The Good Apprentice (32 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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‘And Bettina can do all sorts of things — ’

‘She mends things, Mother May cooks — Bettina’s jealous now because you prefer me — ’

‘Ilona, don’t be so silly! Jesse sent you his love. He said you were a good girl, he told me to tell you.’

‘A good girl — that’s nothing. There was something great here once, but we’re just carrying it on mechanically in a pretend way. We can’t seem to
do
anything any more, we can’t even play the recorder any more.’

‘But you played to me on that morning.’

‘That’s the only tune we can play properly.’

‘And you used to weave.’

‘Used to, yes. There was something, it’s like remembering history, something long ago to do with salvation by work, and it was anti-religious and anti-God, that was a point, a sort of socialism, and like a kind of magic too, and being beyond good and evil and
natural
and
free
— that’s what’s so tragic, it was something beautiful, but the spirit’s gone, it’s gone bad, perhaps it was always sort of too deep a kind of knowledge, with something wrong about it, or rather we failed,
we
failed, he was too great for us — but that’s what made Jesse so alive and full of power and
wonderful
as he used to be, as if he could live forever. And of course we had to be happy, and we
were
happy, I can remember that, and now we have to pretend to be happy, like nuns who can never admit that they made a mistake and that it has all become just a prison.’

‘Why don’t you leave?’ said Edward.

‘How can I leave?
You
can’t leave. How could I?’

So I can’t leave, Edward reflected later when he was by himself, standing in the middle of the floor in his bedroom, gazing at his unmade bed. The brief sunshine had gone, the wind from the sea was rattling the windows, the air in the house was humid, his clothes felt clammy. A rolled piece of paper was jutting from his pocket. He pulled it out and unrolled it. It was Jesse’s drawing of Ilona which Edward had, he now recalled, picked up that morning as he came down through the studio. It represented Ilona as a child of twelve or fourteen. She had a surprised joyful look; perhaps that was in the days when they were all happy and believed in Jesse’s magic. Her hair was done as it was today, the main central strands pulled back and clipped into a slide, the rest hanging free on each side. She was wearing an open-necked shirt-dress with flowers vaguely sketched upon it, which reminded Edward how much the girls’ day dresses now looked like uniform. Even the woven evening dresses looked to him artificial, like pieces borrowed from a museum. He thought, women without men, they doll themselves up for me, but it won’t do. Really they are dowdy, they cannot overcome a carelessness about their appearance, slatternly ways which have gradually come upon them. In the drawing Ilona’s characteristic movement, her impetus forward, was indicated by a few lines representing the free folds of the dress. It was moving and extraordinary, how present Ilona was in the simple, probably hasty, sketch. Edward smoothed the paper out and put it carefully in a drawer, covering it up.

And why can’t I leave, he thought, what keeps me here? Jesse, love for him, pity, duty.
My God, I said I’d stay.
And I can’t really trust anyone. I don’t even know how old these women are or which is which. They are all elf maidens. Today as we were talking Bettina looked so old, perhaps
she
is the mother. Ilona looked old too, and so tired and wrinkled with anxiety, when she was with me just now. And Jesse, did he want me to come, ask them to bring me, does he really know who I am? Did he think about me in the past and want me, or did he, out of his
charm,
just
invent
it all as soon as he saw me? Was I brought here to help, to liberate his mind by talking to him, to be the guardian of his last days — brought here by them, by him, by fate? Oh how I shall disappoint them all! Is this a holy place where pure women tend a wounded monster, a mystical crippled minotaur? Or have I been lured into a trap, into a plot which will end with my death? I cannot leave. When Jesse said ‘I want to see your youth’ how could he not hate me for being so young and so alive? He is capable of rage and hate — and lust too perhaps. Have the women lured me here to punish me, to execute some communal revenge upon Chloe? I am the perfect victim, the fine upstanding youth with the wrong mother. Or is it just that, for some reason I shall never know, I have to take part in the final act of a drama which only incidentally concerns me and in which I shall be casually annihilated? God, how they frighten me, all of them. Jesse said they’d poison him. They could poison me any time. I’m always drinking those herbal draughts they put into my hands. Perhaps they are slowly depriving me of my wits, inducing hallucinations, like seeing that electric wire in Transition as the foot of a bird coming out of the wall. I thought I was mad because I was in love with Mark and couldn’t go on living. Wasn’t that why I came here? To lose the old hated self and be given a new one by magic. I was in love with Mark — and now I’m in love with Jesse. Is that my cure, my healing, my longed for absolution? One thing I can be sure of: there are awful penalties for crimes against the gods.

Midge McCaskerville was at Quitterne, the McCaskervilles’ country cottage, sitting at her bedroom window. It was the afternoon, she hated the afternoon. Her knee was stiff, hot and painful, her hands were red and visibly grazed; she kept putting them to her cheeks to feel their roughness. She was near to tears, would welcome them soon, remembering the fall, and how, a day before, at Meredith’s school concert, she had been moved to weep by the high sound of the boys’ voices singing. Meredith’s voice was not among them as he affected not to be able to sing. I’m always crying these days, she thought, rubbing her aching knee.

She got up and wandered about the room, touching her cosmetics which she laid out neatly like tools, then returned to the window. She had intended after lunch to make a big flower arrangement, but then it had seemed pointless. God, how restless I feel, she thought, I
can’t
rest, all my limbs have that creeping restless ache. She had a feeling, familiar to her now, of needing to do something very odd simply to preserve her sanity. I want to do something, she thought, like to break something or jump into a river or out of the window, it’s like wanting to brush something off, like a purification. But how can I be purified? Any action which it is possible for me to perform is evil. And there is Thomas weeding the border. I hate the way he leans down so deliberately and then puts the weeds in a neat heap with all the roots together, he’s so meticulous. And he wants to have a bonfire and then he always gets excited and looks stupid. He’s not thinking about me. But he’s a psychologist. How can he not know what is
streaming
through my head all the time?

