Tallis went into the kitchen and closed the door. There was a dead sallow light of late afternoon and it was just beginning to rain. He threw the old newspaper down underneath the sink where a row of half choked milk bottles had congregated once again. He closed the window. A lot of dead leaves seemed to have got inside and were blowing about in the draught. He thought for a moment of the Sikh and of the Pakistanis upstairs, who had come, no doubt with hopes, for who can prevent the human heart from hoping, from their own troubled lands into this alien milieu of poverty and racial tension and petty crime.
The remains of Tallis’s lunch time baked beans were still upon the table. He scraped the bean juice into a screw of newspaper and put the plate into a basin on the draining board. The sink had been blocked for several days and was full of dark brown greasy water. Perhaps the dead leaves had clogged it, or perhaps some hot fat which he had poured down the other day. Now he washed up occasionally in the basin and threw the water down the drain outside the window.
He had still not managed to tell his father. Did Leonard already know, had he guessed and was a comedy being played out between them, a comedy which would continue to the end? ‘You’ll feel better soon, Daddy dear.’ ‘You’ll get better when the warm days come.’ Tallis could not believe that his father had understood. And he still knew that he ought to tell him, that the freedom of this last thing ought not to be denied him. But when and how to tell him? Should he go up to him now, mount the stairs, open the door, interrupt Leonard’s sarcastic welcome? ‘There’s something I must tell you. You are iller than you know.’ What one, of all the possible tones of their converse, could suit itself to this theme? The usualness of Leonard, his special predictable liveliness, gave comfort. Perhaps it made unreal what was to come, extending a veil over it from the past. Human beings cannot live without custom. Leonard had always been so. How could he cease to be so, how could that fearfully characteristic vitality ever come to an end?
I ought to tell him, thought Tallis. I’ll tell him tomorrow. He sat down at the table and made the accustomed gesture of spreading out his books. The class at Greenford were hostile. They seemed to enjoy catching him out. But perhaps it was all imagination. He gazed ahead of him. On the dresser were the pretty cups and saucers which Julius had arranged there, the cups hanging from hooks, the saucers upright upon the shelf. Seeing them so neat and clean reminded him of old quiet things almost beyond the reach of his memory, his earliest childhood, an orderly world, his mother. Near to the cups upon another hook hung the amber necklace which Tallis had mended again. He had still not had time to sort out the coagulated junk on the lower part of the dresser. It spilled over to the floor during the regular search for the tin opener.
The air was dense with subdued noise. Tallis was used to it. The endless din of motor cars made the room vibrate, made the pretty cups and saucers tinkle. There was a faint squeaking and shrieking, metallic sounds of grinding and jarring, sounds that set the teeth on edge, the minor pandemonium with which he had lived intermittently for so long. Once he had feared that this would get steadily worse until it overwhelmed him with horror. Now he treated it merely as a nuisance, as a mechanical accompaniment of his consciousness. And even when he saw with clarity some weird crawling thing he felt pity rather than disgust. Other things he feared. The ambiguous presence of his sister. Her visitations disturbed him with a sense of an alien and somehow dangerous reality which increasingly jostled him close. Here perhaps one day some thin partition could break down. He had come into his bedroom and thought that he saw his sister lying on his bed. Only that must have been a dream.
For the rest, he seemed to have nothing left. No experiences, no certainty. Had there ever been certainty? There had been experiences. He remembered something, like a kind of light, nothing with form. Perhaps that had been a dream too. He never knelt down now, that act of homage to elsewhere had become impossible, would have seemed obscene. Perhaps it had always been just a mucky sexual ritual after all. Any kind of prayer would be superstition now. But sometimes he caught hold of things, edges of tables, sides of doors, books, the bakelite handles of knives. Caught hold of them and held them tight, not so as to perform any act himself, but so as to immobilize himself for a moment to be, if that were possible, perhaps acted upon, perhaps touched.
