A Fairly Honourable Defeat (61 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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‘How do you know?’ said Tallis.
‘Hilda told me. She has been a very willing informant throughout. I must say, I do respect Hilda and I don’t blame her too much for getting lost. She is a very good-natured and kindly person who doesn’t think too much about herself. She’s not
interested
in herself, the way the others are. This is what makes her so restful to be with. She used to be a bit hostile to me, you know, but I’m glad to say she’s entirely got over it. I so much enjoyed talking to her and being with her. She’s entirely truthful and genuine, unlike her sister. In fact in other circumstances Hilda—There is something so relaxing—Well, I suppose I always did rather want a mother figure—However I didn’t come here to talk about myself.’
‘What’s happened now to Rupert and Morgan?’
‘I don’t know the
very
latest, but Hilda told me all she knew before she took off for Wales. Rupert is so tied up with guilt and damaged vanity and loss of face he can’t say or do anything straight. Morgan, with her eternal determination to have everything all ways and eat all cakes and have them too, has been appealing to her sister to go on loving her in the sacred name of childhood days. I must say, they have behaved predictably to an extent which is quite staggering. Indeed if any of them had been less than predictable the whole enterprise would have collapsed at an early stage. They really are puppets,
puppets.
’
‘You haven’t talked to Rupert or Morgan about it?’
‘I’ve kept clear of Morgan. I find her company very lowering, even the pleasures of curiosity have palled. I had a few words with Rupert. He was mainly concerned with the destruction of the big spotless Rupert-image which he’s been living by, and which he mistakes for some sort of vision of goodness. He was also rather down in the mouth because Peter had destroyed his book.’
‘Peter destroyed Rupert’s book?’
‘Yes. Tore it up into small pieces. And unfortunately it’s the only copy. Still, I don’t think the world has lost a masterpiece.’
‘But why did Peter—?’
‘Well, poor Peter’s always been in love with mama and lately he’s been in love with auntie too, and when he found out that papa was betraying mama with auntie it was a bit too much for the poor lad.’
‘How did he find out?’
‘I told him. He came round once when I was with Hilda and Hilda was in tears. I told her I’d see him off the premises and tell him some reassuring story. I told him in fact, in a curtailed version, the truth, and his imagination did the rest. He then set off to make a scene and doubtless caused much dismay. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Peter, it was just my instinct as an artist, it was entirely impromptu. And I suppose he would have found out anyway.’
‘When did Hilda go to Wales?’ said Tallis.
‘The day before yesterday. I would have come to see you yesterday, only I had the most terrible migraine. Indeed, I might have told you all about it last time I came. I half intended to, only you started telling me about your father and then it seemed out of place to start on this rather peculiar story.’
‘Why are you telling me now?’
‘Oh you know why. And I didn’t really intend things to proceed quite so far. It all got rather out of hand. I expect you have this sort of experience too. And honestly I’m getting a bit tired of it and I don’t know what to do next.’
Tallis sat for a moment reflecting. Then he jumped up. ‘We must telephone to Hilda.’
‘You mean tell her all this?’
‘Yes. They must all be told. At once. Not the house phone, everyone hears every word. There’s a phone box down the street. Come on.’
‘Are you going to talk to Hilda?’
‘No. You’re going to talk to Hilda.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
 
IT WAS RAINING. The wind rattled the windows and bore down over the wet grass, flattening it, shaking it. Twilight was coming over the treeless land with a chilly brownish greenish autumnal glow, bright in the light rain.
Hilda had imagined that the solitude of the cottage would be a refuge, that it would provide a kind of freedom. She had imagined herself sitting there and steadily thinking things out. She had been careful to deceive Rupert into believing that she was going abroad. After two days however the loneliness and all sorts of physical fears which invaded her weakened organism had reduced her to such a state of panicky misery that she was quite incapable of thinking at all. She had never been alone at the cottage before. There had always been Rupert’s strong, full reassuring presence, a completely effective bulwark against anxiety of any kind. The cottage made her miss him dreadfully in an instinctive way, and she wept. Day-time and night-time became equally terrible. Strange distant figures appeared on the horizon during the day, seeming to watch. Things disappeared from the outhouses. Windows opened and banged horribly. At night there were noises to which Hilda sat breathlessly listening. Bodies seemed to brush against the walls of the house. Latches were quietly lifted and bolted doors quietly pressed upon. There were sudden near sounds, rustlings and little murmurs, and mysterious distant incomprehensible booms. Hilda imagined ferocious animals, gipsies, murderers, and beings from beyond the bounds of the human world whose presence she even more indubitably felt as they detached themselves quietly from the heather and crept slowly towards the cottage. At night she sat by candle light and the light of the fire. There were oil lamps but she did not know how to light them. Rupert had always lit the lamps.
After the first night Hilda told herself that she must get out or lose her reason. But the weakness which attracted the terrors made her also unable to decide or move. This had seemed to be a safe place, at least it was familiar, it made some kind of sense to be here. Where else could she go, to whom could she go? Could she live in a hotel, sit in a bleak bedroom, take her meals alone in the dining room? If she went to stay with somebody she would be incapable of pretending, and there was no friend to whom she wanted to talk about the carnage which had taken place in her life. The only person she felt in any way inclined to see was Julius, him she even at moments craved to see, but it was an odd craving, as if for something unreal. A very few days of not seeing Julius had made him seem once more unapproachable and remote, and she had not had the spirit to telephone him, though she had written him a long letter just before she left London.
