by Iris Murdoch
She turned now and saw Luca behind her, sitting on the stairs. How much, in these days, Luca had the air of an interested spectator. He was smiling at her now. Could so young a child actually be looking sardonic? That could not be the meaning of his smile. ‘You little hobgoblin you!’ she said and seized him and shook him roughly in her embrace. New springs of love for her son had risen in her expanded being, and the perfect physical connection between herself and Blaise made her able to touch and hold the child in a new way.
'I’m sorry,‘ said Monty. ‘I’m very sorry.’
He and Harriet were sitting on a rather skeletal rain-worn teak seat on the lawn by the study window. Fast small clouds bowled along, occasionally blotting out the sun. Monty in a flimsy black summer-weight jacket, felt cold and would have liked to go inside to the wood fire in the study, only the nature of the recent conversation made any immediate such move seem frivolous, even heartless. Harriet, very tense, was staring down the garden at the Douglas firs, stroking Lucky (his surname had been early dropped), who was sitting beside her on the seat with a responsible air, his huge wide paws upon her lap, gazing up into her face with calm contemplative affection, while her mechanical hand lightly lifted the ruff of rusty brown fur about his big long-nosed face. On the lawn Babu and Panda lay watching with jealous concentration, while Buffy, wrapped in his unhappy thoughts, sat erect behind them.
Harriet had lived through universes of feeling since the moment, years ago it seemed now, when she had received Blaise’s second letter. Her certainty and promptness about leaving Hood House had seemed later to be a sort of pointless pique. In such a tragedy why run anywhere? Then it had seemed right again, an impulse of self-defence which had landed her in just the proper place. The flight symbolized her surprising determination not to forgive her husband. When Harriet had wanted to reassure Blaise and to take away his pain she had felt utterly at one with herself. She was a woman, and perhaps there are many such, who lived, like an embryo inside an egg, upon a supporting surrounding matrix of confidence in her own virtue. No nineteenth-century matron, or even one from ancient Rome, could have been more confident than Harriet that she was a good person and would always be able to act rightly. There was nothing vainglorious or forced about this view, it even coexisted in her with a good deal of simple humility. I just have that sort of temperament, she said to herself, the result of a cheerful orderly childhood and a good upbringing and a quiet way of life. Of course, I have never been severely tried, but I have resources and principles. I can rely upon myself and others will be right to rely upon me. This little confidence she placed, without feeling herself in any way remarkable, indeed conscious that she was the smallest of small fry, in the centre of her family life. She saw more of Blaise’s faults than he ever dreamt of, and she supported him with the pure will of her own humble decency. That was how she felt it all and lived it all, and this was a great part of her happiness.
So it was that when the awful trial did come Harriet swung into response to it with an almost exultant and only momentarily surprised sense of her own strength. She suffered the shock and the pain, but there she was, where she had always been, in the centre, needed and able to respond. Distress had to be eased, tears dried, and she could do it, and the performance of these duties was patently more important than the indulgence of her jealousy or of her shocked disappointment in her husband. The performance of the duties was a real solace, and the power to perform them filled her up at need like divine grace. This had been before Blaise’s second defection. The difference then she could never have conceived of beforehand. She could support and forgive a penitent husband who needed her love and her strength. But when all that power seemed no longer necessary, when Blaise cut the channel through which, for so many years, as he almost unconsciously made use of it, it had fed him, Harriet felt utterly deprived of her central certainties and no longer at all knew how to think about what she ought to do. Perhaps she had never known how to think about what she ought to do. What she had possessed were not principles but instincts, the warm wise possessive instincts of a happy wife and mother. For a situation where she was not needed she had no heroism.
