The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
‘She doesn’t, except that she was talking about a seance, and she must have put a card in my pocket, this card.’ Edward produced the card. Thomas put on his glasses and inspected it. ‘Well, you see the message. I went there, and the medium said that there was a message for someone with two fathers, that was obviously me.’
‘And — ?’
‘And the message was — from my father. It was weird, like a hallucination, only it somehow wasn’t, the room was all dark, and there was this great head, like a sphere of bronze, sort of suspended, a terrible talking head, and it said, “Come, my son, come home to your father.” And it actually uttered my name, “Edward”.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘How very interesting,’ said Thomas. ‘What sort of voice did it have?’
‘A deep voice, some sort of accent, sort of slow, spoke quite clearly — I suppose it was a trick, a fake — and yet it couldn’t have been. Anyway it was a sign. But it must have come out of my mind. Do you think it’s just that bloody drug still working in me, some sort of subjective illusion?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘But you. know it wasn’t an illusion, it was something else. I suppose Jesse Baltram isn’t dead, is he?’
‘He couldn’t be, it would be in all the papers, your father is a famous man.’
‘How awfully odd it is to hear you speak of him as my father. I never wanted to see him, I made him non-exist. It’s worked till now. He was never part of my life. Harry never wanted me to go near those people. And of course Chloe hated him.’
‘You saw him when you were a child — ’
‘Yes, Chloe took me over two or three times, when they were in London. He was horrible, he sort of sneered at me, a big tall chap with a lot of dark hair. And she, the wife, tried to pet me, but it was false, I saw through it all. And the little girls stood like malicious dolls armed with pins. I felt they were all trying to kill me. Perhaps Chloe took me there on purpose so I could see how awful they were.’
‘He probably felt guilty at having mislaid you. He may even have coveted you. The women were jealous.’
‘Do you think so? You know, now that it’s happened and I’ve started to think about him I can’t imagine why I didn’t want to discover him ages ago — my real father.’
‘In an important sense Harry is your real father.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. You won’t tell Harry about this?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Because you see — he summoned me — and I must go to him.’
‘Go to him? What will you do, write, ring up, say can I come? I suppose he’s still living in that house he designed, which everyone was so interested in once. What’s its name?’
‘Seegard.’
‘It was in all the architectural reviews.’
‘Yes. Everyone’s forgotten now. They’ve forgotten him. He’s out of fashion. People don’t know he’s still alive.’
‘I read he was still painting, producing a lot of new stuff. So that’s where you’re going to run away to. I won’t tell anyone. Edward, something new has happened to you.’
‘No, it can’t be new, it must be connected, it’s to do with my mind, it’s a compulsion, I’ve got to go — and it’s to do with death — there’ll be a catastrophe, and I’ll make it happen.’
After Edward went away Thomas sat motionless in his chair for some time. When Edward was leaving Thomas had touched him, putting an arm round his shoulder, then quickly sliding his hand down to the boy’s wrist, feeling for the bare skin beyond the cuff. It had all happened in a moment. Thomas never touched Mr Blinnet, that would be inconceivable. As for Edward and Stuart, he could have hugged them, only that was inconceivable too.
Thomas was not displeased with the conversation, whose strategy he had planned carefully beforehand. Information had emerged, ideas had been planted. Edward would reflect and remember. He had taken the risk of leaving the boy alone with his horrors. Loving care, even authority, tolerated now, would have been rejected earlier. Thomas had to admit the intrusion of accident. The business of the seance was a surprise. Concerning paranormal phenomena Thomas was an interested agnostic. Of course such phenomena were, in ways yet unclear, products of the mind. Whether they were to concern him, and how and why be distinguished from more ‘ordinary’ illusions, was something to be decided in particular cases. He felt no strong emotions about the problem. About Edward, he would wait and see. A psychotic episode is sometimes of value in altering a pattern of consciousness. Prompted by the patient himself, it can be a beneficent disturbance, releasing healing agencies. Yet such things could be unpredictable too. The ‘dialogue’ had been quite a success. Edward had been alert, he had attended, responded, argued, defended his position. He had been able to follow Thomas. How eloquent they can be, he thought, the afflicted ones, the soul-wounded, speaking suddenly with tongues, forced by anguish into being poets. He had never heard Edward speak so well. What awful images of pain the boy had spewed out: captivity, machinery, starvation, electrocution, the dying chrysalis, the plunging aeroplane, the dead butterfly. And my weak magic, thought Thomas, pale and wan against that blackness, like a failing torch. So often, in extremity, and especially when guilt is involved, only strong love can heal. But is it available, is it intelligent, intuitive, can it discover the way? God is a belief that at our deepest level we are known and loved, even to there the rays can penetrate. But the therapist is not God, not even a priest or a sage, and must prompt the sufferer to heal himself through his own deities, and this involves finding them. How many souls there are who, encountering no good powers, are never healed at all. Yes, thought Thomas, they can go down, simply surrendered to gravity, unable to rise against the weight. He had, only once, lost a patient. The boy, after endlessly announcing that he would kill himself, did so. The parents blamed Thomas. Did he blame himself? Yes. But the blame was scarcely distinguishable from the grief. How well he understood the identification in Edward’s case. That failure did not bring Thomas any new knowledge. Those who help others to play for high stakes with ‘spiritual death’ must understand the risks. The desire for revenge on fate can turn against the accursed body. Each person is different, the general idea of ‘neurosis’ a mere hypothesis. Sometimes at least the afflicted have a right to play out the game themselves without drugs or ’scientific’ mythology. The ’myth’ that heals is an individual work of art. Edward was partly right when he said that he was borrowing Thomas’s energy. In fact Thomas, reaching into the mystery of another unconscious mind, was also using Edward’s. If the healer identifies with his patient he may mistake his own powers for those of the other. Not everyone is strong enough to ’play’. Thomas no longer believed in ’dreaming along’ with his patients, taking over their fantasies and playing the doctor in an endless therapeutic drama of mutual need: the love affair of healer and patient enacting a play of stirred-up egoism. He had so far changed his early assumptions that he sometimes felt he ought to invent a new name for what he was doing. He once puzzled an idle questioner at a dinner table by saying that his special subject was death. Death in life, life in death, life after death; and yet also simply annihilation. To say that the self-destroyer leaves behind all obligations except to his own soul says nothing, merely states the mystery, the enigma. To reach this position is itself an extreme move. The helper, whom Thomas also pictured as the servant, can do little except present a vision, his image of this particular salvation, and try to communicate the spiritual force needed to choose the death that leads to life; must, with his eyes open in the dark, and with all the magnetism of his intuition, find and release that force in the deep mind of his patient, making him understand the sense in which he is dead already. The motive, yes, as Edward said, the motive must be found. In so many kinds of affliction, in so many forms, the need for death, its necessity, appears to people who never, in their ’ordinary lives‘, conceived of it at all. Thomas recalled Edward’s weird exalted stare, his unca
Thomas took a comb out of the drawer of his desk and combed down his sleek light grey hair which swirled out so evenly from the crown and made so neat a fringe across his brow. His hair, which always looked ostentatiously neat, was of a radiant grey, not properly described as silver. He absently cleaned his glasses again upon a snowy handkerchief and resettled them firmly before his eyes. His heart was still beating hard from the encounter with Edward, beating for Edward. We do not have mythical fates, even the individual ‘myth’ is ultimately consumed, it is ‘worked away’ in living and only in this sense exists. How was it that Stuart had discovered those things so easily? He did not even know that he knew them. Thomas’s face, poised and wrinkled up with thought, had a whimsical almost sentimental gentleness. There are some faces which cannot be ‘read’ without a key. For one face there may be many keys. There are many ways of assembling that enigmatic Gestalt, and some of the most convincing ones can be false. In Thomas’s case it certainly helped to know that he was half Jewish. He did not look superficially Jewish, but he looked deeply so. The curl of his mouth, even the wrinkles round his eyes, somehow proclaimed it. His way of seeming civilised, super-civilised, even over-civilised, proclaimed it. The Jewishness was on his mother’s side. Thomas was indeed, as Harry had indicated, proud of his ancestry. The McCaskerville side, a brave but ineffectual Catholic family, were in their more recent days (which dated from the eighteenth century) a product of the Old Alliance. Their connections with France predated the misadventures of the Pretenders and they followed the white cockade into exile after the battle of Sherrifmuir. McCaskervilles had fought at Bannockburn, and some younger sons died at Culloden. (Such details would Thomas, very occasionally, impart to a sincerely interested enquirer.) Some of the exiles intermarried with impoverished French gentry, described as aristocrats. In the nineteenth century trade brought them back to Edinburgh, and later wealth set them free to become, as they pleased, lawyers and doctors. Thomas’s father and grandfather, still strong Catholics, favoured the law, and one of his great-uncles had been Procurator Fiscal.
Thomas’s father however broke with what was by now a grand air of tradition by abandoning his faith and marrying a Jewish girl, the daughter of a well-known Scottish Rabbi. Both families were horrified. The Godless young people (for Rachel, Thomas’s mother, had also quit her ancestral religion) prospered nevertheless and in time, with the birth of the longed-for boy, and in spite of their socialistic atheism, regained the trust and affection of their respective relatives. Those two groups rarely met however, and the child Thomas was discreetly battled over by two powerful clans, against whom he was also defended by his parents. To the relief of the latter Thomas (an only child) showed no sign of a religious conversion to either party. He showed, indeed, no sign of having the slightest interest in religion; in this respect however he was a deceiver. He loved his parents very much, but constantly, out of a kind of tact, concealed from them many of his deepest feelings. This laconic, secretive discretion, which became in the growing boy a major characteristic, was fostered by the tension, never relaxed on either side, between his Jewish and Christian grandparents. Thomas, an affectionate child, was at home with both sides, but the secret romanticism of his heart favoured the Hebrews. His mother’s father, a dignified and witty patriarch, a bearded scholar, a Zionist, an expert on Hasidism, seemed to young Thomas a figure out of a fairy tale. He loved the fancy dress, the embroidered caps and shawls, the long table with the white cloth, the candles and the wine and the exotic food, where so many people so often assembled for feasts and rites from which he was not entirely excluded. And yet he was excluded, because of his mother’s crime, that terrible marriage, in the guilt of which her son silently partook. His mother, whose Slav ancestors had long been Edinburgh merchants, spoke in her parents’ home both Hebrew and Yiddish, tongues to which Thomas listened with silent anguish, well aware that it would not be his lot to learn them. He knew in fact, even as a boy, that he was psychologically disabled from any later adherence to either of the faiths whose strong smell pervaded his childhood. Religion remained for him a princesse lointaine; or more like a native land from which he was irrevocably exiled and whose half-remembered songs he could sing only in his heart: a kind of fate which indeed he shared with many of his ancestors on both sides.
Both Thomas’s parents passionately loved Scotland, and he pleased them by going to Edinburgh University. As soon as his further education permitted however he went south. His mother died when he was in his twenties. His father lived to see his son’s late marriage. (And hurt Thomas deeply by saying that he had simply ‘married a pretty face’.) After his father’s death Thomas took Midge, at her request, and Meredith aged seven, on a little tour of his past, which upset him very much. They visited some McCaskerville cousins who lived in a mediaeval tower and regarded Thomas as a laughable oddity. Thomas went alone to see his Jewish grandfather, still alive and rather mad in a hospital, who failed to recognise Thomas and talked to him in Yiddish. Since then Thomas had not returned north of the border. Sometimes he felt that he hated Scotland; he made no drama of this but it made him sad. There was an alienation of being which he saw, with mysterious difference, continued in his son. Meredith never referred to Scotland or asked to go there. Looking at the silent watchful straight-backed undemonstrative child, Thomas saw the very image of himself. Meredith, unhampered by parental advice on the subject, underwent the mild Anglicanism of his school without comment. His only effective grandparent was Midge’s drunken painter father, more recently dead. With this tramp-like figure the child had had a relation friendly enough to arouse pangs of jealousy in Thomas’s secretly yearning heart. Thomas’s choice of a profession was no doubt influenced by his peculiar homelessness, and by certain conflicting and deep desires, even passions, occasioned by a proximity of religion as a forbidden fruit. This same condition now prompted the interest which he felt in Stuart Cuno.
