Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince

I'm Arnold's wife forever. And you can go and write your book and be alone and whatever you want. But we'll each have a resource, we'll have each other, it will be an eternal bond, like a religious vow, it will save us, if only you will let me love you.»

«But Rachel-this will be a secret-?»

«No. Oh, everything's changed so since even a little while ago. We can live in the open, there's nothing to be secretive about. I feel free, I've been set free, like Julian's balloon, I'm sailing up above the world and looking down at it at last, it's like a mystical experience. We don't have to keep secrets. Arnold has somehow forged a new situation. I shall have friends at last, real friends, I shall go about the world, I shall have you. And Arnold will accept it, he'll have to, he might even learn humility, Bradley, he's our slave. I've got my will back at last. We've become gods. Don't you see?»

«Not quite,» I said.

«You do love me a bit, don't you?»

«Of course I do, I always have, but I can't exactly define-«Don't define! That's the point!»

«Rachel, I don't want to feel guilty. It would interfere with my work.»

«Oh Bradley, Bradley-« She began to laugh helplessly. Then she drew her knees up again and threw the weight of her torso forward against me. We toppled over backwards into the chair with her mainly on top. I felt her weight and saw her face close to mine, leering and anarchic with emotion, unfamiliar and undefended and touching, and I relaxed and felt her body relax too, falling like heavy liquid into the interstices of my own, falling like honey. Her wet mouth travelled across my cheek and settled upon my mouth, like the celestial snail closing the great gate. As blackness fell for a moment I saw the Post Office Tower, haloed with blue sky, aslant and looking in at the window. (This was impossible, actually, since the next house blocks any possible view of the tower.)

«Of course you will. You are a chap who thinks.»

«Rachel-«

«I know. You're going to tell me to go.»

«Yes.»

«I'm going. See how docile I am. Don't be frightened by anything I said. You haven't got to do anything at all.»

«The unmoved mover.»

«I'll run. Can I see you tomorrow?»

«Rachel, I'm so terrified of being tied by anything just now. You'll think me so mean and spiritless-I do care and I'm very grateful-but I've got to write this book, I've got to, and I've got to be worthy to-«I do respect and admire you, Bradley. That's part of it. You're so much more serious about writing than Arnold is. Don't worry about tomorrow or about anything. I'll ring you. Don't get up. I want to leave you sitting there looking so thin and tall and solemn. Like a-like a-Inspector of Taxes. Just remember, freedom, a new world. Perhaps that's just what your book needs, what it's been waiting for. Oh you're such a schoolboy, such a puritan. It's time for you to grow up and be free. Good-bye, Bradley. May your own god bless you.»

She ran out. I stayed where I was, as she had told me to. I was greatly struck by what she had just said. I reflected upon it. Perhaps after all Rachel was the destined angel. How very peculiar it all was, and how brimful I was of sexual desire and how unusual this was.

I found that I was staring at the face of Francis Marloe. He had, I realized, been in the room for some time. He was making curious grimaces, closing up his eyes in a way that involved wrinkling his nose and dilating his nostrils. He looked, while doing this, as unselfconscious as an animal in the zoo. Perhaps he was shortsighted and was trying to focus on my face.

«Are you all right, Brad?»

«Yes, of course.»

«You've got a funny look.»

«What do you want?»

«Do you mind if I go out and have some lunch?»

«Lunch? I thought it was the evening.»

«It's after twelve. There's only baked beans in the kitchen. Do you mind-«

«Yes, yes, go.»

«I'll bring some light stuff in for Priscilla.»

«How is she?»

«She's asleep. Brad-«Yes?»

«Could you give me a pound?»

«Here.»

«Thanks. And, Brad-«

«What?»

«I'm afraid that bronze thing got broken. It won't stand up properly.»

He thrust the warm bronze into my hand and I put it down on the table. One of the water buffalo's legs was crumpled. It fell over lop-sidedly. I stared at it. The lady smiled. She resembled Rachel. When I looked up Francis was gone.

I went softly into the bedroom. Priscilla was sleeping high up on her pillows, her mouth open and the neck of her blouse pulling at her throat. Relaxed in sleep, a softer less peevish dejection made her face look a little younger. Her breath made a soft regular sound like «eschew… eschew…» She still had her shoes on.

Very gently I undid the top button of her blouse. The neck fell open, revealing the badly soiled interior of the collar. I eased off her shoes, holding them by the long pointed heels, and pulled the blankets over her plump sweat-darkened feet. The breathing-murmur ceased, but she did not waken. I left the room.

I went into the spare room and lay down on the bed. I thought about my two recent encounters with Rachel and how calm and pleased I had felt after the first one, and how disturbed and excited I now felt after the second one. Was I going to «fall in love» with Rachel? Should I even play with the idea, utter the words to myself? Was I upon the brink of some balls-up of catastrophic dimensions, some real disaster? Or was this perhaps in an unexpected form the opening itself of my long-awaited «break through,» my passage into another world, into the presence of the god? Or was it just nothing, the ephemeral emotions of an unhappily married middle-aged woman, the transient embarrassment of an elderly puritan who had for a very long time had no adventures at all? Indeed it is true, I said to myself, it is a long time since I had an adventure of any sort. I tried to think soberly about Arnold. But quite soon I was conscious of nothing except a flaming sea of vague undirected physical desire.

It is customary in this age to attribute a comprehansive and quite unanalysed causality to the «sexual urges.» These obscure forces, sometimes thought of as particular historical springs, sometimes as more general and universal destinies, are credited with the power to make of us delinquents, neurotics, lunatics, fanatics, martyrs, heroes, saints, or more exceptionally, integrated fathers, fulfilled mothers, placid human animals, and the like. Vary the mixture, and there's nothing «sex» cannot be said to explain, by cynics and pseudo-scientists such as Francis Marloe, whose views on these matters we are shortly to hear in detail. I am myself however no sort of Freudian and I feel it important at this stage of my «explanation» or «apologia,» or whatever this malformed treatise may be said to be, to make this clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. I abominate such half-baked tosh. My own sense of the «beyond,» which heaven forbid anyone should confuse with anything «scientific,» is quite other.

I say this the more passionately because I think it just conceivable that an obtuse person might mistake some of my attitudes for something of that sort. Have I not just been speculating whether Rachel's sweet unexpected affections might not set free the talent which I had so long known of, believed in, and nursed in vain? What sort of picture of me has my reader received? I fear it must lack definition, since as I have never had any strong sense of my own identity, how can I characterize sharply that which I can scarcely apprehend? However my own delicacy cannot necessarily cozen judgment and may even provoke it. «A frustrated fellow, no longer young, lacking confidence in himself as a man: of course, naturally, he feels that a good fuck would set him up, release his talents, in which incidentally he has given us no good reason to believe. He pretends he is thinking about his book, while really he is thinking about a woman's breasts. He pretends he is apprehensive about his moral uprightness, but really it is quite another sort of rectitude that is causing him anxiety.»