Harriet had of course, from the start of the new time, wanted and required to believe Blaise’s assertions about the deadness of his present relation with Emily. Feeling sorry for Emily had helped Harriet a lot. Also she could not imagine, after meeting Emily, how any man, let alone wise decent Blaise, could prefer such a woman to herself. That an erotic preference could so war with all the tried openness of married love she did not conceive, and in any case she knew nothing of Blaise’s ‘special interests’. Now she believed that he had loved Emily and that he still loved her. Blaise’s second letter brought instant despair and sheer agonizing amazement to Harriet. And with these came afflictions which were quite new to her, debilitating crippling jealousy and resentment, anger, even hatred. Like a cloistered jungle native suddenly infected by the viruses of civilization, she keeled over. What a less secluded temper might have withstood laid her low. She simply did not know what to do with her mind. She needed support and someone whom she cared for to confide in. This after all she had always had. Adrian was in Germany. David had his own agony and repulsed all her attempts to speak to him. She turned with increasing urgency to Monty.
It now seemed to her that she had loved Monty for a long time. He alone of all her vague friends had held an important place in her heart. Her desperate need of him now made this temperate but deep affection turn into a frenzy. The sense of being laid aside out of the action, rejected, no longer needed, sent away, shook Harriet to the roots of her being and almost seemed to make her a different person. She felt as if she were back at the beginning again, though a much more empty beginning, as if she were young and in anguish, facing an open alien world and grasping wildly at what might save her. It was not just that she needed help and comfort, somebody literally to hold her hand. Her disowned rejected love needed another object. It was not that she now judiciously cast her husband off. She experienced him as gone, and she had to have the comfort of making someone else need her. Her powerful loving nature could not rest idle. She loved Monty, and could not remain silent or make little of it. Hence the extraordinary (to him) confession which she had just uttered.
Monty had felt enough affection for Harriet to be glad of her visits at a time when he wanted to see no one else, and enough to be thoroughly irritated by Edgar’s attentions to her. This represented perhaps, to him, a good deal of affection. Now, however, he was alarmed. There are unhappy countries (Poland, Ireland) whose misery is aesthetically unpleasing and inhibits sympathy. Monty had been moved by the spectacle of Harriet the loving and successful wife and impressed by the confident forgiving wronged Harriet. He had even admired, at first glimpse anyway, the fierce decision-making ‘Hood House is finished’ Harriet. This latest Harriet (for indeed it was like meeting a new person) unnerved and puzzled him. It was as if (and how unjust this was) Harriet’s innocence were gone, had been destroyed for ever: that innocence upon which, he now realized, he himself had in his own way reposed. Now he saw in her the scars of jealousy and resentment and the relentless tentacles of need, and he pitied her heartily but he shuddered. He feared for himself. He feared the dreadful complexity of her urgent demand upon him. He did not want to have to change himself, to modify his being to meet her case. In fact all the time he knew that part of him was pleased by her strange declaration of love; and he was very much afraid of betraying any tenderness which should, in this dangerous state of things, sweep her towards him. I must be very hard and clear, he thought. That will ultimately help her most.
‘I am very touched,’ said Monty. ‘But I just cannot help you in the way that you want.’
‘I’m not suggesting a love affair,’ said Harriet, in a new rather metallic tone, still staring down the garden. ‘I might suggest marriage, I mean later. That’s how much I feel. The point is I need you now. I need you to be with me and simply to let me love you. I must
love you.’
‘You mustn’t,’ said Monty. ‘You don’t know me. If I accepted your love it would do us both harm. One can’t simply stand there and be loved. You want an involvement and I just absolutely don’t. Sorry. Sorry.’
‘You can’t – I think – imagine,’ said Harriet slowly, ‘what it’s – like – to be me – now. I realize a lot of things about myself. Obvious things perhaps. I married very young. Blaise has been my only man. I suppose that meant that in a way I never grew up. It seemed perfect. If Blaise had been what he appeared to be perhaps it would have been perfect, a kind of perfection anyway. I would never have needed to grow up and change and see the world as terrible, for it is terrible, it is terrible in its nature, in its essence, only sometimes one can’t see. Some people never see. You have always known this, and I know you knew, long ago, something I could not name in you attracted me, and it was this, that you knew. As Blaise never did. Blaise pretended to. He played at it with his patients, but he was too self-centred and too fond of pleasure really to see it. Blaise has always lived in a dream world.’
