A Fairly Honourable Defeat (64 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
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‘Why didn’t you change yours back?’
‘I don’t know. A sense of history perhaps. I have a strong sense of history. What has happened is justified somehow. At least it’s one up on what hasn’t happened.’
‘You are an only child?’
‘Yes. And you had a sister. Only she died of polio.’
‘She didn’t actually,’ said Tallis. ‘She was murdered. She was raped and killed by a sex maniac. She was fourteen.’
‘Ah—I’m sorry—’
‘I don’t tell people,’ said Tallis. ‘Because it remains—too dreadful.’
‘I understand. Where do the knives go?’
‘In the drawer of the table. Here.’ Tallis shifted his chair back a little and opened the drawer.
‘Any special order?’
‘Any old how.’
Julius leaned forward and began to stow the knives into the drawer. He closed the drawer.
‘Wait a moment,’ said Tallis.
Julius’s shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. Just above the elbow something was visible upon his arm. Tallis took hold of Julius’s wrist with one hand and with the other rolled the sleeve back a little further. There was a blue tattoo mark, a number inscribed in a circle. Tallis released him.
‘So you were in a concentration camp?’
‘Yes,’ said Julius. He added apologetically, ‘I spent the war in Belsen.’
‘Morgan must have noticed that mark,’ said Tallis.
‘Oddly enough she didn’t. Perhaps it is only visible in certain lights. You need a little line here to hang your drying cloths on. They’re all quite wet now. There. I think that’s all I can do at the moment.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tallis.
Julius rolled down his sleeves and began to pull on his jacket.
‘The sun’s coming out. That’s nice. Well, I suppose I’d better be getting along.’
Tallis rose and Julius fingered the door. They looked at each other and then looked away.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tallis. ‘But there it is.’
‘I quite understand. Well, what am I to do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Oh just go away,’ said Tallis. ‘I don’t think you should live in the Boltons or Priory Grove. Go right away.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I didn’t really intend to settle here. I was only playing with the idea. I’ll go abroad. I may take on another big assignment quite soon. This was just an interim.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Do try to get yourself a decent job. As things are, what does your life amount to? I suppose it’s always like that, but it does pain me. After all, I am an artist. This is just a mess.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Tallis.
‘Let me lend you some money,’ said Julius. ‘Or rather, let me give you some. As I explained, I never lend.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Why not? I know you refused before, but we do know each other better now. Think again. I have money, you need it. Morgan owes you money. Let me pay her debt. She owed you four hundred pounds and paid you a hundred pounds. Let me give you the remaining three hundred. Come, be generous.’
Tallis reflected. ‘All right. It would certainly come in handy. Thank you.’
Julius wrote out the cheque.
‘Yes, well, I must be going,’ said Julius. ‘Good-bye. I suppose in the nature of things we shall meet again.’ He still lingered. ‘You concede that I am an instrument of justice?’
Tallis smiled.
The door closed behind Julius and immediately the house was full of noises. Squealing in the kitchen, jazz music in the room opposite, altercation in Urdu upon the stairs, and Leonard calling out loudly for his son.
‘Coming, Daddy, coming, coming.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
 
THE PALE BLUE HILLMAN MINX was heading south. The sun-striped poplar-shaded road ran straight on ahead, on and on and on. Simon’s arm was stretched along the back of the seat.
‘We thought of ourselves.’
‘We were so damn relieved.’
‘If only we’d thought a little more carefully about
them.
’
‘Yet at the time it did seem rational to keep quiet.’
‘But oh God, if only we hadn’t.’
‘Don’t keep on about it, Simon.’
‘We were so relieved,’ said Simon. ‘We’d found each other again. Being back home inside our own love was so wonderful. I was nearly faint with joy that evening. I just felt I was right out of the tangle. The rest of it was so messy and obscure. I didn’t want to think about it any more. I felt all my own guilt had been left behind
there
, and I had no responsibility any more outside my love for you.’
‘We have lived too much inside our love for each other.’
‘Axel, you don’t mean—’
‘No, no, stop being so frightened. I just mean I think we should see more people and live more in the world. We’ve been so shut in with each other.’
‘Yes. You know, I think if we saw more people and went about more together it would sort of give me confidence.’
‘It’s probably to do with being homosexual. We’re all a bit afraid of society. There’s a tendency to hide. It’s bad.’
‘You don’t want to send that letter to
The Times
or tell all Whitehall?’
‘No. It’s not their business. But we shouldn’t hide so. I think if we’d been living more in the open we mightn’t have been involved in this terrible muddle.’
‘Oh God,’ said Simon. ‘I know. It was all my fault, all my doing—’
They had been through it all over and over and over again. With a melancholy patience Axel had led Simon round the circle of accusation, explanation, exculpation, accusation. Each time Axel said a little more, was a little more definite, a little more pressing, attempting to clarify both charge and excuse, trying to help Simon to accept and understand the full awful detail of what had happened.
‘No,’ said Axel. ‘If you think of the terribly tangled network of causes which led to Rupert’s death and how very little any of us actually knew at any given moment about the whole situation and about the consequences of our actions—’
‘But I acted wrongly knowing it was wrong,’ said Simon. ‘Everyone else was just in a muddle. If only I hadn’t started telling lies to you, if only I’d told you everything right from the start—’
‘If you had Julius probably wouldn’t have told you about his little plan at all.’
