Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS JACKSON’S DILEMMA
Title Page
Copyright Page
ONE
TWO
THREE - The Past
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
PENGUIN BOOKS JACKSON’S DILEMMA
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 and grew up in London. She trained as a philosopher at both Oxford and Cambridge, and was for many years a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy. She wrote several works of philosophy, among which are Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of Good, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She was also the author of twenty-six novels, including The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978; The Book and the Brotherhood; The Message to the Planet; and The Green Knight. She died on February 8, 1999.
By the same author
UNDER THE NET
THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER
THE SANDCASTLE
THE BELL
A 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
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
Philosophy
SARTRE, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOOD
THE FIRE AND THE SUN
ACASTOS: Two Platonic Dialogues
METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS
Poetry
A YEAR OF BIRDS
(Illustrated by Reynolds Stone)
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Limited 1995
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1996
Published in Penguin Books 1997
Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1995 All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Murdoch, Iris.
Jackson’s dilemma/Iris Murdoch.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17412-8
I. Title.
PR6063.U7J33 1996
823’.914—dc20 95-39986
http://us.penguingroup.com
ONE
Edward Lannion was sitting at his desk in his pleasant house in London in Notting Hill. The sun was shining. It was an early morning in June, not quite midsummer. Edward was good-looking. He was tall and slim and pale. He was very well dressed. His hair, slightly curling, thickly tumbling down his neck, was a dark golden brown. He had a long firm mouth, a rather long hawkish nose, and long light brown eyes. He was twenty-eight.
His beautiful mother had died of cancer when he was ten. He had seen her die. When he heard his father’s sobs he knew. When he was eighteen, his younger brother was drowned. He had no other siblings. He loved his mother and his brother passionately. He had not got on with his father. His father, who was rich and played at being an architect, wanted Edward to be an architect too. Edward did not want to be an architect. He studied mediaeval history at Cambridge. Informed by his father that he should now earn his living somehow, he joined a small academic publishing house which dealt with the kind of books Edward liked. Unknown to his father he employed himself at publishing for only two mornings a week, devoting the rest to reading, and attempting to write historical novels, even poems. When Edward’s father died Edward shed tears and wished he had behaved better to his father, who had left him the house in Notting Hill, and the estate, and the handsome house in the country. The name of the house was Hatting Hall, a name regarded as ridiculous by Edward and his brother Randall when they were children.
Hatting Hall, half Tudor half Georgian, having by now lost some of its larger property, was now content to own big beautiful gardens and some miles of adjacent meadows. Through these meadows ran the narrow stream of the river Lip, passing through the village known as Lipcot. Lipcot, high up upon the far side from Hatting, after giving its name to the river, was now becoming nothing more than a hamlet, consisting of a few small houses, some smaller genuine cottages, a few shops, and a pub. Upstream, recently restored, was a sturdy bridge, leading to what the villagers called ‘civilisation’. The Hall owned the land on its own side down to the river, together with half of a much disputed fragile bridge, the land on the other side, for a considerable distance, being the property of the only other ‘grand house’ in the vicinity. Farther down the river, on the Hatting side, reached by an ancient stone bridge, upon a little hill (land owned by Hatting) was a fourteenth-century church, complete with a little rectory and a tiny congregation. The other ‘grand house’ up from the river and among many trees, was called Penndean after the Quaker family which had owned it, and still owned it since the days of William Penn. In fact Penndean was older still, its original name being lost. It had thereafter been diminished by fire as well as being (as Edward’s father said) ‘messed about by the Victorians’. Edward’s grandfather had had some feud with the inhabitants of the ‘other House’ (their family name was Barnell). Edward’s father had been polite. Edward was polite.
