by Iris Murdoch
‘I wish at least you’d get a job, and then—’
‘You got to be joking! Can you see me working for a master, honest, can you? I got to be free, it’s my nature. Anyway what’s the use? A lot of bloody money-grubbing bosses. The upper class are all right, it’s the middle class that are hell, they’re materialists. Look at Lawrence of Arabia. This society’s rotten, it isn’t going to last much longer. It’s all right for you, you’re different, you’re special, you got nothing. But most people are shits. I’m telling you and I know. The lies they tell, they even tell lies to you, God if I started to say all the lies I’ve heard people telling you—’
Cato looked down in the dim light at the brightly self-conscious face, the eyes flickering behind the glinting hexagonal glasses. Beautiful Joe never looked wholly serious. The long dry intelligent mouth quivered at the corners with awareness and suppressed amusement. Joe had combed his straight hair carefully, probably as he came up the stairs, and it swung, silky, neat and brilliant. Touchable.
‘Oh, I know,’ said Cato, ‘I know.’ He moved away.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Father, don’t be sort of cold, because I go on so. You do still pray for me, don’t you.’
‘Of course.’
‘I tried to pray last night. Honest I did. I knelt down and I spoke to God like He was my best friend. I said, God, why did You make me if I was to be frustrated?’
‘Listen,’ said Cato, ‘if I could organize an expensive education for you, would you take it?’
There was a silence, Beautiful Joe, staring, jutting his jaw and pulling down his lower lip with one finger. ‘What do you mean “expensive”? You mean sort of like Eton College?’
‘No. I mean a crammer, a tutor, people to teach you specially, and you’d be financially supported while you were learning.’
‘You mean given money?’
‘Yes, like a grant. You could have a nice room, money, teachers, but not like school, you’d be quite free. Then maybe university—’
‘You know, Father,’ said Joe, ‘You’re a cunning one. You’re quite a villain yourself in your own way. I don’t want anything like that. I just want you to love me and care for me. That’s all that’s needed, Father. You will, won’t you? Won’t you? Won’t you?’
The chief reason why Hannibal succeeded in performing miracles of military organization was that he was a monster of cruelty. Henry remembered having been told that at school, and having been impressed by it, some time after he had irrevocably identified himself with the Carthaginian general. He had an instinctive identification with heroes beginning with H. Homer. Hannibal. Hobbes. Hume. Hamlet. Hitler. What a crew. Only his own name seemed empty, a sort of un-name, another cause for resentment, unredeemed by kings. And of course the letter H itself was an un-letter, a mere breath, a nothing, an identityless changeling rendered by a G in Russian. Gamlet, Gitler, Genry. H, an open receptacle, a standing emptiness, equally good or bad either way up.
Henry was standing in the ballroom. It was late afternoon after tea. Henry had not attended tea but he had smelt that special smell of toast and groaned. The room, its fine parquet floor, laid down by Henry’s grandfather, dusty and unpolished, was empty of furniture except for a group of chairs at one end. Those chairs, Henry saw, were all broken, perhaps discarded, perhaps awaiting renovation: old sagging armchairs with their seats upon the floor, upright chairs lacking a leg, tilting over at crazy angles. A subject for Max in drypoint. Maimed chairs. The space. The terrible space. Henry shivered. When he was a small child his angry father had thrust him into the ballroom one afternoon and locked the door. Tearful Henry had buzzed in the empty room like a hysterical fly, that sunlighted space more terrible than any dark cupboard.
He moved to the tall northern window and looked across the terrace and the lawn towards the conifers and the edge of the birch wood. The sun was weakly shining. The daffodils were over. It had not rained for two days. Bellamy, seated upon a yellow motor mower, was carefully and slowly proceeding along the edge of the longer grass. Only now he saw that it was not Bellamy, it was his mother, dressed in an old tweed jacket and baggy trousers. She seemed to turn her head towards him, then look away. Yesterday, outside, he had seen his mother watching him from the drawing-room windows as he was returning from the greenhouse. He had visited the orchard, the tennis courts, the walled garden. He needed to visit everything, to tell everything the news, to reassure himself that he had tasted every memory, sprung every booby trap that the past had left for him. He had been to Dimmerstone and stood with glazed eyes beside the low wall of the churchyard. He had thought of his father there more than Sandy. Or perhaps already these two sad images were joining hands. Sandy was more suddenly present in the warm greenhouse where the smell of some aromatic herb made Henry close his eyes in sudden pain. He came running back and saw the watching figure of his mother. As he drew near she faded and vanished like a ghost. Now he, a ghost, was watching her.
