The Good Apprentice (77 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: The Good Apprentice
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I was in love, thought Midge, I was
mad,
but I
was
in love. It was a self-authenticating experience, as he used to say; was it not unfair to call it a dream? Only not everything has a place in life, and there was no place for this. Was it just the long lying that ruined their chances? Supposing they had told Thomas at the start? But the start was so exciting, so confusing, no statement could possibly have been made, it was all an unutterably brilliant present, there was no future, the present was the future, how could they have reflected and planned? Later on the structure of falsehood was already there and it seemed at every moment impossible to tell Thomas, and equally impossible not to intend to tell him. They were both waiting for a sign. Well, the sign had come. Did she still wish, as she often had wished, that she had met Harry first, never married Thomas, that it had all been different? This wish, which had seemed so full of substance, now seemed empty. But something, the undeniable past itself, could not be destroyed. Would she, one day, feel sentimental about it? She would not forget that she had loved Harry and the remembered love would become in time harmless. Meanwhile the possibility of Harry would remain for a while, rejected yet active, like a benign curable tumour. The word was frightening, some tumours destroyed their owners. Death could come; but I won’t die of that, she thought. Death was everywhere, its rays were falling upon herself and upon those she loved and upon the whole earth. She recalled her dream of the white horseman, and the curious effect which Stuart had had upon her, the killing of her ordinary life, the annihilation of her instinctive desires, the sense of utter deprivation which had been too a kind of unearthly joy. She realised that this intense feeling had passed, was already remote even absurd, yet was also something she would not forget.
The sun was declining and the shadow of the copper beech had covered most of the lawn, where Thomas and Meredith were playing badminton, enthusiastically but very badly. Now Meredith’s dog, a golden labrador puppy with a talent to amuse, had seized hold of the shuttlecock. As the players pursued him with shouts of laughter she was aware of something moving in the sky. It was the air balloon with blue and yellow stripes which she had seen once before, and she felt an impulse of pleasure, remembering how unhappy she had been then.
Midge left the window and opened a drawer in her dressing table and took out a pair of stockings in which she had concealed Harry’s letter. She wanted to read it just once more.
I cannot and will not accept what you say. Please be clear about this. I will not accept it and you do not mean it. This is, how strange, my first love letter to you. Ever since that day after Ursula’s party when we looked into each other’s eyes, looked away, looked again, and
knew,
we have been so close, so often together, we have lived without letters. I wanted to write to you, to consume the pain of absence in writing, but you were so afraid of Thomas. Now that doesn’t matter any more, I don’t even care if Thomas reads this. I love you, I
love
you, and I possess you and will not give you up. And you love me, and you
love no one else
. Do not deceive yourself, my darling and my queen, do not falter now when the way is open for us at last. I love you, I live by and in your love, my life rests upon your love. I have had to live from day to day, every day you were still with me was paradise regained. But I hoped, arid you hoped, that the time would come when we would live in eternity, just us two absolutely together. My knees shake, they give way when I think about you, I lie struck down to the floor as I was on that first day. Do you realise how rare this is, mutual perfect love? With my body I thee worship. We know, which is given to so few, perfect happiness, perfect joy. You cannot deny this, to do so would be a deep wicked lie, not like the lies we had to use to protect ourselves, to protect our precious love, and which we hated so, I hated so, they were never my fault. I should have stayed with you on that day when Thomas arrived, when he knew, I regret that, I am sorry, I was a coward, fear of Thomas has undone us all along, let it not do so now when at last there is no need. Oh my love, my sweet dear love, my every instinct is not to hurt you, I would fight with demons, with God himself, to save you from any smallest hurt or harm. And now I seem to be accusing you. I
do
accuse you, of untruthfulness, unfaithfulness, lack of courage — lack of courage at the very moment when it is most needed and will be most rewarded. We are so close to our happy ending, to achieving what we have worked and suffered for and have a
right
to, our freedom together. You have had a shock — two shocks — Thomas’s discovery and your little mad fit about Stuart, which I hope and believe is over. (
That
I could not credit or countenance. I now realise that I took it too seriously!) You may feel that you want to rest. But, my love, my angel, this is no moment for resting. We must
work.
We must establish our true home, where we shall live forever immortal as the gods, where we shall fly our indomitable flag — you remember about the flag? Midge, do not delay now, do not be
idle,
I cannot believe that you, with open eyes and who have experienced both, could now prefer the second best, the tenth best, to the best! If you did you would regret it bitterly, as the years passed, inside the emptiness and loneliness of your marriage. You would grow old quickly if you stayed with Thomas,
he
is old. Don’t let sheer weakness, sheer senseless convention, for it is
entirely
senseless now, don’t you see, keep us apart for another day. I am waiting for you, hour by hour, minute by minute,
waiting.
We shall have Meredith, he will be ours, we have agreed, we know. Don’t be afraid! How can he not prefer us, and our happiness and our gaiety and our freedom, to the austerity and dull harsh Scottish gloom of Thomas’s world? Thomas is a melancholic. We can live anywhere, in the coloured places, in the sun, as you always wanted. We can travel to the east. You said how much Meredith wanted to go to India. He can go to India with us. We’ll be a happy trio, a happy family, we’ll
enjoy
life.
We
won’t live in the dark. Don’t delay, don’t any longer live without all those
good
things, so
many
of them, which in your deepest heart you
desire.
Oh follow your desires, your own, your very own. Not only the utter perfection of our bodies together — let
them
speak for us — but also a universe of rich harmonious endlessly various and ever renewed happinesses for us and for Meredith — My dear dear love, I kiss your feet, and beg you to end this agony of uncertainty for both of us. I feel I shall die of this pain, die of your absence from me —
imagine
what it will be like when you run to me, into my arms, and when at last we can go away together without needing any falsehood or fearing any discovery. Don’t you see — we have been
given,
what we could not boldly seize,
permission,
I mean moral permission, to do what we
want?
Don’t feel any guilt about it. You won’t hurt anyone much, only Thomas’s
amour propre
. He has deep feelings, but not in his marriage, as you said once. But if you destroy me — I don’t mean I should commit suicide or die of grief, I should live on and perhaps even try to fall in love with somebody else. But any other love would be a shadow, a fake, compared with this reality which we have achieved together, this world-revealing certainty which we have shared, my princess, my gentle sweet darling, my one and only. Midge, nobody in the world can make you
be
as I can.
I ought never to have let you go away, I regret this and ask your forgiveness on my knees for this and any other fault which I have unwittingly committed. Once it was
known
I ought never to have left your side. The crazy thing about Stuart came like a cloud between us at the crucial moment, as if some devil, perhaps out of Thomas’s deep mind, had come to confuse us. If it had not been for that you would have run to me the moment, the second, that Thomas found out. Your weird obsession with my son, so uniquely hurtful, upset me too much, as I now see, impressed me too much, I should not have believed it. It was a neurotic fancy that you ran into rather than face the immediate task of breaking with Thomas.
Come to me
— and let us live, where you always wanted to live, in the truth and the light. Oh God how much I love you. There is nothing in me but that love. Do not destroy me, Midge.
H.
 