Thomas had in fact, though spiritually ‘destined’ for it, meandered into psychiatry by a route which Ursula Brightwalton would have disapproved of even more had she known the details of it. Thomas had studied literature at Edinburgh, wanted to be an art historian, then took a medical degree to please his McCaskerville grandfather, became a general practitioner and hated it. He returned to medical school to study mental illness. Then, nearer to a ‘nervous breakdown’ than he ever admitted to anyone, he took a short ‘training analysis’, ostensibly as part of his medical course. He shunned and feared deep analysis and the ‘training’, though instructive, increased his scepticism. He was now, in a formal official sense, ‘qualified’, and soon exerted all his considerable ability to impress people in becoming set up, respected, and soon well known as a psychiatrist. Yet all this time, and in the midst of increasing ‘success’, he felt he was an amateur. On bad days he felt he was a charlatan. ‘There’s nothing deep involved, it’s just a matter of becoming some sort of ad hoc expert on misery and guilt,’ he said to someone who was set on admiring him, and who then admired him even more. Of course there were many things which Thomas’s medical training had taught him, especially about diagnosis and what not to do. About drugs and electric shocks he knew a good deal more than Ursula imagined. He knew whom he couldn’t treat. More deeply he was aware that he was an unbeliever, he did not share with his colleagues a certain traditional faith in this form of healing. He did not think that he was a scientist.
Such reflections were constantly at work in Thomas’s exercise of power, where at times, in his concentration upon an individual patient, he felt that he was making risky guesses. How he dared to do what he did, he did not know. Sometimes he wondered whether his reluctance to generalise were not a result simply of laziness. Yet when he was w
Without, until recently, even hinting this to anyone Thomas had been slowly divesting himself of his powers, trying to ‘finish’ his patients, meticulously of course, and release them or find them another ‘place’. He felt that he required an interval, which might prove to be a long one. He wanted to think, perhaps to write, to leave London, to live in the country, to be more alone, and if these things seemed like luxuries he did not care. He felt he was beginning to need his patients, and this was dangerous. He needed Mr Blinnet, had by now come too close to him; without excluding the theory, for Thomas was more sceptical than Ursula imagined, that this clever and interesting man was at least partly engaged in teasing his psychiatrist. It was time to make a change.
And now there were those two boys in a state of crisis. Perhaps this too was some sort of signal. Thomas loved his wife and son blindly and exceedingly, his ‘coldness’, his critical ‘knocking’ attitude to Midge, remarked upon by Ursula, was an instinctive attempt to avert the envy of the gods. He was proud of her and continually felt how lucky he was to possess her. Whereas he ‘read’ himself in Meredith, she remained opaque, radiant like a work of art, full of strange rays. He loved her, he admired her, and in an odd way he pitied her, and this intense pity was stored in the centre of his love. He never forgot his father’s remark, but he translated it into another language. The two boys were a bonus, brought to him by his wife as part of her dowry, two extra sons. Thomas, always an exile and an only child, lacked family. He missed his parents, he thought of them every day. He loved Stuart and Edward, but secretly, and with a more detached emotion which included curiosity, whereas about his wife and son he felt none, they were absolutes. With ‘the boys’ he had felt a pleasure as at watching animals at play, and now his fear for them felt like a fear felt for loved animals. They were both, in different ways, in pledge to death. Was he to redeem them? For both had become, at once, his patients. Thomas was certainly not going to let Stuart escape without giving up a secret or two. He almost looked forward to seeing him in trouble. In this, over which he almost smiled, Thomas experienced in himself the shadow of the old conflict between holiness and magic, so alike, so utterly different. It was as if Stuart had become for him a talisman, a symbol of death, an object of awe and envy, yet also provocative of painful anxiety: Stuart, with his curious blankness, so unattractive to some, to Harry, for instance, maddening. Edward had lost all value, Stuart was gorged with it. It was as if Stuart had become an albino, Thomas saw him as something immensely solid but without colour. Would it develop, would it last? Edward’s problems were simpler, but also graver. Edward was about to destroy the world, to banish it by flight, as Thomas had predicted, fleeing out of the mess of here to the purity of elsewhere, taking flight as his image of death. But with what a terrible destination. Edward was running away to the most dangerous place of all, and Thomas was not stopping him. Was he not indeed sending this beloved child straight into the underworld?