The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
What had happened had been in effect a means by which she had separated herself from Harry, a light in which she had been appalled by the last two years. But did this change in Stuart’s image which was also, was it not, a self-preserving flight from death, leave her as she was before, however for the moment separated and appalled, still Harry’s mistress? Could not the Stuart drama be regarded as a pointer to the truth and realism of — acknowledging Harry and marrying him, thus ending the evasions and the lies? Was the separation from Harry perhaps a cleansing period which would return her to him, truthful resolute and unashamed? Or was Harry over? Would she be taken back into history, rejecting as an episode the shocking, the revolutionary, the entirely new? So complex and so swift were the thoughts, condensed yet clear, which Edward had occasioned by his awkward intuitive words, by his very presence. After a paralysis of misery and fear Midge’s mind flew about like a bird seeking freedom. Am I calculating, she wondered, can I calculate? If I stay with Thomas I can be friends with Stuart, but not if I go to Harry. If I leave Thomas I might have to fight for Meredith. I’ve never really thought about … Meredith’s unhappiness … Harry always said it would be all right. Yes. Meredith is an absolute, Stuart is not. Edward had said, doesn’t that leave you with the real things? He meant Meredith and Thomas. Yes, they were real. Stuart was a dream. Harry was … Had Stuart permanently killed her love for Harry? Had not her delays and her falsehoods themselves been evidences that she did not love him enough? Could she make that sacrifice for Harry, to destroy her home, her marriage? Evidently not. And, evidently, the long affair had not unmade her home and her family. And Thomas … didn’t she love him? Yes. Oh how she was weighting the scales now, doing it deliberately, and seeing everything except the ultimate why she was suddenly seeing in this new light. When it came to it (but why was it now coming there?) Harry too, like Stuart, was a dream, something that couldn’t be, and had she not known this all along? Those two awful years, and they had been awful, had proved it so. But surely all that love and joy had been something real? Well, it was past. Then when Thomas arrived it was as if she had expected him: such a gentle quiet unfrightening loving Thomas. It was as if he too had been thinking and thinking, approaching her in his thought, and their two thoughts had brought them, at just the right moment, together. (This was something which Thomas said later on.) He had even begged her pardon and kissed her hand. That he kissed her hand somehow impressed Midge very much. After that they embraced and Midge cried a lot and Thomas cried a little. And after that they talked for hours. And Midge could see that her decision had been made.
I deceived my husband, Midge thought, and now I have betrayed my lover. I handed him over to Thomas, tied hand and foot, gagged and helpless, I did not look at his beseeching eyes. I told it all to Thomas as if it were the story of a catastrophe, a bondage from which I had escaped (but I did feel I was escaping, I did feel free), something awful which had happened to me and which he was to sympathise with, and he did sympathise. He did more, he protected me so carefully at every point where I might have felt shame or resentment at having to tell such things to anybody. He made me tell them, yet at once they were turned into something else, as if as soon as they were told, as soon as they came out of my mouth, they were metamorphosed from black into white. And Midge had a picture of black pellets emerging from her mouth and being changed into white sweetmeats, white bread, white moths, doves. I suppose that’s what happens when people confess to a priest. And that was how I betrayed Harry. I sold him for gain. And yet I had to, I had proved to myself that there was no other way to move, it was what I wanted more than anything to do. And when I was talking to Thomas I knew that I loved him and had always loved him and my not-loving-him had been a necessary fake. Or perhaps too I was falling in love with him again in a new way. The not-lying made everything so completely different, and of course not as it once was. And if I had refused what was then possible I would have unmade myself and been taken to hell by a black serpent. Why do I think this, has Thomas put all these notions into my mind? There are such strange things there too. Are they out of his old Scottish-Jewish mind, full of monsters? Or are they my monsters? I must not be afraid now, but oh the pain, the pain of it all. Of course I didn’t tell all of it; and since the telling of it made it something different perhaps I didn’t tell any of it. And of course Thomas understands that too. He knows when to press, to hold on with a grip of iron, and when to relax, to make light and air, to withdraw to a great distance so that he is only a tiny figure the size of a matchbox. I suppose that is his kind of cleverness, or is it wisdom, I don’t know, the cleverness for which I love him. But he thinks he was a fool not to have guessed, and I hate to think of that. And there he is now, he has finished his mowing and is putting up a badminton net.