Henry took a cup of coffee for breakfast and avoided tea time, but otherwise he accepted the routine of the house, the tinkling bell rung by Rhoda, the polite conversation, the amazingly meagre and parsimonious but still formal meals. Whatever would his father have thought? In the evening they watched television together in the library. Henry always went to bed early. There seemed no reason why this pattern should not go on forever. Henry sat in his bedroom and gasped at it all. Upstairs in Queen Anne everything was sober, chaste, rather cold; white towels, white lavatory paper, Pears soap. He had now explored his bedroom, opened every drawer. He had fled to America almost with what he stood up in. All his old clothes were here, carefully hung in the wardrobe, carefully folded in the drawers, smelling of moth balls. A Henry museum. A Henry mausoleum. Even his old name tapes, long ribbons of his red embroidered name, waiting to be sewn onto his shirts and socks. Henry Blair Marshalson Henry Blair Marshalson Henry Blair Marshalson. It was all significant yet impersonal, archaeological. There were no papers, no letters. Had he destroyed them? No books. Had they thought he would never return? The room was old, waiting for a Henry who would certainly never return, who did not exist any more.
Two days after his visit to Cato, Henry had gone up to town again to collect his Volvo and had raced back along the motorway. It was amazingly quick and easy. When he was young getting to London had been quite an enterprise. The yellow Volvo now sat in the big garage in the stable block next to his mother’s Austin and Sandy’s Jensen. Sandy’s Ferrari had perished with him in the accident of which Gerda had given Henry the necessary minimum account. It had been a banal pointless road accident. Henry had asked no questions. Searching about he had discovered in a loose box an old ERA, obviously lovingly refurbished by a mechanical Sandy since the days of its old Brooklands debut. He had already spoken to Merriman about selling Sandy’s cars. Henry was not a car fetishist. He noticed that his mother’s Austin had not been out since he arrived. Did his mother usually spend all her time at home? Was she waiting to see what he would do? Become a squire? Go away?
Henry was very glad that he had been to see Cato. He had not known until he satisfied it how strong was his need to talk to a man of his own age and an Englishman. Cato gave him a sense of identity and a non-painful link with the past. Was he at thirty-two destined to achieve nothing except some as yet veiled act of destruction? The meeting with Cato had given him the glimmerings of a plan. Henry might be nothing, but his money was something, and faith was something, even if it was not his own. The idea of Cato Forbes as a priest had seemed laughable. But the black-clad man in the derelict house had been for Henry touching and impressive. That stripped life had its beauty. Holiness, that was a sense datum. And even if it was no more than picturesque, it was a sign, and was he not in the market for a sign? Christianity had made little impression upon Henry, but he and Bella had had their go, ignoring Russell’s scorn, at West Coast Buddhism. Efforts at meditation did not continue for long, but Henry had gained a new conception of religion, a conception it is true whic
h remained purely abstract since he could do nothing with it; but which now constructed a gate through which Cato Forbes could more significantly re-enter his life.
That morning Henry had received letters from Russell and Bella. Bella’s letter was long. Honey, we miss you so … Don’t go English on us … you said so often you hated the set-up, don’t buy it now … Come home soon, won’t you. Russell’s letter was brief. Hi, kid, hope you’re O.K. Write. Russ. Henry felt incapable of answering the letters, but as he crumpled them he felt that really he missed Russ more than he missed Bella. Had he left his real self, his moral being, his only hope of salvation behind him in little plain shadowless clapboard Sperriton, baked in the lux perpetua of the prairies and of the great American middle west and the great American goodness? And if he did would he not one day soon have to go back to stay? Had he ever doubted that he would go back? What insane hope of what had led him to England?
