A Fairly Honourable Defeat (53 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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Julius’s company had been a stimulus. Now that he was gone she felt utterly dejected and rather frightened. She took the tea things out into the kitchen. She realized that she felt very hungry, having had no lunch. She cut a piece of the walnut cake but found she could not eat it. She went upstairs to her boudoir, lifted the telephone and dialled the Whitehall number. The telephonist at Rupert’s office said there was no reply from his extension. That proved nothing. She went into the bedroom, bathed her face in cold water, and put on some more make-up. The garden was luminous with a heavy apricotish evening light, clear and faintly menacing. The house felt hollow and meaningless and sad, like an empty house. A homing aeroplane droned overhead. The sun and the evening time were desolate.
Hilda thought, I must do something to stop myself from getting panic-stricken. She went back to her boudoir and sat down at the desk and started fumbling with her papers. She could feel her eyes staring with fright. She thought, I must find something to hold onto, something to peg me down into the real world, something to make me believe in the reality of the past. Perhaps I might look at some of Rupert’s old letters. A word from Rupert, even a years-old word, might ease this awful sick disconnected feeling. She had kept most of Rupert’s letters dating from the earliest days of their courtship. There were few more recent ones since she and Rupert had always been together. The letters were in a secret compartment at the back of her desk. This consisted of a box tucked in behind the lowest drawer, which was correspondingly shortened. The lowest drawer was fixed so that it could not be pulled entirely out, and the box could only be reached by removing the drawer above and reaching in behind the drawer below. Hilda removed the upper drawer and her fingers scrabbled at the hidden box. Even before she was able to grip it and draw it out she realized that it was empty.
She sat still for a while with the empty box lying in front of her on top of her papers. Then she began, slowly, she was breathless but deliberately slow, to examine the desk. She fingered about above and below where the box had been, looking for cracks or crannies. There were none. She opened the other drawers, though she knew that this was futile. More frenziedly now she searched the rest of the desk, she looked under it, she pulled it away from the wall. Then she sat down in an armchair and thought.
The letters were gone. Only Rupert knew where she kept them. Therefore Rupert must have taken them. Hilda sat stiffly in her chair. What an absurd cruel strange
mad
thing to do, to take away his old letters without telling her. The action made her with a shudder intuit a whole dimension of otherness, Rupert’s otherness. Rupert had all kinds of thoughts and needs and impulses of which she knew nothing, of which she could not conceive. He had wanted—what had he wanted? To meddle with the past? To destroy the evidence? He had come into her room and with some unimaginable expression on his face had furtively thrust his hand in and drawn the letters out of the box. Had he assumed that she would not notice their disappearance? It was indeed nearly a year since she had looked at them. Was he testing her perhaps? What was she to think?
Hilda found that she had risen. She went down the stairs and out into the thickly darkly sunny garden. Long tongues of sunlight crossed the pavement, casting chamomile shadows, and the worn surface of the old brick wall glowed patchily with golden browns and rosy reds. Twilight was gathering in the shadowed places where green things glowed with a momentary intensity of colour. What does it
mean
, thought Hilda, and she clutched at her dress with fright.
Then she saw, from the corner of her eye, that something round and brown was floating on the surface of the pool. She turned and looked quickly down. It was the hedgehog.
Hilda knelt and plunged her arms into the pool. The hedgehog was floating half curled up, its brown prickly back uppermost. She put her hands underneath it and felt the soft wet fur, the little pendent feet. She lifted it out. It was quite dead. Hilda laid the little light rounded body down upon the pavement where the water made a dark stain. The little black tipped nose protruded towards her, the feet were limp and splayed, the eyes closed. Tears streamed down Hilda’s face. She thought, I must tell Rupert and he will comfort me. She half rose, then sat back with a moan. She thought, I must bury the hedgehog, but the task was beyond her. She picked it up quickly and dropped it down behind some plants. Then she ran into the house and up the stairs, blinded with tears.