‘We all live in dream worlds,’ said Monty.
‘And now that I’m out – now that I’ve had – all my possessions – ripped from me – it’s as if I were back at the start, having to live by my wits, if you see what I mean, for the first time in my life. When I married Blaise I was just a piece of ectoplasm, and I might have stayed like that for ever. Now I realize I’ve become a person – not necessarily a nice person at all – but a person, an individual, something with edges. When I was happy I was – you can scarcely imagine it because you’ve always been a person – maybe men always are more than women – when I was happy I was so vague. I lived in others and through others, I didn’t live in myself. It sounds like a good way to live. Maybe it was a good way to live in some small sense, I mean that a part of the world was good, was contented and in order – and I was part of that part, not exactly causing it, but it lived through me and I through it. But I wasn’t anything real or hard in the middle, I had no structure, or if I had I wasn’t conscious of it and I didn’t use it I must have been changing though, and becoming, though I didn’t know it, what I am now. I can’t have become all this, and there’s really a lot of it, in a few days, can I?’
‘We discover ourselves in affliction,’ said Monty.
‘I suppose one way of putting it is that I’m free for the first time in my life. I have to make decisions and choices in an open field. I have to look after myself and make or mar my own destiny by reaching out for things or letting them go. I’ve been so protected, so shut up, so shut in. Now it’s like a bright light, awful, too bright, one has nowhere to hide, one has to move. And it’s in this light and in this way that I’ve come to you, Monty. You can’t think how – significant this is to me – that I realize that I love you. It’s as if it’s my first free act – it’s so – valuable -’
It is to you, he thought. But that does not necessarily give it value for me. This new intensely self-possessed Harriet was fascinating. Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.
‘And I feel so strong, Monty. I feel as if I can compel you almost I’ve always thought of you as strong and myself as weak. But now I feel as if I had power over you, claims, rights. You’ve got to help me, I will make you love me, we have a future. This is a strange way for a woman to talk whose husband has just left her. But I won’t sit at home and weep, I won’t! I can make a new destiny, a new life, I’ve got to, whether I like it or not. And when I need you, you are here. You must see how meant it all is. You needn’t work it out now – you think so much and that makes you cautious -I don’t really want to capture you all at once – at least I do want to, but I know I can’t – I want you simply to let something begin between us – well, it has begun, it began before, before I knew about Blaise. Just let it go on, let it live, let it be, let it become. I need you terribly, Monty, oh I do need you so. Won’t you simply please meet these needs, I mean hour by hour, minute by minute, be with me, look after me, help me? Then you won’t be able not to love me. You need love too, you know – not only to be loved, but to love.’
Oh if only you knew, thought Monty. He replied, ‘Look Harriet, sober up. Loving confers no rights you know. You talk as if you had just emerged into the clear light of day. It seems to me that the opposite is the case. You’ve been knocked on the head, you’re suffering from shock, you’re in frightful pain. Jealousy is one of the most awful of all mental pains and in order to help yourself bear it you’ve invented this great affection for me —’
‘So you think I’m suffering agonies of jealousy?’ said Harriet.
‘Yes.’
She considered this, lifting Lucky’s heavy and now recumbent front half off her knee, and setting him to lie curled up beside her, his big head against her thigh, as she gazed still down the garden towards the yellow privet hedge and speckled fence that divided Monty’s property from that of Mrs Raines-Bloxham.
‘The odd thing is,‘ said Harriet, ‘I don’t think I am. The shock has been somehow too great and that has actually helped, like when someone is shot and instantly paralysed so that the nerves are spared the agony which might kill. Of course I could feel jealousy and I may feel it. Only somehow that’s already something small, and I do feel in this awful way so strong and solitary. I don’t think that Blaise or my former life will ever come back to me in any form – that I could accept or be – pleased by – any more.’ For the first time since her confession began her voice faltered a little towards tears.
