The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch
His parents were poor but not too poor, evangelical but not too evangelical, kind and well-intentioned like himself. He was an only child, he had a happy childhood. When Bellamy was over thirty his father (an electrician by trade) died in a freak accident and his mother decided to return to New Zealand, the land of her birth. Her death there was much later reported to him by a remote cousin. Bellamy was deeply grieved by these losses, but was able to deal with the pain in a fairly rational way. He often thought about his mother and wished that he had visited her in New Zealand as he had often intended to do. But they, perhaps (as he reflected later) because of the simple purity of their lives and the plain ordinary openness of their relations with him, did not enter into the torture chamber of his soul. About not having, in time, visited, even joined, his mother, he felt regret, but no anguish of remorse. In general, nobody bothered Bellamy. He worked hard at school and gained a scholarship to study history at Cambridge. Why after two years at that university, he left to study sociology in Birmingham, no one knew clearly. He suddenly, as he said, ‘couldn’t stand Cambridge’. He wanted to get closer to something – perhaps life. But life continued to reject him. Armed with his sociology degree, he went into local government, first as an administrator, then as a social worker. Later he taught sociology and religious studies at a sixth form college. Then he was unemployed, seeming unable to find any job. Then (to the horror of his mother – his father was by then dead) he became a Roman Catholic. One thread in his erratic life was (as he now felt he had discovered) that of a religious quest. He thought of becoming a priest, and even made some plans to enter a seminary. However, instead of doing so, he became a teacher at a comprehensive school teaching modern history. He soon lost this post through a complete inability to keep order. He then seemed to be intending to attempt a return to his earlier career as a social worker, and, in spite of the fact that his curriculum vitae was now patently so blurred, hopefully filled in some applications. Then something, which he felt was at last that for which he had been seeking, overcame him and he decided to ‘give up the world’ in the most extreme and complete manner possible by becoming a monk in an enclosed order. He made contact with a religious house, which he had now visited several times, and into which he hoped before long to be admitted as a novice. On this subject he was now in continual correspondence with one of the Fathers. How frightened and appalled he often felt at this prospect he kept concealed from his friends. He welcomed this fear into his soul as an intimation of something more irrevocable, the entry at last of Truth into his life. Much was made, perhaps too much, by those friends who saw in his plans only what Joan Blacket had called his ‘death-wish’, of Bellamy’s homosexual tendencies. It was true that he did prefer his own sex, but seemed to find no difficulty in remaining chaste.
At Cambridge he had gained two good friends, Teddy and Clement, from whom he later acquired Lucas and Louise. Clement in fact had been the ‘bonding agent’. Like Bellamy, Clement left Cambridge without a degree. He was, by temperament and in appearance, exotic. Bellamy was fairly tall, thick-set veering on stoutness, with a large face and a round head. He wore round glasses. He had light brown eyes, the colour of beech trees in spring one of the girls had said, and thick lips and untidy straw-coloured hair now hiding a bald spot. He smiled readily and had a mild and gentle expression. Clement was tall and slim, with copious dark almost black hair and very dark eyes and eyebrows and a long straight narrow Grecian nose, shapely red lips, and a fierce proud expression. His father was Italian-Swiss, his mother was English of a traditionally military family in Hampshire. His father, ‘a financier’, Clement was never quite sure what his father did, had worked partly in London, partly in Geneva, with residences in both cities. As longed-for children did not appear, the couple, then in England, had adopted a boy. This boy was Lucas. As sometimes happens in such cases, two years later the mother became pregnant and Clement was born in Geneva. At a later time, when Lucas and Clement were at an English boarding school, the tall good-looking father (whose striking appearance Clement had inherited) defected, departing for America with a mistress whom he subsequently married. The boys received affectionate, slightly apologetic, letters at intervals. Clement sometimes replied, but Lucas never forgave his father. The father paid for the boys’ education, the mother in due course returned to Hampshire, Lucas took over the London house, the father disappeared, a letter which Clement sent to him when the mother died was returned ‘unknown’. Over their mother, Lucas and Clement shed tears, but separately.