How has it all happened, she wondered, because it has happened. Or am I still in danger? Do I have to know that ultimate why or how before I am not in danger? Is it all ultimately a matter of instinct? When Thomas kissed my hand I just knew. Perhaps it’s impossible after all to explain, really to tell the truth to anyone, or to see it all oneself. That’s what God is for, to make our lies truth by seeing into the heart. But that’s something we can’t know. I cheated Thomas really, I told him everything except one thing, not a particular thing, not like a fact, but I kept something back like a precious jewel, I stole one thing from the casket when I handed it over. That’s what Thomas knows, but he won’t say, he’ll just watch. And I misled Stuart because I said I no longer loved Harry and that Stuart had killed my love for Harry when what he had really killed or maimed was my desire for sex. And that comes back. How awfully strange it all is now, as if I can suddenly see everything in my life, it’s not quite in focus but it’s very vivid, and I can sit here with folded hands and look at my life. It’s as if I have nothing to do now, Thomas and Meredith will do it all. I still love Stuart, but it’s a quiet subjective sort of love, I don’t want to shoot myself and fall at his feet. I frightened him, poor boy. Thomas said Stuart was a ‘negative presence’, a catalyst. A handy thing to be, he said, a good catalyst. He said I’d put it all onto Stuart, like an ass’s head. He said in a little while I ought to write him a kind letter. Stuart will want everything to be all right, and I’ll help him and there will be a bond between us. Such things did Midge say to herself for consolation and to keep her mind calm and clear while she was suffering the terrible pain. For the secret which she still carried with her was that even now nothing in the world prevented her from going back to Harry. His love for her was still there waiting, like a great warm house, a spacious beautiful sunny landscape. Her love for him existed too, crushed into that tiny radioactive capsule, tumour, gem or speck of poison.
Of course the fierce little thing would slowly lose its potency, fade and dissolve away into nothing, or rather be changed into some identifiable but harmless piece of tissue. But now, a slight shift in the particles which determine events and she could be far away, with Harry, in the south of France, sitting in a café and looking at the sea, or on an island in Greece, or in an exquisite white Italian city perched on a hilltop. The banality of her imagining made her sigh. That was not the stuff of her great love which had now been almost entirely transformed into pain. Now that she had made her choice she had the fearful leisure to rediscover all her old attachment and experience it, alone. Thomas could not, in that secret place, help her, though he knew, he saw, her suffering and was humble and gentle in its presence. He saw where it was and regarded it with his cool blue eyes. Stuart had said stop lying and you will see where you are, if you stop lying and go home you will be happy. It was not as simple or as fast as that; though there was, she knew, a lightness in the future which had been absent from her life for two years. Be patient, Thomas had said to her, be quiet, do not be made unhappy by your unhappiness. Welcome it in. Welcome it! Sometimes it devoured her, her substance preying upon her substance, her own cells blackly infected and turned to burning ill. She had written to Harry. She had not to
Midge sat relaxed at the window, all her limbs limp. She was an invalid. She was waiting for the signs of health which would gradually appear, touching her whole body and her aching soul with little gentle caresses. She could wait and breathe and be patient as Thomas had told her to. She would cook and clean the house and bring in flowers, aware that all the good things she felt sure she was destined to do would perhaps after all turn out to be the dull old familiar things, the duties of her family and her home. She could not have survived that rupture, that desertion, that flight, that had seemed so beautiful in the unreal prospect of it, to leave Thomas behind and Meredith torn in two, and live a new free life with Harry, casting off the past. It had only seemed possible because it was really out of the question, something not really imagined, a fantasy coexisting with a reality which excluded it. How could she have done it to Meredith: the choices of which to hurt, the painful embarrassed visits, the car driven mutely from the door, each parent unable to talk about his life with the other; the silent loneliness and the terrible cultivation of indifference and withdrawal. Sometimes such fates could not be avoided, but here it would have been wanton. I wish he hadn’t known, she thought. But he would have found out later. And he is so grown-up now, with his clever conscious eyes, and how intelligently he and Thomas have worked together to entangle me in their love and, it seems incredible to think of it in that way, their gratitude. And Thomas says they haven’t discussed it, and I believe him, they haven’t exchanged a word. How alike they are! And she smiled, for of course it wasn’t just for Meredith that she had thrown away that of whose charm and beauty she dared not think, it was for Thomas. She had tried to learn to hate Thomas in order to have the strength to leave him. It was difficult to credit, even to remember, those states of mind. Now she was free to discover all her old feelings for Thomas, or rather to find out what had been happening to them, as if she had come back to find them grown, developed, refined, and most evidently powerful. Had she not always known that Thomas was better, stronger, more lovable, more interesting? Thomas had won the game.