He had talked to his mother but it was maimed talking. She had asked him a lot about Sperriton and he had given her clipped answers, minimizing everything, making it sound dull. Of course it was dull, beautifully dull, but not as unintelligibly dreary as Henry’s portrayal of it. ‘Did you like your work?’ ‘Not much.’ ‘Did you walk in the country?’ ‘There is no country. And no one walks.’ Naturally these questions were not what they seemed, Gerda scarcely listened to his answers or he to her questions. What she was saying was: I need you. I want to know you. I can be patient, you’ll see. And he was saying: Why do you pretend to be interested now? You never wanted to know before about what I was doing or who I was, you never even came to Sperriton. It’s too late now. To which she replied: it isn’t too late, it isn’t, it isn’t. ‘Did you get on well with your students?’ ‘Not very.’ ‘Did you have good friends?’ ‘A married couple.’ And sometimes it seemed to Henry that the house too was wooing him in that same fruitless incompetent ultimately rather self-satisfied way, saying to him: Here I am, after all, welcome home, I’m yours. To which Henry replied: When I wanted you you were not mine, when I needed you you rejected me. Why should I cherish you now? Henry noticed that his mother had quietly removed the silver-framed picture of Sandy from the drawing-room.
Lucius continued polite, even obsequious, and Henry treated him as if he were a poor resident tutor. What indeed his role was was unclear to Henry, and he would have ignored him had Lucius, by his own fear of Henry, not constantly put himself in the young master’s way in a manner which clearly annoyed Gerda. Lucius felt it incumbent on himself to pose intellectual questions about literature, about American politics, so as to set up a sort of academic masculine tête-à-tête for Henry’s benefit. He would have lingered with Henry over the claret (when there was any) if Henry and Gerda had permitted it. Henry was casual. He would deal with Lucius later on. For the present, Lucius must simply look to himself in so far as he dared to parade about between the fell incensèd points of mighty opposites. Meanwhile Henry mystified him. Lucius wanted to find out what Henry was up to. But Henry was up to nothing. Henry was waiting. He was waiting, with a kind of awful anguished confidence, for something to happen.
Seeing his mother employed upon her yellow mowing machine so far from the house Henry decided that now was the moment to do something which Gerda had, with evident pain, requested him to do, and which he had put off doing; this was to sort out the things in Sandy’s room. Plainly, Gerda had been unable to enter the room. Also perhaps she felt that it would be appropriate, even salutary, for Henry, the heir, to sort out Sandy’s papers. Merriman, whom Henry had seen again, had also suggested that this should be done. Henry ran out of the ballroom and up the back stairs, catching a glimpse of bird-headed Rhoda sitting in the kitchen reading a magazine. He sped along the corridor past the gallery to the door of Sandy’s room, which was opposite to his mother’s room at the west end of the house. He looked round guiltily, then quietly turned the handle and let himself in.
For no good reason, as he now realized, Henry had expected the room to be all cleaned and tidied, turned already into a Sandy museum with everything neatly piled up or put away in moth balls. But what confronted him was a living room, a room that had not yet been informed that its owner was no more. It was as if the occupant for whom the room lived and breathed were surely still nearby, thinly and anxiously concealed beside a cupboard, behind a shutter. The room was exactly as it had been on the morning when Sandy rose, shaved, dressed, had breakfast, got out the car and set off for London. There was a faint smell of pipe tobacco. The curtains were rather roughly pulled back so that the room was a little dark. The big roll-top desk was open and strewn with papers. There was a newspaper unfolded on the table, two pipes, a pair of spectacles. So Sandy had taken to wearing spectacles. Several ties and a towel lay upon the floor. There was a smear of soap on the mirror above the wash basin. The bed was undone, a hot water bottle lying upon the pillow. Mechanically Henry pulled the curtains well back, then picked up the hot water bottle. He took it to the basin and unscrewed it and poured out the water. Seeing the white basin and the flowing water he had a sudden desire to be sick.
