A Fairly Honourable Defeat (12 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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‘I’ll tell him. Cheerio then, Leonard.’
Hilda turned away and hurried across the road. By the time she reached the opposite pavement she had forgotten Leonard’s existence. The vague optimism which she had felt last night about Peter had entirely vanished. The impact of Morgan’s return, more violent than anything that she had expected, had laid her soul open to fears. And when the prospect of meeting Peter was close it was now always rather alarming.
The door was still slightly off its hinges and lurched back, grinding along the floor. It only needed five minutes’ work with a screwdriver. When Hilda had mentioned the door to Tallis once he had said that it was never locked at night as if this was an answer. Hilda went in, tugged and lifted the door back into its place, and found herself in semi-darkness. The indescribably horrible smell of the house assailed her. The smell was really mysteriously unpleasant. Hilda had never experienced anything quite like it. Old dirty lodging houses usually have a stale odour, stale sweat, stale food, stale urine and the dark brooding smell of dirt. The smell in Tallis’s house was fresh and bitter and at the same time nauseating. Hilda wondered if it were not caused by some extremely recherché form of dry rot. Or possibly by some insects too loathsome to think of. She shuddered and listened. Silence. She pushed open the kitchen door.
There was no one in the kitchen, which was a relief. When Tallis was at home he was usually in the kitchen during the day, where he worked at the big kitchen table. In fact an open notebook and several well-worn and learned-looking volumes from the London Library were lying about on the table together with stained newspapers, jam-smeared plates, brown-rimmed tea cups and a milk bottle half full of solidified sour milk. Hilda moved over to the table and looked at the notebook. At the top of the empty pages in Tallis’s rather large hand was written
In my last lecture I.
Hilda inspected the kitchen. It looked much as usual. The familiar group of empty beer bottles growing cobwebs. About twenty more unwashed milk bottles yellow with varying quantities of sour milk. A sagging wickerwork chair and two upright chairs with very slippery grey upholstered seats. The window, which gave onto a brick wall, was spotty with grime, admitting light but concealing the weather and the time of day. The sink was piled with leaning towers of dirty dishes. The draining board was littered with empty tins and open pots of jam full of dead or dying wasps. A bin, crammed to overflowing, stood open to reveal a rotting coagulated mass of organic material crawling with flies. The dresser was covered in a layer, about a foot high, of miscellaneous oddments: books, papers, string, letters, knives, scissors, elastic bands, blunt pencils, broken biros, empty ink bottles, empty cigarette packets and lumps of old hard stale cheese. The floor was not only filthy but greasy and sticky and made a sucking sound as Hilda lifted her feet. She resisted her usual impulse to start washing up straightaway. She did not want to dally in case Tallis returned. And the tap gave no hot water and the gas stove would take at least ten minutes to boil a kettle.
Hilda mounted the stairs feeling a bit sick inside and knocked on Peter’s door. She entered on his murmur. Peter was reposing on his bed as usual, propped up against a grey mound of pillows, dressed in shirt and trousers, barefoot. His hands were clasped upon his breast and his eyes were dreamy. Peter was a good-looking boy, very blond like his father, and inclined to plumpness in the face. He had a good straight nose and long intelligent eyes of bright blue which gave him, possibly through some reminiscence of the youthful Napoleon, the look of a young soldier. He looks like a leader, Hilda thought, surveying the limp form of her son with tenderness and exasperation. He greeted his mother with a yawn and with an agitation of his fingers, his hands remaining clasped.
‘Is Tallis in the house?’ said Hilda.
‘Tallis is doubtless somewhere if he is still alive. He is not here.’
‘You haven’t any reason to think he’s not still alive, have you?’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘You got my note?’
‘Yes.’
‘Peter, the scene in the kitchen is revolting. Why don’t you at least wash up?’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘And I think you ought to fix the front door. All you need is a screwdriver. Isn’t there a screwdriver somewhere in the house? I thought I saw one on the dresser.’
‘You might have done.’
‘And I think you ought to lock that door at night.’
‘The people upstairs come in and out at all hours.’
‘Why can’t they use latch keys like ordinary Christians?’
‘They aren’t Christians they’re Muslims. And they would lose their latch keys and knock us up.’
Hilda sighed. She sat down rather carefully on the edge of the chair. The seat was a snare. Reflected sunshine lighted up the room revealing its nakedness. Hilda shuddered. A stripped room is a place of fear. Apart from Peter’s iron bedstead and the chair there was little furniture. There was a large cardboard box full of old shoes—not Peter’s—and pieces of rope and what appeared to be leather belts. A dressing table from which the mirror had been unscrewed was littered with objects. The floor was of unstained wooden planks, grainy with dirt, and the whitish walls were scrawled over with spidery cracks and lightly festooned with cobwebs.
Hilda looked uneasily at the objects on the dressing table. They included two transistor sets, three silk handkerchiefs, obviously new, a camera, a shiny leather box which might have contained cuff links or jewellery, a rather expensive-looking electric torch and an enamelled cigarette lighter. Hilda was about to ask Peter a question about these things when the door flew open.
A lot of white teeth and a hazy flurry of black hair came round the door.
‘Cannayeh berroo yatipout aggen?’
‘Sure, you know where it is.’
The door closed.
‘What was that?’ said Hilda.
‘A Muslim.’
‘What language was he speaking?’
‘English.’
‘What did he want?’
‘He wanted to borrow our teapot.’
‘Why doesn’t he buy one of his own? They aren’t expensive.’
Peter reflected for a moment. ‘I don’t know.’ He closed his eyes.
‘Oh Peter, Peter!’ said Hilda. ‘I wish you didn’t live in such a
mess.
And by the way, where are all those books I brought you from home last time I came? I don’t see them anywhere.’
‘I sold them.’
