The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
‘There’s a ruined village where fisherfolk used to be,’ said Mother May, ‘and a little abandoned harbour.’
Edward liked ‘fisherfolk’. ‘I’d like to see a map of the area.’
‘I don’t think we have one, have we?’ said Bettina.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Mother May, ‘I can’t think where it would be.’
‘You don’t often go to London?’
‘No,’ said Mother May, ‘if you live in paradise why go elsewhere? London for us represents all the empty idle noisy busyness of the world — here our lives are full of natural true busyness.’
‘We try to carry out Jesse’s ideals,’ said Bettina.
‘Jesse was a fiery socialist when he was young, we all were, true socialists, we worked for the good society on the basis of simplicity.’
‘We still are, we still do,’ said Bettina. She lifted up her large head, like the head of a fine sleek keen-faced animal, and looked at Edward as if expecting him to challenge this.
‘We never tire of hearing Mother May talk of the old days,’ said Ilona.
‘We exercise the body and the mind,’ said Mother May. ‘The health of the planet rests upon the health of the individual.’
‘Eastern wisdom teaches that the body is important,’ said Ilona.
‘All right, Ilona!’ said Bettina.
‘We wanted to have a regular arts festival,’ said Ilona, ‘to express our ideals, with music and poetry and dance, and there’s a big exhibition room for painting in the tower — ’
‘Why didn’t you?’ said Edward.
‘It was too financially risky,’ said Mother May.
‘Besides,’ said Bettina, ‘as soon as you start organising something involving other people there are corrupt elements.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Edward, ‘you live such a free life here.’
‘The girls are free beings,’ said Mother May smiling. ‘Jesse and I have seen to that. We stand for creativity and peace, continuity and cherishing. Here I think women have something special to give.’
‘Mother May thinks that, compared with us, others are barbarians,’ said Bettina, smiling at her mother.
‘You are civilising me!’ said Edward.
‘Oh, we’ve only just started,’ said Mother May. ‘We’ll teach you to paint, we’ll teach you to see — ’
‘I think I can see better already. I can see Seegard better, I mean the building.’
‘One has to learn to read it.’
‘See it as a ship,’ said Bettina.
‘See it as a cathedral,’ said Mother May.
‘See it as a little town,’ said Ilona.
They laughed.
‘People didn’t like it,’ said Ilona. ‘The Architectural Review said it was a mess.’
‘It is both too complex and too simple for the vulgar taste,’ said Mother May. ‘One must see its lines. The best critics loved it. One has to learn new art forms.’
‘“New styles of architecture, a change of heart”, was one of Jesse’s sayings,’ said Bettina.
‘I see it as a palace,’ said Edward, ‘the kind that vanishes!’ He added, out of a sheer idle awkwardness which talking to all three of them made him feel, ‘You know, my brother Stuart would like this place, it would suit him down to the ground!’ The next moment a spear-like pain went through him. Why had he so stupidly, so ill-omenedly, mentioned Stuart’s name? Stuart was the very last person he ever wanted to see here. Here, on Edward’s territory.
Bettina rose. ‘I think everything’s ready.’
‘Come along, children,’ said Mother May. ‘After lunch, Ilona, why don’t you show Edward your jewellery? Take the afternoon off.’
‘I like them very much,’ said Edward looking at Ilona’s anxious face. But he was not sure that he did.
‘My style has changed a lot,’ said Ilona, ‘This is modern stuff, what they like now. Boys wear it too.’
Edward could not imagine himself, or indeed anyone, wearing the peculiar entities, made of steel, copper, aluminium and wood, which confronted him in Ilona’s workshop on the ground floor of East Selden. ‘How do you keep that on?’ he said, lifting a long piece of grainy wood shaped like an elongated bird.
‘Oh you put it on your wrist and tie it on with a scarf. Or hang it round your neck with a leather thong, you can tie it here, round the bird’s foot.’
‘But then the bird will be upside down.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Do you make all the jewellery you all wear here?’
‘Yes. I used to buy semi-precious stones, but it became too expensive. Then I made my own stones out of Araldite and dyed them. And I ordered Venetian beads and set them with beads of my own. But that’s my old style. I still make wooden beads and carve them, I carve all sorts of wood that I find around here — and that pale bleached wood is driftwood. I make the flat bits into pictures if the wood is stained in an interesting way, or into amulets, like this.’ She put into Edward’s hand a little wooden square with a sort of Celtic animal incised upon it.
‘I like that. Does Jesse wear your jewellery?’
‘Oh yes. I used to do flower necklaces, cutting the metal and then hammering it, but it took too long. I used to do enamel too, Jesse taught me. Now I mainly do simpler things.’
‘Those chains don’t look simple, and those coiled bracelets.’
‘The chains are easy. I use aluminium wire and copper wire, it’s very pliable, you can twist it and plait it and spiral it in hundreds of ways. And I make these funny ornaments out of steel and nickel.’
‘I can’t imagine how — ’
‘With tools, silly. There are such things as hacksaws and hammers and pliers and pincers and tweezers and drills and files — ’
‘Yes, I can see them. And what’s that?’
‘A soldering iron.’
‘And these things here are finished, they’re pieces of jewellery? I suppose they could be hung onto the human form somehow.’
‘You’d be surprised. This sort of steel triangle is very popular, and this square collar made of aluminium, and this copper anklet — ’
‘I wondered what it was — sorry, Ilona!’
‘It’s primitive really, like in Africa. It gets good prices. Dorothy, Mother May’s friend, takes what we make to quite expensive shops. Jesse’s name helps to sell it, of course, we call it Jesse Baltram crafts.’
‘And did Jesse invent all this primitivism business?’
‘He is the source of everything we do,’ said Ilona solemnly.
It occurred to Edward for a moment suddenly to think, perhaps Jesse does not exist at all? Perhaps he’s someone whom they invented, or something they just believe in, like God? Or perhaps the word in their language isn’t a proper name but means something quite different? He looked across the thick heavily scored work bench at Ilona who was wearing a leather apron and playing with the soldering iron. She smiled at him. The moment passed. He looked at her small brown hands, at the numerous tools in their neat rows, at the glittering barbaric baubles. He said, ‘I think you’re marvellous, I can’t think how you do it.’ He thought, her bedroom must be just above this room. ‘Ilona, there’s such a strange place upon the hill, in that wood, a sort of long glade with a pillar in it.’
‘Oh yes, you found that,’ she said in quite a casual way looking at him affectionately. ‘It’s an old place.’
‘How old?’
‘I don’t know. The Romans were there, and the Druids.’
‘That stone, that pillar — ?’
‘The base part is Roman. The pillar is older.’
‘Is it yours, your land I mean?’
‘Yes. The pillar had fallen down and Jesse set it up again, the tree men helped him. Some archaeologists were cross with us. But Jesse knew how it had been.’
‘What do you call the place?’
‘Well, Jesse called the stone the Lingam Stone, and so we call it the Lingam Place.’
&n
‘It’s just a name that Jesse invented, he invents names.’
‘Like Interfectory!’ Edward had by now, after questioning his memory, worked out the meaning of that word. By its Latin derivation it did not mean ‘eating place’ or ‘conversing place’, it meant ‘killing place’. Another schoolboy joke perhaps perpetrated by Jesse upon his innocent family. What did such a sense of humour signify? He went on, ‘That thing in the Interfec over the fireplace, that piece of wood, Jesse carved that didn’t he? But what does the motto mean, I am here. Do not forget me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who is here? Who is speaking?’
‘I suppose it’s a general love message, something mediaeval perhaps, Jesse is inspired by all sorts of historical things.’
‘Ilona, when will he come — ?’
‘Oh, very soon.’
‘And we’ll have a festival with wine?’
‘Yes, yes. I must go and rest now — ’
‘May I come up and see your room?’
‘No, it’s too untidy.’
Thinking about Ilona and her room Edward wandered back to West Selden, and then through a little door in Transition that led out at the back of the house between ‘Selden Square’ and ‘Stable Square’. He took the gorse-bushy path toward the fen, the way he had walked on his first day, which now seemed so long ago. He passed through the celandine meadow where the withered flowers were already overgrown by lush green grass. He looked back, as he had done before, at the irregular shape of the house; the majestic cathedral-like forms of the barn and the tower made sense, but the two jutting courtyards and the domestic village-like jumble of Transition, its messiness visible from this side, were certainly harder to ‘read’. He tried to see it as a sort of town, but it gave little satisfaction. Perhaps a ship in harbour with harbour buildings. He set off toward the line of willows. He had of course walked this way several times in the interim but had been stopped by flood water and had never set eyes on the sea. He very much wanted to see the sea, and to find the little harbour where the ‘fisherfolk’ once were. Today as he passed through the willow screen he saw that the flood had receded a bit, but a low layer of mist hung over the further view. Against the grey cloudy sky above the mist a dazzling flight of white doves, caught by a momentary gleam of sun, flashed over the fen. The dark sinewy mats, upon which he had precariously walked before, were covered now in an intense green sprouting of reedy spears. Between them something like ‘dry land’ was emerging at last, and Edward could pick his way fairly easily upon long humps of dried mud, stepping over rivulets of black water, and finding here and there dark pools where red-beaked moorhens swam jerkily away, flashing their white tails in signals of alarm. As he strode long-legged he was thinking about what he had witnessed in the sacred grove. He had seen Ilona dance. But had she really been, as he seemed to recall, floating in the air? Could that have been simply an optical illusion? Had he here, at Seegard, come to a place where he imagined things that didn’t happen — or where things happened which did not usually happen? When he at last met Jesse would it all come clear to him, would his judgment of the women, lately become more clouded, be clarified? It was as if Jesse were a prophet or sacred king whose presence would purify the state, making what seemed good be good, and what was spiritually ambiguous into something altogether holy. Yet was not this way of looking itself a product of the Seegard atmosphere?
