Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

'I'm afraid the car's miles away,' said Patricia. 'Shall we all walk or shall I get it? We can carry the cases between us. I want to get out of here.' She said to the priest, 'Can I give you a lift?'

'No, thanks, I've got to see someone who lives nearby.'

Gideon said, 'You and Tamar get the car. There's no point in carrying the cases. We'll put them out on the landing. I'll I wait here. Violet might even emerge.'

`She won't. 0 K. Come on, Tamar.'

Gideon and the priest looked at each other. The priest, raising his eyebrows, motioned slightly with his head toward the closed bedroom door. Gideon, expressionless, continued to hold the door open onto the stairs. He said, 'Thank you very much. We'll talk again.'

'Yes.' Father McAlister sighed, then with a wave of his hand set off down the stairs and into the street.

Gideon waited until he heard the front door close. Then lie carefully closed the flat door and went to Violet's bedroom and knocked.

`Violet! They've gone. Come out now.'

After a short time Violet emerged. She had changed her clothes, combed her hair, powdered her nose, removed her glasses. She had evidently been crying, and elaborate powdering round her eyes had made the wrinkled skin pale, dry and dusty. She peered, frowning, at Gideon and he saw over her shoulder the chaotic room which had defeated Pat. She walked across to Tamar's tidy room, moved the table a little, then lifted the plate of'cakes and oflered it to Gideon. He took a cake. They both sat down on the bed. Gideon felt, for the firs time for many years, a sudden physical affection for his old friend, a desire, to which he did not yield, to hug her and o, laugh. He thought, somebody, a real strong person, a lovable, admirable person, has been lost here, ruined.

Violet's hair, like her daughter's, needed cutting but had been neatly combed and patted into shape. It was still brown, its lustre here and there embellished by single hairs of'a pale luminous grey. Her nose was slightly red at the nostrils, whether from a cold or recent weeping. Her small mouth, now touched by lipstick, was at its sternest. She stroked down her fringe over her brow, over her indelible frown, moulding it inoo shape with a familiar gesture. She had, Gideon reflected, het higher civil servant look. She looked in no way like a defeated woman. In taking Father McAlister's gamble Gideon had feared, perhaps wanted, something rather more weak and pliable. It was a moment for Violet to surrender to fate, bw she looked now unlikely to surrender to anything. They had both been thinking, and each allowed a space for the other to speak first.

`They'll be back,' said Gideon, 'at least Pat will ring the bell and I'll carry down the cases. The car is a good way off. We've got ten minutes. But of course I'll come in tomorrow.'

Violet said, 'Why did you spring this loathsome charade on me? That creep McAlister was the last straw.'

`It was his idea,' said Gideon not entirely truthfully. The strategy had been the priest's, the tactics certainly Gideon's. `It was a device, you understand.'

`To get Tamar away.'

`Yes.'

`But she could have gone any time, I wasn't keeping her a prisoner!'

`You know, in a way, you were. You had taken away her will. She had to have moral support -'

`Moral support?'

`To get out in a definite intelligible manner, with a reasonable explanation.'

`You mean sponging on you?'

`She couldn't just cut and run. There had to be a raid by a respectable rescue party.'

`It shows you think nothing of me, you think I'm not a person. That mob pushing their way in here without any warning! You wouldn't do that to anyone else. You feel contempt for me.'

`No, Violet -'

`All of you acting well-rehearsed parts.'

`You were acting too.'

`You think so? It was designed to humiliate me. All right, it was clever. My reactions could have been predicted, all my lines could have been written beforehand. It was like – it was -an attempt on my life.'

`I'm sorry,' said Gideon, 'but look, you don't really mind my paying a bit for Tamar at Oxford?'

`I don't care a hang -'

`Good, that's out of the way -'

`So long as I never see her again.'

`Then there's you.'

`I don't exist.'

`Oh shut up, Violet, think, you can think. McAlister thinks that Tamar really deeply loves you and -'

`She hates me. She's always been cold as hell to me, even ito a small child. Obedient, but icy cold. I don't blame her. I hake her, if it comes to that.'

