A Fairly Honourable Defeat (36 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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‘I don’t know. They quarrel endlessly.’
‘It could be a significant remark.’
‘Really, Julius! But hardly gallant. I feel rather especially bothered about Tallis at the moment, so no wonder I see these apparitions! I’ve just swindled him out of three hundred pounds!’
‘How?’
‘I owed Tallis four hundred and Rupert gave it me to pay him and I gave him a hundred and kept three hundred. Don’t you think that’s caddish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a word, by the way, as Hilda doesn’t know Rupert lent me the money. I never told her I owed Tallis anything.’
‘How does hubbie fit into the new scene of free innocent loving?’
‘He’ll get his share.’
‘We’ll all play ring-a-ring-a-roses?’
‘Julius, we will be friends, won’t we, you and I? It’s terribly important. Your
thoughts
about me are so important. You know how someone else’s consciousness could drive one mad? Yours could drive me mad. You must be merciful. I’m terribly connected with you, I always will be. I love you and I’ll always love you.’
Morgan had not meant to say this. Her thoughts about her new life had not really comprehended Julius any more than they had really comprehended Tallis. She felt a fierce determination to change herself. But she felt too, with a sort of relaxed despair, how in these two relationships she was not yet changed. Her own mention of the house in the woods had brought it all back. Breakfast on the terrace with the hot resiny smell of azaleas, the marzipan smell of magnolias. Julius singing arias as he fries eggs and bananas. Scarlet wings of cardinal birds in evergreen oak trees. Chipmunks and red squirrels and mysterious pendant possums. Alligators with jewelled backs and huge-eyed dragonflies in swampy steamy creeks. Long breathless silent evening walks beneath the canopies of Spanish moss, Julius’s hand caressing her shoulders, plucking at her dress where perspiration had glued it to her body. Cascades of clematis and trumpet vines and bougainvillaea, a paradise. Julius’s face a brilliant mask of tenderness after love-making. The secret house with its huge windows full of luminous green pine branches and radiant blue sky. The house in the woods had unmade London for her, unmade Europe.
It can’t all have gone, she thought, gone away, vanished into nothing. Julius is
in
me. I haven’t solved Julius. All my moods have been modes of consciousness of him. First ecstasy, then misery, then cynicism. Now this new sense of a possible enlargement. In which he
must
help me. This can only be done
with
him. We shall never be finished with each other,
never.
This is only the beginning of a drama which will last the whole of our lives. The thought was deeply consoling.
Julius now turned to look at her. Before, he had been gazing vaguely around the room, twitching his shoulders, glancing at his watch.
‘
Please,
’ said Morgan. She laid her hand lightly upon his sleeve.
Julius looked at her as one might look at a child. ‘I am afraid you attach too much importance to personal relationships.’
Morgan twisted the stuff of the jacket savagely and let it go. ‘You are a monster. You are the sort of man who really would prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of his finger!’
‘No, no. I’m serious. These things are not as important as you think, Morgan. They are flimsy and unreal. You want some sort of drama now, you want an ordeal of some kind, you don’t want to suffer in a dull way, and you want me to help you. But these are merely superficial agitations. Human beings are roughly constructed entities full of indeterminacies and vaguenesses and empty spaces. Driven along by their own private needs they latch blindly onto each other, then pull away, then clutch again. Their little sadisms and their little masochisms are surface phenomena. Anyone will do to play the roles. They never really see each other at all. There is no relationship, dear Morgan, which cannot quite easily be broken and there is none the breaking of which is a matter of any genuine seriousness. Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes.’
Morgan glared at him. She was delighted that he had used her name. It was a moment for argument. With a physical thrill, she felt the sudden immediacy, the directness of connection, the old current once more at last flowing between them.
‘I don’t agree. There are some relations which can’t be broken.’
