A Fairly Honourable Defeat (38 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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All these goings-on, thought Rupert, had merely postponed Morgan’s growing up. It was happening now. She has got to decide what sort of person she is and what human life is about. I cannot see her returning to Tallis. And I cannot see her staying with Julius either. Julius has done her no harm, he has shaken her, probably educated her. But Julius is not a marrier. He is a man who has to strip himself bare at regular intervals. Morgan will have to be alone for the time being. There is a lot of violence in her and she will have to suffer, more perhaps than she yet realizes. She is still trying to be on holiday from her problems. She is trying to be on holiday from herself.
He thought of her as he had last seen her, helping Hilda to arrange roses in the kitchen at Priory Grove, Morgan in tight mauve pants and blue cotton sweater, clowning around, throwing flowers about, putting pink and white petals into her hair, down Hilda’s neck, pricking herself, screaming, laughing. While Hilda, smiling, placid, plump, her greying hair bunched up inside a scarf, wearing a huge butcher’s apron over her dress, went on clipping off the leaves and arranging the blooms in a pretended disregard of the cries and the capers. She might have been Morgan’s mother.
She must confront life, he thought, with a twinge of warm preoccupied concern for the younger woman. I must talk to her, help her if possible. She must see that there is
a way.
Rupert’s mind swerved in a natural and familiar manner towards the book on morals which he had now so nearly finished, and he wondered to himself if that book would ever help anybody who had like Morgan lost their bearings. Would his words ever bring comfort to another, help ever to check a bad resolve or stiffen a good one? It was a presumptuous thought. Rupert did not imagine that he was a great philosopher. He was a clear-headed and experienced man and he knew how to write. But there were plenty of men like that. What Rupert had extra, he often told himself, was simply a confident sense of moral direction and the nerve to speak about it. He knew where good lived. Moralists are far too timid, he thought, especially now when they feel they have to placate the logical positivists and the psychologists and the sociologists and the computerologists and God knows who else. They fill their pages with apologies and write everybody’s language but their own. Whatever his book was, it was not apologetic. When it was in typescript he must let Morgan look at it. He would be interested to have her opinion.
Rupert smoothed down his blond hair. It had become bleached and unruly and dry from the sun, which had also given his face a smooth bloom of reddish bronze, making him look, he was well aware, even more juvenile than usual. Today he would have to be mature and impressive at a meeting of government economists. He would not find it difficult. Rupert knew the meeting game. And he had long since stopped feeling nervous of these latterday panjandrums, or imagining that they had secret expertise of which he was ignorant. He had seen too much of their bungling and privately believed that he could do their jobs better than they did. However they were ministers’ darlings and had to be soft-soaped. He would be deferential, dignified, not quite imperceptibly sceptical.
Rupert returned to his desk, leaving the window wide open. The air from the park was light and fresh and seemed to smell faintly of flowers. There was that strange lucid lightweight atmosphere of early mornings in summery London, when the sun seems for a time to rinse the city and make it silvery and hollow and clean. Only, as Rupert now reminded himself, it was not in fact all that early and he must stop dreaming and get on with his work.
His well-trained personal assistant, a charming girl with a passion for potted plants which Rupert only just managed to keep confined to the outer office, had set out his papers, including such of the confidential ones as he allowed her to handle. Briefing copies of ministerial committee papers were fanned out in folders of blue, yellow and green. Something unpleasantly familiar with a red flag on it had been weighted down by a piece of pitted volcanic stone from Sicily, and today’s letters, all opened and sorted, were neatly held in place by a lump of pinkish Aberdeen granite. No, one of the letters had not been opened. A typewritten envelope marked
Personal.
Rupert looked at it with faint puzzlement. He had never received personal letters at the office, though he knew that, for various peculiar reasons, many of his colleagues did. As he reached for the letter the telephone rang and Rupert’s day began with a conversation with an anxious man who was being pursued by an irate man who was extremely exercised about what a certain minister would think about the thing with the red flag on it which was now lying upon Rupert’s desk. After nearly an hour of telephone calls Rupert wrote a tiny minute and sent the dangerous file away to burn a hole in somebody else’s desk. He noticed the letter again and began with one hand to prise it open, skimming through a memorandum on
National Promotion in Absentia
at the same time. He saw out of the corner of his eye that the communication inside was from Morgan.
Rupert felt a curious shock as he saw the familiar handwriting. He dropped the memorandum, pulled the letter out and unfolded it. It was rather long. It showed signs of having been written hastily and there were many crossings out. It ran as follows.
My dear. Listen. You have been extremely kind to me. You have given me your time, you have given me your company. I have been guided, philosophized at, befriended and have enjoyed every moment of it. You talked such superb sense to me the other day. I suspect you are the wisest person I have ever met. You not only steady my nerves, you make me feel that I am a rational being after all and able to thread the mazes of the world. I am grateful to you for the big things and for the little things: for your help in all the immediacies of my situation, for your so evident and sweet concern.
Now. What will you say and what will you think when you hear what comes next? I swear to you that I did not expect this and I am as surprised and alarmed as you could possibly be. Since I arrived in this country I have, as you know, had many and various preoccupations. I did not expect this
too!
Even the last time I saw you I did not really divine it, though I have known for some time that you were becoming important to me and that, oh God, I rather needed you. Now it appears that, quite suddenly, I have fallen as deeply and foolishly in love with you as a child of seventeen. And I feel I have no choice but to put the matter before you. I am a married woman. And you—I dread to imagine what you will think of me for having forced just
this
problem upon you! You with your orderly and busy life and your quite special commitments! Have pity on me, I am inclined to say: yet I know that your pity might lead us straight into the kind of confusion which I know you detest. I am in a complete muddle, my darling. My own life is full of problems and emotional needs about which you know a little. But that scarcely excuses my making you a present of this embarrassing and unrequested love. I dread your judgement upon me. But I ask you
at least
to believe in the tragic seriousness of the deep and also
passionate
feeling which you have inspired in me. Please please don’t do anything hastily about this. I need the coolness and rationality of which you are so pre-eminently the master. I have never needed it more. When I see you I will speak with calmness and I beg you to do the same. But I
must
see you soon, and not in any of our usual haunts for obvious reasons. My flat is too public. I will suggest a place. Please, my darling,
help
me now and forgive me for loving you.
Morgan
 