Meanwhile Tallis’s days went on much as usual. Classes, preparation for classes, committees, aftermaths of committees, writing manifestos, fetching them from the printer, putting them in envelopes, seeing clergymen, seeing probation officers, seeing police officers, seeing people in tears. He thought a good deal about Rupert. The image of Rupert spreadeagled in the pool often came to him involuntarily, with the clarity of a memory, and regularly appeared in his dreams. He did not believe that Rupert had taken his life. But this was little consolation. The accident was deeply the product of its circumstances. Tallis did not try to unravel these nor did he speculate about the guilt of any person, not even about his own. He grieved blankly over something which seemed, in its disastrous compound of human failure, muddle and sheer chance, so like what it was all like. It went wrong from the start, he said to himself. But these were not his words, and this was not his thought, and he put it away from him as a temptation. Then he tried just to remember Rupert and keep the memory clear and feel the pain of it mindlessly.
An air letter from Hilda which had arrived by the morning’s post was lying on the table. Hilda and Morgan were in America. Morgan had taken a university job on the West Coast. They had bought a pretty modern house with eucalyptus trees and a view of what Hilda called the ocean. Hilda wrote regularly. She sent news of Peter. Peter had eventually been caught on a massive shop-lifting spree. He was put on probation and was to have psychological treatment. Then Hilda took him away with her, and he was now undergoing prolonged psychoanalysis in California. A good start had been made. He was living with his analyst. Later, Hilda sent colour photographs of the house. Of the view from the picture window. Of the patio with the Spanish tiles. Of the Chevrolet in the car port. Her letters were chatty, mentioning Morgan in a casual way, as if this were a dear friend with whom she had always lived and whom she took entirely for granted. Morgan never wrote. And Tallis in his chatty replies never mentioned her. He told Hilda anecdotes of his classes, little dramas of the house and the street, political chit chat. He did not fail to describe the weather. Why Hilda wrote to him in this way he did not know. Probably out of pity.
He thought about Morgan, but rather vaguely, with disconnected images of the past. He often saw her eyes, glaring at him with affectionate exasperation, through those steel-rimmed spectacles. He remembered the house where they had lived in Putney and he even visited it one evening when he had business in that part of London. It seemed to be full of Chinese. He recalled how awfully untidy that house had been, but with a cosy organic sort of untidiness, quite unlike his present jumble and clutter. He recalled a small tabby cat which had adopted them for a short while. Morgan had called it Mackintosh after one of her earlier swains. They never discovered its sex. The nervous anxious tenderness which had pervaded his marriage came back in clear moment-visions and cloudy swirls of atmosphere. He remembered Morgan’s jokey self-consciousness about her wedding ring and the peculiar shy ache of his pleasure when she displayed it. He never bought her an engagement ring. In fact they were never really engaged. They just suddenly found that they were married. Hilda was annoyed that the engagement had never been properly announced. He remembered the dreadful anxiety of going to bed, Morgan’s extraordinary sweetness, the things she said, always the same things like a liturgy, to comfort him, the strangeness of it all. They had never got used to each other. He thought of these things now vaguely and without urgency. He did not even wonder if he would see her again. He simply let her continue to occupy his heart.
Yes, thought Tallis, tomorrow I will tell him. Tomorrow, oh God, tomorrow, not today. It was cold in the kitchen. He lit the gas oven and opened the oven door. He found his pen and turned the pag
es of his notebook. If Leonard stopped the treatment would there be more pain? The doctors were so evasive. Perhaps they were just experimenting. What was the pain like, would it become terrible, unbearable, before the end? I must tell him tomorrow, thought Tallis. He must know what is happening to him. I must explain it all and I must look into his face while I do it. God, he’s had such a bloody rotten life, he thought, and now it’s nearly over. And he thought, how can I endure my dear father’s death, how can I live through his dying? Tears welled from his eyes and soaked into the stubble on his cheeks. Blinking, he leaned forward and began to write. It was not until 1860 that the Coal Mines Regulations Act enjoined that children under twelve years of age should not be employed in the mines. Previous to that date …
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE RICH AUTUMN SUN flattered Paris. The Seine was enamelled with blue and silver under a lapis lazuli sky, and green chestnut leaves with golden rims lay about motionless like bright discarded fans upon the warm stony paths of the Tuileries gardens.
