by Iris Murdoch
Harriet immediately understood his look. ‘I know. I didn’t think when I read your letter – Oh that seems ages ago now But the extraordinary thing is that I can – stand up to it. It’s as if – one were to go over a waterfall – over Niagara Falls and find one’s still alive, one’s bones aren’t broken – one is at least alive.’
‘Oh my queen and my saviour, my own dear girl —’
‘Well, we don’t really know yet, do we.’
‘If you still love me now we can manage anything together.’
‘I married a man who was honest and good, and this scrape-,’ the word seemed ridiculous once she had uttered it, ‘doesn’t really alter that’
‘God, why didn’t I tell you years ago!’
‘But will it be a secret? Oh my dear, we’ve got to live it now, and it will change things. You aren’t in love with her any more, are you? I know you said in the letter —’
‘No, no, no, I can’t stand her, I regard her as—’
‘I don’t want you to talk like that It’s just that it is terribly important – it is absolutely important – to be clear about this – that you don’t love her?’
‘I don’t, I hate her, she’s a snake, she’s a poison, spoiling my marriage, it’s only you that matter to me, only you, girl, believe me, if you don’t I’ll —’
‘All right, all right. You mustn’t say unkind things. I don’t want you to sort of sacrifice her like that, it’s enough that you – I know that there can be no question of your abandoning her and little – Luca.’
Blaise who had been sitting opposite to her, breathing hard, clutching his whisky glass in the passion of his declaration, met her intense but now strangely calm stare. He dropped his head.
‘Of course you can’t abandon them,’ said Harriet ‘But life will be different – here.’ She gave a little gasp. ‘You know, you have been very cruel to her, haven’t you?’
Blaise mumbled ‘Yes.’
‘Yes. Very cruel. You loved her – yes, you did – then you ceased to love her – you neglected her. You have neglected her, haven’t you?’
‘Dreadfully,’ said Blaise, still hanging his head. He said, ‘I didn’t really love her – not with real love like I love you – it was just a—’
‘You must be absolutely truthful now,’ said Harriet, ‘absolutely literally carefully truthful. That’s, part of what will help us, isn’t it? You will be, won’t you?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Have you told her about telling me?’
‘I told her I was – probably going to.’
The idea of Blaise conversing with Emily McHugh about herself was something Harriet could not yet contemplate. She said hurriedly, ‘What about telling David?"
‘Oh Christ. Oh Christ. David’s knowing this – is – just utter – hell.’
‘I will tell David,’ said Harriet ‘I’ll tell him at once, tonight Will you tell Monty?’
‘Monty? Er – must Monty know?’
‘I want Monty to know. I want somebody else to know, somebody who is my friend, who is friend to us both, to know. That will help to make it more real – I’ve got to see it’s real – I’ve got to feel it all really exists – it still seems like an awful dream —’
‘All right. I’ll tell Monty.’
‘The secrecy hurts, you see. Everyone thinking it’s all right, like it was, when it’s all changed. I’ve got to accept —’
‘Yes, yes, I understand. I’ll tell him. But let’s not be in a hurry—’
‘And when shall I see her?’
‘See her?’
‘Yes. You don’t imagine it’s all going to go on as it did before, do you? We’re agreed that you aren’t going to abandon her, but did you imagine -?’
‘I don’t know what I imagined,’ said Blaise. ‘But there could be no possible point in your meeting her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because – well, she’s a rough tough London girl —’
‘Are you afraid she might swear at me?’
‘No, no, I mean she’s just a poor fish, she’s a waif, she’d resent it anyway. You simply couldn’t talk to each other, it would just be a horrible shambles, it’s not necessary, you’d regret it – sorry. I’ve never conceived of your meeting, it could serve no purpose – do try to understand – sorry, I can’t concentrate —’
‘I don’t see that her resentment should decide anything!’ said Harriet.