Edward’s ancestors had not perpetually possessed Hatting Hall, being by descent Cornishmen, and having only acquired Hatting late in the eighteenth century, the previous owners being obligingly bankrupt. This Cornish legend pleased Edward and Randall, but displeased their father, who did not care for piratical ancestors feasting on myths. He preferred to ‘take up’ the line of the unfortunate but titled gentry from whom the Lannions seized the charming and romantic residence. Even before the chaotic troubles of his grown-up life Edward had been aware of his odd aspect, his being rather fey, even as being, perhaps because of the Cornish past, under a curse. This withdrawal had also, at school and much later, led to hi
s being called a prig, a prude, a puritan, even a ‘weirdo’. He did not greatly mind such treatment, or even being lonely and secluded - but he found himself at times mysteriously frightened. He sometimes had a sensation of being followed. He even pictured himself as a criminal, perhaps a terrorist, who had been reformed, but knew that his erstwhile comrades were on his track and would certainly kill him. He seemed to remember that when a child he had played some sort of game like that with Randall. Later, when he was over twenty, he had another very remarkable and puzzling experience; but of these matters he did not speak to anybody. Edward’s father had never recovered from Randall’s death, Randall had always been his favourite. Randall was merry, Edward was taciturn. With surprise, moreover, he now found himself the master of Hatting Hall. This discovery which in itself might have cheered him up, filled him at first with alarm, though later he found that things ‘went on much as before’. The staff, the ‘eople’ as his father had called them, the butler and gardener Montague, his wife the maid Millie, continued as before, perhaps almost as before, since Edward’s father (Gerald Lannion) had been more self-assertive and explicit than the kinder and vaguer ‘young master’. Edward continued to stay much of the week in London, abandoning the publishing house, attempting another historical novel and trying to write poetry.
Then, when he was settling down and assuming that now nothing would ever happen, there was a change, a bright light, a fresh wind. He had a little earlier, partly in connection with his father’s death, made some sort of mild relationship or ‘reconciliation’ with the inhabitants of Penndean. At that time these had consisted only of an elderly man, known as ‘Uncle Tim’ somehow connected with India, and a younger but over forty man, his nephew called Benet. Meeting him in the village, Benet had asked Edward if he would come to lunch. Edward, just returning to London, had said sorry, he could not. A little later Edward, again in London, learnt from Montague by telephone that the ‘old man’ at Penndean had just died. Edward felt sorry, he realised now that he would have liked to have met him. He sent a letter of condolence to Benet. A little later still he accepted an invitation to lunch. He liked Benet, and was able to glimpse the gardens of the house not visible from the road, but he did not get on with Benet’s friends and refused a subsequent visit. The time was now late autumn. Invited yet again a little later he accepted, finding that the party consisted of Benet, the local Rector on visit, a handsome middle-aged woman with a great deal of glossy brown hair (Edward recognised her from the last occasion), another good-looking woman evidently ‘from Canada’, and her daughters, two pretty young girls, one nineteen, one twenty-one, one called Rosalind, the other Marian. Benet explained to Edward that the girls’ surname was that of the (now dead) father, Berran, while their mother, subsequently married to a Canadian whom she later left, was called Ada Fox, that the girls had been to, and now left, a girls’ boarding school, and that they had all rented a cottage in Lipcot for holidays. During lunch the girls reminded Edward that they had met him more than once in the street when they were inhabiting their cottage. Ada, sitting next to Edward, told him that the girls had just completed a trip with her to Scotland, after which she would return to Canada leaving them with their new flat in London to amuse and educate themselves. ‘London is itself an education,’ she said, and Edward, sitting next to Marian on his other side, nodded sagely.
Contrary to his expectations Edward did not see very much of the girls even after the delayed departure of their mother shortly before Christmas, after which the girls went to Paris, returning to London and reappearing in early spring in Lipcot and again meeting Edward in the street, when they told him they had again rented the same cottage. After that - well, after that - the girls now staying on at their cottage wanted to play tennis. Edward hastily refurbished the tennis court at Hatting. They wanted to ride. Edward did not ride, but he arranged for them to have ponies. Edward did not like long walks, but the girls did and they all went on long walks and Edward read the map. The girls wanted a swimming pool and Edward told Benet that there must be a swimming pool. The girls teased Edward, they made fun of him, they called him solemn. They were often with Benet and with Benet’s friends, some of whom Edward began to tolerate. In all this time however they had not set foot in Hatting Hall. At last Edward, who was absolutely averse to entertaining, noticed the now continual hints, and gave a lunch party. Indeed it took Edward himself some time before he became thoroughly aware of what was going on, what it was all about, that he was falling madly in love with Marian, who was madly in love with him. Only later did he discover that everyone at Penndean, and at Hatting, was ‘in on it’, not of course excluding the inhabitants of the village who were taking bets in the pub.
How had it all so gently, so quietly, so inevitably come about? Can I be happy, Edward wondered to himself, can my dark soul see the light at last? There he was now, early in the morning, sitting upright at his desk on the first-floor drawing room of his house in Notting Hill. He was breathing deeply and expelling his breath in long gasps. He could feel his heart hitting his ribs violently. He put his hand to his chest, the palm of his hand feeling the force of the blows. He sat there quietly, silently. Tomorrow he was to be married in the little fourteenth-century church upon the hill near Hatting Hall.
