A Fairly Honourable Defeat (29 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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When Rupert had finished speaking Tallis waited as if there might be something more to come. He looked puzzled. Then he said, ‘Thank you very much, Rupert.’ And to Hilda, ‘Please forgive me, I must go. Don’t bother to see me to the door. Oh how kind of you. Thank you, good-bye, good-bye.’ He went away smiling and waving.
Hilda and Rupert walked back into the drawing room. They picked up their drinks. They stared at each other in complete bafflement.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
‘I WANT A PEE,’ said Peter.
‘Well, let’s stop here,’ said Morgan. ‘It seems a nice place.’
She stopped the car. They were on their way back from Cambridge, where Peter, all docility and common sense all of a sudden, had conversed with his supervisor.
Peter, perspiring in white shirt and rolled up sleeves, jumped out and disappeared through a screen of tall pale yellow grasses into some sort of gully. Morgan sat at the wheel of Hilda’s car, dreamily looking up into the blue sky. It was suddenly very silent now that the engine of the car was switched off. No, one could hear insects, a quiet incessant buzzing, not peaceful, rather frenzied really, but happy. There was an intense summery sense of the present moment. A dry smell of grass tickled in the nose. The flowers of the grass were mostly dried up and baked to a brittle tawniness, but there were a few feathery mauve globes here and there, and also some plump red poppies.
The world is crazy but good, she thought. That seemed to be the right formulation. It had all become so much clearer in the last few days. It had been right to go to Julius. When one has such a deep instinctive need to do something then it cannot be wrong to do it. Julius always
shows
me things, she thought, he is a great world-revealer. I have no idea what is going to happen, but I feel whole for it now, whole in madness. Madness can be a kind of spiritual strength. I will see Julius again. We have not yet done with each other and we are in the hands of the gods. Yes, that is it. With Julius one is in the hands of the gods, one has
fallen
into their hands. That is frightening but life-giving. To be
deep
in life: not to creep by or tremble on verges. She looked up. A strange regular metallic sound was coming down out of the sky. She saw three swans flying, their whiteness kindled and almost invisible against the pale sun-brimming sky. The rustling whistling sound of their wings passed on over her head and faded.
‘Morgan, do come and look. It’s such a marvellous place. It’s an abandoned railway line.’
Morgan got out of the car and parted the screen of yellow grass. Ahead of her Peter was plunging down a steep slope through a tangle of grass and milky white flowering cow parsley. The place was a railway cutting. Only the rails and sleepers had been taken away and the floor of the cutting was a green level where shorter finer grass now almost entirely concealed the stony bed of the vanished railway line. Morgan slid and scrambled down, pulling up the skirt of her dress, until she reached the level. It was hotter here and rather stifling with the drowsy honey smells of flowers and the smell of green. The banks were tall and very wild, narrowing the sky. She thought, it is a place, a human place, and yet not any more, it has been taken over, lost to us, taken by, yes, by
them.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ said Peter. He spoke quietly, not raising his voice. ‘I’m just going to walk along a bit.’
She nodded.
She stood staring up at the sloping walls of grass and flowers on either side of her. She began to see more detail, more and different flowers hidden in the grassy jungle. Flowers which the scientific farmer had long banished from his fields lingered here in secret, dazing with their variety the drunken bees who crawled laboriously among the stems, buzzing as they walked with sheer exhausted joy. Small wild rose bushes scattered the slope with circles of papery luminous pink. Deeper pink of willow herb and white of flowering nettle and purple of self-heal, trailed over by bryony and latticed by stiff networks of radiant blue vetch. Their names came back to Morgan from very far away, out of childhood, out of distant classroom innocence. Tufted vetch, wood vetch, wood bitter vetch. And wild mint with its woolly flowers of creamy blotting-papery rose. She plucked a leaf and crushed it and smelt the cool quick odour on her hand.
Peter had disappeared. She saw that the cutting curved a little and a bulky shoulder of sun-baked grass and flowers hid the next part of the line. She began to walk slowly along the level grassy floor. She could feel the perspiration quietly running down her back. She pulled at her light blue cotton dress, detaching it here and there from her body. She ran a hand round her damp hot neck, lifting up the ring of her hair. She ought to have brought a hat and dark glasses. The flowers were beginning to quiver in front of her eyes. How extraordinary flowers are, she thought. Out of these dry cardboardy rods these complex fragile heads come out, skin-thin and moist, like nothing else in the world. People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. She now saw that what she had taken for flowering nettle was white comfrey, a plant which she had not seen since she had found it long ago in rivery meadows in Oxfordshire on holidays in childhood. She leaned forward to caress the drooping flower heads and touch the strong slightly hairy stems.
The next moment she was lying full length in the long grass and there was a great deal too much light. Light was vibrating inside her eyes and she could see nothing but dazzling and pale shadows as if the whole scene had been bleached and then half blotted out by a deluge of light. Her body seemed to be weighted and pinned to the sloping bank by a potentiated force of gravity. Rays from very far away were being focused through her flesh. Her head fell down into deep grass and she fought for breath. The blazing light was rhythmically changing into luminous flashes of black, tugging the visible world away from her, tugging her out of consciousness. The earth was pressing upwards against her. As she resisted it with her hands and rolled her head about, trying to breathe, the sky above her through the dome of grass was lurid and brilliant and dark.
