Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

'So all you can say is that you've got to go?' `You'll be on the telephone to them.' `Don't be contemptible as well as cruel.'

'Of course they are my friends too. I'm gambling the whole issue.'

'I don't like the gambling image either. To imply you just crave excitement does yo uless than justice. I suggest you get dressed and have some coffee and calm down.'

'I'll take a suitcase,' said Jean, 'and come back for the rest some time when you're at the office. You can go to bed and to sleep, you're reeling with sleep. When you wake up I'll be gone and you can curse me.'

'I shall never curse you .I just think you're a bloody traitor.' 'I don't know what to say. I don't know what the future holds, whether I'll be alive even.'

'What the hell does that mean?'

'To go near Crimond i sto go near death, somehow .I don't mean anything in particular by that – just, it's danger. He doesn't fear death, he's a Kamikaze type, in a war he'd get a VC'

'He keeps guns and has a very nasty fantasy life, that's all.'

'Well, you used to keep guns when you belonged to that club, you fancied yourself as a marksman. You and Crimond were always messing g with guns at Oxford. No, but if he ever stopped working he might be very desperate.'

'And kill himself or you? You said he once proposed a suicide pact!'

'Not really, he just likes taking risks. He's brave, he doesn't evade things, he tells the truth, he's the most truthful person I've ever met.'

'You mean brutal. You can't be truthful without other virtues.'

'He has other virtues! He's dedicated, he's an idealist, he cares about poor people and -'

'Hejust wants to be admired by the young! You know what I think about Crimond's "caring'!’

'He's a strong person. You and I connect through our weaknesses. Crimond and I connect through our strength.'

'I don't think that means anything, it's vulgar rhetoric. Jean, on the day we got married you said, this is for happiness.' 'Happiness. That's one of our weaknesses.'

'You certainly won't find it there. But don't think it will be death or glory this time. You are choosing a dull and dreary servitude with a mean cheap little tyrant.'

'Ali – if I could only tell you how little I value my life -' 'You are telling me, and it doesn't mean anything except that you want to insult our marriage.'

'I don't,' said jean frowning. She was leaning back against the closed door and had kicked off the dusty slippers in which she had danced all night. 'That's not right. You mentioned happiness – I'm just trying to convey to you how little it matters to me -'

Duncan pulled himself up a little in his armchair. He said to himself, I'mtrying to make her argue, I'm trying to keep her just a little longer, like asking the executioner for two minutes. He thought, so I have despaired already? Yes. Now it is as if I expected it. But, oh, the happiness, the happiness, which she now sees as nothing. He said, 'Look, this love of yours for Crimond seems to me without substance, almost something stupid, it's not to do with real life at all. You're like two mad people who crave to be together but can't communicate -'

'Mad, yes,' sa id Jean, 'but – we communicate.' Her eyes widened again and she sighed hugely, touching her breast and rolling her head.

'My dear – when you chucked it last time it was for good reasons.'

'I can't remember the reasons, except that loving you must have been one, and still loving you – but, well, here we are-“`If only we'd had children, that would have anchored you in reality. I've never managed to make all this real for you. You've been like some kind of visitor.'

`Don't keep saying that about children.'

`I haven't said it for years.'

`All right, we've never played the husband and wife game which you call real. That hasn't stopped us from loving each other absolutely -'

"'Absolutely"?!'

`I'm sorry, everything I say now must seem gross and stupid, it's part of how things have totally changed that I can't speak to you properly. But you understand -'

`You expect me to understand you so perfectly and love you so much that I won't mind your going to another man, and for the second time!'

`I'm sorry, my darling, I'm so so sorry. I know this wound won't heal. But this has to be. And – this doesn't make it any better for you – it isn't, for me, really anything to do with the future – the future doesn't in that sense exist one way or the other.'

`You leave the future to me, now that you've utterly desolated and defiled it. But you will have to live your own foul enslaved future day by day and minute by minute – quite apart from anything else, your stupidity amazes me.' Duncan, with some difficulty, hauled himself up out of his armchair. `Everything about this infatuation, everything that I imagine about you and Crimond being together, fills me with loathing and horror and disgust.'

`I'm sorry. It's terrible. It's carnage, it's the slaughterhouse. I'm sorry.' She opened the door. 'Look – do stop drinking – don't take to drink now, cut it down a bit.'

Duncan said nothing, he moved away towards the window, turning his back on her. jean watched him for a moment, looking at his broad back and hunched shoulders and pendant shirt. Then she left the room and closed the door. She ran to her bedroom and began cramming things into a suitcase in desperate haste. She slipped out of the kimono and stepped into a skirt. She made up her face carefully, simply. Her face with Duncan had been stern and calm, the face of what had to be. Now in the mirror she saw a mad scattered convulsed face.

All the time, as she packed and dressed and dealt with her face, she was shuddering and trembling, her lower jaw moving compulsively, a faint growling in her throat. She put on her

coat, found her handbag, stood still for a moment controlling breath. Then walked out to the front door and out of the flat.

Duncan, who had been looking down through the leafy hoanches of the tall plane trees at the garden in the square, heard the soft click of the closing door and turned round. He oaw on the carpet the dusty discarded slippers and picked them up. He did not want to be moved by them either to anger or to tears, and he dropped them into a waste paper basket will went through into his bedroom. He and Jean occupied separate rooms now. Not that that had any great significance in the huge peculiar apparatus of their marriage, their unity, their love, which had lasted so long and survived so much and was now perhaps finally over. Something cosmic and crucial had occurred, his whole body knew it and he panted for breath. It had happened again, the impossible, the unbelievly had occurred, it had happened again. Why had he not wept, screamed, fallen to his knees, beseeched, raged, seized Iran by the throat? He had coldly despaired. Hope would have been death by torture. He had never for a moment conjectured that Jean might be mistaken, never conceived of paying: 'It's all in your mind, if you turn up he'll be dismayed imd embarrassed.' He entirely believed that in all that long night they had not exchanged a word. That bore the unmistakable mark of Crimond's style. Duncan knew that Crimond now expected her to come with the same certainty that she had in coming.

It was in the despair and the finality that he sought refuge. He could not have endured speculation. The suddenness of the thing made it now seem so like death. Jean's abrupt vanishing, the unspeakable reappearance of Crimond, the dreadful fall into the river. It was all one absolute cosmic universal smash. How wrong Jean had been to imagine that he would now telephone the others. He felt at that moment that in losing her he had forfeited all his relation to the world, and had no desire left for any human contact. He supposed that later he would be discredited in front of his friends, humiliated and disgraced, ashamed of this second defeat, of the fatal `bungling' of which his wife had accused him. Now his misery made no account of shame. Of course, he would 'take her back' if she came, but she would not come, would not want to return to what was left of him after this laceration. She would have to assume that he hated her. If Crimond ditched her, whether this happened tomorrow or years from now, she would go right away into an aloneness and a freedom which she had perhaps yearned for during all the time when she had put so much energy into keeping faith with Duncan and with her idea of their mutual love. She would go away and work and think, take counsel with her powerful father in America, discover some world to conquer, go to India or Africa, run some large enterprise, use up elsewhere all that restless clever power which, as his wife, she had wasted on happiness. Yes, they had done it for happiness, and .jean might be right to see this as weakness.