He turned towards the bookshelves and held onto them, breathing slowly and deeply, feeling sick and slightly faint. Carefully he began to read the titles of the books. Naval Aeroplanes in the Second World War. Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. Traction Engines Past and Present. The Vintage Alvis. The Railway Enthusiast’s Handbook. Railway History in Pictures. The Tay Bridge Disaster. He felt better. A Latin tag came into his head. Delenda est Carthago. That was something Sandy used to go around saying. It amused him for some reason. Delenda est. He now went over to the desk, with a little curiosity, but mainly with a desire to get it over with and then call in the tidiers, the cleaners, the refuse collectors. He pulled the big waste paper basket near to him and began to shovel into it, after a cursory look, papers which were lying about on the desk. Receipts, advertisements, club notices, motor car stuff. A few singularly uninteresting personal letters and invitations. What, if anything, did Sandy do for sex? Henry quested quickly through the drawers and pigeon holes. Cheque books, bank statements, insurance, income tax, the stuff Merriman wanted. Keys, bank notes. A blue velvet cuff links box, empty. Odd chess men. (Sandy excelled at chess. Henry never learnt.) Old photos of the Hall with family and fourteen servants. Henry’s methodical hands flew about, discarding, sorting. He had nearly finished when he noticed that the long low open slot below the pigeon holes, which he had thought to be empty, contained something, a sort of folded paper which had been pushed away to the back. Thrusting his arm in to the wrist Henry’s fingers plucked at the paper, then drew it out.
It was a legal document, typed upon thick glossy slightly faded paper and tied up with a red ribbon. Henry untied the ribbon and opened the document. It was a lease. He read the first part of it, taking in that it was a lease, still with many years to run, of a flat in London. In Knightsbridge. Henry stared at the paper. The owner of the lease was Sandy. So Sandy had a flat in London. This was not very surprising. Only no one had mentioned this flat. Neither Merriman nor his mother had said anything about it. So presumably they did not know it existed. So presumably Sandy had a secret flat in London. The flat had not figured in Merriman’s lists of assets. Who owned the flat now? Sandy had left everything of which he died possessed to his brother Henry Blair Marshalson. So Henry now owned the flat. And of course Henry would keep it secret too. He folded up the lease and put it in his pocket. He then also pocketed the bunch of keys. He left the room on tiptoe.
The garden was darkening a little towards twilight. His mother would be coming in, so Henry decided to go out. He ran noiselessly down stairs and out through the front door, noticing how the old brown paint had flaked off and how the glass panels, which used to rattle so in the wind, still did not fit properly. He leapt the steps. He ran down the long steps of the descending terraces to where at the bottom Gerda’s well-kept herbaceous border ran along the ochre-coloured wall. It was a windless evening, full of the rapt awful
ness of spring. The grass, intensely green, was thick and spongey underfoot, already wet with dew. The sky had clouded over but was still bright, a radiant blue-grey, turning a little yellow near the horizon. There was a slight mist over the lake and the trees on the hillside were bathed in a misty radiance as if grey luminous gauze were hanging down from their still almost bare branches. The birds were crowding the evening with thin crazy continuous noise.
Henry began to walk towards the river, intending to climb up to the folly. Terrible sadness, dread, an agonizing desire for happiness, swelled in his heart. He had grown up in one of the most beautiful places in the world and he had wasted his childhood in stupid resentment and jealousy. Now when, so strangely, he had been permitted to return, it was to find himself still an alien. Gould he learn this music or would it forever float by him? Was there some ritual, some ceremony of possession, for which he was never to become worthy? Had his grandfather, his father, possessed this place? Had Sandy possessed it? He could not doubt it. Only excluded Henry saw it untouchably through a glass, utterly lacking the key to the enchantment. He seemed to stand between crime and crime, not knowing where his fulfilment lay or whether he were not always condemned to be a small whining man. He felt empty and purposeless and young. If only he were a painter, or could even feel that there was any point in going on and on and on trying to become one.
He crossed the bridge and looked up at the folly, which was dark now against the yellow sky. The birds had become quieter. He decided not to climb the hill, but walked back along the stream towards the lake to where there had been a little path, overgrown now. Perhaps it had been worn by his feet and Sandy’s. He skirted round a grove of lacquered green bamboo, touching the wet rigid stems gently with his fingertips. A moor-hen, flirting its white tail, scurried across in front of him and took noiselessly to the still water among the reeds and swam jerkily away. The reeds were motionless, the wreckage of last year’s growth still arching among the young spears. The mist had cleared a little. Henry walked with a deliberate quietness, breathing the moist air, and feeling now the wetness underfoot where the spring rains had made the lake overflow a little onto the grass. He looked out over the expanse of the water. He stopped still.