by
Iris Murdoch
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‘I remember your talking about a first love, but these things are imaginary, they are fables. You’re just suffering from the shock of seeing her, give it a fortnight. And she’s got a bourgeois marriage and a son, and, Charles, she’s ordinary, you can’t do it to an ordinary woman just because you fancied her at school, it’s nonsense and she wouldn’t understand! Besides, you wouldn’t be able to, you’re not all-powerful, not in real life you aren’t. You’d simply get yourself into a very unpleasant mess, just the sort of mess which you of all people hate. You’d lose face! Think of that! Have enough self-knowledge to see how you’d hate it, you haven’t any role here, you haven’t any lines. You even admit she doesn’t want to talk to you!’
lol
[...] I wanted, in the time that was left to us, to console her as a god consoles. But I also wanted increasingly, and with a violence which almost burnt the tenderness away, to own her, to possess her body and soul.
jesus
I said to Titus, ‘I want him to see the letter. And you are both to stay here. Are we that man’s slaves? I want to let your mother out of that cage.’
Hartley gave a cry of woe.
god lol
‘Oh—good. Hartley, just relax, let it go, let it drop.’
‘Let what drop?’
‘You know—this burden, this useless fruitless loyalty, this pointless sacrifice. You’re making his life a misery too, let it go, let him go. You’re like a half-dead person.’
[...] Thus we existed together in a sort of crazy mysterious precarious mutual toleration. At intervals she repeated that she wanted to go home, but she accepted my firm refusals passively, and this was encouraging. Of course with every hour that passed her fear of returning must increase, and this in itself gave me hope. Surely a moment must come when the amount of her fear would automatically make her mine?
I awoke suddenly. The moon was shining into my bedroom, where I had omitted to pull down the blind. I could hear the splash of the sea and a very faint rattle of the stones which the waves were gently clawing as they withdrew from the cauldron. It must be low tide. I could hear also, or sense, a vast void, a dome of silence, within which my heart was beating exceedingly fast. I felt suffocated and had to sit up abruptly and gasp for breath. I remembered, as I now did whenever I awoke, with a pang of anguish and love and fear, that Hartley was in the house. At the same time I felt the most terrible dread, a premonition of some catastrophe, some horror, or indeed the certainty that it had already occurred. I began to get out of bed, trembling violently, and fumbled for my candle. I lit it and then stood up and listened. The void dark house was ominously quiet. I very quickly opened my bedroom door and looked down the landing. There seemed to be a dim light coming from the alcove, but perhaps it was a trick of the moon. I listened and seemed to hear a beating sound, a heavy noise, deep and accelerating, very very far away. I moved slowly forward, putting each foot down carefully so as not to make the boards creak. I could now see quite clearly Hartley’s door and the key in the lock. I wanted to reach it, to put my hand onto the key, but I was afraid to hurry, afraid to enter that terrible room. I got the key into my hand and turned it and stepped in through the doorway holding my candle. The mattress on the floor, at which I always looked on entering, was empty, the bedclothes disordered. Hartley was gone—I stared about, ready to cry out with panic fear. And then I saw her—she was standing in the corner. I thought, how odd I had forgotten how tall she is. Then I thought she is standing on something, how odd, she must be up on the chair or the table. Then I saw that she was suspended from the lamp bracket. She had hanged herself.
this passage really got me [it was a dream]
‘I haven’t started yet. I never told you this at the time, I thought I never would. You made me pregnant. I got rid of the child.’
I drew a circle in the dust on the radiator of the car. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because you weren’t there to tell, you’d gone, gone off with Lizzie or whoever was the next dream girl. God, the sickening casual brutality of men—the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone. I made that decision alone. Christ, how I wish I hadn’t done it. I was crazy. I did it partly ‘Because you weren’t there to tell, you’d gone, gone off with Lizzie or whoever was the next dream girl. God, the sickening casual brutality of men—the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone. I made that decision alone. Christ, how I wish I hadn’t done it. I was crazy. I did it partly out of hatred of you. Why the hell didn’t I keep that child. He’d have been nearly grown up by now.’
I had deliberately declared, for my maddened wounded mind, an interim. It was indeed clear that what had happened had been engineered against my will by James. If I had kept my nerve, if I had persevered, if I had only had the sense to take her right away at the start, Hartley would have abandoned herself to me. She would have given up, she would have given in, at first with the weak despair of one in whom the hope of happiness had simply been killed. It was my task and my privilege to teach her the desire to live, and I would yet do so. I, and I only, could revive her; I was the destined prince. Perhaps in a way, I reflected, it was just as well to let her go back, this time, for a short period. My shock tactics would not after all have proved useless, she would have time to reflect, to compare two men and evolve a concept of a different future. The lessons I had tried to teach her would not be lost. A dose of Ben, after having been with me, after having had the seeds of liberty sown in her mind, might very well wake her up to the possibility, then the compelling desirability, of escape. A dose of Ben would make her concentrate at last. It would in fact be better thus, because she would make her own clear decision, not simply acquiesce in mine. If she could feel a little less frightened, a little less trapped, she would reflect and she would decide to come. My mistake had been to act so suddenly and so relentlessly. I ought never to have locked her up, I saw that now. I could easily have kept her, for a short time, by strong persuasions. Then I could have touched her reason. As it was she was too shocked to take it all in. I had given her the role of prisoner and victim, and this in itself had numbed her powers of reflection. Now at least, at ‘home’ in that horrible den, she would be able to think. He could not always batter her mind and supervise her body. I would wait. She would come. I would not leave the house. She might come at any hour of the day or night. And, I thought, with a final twist, yes, and if she does not come I shall do what I said to James, I shall simply start the whole thing again from the beginning.
‘Oh I don’t care,’ said Peregrine, ‘I wish you were dead. I thought of calling you out, only then I thought you might kill me instead, because you drink less than I do. I suppose honour is satisfied now anyway, and I won’t have to offer you any more drinks, thank God, and I won’t even want to tell you what a four-letter man you are. You’re an exploded myth. And you still think you’re Genghis Khan! Laissez-moi rire. I can’t think why I let you haunt me all these years, I suppose it was just your power and the endless spectacle of you doing well and flourishing like the green bay tree. Now you’re old and done for, you’ll wither away like Prospero did when he went back to Milan, you’ll get pathetic and senile, and kind girls like Lizzie will visit you to cheer you up. At least they will for a while. You never did anything for mankind, you never did a damn thing for anybody except yourself. If Clement hadn’t fancied you no one would ever have heard of you, your work wasn’t any bloody good, it was just a pack of pretentious tricks, as everyone can see now that they aren’t mesmerized any more, so the glitter’s fading fast and you’ll find yourself alone and you won’t even be a monster in anybody’s mind any more and they’ll all heave a sigh of relief and feel sorry for you and forget you.’
[...] Oh God, if I had only told Titus, don’t swim there, it’s dangerous. If there’s any swell you can’t get out. Never swim in a rough sea, dear boy, this sea’s a killer. But the past refused to come back, as it did in dreams, to be remade. Titus walked in my dreams in the brightness of his youth, which was now made eternal. Or else I dreamed that he was dead and felt joy on waking. I took Hartley’s letter out and pressed it to my brow and prayed to her that she would save me out of the desolation and the wreck.