‘None, none. All human beings have staggeringly great faults which can easily be exploited by a clever observer.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I could divide anybody from anybody. Even you could. Play sufficiently on a person’s vanity, sow a little mistrust, hint at the contempt which every human being deeply, secretly feels for every other one. Every man loves himself so astronomically more than he loves his neighbour. Anyone can be made to drop anyone.’
‘In some cases maybe—in the very long run—’
‘No, no, quickly, in ten days! Don’t you believe me? Would you like a demonstration?’
Morgan stared at him. Then she laughed. She felt the quivering of a physical bond between them and her eyes kindled at his eyes. Julius’s face had the clever delighted look which she had loved, which she had kissed, once.
‘My dear! You really are—All right, why not? But you’ll fail. I’ll bet you—ten guineas. But who can you try it on?’
‘Ten guineas. Done!’
‘And I’ll be generous and make it three weeks. Four if you like. You’re completely mad, of course. But whoever could you try it on? It must be people we both know. You really are a mischief-maker! ’
‘Let me see, let me see!’ Julius was now in high spirits. ‘What about—what about the little Foster?’
‘Simon? Oh no! You mean—what?’
‘I wouldn’t do him any harm. I would simply detach him quite painlessly from Axel. I would rather like to have the little Foster for my squire.’
‘It seems so unkind now it’s real people!’
‘But no one would really suffer, that’s part of my point. I’d do it in the most
angelic
manner.’
‘Oh Julius—You know, in a way I really think it might be good for Simon. I do feel Axel rather forced it on him. And I doubt if they’re really happy. I’m sure they torment each other.’
‘You make it sound as if it’ll be too easy! Would you like some other test case?’
‘No, no, that one will be fine. I shall be absolutely riveted! Julius, you really are the most fantastical person I have ever met!’
‘Well, I think it’s time for a martini. Let’s go and clinch our wager.’
As they rose and turned to go Morgan drew her finger tips along his sleeve and lifted her hand up into the air. Her body felt alive and light. She was suddenly blindingly happy. She looked round upon the Turners. She could see now how limited and amateurish they really were.
CHAPTER TWENTY
 
THE CHINESE RESTAURANT was in a basement. One reached it by going down a flight of steep crumbling rather fungoid steps, holding carefully onto a handrail. The evening was warm and a little overcast.
Simon was early. He hoped to settle in and get himself a drink before the others arrived. He felt thoroughly irritated by the prospect of Chinese food. Axel would insist that one must drink lager. Simon would fight for white wine. In any case, neither drink went properly with that mess of anaemic bean shoots and nameless fragments of fried stuff. Oh God, Julius would want to drink
tea!
That would be the last straw.
Simon was not in any case looking forward to the evening, though he felt a little interested to see how Tallis and Julius would behave. He thought it odd of Tallis to come. Could Tallis be moved by anything as vulgar as curiosity? Relations with Axel were still strained. Axel had never been quite like this before. He was polite and kindly but in some scarcely definable way still distant. Had some condemnation been made, some decision been taken, in a secret department of Axel’s mind? Had there perhaps been some cold and final act of writing-off? Simon woke and slept with fear. He knew his friend too well to attempt any sort of emotional show-down while Axel was in this kind of mood. Any desperate appeal would be treated merely with raised eyebrows and slight frowns. Simon would have to wait for the right moment. But the right moment did not come, and meanwhile Simon’s own apparently calm response to Axel’s treatment of him widened the gap between them.
The curious incident at Julius’s flat was refusing to recede into the past and mix itself with oblivion. If only he had told Axel about it at once! It was impossible to tell him now. This secretiveness not only constituted, what Axel had always adjured him against a lie, it also made the incident itself curiously potent with psychological consequences. Consequences which concerned Julius, and consequences which concerned Morgan. Simon had several times dreamt about Julius. He had had a version of a dream which had been a familiar visitant over many years. When he was at his prep school, the boys’ letters were set out in a big set of black pigeon-holes, one hole for each letter of the alphabet. F was rather high up and, when he was an exceptionally small new boy, Simon had not quite been able to reach it. He longed for letters from his mother. These came regularly, but to obtain them became an early morning ordeal. Simon would stand shyly near the pigeon-holes, hoping that someone fairly tall who knew him and was also nice would come along and could be casually asked if he could see if there was anything for Foster. Sometimes the older boys laughed at him. Once a big boy, with a cry of ‘Letter from Mummy!’ lifted Simon up to the top pigeon-holes. Simon wept with shame afterwards in the lavatories.
These pigeon-holes, mercifully forgotten in his adolescence, began to haunt his dreams in his early twenties. Very greatly enlarged and deepened, they became portentous windows out of the deeply recessed interiors of which Simon was always wanting to look at some brightly coloured scene of intense interest. Only the hole through which he wanted to look was always just out of his reach. He would climb up towards it, mounting on piles of crumbling collapsing boxes or precarious scaffolding, or sometimes climbing endless stairs. The scene itself when, now and then, he managed to glimpse it through the long shaft of the pigeon-hole, was always strangely separated from the rest of the dream, a weird landscape perhaps, or strange animals at play. It inspired painful excitement. But awful anxiety attached to the clambering up. Very occasionally in the dreams someone actually lifted him up, and this feeling of powerful hands gripping him about the waist revived the old terrible sensation of shame. In so far as he could identify the lifter up it was usually his father or Rupert. In his most recent pigeon-hole dreams Simon had realized on waking with extreme distress that the person who had lifted him up had been Julius.
Simon had thought a good deal about Morgan too and wanted very much to go round and see her. He felt a kind of laceration which talk with her, talk about anything, would have soothed. But he knew that if he went to see her at the moment he would have to conceal this from Axel. Any mention of Morgan would increase the aloofness and the coldness which even now were just as much as Simon could bear. Sometimes he felt that it would not matter too much if he did see Morgan and said nothing about it. This concealment would be merely an extension of the first one. The ‘compact’ of which Morgan had spoken seemed to have begun on that evening at Julius’s flat, though it had been given its substance later. At other times Simon knew that this was muddled thinking and that the best way to encourage the first lie to shrivel right away was to be guilty of no more. He wrote a long affectionate letter to Morgan and then did not send it. He had the pigeon-hole dream again, once more with Julius. What he saw through the dark shaft was Morgan walking in a garden with no clothes on.
The restaurant was lit by neon strip lighting and made a bright cold rather sickly impression after the blue misty light outside. Simon blinked. He wondered if Axel had booked a table. The place appeared to be empty. He looked around, searching for the most protected place to sit. No, there were some people in the far corner, standing round a table in a group. Simon chose a table fairly near the door and against the wall. He picked up a menu and began gloomily to study it. Chow this and chow that. He would have a decent drink to start with anyway. Where were the waiters?
There was something a little odd about the atmosphere. Simon looked up and his eyes were now a little more accustomed to the bright gloomy greenish light. The light seemed to be flickering very faintly. The people in the far corner, who had looked round when he came in, were now intent again on something else. Five of them were standing, one sitting at the table. The five who were standing were, he saw, burly youths of about eighteen. The man who was sitting down appeared to be a dark man, perhaps a Jamaican. There was a curious silence. As Simon watched he saw the Jamaican slowly raise his table napkin to his face. The white napkin came away stained with something dark. Blood.
There’s been some sort of accident, Simon thought. Something has happened. The man is hurt. He felt a sudden tension in the chest. Then as he watched, one of the youths reached out and cuffed the coloured man on the side of his head and then drew his hand roughly down over his face, pushing him backward. The chair rocked and grated on the floor. The youth then ostentatiously wiped his stained fingers across the front of the Jamaican’s shirt. The other four laughed. The Jamaican put the napkin back in front of his eyes and nose. Another of the group reached forward and snatched it away from him. They leaned over him.

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