A Fairly Honourable Defeat (65 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
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‘Let’s go in at once!’ said Simon.
‘No. It’s already too dark inside. We’ll see it tomorrow.’
Simon did not argue. He felt that he would never argue with Axel again.
‘There’s our hotel,’ said Axel.
The modest-looking Hotel Restaurant du Commerce occupied the corner of the square. The Hillman Minx stopped outside it.
Simon followed his friend in, and stood aside while Axel asked the
patron
for a room. Simon could read French but could scarcely speak it. He liked Axel to be the one who knew such things.
The little hallway of the hotel was dark and smelt of something very good to eat. Simon looked through and saw that there was a garden beyond where the sun was shining onto a clipped lawn and onto a vine which had trailed over a trellis to make a little arbour where there was a table and two chairs.
Simon went on through the hallway and out into the garden. The sun was still warm and bright, though the evening star had strengthened. The vine was hung with grassy green translucent grapes and the leaves and tendrils glowed with a pale green radiance, outspread and welcoming and still in the quiet sunlight. Simon moved towards the vine, bowed his head under its shadowy arch, and touched the warm pendant beads of the grape bunches.
Axel came out, removing his jacket and rolling up his white shirt sleeves. The sun made gold in his dark hair. ‘I’ve asked the
patron
to bring us a carafe of wine out here straight away. I’m just going up to look at the room. You stay here.’
Simon sat down at the table. The
patron
bustled over wearing purple braces, with a carafe and two glasses.
‘Merci.’
Simon poured out some wine and tasted it. It was excellent. The serrated green leaves extended above him, before him, their motionless pattern of angelic hands. The air quivered with warmth and a diffusion of light.
Simon thought, it is an instinct, and not a disreputable one, to be consoled by love. Warily he probed the grief which had travelled with him so far, and he felt it as a little vaguer, a little less dense. His thoughts of Rupert now reached back further into the past, to good times which had their own untouchable reality. He drank some more wine and raised his face to the dazzle of the sun among the leaves and felt his youth lift him and make him buoyant. He was young and healthy and he loved and was loved. It was impossible for him, as he sat there in the green southern light and waited for Axel, not to feel in his veins the warm anticipation of a new happiness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
 
‘EVEN MATCHBOXES aren’t what they used to be. When I was young a matchbox looked like something, it had personality. Now they’re just insipid trash or else garish catch-pennies for tourists.’
‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea, Daddy.’
‘The world is poisoned and starving and on the brink of nuclear war and all you can do is bring a cup of tea.
And
you’ve slopped it in the saucer.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ve got the most frightful pain in my hip, little you care.’
‘Have you taken your tablets?’
‘Yes. They’re no good. Just placebos. Probably made of sugar. There’s the Health Service for you,
and
you have to pay a shilling.’
‘Let me do your pillows, Daddy, they’re all over the place.’
‘I can do my own pillows. You might bloody well spend some of your valuable time cleaning this room out. It’s a wonder I’m still alive at all with all the germs there must be crawling about here. That piece of toast I threw at you last week is still there going mouldy underneath the dressing table.’
‘I’ll take it away.’
‘No, no, leave it, I’m getting quite fond of it. It’s nice to see a familiar face. Since you never seem to bother to come and see me.’
‘I’m sorry, Daddy, I have to go to my classes and—’
‘The idea of you teaching anybody anything is a laugh all right. I don’t know what I did to deserve such a stupid son. I suppose you are mine. Other men of your age manage to live all right. They have proper jobs and decent houses and wives that don’t run off with Jews.’
‘Drink your tea, Daddy, you’ll feel better. Would you like some cake?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. And I feel perfectly all right except for this ghastly pain. I’m not going to go to any more of those heat treatments. They aren’t doing any good. I feel worse than I did when they started.’
‘It’s the damp weather. You’ll feel better soon.’
‘And those whelps at the hospital talk about me as if I were some sort of animal or moron. “Shove him along, Joe,” one of them said last week. “Shove him along,” I ask you! I wonder they didn’t say “it”! And they chatter to each other all the time and giggle and ignore the patients. I bet they’re all pansies.’
