Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

Jean did not ques tionCrimond about the book, and of his long hours in the playroom asked only, 'How did it go?' She looked at, but did not open, the piles of notebooks. Once or twice she inspected a current page left open on the desk, but found the subject matter obscure and Crimond's tiny inky writing hard to read. She shopped, she cooked, she looked after the house but did not venture to prettify it. She gave up drink, but did not entirely give up buying clothes which was a natural function. She was used to wearing new dresses. At first she ‘dressed' on occasional solitary visits to central London, to art galleries and matinees. But she feared to meet someone she knew, and these jaunts soon began to seem pointless and out of place. She wore her pretty clothes on some evenings for Crimond who, though disapproving of extravagance, humoured this diversion. Perhaps he felt she must be allowed to retain some small symbol of her former splendour; perhaps that image of the splendour enriched his sense of possession. Crimond had a car, a Fiat, which he occasionally used to go to meetings in the Midlands. He never drove into central London. Jean, soon after her arrival, had fetched her own car, a Rover, to Camberwell, but had hardly ever driven it since. Her Rover and Crimond's Fiat lived outside on the street, sometimes close, sometimes apart, according to the Fiat’s wanderings. Crimond no longer used his bicycle, which remained in the hall. Jean had suggested that she might get a bicycle too and they might go riding, but this had not proved a fruitful idea. She did not mind having no jaunts and no society, and after a while the idea of 'social life' began to seem impossible and abhorrent. Sometimes, encouraged by Crimond, she went to tea with Mrs Lebowitz, the old Polish lady upstairs, who reminisced about the Warsaw Rising. Crimond rose early and worked all day on the book, taking a cup of tea (he never drank coffee) for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch. About six or seven he stopped and they had high tea in the kitchen. Then they watched television inthe front room, the news and political debates in which Crimond vociferously joined, often amusingly, sometimes furiously. They talked easily and continuously at such times, about politics, about books, about pictures, about their childhoods, about places they had been to, especially about cities (Crimond hated 'the country', he had had enough of that when he was a boy), about Ireland, about the history of their love. They did not talk about people they knew. They drank chocolate and ate creamy and sugary cakes (which Crimond liked) at eleven, then went to bed on the big divan in the playroom. On some days, though not often, Crimond knocked off at three and they spent the afternoon making love.

Crimond did not like music, but he enjoyed literature and painting, about which he knew a great deal. He was particularly fond of poetry. All his old college books were on the shelves in the television room, which he called the library, and sometimes he read Greek and Latin poems to Jean and translated them, sometimes he treated her to Dante and to Pushkin. Jean, whose Latin was rusty and her Italian poor, and who knew no Greek or Russian, did not attempt to follow these performances, but watched his animation with intense pleasure. He avidly perused book catalogues, was excited when they arrived, and did not only purchase 'work' books. He had been athletic at Oxford, he cared about fitness, hedid exercises before his breakfast tea. His only visible 'hobby' was guns, which he collected, and could use, as she had seen in Ireland, but in which he did not attempt to interest Jean. Her worries about whether he would be irked by her continual proxitnity soon vanished. He said, 'I work so much better now you're in the house.' On one or two evenings he asked her to sit in the Playroom, not near him but at the far end where he could see her, and read or sew. She had learnt that he liked to see her sew. When he was tired he sometimes cried out,'I can't it, I can't rest!' He would call Jean to him and she would stroke his head, back from the brow and down onto his neck, or 'draw' his sallow freckled face, smoothing his cheeks and his closed eyes and passing her fingers down his long nose. Then he would begin to work again. His industry was terrifying. 'We're crazy people,' he would sometimes say, 'it's like Kafka.'

'It's like happy Kafka,' said Jean.

Or he would say, 'Our love is entirely necessary and entirely impossible.' To which she was to reply, 'It's necessary, because we have proved it is not impossible.' To which he would answer, 'Good. So it exists necessarily like God.' She was ched, surprised, deeply moved, even terrified by his dependence upon her. 'You are the only woman I have ever wanted or ever will or could want.'

Downstairs, they sat on the big double divan, low, hard, almost square, covered with a very old quilt of faded green covered with geometrical designs which Crimond said had been woven in the Hebrides and had once covered his parents' bed.

' I wish you didn't have these guns in your life. Have you got a licence?'

'Ssssh!'

'Why do you like them? All right, I know that men like guns, but why do you?'

'I've always played with guns. Country people have them. They were around when I was a child. My grandfather was a gillie.’

'You never told me that.'

`Well, he was a part-time gillie, so was my father when he was young. They loaded the guns for the gentry and piled up the dead birds. You've probably never witnessed those horrible scenes. You're romantic about firearms because they've never been part of your life.'

`You're romantic!' Jean decided not to tell Crimond that Sinclair had more than once taken her to a 'shoot'. How odd memory was. She saw Sinclair suddenly so clearly with his blond mane and his short straight nose and his luminous intimate dark blue eyes which were so like Rose's, and his jaunty roguish teasing air of a spoilt boy which was so unlike Rose's gentle patient withdrawn look. He was holding a shotgun as, in Jean's memory picture, he turned towards her. His knee-breeches were covered with flecks of golden bracken. Jean had hated it, hated seeing the birds fall. Rose hated it too. 'Do you imagine you'll have to defend yourself one day?'

'I don't think so,' said Crimond, taking her question seriously. 'It's just a matter of precision, I like precision.'

'Oh, I know you're good at it, I remember at Oxford, and in Ireland. You said the target was a symbol, you haven't shot at it since I've been here.'

'I know you don't like it. I'm going to get rid of most of the guns soon anyway.'

'But not all?'

'I want to be able to kill myself if necessary.'

'Not sleeping pills? Of course you'd prefer a more stylish exit.'

'And more certain.'

'I feel sometimes you'd like a war.'

'I don't think so, it would interrupt my work.'

'Really you'd like the Bomb to fall and get rid of all that messy clutter of the past and all that kitsch and false morality you hate so much!'

'We are fat with false morality and inwardness and authenticity and decayed Christianity -'

'Yes, but there must be morality! After all you're a puritan, you detest pornography and promiscuity and -'

'It's the final orgy, the last stand of the so-called incarnate individual, who has withered into a little knot of egoism, even the concept stinks. It's the end of a civilisation which gloats over personal adventures.'

'Crimond! You're a person and an adventurer! You enjoy being an incarnate individual! Or do you let yourself off because you're a philosopher and can see it all – or because you can’t help being a product of a corrupt era? And you say’final’ but what next? We've got to clear it up, we can't rely on bombs or God! Sometimes I think you even want to hate sex, only you can't, you mixed-up son of a Galloway postman!'