Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

I stopped to look at Paris. Its gentle colours awoke for me, clear but not violent under the July sun. The fishermen were fishing, and the fiáneurs were flaning, and the dogs were barking down at the steps where people try to persuade them to swim in the Seine. How strangely it excites people to see their dogs swimming! Beyond the green trees the towers of Notre-Dame rose tenderly like lovers rising from the grass. 'Paris,' I said aloud. Once more something had slipped through my fingers. Only this time I knew very well what it was. Money. The heart of reality. The rejection of reality the only crime. I was a dreamer, a criminal. I wrung my hands.

As I reached the left bank I began madly to want to drink; and at the same instant I realized that I had hardly any cash. I had thrust into my pocket as I was leaving the few notes which I had left over from my last trip. I had intended to borrow something from Madge. But no one with any aesthetic sensibility would have tried to borrow five thousand francs off somebody from whom he had just refused to accept twelve hundred pounds. And anyway I didn't think of it. I cursed. I walked as far as the Boulevard Saint-Germain wondering what to do. Then a second need, equally expensive, began to make itself felt: the need to communicate my sorrow to some other person. I balanced the two needs against my assets and against each other. The need for communication was the more profound. I made for the post office in the Rue du Four and addressed a wire to Messrs Gellman and O'Finney which ran as follows. Just definitely refused minimum sum of twelve hundred pounds. Jake. Then I went to the Reine Blanche and ordered a pernod, which although it is not the cheapest of aperitifs is the one with the highest alcohol content. I felt very slightly better.

I sat there for a long time. At first I kept thinking about the money. I brooded on every aspect of it. I turned it into francs. I turned it into dollars. I shifted it around from one European capital to another. I invested it avariciously at high rates of interest. I spent it riotously on chateau wines and chateau women. I bought the very latest make of Aston Martin. I rented a flat overlooking Hyde Park and filled it with works of the lesser-known Dutch masters. I lay on a striped divan beside a pale-green telephone while the princes of the film world poured fawning, supplication, and praise along the wire. The exquisite star, the idol of three continents, who lay like a panther at my feet, poured me out another glass of champagne. It's H. K.,' I murmured to her, putting my hand over the mouthpiece; 'what a perfect bore!' I tossed her an orchid which lay on the table; and clasping my body with her sinuous hands she began to pull herself up to lie beside me, as I told H. K. that I was in conference and that if he would contact my secretary in a day or two no doubt a meeting might be arranged.

When I was tired of this I began to think about Madge, and to wonder who it was who had installed her in the Hotel Prince de Clêves and whose unseen presence had hovered in the background of our interview. Was it the man who had owned ships or something in Indo-China? I pictured him, white-haired and heavy, battered by winds and stained by the oriental sun, with power and intelligence breaking through the lines of his face of an old Frenchman who had seen, in his time, many things. I liked him. He was wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. The years which had passed since he had pursued money with passion could now be counted by the score. He had had his fill of money: he had loved it, struggled with it, suffered for it and made others suffer; he had bathed in it until it had filled his head and eyes with gold; finally he had tired of it, and cast it from him fortune by fortune. But money will never leave a man who has endured enough for its sake. He had become weary, he had consented. He lived with it now as with an aged wife. He was come back to France, tired and detached, with the detachment of one who has gratified every wish and found every gratification equally transitory. He would watch with a gentle indifference the launching of his film company, in a scene where every actor except himself was driven mad by the smell of money.

Or perhaps Madge's protector was some shrewd Englishman: a middle-aged man, I pictured him, with long experience of the film business. Perhaps a failed director who had turned his artistic talents into the business side of the industry, consoling himself by making money for the loss of a vision of beauty which would nevertheless haunt him all his life, and make him short-tempered whenever he came near the set and saw other men struggling with the problems which had given him ecstasy at twenty-five, and sleepless nights at thirty, and finally brought him to despair. Where had Madge met him? Possibly at one of those parties of 'film people' which Sammy had said that Madge frequented on the occasion when he had warned me that not letting them out of your sight was the only way.

Or perhaps--the devastating thought struck me at last--perhaps Madge's friend was Jean Pierre himself? I absolutely hated this idea. But it was by no means impossible. I had never introduced Madge to Jean Pierre although she had often asked me to do so. Some instinct of caution had deterred me from promoting this particular juxtaposition. There are Englishwomen for whom Frenchmen are, as it were, ex officio romantic, and I think I suspected Madge of being one of these. Madge was, however, perfectly capable of having introduced herself to Jean Pierre without telling me. I remembered the familiar way she had referred to him by his Christian name in our recent talk; and although she might have simply picked this up from me, or from her new milieu, it was also possible that she had in fact cast Jean Pierre in the role of her fortune maker. He was not my idea of a charmer, but women are funny.

I thought about this a bit longer and then decided that after all it was unlikely. Of my three hypotheses the second one was doubtless the most probable. A while later I felt that I didn't care anyhow. One glass of pernod had taken me some way; a second glass took me further still. The sun began to rise over my intellectual landscape and I saw at last, in an outburst of clarity, the real shape of that which had before so obscurely compelled me to what had seemed to be a senseless decision. It wasn't just that I didn't want to enter Madge's world and play Madge's game. I had so littered my life already with compromises and half-truths, I could have picked my way through a few more. The twisting hills of falsehood never cease to appal me, but I constantly enter them; possibly because I see them as short corridors which lead out again into the sun: though, perhaps, this is the only fatal lie. I didn't care for the role of valet de sentiment which Madge had prepared for me, but I could perhaps have supported it because I really liked Madge and because of the cash prizes, if there had been nothing else at stake. I had said to Madge that it wasn't Anna, and I think that that was true. What my relations with Anna might or mightn't compel me to do in the future remained to be seen. I felt, indeed, almost fatalistic about it. If Anna was strong enough to draw me to her over every obstacle she was strong enough to draw me, and the obstacles would be overcome at the proper time. Meanwhile Madge was in no position to make complaints. It wasn't that.

When I asked myself what it was, there rose authoritatively before me the shop window which I had seen earlier that morning surmounted by the words Prix Goncourt. As for the Prix Goncourt itself, je m'en fichais, that was just a label. What mattered was what Jean Pierre had done. Or rather even that didn't matter. Even if Nous Les Vainqueurs turned out to be just as bad as Jean Pierre's other books, this was of no importance either. All that mattered was a vision which I had had of my own destiny and which imposed itself upon me as a command. What had I to do with script-writing? When I had told Madge that it was not my genre I had not been thinking what I was saying; but it was true all the same. The business of my life lay elsewhere. There was a path which awaited me and which if I failed to take it would lie untrodden forever. How much longer would I delay? This was the substance and all other things were shadows, fit only to distract and deceive. What did I care for money? It was as nothing to me. In the light of that vision it shrivelled like autumn leaves, its gold turning to brown and crumbling away into dust. When I had had these thoughts a profound contentment filled me, and I resolved at the same instant to go and look for Anna.