A Fairly Honourable Defeat (18 page)

Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: A Fairly Honourable Defeat

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‘Spiritually speaking, I slaved. God, what a rotten life. Started work at fourteen. Fifty years of sodding boredom. Wife left me, the bitch. You as an offspring. I often wonder why I didn’t end it all long ago.’

‘Well, why didn’t you?’

‘So now you’re trying to drive your old father into his grave—’

‘No, Daddy, of course I—’

‘I know you hate my guts.’

‘Daddy, don’t talk
rubbish.
’

‘God, as if it wasn’t enough punishment living in this shithouse and seeing your face every day I’ve got this blasted pain all the time in my hip. Can you imagine what that’s like? No, you can’t, and you don’t even try to. You’ve got no physical sympathy. All you care about is your precious nig nogs and layabouts.’

‘The doctor wanted you to go to hospital for a test—’

‘You come out of those places feet first. They’re swarming with bugs. They don’t even bother to sterilize things any more. They know it’s no use.’

‘They can operate for arthritis now, Daddy. They can give you a new hip joint.’

‘I don’t want their bloody machinery rusting away inside of me!’

‘It won’t rust. Things only rust if they’re exposed to the air.’

‘Fat lot you know about it. I doubt if you know a single true fact.’

‘It’s after eleven thirty p.m.’

‘It isn’t in Australia. It isn’t on the moon. So it can’t be true here.’

‘Oh all right. Do let someone help you or else stop complaining. The doctor said—’

‘The doctor’s a fool. They don’t teach them properly nowadays. Did you know that your hair goes on growing after you’re dead?’

‘No.’

‘They have to shave corpses. There’s a man at the hospital who does nothing else.’

‘OK, OK—’

‘Must you talk like a bloody American? You needn’t bother to shave me. You’ll be too busy celebrating anyway.’

‘Daddy, please—’

‘And I’ll tell you another thing you weren’t able to give your wife—’

‘Shut up, Dad, and clear off. I’ve got to work.’

‘Work he calls it. You live in a dream world. You clear off. I’m sick of the sight and the smell of you.’

Tallis stood up and gathered his notebooks together. He picked the pieces of the broken plates up off the floor and put them on top of a pile of old newspapers underneath the sink. He resisted the familiar impulse to slam the door and began to go slowly up the stairs. The jazz music from up above became louder. Tallis pulled himself up by the banisters and went into his own bedroom and shut the door. He pulled the blind down. There were no curtains. He sat down on the divan bed and began to pick his nose.

The room was small and narrow and the bed, which stretched along the wall, took up most of it. There were no sheets, but a mound of thin blankets underneath which Tallis slept in winter and on top of which he slept in summer. Books were piled against the other wall. Tallis pulled his legs up and leaned back. He could not think without a table. Better give up and sleep now. Get up early and finish lecture. Better not thoughts now. Sleep. Unbeing. No point in kneeling down, folding hands, muttering. Self-abasement, prostration, licking the ground and wriggling through. Tears and sex. God, what a muck-heap my mind is, thought Tallis. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and regularly. Words came without volition, sinking very slowly through his mind like pebbles. Words out of some lost and ancient past. Lighten my darkness. Tiddy pom tiddy pom tiddy pom from up above. The perils and dangers of this night. With his eyes still closed he uncurled his legs and turned over to lie prone upon the bed, burying his face in the pillow. That peace which the world cannot give. There was light somewhere, cool precious light, somewhere quite else. The pillow smelt of dust and age and grief. It was an old pillow. It had attended upon life and death and birth and was tired of them all. It had no pillow slip on and it tickled Tallis’s nose. Get undressed and turn out light. Idiotic go sleep like this.

His sister was standing at the foot of the bed dressed in a long dress. There were visitants from another world by whose presence he was sometimes troubled and perplexed and more rarely delighted. These he knew were minor presences, riff raff of consciousness. This was different. She came with a vividness which was not that of dream, yet always at these still moments and at night. Sometimes he felt she cheated him of other things. She interposed. Was it a protection? She wore a long robe of a pale colour. She must have altered with the years, growing older with him, but he could not clearly remember. She was silent and yet seemed to speak. Perhaps she spoke to some part of him of which he knew nothing. She looked and yet he could not see her eyes. He was always very quiet when she came, pinned down, heavy, glad, and yet a little frightened too.

He jerked over with a fast beating heart. The room was empty. The electric light was on. It was too bright. His mouth had moistened the pillow. He sat up. The room was filled with the appalling thought of Morgan. While she had been inconceivably far away the thing had been bearable. Now he felt crippled with pain at the knowledge that she had returned to England and had not come straight to him. Yet why should he have expected this? He had not really expected anything, he thought, during the time that she was away. He had tried not to think of it as an interim, though he had never for a second told himself: it is finished. It was as if she had been translated to another planet. There was no spatial tug any more between them. Yet he must all the time have retained his hope and thought of himself still as being her home and the natural ground of her being.

Now that she was back, every day and every hour of her silence turned that hope into torture. She was no longer outside the world. The distance between them was the familiar traversable distance between w.11 and s.w.10. They could reach each other by bus. No, he had no plan. He did not even wonder whether it was pride which made him idle when every tormented nerve yearned to cry out: Come back! He did not look so deep. He knew that for the moment he could do nothing. He just thought about her and about the past. They had known it would be difficult. The tender humble consciousness of difficulty, of distance, had always been a part of their love. Yet it had seemed like the beginning of a great enterprise. They had never quarrelled.

