The Good Apprentice (70 page)

Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: The Good Apprentice

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Frightened by his thoughts Stuart jumped up and hurried out of the church without looking back. Behind him he heard some footsteps, perhaps of a priest who had emerged from the vestry. He hurried back to Oxford Street and went on walking in the direction of Oxford Circus, walking, a tall man, among the people, swerving and tacking to avoid touching them, looking over their heads, walking like (he suddenly felt, and it was a terrible image) a man seen in a film, when the star is seen walking alone in the crowded streets of New York (it had to be New York) filled with the magical significance of his role, happy or unhappy, an image of power, of the envied life, surrounded by other actors who are, by contrast, devoid of being; and it is all false. When he reached Oxford Circus, Stuart went down the steps into the Underground station. He wanted to get back to his new digs and shut the door. He wondered, am I simply ill, is it ‘flu? Am I seriously ill, will I die young, is
that
the solution? What idiotic thoughts. Perhaps I’m just hungry.

He began once more, as now often, too often, to relive those extraordinary final hours at Seegard, his father looking so white and wretched, averting his eyes and pretending to be calm, calling Stuart ‘son’, then Jesse with his big shaggy head and glowing eyes like a witch-doctor in a superhuman mask, shouting, ‘That man’s dead, take him away!’ And all this time Stuart had sat at the table silently watching it all; no, he had risen for Jesse. He was the passive hated witness, a corpse sitting there, everywhere an intruder, as his father had said. This was the condition for which
work
was the cure, but would he ever really achieve it? He thought, I sat quietly at the table, I sat quietly in the back of the car and I felt terrible and small like a vile bacillus. No, I didn’t feel that at the time, I was just paralysed, I was very frightened of
him,
in the car I was thinking more about
him
than about
them,
as if he were really powerful and dangerous. And now he is dead. Poor Edward.

As Stuart stood upon the platform waiting for the train he felt a new and dreadful feeling of shame, a shameful loneliness and sadness and grief, as if he were both banished from the human race and condemned for eternity to be a useless and detested witness of its sufferings. This was what he had felt and foreseen when he had found the church so repugnant and so empty, and with this he returned to the scene with Harry, Harry’s rejection of him, Harry’s misery and hatred, the blow in the face which would be remembered forever.

As he thought these thoughts, standing upon the station platform, feeling a little giddy as with hunger, he was looking down into the black space below him, the vault underneath the rails. Stuart had sometimes imagined how, if someone were to fall down there, he would jump down after them and pull them up just as the train was roaring into the station. Now, without any image, he gazed down onto the black sunken concrete floor of the track. Then he saw that there right down at the bottom something was moving, as if alive. He frowned and focused his eyes. He stared. It was a mouse, a live mouse. The mouse ran a little way along beside the wall of the pit, then stopped and sat up. It was eating something. Then it came back again, casting about. It was in no hurry. It was not trapped.
It lived there.

This revelation was taken in by Stuart in a moment. It entered him like a bullet. It exploded inside him. He felt about to fall. He stepped back from the edge of the platform. He found a seat and sat down, leaning his head against the tiled wall. What had happened, was he having some sort of fit? He gasped for breath, feeling his whole body change. An extraordinarily peaceful joy ran through him, a thrilling consciousness of the warmth and pace of his blood, running through all his veins and arteries down to the minutest vibrating threads in his finger tips. A light shone in his eyes, not painful, not like a flash, but like a shrouded sun which warmed his body until it glowed as if it too were all radiantly alight. He rolled his head to and fro against the tiles, half closing his eyes and sighing with joy.

‘Are you all right, son?’ A burly figure in overalls was leaning over him.

‘Yes — ’ said Stuart.

‘You got blood on your face. Have a fall or something?’

‘No — thank you so much — I’m all right — I’m really — all right.’