‘But if I’d told you
then
, after Julius came to the museum—’
‘We might certainly have decided to keep quiet—in fact we almost certainly would. The only person about the place with really sound instincts is Tallis. He led Julius straight to the telephone.’
‘Yes. Tallis was right. He saw how awfully perilous it was.’
‘And we didn’t because we were so damn self-absorbed. We thought the others would manage.’
‘All the same, Axel, I can’t help feeling I’m more to blame than anyone. I simply let Julius enslave me.’
‘Dear boy, I am to blame too. I just didn’t take Julius seriously enough as a possible mischief-maker. Yet I’ve seen him do something like this before. And I did nothing about it then simply because I was flattered at being Julius’s friend, at seeing how dangerous he was to other people and yet not to me. Similarly now, I let myself be flattered by Julius, and when I did begin to be suspicious all I could see was his connection with you. That day when we left Rupert’s, after you’d pushed Julius into the pool, when you said “Stop the car”, I thought you were going to announce that you were going off with Julius!’
‘Oh Axel, Axel—’
‘It seems mad enough now, thank God. As for your telling me lies, why did you do so? Because you were afraid of me. That fear ought not to have existed. It’s not just that I’ve always bullied you a little. A little bullying between lovers needn’t matter. But I’ve always withheld a bit of myself. And you have felt this and it has made you frightened.’
‘Yes, I have felt it,’ said Simon, ‘but again I blame myself. Why should
you
be interested in
me
at all? I’m so flimsy compared with you. And I know you’ve always hated
that
world, and I did so absolutely belong to it. It was very easy for Julius to make me think that for two pins you’d throw me over.’
‘Well, you should have had a bit more guts at that point. Hope and faith are courage too. But if you’ve had these doubts I’ve really prompted them by holding back from you, by keeping in reserve some corner of my personality, something which you never saw at all and which might be taken away intact to some other place. This was partly failure of nerve, partly pride. I wanted to feel that if all this came to grief there was a part of me which had never engaged in it and which was not discredited or even disappointed. It was a failure of love. You held nothing back, but I played for safety. I haven’t deserved your full and absolute faith.’
‘Axel, you aren’t going to go away to some other place, are you?’
‘Don’t keep asking that ridiculous question. You know we are much closer to each other now than we have ever been before.’
‘So you won’t leave me?’
‘No, you fool. You won’t leave me?’
‘Axel, what can I swear by—?’
‘All right, all right.’
‘You’ll
never
leave me?’
‘How do I know? I don’t intend to leave you, that’s all. I love you, that’s all.’
‘You won’t flay me in the end?’
‘How do I know, child?’
‘You’re right that I should have had more guts with Julius.’
‘You should have been brave, like you were that night in the restaurant.’
‘Will we be all right, Axel?’
‘We’ve got a reasonable chance. Mutual love is something in this vale of tears and it’s rare enough. But this sort of thing can be precarious, as you know.’
‘Will you, after this, open up that reserve, not shut me out?’
‘I’ll try. I’ve never done so with anyone else. But love is awfully difficult, Simon. One learns this as one grows older.’
‘It seems easy to me. Nothing in the world is easier for me than loving you.’
‘My dear.’
‘I say, I can’t help being rather glad Hilda didn’t come with us! I hope we pressed her enough?’
‘I think so. It may be better for Hilda not to see us at present. We’re all of us still a bit shell-shocked.’
‘I wonder if it’s good for her to be so much with Morgan?’
‘We can’t know what passes between those two.’
‘It’s almost as if Morgan’s—taken her over.’
‘Hilda must be suffering terribly. And there are very few people in the world whom one can really talk to. Think how much more dreadful it would all have been for us if we hadn’t been able to talk endlessly to each other.’
‘You don’t think we’ve somehow—cheated—Axel? I mean, that we’ve taken too much refuge in our love and not really faced what happened, suffering it properly?’
‘Of course our love is selfish. Almost all human love is bloody selfish. If one has anything to hang onto at all one clings to it relentlessly. We’ve tried to face it and to suffer it. To take refuge in love is an instinct and not a disreputable one.’
‘I feel so damned responsible and so guilty. If I could only
see
it all clearly—’
‘You may never be able to do that.’
‘If only I’d told everybody—’
‘Don’t begin again, darling. Not today. Now perhaps if you’d just look at the map—’
‘Oh Axel, if only—’
‘Stop it, Simon. You said there was a village with a Romanesque church.’
‘Yes, we must be almost there. Shall we stop and look?’
‘There’s your village, I think. We may as well stay the night there, if there’s a decent little hotel. We needn’t rush. We can cross the Alps the day after tomorrow.’
‘That’s right, we needn’t rush, need we? What a marvellous strange light. The sun’s shining but I can just see a star. Look.’
‘ “The evening star is the morning star.” Frege.’
‘Come, Axel, that’s poetry, not logic.’
The solid grey forms of the village rose from behind a meadowy hillside where the strange light had turned the grass into a furry green velvet. The light blue Hillman Minx took the hill at a rush and glided into the grey square where the declining sun was making shadows between the cobble stones. A little
mairie
with a glittering high-pitched roof of bluish slate faced the façade of the church. The church tower reached upwards in crazed irregular lines of arcades and archlets to a slender spire of matching blue slate whose weather-cock had become a blurred spear of gold. In the tympanum above the doorway a very battered Christ wearily opened long arms and huge hands, receiving, judging.

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