Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

`I'm sorry to keep repeating myself,' said Gulliver, 'but I don't see why we should keep paying out money every year to support a book that we passionately disagree with, which we aren't allowed to look at, which he may have abandoned ages ago, which perhaps never existed at all!'

`Oh come,' said Jenkin, 'of course it exists, Crimond isn't a cheat, Gerard saw some of it once -'

`A hundred years ago!' said Rose .

`The point is,' said Gerard, 'that we can't ditch Crimond, We said we'd support him and there it is, we made a promise.'

`The point is,' said Rose, `that it's not the book we said we'd support. I think it never was. Crimond misled us. Crimond is not the man we thought he was. He believes in violence and he believes in lies. He says in one of those pamphlets that truth may have to appear as a lie – and that we are sick with morality, that morality is a disease to be got over!'

`Rose, he meant bourgeois morality!' said Gerard. `He said morality. And he admires T. E. Lawrence.'

`So do I,' said Gerard.

`He supports terrorists.'

`It's hard to define terrorists,' said Jenkin, 'we agreed earlier that violence is sometimes justified -'

`We've been into all that!' said Gulliver.

`Don't defend him,' said Rose, 'I'm not going to help to finance a book that excuses terrorism. We'd all be blamed later for that, people would think he represented our views.'

`I don't think Crimond meant -' said Jenkin.

`How do we know what he meant?' said Gulliver, 'he wraps it up so. Rose is right, he can't distinguish truth and falsehood.'

`Those are old things,' said Gerard, pointing to some pamphlets which Gulliver had discovered and brought with him as 'evidence'.

`It was a phase he went through -' said Jenkin.

`How do we know that?' said Gulliver to Jenkin. 'What he thinks now may be even crazier. And why don't we know what he thinks now? Because he only lets his stuff out to the initiated! You seem to believe he's some sort of dedicated hermit! Of course he belongs to a highly organised underground movement!'

`It's true that he writes things which are circulated privately,' said Jenkin. 'He doesn't publish in the ordinary way any more. Someone showed me a recent thing, quite short -'

`And was it as pernicious as these ones?' asked Rose.

`I don't know whether pernicious is the word, it certainly wasn't less extreme – but it expressed some deep ideas. Rose, he's a thinker, the activists attack him for not caring about the working class!'

`All right, it's his ideas we don't like!' said Gulliver. 'Ideas do things too, as you know perfectly well! Of course he's not a Stalinist, he belongs to some sort of mad Trotskyist-anarchist roue, smash the nearest thing is their creed, any sort of chaos is a form of revolution!'

They had been arguing now for nearly an hour. Everything about the argument upset Gerard. Rose and Gulliver were both surprisingly venomous, they seemed to be consumed by personal hatred for Crimond. Gulliver detested Crimond because (and Gull had told Gerard this) Crimond had once snubbed him savagely at a public meeting. But he also hated what he took to be Crimond's theories, and was speaking from he heart in defence of ardently held political convictions. Gulliver, riffling his dark oily hair back with his hand and opening his golden brown eyes defiantly wide and expanding the nostrils of his aquiline nose, looked spirited, distinctly younger and more interesting. At one point Gerard smiled at him and received a signal of gratitude from the brown eyes. Gerard then felt guilty and thought, I must help that boy, does he blame me, I hope not. Rose's emotion (she was quite flushed with indignation) Gerard attributed not only to strong political principles, especially concerning secret societies and terrorism, but also to herbelief, of which he had often been made aware but on which he had never commented, that Crimond was Gerard's enemy and might some day do him harm. Also involved were Rose's deep feelings about Jean, Rose felt anger with, and fear for, her life-long friend and blamed Crimond for both of these distressing sensations. Gerard had not discussed this matter with her either. Is Crimond my enemy? Gerard wondered. It was an unpleasant idea. Gerard had also been upset, during the argument, by Jenkin's quiet determination to excuse Crimond. It was some time since Gerard had had a really detailed discussion of' politics with Jenkin. He had always assumed that their views on this matter more or less coincided. Supposing he were now to discover, and feel obliged to pursue, some really serious and disturbing difference of opinion? This possibility of a damaging breach was instantly transformed in his mind into the image of Jenkin somehow defecting to Crimond. But this was, must be, unthinkable. Gerard was more immediately annoyed by the aggressive atmosphere in which he was being driven to go and 'have it out' with the rascal.

They were sitting at the round rosewood table in Rose's flat which overlooked a little square garden enclosed by railings. Between bare branches of trees, before Rose had pulled the curtains, the lighted windows of houses opposite made a pattern of golden rectangles. Snow was still slowly falling. It was now after five o'clock and the lamps were on in Rose's sitting room. It was warm in the flat and their overcoats and umbrellas, now dry and unfrozen, were piled upon the Jacobean chest in the hall. Rose's flat was comfortable, a bit shabby, full of a miscellany of things which had come from her maternal grandfather's house in Ireland. The 'fine' stuff, the Waterford glass, the Georgian silver, the pictures by Lavery and Orpen, Rose had given to her cousins in Yorkshire after Sinclair's death, at a time when she felt dead herself and wanted to throw away all the things that might have lived in her brother's house and belonged to his children, to strip herself of all those insidious small reminders, the terrible details, leaving but one great comprehensive pain. That had been before she had found herself, so miraculously, in bed with Gerard. We were suffering from shock, she thought, we were broken and not put together, we were half made of wood like puppets not quite changed into real people. It was something not quite real and for him, she felt, forgettable like a dream. Did he remember, she even wondered? If only it, that, could have happened earlier – but it couldn't – or later – but it didn't. It was several years before Rose really wanted to acquire anything, even clothes, for herself. Her remaining pieces of furniture, mainly from Ireland where she now had no close relations, were handsome enough but un-looked-after, imperfect, damaged, scuffed, stained, even broken. The mahogany sideboard was scratched, the Davenport lacked a foot, the rosewood table had wine-glass rings, the Jacobean chest in the hall upon which the thawing coats were enjoying the warmth of the central heating had lost a side panel which had been replaced by plywood. Rose had once meant to have the bathroom carpeted and the curtains cleaned. She had meant to have the furniture 'seen to', but she kept putting it off because her life always seemed so provisional, a waiting life, not settled like other people's. Now it was probably too late to bother. Neville and Gillian, the children of her cousins, the heirs, sometimes chided her for not having the table properly French polished and the chest restored. The young people cared about these things. They would be theirs one day.

`I wonder if he's actually mad,' said Rose.

`Of course not,' said Jenkin, 'if we get obsessed with his S hcrecklichkeit and simply call him crazy we won't think about what he says -'

`He's on the side of the evil in the world,' said Rose. 'He's a bully, and I hate bullies. He's dangerous, he'll kill someone.'