Edward was back in London. He had waited, standing in the avenue, long enough to see the body of Jesse, together with its bearers and mourners, enter into the house. Mother May and Bettina, both weeping, entered last. Then he ran away down the drive and along the track to the road. It was only when he reached the road and stopped hurrying that he realised that his jacket was left behind. By now
they,
wailing beside the body, would have lifted it to look on Jesse’s face. Fortunately Edward’s keys and money were in his trouser pocket. He began to feel cold. There was distant thunder and it started to rain. He set off walking toward the station, but the bus picked him up when he had gone a mile. He wondered briefly whether it was his duty to telephone the police and decided it was not. A train had been cancelled and he had to sit for a long time, in wet clothes in a cheerless waiting room, his body aching with restless misery. It took tediously, agonisingly, long to get back to London, to his room, or rather to Mark’s room as he now thought of it. He considered going back to Bloomsbury, but he was afraid to miss any message there might be from Brownie. There was none. It was evening. He had eaten nothing.

He wondered whether he ought to have stayed at Seegard. His desire to get away
at once
had been intense and imperative and he later wondered what it was: simply fear? He did not want to have to see that thing again. There is primitive fear of dead people, the ugly unnatural dead, the polluted dead who spread sickening vapours, the envious dead who drag the living down and smother them. Edward remembered the terror he had felt when touching that wet humped weight. But it was not just fear which made him run, it was a curious painful sense ofpropriety. It was not for him to stand by and watch the women crying. He did not belong to that scene. He had been a visitor at Seegard, not a part of its substance. And he felt too with an intensity that was almost comforting that he had said his final farewell to Jesse down at the river by the willow trees. There was no other farewell to be said. He had done his duty, completed his appointed task, his last service to the ladies of Seegard. He had performed the rite which, evidently, was to be performed by the son for the father. He had found Jesse in his secret place. Standing around with the tree men while the wife and daughters did things to the corpse, sent messages, made arrangements, made a meal perhaps, he would have gone mad with misery. Nor did he want to witness Ilona’s grief, or risk being the one who had to tell her. But he was sorry not to have seen her, and this alone he regretted.

On the evening of his return, although it seemed shocking to be hungry, Edward had gone out to a pub and eaten sandwiches and drunk a lot of whisky. Then he came back to the room which smelt of emptiness and absence and went early to bed and into a deep sleep. He awoke next morning to a frightful new form of unhappiness. His father whom he had sought and found and sought again was dead. In his crazy searching round London he had, he now realised, hoped and somehow believed that his father was alive. Now Jesse was dead and there was
nothing to do,
the story was over. Mark was dead and Jesse was dead too. They had made a pact together against Edward. It was, he suddenly felt, almost a comfort to return to the old familiar pain of Mark’s death, as a distraction from the new awful pain of Jesse’s. Am I getting used to Mark being dead, he wondered. Then he looked about the room, at the bed, at the chair, at the window, and the old horror rose up afresh. He thought, I
must
find Brownie. He had left London on the day after his failure at their rendezvous. Surely she would write or come to see him, she
must
have known that only some terrible accident could have stopped him from arriving. He decided to wait all day in the room in case she came, but the agony of waiting was too intense. He went out, leaving a note on the door of the room, another on the front door, and a message with his landlady. He walked the streets of London, and could not help still looking for Jesse among the people who passed by. He went to the pub where they had arranged to meet and stayed there, getting drunk, till closing time. He went round to Mrs Wilsden’s house, he remembered her address from her numerous letters. Of course he did not dare to ring the bell, but he hung around at a distance watching the door. He sat in a café which commanded one end of the road and watched till his eyes glazed. Of course Brownie had said she was staying with Sarah, but she might well have gone back to her mother. He considered going round to Sarah’s house, but could not make up his mind to, he felt too ashamed. He went back to his rooms, then to the nearby pub and then to bed. A note left with his landlady turned out to be from Stuart giving his new address. He did the same on the next day and on the next. Then he thought of Mrs Quaid. Mrs Quaid had found Jesse. Might she not find Brownie?