Julius was crossing the iron footbridge. He paused a while to look down towards Notre Dame and to feel the obscure pleasure of many overlaid and inexplicit memories of previous visits to Paris, all happy ones. The memories were cloudy, sugary, making the quiet brilliant outward scene into an inner one of even greater vividness.
He had spent the earlier part of the morning at the Louvre. Painting may not be the greatest of the arts, he reflected, but perhaps it gives the purest and most intense pleasure. At least it does to me. I love music, but my pleasure in music remains always a little muddied by emotion. My pleasure in painting is, as pleasure should be, absolutely cold. After leaving the Louvre he had procured a ticket for the opera. L’incoronazione di Poppea, a work to which he was devoted but which he had only seen performed once. He greatly looked forward to a second experience. The cast was said to be very good, with a Canadian soprano to whom he was particularly partial. After that he had walked along the Rue de Rivoli and impulsively purchased some mauve shirts. Julius was usually rather sober in his dress, almost clerical. Was the spirit of the times taking hold of him after all? He adjusted his collar and tie. He was wearing a dark grey suit of fine worsted with an almost invisible stripe, a white shirt and a black tie with scarlet rosettes upon it. He was carrying a thin black silver-topped cane which, although he thought it a trifle ostentatious, he always took with him when he felt especially at leisure.
He was staying at the Crillon, but of course one didn’t eat there. He felt in a mood for exploring little restaurants, tiny bars, places where petty bourgeois consumed in silence the best food in the world. He walked on across the bridge, breathing in the warm fresh watery smells, and felt his step so light that he almost floated in the air. He was so much better now that he was not closely involved with human beings. Involvement was always bad for his nerves. He had friends in the biology department of the Sorbonne, but he felt no inclination to telephone them. He was happy, for the present, to be by himself in Paris, an outsider, even a tourist. He paused at the quai, waiting to cross, watching the cars speeding by. The traffic was certainly much worse. Yet perhaps he had been wrong to say that he could not live in Paris. He might even look at a few apartments while he was here. It would pass the time.
He walked under the Institut archway and up the Rue Mazarine. He was beginning to feel that a quiet aperitif and then one of those really serious meals would be just what was required to complete a very satisfactory morning. He found that his digestion always improved when he was completely on his own. He turned to the right, through streets that he remembered well, and found himself at the corner of the Rue Jacob. Somebody had mentioned a restaurant here. Oh yes, it was Rupert. What was it called? A la Ville de Tours. Julius walked along a little and saw the sign. It looked a promising place. Dark inside, red and white check table-cloths covered with sheets of white paper, flaking brown paint, a fat cat and an aspidistra. The food would probably be excellent. He would book a table and then return to the Place Saint Germain for a leisurely aperitif. He began to examine the menu. The sun was warm upon his back. Life was good.
By the same author
Philosophy
SARTRE, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST
THE FIRE AND THE SUN
ACOSTOS: TWO PLATONIC DIALOGUES
METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS
EXISTENTIALISTS AND MYSTICS
Fiction
UNDER THE NET
THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER
THE SANDCASTLE
THE BELL
SEVERED HEAD
AN UNOFFICIAL ROSE
THE UNICORN
THE ITALIAN GIRL
THE RED AND THE GREEN
THE TIME OF THE ANGELS
THE NICE AND THE GOOD
BRUNO’S DREAM
A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT
AN ACCIDENTAL MAN
THE BLACK PRINCE
THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE
A WORD CHILD
HENRY AND CATO
THE SEA, THE SEA
NUNS AND SOLDIERS
THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUPIL
THE GOOD APPRENTICE
THE BOOK AND THE BROTHERHOOD
THE MESSAGE TO THE PLANET
THE GREEN KNIGHT
JACKSON’S DILEMMA
Plays
A SEVERED HEAD (with J. B. Priestley)
THE ITALIAN GIRL (with James Saunders)
THE THREE ARROWS and
THE SERVANTS AND THE SNOW
THE BLACK PRINCE
Poetry
A YEAR OF BIRDS
(Illustrated by Reynolds Stone)
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends