Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

He picked up the plate and the mug from the tiles beside the fire and took them back to the kitchen. He put on the kettle for his hot water bottle. He had forgotten to switch on the electric fire in the bedroom and the room was icy. He switched it on and pulled the curtains. The wind, now filled with rain, was lashing at the window panes which were rattling and admitting cold streams of air which were agitating the curtains. He said to himself, of course I'm drunk, but that's how it is. The curse I'm under is the one we're all under. The Oxford colleges and Big Ben can't buy us off now. The time when we could talk on this planet of controlling our destinies is finished for good – the short short time. Rose is right, it's no use trying to think any more. The party's over. Apris nous le diluge.

The kettle boiled and he filled the bottle and put it in the bed which seemed to be inhabited by some cold damp fungus. He took his pyjamas and went back to the sitting room to undress before the fire. Crimond's galley proofs were all over the floor and he thrust them into a heap with his foot. He took off his tic which he had put on hours ago to go to the Fairfaxes' party, where fie knew he would see Rose, and where he had arrived late because he had been unable to tear himself away from that damnable book.

As he unbuttoned his shirt he saw Duncan's letter open upon the chair. He would reply of course, but he felt no urgent desire to see Duncan. Later perhaps. I feel discredited, he thought, these deaths have knocked the stuffing out of me. I'd be ashamed before Duncan. It's all right for him to have a woman and a house. Duncan could manage his life, even his bad luck, he was never 'high-minded', like Jenkin, like Gerard, like Crimond. Gerard remembered that he had used that term to Rose to describe Crimond's book. But Jenkin's high-mindedness was not like Gerard's or like Crimond's. Gerard recalled how Levquist had snubbed him when he had suggested that Jenkin hadn't 'got anywhere'. 'Riderhood doesn't need to get anywhere. He walks the path, he exists where he is. Whereas you -' Yes, thought Gerard, Jenkin always walked the path, with others, wholly engaged in wherever he happened to be, fully existing, fully real at every point, looking about him with friendly curiosity. Whereas I have always felt reality was elsewhere, exalted and indifferent and alone, upon some misty mountain peak which I, among the very few, could actually see, though of course never reach, and whose magnetism thrilled in my bowels (that was Levquist's phrase) while I enjoyed my superior vision, my consciousness of height and distance, the gulf below, the height above, and a sense of pleasurable unworthiness shared only by the elect – self-satisfied Platonism, Augustinian masochism, Levquist called it. Why didn't I go back and see him and talk about all that, I could have gone any time. Now I feel, I feel at last alone – and the mountain and the mountain peak, that hanging on, that looking up, was it all an illusion? Can I live without thinking of myself, and of it, in just that way? Perhaps it was the loss of it which I felt just now when I realised how poisoned I am by that murderous doubt, when I thought it's too high, it's too far. Just when I meet with the insuperable difficulty which I've so much desired I find I have no strength left. I shall shrink and shrink and creep into a crevice. What I thought was the top of the mountain was a false summit after all – the summit is far higher up and hidden in cloud and as far as I'm concerned it might as well not exist, my endurance is at an end.

He thought, I'll go right away and hide somewhere. I'll buy a flat and lock it up and go. I won't tell anyone where I am. Who cares anyway, except Rose, and she's got her own family now. What a lot of nonsense I talked to her tonight, it was probabl ythe drink, I'm not used to it. I'll tell her not to tell anyone I had that daft idea. Well, she won't tell anyone, she wants it to go away, she probably knows it's bound to. How I wish I could talk to Jenkin. Perhaps this visitation of awfulness is really knowing at last that Jenkin is dead and isn't anywhere. He put Duncan's letter back in its envelope and put it on the mantelpiece, and began to glance at the other letters which he had dropped on the floor. There were two letters for Jenkin. There had been many of those to begin with, now there were fewer. These two were advertisements and he put them in the wastepaper basket. One was the gas bill which he put in his pocket. Then he suddenly felt something like a massive electric shock, ajolt, which for a moment he could not account for and imagined he had actually been touched by some stray wire which had sent a current through him. Or perhaps he was ill, something had given way in his brain. He found lie was looking down at the last of the letters which was lying on the floor at his feet. It was the writing on the envelope which, darting its message into his unconscious mind, had produced this strange shock, and even now, after Gerard had realised that this writing was portentous, perhaps terrible, he did not immediately recognise whose writing it was. Handwriting can tell a tale of joy or of fear well before it is connected with a name. It was Crimond's writing. It was many years since Gerard had received a letter from Crimond, but the script somehow, like a sinister hieroglyph revealed by torchlight in a tomb, took him back many more years, to Oxford, to something, some event, some feeling, too deep now to be uncovered, far away in the dark depths of his mind, and from which the frightening portent derived its original power. Even as Gerard was returned to his present self he felt a sick terror at the sight, a disgusted loathing, and was tempted to tear the unopened letter up into small pieces. He even turned his back upon it and went out to tidy the kitchen, to wash his mug and plate under the hot tap and turn off the light. Then he returned to the sitting room and picked up the letter and opened it. At any rate it was not a long letter. It consisted of only one line. It was an accident. D.

Gerard now took another interval. He went out into the hall, he even opened the front door and found that the rain was less, the wind as ill-tempered as ever. He closed the front door and instinctively bolted it, though he did not always do this. Then he returned to the sitting room and sat down beside the fire and read the note again several times. He sat very quiet while a storm of mixed emotions filled his head, then flew round his head, then filled the room as if with a mass of dark silent swift birds. Human thought is easil yable to break the rules of logic and physics, and at that moment Gerard was able to think and feel a very large number of vivid, even clear, things at the same time. He thought chiefly about Jenkin, Jenkin's death and the accident which had caused it, and this presented itself as a topic which he could now discuss with Jenkin. At any rate, as lie put it to himself, how Jenkin doesn't have to be a ghost, he can be himself, only in the past. His being remains absolute. He didn't suffer, Gerard thought, I can really say this to myself now, it was sudden, he didn't know. Gerard had been unable to look at the brief newspaper reports which described a freak mishap, but he had received a llimpression from hearing people talk. Hefelt now no urge to go further than that impression. I won't ever ask him, he thought (meaning Crimond), I don't want to know exactly what happened, because it doesn't matter now. At no point did it occur to Gerard to doubt that Crimond's sentence told the truth. To doubt it would have been to consent to soul-destroying madness, the whole of the rational world cohered with Crimond's truth-telling. Hecould not write such a letter arid it not be true. As Gerard took all this inhe not only felt the energy which had seemed to forsake him flooding back in great calm generous waves, he also felt as if" in some way he could not yet master, the whole world had pivoted around him, being the same yet offering him all sorts of different views and angles. As he began to consider these Gerard rose and collected up the scattered sheets of Crimond's book and replaced them ina neat pile oil the sideboard. He walked to and fro across the little room, and it was as if the dark bird-thoughts which had been tearing round and round like swifts had begun to settle quietly onthe furniture and regard him with their bright eyes.