Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

All this time Tamar carried around with her the horrors which had, in Father McAlister's words, 'driven her into the arms of the Almighty': the dead child, her faithlessness to Duncan, her cruelty to Jean, the shock of Jenkin's death in which she had felt so mysteriously involved, her awful relationship with her mother. Tamar, out of her old bitter godless Nirength, had been capable of saying nothing to Violet, on that evening, about Jenkin's death. She was also capable, in the i uthless reticence necessary for her 'recovery', of telling Violet nothing about what was happening to her and how she was spending her time. Relations between Tamar and her mother gradually and almost entirely broke down. Violet kept asking Tamar when she was going back to work, Tamar kept saying she was on leave. Violet said Tamar would lose her job, Tamar said she didn't care. Tamar tried to say 'kind things' to her mother, but it was as if, here, she simply did not know the language of kindness. Everything she said irritated Violet into spiteful replies. Later on they simply stopped addressing each the yand lived in the house as strangers. Tamar was out all day, in churches, in libraries, or in the clergy house in slington where her meetings with her teacher took place. Father McAlister, to whom she reported everything, kept Dying that that problem would be solved later on; Tamar ouspected that he had, at present, no idea how. About the other things she had gradually, as part of other changes in her reviving heart, begun to feel better, though not yet without fear of relapse. At tunes the old horrors still seemed like unassimilable matter, stones, darts, the poisoned heads of broken arrows. She had been able to rid herself'of the insane irrational superstitious indeed wicked thought that she had `brought about'jenkin's death. She was able to feel a natural grief. Many frightful pains grew less, repentant regret, like a kind of knowledge, gradually replaced self-destructive self-hating remorseful misery and despair. There were differences and she understood the differences. She went on tormenting herself about Jean and Duncan, had Duncan told Jean about Tamar, had Jean told Duncan about the child? I gave away his secret, I cursed her. I must be hated and despised. Father McAlister said wise things about not worrying about other people's thoughts. Where one could see no way to mend matters, one must just keep them in mind, surround them with good reflections. The desire to mend was often a nervous selfish urge to justify oneself, and not a vision of how anything could be made better. He told her to wait patiently, to make abstention from action into a penance, not to meddle, to leave it to God. But Tamar doubted her patience and wanted very much to write a long emotional letter to Jean.

About the dead child Father McAlister, to his great satisfaction, was at last able to do something definitive. He had said all sorts of things to Tamar, he told her to keep the child with her, not touched, not agonised about, as a sad presence, lived with, not hated, not feared, not frenziedly yearned for. He told her to think of the child as the Christ child. Tamar found this difficult, the priest said it was a spiritual exercise. Then at last Father McAlister, alone with Tamar in a church in north London, performed a rite which he had never performed before, and which indeed he had largely invented, a kind of burial or blessing of the dead child, a formal affirmation of love and farewell, containing an act of contrition. He did not say so to Tamar, but he also thought of this performance as an exorcism, a propitiation of'a potentially dangerous spirit: for he was not without his superstitions and had seen, in his time, very terrible demons emerging from the unconscious minds of' his flock, or from whatever the places are where demons live. Tamar murmured that she acknowledged her transgressions and her sins were ever before her, that she had been poured out like water and all her bones were out of joint, that she desired to be washed and to be whiter than snow, that a broken and contrite spirit might not be despised, that broken bones might after all rejoice, and she might put off her sackcloth and be girded in gladness. Father McAlister then blessed the poor nameless vanished embryo, desired it to repose in peace and be received by God into those heavenly habitations where the souls of them that sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity, and that God might look upon Tamar's contrition, accept her tears and assuage her pain. Then was He to bless her and keep her, make His face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her, liftup the light of His countenance upon her, and give her peace. This rite, a mixture of old familiar words and his own pastiche, and thought of by the priest as a most holy farrago, gave him intense pleasure; and he was rewarded too by the sight of Tamar's face, tear-stained and radiant.

‘You know what today is?' said Rose.

‘Of course,' said Gerard.

They said no more. It was Sinclair's birthday. He would have been fifty-three.

Two nights ago Rose had woken in the night, hearing a dog scratching at the door of the flat. She had woken up thinking at once: It's Regent! He's come back! She put on the lamp beside her bed. The house was silent. Of course it was not Regent, it was a dream. All the same she got up and turned on all the lights in the flat, opened the door and turned on the lights on the stairs. She even went down and opened the door into the street in case there had been, somewhere, some poor dog, some real dog. But there was nothing. After that she could not sleep.

She recalled this now, sitting in the little sitting room of Jenkin's house, having tea with Gerard. This having tea together was a custom which they kept up intermittently, though the 'spread' had grown steadily smaller and less sumptuous as the passing years had somehow removed the substance from the idea of `tea time'. At Boyars it retained some of its majesty for the sake of Annushka. But today, with Gerard, there had been no scones, no sandwiches, no bread, butter or jam, just some rather old biscuits and a fruit cake. Neither of them had eaten much. This was partly because Reeve was coming to pick Rose up and take her out to dinner at his hotel. This picking up had been Reeve's idea, he said he wanted to see Gerard, they had not met for so long; Rose rang Gerard, it seemed inevitable.

Gerard was angry that Rose had thought it conceivable that Reeve should come and pick her up. Of'course he had said that he would be delighted to see Reeve, and he was concealing his annoyance from Rose, or trying to, but he could see her sad look, and cursed himself for not having vetoed the rotten idea, or at least now evidently not managing to dissemble enough to be a pleasant companion.

This living at Jenkin's place was not working, it had been a bad plan, based on an illusion. Whatever did I expect, Gerard wondered, that I could live a better life here as an ascetic hermit, that I could somehow become Jenkin? Did I think that? Or was I just trying to get away from Gideon and Pat? The house resisted him. At first he had tried not to alter it, then as that seemed wrong he made a few changes, a new sink in the kitchen, a larger refrigerator, a few of his watercolours brought over from the house in Notting Hill. Some of his furniture was still there, relegated to the upper flat, some was in store, some had been purchased by Gideon. His books were all over the place, at Notting Hill, with Rose, or here, not unpacked, as he had been unable to decide to touch Jenkin's books which still occupied the shelves. The house felt dead, it was senseless, it was becoming dusty and untidy. Rose had said she would come and clean it, but he had told her not to bother and she had not pursued the matter.

The tea things, Jenkin's teapot, Jenkin's milk jug, the cake on too small a plate, the biscuits on too large a one, were perched on a small folding table upon which Gerard had spread a flowery linen drying-up cloth, imagining it to be a table cloth. The cake, awkwardl ycut, had spread its large moist crumbs upon the cloth, the biscuits, broken anyway, had deposited their smaller drier crumbs, and some crumbling mess upon the carpet wasnow beingabsently pushed by 'Gerard's foot onto the green tiles in front of the gas fire. Gerard was wearing slippers. He looked, Rose thought, tired and older.