Opening her mouth she filled her lungs with air which it then seemed impossible to expel. An age passed and she expelled it Another age and upon the very brink of unconsciousness she inhaled again. What she had read seemed impossible and her whole mind rejected it It must be a mistake, Blaise had made a mistake. This could not be true of her Blaise, the past could not be changed in this way, after all it was well known one could not change the past. The person who was saying these things was automatically a stranger and could not be saying anything which could alter her life. Yet at the same time she believed. The eloquent pleading which had moved Blaise was invisible to Harriet All she saw was the huge inconceivable intolerable fact.
I have got to deal with this, she told herself, I have got to be strong, this is catastrophe such as I knew must sometime come. Now I must find out whether I am brave or not Still holding the letter she went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed The ignorant familiar furniture crowded affectionately about her, the familiar row of trinkets paraded upon the chimney piece, a tie of Blaise’s lay upon the table and his blue enamel cuff-links which she had given him. She could not breathe lying down, so she sat up again and tried to cry. A few tears came and then the gasping once more. I must be strong, Harriet said to herself, this is the catastrophe, and I must be strong.
What hurt her most at first was a sheer almost savingly objective jealousy. Could a fact hurt so intricately? He had taken a mistress and she, his wife, had known nothing of it. He had deceived her. Other husbands were deceivers, but not hers, and yet he was. He had given his love to another woman, he had broken the completeness of the world, and darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect. Blaise looked suddenly alien and mean, and her love for him shuddered with pain. Then, there was the boy. A boy, his son, not hers, another fact Harriet then recalled the boy she had seen in the garden, but she did not think it was that boy. She thought vaguely of the twilight boy as a symbol or prefiguration of what had come to pass. Blaise had another family.
Harriet went to the dressing table and sat down and looked into the mirror. The calm face she had known all these years was gone and a strange woman stared back, big eyed and distraught her mouth ugly with grief. Harriet felt giddy and exposed as if very quietly, as in a silent film run in slow motion, the house had been hit by a bomb leaving her sitting amid wreckage. And she remembered an Annunciation by Tintoretto in which the Virgin sits in a wrecked skeleton stable into which the Holy Ghost has entered as a tempestuous destructive force. Only Harriet was not glorified by ruin. Her house was destroyed indeed.
Hold on, she said to herself, hold on. Think. Blaise will come and I must be able to say something to him. She looked at the crumpled letter again. Emily McHugh. How terrifyingly particular the name was. He had been tender and sweet with this woman, laughed with her, had little private rituals of domesticity. The gross details of infidelity did not touch Harriet so much as the theft of that intimate personal tendresse. The fact of the child made it all so mysterious and huge, made of it another rival place where Blaise was hidden and whence he looked at Harriet with strange alienated eyes. She moaned now and wept freely, her hands over her nose and open mouth, gazing at her crumpled face in the mirror.
Hold on, she said, hold on, soldier’s daughter, soldier’s sister, think. What can help me, what can help him, now? I must find a way of thinking about it. It all happened a long time ago. He no longer loves her. She is a hateful burden to him. He has a duty to her and to the child. Of course he ought to have told me. But how he must have suffered, with his kind truthful nature, tied to a woman whom he no longer loved and lying to one whom he loved For amid all her sense of a world devastated and defiled Harriet did not for a second doubt Blaise’s love for her. She clung to him in her heart and her thought, and as she did so she seemed to see Emily McHugh and her son drifting away as if they were upon a raft. They were drifting away and she was with Blaise upon the shore.
Harriet jumped up and ran down stairs through the wrecked house. A lurid light of unhappiness and fear shone on to everything. It was only ten o’clock and Blaise had said he would return at noon. Oh where was he, where was he, he who had always in every sorrow supported and consoled her? And would he not aid her now? She felt a desire to run, to run wildly along the street looking for Blaise, calling out his name. She sat down and clutched the red and white tablecloth convulsively in her hands. After all she had not lost him, he was not dead, he needed her now more than he had ever needed her. The warmth of Blaise’s pleading began at last to stream through for her comfort. He needed her love, her extra love. Had she that extra power, that grace, to help him in his extremity? Harriet now knew that she had, she felt brimming over and faint with it. She moaned aloud with desire for the return of her husband, so that she could console and reassure him and herself. They had not lost each other, had they? They could not lose each other. There was just a new and awful pain to be suffered together.