On this occasion Edward had no difficulty in finding the house. The sun was shining and the day had established itself as a warm summer day, a London summer day with a London light and dustiness and haze of green trees and resonance of sound and emergence of colour which can seem, according to one’s mood, so genial and festive and full of spacious celebration, or so stifling and oppressive and full of ghostly nostalgia. Edward saw how tired all the trees looked already, their leaves drooping and grimy, and the streets were full of sad echoes. As he approached Mrs Quaid’s house he felt a now familiar sense of danger, and of something shady and disagreeable, even bad. The street door was unlocked as usual and he pushed it open and went soft-footed up the stairs. Mrs Quaid’s door was shut and he stood outside it for a while, feeling a sudden revulsion, unable to decide to knock. At last he knocked, timidly, indecisively. There was a long silence. No one came. Edward, looking at the worn dusty carpet, the banisters sticky with dirt, the dense mass of particles floating in the air, revealed by the sun shining through a landing window, felt sick with a pointlessness and loneliness which deprived him of his sense of himself. He felt a fright at not existing, a feeling of the entirely precarious nature of identity, such as healthy people leading ordinary lives sometimes receive as a sudden quick glimpse of insanity and death. Since it did not matter what he did, he tried the handle of Mrs Quaid’s door, found the door unlocked, opened it and went in.

The corridor inside was dark, all the inner doors being closed. In the light from the landing Edward began to fumble along the wall searching for an electric switch. As he was doing this the door at the far end which led into the big room opened and an indistinct woman with a cap on her head and a necklace round her neck stood in the doorway. Edward said, ‘Mrs Quaid — ’ But he had realised at the same moment that it could not be Mrs Quaid. His hand found the electric light switch. The woman at the doorway took a step towards him and said, ‘Edward.’ It was Ilona.

‘Oh my God!’ said Edward. For a moment he actually considered whether he had not become mad, whether he had
transformed
the image of Mrs Quaid into that of Ilona in his mind. He closed the door behind him and sat down on a chair against the wall.

‘Edward, dear, however did you find me?’

‘
Find
you,’ said Edward. ‘I wasn’t looking for you. You can’t be here, it’s impossible. This is a crazy place full of ghosts and hallucinations. It’s not you. You look different.’

‘I’ve had my hair cut off.’ What Edward had taken for a cap was Ilona’s hair, cut close to her head.

‘Oh Ilona, I can’t bear it, I can’t
bear
it — ’

‘That I had my hair cut? They did it very well — ’

‘No — being
mad
like this, everything being
mad
— ’

‘Edward, I’m so glad to see you. Don’t sit out there like a cat. Come in, come here.’

Edward got up and followed her into the big room which looked almost exactly as it had done on the last occasion, the chairs piled on each other in a heap in the corner, the armchairs by the fireplace. A table had been pulled into the middle of the room. The thick furry curtains had been thrust well back and the room was full of bright light, Edward could see through the window a sunlit wall close by, a tree beyond.

Ilona did indeed look different. Her closely cut short hair made her look boyish and also older, almost sophisticated. Her green dress which was narrow and smart and rather short added to the impression. She wore high-heeled shoes. Only the necklace, one of her old ones, looking oddly out of place, recalled her previous persona. ‘Look, let’s choose a chair and sit down. I’ll have this one, you can have this one. I don’t like those armchairs. Let’s sit at the table. I’ve been writing letters.’

Ilona pulled a chair out of the heap and set it at the table near the one on which she had been sitting. They sat down and looked at each other.

‘Ilona, you left them — ’

‘You mean them at Seegard — yes — ’

‘You couldn’t bear it — what happened — Jesse — ’

‘Oh I left before that — I left after you went, almost at once — I’ve been in London for ages.’

‘Ilona! But you do know — about Jesse being dead — ?’.

‘Of course, I read about it, it was in all the papers.’