‘Sorry, sorry – but it’s pointless – and if there was some sort of row—’
‘I don’t want to reproach her, I’m not a complete fool. I don’t want to help her either, even if I could. That would be impertinent. But now that I know she exists I’ve got to see her – and to see – Luca. Don’t you understand? I’ve got to see them. You can’t just announce their existence to me and go slinking off to visit them now and then as if nothing had changed except that I knew and had forgiven you – is that what you want? – and expect me to put up with it! Of course you can’t desert them and I’m not trying to force or change anything in your relationship to them or your duty to them, though heaven knows I might want to – Only – you know this is between you and me – not what other people might do, but what we two, in our place, in our marriage, are going to do. And if we are going to act together, really together, I’ve got to see it all, not just listen to you, but see for myself. I mean perhaps you should be kinder to them – I’m sure you should, perhaps I can help you to be. All this is part of – saving us and it may not be at all easy – only we have got to save each other, and we can, I know we can. I didn’t know this morning, when I read the letter, but I know now. But I must see them, both of them, at least once, however much pain this causes to me – and to you – and to her. And now please you must tell me everything exactly and truthfully in detail from the very start. Where did you meet her?’
Blaise stared at his wife. She was glowing with an energy and a certainty, almost an exhilaration, of moral force. Here was the gentle creature whom he had cherished and protected, whom he had feared to try. What a fool he had been. He felt her will, her strength, her new strength, the strength he had made in her by this ordeal. He had hoped perhaps for an angel’s kindness, but he had not anticipated an angel’s power. With resigned helpless gratitude he began to talk.
Harriet had told David. He listened to her in silence, only, after the start, turning his face away.
It was evening, the shorn grass of the lawn golden as stubble in the parallels of the rich light. Harriet had eaten nothing. She and Blaise had talked till three. Then she had taken aspirins and gone to lie down. Blaise had gone out for a walk. After that, he said, he would go and tell Monty. Perhaps he was telling Monty now. Harriet felt that she had heard the whole truth, and Blaise’s obvious sincerity and relief in telling it had brought a kind of comfort The weird wrecked feeling of the world persisted, as if a tornado had knocked everything over on to its side, letting in a sort of white glare. Harriet had fed the dogs, her tears falling into their food. All precious domestic rituals were alienated now. Amidst all this wreckage she was upheld by an intense loving pity for her husband and by a stiffness of her own, the absolute need for courage. After all, as she firmly told herself, she was a soldier’s daughter and a soldier’s sister. She recalled Adrian saying, when some incident was being bemoaned, ‘but soldiers are supposed to be shot at, it’s their job.’ Harriet was determined to stay upright now in the gunfire. She summoned up a sort of fierce bravery which she had never had to use before. The pain was very great however and she could feel obscure things in the depths of her mind shifting about in order to endure it. The crisis seemed already to have lasted for days and days. Soon there would be a new phase, not of collapse she was sure, but of now quite unpredictable thoughts and f eelings. This was one reason why she felt she had immediately to perform the task of telling David. She had not foreseen how hard, how awful, how extremely peculiar it would be to tell her son these things.
‘Well,’ sa
id Harriet, ‘there we are.’ She had adopted a cool tone which, also, was new. What a lot of new armour she had suddenly had to forge. She was sitting on David’s bed. He was sitting at the table, occasionally moving his books about, looking at them, straightening them. She could see, beyond the haze of his fluffy golden hair (recently washed) the curve of his cheekbone, the flush of his cheek.
After a silence David said in a similar tone, ‘I see.’ He turned towards her, not meeting her look but deliberately presenting his face, stiff and red with fiercely contained emotion.
‘Your father wanted to live in this free way,’ said Harriet. What an idiotic meaningless remark, she thought. I can’t discuss or comment, it isn’t possible, I had much better go away, only I can’t do that either. I must talk to David, I must get some comfort from him, we shall have to comfort each other, both now and in the future. Only the bright eloquence which she had been inspired to use with her husband was utterly lacking here. She had no words for David, no ardent grace with which to cover up the horror of the facts. She wanted to cry but she knew she must not. ‘He is very sorry,’ she said in the cool brisk tone. ‘We must be kind to him, mustn’t we, and help him. He needs us very much, you know.’
