A Fairly Honourable Defeat (19 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
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‘I’m not going to chuck you out. But can’t you see that your whole mode of existence is crazy, that you live in a wretched muddle?’
‘You live in a muddle too. And you believe your muddle is superior to my parents’ order. And you’re right.’
‘I don’t think it.’
‘Yes, you do. Morality,
their
morality, is all superstition and self-interest. You know that.’
‘I don’t know what I know or think. Go to bed, Peter. I’m bloody tired.’
‘Tallis, don’t be cross with me. But could you sleep with me tonight? I’m feeling awfully eerie. I think I shall get miserable if I sleep alone.’
Tallis was used to these changes of mood and now to this request. ‘Oh all right. But make it snappy, will you.’
‘I feel there are demons around.’
Tallis began to get out of bed. They used Peter’s bed when they slept together, since it was wider. Tallis’s interesting fantasy was still unfinished, but it would be a pity to sacrifice what vague inadequate satisfaction there might be in holding Peter in his arms. Holding another human body does sometimes help. He followed Peter across the landing.
Tallis blinked in the electric light. Peter was putting on striped pyjamas. There was a bitter smell. Tallis felt nervy and unsympathetic and weary of his consciousness. He wanted darkness. ‘Come on, Peter, let’s sleep for God’s sake.’
He straightened Peter’s bed a little and got in. The light went out. The bed sagged and creaked. They lay down together, bumping about, adjusting arms and knees in the cramped space and then were still, Peter with his face pressed into Tallis’s shoulder and Tallis looking over the light cool hair into the dimness of the room. Peter could feel the demons. Tallis could see them. They were not the dangerous kind. Holding the sleeping boy in his arms, with the rudiments of an erection, Tallis watched the demons play.
CHAPTER TEN
 
MORGAN PUSHED THE DOOR. It reeled back, attached by only one hinge, scraped noisily along the floor and then stuck. She stepped inside into darkness. A door opposite to her opened. ‘Oh Christ,’ said Tallis.
He stepped quickly back into the sunny kitchen, and she followed him in, closing the door behind her. She wanted to say something immediately about the untidy littered scene which she could see so clearly. She could not see Tallis. But all that came was an inarticulate sound which she turned into a cough. She coughed again, putting her hand to her mouth. Tallis offered her the chair on which he had been sitting and moved hastily to the other side of the table. Morgan sat down. Tallis said ‘Oh Christ’ again. It was five o’clock in the evening.
‘Were you having tea?’ said Morgan. She could still not see him.
‘No. I was working.’
There was silence. Tallis leaned back against the dresser knocking some things off it.
Morgan said ‘I’m sorry not to have given you any warning. I only decided to come this morning.’
‘Would you like some tea?’ said Tallis.
‘No, thank you. Have you any whisky?’
‘No, I’ve only got beer. Would you like some?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I can go out and get whisky.’
‘No, no, it doesn’t matter.’
Ever since she had learnt that Tallis knew of her presence and had met Julius she had felt an agonizing almost humiliating need to see her husband. He haunted her and drew her. Not till she was walking down the road however had she really reflected that she had no idea how Tallis would behave. Would he be angry? Would he be cold? Would he weep? She had managed to get through the door without fainting and now she was sitting down and had said something, she did not know what.
‘Why didn’t you come to see me, Tallis?’ said Morgan. Her eyes seemed to be paralysed, fixed upon a corner of the dresser where a tangle of string was trailing over the edge, but her voice seemed to be steady. ‘You knew I was here.’
‘I didn’t want—to see you—if you didn’t want—’
‘How do I know what I want? What a horrible smell there is here. What is it?’
‘Various things.’
‘It’s rather like the smell we had at Putney. Where’s Leonard, Peter?’
‘Out.’
‘Pity.’
Tallis said, ‘But you came to see me—?’
Morgan blinked hard and managed to focus her gaze upon him. He was looking at her, but she tried not to see his eyes. He was clutching the dresser behind him with both hands. He had turned pale behind his freckles and his face looked diseased. The undefended face, older, bumpier. She thought, he has less hair.
‘I came to get my manuscripts.’
As Tallis simply continued to stare at her she added, ‘I hope you’ve still got them.’ She coughed again and patted her hair. She had managed several minutes and it must get easier. If only she could breathe more deeply. And not to look into his eyes.
‘Yes—all your stuff here—I locked it up. Would you like to look?’
‘Yes, please. Tallis, I want us to be very quiet and business-like. No emotional talk. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. The stuff’s here, in the room opposite.’
‘Could I see it at once please? I have an engagement at six.’
Tallis made an inarticulate noise which sounded half laugh half moan. Then he said, ‘I don’t know where the key is.’ He turned and began scrabbling among the things piled on the dresser. Something fell and broke. He uttered a long ‘Ooooh—’ He dragged out a bunch of keys and opened the kitchen door with his head still turned away from her, but she could see that his face was screwed up. She looked at his back and at his flapping bedroom slippers with the trodden-down heels. She said to herself, no tenderness, no pity, nothing. I must see him as a puppet. I must go through this like a machine. She felt sick and breathless but dry-eyed.
Tallis unlocked a door. ‘I’m afraid there’s an awful jumble in here. I just put it all in here when we moved. I kept meaning to—I think the manuscripts are all there in the corner. But perhaps you’d like to look at the rest. There’s—clothes and things—’
‘You might have kept the place dusted.’ A cloud of dust seemed to hang in the doorway like a curtain. Morgan sneezed.
‘Dusted!’ Again the laugh and the moan.
‘Would you mind leaving me to look round?’ said Morgan. ‘I’ll be about ten minutes.’
‘Shall I shut the door?’
‘No, leave it open. I don’t want to stifle. Could you open that window, if you can get to it.’