‘Peter! Your
art
books! You used to love them.’
‘I’m through with that sort of art. And the money was useful. I gave some to Tallis.’ Peter opened his eyes a little and surveyed his mother.
‘There’s no need to give money to Tallis. I pay for this room. And surely you can keep yourself on what your father gives you and what I give you extra?’
‘I’m not complaining. In fact I’m grateful.’
‘And for heaven’s sake don’t tell anyone, not even Tallis, that I’m giving you that extra money, because I haven’t told your father! He wouldn’t stand for it, and I daresay quite rightly.’
‘I have already told Tallis, but Tallis never tells.’
‘Oh dear, I wish everything wasn’t becoming so complicated. I’m afraid I’m just no good at being a parent.’
‘Don’t start that again, mother, please. We don’t want any tears this time.’
‘But what are you going to do? You’ve got to make yourself into a going concern. You’ve got to fit into this society somehow. You can’t spend your life in bed.’
‘Sssh, sssh, my darling mother. Give me your hand. That’s right. No, just your hand. Yes, yes, there, there, you know I love you.’
‘But, Peter, you’ve got to
try
—’
‘You mean compete. I’m not going to compete.’
‘And there’s Cambridge and you’ll have to decide—’
‘I’ve decided. We see things differently, mama. We see time differently. You worry about time, you strain against it. I just give myself up to it and it carries me quietly along. As for Cambridge, it incarnates that whole rotten set of beastly old class values. One simply mustn’t touch it. It’s no compromise and no surrender.’
‘Homer and Virgil and—Sophocles and—what’s his name—Aeschylus don’t represent the whole rotten set of beastly old class values.’
‘No, they’re all right in themselves. But the whole set-up is corrupt. I can’t explain to you, mother darling. But I’ve got my own categorical imperatives. I’ve just got to reject the thing
in toto.
’
‘Peter, do try to
think.
You’ve got to earn money. Or do you expect us to support you all your life?’
‘Of course not. Money isn’t important though. I can easily earn a little if I want to.’
‘When you’re older you’ll want more money and you won’t have the capacity to earn it!’
‘This thing about more money as one grows older is precisely one of the assumptions of this lousy society which I refuse to accept. People spend their whole lives chasing money and chasing more of it and wanting more and more unnecessary things. They feel they’ve failed unless they’re continually climbing up a sort of pyramid of material possessions. They sacrifice themselves to houses and refrigerators and washing machines and cars, and at the end they realize they haven’t really lived at all. Their houses and their washing machines have lived their lives for them. I don’t want to be like that. I want to live my own life, out in the open, outside the rat race, outside the capitalist dream. This room contains everything that a human being needs.’
‘No books,’ said Hilda. ‘What about your mind? You’re clever. Don’t you want to develop your talents?’
‘Don’t you worry about my mind, mother dear. A great deal is happening in my mind. Probably more than ever happened in your mind in the whole of your life.’
‘Peter, you’re taking drugs!’
‘No, no. Well, I took some pot once or twice, harmless stuff. No, I’m not on drugs, I don’t need them. I just wait quietly and the strangest and most wonderful things come. Just to wait, that’s the secret. All this struggling and straining with conscious thought separates us from the real world. Look at that brass knob on the end of my bed. To you it’s just a brass knob. To me it’s a golden microcosm.’
‘Yes,’ said Hilda, ‘to me it’s a brass knob and it’s going to stay a brass knob! These are just moods and feelings, Peter—’
‘Moods and feelings are very important, my old square angel of an aged parent. I want to be my moods, to live in the present. Feelings are life. Most people in this society just never live at all.’
‘I know your father thinks—’
‘Please, mama. We did agree.’
‘Oh all right. Has Tallis been putting these dotty ideas into your head I wonder?’
‘Tallis! Really, mama! Tallis is on your side!’
‘Well, I think that if you reject this society, and you’re quite right to do so in many ways, you ought to equip yourself to try to change it, and not lie on your bed having feelings, and that means—’
‘That means the struggle for power. No. Power is just what I don’t want, mother. That’s another false God. Gain power so that you can do good! That’s another way to waste your life. Just look at Tallis. When did dear Tallis ever
live
?’
‘He’s a terribly anxious man, but—’
‘Tallis is always somewhere else, he never really exists in the present at all. Can’t you at least see how anxious I am?’
‘Ye-es. But I think one should try to help people—’
‘Yes, but not anyhow. And if one’s a real person oneself one can help more. I know you belong to the Socialist Old Guard, dear mother, but that’s not the sort of thing that’s needed now, truly it isn’t. Now be a darling and don’t hustle me. I have to discover myself first of all.’
‘I can’t understand you, Peter. When I’m with you, now, it sounds as if you’ve got some sort of real argument. But when I remember it later on it seems like nonsense, it’s just faded away like the dream rushes in
Alice.
’
‘True wisdom looks unsubstantial in the materialistic world. But really it’s your life that’s a dream.’
‘I can’t agree, Peter, but I can’t argue either. I don’t know what to say to you. I must get Morgan to talk to you. Maybe she will be able to argue with you properly.’
‘Morgan?’ Peter sat up. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and fanned out his rather long golden hair. ‘Is there any prospect of Aunt Morgan?’
‘Well, yes. Look, Peter, will you please keep this under your hat and not tell Tallis? Morgan is here, she’s at our house at this moment. She arrived yesterday.’
‘Well, well, well,’ said Peter. He teased out his hair between his fingers, then smoothed it down and relaxed slowly, lifting his legs and burrowing his bare feet into a nest of blankets at the bottom of the bed. ‘That’s good. I’d very much like to see Morgan again. Is she going to rejoin Tallis?’
‘We don’t know. And just for now, not a word to him, please, Peter. Morgan just wants a little peace and—’

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