Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

After a short time it began to seem to Duncan that Crimond's letter constituted a sign. It was fated, it came at its moment duly. This feeling was obscurely connected with what was still wrong, sometimes, he despairingly felt, irretrievably wrong, between himself and Jean. What was wrong was, it seemed, nothing obvious. With what was obvious they could deal. To say that he 'forgave' Jean was to use superficial language. Well, of course, he forgave her, but that was only a part or aspect of some enormous package, something as large as the world, which in being with her again he accepted. He accepted the pain, the wreckage of their lives, the desolations and the ruin in both their hearts, even the possibility that sit, might run away again. He accepted all the things he did not know and would never know about her relations with Crimond. It was like asking God to pardon the sins one has forgotten as well as those one remembers. He soon gave up the blem of whether she had left Crimond or whether Crimond I left her, it became like some piece of metaphysics finally seen to be empty. Perhaps Jean did not know, perhaps God not know. He no longer tried to riddle out what exactly had happened on the night when Jean arrived at Boyars, crashing her car on the wrong road. He listened to the little it she said, and asked few questions. Jean was relieved and grateful, her love enlivened by relief and gratitude and by their world renewed. She was not happy, but, they both agreed, she walls almost happy. She would become happy. He did not speculate too much now about her thoughts. He was not happy, but would become happy. All their talk about living in France, the books they opened and the maps they studied, were the symbol, not the substance of happiness to come sometimes he wondered whether they were wrong to want or expect to be happy, as they had once been; but had they been, perhaps their memory deceived them, or that was not what it was? Perhaps they had hold of the wrong concept. Perhaps all this thought, all this analysis in which they were both indulging was simpl ya mistake, a substitute for some more substantial living in the present? Their living in the present so often seemed (and here too they tacitly agreed) like an ad hoc irdonism which put off the real issues into an elsewhere. This uncomfortable dualism seemed, after the first excitements, to intrude even into their renewed sexual relations which, though yarently so surprisingly satisfactory, took place inside a wid of anxiety and dread. Of this, in kindness to each other, linilier of them spoke. They thought that time would heal them, love would heal them, that love would heal itself, that just here was the place for faith and hope. At the same time he was conscious of something wrong which had not been put in the reckoning, a missing item which made the problem not, insoluble but unstatable. It was after the arrival of Crimond's letter that Duncan concluded that the missing item simply represented the fact that Crimond was still alive.

This was certainty not a simple matter. It was not, that, is simply to do with hypotheses about Crimond's appearance on the doorstep or Jean running back to him. It had more to do with falling down the stairs at the tower, even falling into the river. Yet again, it did not simply represent a desire revenge-The whole world was out of joint and some radical adjustment was necessary. Rationally, Duncan did not imagine that if he killed Crimond 'things would be better'. If he actually committed just this murder, or this maiming, would be in prison, or if lie got away with it he would lot consumed with guilt and fear. It did not appear to him as something owed to Jean; he was indeed aware that, just for this, Jean might hate him forever, and it was a measure of his obsession that he did not reflect much about this possibility. The requirement presented itself as a very pressing duty or the release of an agonising physical urge: something that had to be done about Crimond. When Crimond's letter came Duncan felt at once the appropriateness of the wording. 'Unfinished business' was precisely what there was between them; and he felt it too.

So it was that he looked forward to their meeting as to something fated and necessary, without at all seeing what it would be like. The hammer, the knife, were perhaps just blind symbols. He just had to pass the time somehow until Friday came.

On Thursday morning .Jean had an unexpected visitor.

Often Jean felt very very tired. Among the things which she had not fully revealed to her husband were the conlinimil physical effects of the car crash. She had, on return, visited her doctor and the hospital. After all, she was told, you can’t expect to turn your car over and just sprain your ankle!There was a jolt to the spine, a stiffening of the shoulder, nothing lid serious, but needing prompt physiotherapy. Was she in pain? No, mental anguish had for a time taken her out of her body, to which she now returned. She went to the hospital for treatments and to swim, as in a weird dream, in the warm hospital swimming pool. It's the pool of tears, she said to herself, but not to Duncan. She did exercises. The ankle mended, her shoulder felt better, but now she ached all over errant pains crept about her body. She was too proud to mention these mundane matters to Duncan, except, for he knew that she went to the hospital, as a sort of joke. They talked laughingly of going to Baden-Baden, even to Karlsbad, when the spring arrived.

Meanwhile, upon that other plane, Jean too was experiencthe mutual incompatibility, yet necessary connection, wren analysis and hedonism. She found some relief in both, I neither would relieve her of her deeper, spiritual, sickness, her love for Crimond, from which she had to try, and hope, day by day, hour by hour, to recover. She tried sometimes to remember what it had been like on the previous occasion. Had she really tried then – or had she simply kept the thing intact, hidden away like a virus or embryo, preserved alive in some mysterious jar in some secret cupboard? Would it be like this or did the thing at last face extinction, must it die, would it die? Like Duncan – forshe was like him, had perhaps become like him, her mind like his mind, her talk and mode of' argument like his talk and mode of argument – she sometimes wondered if she had misconceived the problem, had obscured it’s essence by a wrong concept. Why put the question at all? A mattered now was loving Duncan and being happy. In light the loss of'Crimond could seem almost like something mechanical, aninevitable happening, now past, which not radically altered the flow of tier life. Inthis mood she -lied herself for support to certain memories, Crimond's repeted assertion that their love was 'impossible', and, which seemed to her particularly significant, his cry, upon the Roman Road, of 'take your chance!' Well, her chance had been his chance too, and she believed what he said. The brutality of his departure must have been intentional, a seal upon their separation. She was helped by her faith in his truthfulness. It was over and had to beover. There could be no resurrection now. It was over and had to be over. There could be no resurrection now. He had needed his freedom and she must learn to need hers. But the illness was heavy and the healing was slow.

Duncan had gone to the office. He had not yet given in his resignation, that would happen soon. This time was an interim, a breathing space. Even the flat, which they planned to leave, knew it, although Jean tidied and cleaned it and made it almost as it had been before. There was something provisional about their present mode of life which they acknowledged, convincing each other that a move to somewhere else would rejuvenate them both.

Jean had been reading in a history of Provence about how they had found the skeleton of an elephant, which must have been one of Hannibal's elephants, when the bell rang at the door of the flat. She went to open the door. The person who stood outside was Tamar.