 
Midge read the letter again, with tears in her eyes. It moved her terribly. How it conjured him up, with his sweetness, his beauty, the authority of his love, his
absolute charm.
He was right, they were perfectly suited to each other. But it did not follow that they could ever be happy together, and happiness was so much the point. Rightness and goodness of course; but happiness … that was essential … And even now, while she was still so ill with it all, she had tasted it a little, witnessing the joy of Thomas and Meredith. She and Harry had deceived themselves about their future, as they had deceived themselves about the importance of Thomas and Meredith. She read between the lines of the letter, so touching and so ardent, that perhaps Harry realised too that something, he could not tell exactly what, had broken their compact. Midge was not sure exactly what it was either, and when the break had come. Was it to do with Stuart, that cloud which had arrived so strangely at just that time, and had not left her as she was? Surely Stuart was a symptom or a sign, not a cause. What Harry said about Meredith was wrong, almost a lie, something which he wanted to believe. Tears fell from her eyes, tears for something wonderful which had had to end and was gone into the past where it would fade and not be remembered as she remembered it now. How could one resist such a lover, how could one have resisted him? She was fortunate to be, when it ended, in another place, a real place, a place which she had really never left, inside an innocent love. Poor Harry, he had gambled everything, while she had always kept something back. But then that was part of how she had failed and made him fail too. It was hard to think about.
The letter had arrived three days ago and she had intended to destroy it at once, for fear of Thomas finding it, and for fear of being tempted to read it again, but she could not. She had now read it several times. Yesterday, with a terribly beating heart, she had run out to post a note which just said,
No, I am sorry. No.
As she did this she was pierced by the thought: he
will
find someone else, and I shall have such a terrible long pain of jealousy. My pains are not ending, they are beginning. Her hand nearly failed her and turned traitor as she reached the letter out to the pillar box — and imagined Harry opening it, and what different letter she might have written. Yet when it was done she felt better, more free, as she had not felt free for two years, more completely herself. Harry’s letter must now be destroyed. The idea of keeping it and reading it at intervals was horrible to her. It was already dead. She had killed it.
She took it downstairs and burnt it in the grate. She had just finished crushing the ashes with her foot and was standing looking down when Thomas entered, and she moved quickly away.
Thomas, who had of course found and read the letter soon after its arrival, guessed what she was doing, saw the traces of tears and gazed upon her with particular tenderness and pride.
‘Thomas — ’
‘Yes, my darling — ’
‘Now you’re retiring would we have enough money to go to India with Meredith?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ (Thomas, perhaps it was a Scottish characteristic, was in fact far better off than he had ever let on to anybody, even his wife.)
 
 
Thomas was in an extraordinary state of mind. When he was alone he gazed at himself in the mirror and even made faces. He had spied on his wife, watching her through a window he had seen a look of touching animal pleasure on her face as she ate a cheesecake. He tracked her, like a keeper tracking a sick animal. He watched her for symptoms of health. He felt that his general understanding of human psychology had broken down. Where the individual mind is concerned the light of science could reveal so little; and the mishmash of scientific ideas and mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and intuition and love and appetite for power which was known as psychoanalysis, and which of course did sometimes ‘help people’, could make the most extraordinary mistakes when it left the paths of the obvious. Wild guesses, propelled by the secret wishes of the guesser, could initiate long journeys down wrong tracks. The person he found most puzzling was himself. Why had it seemed so essential to run out of the house after he had confronted his wife with the proofs of her infidelity? He had left her with cold words. He seemed instantly concerned with his dignity. He even talked about damage to his practice, not because he cared about it or even thought it would occur, but because he wanted to set up an instant barrier of ironical coolness and ‘practical considerations’, not only to protect himself but to hurt her. He could not have stayed and argued, produced a ‘natural response’ with shouts, commands and prayers, that would have been painfully out of character, he did not want to be forced to become another person. He had been incapable of any direct response also perhaps because he needed to despair at once. The shock of discovering what another man (less orderly, less trustful, less self-confident, less self-absorbed) might have found out sooner had been so intense, an utterly new kind of shock which paralysed distant and unpractised regions of his being. He felt he had to be alone to recover
himself,
and to make himself capable of sustaining with dignity and rational calm the total collapse of his marriage.

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