The Philosopher's Pupil (83 page)

I should say that Brian and Gabriel are for the present, perhaps permanently, living at Belmont and looking after Alex, and Ruby has come back there too. While Alex was in hospital, Ruby fled to the gipsy camp where she seemed to assume that she would now spend the rest of her days. Mike Seanu brought her back to Brian and Gabriel at Como. Later (when Brian declared the house too small for him
and
Ruby) she went to stay with Pearl in London. It has appeared however that Ruby cannot exist outside Ennistone, and when Brian and Gabriel moved to Belmont, Gabriel insisted that she should come back. She has got her pension from Alex after all, arranged by Robin Osmore, and is rumoured to have considerable savings since she never spent any of her salary. I have forgotten to speak of Alex. She never fully recovered from that fall down the stairs. As Stella said, Alex's fall prefigured George's, and had a similar effect. Alex is a shadow of her old self, all that bossy curiosity, that bright restless power, has quite gone. She is (or seems) perfectly rational, but has become very quiet. She spends long times sitting at the big bow window in the drawing-room and looking out. (And what does she see when she does so? Foxes. Our worthy municipal officers, with what our citizens call their ‘usual efficiency', certainly pumped in the lethal gas, but took a long time doing so and failed to block all the exits of the earth, so that the foxes were able to decamp in safety. The ‘fox menace' has now, since the recent council elections, passed out of the public gaze.) Alex rarely goes visiting, but her old friends come to see her, and even her new acquaintances, whom Gabriel calls ‘tourists', including Father Bernard's successor, an elderly youth with a guitar. She likes to be given little presents, anything pleases her, flowers, chocolates, or model animals of which she is making a collection. She does not read much, or watch television, but listens constantly to the radio, including classical music programmes which never interested her before. When visited she initiates no conversation, but will talk readily about the topics proposed. Naturally, her visitors choose these with care. She and Ruby are back on their old silent terms except that of course Alex is less peremptory and (so at least Gabriel is pleased to think) Ruby is gentler and more affectionate. The only time Alex shows any emotion is when George comes to see her, as he sometimes does, accompanied always by Stella, who never leaves his side. At these meetings, one of which I witnessed, George makes a visible touching effort to make the conversation a success. He shows an unwonted animation and tries to make his mother respond, and sometimes it seems that some glimmer of the old Alex is about to appear. However, confusion ensues, the danger of tears, and Stella sees to it that these visits are suitably short. Dr Roach is pessimistic, but I am not. As I said, it is remarkable how ably old brain cells can learn new tricks, I have seen this happen many times. I shall certainly watch both these cases with the utmost interest.

Whenever I see Gabriel she always turns the conversation on to George, displaying an almost spiteful obsession with his disabilities. Of course she is jealous of Stella's absolute possession of George, and the determined way in which she keeps Brian and Gabriel at a distance. The other day (we met at the Baths where the colder weather has again covered the water with a pall of steam) she described George as ‘spiritless, characterless and good'. And of Stella: ‘She always wanted him maimed, she's his nurse now, she imagines her love-cure has saved him, but it's just that he's broken.'

Brian, coming up, added, ‘It's just as well he's broken. He was too bloody dangerous when he was in working order.' And Gabriel, ‘It's sad in a way. Both our monsters are quite tame now.' She said it soberly but with a kind of natural satisfaction.

However, lest
I
should now seem to be spiteful, let me say that Gabriel is very kind and tirelessly attentive to Alex, and seems to be in general more reconciled to being a wife and mother. Perhaps, after witnessing the troubles of others, she feels how lucky she is to have a loyal decent husband, even if he is bad-tempered, and a fine tall growing-up son. She may at times be heard to murmur, ‘Of course, George would have been perfectly ordinary if only Rufus had lived.' I doubt if she is right.

I find it difficult myself to leave the subject of George, whom I confess I enjoy discussing regularly with Stella. Stella says she thinks George has started to write poetry, though he always hides it when she comes in, and she takes this as a hopeful sign. She believes that although George had been daydreaming for some time about murdering his old teacher, he really decided to kill him after he received the philosopher's final savage letter, only at first he concealed this decision from himself by imagining a final liberation from the relationship. ‘I felt I had really finished with him,' George told Stella, ‘only he …
provoked me
so …' This accords with what Tom has since told me of the extraordinary ‘radiance' (he used this word), a sort of unnatural visionary calm which surrounded George when they met at Diane's flat just after, it appears, George had received the letter. George's reflections on his mental state, which he imparted to Stella during the period of his blindness, reveal indeed a considerable capacity for self-knowledge. He even tried to explain to her what it was like to feel that a murder is a duty. What it was that ‘moved' George from liberated euphoria to effective murderous hate must however remain a missing link. To say that the radiant euphoria ‘was really' the scarcely conscious foreknowledge of the final determination to act is merely a way of stating the problem. The motivation of terrible deeds tends to be extremely complex, full of apparent contradictions, and often in fact bottomlessly mysterious, although for legal, scientific and moral reasons we ‘have to' theorize about it. I have never ventured to suggest to Stella that the peculiar shock of her return, with its reminder of an old jealousy, might have had some decisive effect upon her husband. I do not know whether she ever reflects upon this distressing idea. It would be a sad irony if her inopportune mention of the philosopher's name should have prompted the violence which ended this tale as well as that which began it. Was the final ‘provocation' hers after all, and not John Robert's? Such are the chance ‘triggers' which may determine our most fateful actions and yet remain opaque particulars with which science can do little.

Since his early outpourings George has not talked much about the past. It is hard to say how far his present mien is instinctive and how far it is a deliberate façade (the distinction can often be unclear). He seems like a much older man, his hair is turning grey and he treats people with a slow kindly dignified condescension. As I said earlier, and I based it on something Stella told me, George was fascinated by Nazi war criminals and identified himself in fantasy with these condemned and defeated monsters. Perhaps now he is enacting the part of one who after many years in prison emerges not exactly repentant but full of stoical wisdom, facing the truth, quiet and proud, acknowledging his acts as his own. George seems to have perceived his own ‘double-think' about his false ‘liberation' from John Robert. I wonder if he has also understood the part played in his mental stratagems by his old fantasy, derived so he thought from John Robert himself, of being ‘beyond good and evil'? More often than the ‘experts' imagine, purely
intellectual
ideas and images can play ‘deep' parts in human psychology. I do not despair of discussing these questions one day with George, indeed with Stella's help this may now come about in the not too distant future. Some of the dedicated George-watchers in the town are of the opinion that George has ‘found Jesus'. Of course this is a nonsense, most vociferously denied by Stella. However, she reported something rather touching which George said lately. ‘Well, he said that Caliban must be saved too.' About
him
Stella and I often talk. Steve Glatz has been questioning Stella about John Robert, and Stella tells me how prudently she has replied. Steve is writing a memoir about Rozanov, to be expanded later into a definitive ‘life'. He showed me a little of this piece, in which the philosopher has been metamorphosed into some kind of saint! He is also busy reconstituting the drowned notebook of the ‘great work' from his own lecture notes. Meanwhile between ourselves Stella and I have been agreeing that perhaps John Robert was not really quite such a great man as we all imagined.

Steve Glatz is very much upon the Ennistone scene at present. Anthea Eastcote has broken off her engagement with Joey Tanner, thus satisfying those who held that ‘he was only after her money'. Anthea is now said to be ‘involved' with Steve, and Tom and Hattie have lent them the little house at Malibu. Mr and Mrs Tom McCaffrey still live at the Slipper House, where Pearl and Emma often come to stay, putting up with Tom's heavy humour at their expense. Tom and Emma maintain a steady
amitié amoureuse,
although neither of them would dream of using that expression, or indeed alluding to the matter in any way. Hattie and Pearl love each other with the deep love of childhood friends, tempered by the love of those who have been shipwrecked together. They often talk of John Robert, but not of the shipwreck. With an instinctive delicacy which is natural to both, Pearl never speaks of her secret love for the philosopher, nor has Hattie discussed with her those last terrible days at Hare Lane. I wonder (for of course I would never ask her this) whether she ever meditates upon the strange fact that it was John Robert and not Tom who first awakened her sexually. It is certainly fascinating to consider how successfully (and indeed how literally), in the end, the philosopher carried out his plan of thrusting her into Tom McCaffrey's arms.