Life, which so much resented the advances of Bellamy, adored Clement. He swam through it swiftly, weightlessly, lively and slippery as a fish. He arrived in Cambridge stage-struck, after successes as an actor at his school, and immediately joined the Footlights. He enjoyed his academic studies too (he was reading English), loved literature, and mastered the latest fashionable critical theories. He published reviews in university periodicals. However, though tipped for a first or good second, he left Cambridge without a degree, lured to London by one of the talent-spotters who frequented Footlights’ performances. Clement loved the theatre, he loved the buildings, the actors, the sonorous voices, the echo in the empty shell, the clothes, the smell, the perpetual glittering artificiality and transformation scenes. He was, in that great palace of true and false, versatile, some said too versatile. He was a good actor, a natural actor, born with it, grasping very early in life his talent to defend himself by mime. He was strong and agile and graceful, he could have been a ballet dancer, he worked briefly as an acrobat in a circus. Almost everything which could be done in theatre he did. He directed, he designed sets, he designed clothes. He was said to be lucky and to bring luck. Apt at everything, he settled down to nothing, but that, he said, suited him. He was good at what he chose to do, endlessly productive of fresh ideas. Etonne-moi, great figures in theatre land had used to say to him. He was known, but never quite famous. He worked in small theatres, less often in the West End. Older mentors were continually telling him to concentrate his talents, to stop playing the monkey, to stop imagining he was still twenty and in Cambridge. But this was just what Clement did imagine and joyed in imagining, finding little reason to doubt that the gods had given him the gift of eternal youth. There was no doubt in Clement’s case that he loved the other sex; but here again he lacked concentration, he lacked constancy, and was even heard to preach that in that caravanserai it was better not to try to settle down. The theatre was essentially a scene of partings, a métier for free beings. Something like ‘home life’, in so far as it existed for him, was provided by his elder brother Lucas, by Teddy and Bellamy, then by Teddy and Louise, then by Louise and the children; the children being the girls and Harvey, for whom Clement had figured, if not exactly as a father figure, certainly as the most delightful of uncles, and later more like a brother.
The human fish experience of the passeggiata was yesterday. Today they were at the bridge. They had intended to leave early by car, since they were a little behind with their timetable, but it was Harvey who had insisted that they must see the great fourteenth-century bridge, a little outside the town, famed for its grandeur, its great length and height, and for the large number of persons, including distinguished ones, who had chosen to commit suicide by leaping from it. They had had to leave the car at some distance from the bridge and proceed on foot, thereby losing more time, but when they arrived they agreed that it was worth it. The scene itself was grandiose, a deep valley, a chasm with a glimpse of the ruined Roman bridge and a scarcely discernible river, the valley floor and hillsides covered with a thick forest of mingled cypresses and umbrella pines, their dark and light greens creating in the brilliant sunshine a vibrant fuzz of undulating colour. Out of this vast surge the pale bridge rose on sturdy yet elegant piers, in the centre affording a drop of several hundred feet. The bridge carried only a long narrow footway, with a tall wall on one side and on the other a parapet about four feet high and four feet wide. The trio had crossed the bridge and were adm
At the point at which Harvey had mounted, the tops of the pines and cypresses were only a few feet below him. As he walked now, steadily, not fast, aware of the ground falling away below, he fixed his eyes upon a mark at the far end of the bridge, a white post with a tree beside it. He thought, it’s not far away, I must keep looking at it and simply walk straight on. However, a few steps later he found that he was losing the concept of ‘straight on’. It was as if the space upon his right, where the chasm was opening, were turning itself at the level of his feet into a sort of floor, or sheet of faintly glittering water upon which some superior power was gently urging him to step. He took a quick glance downward and a shock passed diagonally through his body, and for a second his mouth opened and his arms rose. He stared instantly back toward the white post and the tree but could not find them. His eyesight seemed to have altered, refusing to deal with the distant manifold. Ahead now all was pale and swimming in sunlight. Yet his feet were finding their way, each foot replacing the other as if they were now in control. He was aware of his arms swinging and a continued impulse to raise them up to balance himself, or as if they were wings. With an effort he focused his eyes, gazing now upon the parapet itself some four yards in front of him. It seemed astonishingly narrow, and becoming narrower – could it actually be narrower? He tried to concentrate upon its texture which was roughish, as of tiny stones engulfed in concrete, what had seemed smooth was now becoming uneven so that even the little stones were casting shadows. The colour of the parapet which had seemed before, long ago, a light brown, now seemed a dazzling white, covered with little black shadows, like a tiny model, it weirdly occurred to Harvey, of a primitive village of little white houses in a bright southern sun. Then it seemed to him that the giant ponderous footsteps which had somehow taken him over were crushing the little houses. Amongst these thoughts he could hear behind him a whispered conversation going on between Clement and Bellamy. They were agreeing that they must not walk beside him, where they would distract him and disturb his balance, but