Oh why can’t I see the sea, thought Edward, if only this accursed mist could roll away. He was close to the mist now, could see it ahead of him, moved by a slight wind in big separated slowly tumbling masses. The mud was still firm to walk upon, but the pools and rivulets were becoming larger. Coarse salty sea-grass was growing here and there and a low plant which Ilona had shown him near the house called bog myrtle. A little sun, released again by the low plump grey clouds, their sides lightened a little by some reflection, perhaps from the sea, brought so much colour suddenly into the dun scene: red stripes upon the reeds, tall almost fern-like mounds of vivid green moss, succulents with thick pointed blueish leaves, orange lichen upon soaked wood, yellow waterlily pads, pink duckweed. A flurry of activity in one of the pools evidenced a mass of young tadpoles. Distantly inland a lark was singing. From toward the sea came an intermittent booming noise, which Edward thought must be made by some bird. Kneeling down upon dryish mud to look at the tadpoles, he saw something floating which turned out to be a starling. He picked it up by one long outstretched wing and laid it, so limp and dead, upon a bed of young green reeds. He thought, so birds too can drown. As he rose, with some difficulty, as the mud had become damp under the pressure of his knees, he felt a little giddy, and blinked for a moment against a sensation of flashing lights. He realised he was feeling cold and decided it was time to go back.
It was then that he saw something very surprising not far off upon his left. He took it at first for a post, or a thin tree, an unusual sight in this part of the fen. The mist had moved, slowly rolling itself over in fuzzy greyish-white balls, and the object was only intermittently to be seen. Edward stared, then walked a few paces, cautiously watching his footing, and stared again. He decided that the motionless thing was a person, a human being. A faceless monochrome figure of which he could not tell whether it were turned towards him or not. Jesse perhaps, he thought at once, Jesse landed from the sea, at the abandoned harbour. Or Jesse, newly come from the house, hurrying out into the fen to look for … his son. The figure was quite still and now seemed to be looking towards him. A slight shift and lightening of the mist then revealed a figure in trousers, and a blue mackintosh, feet set apart, who might have been of either sex. Edward leapt across a channel of murky water, steadied on an island, looked again and saw a girl fairly near and looking straight at him. His first instinct was that it must be either Mother May, Bettina or Ilona. They were the only women in this part of the world. Only they never wore trousers. Besides he could see that this was a girl with straight not very long brown hair. He could not see the face clearly, but she was certainly not one of his sisters. A girl who was not a sister, standing there with her hands in her pockets, out in the misty watery emptiness of the fen, and looking at him, as he looked at her. At that moment Edward lost his balance and slid down the slippery muddy side of the mound upon which he was standing. One foot descended into water. Stepping upon dark earth which yielded like fudge he gracelessly scrambled up onto something like terra firma. He looked about again, and again and again, but the mist rolled on and the girl had vanished.
‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, nor services to do till you require. Nor dare I question with my jealous thought where you may be, or your affairs suppose — ’
‘That’ll do, Harry. Besides,’ said Midge, ‘you always know where I am — ’
‘Do I?’
‘And you have no cause to be jealous. And you are not a slave. I am the slave.’
It was one of their days. Thomas was at a conference in Bristol, Meredith was at school, Midge and Harry were in the spare room, Midge was wearing her red and purple imperial robe. Harry had only just arrived. He had taken off his tie. He had let himself in with his backdoor key. He liked Midge to wait upstairs like a captive bride. Who saw him enter the house? No one. He came by a tree-shaded back alley through a gate into the walled garden. He wore various disguises. He liked that. He also possessed a frontdoor key, but that was just symbolic.
Midge was shaken and frightened because she had had a fall. Shopping that morning she had, in the incomprehensible way in which such things happen, caught her toe on a paving stone and fallen violently upon her knees, then full length, her cheek and elbow were grazed upon the pavement, her handbag went flying and disgorged its contents, one shoe came off. People rushed to help her up, to gather the little personal trinkets out of her bag, she felt a fool with h
‘Everyone thinks Edward is at Quitterne,’ said Harry. That was the name of the McCaskervilles’ country cottage. ‘But you say he isn’t.’
‘He isn’t!’
‘All right, I believe you!’
‘Then why do you say “I say” he isn’t?’
‘I hate to think you might be keeping Thomas’s secrets.’
‘You don’t seem to care much where he is.’
‘Of course I do. But I know he’ll be all right because he’s like me, full of expanding curiosity, absolutely connected with the world. Not like Stuart, Stuart’s a Faust manqué. He’d sell his soul to be a great physicist. As that can’t be arranged, he can’t be everything so he’ll be nothing. Really he’s power mad. If he wants to be encanaillé I can’t stop him, it’s the virtuous pose that’s so sickening. And it won’t work. He doesn’t realise how much people will hate him. A child who’s born without hands can cope somehow, be helped by society and praised too. Stuart was born without — something — and he’ll be pecked to death for it. No he won’t — he might want that — he’s just a mess. He’ll be arrested for molesting a child. I don’t mean he will molest a child, but people will think he has. They’ll see him as sinister.’