I share the general view that the marriage will be a happy one. I see Hattie as the leader. Tom and Hattie still sometimes discuss whether they would have come to love each other without being urged to do so by John Robert's tremendous willpower. They agree that, even though he brought them together, this merely counts as one of those pieces of pure luck that bring about happy marriages. Hattie is determined not to let her university studies prevent her from starting a family. She feels sure that the first child will be a girl. Perhaps John Robert ought to have waited after all? Tom and Hattie intend to have a lot of children, so there will be plenty more McCaffreys available in the future for the inhabitants of Ennistone to gossip about.

The end of any tale is arbitrarily determined. As I now end this one, somebody may say: but how on earth do you know all these things about all these people? Well, where does one person end and another person begin? It is my role in life to listen to stories. I also had the assistance of a certain lady.

A Biography of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century. She wrote twenty-six novels over forty years, as well as plays, poetry, and works of philosophy. Heavily influenced by existentialist and moral philosophy, Murdoch’s novels were also notable for their rich characters, intellectual depth, and handling of controversial topics such as adultery and incest.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Murdoch moved to London with her parents as a child. She attended Somerville College in Oxford where she studied classics, ancient history, and philosophy. While at Oxford, she was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (which she later left, disillusioned) and, in the 1940s, worked in Austrian and Belgian relief camps for the United Nations. After completing her postgraduate degree at Newnham College in Cambridge, she became a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lectured in philosophy for fifteen years.

In 1954, she published her first novel,
Under the Net
, about a struggling young writer in London, which the American Modern Library would later select as one of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century and
Time
magazine would list as among the twenty-five best novels since 1923. Two years after completing
Under the Net
, Murdoch married John Bayley, an English scholar at the University of Oxford and an author. In a 1994 interview, Murdoch described her relationship with Bayley as “the most important thing in my life.” Bayley’s memoir about their relationship,
Elegy for Iris
, was made into the major motion picture
Iris
, starring Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, in 2001.

For three decades, Murdoch published a new book almost every year, including historical fiction such as
The Red and the Green
, about the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and the philosophical play
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues
. She was awarded the 1978 Booker Prize for
The Sea, The Sea
, won the Royal Society Literary Award in 1987, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth.

Her final years were clouded by a long struggle with Alzheimer’s before her passing in 1999.

Murdoch as an infant with her mother, Irene, in 1919. Irene was a trained opera singer, though she gave it up after Iris was born. Murdoch’s father, John, worked as a civil servant once the family moved to London.

Murdoch in 1923, at age three or four. She was an only child and remembered her childhood as “a perfect trinity of love.” Her father encouraged her to read at a young age and her favorite authors included Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson.

The London house in which Murdoch grew up, seen here in 1926.

Murdoch in 1935. She was studying philosophy, classics, and ancient history at Oxford at the time of this photo.

Murdoch with an unidentified friend in 1946. At this time Murdoch was studying philosophy at Cambridge, where she enrolled after working for the United Nations to help Europeans displaced by the Second World War.

John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband, in the 1960s. The two were married in 1956 after meeting at Oxford.

Murdoch and Bayley at an unknown date. One of the couple’s shared passions was swimming, which they did together whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Bayley and Murdoch on vacation in Orvieto, Italy, in September 1988, with family friend Audi Villers, whom Bayley married after Murdoch’s death.

Bayley and Murdoch in Delft, Holland, in 1996. Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the mid-1990s.

Bayley’s writing desk, which originally belonged to J.R.R. Tolkien. Murdoch’s scrapbook can be seen atop the desk.