Morgan pushed the earth away and rolled down the slope onto the level of the shorter grass. She lay there prone and struggled with giddiness and nausea and unconsciousness. She told herself, and hung desperately on to the thought, I have got sunstroke, that is what it is, it must be. She got herself onto her knees, panting, gasping, keeping her head down. She did not know whether her eyes were closed or not. She seemed to see the expanse of green floor between the high flowering banks and it was alive with movement and huge forms. The great ray from afar was pinning her between the shoulder blades and trying to force her down again. Was it giddiness she was feeling now, a dazzled sensation of spinning drunkenness, or was it something else, disgust, fear, horror as at some dreadfulness, some unspeakable filth of the universe? Saliva was dripping from her mouth. The loathsomeness at the centre of it all. She let herself fall forward again and the stones pressed into her face. She spread her hands upon the grass, upon the stones, and attempted to lift her head. She felt the sun burning into the back of her neck as if it was directed through a prism. She thought
I have got to get up.
Gasping and sobbing for breath she got to her feet and as if still blind and yet seeing began to run as fast as she could along the level floor of the cutting.
‘Isn’t it a magic place?’ said Peter. ‘Why, Morgan, what’s the matter? Whatever is the matter?’
Her body gave way again and she sat down abruptly with legs outstretched, leaning back against the longer grass. Her heart was pounding violently but her vision seemed to have returned and the awful light was gone. She wiped her mouth.
‘What is it, Morgan?’
‘Just a case of panic,’ she said.
Peter was silent. Then he said gravely, ‘Yes, Pan might be here.’
‘I don’t know what his name is,’ said Morgan, ‘but he was certainly here just now.’
‘Or it might be a touch of the sun,’ said Peter.
‘Or it might be a touch of the sun!’ She laughed weakly.
‘Are you feeling sick?’
She breathed deeply. Her head was spinning but the nausea was gone. Just breathe quietly, deeply. ‘No, I feel odd, but not sick now.’
‘Rest a bit,’ said Peter. ‘Then we’ll go back to the car. You’re not frightened now?’
‘No. It’s strange. I
was
frightened, terribly. One can have these open-air nightmares, meet open-air ghosts, in summer. But now it’s quite gone.’
‘Lie back in the grass.’
‘No, it’s better to sit up. I feel all right.’
The scene was there before her again, the yellow grass of the slopes alive with flowers, the green grass of the track, wiry and short as if it had been cut, as if the place were a garden, as if it were still a road, but a road not trodden by human feet. The hot air was thick with flowery scents and subtle dry emanations. The insects were hissing and murmuring in the honeyed forest of the grass. But now it was suddenly more beautiful to her, more intensely coloured and more absolutely here, under a sky which had resumed its blue. It was as if she had passed through a screen into some more primitive and lovely world, as if she were millennia away in the past or in the future in some paradise of undimmed experience and unblurred vision. ‘How beautiful it all is,’ she said. ‘How infinitely beautiful. I worship it.’
‘It’s certainly an enchanted place,’ said Peter. He sat down beside her on the grass. He was still looking at her in a puzzled and anxious way.
‘I don’t mean this place,’ said Morgan. ‘I mean the world, the universe, everything that is. All is good, all is beautiful. Heaven is round about us.’
‘Morgan, are you really feeling all right?’ said Peter.
Morgan turned to him. She had to prove it to him now. If she could only
prove
it. ‘Things are good, Peter.’
He stared at her, wondering how to take her words. They were close together now, their hands almost touching on the grass. Peter’s plump face was flushed and reddened by the sun, his eyes clear and blue, his long floppy hair bleached and glinting. He looked at her, serious, puzzled. ‘I think things aren’t good,’ he said in an obstinate voice. ‘There’s war, and hunger, and terrible injustice. I think things are bad.’
‘No, good, good,’ she said. ‘What seems bad is just apparent. If one thing is good then all things are, if one thing is intact and precious and absolutely beautiful then everything is. That’s it. One simply needs a starting point.’
‘Well, nothing in the world,’ said Peter, ‘is intact and precious and absolutely beautiful. Everything is contaminated and muddled and nasty and slimed over and cracked.’
‘Something is good,’ she said. ‘Something is. This is.’ She lifted up a feather-leaved stem covered with tiny vetch flowers. Each flower was purple above and blue beneath and very faintly striped as if the colour had been drawn in by repeated strokes of a very fine pen.
‘Oh
nature,
’ said Peter. ‘I don’t count that. That’s just stuff. I mean
our
things. Find me one of those and I’ll be impressed.’
‘What about,’ she said, ‘what about, what about … What about this:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Mermaids hourly ring his knell.
Hark now I hear them,
Ding dong bell.’
 
There was silence. The insects buzzed and whispered and behind their small patient frenzy the hot stifling air sighed with its own stillness.
Peter and Morgan were staring at each other.
‘Yes,’ said Peter very softly. ‘Yes. That is—perfect. And—oh Morgan—’
Morgan took off her glasses. The next moment she and Peter were locked in each other’s arms.
Morgan shifted her knees, drawing the boy’s body close up against her own. She could feel the firm sweaty flesh through the flimsy shirt. Her arms were locked behind his shoulders and her lips quested over his hot cheek. His hands moved upon her back, gentle at first, now suddenly violent. Their heads, pressed bone to bone, struggled for space and their lips met and remained joined.
After some time Morgan opened her eyes and began feebly to thrust him away. After that they kissed slowly and deliberately, eyes open, several times. Morgan sighed, Peter groaned. Their bodies parted a little.
‘Oh heavens—’ said Morgan.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Peter.
‘Don’t be sorry. I think it’s one of the nicest surprises I’ve ever had in my life.’
‘I didn’t expect it either. But you know—you’ve always been for me—something very special.’
‘That’s good.’
Morgan knelt now, pulling down her cotton dress. Peter tucked his shirt into his trousers, half got up, and then sat cross-legged. They were not touching each other. They stared luminous-eyed.
‘Morgan, I am sorry—But you see—Please let this mean something.’

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