He sat on the bed rubbing his eyes. His eyes itched with tiredness and dust. His body was warm and restless with sexual desire. He had not made love since the last time with her. The Pakistanis’ wireless played
God Save the Queen
and became silent. Good night, good night. There were distant cars and the intermittent night cries of the neighbourhood. There was almost always to be heard some sound of human trouble, shouting people, quarrelling people, weeping people, drunks. Tallis wondered where Peter was now. Although he tried, he communicated less and less with the boy. Tallis’s Peter was a very different person from Rupert’s Peter or even Hilda’s Peter. Tallis knew that. With his parents Peter acted a part. Tallis had thought this was something bad but was just now beginning to believe that it might be an element of salvation. The separation from which so much had been hoped had conceivably stripped the boy of his last defence, the imperative need to keep up appearances. With Tallis Peter had no role and lived in a state of vulnerability and nakedness which was not too far from despair.

They had also begun to get on each other’s nerves. Tallis was clumsy, Peter was surly. Tallis had hoped that his protégé would have eyes for the unfortunates about him, who even if they could not always inspire compassion might appear interesting or at the very least picturesque to a boy nurtured in a world where money and good breeding precluded screams and blows. Here the causes of human misery, though they were infinitely complex, were shadowily visible and one could see the machine. Tallis had trusted that a glimpse of the machine might make Peter understand something, might make him see that revolt may be itself mechanical, and that human ills need thought and work which are disciplines of the imagination. Even if Notting Hill had made Peter want Cambridge that would have been something. But now these calculations seemed merely stupid. Peter was shut up inside a world of private mythology and personal adventure and the picturesque ministered merely to that. Tallis knew of all the dangers. There was crime, there was heroin, there was despair and unbalance of the mind. Peter no longer told him with whom he spent his time. The objects which appeared at intervals in Peter’s room were doubtless not acquired by the old-fashioned method of handing money across a shop counter. Tallis had so far failed to make Peter discuss this seriously. He had imagined that Peter needed love and for the moment not parental love. Now he was not far from thinking that perhaps what the boy needed was professional psychiatric help. The idea was detestable.

All Morgan’s things were still in the locked room downstairs. Would she come for them? No. She would send Hilda. And this time he would not be able to say no. Then I’ll let the room, he thought. At any rate that would bring in four pounds a week. Hilda paid him for Peter’s room, of course, but she seemed quite unaware how much London rents had gone up, and only paid him thirty shillings a week, though it was the best room in the house. The bank manager was getting nasty about the overdraft. The problem of how to run an ordinary life seemed to be getting more and more insoluble. How can I be responsible for Peter, thought Tallis, when I can’t organize myself? I must find more lecturing, he thought, another class. Why on earth did I agree to write that report for the housing committee? Would this muddle just go on and on or would it end in some sort of final catastrophe? Sometimes he wished for that catastrophe, wished that someone would come and just cart him away. Yet he knew his own toughness and knew that in all probability while he lived the muddle would simply go on and on and on.

Tallis got up and began to take off his trousers. He stood in his shirt vaguely scratching his back. He felt depressed and amorous and very tired.

There was a soft padding sound on the stairs and a tap at the door. It was Peter. His plump face and tassels of blond hair leaned round the door. ‘Hello, Tallis. I’m starving. Is there anything to eat? I can’t see anything.’

‘There’s a tin of tongue in the cupboard,’ said Tallis. ‘The tin opener’s somewhere. On the dresser. Where have you been?’

Peter had vanished. Tallis pulled off his shirt. He always slept in his vest. He pulled back the top blanket and turned off the light. He sat upright in bed with his back against the wall, looking at the red night sky outlining the blind. He saw Morgan’s face alight with tenderness and humour. He deliberately blotted it out. He thought of quite other things. He began vaguely to caress himself.

‘Tallis, are you asleep?’

Damn. ‘No, Peter, what is it?’

‘Can I talk to you?’

‘Oh all right. Where have you been?’

‘Walking.’

Peter sat down on the end of Tallis’s bed, his big head outlined against the reddish light.

‘Peter, I looked into your room today and what did I see? I saw two transistor sets, two cameras, two electric torches, three electric razors, two silk scarves and a cigarette lighter.’

‘Really?’

‘Did you steal these things?’

‘Not the smaller electric torch. Mother brought that over ages ago. I’ve had it since I was ten. I think she felt it might cheer me up, like an old teddy bear or something.’

‘Peter, you know you mustn’t steal.’

‘So you said before. But you were unable to tell me why.’

‘To begin with it’s wrong. And secondly you might get into serious trouble.’

‘I’m indifferent to secondly and I don’t understand to begin with. What does it mean to say stealing is wrong? I only take things from big shops. No one is hurt. What’s wrong with that?’

‘It’s
wrong.
’

‘But what does that mean?’

‘Oh hell,’ said Tallis. He felt very weary and aching with unsatisfied desire. Right and wrong were as shadowy as bats. ‘It’s undignified.’

‘Suppose I reject dignity as a value?’

‘You should respect other people’s property.’

‘I’m prepared to respect other people. But under capitalism these things are not the property of the people, they’re the property of big impersonal combines which are already making far too much money.’

‘It involves concealment and lying.’

‘Not even much concealment. I just pick the stuff up. And no lying. If someone asks me what I’m doing I shall say I’m stealing. And I’m not lying to you.’

‘Your parents would be very unhappy if you were arrested.’

‘Possibly, but that’s nothing to do with
stealing.
And parents must take their chance.’

‘You haven’t joined any kind of gang have you?’

‘No, I’m on my own. I’m free. I’m just experimenting with myself. You mustn’t worry so.’

‘It’s all so bad for you, Peter. God, I wish you were back at Priory Grove.’

‘Well, I’m not going back there! If you chuck me out I’ll find another room around here by myself.’