The letters, she thought, if only I could find the letters, where are they, are they safe somewhere near? He cannot have destroyed them? Is it possible that he wanted to see them somehow to comfort himself, to make him remember? She went into Rupert’s study. In there his absence was terrible. She wanted to tell him about the hedgehog and to weep in his arms. She opened his desk and began helplessly to turn things over. Rupert did not keep his desk very tidy. There was a row of little compartments where he stowed receipted bills, insurance papers, stubs of old cheque books, old diaries, oddments of photographs, references, pamphlets. Hilda took a mass of tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and stared more intently at the desk. What Julius had said about relieving her mind, that was not absurd. Supposing she could find some communication from Morgan, something completely innocent and ordinary, something which would give her the
tone
of their relationship? It was that mystery most of all which troubled her. And it might prove to be a harmless one after all. Oh how relieved she would feel! As for the letters Rupert might well have taken them just to look them over again. He would laugh at her terror.
Hilda began methodically to search the desk. She leafed through the photographs. They were all old ones of Peter and herself. There were a few letters, from an antique dealer about mending a bookcase, from a bookseller about completing a series of periodicals. Her fingers passed over the insurance papers and the old cheque books. Then she paused. Rupert threw his old cheque book stubs into the end compartment. After a year he destroyed them. The latest one was always on the top. Hilda picked it up and opened it. The last entry was a week ago. She began to run through the entries. Here Rupert was meticulous. Bookshop, drink shop, Harrods, New and Lingwood, Fortnum and Mason, the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, the Postmaster General, the local builder. The next entry read simply ‘M. £400’. Hilda put the booklet back in its place. She sat down in Rupert’s chair.
She began more hurriedly to search the rest of the desk. She looked into all the drawers, pulling them right out and examining their contents. There was nothing. The lowest drawer would not pull fully out, it seemed to be jammed. Hilda tugged at it, then thrust her fingers in and clawed its contents forward into the light. Only a saleroom catalogue and some stamps. Then she thought, the drawer is too short, there is a secret compartment behind it, just as in my desk. The desks were of similar date and style. Trembling now she pulled out the drawer above and felt far in behind the lower drawer. Her fingers touched a piece of folded paper. She drew out the secret box and lifted the paper out of it. She saw at once that it was something in Morgan’s handwriting. It was a letter and it began as follows.
My angel, the ecstasy of your love makes me the happiest person in the world. Was it strange that I cried yesterday when I was in bed with you? I was crying with joy. Must we not soon, somehow, be properly together? …
 
Hilda read the letter through to the end. Then she folded it and replaced it in the box and put the box back into its secret place. She closed the drawers and arranged the contents of the desk as they had been before and closed it up. She went slowly downstairs to the drawing room.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 
‘I MUSTN’T STAY HERE ANY LONGER.’
‘But you told Hilda you’d be working late at the office. You don’t have to go yet.’
‘You persuaded me to do that. I shouldn’t have let you.’
‘You’re such a coward, Rupert! She’s not likely to go round to the office to look for you, is she! And even if she did you could invent some story. I think it’s much more imprudent of you to have left your car outside the door.’
‘Yes, I know. I just drove it from Earls Court station, I didn’t think—’
‘Rupert, don’t be so jittery! Just rest on
me.
’
‘I wish I could. I feel I just don’t know what I’m doing at the moment. I hate telling lies to Hilda.’
‘Well, she doesn’t always tell you the truth, you know.’
‘Yes she does!’
‘For instance, she’s never told you that she’s been financing Peter lavishly ever since he chucked Cambridge. All the time you were making such a thing of making him live on two pounds a week or whatever it was!’
‘Really? Is that true?’
‘Do you doubt my word? Ask Hilda. I dare say there are other little things like that too. There are in any marriage. Why should yours be so special?’
‘It was special,’ said Rupert. ‘ “Was”. Oh God.’
‘Well, don’t whinge about it for heaven’s sake. You decided to break out. You didn’t have to. Yet I suppose you obviously needed to. Men do after a while.’