‘If you hate it,’ said Tallis, ‘you shan’t go any more.’
‘Well, and why shouldn’t I go! It’s a chance to get out of this shit-house. Makes a change from these four bloody walls and you and your cups of tea. And the blasted Welfare State may as well do something for me, even if it’s completely futile, since I’ve been paying through the nose all these years. And to think people are dimwitted enough to be grateful, after the state’s stolen nearly everything they earn and given them some rotten slapdash medical attention at the end when they’ve got one and a half feet in the grave and they don’t realize they’ve already paid for it fifty times over! People as blockheaded as that deserve a government like this one. They deserve to be treated as they are treated, like sheep.’
‘People are a lot better off now—’
‘Now that they have television sets to make all the horrors of the world into an evening’s entertainment. It all went wrong from the start. It’s no better now and no worse, only stupider and more vulgar. The sooner it’s all bombed into oblivion the better.’
‘Daddy, I must go and write my lecture—’
‘I wish I had half a crown for every time you’ve uttered that inane formula so as to get away from me.’
‘It’s true—’
‘You and your lectures. You’re like an old maid with her crochet work. Except that crochet amounts to something.’
‘Can I do anything for you?’
‘No, just clear off. Yes, you can take some of the newspapers off the floor. Not those ones. Those ones. They’ve been here for weeks. Be careful, there’s some muck inside one of them, God knows what it is, you’d think half the dogs of Notting Hill had been shitting in here.’
‘You haven’t drunk your tea.’
‘Your stench spoils the taste of it. And it’s cold. No, I don’t want any more. And you can tell that bloody nig nog to turn off his blasted transistor.’
‘I’ll ask him to turn it down.’
‘ “I’ll ask him to turn it down.” You talk like a blinking constipated deb. I sometimes think you’re just a girl in disguise. You’re afraid of those nigs, afraid you might say something nasty and hurt their precious feelings. They’re all a bunch of crooks anyway.’
‘All right, Daddy, I’ll—’
‘Filthy habit wearing a turban all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wears it in bed. Don’t suppose he’s washed his hair in years. We’ll have lice in the house at this rate. Don’t suppose you’ve washed your hair in years if it comes to that. All right, go away, go away.’
Tallis retreated. Through the closing bedroom door he saw his father sitting bolt upright in bed dressed in an old tweed jacket and dirty crumpled blue shirt. Leonard’s eyes were brilliant with aggrieved vitality. His face was losing the podgy wrinkled look and was gaunter, paler, transparent, the skin pulled and smoothed and yellow, the nose sharper. The tonsured bush of silver hair was flatter, thinner.
Tallis went down the stairs and knocked. The Sikh, asked to turn down his transistor, turned it off altogether. He inquired kindly about Leonard. Tallis inquired about the dispute at the bus depot about the turban. It appeared to be over. The men had got used to their outlandish fellow worker. The Sikh was now happily united with his fellow males in an attempt to sabotage a campaign for women bus-drivers. Tallis was offered tea but refused. He looked with gratitude into the gentle dark sympathetic eyes of the man from so far away. He had heard the story of the Sikh’s life. It was not a happy one.
Tallis went into the kitchen and closed the door. There was a dead sallow light of late afternoon and it was just beginning to rain. He threw the old newspaper down underneath the sink where a row of half choked milk bottles had congregated once again. He closed the window. A lot of dead leaves seemed to have got inside and were blowing about in the draught. He thought for a moment of the Sikh and of the Pakistanis upstairs, who had come, no doubt with hopes, for who can prevent the human heart from hoping, from their own troubled lands into this alien milieu of poverty and racial tension and petty crime.
The remains of Tallis’s lunch time baked beans were still upon the table. He scraped the bean juice into a screw of newspaper and put the plate into a basin on the draining board. The sink had been blocked for several days and was full of dark brown greasy water. Perhaps the dead leaves had clogged it, or perhaps some hot fat which he had poured down the other day. Now he washed up occasionally in the basin and threw the water down the drain outside the window.