‘Is he going to leave those people now?’ said David, after a pause. He had returned to fingering his books.
‘No, of course not, how can he? There’s the little boy.’
After another pause David said expressionlessly. ‘Thank you very much for telling me. Now I think I don’t want to hear any more about those foul people.’ ‘Foul’ was a word of Monty’s which David had recently acquired.
‘But, my dear heart, you must try – I know it’s hard, it’s a terrible shock – but it’s a fact and we have got to live with it’
‘I am not going to live with it. I don’t want to know any more about it.’
How hurt he was in his youthful fastidious chastity, how outraged and ashamed. Harriet yearned to touch him, to embrace him, but two cold dignities kept them stiffly apart ‘Well I’m going to meet them,’ she said.
‘No !’
‘Yes. Blaise is my husband. He has told me all about it. It just can’t be all hidden again. I don’t want part of his life to be hidden from me.’
‘You are going to meet that woman?’
‘You sound like someone in the nineteenth century! That woman is a very unlucky and very unhappy person.’
‘I regard her as a criminal and a thief.’
‘But it’s all over, all that’s over —’
‘It isn’t over, as you just said yourself. It can’t be, and how do you know you’ve heard everything, you can’t possibly have.’
‘Your father told me all about it, all the truth,’ said Harriet, fighting the tears out of her eyes with a fierce exertion of will.
‘I think it’s lunatic of you to want to meet her. It’ll produce a sort of awful connection. It’ll just make the thing go on and on.’
‘But there is a connection and it’s got to go on and on!’
‘Well, there you are.’
‘You’re deliberately misunderstanding. While Luca is still a child—’
‘I don’t want to hear any names, please.’
‘Blaise can’t just abandon them, he’s responsible for them, he supports them, it’s a matter of money. We can’t just wipe, them away. Luca is your brother. You’ve so often said you wanted a brother.’
‘I don’t want this sort of foul brother.’
‘Please don’t speak in that ugly tone. At least the little boy is innocent.’
‘This talk about the "little boy" is making me feel sick.’
‘Please try to help me. I’ve got to support this, I’ve got to find some way of thinking about it, without screaming. You don’t think I like it, do you?’
‘I am trying to help you. But I feel it’s all so – vulgar – and everything’s sort of – spoilt for ever. Can’t we just go away together, you and me?’
‘Go away?’
‘Yes. To Italy or somewhere. Just the two of us. Leave him to clear up this mess. Tell him to get rid of these people somehow. He can give them an annuity or something, can’t he? I will not have these people in my life.’
Harriet felt: a little while ago I would have been so rapturously happy that he wanted to go to Italy with me! But now it is impossible. A prophetic sense of being caught in deeper and deeper awful muddle made her suddenly gasp with pain. Would that old happiness, which for a moment in David’s presence seemed so close, ever come back again? ‘I can’t go away, I can’t leave him in all this misery.’
‘You’ve forgiven him. He needn’t be miserable.’
‘Oh don’t be stupid!’ said Harriet Some tears rushed into her eyes and she tried to repress them with her fingers. Then she said, ‘David, you must forgive him too. Can you? It’s terribly important.’
‘I just don’t think I can talk about it, with him or anybody. I suppose anyway it’s a secret. I don’t want people at school to know all this muck.’
‘It is a secret,’ said Harriet, ‘for the present –’ But could it now be a secret? What would things be like now? ‘Anyhow you see why I can’t go away.’
‘Are you afraid of leaving him with them?’
‘Of course not!’
‘I’m sorry to be stupid,’ said David, looking at her now, pushing back the golden torrent of hair, his mouth pursed up with self-control. ‘I just can’t tell you how awful I feel about this, awful. I think I’m just going to cut it right off, I’ve got to. As far as I’m concerned it does not exist. Please don’t talk to me about it any more. And those people must never never never come near this house. I live here too and I won’t have it. Do you understand?’