keep close behind him. What use is that, thought Harvey, now irritably aware of them out of the corner of his eye, why are they there at all, when this is happening? Cautiously he drew his downward gaze, riveted to the parapet surface, closer to him. He was keeping going, but how? Must he not suddenly tire? He felt tired, his movements less steadily mechanical. The powerful spirit on his right was still subtly tempting him to move out onto that floor of void, to walk there, to fly there. He felt a pressure as of a strong wind. He wondered, shall I look at my feet? Surely he must not do that. He was suddenly aware of something approaching him, something dark just below him on his left, someone who was crossing the bridge, who would pass him, perhaps brush him, push him, compel him to move aside. The figure came nearer like an approaching wave, he could feel a force upon his breast. A voice said, ‘Sei pazzo?’ That was over. Now he could feel, almost see, his moving feet, his dusty blue and white running shoes flashing to and fro, the white laces flapping. He thought, I did not check my shoes before starting. I shall trip over my laces. But there had been no ‘before starting’, just suddenly the thing itself. He resisted an impulse to bow his head, to let it descend onto his breast. He lifted his gaze, concentrating upon the lines, the receding straight converging lines, the limits of his ordeal. They now seemed, these lines, as if they had been very finely drawn in black ink, enclosing the terrible narrow, ever more narrow, path upon which and within which he must keep on walking. He thought, it’s geometry, it’s just geometry, it’s like walking on a map. He did not dare now to seek for distant landmarks. But he allowed himself to think, is it halfway, surely it must be halfway – only I must not get tired, I must keep moving, above all I must not look down there. He was beginning to be conscious of his breathing. Suddenly the temptation overcame him and for a split second he glanced right and down. He saw no longer the appalling chasm but the roof of green colours still far off below him. He breathed again, he concentrated upon the lines, he thought it can’t last forever. Then he tried again to find the white post and the tree – and suddenly they were there, in place, quite clear, nearer. He slightly slowed his pace. He became conscious again of the muted voices of Clement and Bellamy behind him. He began to have a collected feeling. The parapet seemed suddenly wider, no longer a punishment of inky lines. He was able to think, yes, it’s an ordeal, it’s something that had to be. Then he saw, in what seemed at last some quite ordinary sense of looking, a group of three girls standing beside the white post. He felt an impulse to smile and was aware of his mouth being open. He thought, I mustn’t fall at the last moment. The trees were close below him now, the end of the bridge, which he had not conceived of when he was looking at the white post, now clearly visible, and the brown stripe of the path behind it. Harvey now walked slowly. He was there, he had done it, he had conquered. He waved his arms. The girls were waving at him, he could hear their voices. The parapet ended, Clement and Bellamy were there saying things. Harvey turned and looked back at the way he had trod. He smiled at the girls. Then, with a yelp of triumph, springing high into the air, he leapt to the ground.
The ground was not exactly where he expected it to be. His eyes were dazzled as by a white flash. He hit the ground hard, his legs violently jarring his body, then slipping from under him, scraping a track in loose stones. He fell on his side, an outstretched arm jolted, his shoulder taking the impact. A surge of outraged annoyance bore him up, and in an instant he was on his feet, leaning against the wall and brushing earth and stones off his shirt. He felt a blush of shame and anger run up his neck and across his face. How could he have been, at the very last moment, such an idiot! He could hear the girls chattering in Italian.
Bellamy was saying, ‘Are you all right? You haven’t hurt yourself?’
Clement said, ‘You bloody fool! I was going to shake you, only it seems you’ve shaken yourself! Now come on, get a move on, we’re late, let’s get away from this awful place!’
Harvey said, ‘Yes, sorry.’ He touched his cheek which had evidently also been grazed in the fall, and looked at the blood on his fingers. He had instinctively lifted one foot from the ground. When he put it down and placed weight upon it, trying to step forward, a sharp pain ran up his leg. He was conscious now of a continuous pain in his foot and ankle.
Clement repeated, ‘Come on!’
Bellamy said, ‘He’s hurt.’
Harvey said, ‘I’m all right.’ He tried to walk, limped, then hopped as far as the white post and leaned against it. The girls, who had retired to a distance, were watching. ‘Damn it, I’m sorry, I seem to have wrenched my ankle, I expect it’ll be OK in a minute or two.’
‘We haven’t got a minute or two,’ said Clement. ‘All right, rest it – but then we must go.’
Bellamy said, ‘Oh dear, I shouldn’t have said it, it’s all my fault!’ They stood looking at him.
Harvey was panting. He felt breathless and suddenly helplessly weak. There was a raging furnace in his foot, which he was holding up clear of t
‘It’s not all that bad, is it?’ said Clement.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Harvey, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ll just have to walk to the car, there’s no other means of transport.’
‘We could carry him,’ said Bellamy.
‘Don’t be silly!’
A few yards further on along the path there was a seat. Hopping on one foot and leaning hard on Bellamy’s arm Harvey got as far as the seat and sat down, burying his face in his hands. Kneeling before him Clement undid the laces of his shoe and with some difficulty eased the shoe off. The foot was dangling at an unusual angle. He gently rolled the sock off and revealed the swollen foot and ankle, crimson and blue, the distended skin burning hot to the touch. Opening his eyes Harvey looked at it. He groaned.