Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

'And you would leave us to hold up the baby?' Dave was incoherent with indignation. 'You commit stealing and blackmail and when all is confusion you go of to Paris and leave here your stolen property to be found by the police, no?'

'All expenses paid,' said Finn.

'Look,' I said, 'I won't stay long, only half a day if need be. I'll just see what Madge wants. If trouble breaks out here you can cable me and I'll be back in a few hours.'

Dave calmed down a little. 'Can you not wait?' he said.

'It sounds so urgent,' I told him, 'and there may be money in it.' The all expenses paid aspect had suggested this to me very strongly.

This made Dave more thoughtful. 'All right,' he said, after a little more discussion, 'you may as well earn your bail. But first we must decide what letter to write, and second, you must leave us much money to feed the animal and in case there is a crisis.'

'There's no difficulty about money,' I told him, nursing a secure feeling about Sammy's cheque.

Then a dreadful thought spun me round like a bullet in the shoulder. Of course, as soon as Sammy had heard who it was that had kidnapped Mars he would have stopped the cheque. I leapt out of my chair.

'What is it now?' said Dave. 'You are getting on my nerves.'

How far would Sammy's sporting instincts extend? Not that far, I was pretty sure. Or would it depend how angry he was? A mental picture of his sitting-room as I had last seen it rose before me and I groaned. The only possibility was that he might have forgotten about the cheque altogether.

'You spoke to Sammy personally on the phone?' I asked Dave. 'Yes,' he said, 'from a call box, of course.'

'And was he angry?'

'He was murderous,' said Dave.

'Did he say anything special?' I asked.

'Now I come to think of it,' said Dave, 'he did. I meant to tell you earlier. He said, tell Donaghue he can have the girl and I'm keeping the cash.'

I could have wept. Then of course I had to tell them all about it. I went and fetched the cheque and we looked at it together. It was like viewing the corpse of a loved one. Finn said he had never seen a cheque for so much money. Even Dave was moved.

'Now I must go to Paris!' I said. With the world owing me so much money something radical had to be done at once.

Finn was studying Sammy's statement of account. 'There's still Lyrebird,' he said. 'He can't take that back.'

'It only hasn't won yet!' said Dave.

'You two watch the papers,' I said. 'I've got about sixty pounds in the bank. How much can you put up, Finn?'

'Ten pounds,' he said.

'And you, Dave?' I asked.

'Don't be a fool!' said Dave.

Finally we agreed that a stake of fifty pounds should go on the horse from the three of us. We were all a little unhinged still by the loss of the six hundred and thirty-three pounds ten.

After that we discussed the question of the letter. I maintained my view that our dealing should be with Sadie. I was still wounded by Dave's conjecture, and I recalled with some distress how Sadie had said that she liked me. If there had been more time I would have speculated about whether this had influenced my decision. It wasn't, however, a moment for indulging in analyses of motive. If one has good reasons for an action one should not be deterred from doing it because one may also have bad reasons. I decided that scruples were out of place here. Sadie was more intelligent than Sammy, and as far as this adventure was concerned Sadie was the boss. Also she had not had her curtains wrenched out of the wall and her sitting-room turned upside down. That Sadie might still fancy me was neither here nor there. I didn't like it, all the same, and I was impatient to be off.

We agreed finally that Dave should write a simple letter over my signature to Sadie proposing an exchange of Mars for a formal recognition of my status in the matter of the translation and an adequate compensation for the use which had been made of it. We argued for some time about what compensation we should demand. ' What are you after,' as Dave put it, 'restitution, damages, or revenge?' Finn thought that we should make it a straight case of blackmail and ask for as much as we thought we could get by the detention of Mars together with veiled hints about a possible deterioration in his health, and suggested five hundred pounds. Dave thought that we should only ask whatever might have been the fee charged for a preview of the translation. He said that he had no idea what this would be, and that strictly it was owed to the publisher and not to me, but that in the circumstances and in order to uphold my dignity I might ask for fifty pounds. I thought that I needed to receive not only the regular fee but also compensation for the theft of the typescript, and suggested modestly two hundred pounds.

In the end we fixed the sum at a hundred pounds. I felt this was very tame; but I was now thoroughly obsessed by the idea of going to Paris and I would have agreed to anything. I signed my name at the foot of a number of sheets of paper, on one of which Dave was to type the letter when he had drafted it along the lines we had agreed upon. Dave wanted me to suggest some endearments or personal touches which could be added to make the letter look more authentic; but I insisted that it must remain completely impersonal and businesslike. I very reluctantly gave Dave a blank cheque. Then I set off to Victoria to catch the night ferry, in order to save money and because I am nervous of air travel.

Fourteen

I find that sea voyages promote reflection. Not that the ferry can strictly be called a sea voyage in the ordinary sense. A necessary element in the experience of travelling by boat is the smell; whereas one of the special features of the night ferry is that one encounters the kinaesthetic sensations of a boat combined with the olfactory sensations of a train. It was in the midst of such a dèreglement de tons les seas that I now lay thinking about Hugo.

My interview with Hugo could hardly be said to have been a success; on the other hand it hadn't exactly been a failure either. I had acquainted Hugo with something which he needed to know, and we had exchanged not unfriendly words. We had even had an adventure together in the course of which I had acquitted myself at least without shame. In a sense it could be said that the ice was broken between us. But it is possible to break the ice without burying the hatchet. As I had been rather busy since my meeting with Hugo I had not yet had time to brood upon my impressions. I now gathered them all together and began to turn them over one by one. I remembered vividly my first sight of Hugo, as he stood there at the top of the steps, like the tsar of all the Russias. He seemed to me now, as I lay upon my undulating pillow, an image of mystery and power. I felt more than ever certain that we had not finished with each other. To whatever effect the threads of my destiny might be interwoven with his, the tangle had yet to be unravelled. So strongly did this come upon me that I found myself regretting that I had to go to Paris and surrender, even for one day, the possibility of seeing him again.

What had not been made at all clear by our interview, and from this point of view it could be said to have been a failure, were Hugo's present feelings towards me. He had not, it is true, displayed any overt hostility. His behaviour had been, if anything, rather casual. But was this a bad sign or a good sign? I recalled in detail Hugo's expression, his tone of voice, his gestures even, and compared them with earlier memories, but without reaching any conclusion. How fed up Hugo was with me still remained to be seen. I then thought about The Silencer and could not help wishing that Sadie and Sammy could have chosen some place other than Sadie's kitchen for their conspiratorial talk. I would, all things considered, have preferred to have retrieved the book and been without the information, and so been spared a great deal of trouble, past and to come; for I didn't seriously imagine that my warning to Hugo had any importance save as a gesture of good will. As for the book itself, it figured in my mind, not only as a casus belli between myself and Hugo, but as a constellation of ideas which I could no longer be so disloyal as to pretend to be discontinuous with the rest of my universe. I must reconsider what I had said. But where could I find a copy now? It occurred to me that I might perhaps take off Jean Pierre, if he still had it, the copy which I had sent him on publication and which I could be fairly certain that he had never opened. The thought of Jean Pierre led me on to thoughts of Paris, beautiful, cruel, tender, disquieting, enchanting city, and on these I slept and dreamed of Anna.