They stared at each other with a sudden harsh puzzlement, seeming scarcely to recognize each other. It was a new world and they were new people, not knowing how to behave. ‘All right,’ said Harriet, as if making a concession. She felt she was about to be dismissed and that it was her last chance to speak to him with feeling. ‘Please, dearest one, be gentle with your father, be kind. You can’t just pretend nothing’s happened, that would be so cruel. He’ll feel so ashamed when he sees you.’
‘Don’t use these words, please. Don’t you see, you mustn’t use these sort of words at all. Please try to understand.’
‘I will try. But you mustn’t be cold —’
‘I can’t tell you how uncold I feel. Please go away now, mother, please go away.’
‘You mustn’t —’
‘Please go away.’
‘She’s sitting outside in the car,’ said Blaise. ‘Well, not just outside, round the corner.’
‘Why not outside?’ said Emily. ‘Who are you kidding now?’
‘I thought it better – in case you didn’t —’
‘You could have warned me.’
‘I did warn you! Christ, I said it three times over the telephone!’
‘I didn’t believe you. I thought it was a joke.’
‘A joke?’
‘So you’ve really told her at last. Poor old Mrs Placid. How did she take it?’
‘Marvellously.’
‘Marvellous old Mrs Placid.’
‘I mean, she wasn’t angry, she understood, she doesn’t expect me to leave you.’
‘How awfully kind of her.’
‘Emily,’ said Blaise, ‘stop talking in that tone. Help me. I need your help. Help me.’
‘What am I supposed to do,’ said Emily, ‘cheer because she’s being nice to you and not demanding a divorce? What’s in this for me? Nothing.’
‘She wants to meet you. She isn’t bitter. She’s terribly hurt and shocked, but she’s doing her best to —’
‘I don’t want to meet her. I don’t want to know what her stupid face looks like. I’m not interested. Don’t you understand? I’m just not interested.’
‘I’ve brought her here —’
‘Well you can take her away again. I’ve been hating her very ex
istence for nine years. I’ve wished her dead. The fact you’ve owned up and evidendy been forgiven doesn’t alter any of that. All it means is that you’ve stolen my trump card, my secret weapon. At least in the past I could always threaten to tell her. Not that I got anything by it except seeing you shitting with fear, but that was something. You’ve deprived me of a minor pleasure, that’s all. Except that it’s not all. You’re looking twice yourself. Seen yourself in the mirror lately? You’re like a fat cat, you’re glowing all over with satisfaction at being forgiven. You’ve fallen in love with her again now that she’s forgiven you. You’re happy! Oh Christ, you’re happy!’ Emily, who had been holding a glass of sherry in a trembling hand, hurled the glass down violently into the fireplace. A quick storm of tears blurred her eyes and she turned abruptly away. When she turned back Harriet was standing in the doorway.
Years later Emily McHugh still remembered this moment with the greatest clarity. It was a moment of revelation, when deep feelings, which have seemed leaden and immovable, suddenly begin to skip like the mountains of the psalmist, and intellect, like a flash of lightning, reveals a completely new configuration. Briefly put, Emily realized that she could not hate Harriet At any rate, she realized that ‘the hated wife’ was now over and done with and some quite different problem had come into being. She also felt, and was horrified at herself in the same second, both guilt and shame. She felt, before Harriet, the legitimate spouse, guilty and ashamed.
Harriet’s face was scarlet and she was looking thoroughly frightened. She was wearing a long white linen coat with the collar roughly turned up, supporting her massive bun of dark yet shining hair. A light blue silk scarf, tied in a bow, was sitting awry. She looked plump and tall and desperately old-fashioned and awkward, she seemed to Emily like a being from another era, and it was hard to imagine how they could both inhabit the same moment of time. Perhaps Emily had never attempted to imagine this. She felt riveted, curiously impressed, by her own ridiculous guilt, but she stared at Harriet in an almost contemplative way.