Blaise came back about eleven. Harriet, who had by now schooled herself to wait until twelve, was sitting stiffly like a prisoner who has been pinioned in some tormenting way and who sits still, wondering just how bad the pain is. Then suddenly she heard a footstep and there he was before her. The sun had come out weakly and the kitchen was filled with clear pale light, and there was Blaise gazing at her with a look of frightened agonized entreaty. Harriet rose and, almost carefully, as if to encompass something huge, put her arms around him and laid her head to rest upon bis shoulder and felt his hands gripping her, gripping her dress, almost tearing it His cheek touching her brow was blazing hot They stood thus in silence for some time.
At last she thrust him away. ‘Sit down there. No, get me something, some whisky.’
‘Harriet girl, do you forgive me?’
‘Yes, of course. Oh don’t worry, that’s all right, that's all right’
‘You still love me?’
‘Of course, of course. Don’t be silly. Get the whisky.’
Before Blaise’s return Harriet had remained submerged in a confused agony in the midst of which she simply held on to him. There was perhaps a comfort in thus isolating him and collecting him to herself. He was what mattered, and in this mattering she could almost forget about Emily McHugh. It was as if Blaise had suffered some disaster, had been maimed or disfigured or subjected to some awful menace, and only Harriet’s thoughts, only her unremitting attention, could save him. She thought of him blankly and with absolute love and suffered her prisoner’s pain hardly knowing what it was. Then as soon as Blaise appeared, quite suddenly, in a great white flash, she was able to think again, even to think logically and clearly, to see what was important, almost to see what had to be done. Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.
Blaise got the whisky, then stood looking down at her with a fixed grimace of fear.
‘Don’t look so awful, so frightened,’ she said. ‘I love you.’
‘You won’t leave me?’
‘I wouldn’t leave you in this misery. What do you think I married you for?’
‘You won’t want a divorce?’
‘No. I’m just so glad you’ve told me the truth at last. You should have told me years ago. Aren’t I here to help you in trouble?’
‘Oh thank God, thank God, thank God,’ said Blaise. He jolted the whisky bottle down on to the table and began to cry, rubbing his wet trembling mouth to and fro upon his knuckles.
‘Of course it is – terrible,’ said Harriet, ‘it’s a terrible shock. Oh you shouldn’t have deceived me, you shouldn’t, you should have trusted me, oh it does hurt so. Don’t, please don’t cry like that, I must keep my head clear. No, I won’t have any whisky, you have s
ome. Sit down, sit down. What is – the little boy’s name?’
‘Luke. Only we – we call him Luca. Sort of – Italian —’
Luca. We call him Luca. The details, the details were what would kill, and they were only just beginning. ‘And where do they live – Luca and Emily McHugh?’
‘In a flat South of the river. God, just to hear you utter those names is so catastrophic.’
‘Well, these people exist. You have been visiting them for years. I’ve got to get used to their names, haven’t I? Who else knows about them? Did you tell anybody – our friends – anyone?’
‘I only told one person,’ said Blaise.
‘Who?’
He hesitated. ‘Er – Magnus Bowles – I told Magnus a little – just because – well, I had to tell someone.’
‘You told Magnus? When?’
‘Oh, years ago -I didn’t tell him much –I just —’
‘You told Magnus. That hurts me somehow. What did he say?’
‘He said I ought to tell you.’
‘Did he? He’s good, he’s wise. Still I’m glad it was only Magnus. I couldn’t bear it if everyone had known but me.’
‘Girl dear, how could you imagine —’
‘I don’t know what to imagine here. I’m still in a state of shock. So it was all a secret. Will it stay a secret, now?’
Blaise stared at her blankly. He did not know. He had not looked beyond the absolute barrier of confession. Beyond that there had been simply an obscure vista of pulverized wreckage. Now with a sudden deep surge of joy he realized that the barrier was passed and he was still alive. He was having a conversation with Harriet. She had forgiven him, she had said she loved him. There were thoughts and possibilities and explanations, not simply blood and screams. ‘I don’t know,’ he said vaguely, looking at her with wide suddenly joyful eyes still wet with tears. The thing he had dreaded for nine years had happened, easily, almost painlessly, in a moment, it was done, it was over, he was released, he was free, he was free at last to be sane, ordinary, happy, good –