At the bottom of the page, in a hand so hasty and scrawled as to be almost illegible, was written:
Don’t reply or speak of this letter even to me. I die of shame. A new start must be made. Meet me on Wednesday at 10.30 at the Prince Regent Museum, Room 14.
 
Rupert read the letter through carefully twice. Then he lifted the telephone and asked his personal assistant to see that he was not disturbed during the next hour. Then he went to the window once more and surveyed, with a very different eye, the hazy bosky vista of St James’s Park. Later, Rupert was to tell himself censoriously, though it was by no means so clear to him at the time, that his very first feeling had been one of mad elation. Human beings crave for novelty and welcome even wars. Who opens the morning paper without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing some great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself. Rupert liked order. But there is no man who likes order who does not give houseroom to a man who dreams of disorder. The sudden wrecking of the accustomed scenery, so long as one can be fairly sure of a ringside seat, stimulates the bloodstream. And the instinctive need to feel protected and superior ensures, for most of the catastrophes of mankind, the shedding by those not immediately involved of but the most crocodile of tears.
Yet this was only a momentary leap of the consciousness. Rupert was not in any way inclined to discount what lay before him. He might have been, if not wiser at least luckier, if he had decided at once to laugh it off. But Rupert was not a laugher off. He took the letter seriously and settled down to study the situation. He thought: poor Morgan. Then he thought, and this was less pleasant, we are all endangered. Things can never be quite the same again. Our quiet world, our
happy
world, has been disturbed. Life will be anxious, uncomfortable, unpredictable.
Rupert returned to his desk and sat there rigid while nearly an hour went by. He cared for Morgan. He grieved deeply that this strange aberration had damaged, perhaps fatally, a friendship whose warmth had been so easily carried by the sweet casualness of family life. How much warmth there really had been he now felt with an almost elegiac sadness. The impetuous girl had brought all to consciousness and landed them both with a really frightful problem. Morgan had spoken of quite special commitments. Yes! If Rupert were married to anyone else in the world but Hilda it would all matter much less. Rupert drew in his breath. He began gradually to see the whole hideousness of what had happened.
Rupert thought, of course the girl is in a thoroughly unbalanced state. Tallis, Julius, me. No one must know, for the present not even Hilda. Morgan must be persuaded to go away. And yet, poor child, where could she go? She had come to England, she had come, it was now suddenly clear, to
him,
as to a last refuge. To drive her out now would be to drive her into a life of desperation and perhaps into a mental shipwreck. I’ve got to enclose this thing, thought Rupert, I’ve got to contain it, I’ve got to live it through. I can’t just send her off. This has got to be dealt with by love. How would I feel if I told her to go and she committed suicide? Morgan was someone who could commit suicide. She must not feel rejected, he thought. I must keep her with me.
Rupert got up and began to pace the room. He saw now with a coldness which really did chill his heart what the difficulties were likely to be. He was, in a way which ordinarily would not matter at all, damn fond of Morgan. What he had said to Julius once had been true: he had come not so much to despise as simply to ignore the drama of his motives. He sought simply for truthful vision, which in turn imposed right action. The shadow play of motive was a bottomless ambiguity, insidiously interesting but not really very important. Could he do it here, latch himself onto the machinery of virtue and decent decision, and simply slide past the warm treacherous area of confusing attachment? For there was no doubt that he was extremely attached to his sister-in-law.
The more reason, he then thought, to be absolutely coolly responsible. He would, he could, say nothing to Hilda. It’s just a matter of steadying her through, he thought. In extremities human beings need love and nothing else will do. Morgan was hungry for a steady unviolent unpossessive love which neither Tallis nor Julius could give her. I cannot refuse this challenge, Rupert told himself. All my life as a thinking man has led me to believe in the power of love. Love really does solve problems. To adopt a mean safe casual solution here would be unjust to both myself and Morgan. She has called me wise: let me attempt to be so. True love is calm temperate rational and just; and it is not a shadow or a dream. The top of the structure is not empty.
CHAPTER TWO
 
‘NATURALLY,’ said Julius, ‘you felt you had to have a flat of your own. This can be important.’
‘Rupert and Hilda were very kind—’
‘But you felt you had to move out. Of course. Other people’s family life can be so oppressive.’
‘Hilda found me this place—’
‘What ghastly pictures. Oh dear, are they yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry. I’m allergic to reproductions. I don’t imagine it’s cheap here? This part of London is becoming fashionable I’m told.’
‘It’s not bad. Are you really going to buy a house in the Boltons?’
‘I might. One must have a little place somewhere to stow one’s kit, don’t you think?’
‘I can’t imagine you staying anywhere permanently.’
‘I’m a great home-lover really. Are you still living on that three hundred pounds you swindled your husband out of? You honest middle-class English people are full of surprises.’
‘I have a little money. I thought perhaps—’
‘I’m terribly sorry I’m not in a position to lend you any. My income tax position is most peculiar at the moment.’

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