‘I haven’t “broken out”,’ said Rupert. ‘I’m married to
Hilda.
Have you forgotten?’
‘I haven’t forgotten. I thought you had.’
‘I think we’re both behaving rottenly.’
‘Come, come, we’re scarcely behaving at all! Anyway it was your idea!’
‘It wasn’t my idea, it was your idea!’
‘Well, never mind whose idea it was, we’re both in it now and everything would be perfectly all right if only you wouldn’t make so much fuss. You were the one who said we could sail through it all and build a marvellous relationship. I wouldn’t have started anything if you hadn’t been so confident and starry-eyed about it. You said you wouldn’t let go. I thought you were damn brave. Now you’re wrecking the whole thing because you haven’t got a bit of sense and resolution. Decide what you want to do and do it, for God’s sake. Or do you want me to go away or what?’
‘I don’t want you to go away,’ said Rupert miserably. ‘I couldn’t just blankly send you off. I knew that from the start. But I can’t carry on with this on a basis of deceiving Hilda. It’s poisoning my life.’
‘If you tell Hilda, everything will be utterly different.’
‘Well, it’d better be!’
‘All right then, tell Hilda!’
Morgan and Rupert were sitting opposite to each other in Morgan’s sitting room on upright chairs. They were huge-eyed and stiff, like a pair of Egyptian figures. They had both by now drunk a good deal of gin. The sun, sloping towards evening, was gilding a white wall across the street and the room was full of soft intense reflected light. The traffic was humming steadily in the Fulham Road.
‘Oh Rupert, don’t let’s quarrel,’ said Morgan. ‘There must be some rational way of looking at this peculiar situation. I was so much wanting you to come this evening and now we’re quarrelling. ’
‘I was so much wanting to come too.’ He stretched out his hand and she gripped it hard. Then they resumed their stiff positions face to face.
‘It’s not that I’m against telling Hilda,’ said Morgan. ‘I just think there’s no point in telling her
now.
This is the moment of maximum chaos. We wouldn’t even know what to
say
to Hilda, and anything we said would be likely to mislead her and make her think there was more to the thing than there is. So in a way it’s really more truthful not to tell her. I mean—’
‘I’m afraid there is a great deal to the thing,’ said Rupert. ‘That’s the trouble!’ He got up and began to pace the room.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Morgan. ‘I feel that too. Of course. But we
have
kept our heads. Quaint phrase!’ She laughed and poured out more gin.
Rupert was thoroughly miserable. The loss of contact with Hilda made him feel reduced and mutilated. He hated telling Hilda lies and was in a state of abject fear in case his lies were discovered. At the same time, he craved for Morgan’s company, even quarrelling with Morgan had become something necessary. They had endlessly discussed the situation and only succeeded in tangling it up to a mysterious degree. They had rationed their kisses. But he felt her passion and knew by now that she felt his.
At first it had seemed very clear to Rupert that he must
talk
to Morgan and not send her away, simply because the idea of sending her away in that peculiar state of wretchedness seemed so appalling. She had had a very unhappy time, she was seriously confused about her life, and she needed him. All this seemed to add up to some kind of duty. She had taken the responsibility of telling her love. He must take the responsibility of leading them both through to sanity.
Now it all seemed considerably less clear and somehow dreadful, yet he could not quite see what was the wrong step which he had taken. To deceive Hilda, temporarily of course, had seemed simply an essential part of doing his duty to Morgan. Of course he was well aware how fond he was of Morgan. Indeed it was on this fondness that he was prepared to build. Only love will do, thought Rupert, real love, real caring. He would not send Morgan away into bitterness and wretchedness. She needed love, as all human beings did. He would give her love, wise steady strong love, and this, he honestly believed, would set her free at last of the whole tangle. Tallis, Julius, himself. She would find then that she knew what to do about Tallis. She would become once more, or indeed perhaps for the first time, a whole person.

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