Midge had wakened up that morning early, hearing the maddening hurtful singing of the birds, and at once thinking about the ‘weekend’ on which Harry was so much insisting and which now seemed impossible. Desire for Harry, for his embrace, most of all simply for the blessed relief and happiness of his
presence,
burnt in her now, making her rise again for another tour of her room. Only in Harry’s presence was she collected and good. So was Thomas the cause of all her evil? Must she not have the strength to hate her husband and to join her lover? Perhaps it was so. Oh for freedom, to be out of this cage of lies and pain at last! She looked into her dressing-table mirror, at her beautiful hair and her distorted face, and for a moment opened her eyes wide and resumed her old insistent animated look which said ‘like me, like me’. And was it she, whom everybody liked and petted, who was soon to cause such grief, such scandal and such chaos? She turned away from the mirror. ‘You’re always
moving
these days,’ Meredith had said that morning. What had Meredith seen? What had he heard and understood? Perhaps nothing, she persuaded herself. The memory of that scene was already blurred. After the ‘sighting’ he had disappeared as if he had never been. She had said nothing to Harry.

Quitterne was a small pretty house, two red-brick cottages made into one, woodmen’s cottages perhaps since it stood in the middle of a wood. Civilisation, because of convenient access to London, had neared it, but its immediate surroundings were still unspoilt. The McCaskervilles had lived at Quitterne for twelve years. Their predecessor had put on a slate roof instead of thatch and made a gravelled drive, and surrounded the house with an area of rounded sea stones, black and glittering when wet, speckled and grey when dry. The garden, which had possessed rose beds as well as two long herbaceous borders, had been simplified by Thomas. There was now a plain lawn, showing off a fine copper beech tree, and one piece of flower bed up against the long box hedge which had been allowed to grow ragged. The wilder garden which blended into the wood was full of huge gross rhododendron bushes, soon to be covered with mauvish blooms, and dotted about with wellingtonias and macracarpas and a few elegant birch trees. The woodland, once so amazing to Midge, was of tall thinnish oaks and chestnuts, with a few big wild cherry trees, and places where filtering light had encouraged an undergrowth of ferny bracken. Among last year’s brown debris where young shoots were emerging, patches of bluebells were here and there coming into flower. It had all seemed a paradise to Midge once, but now the little wild plants which used to please her no longer did so. She was alienated, frightened by the wood, tired by the stones. She would have preferred a pavement round the house and the (unthinkable to Thomas) complete removal of the copper beech. The dark intrusive tree exuded melancholy, even brushed the bathroom window with its drooping fingers. And now farther off in the wood where the McCaskerville territory ended some people called Shaftoe had built a horrible little modern house and a tennis court. Midge had heard the sound of falling trees and of distant alien human voices. Thomas and Meredith had been inclined to fraternise, but Midge had discouraged this. Thomas kept talking of retiring and living at Quitterne all the time. He said Meredith could have a dog then. At the thought of the dog Midge’s eyes filled with tears at last.

Thomas had made his bonfire and the wind was blowing the smoke into the kitchen. Midge came out. Thomas’s pile of weeds and winter cuttings had been rather wet, and Thomas had poured some paraffin on to encourage the now too violent blaze. Midge retreated from the heat. ‘Keep back!’ Thomas shouted to her, and to Meredith who had just come out of the wood. Meredith, who seemed to have grown several inches in the last week, stood by with his hands in his pockets with a slightly smiling supercilious expression, as of sympathy with childish antics. A little while ago he would have been dancing round the fire and rushing about to find things to burn. Now Thomas did the dancing. Red-faced, in an old threadbare suit and a flat cap, armed with a pitchfork, he circled the blazing fire, catching up mounds of falling burning twigs and hurling them back into the centre. A pillar of grey ash rising from the blaze was distributing itself, falling upon Thomas’s cap and his clothes and his spectacles and his glaring sweaty face. What is he burning, she wondered, what is he
destroying
with such a fierce enthusiasm? She winced as she saw the force of the thrusting fork. What would happen if — ? If what? If the customary modes of gentleness and concern and ordinary instinctive communication and
politeness
were ever, between her and Thomas, to break down? He was such a gentle polite man, so careful and so kind. Oh why can’t I be
happy,
thought Midge. Isn’t
that
the centre of the problem? I’m not happy, I’m miserable, I’m in hell, and that’s all wrong, it isn’t
me.
I
must
be happy, it’s my nature, it’s my right. That’s what maddens me, what goads me almost into insanity, the feeling of that happiness,
my
happiness, existing so near, so very near, and I just … somehow … cannot‘… reach it …

‘How’s the poor knee?’ said Thomas.

‘Oh, better.’

‘Let me look.’

They were sitting out in a moment of sunshine, their garden chairs with sagging canvas seats tilting a little on the uneven stones.

Midge displayed her bare leg with the scarred knee. Of course Thomas had fussed over her wounds, applied disinfectant, expressed sympathy. Now he was peering over his glasses in the way that irritated her. He placed his hand caressingly on the glossy unseamed skin above the scar.

‘It’s all hot,’ said Midge, ‘should I cover it up?’

‘No, better leave it, it’s clean. Poor darling, what a nasty fall.’

‘It was stupid.’

‘You are a juggins, you shouldn’t walk in those high-heeled shoes, they’re only fit for drawing rooms!’

‘Yes — oh — all right — ’

‘Are you feeling well — I mean generally?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘It’s not the end of the month?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘You sometimes seem so — ’

‘So what?’

‘Absent.’