There had been no grand explanation with Rupert. In fact Hilda had avoided one. On the first evening Rupert had seemed quite dazed. Hilda had locked the bedroom door. Rupert had tapped on it late at night. From his voice it had sounded as if he were rather drunk. Next morning it appeared that he had drunk almost a whole bottle of whisky and had gone to sleep fully clothed in his dressing room. Hilda had left the house before he woke up and installed herself in a near-by hotel. For the moment she could not bear the sight of Rupert. Once the first shock was over jealousy inhabited her like a fever making her shake and sweat. She had to get away from the house where all the ordinary things did not yet know of Rupert’s faithlessness and where sweeping brushes and tea cups and cigarette boxes and little innocent unconscious knick-knacks told her at every moment the extent of her loss. Something very like embarrassment, only embarrassment potentiated into agony, made her anxious to shun her husband. She did not want to look into his guilty eyes and to see the man whom she had worshipped shorn, defeated, utterly at a loss.
It was also very necessary to avoid Morgan. About Morgan Hilda felt a sickness too deep to be identified as misery or anger. That particular betrayal had injected its venomous power into the whole of her past, changing all that was good into rotten specious appearance. Everything was different now right back to the start. To cherish her sister had been the chief business of her life, a constant unfailing source of warmth and sense. She had received a note from Morgan saying
We will not be divided
and she had thought how ridiculously characteristic it was before she had realized with a jerk that such a thought could no longer be a vehicle of affection.
Hilda came back and fetched her clothes. She saw neither Rupert nor Morgan. Letters from both of them were lying on the hall table at Priory Grove and she read them later in her room at the hotel. Rupert’s letter was hopelessly confused, full of self-accusations and pleading, and at the same time denials that anything worth mentioning had really happened at all. She tore it to pieces with misery and disgust. Morgan’s letter made a good deal more sense. Morgan explained how Rupert had suddenly fallen desperately in love with her, how they had decided not to tell Hilda, how they had hoped that the situation could be contained. Hilda set this letter aside more thoughtfully. On the spur of the moment she wrote a very bitter letter to Rupert. She ended by telling him that she was going to Paris to stay with her old friend Antoinette Ruabon. She conveyed the same information more curtly to Morgan on a postcard. Then she hired a car and drove to Wales.
The cottage, which was six miles from the main road and further than that from the nearest village, was approached by a rough track which ran between mossy brambly mounds which had once been stone walls. The only habitation near it was a farmhouse now empty and for sale. The sea was two miles away. Hilda had imagined herself staring at the sea and receiving from its indifferent immensity some old grey weary sort of wisdom. In fact she had not been to the sea. She set out towards it on the first morning, tore her leg on some barbed wire, and returned to the cottage in tears.
She decided, I must go back to London tomorrow. Oh God, I wish I hadn’t written that awful letter to Rupert. There’ll have to be
talk
and it’s unkind as well as cowardly to run away like this. They must both be in torment. I see now that I ran away in order to punish them. Then she began to wonder: what are they doing at this moment? Then she thought, holding each other’s hands and taking counsel about what to do. Comforting each other. Discussing me. And she cried out with pain, alone there in the dusky comfortless room. She thought, I am the one that is destroyed, by that particular alliance, by that special and absolute cruelty. They have futures, I have none. Can Rupert and I, in the end, attempt to go on as before? Things can never be as before, and whatever they do, what has happened has happened forever. She remembered Morgan’s letter, and thought, I cannot exist without Morgan and yet now it is utterly impossible to exist with her. I cannot accept her back into my life. Oh what will become of me now?
Hilda rose and bolted the doors. It was dark outside, windy rainy rumorous darkness coming from far away across the empty coast and the sea. She lit three candles and put dry wood onto the fire and carefully pulled the curtains, thinking how solitary and strange that square of lighted window must look, glowing and flickering in the middle of nowhere. She hoped that no being was watching it now. She sat by the fire and began to cry quietly. She had been happy and protected for so long. She was too old to find her way in this wilderness of unpredictable violence and naked personal will.
A sudden loud shrill noise filled the room. Hilda sprang up with a little shriek of fear before she realized that it was the telephone. Her instant thought was: Rupert. She ran to the instrument and lifted it with clumsy frightened fingers.
The remote unmoved voice of an operator said, ‘Professor King is calling you from a London call box. Will you pay for the call?’
‘Professor—? Oh yes, yes, please, yes—’
‘Hello, Hilda,’ said Julius’s voice.
‘Oh
Julius
, thank God. I’ve been just going mad down here, I shouldn’t have come, I can’t think and it’s all turning into nightmare, how I wish I’d seen you before I left London, but I wanted to rush away and I see now it was crazy, I’m simply going to pieces here, oh Julius I’m so grateful to you for ringing, it’s such a blessed relief to hear your voice, can we talk for a bit—’
‘Hilda,
listen
please—’
‘Have you seen Rupert or Morgan?’ How terribly real and present Julius’s voice made London seem.
‘No, I haven’t. Hilda, I want to tell you something important and I want you to listen carefully.’
‘Something about—them?’
‘Yes. You have—’
‘Julius, I’ve been so wretched, I know I shouldn’t have left London—’
‘Hilda, please just
listen.
Can you hear me all right? You have been the victim of a trick.’
‘A trick—?’
‘Yes. Rupert and Morgan did not fall in love with each other and they have not been having a love affair. What you have seen is simply a façade of falsehoods. You have all three of you simply been duped.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Hilda. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘A trick has been played upon them and by extension upon you. Each of them was falsely convinced that the other was in love. Their kind scrupulous natures produced the rest of the confusion. There has been nothing else, no love affair and indeed no love.’
‘But a trick—who could have—’
‘I was the magician, Hilda. It started as a sort of practical joke but it got rather out of hand I fear. But never mind about me. You must attend carefully while I tell you exactly what happened so that you can understand that they are entirely blameless.’

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