I was in love, thought Midge, I was mad, but I was in love. It was a self-authenticating experience, as he used to say; was it not unfair to call it a dream? Only not everything has a place in life, and there was no place for this. Was it just the long lying that ruined their chances? Supposing they had told Thomas at the start? But the start was so exciting, so confusing, no statement could possibly have been made, it was all an unutterably brilliant present, there was no future, the present was the future, how could they have reflected and planned? Later on the structure of falsehood was already there and it seemed at every moment impossible to tell Thomas, and equally impossible not to intend to tell him. They were both waiting for a sign. Well, the sign had come. Did she still wish, as she often had wished, that she had met Harry first, never married Thomas, that it had all been different? This wish, which had seemed so full of substance, now seemed empty. But something, the undeniable past itself, could not be destroyed. Would she, one day, feel sentimental about it? She would not forget that she had loved Harry and the remembered love would become in time harmless. Meanwhile the possibility of Harry would remain for a while, rejected yet active, like a benign curable tumour. The word was frightening, some tumours destroyed their owners. Death could come; but I won’t die of that, she thought. Death was everywhere, its rays were falling upon herself and upon those she loved and upon the whole earth. She recalled her dream of the white horseman, and the curious effect which Stuart had had upon her, the killing of her ordinary life, the annihilation of her instinctive desires, the sense of utter deprivation which had been too a kind of unearthly joy. She realised that this intense feeling had passed, was already remote even absurd, yet was also something she would not forget.
The sun was declining and the shadow of the copper beech had covered most of the lawn, where Thomas and Meredith were playing badminton, enthusiastically but very badly. Now Meredith’s dog, a golden labrador puppy with a talent to amuse, had seized hold of the shuttlecock. As the players pursued him with shouts of laughter she was aware of something moving in the sky. It was the air balloon with blue and yellow stripes which she had seen once before, and she felt an impulse of pleasure, remembering how unhappy she had been then.
Midge left the window and opened a drawer in her dressing table and took out a pair of stockings in which she had concealed Harry’s letter. She wanted to read it just once more.I cannot and will not accept what you say. Please be clear about this. I will not accept it and you do not mean it. This is, how strange, my first love letter to you. Ever since that day after Ursula’s party when we looked into each other’s eyes, looked away, looked again, and knew, we have been so close, so often together, we have lived without letters. I wanted to write to you, to consume the pain of absence in writing, but you were so afraid of Thomas. Now that doesn’t matter any more, I don’t even care if Thomas reads this. I love you, I love you, and I possess you and will not give you up. And you love me, and you love no one else. Do not deceive yourself, my darling and my queen, do not falter now when the way is open for us at last. I love you, I live by and in your love, my life rests upon your love. I have had to live from day to day, every day you were still with me was paradise regained. But I hoped, arid you hoped, that the time would come when we would live in eternity, just us two absolutely together. My knees shake, they give way when I think about you, I lie struck down to the floor as I was on that first day. Do you realise how rare this is, mutual perfect love? With my body I thee worship. We know, which is given to so few, perfect happiness, perfect joy. You cannot deny this, to do so would be a deep wicked lie, not like the lies we had to use to protect ourselves, to protect our precious love, and which we hated so, I hated so, they were never my fault. I should have stayed with you on that day when Thomas arrived, when he knew, I regret that, I am sorry, I was a coward, fear of Thomas has undone us all along, let it not do so now when at last there is no need. Oh my love, my sweet dear love, my every instinct is not to hurt you, I would fight with demons, with God himself, to save you from any smallest hurt or harm. And now I seem to be accusing you. I do accuse you, of untruthfulness, unfaithfulness, lack of courage — lack of courage at the very moment when it is most needed and will be most rewarded. We are so close to our happy ending, to achieving what we have worked and suffered for and have a right to, our freedom together. You have had a shock — two shocks — Thomas’s discovery and your little mad fit about Stuart, which I hope and believe is over. (That I could not credit or countenance. I now realise that I took it too seriously!) You may feel that you want to rest. But, my love, my angel, this is no moment for resting. We must work. We must establish our true home, where we shall live forever immortal as the gods, where we shall fly our indomitable flag — you remember about the flag? Midge, do not delay now, do not be idle, I cannot believe that you, with open eyes and who have experienced both, could now prefer the second best, the tenth best, to the best! If you did you would regret it bitterly, as the years passed, inside the emptiness and loneliness of your marriage. You would grow old quickly if you stayed with Thomas, he is old. Don’t let sheer weakness, sheer senseless convention, for it is entirely senseless now, don’t you see, keep us apart for another day. I am waiting for you, hour by hour, minute by minute, waiting. We shall have Meredith, he will be ours, we have agreed, we know. Don’t be afraid! How can he not prefer us, and our happiness and our gaiety and our freedom, to the austerity and dull harsh Scottish gloom of Thomas’s world? Thomas is a melancholic. We can live anywhere, in the