‘It’s stuck, won’t open.’
‘Well, never mind, thank you, thank you.’
Tallis vanished, the kitchen door closed. Morgan half closed the door of the room and sat down upon a trunk and covered her face.
At any rate I’ve
seen
him, she thought. Something of the worst is over. That particular shock can never happen again. I’ve managed to stay upright. She had been feeling so sick all day, like an examination sickness. She had made herself wait until five o’clock to be more sure of finding him in. She did not want to have to walk down that street twice. Her imagination could not beforehand frame the moment of meeting. It was as if at that anticipation, her deepest faculties swooned. What she could imagine, and hung onto desperately, was the idea that there would come a moment later on in the day, when she
had seen
Tallis. When she had seen him and come away. When she would be having a drink with Hilda and telling her about it. Morgan drank a lot of whisky before she left the house. She told no one of her intention.
She had now no memory of what had been said, only of that terrible air of suffering. She tried to remember how much it had irritated her once. Tallis was framed for suffering. Let him suffer. She must remain cold and hard and purposeful and vile. She must keep sharp and rigid her intent to survive, whatever cries were heard, whatever blood was shed. So long as I can keep it all completely dismembered, she thought. Keep everything small and separate and manageable. Frame no general picture. Do not wonder what he is doing now in the kitchen. She thought, and her consciousness seemed to reel at the effort, I simply
must not
give way to that ghastly heartbreaking tenderness, that
animal
feeling. For this moment, I must have no heart strings and no heart. She felt giddy. It was as if love or terror or something were trying to thrust itself through into her mind. She felt a pain which was curiously like sexual desire. She knew that in a moment she would be in tears.
Morgan got up. Detail, detail, detail, keep everything small and separate. She closed the door. She breathed in the hot dusty air, expelling it slowly through her mouth. The sun was slanting along the grimy window and the cluttered room was bright and curiously attentive and still, as if all the things in it were watchful and alive. She made herself scan it. The floor was entirely covered. There were three trunks and several suitcases, a lot of cardboard boxes with shop labels on them, several half collapsed heaps of books, and a number of tins. The manuscript notebooks, tied together with string, were in the corner on top of a suitcase. Coats and jackets and jumpers, thick with dust, lay strewn about, together with odd books and pamphlets and off-prints. Morgan kicked a few things aside to clear a space, scuffing up sheets of yellow newspaper which had been laid down as a covering upon the bare floorboards.
She clambered across to the notebooks and slipped the string off. She checked them quickly. Her embryonic articles, the backbone of her book. They looked almost weird to her now.
Language, Form or Substance. Association Theory and Homonyms. From De Saussure to Chomsky. The Prague Circle and After. The Real Definition of Phonemes. Towards an Algebra of Language.
She tied them up again. There was nothing missing. She would be able to carry them away. She began to look around her at the other things and felt with a sick jerk the appalling reality of the past. All those tins of pâté and jellied chicken and dressed crab and cocktail sausages and lambs’ tongues from Fortnums which she had once suddenly decided to stock the larder with. Why hadn’t they been eaten long ago? Why were they lying here, a little rusty, among these old jerseys which she could now see were moth-eaten? And those awful nightmarish cardboard boxes. During the last period with Tallis, just before, out of her restlessness, she had taken off for that ludicrous philologists’ conference, she had had a bout of frenzied clothes-buying. She always spent money when she was depressed. Dresses, skirts, shoes, even hats, although she hardly ever wore hats. These purchases, which she could not afford, which she had never worn, some of them not even unwrapped, were in those cardboard boxes. They reminded her of what she now knew she had forgotten: the special smell of her unhappiness with Tallis before she even knew that Julius existed.
But had it really been unhappiness? There had been some strange frame of mind which the cardboard boxes now exuded into the thick warm dusty air. She had loved Tallis once. He had utterly pierced her with that agony of protective tenderness, with his quite peculiar unleavableness. And he had exalted her somehow, made her feel that she loved him with the best of herself. She remembered this exaltation and thought now how hopelessly misleading, how
fatal
that strange idea had been. She simply could not live with that part of herself, it was not operational, it was too small. That love was crippled from the start. Could it have changed in time and did she then believe that it would? Perhaps she had imagined that the rough and tumble of married life would make them both more ordinary with each other, more like warm unreflecting animals sharing a hutch. There had been too much consciousness. Would it all have become easier and better if there had been no Julius? Or would her restlessness have, whatever happened, invented a Julius? He expected too much of me, she thought. No, that wasn’t it, how could it be. He really had so few claims and expectations, perhaps too few. It was as if he bored me, except that it wasn’t boredom. We are made of different material.
‘Can I help?’ said Tallis. He had thrust the door open a little.
‘No, thank you. Well, take these out, could you.’ She thrust the pile of notebooks towards him with her foot. No risking a contact of fingers. Tallis took them away, but was back at the door a moment later as Morgan opened one of the cardboard boxes. To avoid a silence she said, ‘This dress, I’ve never worn it. And it’s too long now.’ She held the dress of dark blue terylene up against herself.
‘You could shorten it,’ said Tallis.
Morgan felt the tears away behind her eyes, gathered, present. She threw the dress down. ‘What a jumble here.’
‘I’m sorry. If I’d known—’
‘Well, you did know.’
‘Yes. I should have—’
‘The moths have got into all these woollies.’
‘I did mean to spray or something—’
‘Why didn’t you eat these tins of pâté and chicken and so on? They’ve probably gone bad by now.’
‘They were your special stuff and I thought—’
‘There was nothing special about them. They were just for eating. Why, there’s my old necklace of amber beads, I wondered where it was.’
‘I’m afraid it’s still broken,’ said Tallis. He was leaning in the doorway looking down. The tail of the necklace emerged from under some yellowed tissue paper.

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