He had still not managed to tell his father. Did Leonard already know, had he guessed and was a comedy being played out between them, a comedy which would continue to the end? ‘You’ll feel better soon, Daddy dear.’ ‘You’ll get better when the warm days come.’ Tallis could not believe that his father had understood. And he still knew that he ought to tell him, that the freedom of this last thing ought not to be denied him. But when and how to tell him? Should he go up to him
now
, mount the stairs, open the door, interrupt Leonard’s sarcastic welcome? ‘There’s something I must tell you. You are iller than you know.’ What one, of all the possible tones of their converse, could suit itself to this theme? The usualness of Leonard, his special predictable liveliness, gave comfort. Perhaps it made unreal what was to come, extending a veil over it from the past. Human beings cannot live without custom. Leonard had always been so. How could he cease to be so, how could that fearfully
characteristic
vitality ever come to an end?
I ought to tell him, thought Tallis. I’ll tell him tomorrow. He sat down at the table and made the accustomed gesture of spreading out his books. The class at Greenford were hostile. They seemed to enjoy catching him out. But perhaps it was all imagination. He gazed ahead of him. On the dresser were the pretty cups and saucers which Julius had arranged there, the cups hanging from hooks, the saucers upright upon the shelf. Seeing them so neat and clean reminded him of old quiet things almost beyond the reach of his memory, his earliest childhood, an orderly world, his mother. Near to the cups upon another hook hung the amber necklace which Tallis had mended again. He had still not had time to sort out the coagulated junk on the lower part of the dresser. It spilled over to the floor during the regular search for the tin opener.
The air was dense with subdued noise. Tallis was used to it. The endless din of motor cars made the room vibrate, made the pretty cups and saucers tinkle. There was a faint squeaking and shrieking, metallic sounds of grinding and jarring, sounds that set the teeth on edge, the minor pandemonium with which he had lived intermittently for so long. Once he had feared that this would get steadily worse until it overwhelmed him with horror. Now he treated it merely as a nuisance, as a mechanical accompaniment of his consciousness. And even when he saw with clarity some weird crawling thing he felt pity rather than disgust. Other things he feared. The ambiguous presence of his sister. Her visitations disturbed him with a sense of an alien and somehow dangerous reality which increasingly jostled him close. Here perhaps one day some thin partition could break down. He had come into his bedroom and thought that he saw his sister lying on his bed. Only that must have been a dream.
For the rest, he seemed to have nothing left. No experiences, no certainty. Had there ever been certainty? There had been experiences. He remembered something, like a kind of light, nothing with form. Perhaps that had been a dream too. He never knelt down now, that act of homage to elsewhere had become impossible, would have seemed obscene. Perhaps it had always been just a mucky sexual ritual after all. Any kind of prayer would be superstition now. But sometimes he caught hold of things, edges of tables, sides of doors, books, the bakelite handles of knives. Caught hold of them and held them tight, not so as to perform any act himself, but so as to immobilize himself for a moment to be, if that were possible, perhaps acted upon, perhaps touched.
Meanwhile Tallis’s days went on much as usual. Classes, preparation for classes, committees, aftermaths of committees, writing manifestos, fetching them from the printer, putting them in envelopes, seeing clergymen, seeing probation officers, seeing police officers, seeing people in tears. He thought a good deal about Rupert. The image of Rupert spreadeagled in the pool often came to him involuntarily, with the clarity of a memory, and regularly appeared in his dreams. He did not believe that Rupert had taken his life. But this was little consolation. The accident was deeply the product of its circumstances. Tallis did not try to unravel these nor did he speculate about the guilt of any person, not even about his own. He grieved blankly over something which seemed, in its disastrous compound of human failure, muddle and sheer chance, so like what it was all like. It went wrong from the start, he said to himself. But these were not his words, and this was not his thought, and he put it away from him as a temptation. Then he tried just to remember Rupert and keep the memory clear and feel the pain of it mindlessly.

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