Suddenly something terrible and unexpected occurred. The window pane had cracked and fallen inward, showering the carpet with little diamonds of broken glass. The sound of the report seemed to come a second later. A pistol shot? He leapt to his feet, crying out, as he remembered later. An assault, an attempted assassination, a nearby bomb? Then he thought, someone has thrown a stone through the window. He stepped quickly across, grinding the glass under foot, and looking down into the street. He could see no one. He thought of rushing down but decided not to. He turned back into the room and began to pick up the gleaming fragments of glass, looking about him as he did so, at first putting them into his pocket then into the waste paper basket. Yes, it was a stone. He picked up the stone and held it, then dusted it with his other hand to remove the specks of glass. He put the stone carefully upon the mantelpiece. After that he drove in his beautiful red car to Hatting Hall.
On the afternoon of the same day Benet was, or had been, busy making arrangements for the evening dinner party. Arrangements for tomorrow’s wedding were, so far as he knew, complete. He had discussed every detail with the Rector, Oliver Caxton. The wedding was to be at twelve o‘clock. The service would be the usual Anglican wedding service. The church was normally visited by the Rector, who was in charge of other parishes, once or twice a month, and on special occasions such as weddings, funerals, Christmas, and Easter. Curates just now were hard to come by. The congregations on ordinary occasions (Sunday and matins only) consisted sometimes and at most of Benet, Benet’s visitors, Clun the Penndean gardener, his daughter Sylvia, three or four women from the village, in summer perhaps two or three tourists. Uncle Tim, Benet’s late uncle, had regularly read the lessons. Benet also used to read the lessons. Now Clun sometimes did. Benet had now given up except for special occasions. Sometimes in winter the Rector conducted the service in the otherwise empty church. Of course the Barnells were Quakers, but there was no Meeting near Lipcot, and the plain Anglican service contained, in accord with wishes from Penndean, periods of silence. There was at present no piano. Benet did not object. As for the two beautiful young people, the radiant hero and heroine of the scene, they had at first demanded a scrappy civil wedding, but had been overruled by the bride’s mother, Ada Fox, who unfortunately was unable to be present, and by Mildred Smalden, a holy lady, friend of the Barnells. Benet had wanted a ‘proper show’, as he thought Uncle Tim would have wished. How very sad that Uncle Tim was no longer with them. Concerning the number of the guests, the young pair had prevailed, there were to be very few. There was to be champagne and various wines (Benet did not like champagne) and all sorts of delicious things to eat, sitting, or standing, or walking about, at Penn after the wedding, immediately after which the t
wo children (as Mildred called them) were to depart for an undisclosed destination in Edward’s Jaguar.
A small number of wedding guests were to be present at Benet’s dinner table that final evening. Benet knew Ada well and her daughters very well, having become recently something of a ward to the girls and thus a convenience to their flighty mother. Marian, who loved ‘creating’ things, was spending the last day and night in London completing some secret ‘surprise’ and would drive down very early on the wedding day. Edward, in spite of protests, was to return to Hatting on the morning before. Rosalind, who was of course to be her sister’s bridesmaid, was also coming ‘on the day before‘, with Mildred. Two other guests, friends of Benet, were Owen Silbery, an eccentric painter, and a young man who worked in a bookshop called Thomas Abelson, a friend of Owen, nicknamed ‘Tuan’ by Uncle Tim, and likely to arrive by taxi from the distant railway station. Rosalind and Mildred were to stay in the house, in the ‘old part’, usually closed up, supposed to be haunted, bitterly cold in winter, but now delightfully opened up and prettified by the maid Sylvia. Tuan was to stay in the guest bedroom in the main part. Owen stayed in the village pub, as he always insisted on doing, being a special friend of the proprietor. The pub was called the Sea Kings, with a sign of a pirate ship painted by Owen. In fact Lipcot was not near the sea, but the pub had borne that name for a long time, centuries it was said.
Benet was alone in the library. In the library there was silence, as of a huge motionless presence. The books, many of them, were Uncle Tim’s books, they had been in their places since Benet was young. Many of the books still glowed, faded a fainter red, a fainter blue, the gold of their titles dusted away, emanating a comforting noiseless breath. Most of Benet’s books were still in London. (Why still? Were they planning a sortie to take over the library at Penndean?) Benet’s uncle had died leaving Benet so suddenly in absolute possession, here where from childhood he had lived more as a guest or a pilgrim, a seeker for healing. But even when Uncle Tim was away in India some pure profound gentle magic remained. The books did not know yet, but they would find out that Tim had gone, really gone away for ever.