That’s better, thought Monty. He pursued, ‘You say you are paralysed. But you won’t stay paralysed. You say you may feel jealousy. You certainly will. You’ve got to see Blaise soon and when you see him you’ll inhabit your love for him all over again. Love for someone you’ve been married to for years can’t suddenly end like this, it’s an addiction. You’ve got a long road, Harriet, and don’t imagine I can tread it with you. You’ve got to work this thing out with Blaise and you can’t foresee how he’ll act or how you’ll act. Blaise is perfectly capable of changing his mind again.’
‘I don’t care if he does.’
‘You will care if he does. He could undo everything, including this new you that you’re so proud of, in a moment. Suppose he comes back and throws himself at your feet, you would be instantly metamorphosed back into what you were before. In fact it wouldn’t be a metamorphosis because you haven’t changed, you only have a comforting illusion of having changed. All this stuff about freedom and will is false, Harriet, false. Your real work, and your duty too incidentally, is to go on supporting your relationship to Blaise, living inside it over a long time while he decides what he wants and what he’ll do. He is your husband after all.’
‘What about what I want and what I’ll do?’
‘That has no importance. For these purposes you’re still ectoplasm.’
‘Why are you so unjust to me?’ said Harriet, suddenly now turning to look at Monty, shifting herself and the dog a little way from him for a better view. Monty in black linen jacket and white shirt, his dark hair well combed and neat, his black shoes ludicrously well polished, was looking his most jesuitically untouchable. Oh I do love him so, thought Harriet, and this is new, new in the world. I must convince him, I must make him see. He can save me. / can save him.
‘I’m not being unjust,’ said Monty, still not looking at her, gazing at the dogs on the lawn. (Ajax had just arrived.) ‘I’m being realistic, which I dare say you’re incapable of being at present. Blaise just has absolute power over you. The whole situation holds you emotionally and morally trapped. You are not free. Come back to a few simple clear ideas, Harriet. The idea of your duty, for instance. If Blaise wants soon, or even not so soon, to extricate himself – and he may – to come
back to you, to re-establish Hood House, it is your duty to help him. It mightn’t be another woman’s duty. It is yours. Please don’t interrupt me. It is your duty for David’s sake, even if there were no other reason, and there are other reasons. You are not capable of suddenly "living free". You are not prepared for it by nature or by training. You have got to act the humble powerless part. You cannot and ought not to claim the dignity of will and action. In other words you’ve got to behave like a saint however peevish you may feel, because you, being you, haven’t any viable alternative. Years later, if Blaise has really abandoned you and you find that you can really abandon him, all right, you may have to make other arrangements, learn typing and shorthand, learn some new and uncongenial form of life, who knows. And that won’t be freedom either. When that time comes all those things will be just as compulsory as the things I’ve been speaking of are now. At present you’re simply foisting a false idea of liberty and power on to a mere bubbling up of emotion, a sentimental feeling you have about me, a feeble muddled desire to be helped. Wake up, come back to reality. You are a long way, perhaps years, away from any deep change in your life. Because of the circumstances and because of your nature you have got to be passive now and simply wait for Blaise and see what he does and what he needs. That is the only role of which, without dangerous self-deception, you are really capable, and I advise you to play it.’
‘You are awful,’ said Harriet. ‘Of course I’ve always known that. But I think now, which I’ve never thought before, that you are being stupid.’
‘Another relevant point,’ said Monty, his eye moving over the group of dogs like one who ‘reads‘ a picture, ‘is that I haven’t got what you need. I haven’t the interest. I’m sorry to be brutal, but clarity is better. There must be no muddle here and no, as you put it, beginning. I am a bereaved man -’