`I don't know about Tamar, I want to deal in certainties. Let's say I'm a person, possibly the only person, who not onk knows you, but loves you. 0 K so far?'

Violet this time, instead of returning a cynical reply, said, `Oh Gideon, thanks for loving me – not that I believe ii actually – but it's useless – it's sour milk – only fit to be thrown away.'

`I never throw anything away, that's why everything I touch turns to gold. Let me help you. I can do anything. just by sheer will power I drove Gerard out of that house in Notting Hill. Look, let's sell this flat, Pat's right, it's awful, it's haunted. Come and live at our place.'

`With Tamar? Being the housemaid? No thanks.'

`You and Tamar must make peace, you both need peace never mind the details – you must live, you must be happy- what's money for after all?'

`It's no good. You're a happy person. Someone like you can't just manufacture happiness for someone like me. I’m finished. You can look after Tamar. That's what this is all about.'

The door bell rang.

`I'll come in tomorrow.'

`I won't be here.'

`Don't terrify me, Violet. You know I care for you -'

`Don't make me sick.' She went out into the hall, opened the flat door, then disappeared once more into her bedroom and locked herself in.

Gideon, hearing Pat call below, lifted the cases out onto the landing. He closed the door of the flat. He said to himself, she won't kill herself. I'm glad I said all those things to her. She'll think about those things. In fact, although it was not tonight that Violet would kill herself, she was nearer to the edge than Gideon surmised. She had been frightened by Tamar's mysterious illness, not so much on her behalf as her own. She had seen in Tamar's death pallor and face wrenched by misery the picture of her own fate – her death, since she would never recover, whereas Tamar would recover, to dance on her grave. She was shaken by the new cruel self-willed Tamar, so unlike the cool but submissive child she was used to, and now dismayed by Tamar's departure, which she had riot at all expected. After all she had needed, she had relied upon, Tamar's presence. She felt hideously lonely. Her sense of her own vileness, together with her chronic resentment, made any attempt at human society increasingly difficult. Soon it would be impossible. There were no pleasures. She hated all the plump glittering giggling people she saw on television. Even solitary drinking, which now occupied more of her time, was not a relief, more like a method of suicide. A sense of the unreality, the sheer artificiality, of individual existence had begun to possess her. What was it after all to be 'a person', able to speak, to remember, to have purposes, to inhibit screams? What was this weird unclean ever-present body, of which she was always seeing parts? Why did not her 'personality' simply cease to be continuous and disintegrate into a cloud of ghosts, blown about by the wind?

Later on, over the gin bottle, she thought, perhaps I will go to their place, to that flat. Tamar will move out. But they'll never get me out! I'll stay there and make their lives a misery.

Father McAlister, who had of course no one living nearby to see, was now concerned with getting back to his parish. He was sitting, in an unhappy state of mind, in an underground train. It was easier to set people free, as the world knows it, than to teach them to love. He often uttered the word 'love', he had uttered it often to Tamar. In the thick emotional atmosphere generated by frequent meetings between priest and penitent Tamar had declared that 'really' she loved her mother, and `really' her mother loved her. It was what he expected, and induced, her to say. Was he however so much influenced by, so much immured with, images of the power of' love that he could miss and underestimate the genuine presence of ordinary genuine hate? Was he too tolerantly aware of himself as a magician, pitting against an infinite variety of' demonic evils a power, not his own, which must be ultimately insuperable? The case of Tamar had excited him because so much was at stake. He was sadly aware that much of his work in the confessional (and he was a popular confessor) consisted in relieving the minds of hardened sinners who departed cheerfully to sin again. At least they came back. But with Tamar it had seemed like life and death; if he could free her she would be free indeed. After so much experience he could still be so naive. Oh she had been brave, but what had made her brave? Had all that awful travail simply provided her with the strength required to leave her mother? Was there in the end nothing but breakage, liberty from obsession and nothing enduring of the spirit?