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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: The Good Apprentice
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‘What?’
‘You just came to talk about your mother!’
‘I want to talk about you too.’
‘And my father used to teach your brother. We’re connected. It’s fate.’
‘I’m so sorry about your father.’
Sarah’s father, the mathematician Dirk Plowmain, had committed suicide not long ago.
‘Yes. But we weren’t close. He behaved so badly to my mother, they separated quite a long time ago. Your father behaved badly to your mother too, didn’t he?’
Edward was hurt by the allusion which, he felt, went too far for this early stage of acquaintance. He had a strict sense of decorum. He said nothing.
‘You’re the son of Jesse Baltram, aren’t you, not of Harry Cuno? Some people are a bit confused about it.’
Edward disliked the tone, but replied amiably enough. ‘Yes, but I’ve never known Jesse, I only saw him once or twice when I was a kid. He dropped my mother before I was born, he was married to someone else anyway — ’
‘Yes, I bet your ma kept you well clear of horrible Jesse! Except that she made sure you had his name!’
‘Then my mother married Harry Cuno and then she went and died. I’ve always regarded Harry as my father.’
‘And Stuart is your brother? He’s not Chloe’s child, is he?’
‘No, he’s not my mother’s child. He’s the son of Harry’s first wife, she died before Chloe took over, she came from New Zealand.’ For some reason Teresa Cuno, when she was referred to, which happened rarely, was always thus labelled.
‘So Stuart and you aren’t really brothers.’
‘Not blood relations — but, well, we
are
brothers.’
‘You mean you’re
like
brothers. I’d like to meet Stuart. Someone says he’s given up sex before he’s even tried it!’
‘So that was it, was it? You just wanted to get to know Stuart!’ Edward was fond of his elder brother, but they did not get on too well.
‘No, no, I want to know
you,
I’m studying
you,
can’t you see? And then there’s your aunt, Chloe’s little sister, the fashion lady who married that Scotch psychiatrist. He’s miles older than she is, isn’t he? I suppose she was a mother to you?’
‘Midge McCaskerville, no, not at all.’ Certainly not Midge, his charming young aunt, whom Edward remembered kissing so passionately at a dance when he was seventeen. Margaret McCaskerville,
née
Warriston, his mother’s younger sister, was always known by her nickname ‘Midge’, which she had used during her short career as a fashion model.
‘Not a maternal type,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m told she’s changed a lot. She’s got fat. How do you get on with Harry Cuno?’
‘Fine. Maybe you’d like to meet him too, I’ll give a party!’
‘Oh good! He’s a real adventurer, like an explorer, I’ve seen his picture, like a pirate, a buccaneer, fearfully talented, a hero of our time!’
‘Yes, but not exactly a successful one.’ Why did I say that, thought Edward. This smart little girl will think I don’t like him. She’ll repeat it too. And he is wonderful.
‘I tell you who I’d most like to meet.’
‘Who?’
‘Your real father, Jesse Baltram, now he’s a great man.’
‘You said he was horrible.’
‘I was taking you mother’s view. Anyway he can be both, can’t he? Lots of men are!’
‘I’m afraid I can’t arrange it,’ said Edward.
‘A painter, an architect, a sculptor, a socialist,
and
a Don Juan! My mother met him ages ago. She used to know his wife, May Barnes, before she married him. They’ve shut themselves up in that grotesque house in the marsh. I know that bit of coast, my ma’s got a cottage — ’
‘Isn’t your mother famous for something?’
‘Women’s Lib Journalism. She’s a fire-eater.’
Edward was stirred and upset by this display of irreverent curiosity about his family. Almost any reference hurt. He looked more critically now at Sarah’s clever sallow face, devoid of make-up, her cropped hair and ragged dark fringe, her shaggy jersey and narrow dirty jeans, her big glass beads and noisy Indian bangles, her bitten finger-nails and little strong hand, smelling of nicotine, which intermittently squeezed his knee. She was less beautiful than the last girl he had made love to (a tall American just returned to Boston) but was more attractive, gipsyish, cleverer, nastier, more unpredictable, dangerous. Was this perhaps the beginning of
it
, the serious business for which his love life had been waiting? The way she had undressed him had been so deft, like knitting, her soft accomplished body so tactful and authoritative. She was certainly experienced. Was that good or bad?
One of the candles guttered out. ‘Can’t we have a lamp?’ said Edward. ‘And need we have the incense? I don’t like the smell.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’ Sarah sprang up and turned on a lamp and pinched out the incense. ‘I like the darkness. Have you ever been to a seance? Would you like to go? It’s an experience. Shall we go together?’
Edward suddenly remembered Mark Wilsden. How had he managed
completely to forget
his friend? The sudden love-making, the weirdly concentrated talk about his family, had translated him utterly. And perhaps the use of drugs affects the memory? This was a sober thought. He stood up.
‘Do you believe in life after death? I don’t, but I believe in psychic phenomena. All right, Edward, you’re going, I’ll find your coat.’
‘I must rush,’ he said.
‘Haven’t you got a scarf? I could lend you a woolly cap. It’s getting awfully cold. I wonder if it’ll snow?’
Of course Mark was perfectly all right, would be still asleep. Edward looked at his watch, amazed and relieved to find that his eventful little visit to Sarah Plowmain had taken little over half an hour. He came out into the clear frosty very cold night, gulping in the cold and seeing with satisfaction his deep breaths turned into steamy clouds. Running the short distance between Sarah’s lodgings and his own he levitated several times upon the glittering pavement. He had wanted to be a ballet dancer once.
Edward panted up the narrow flight of stairs. Putting his key in the door he realised that he was drunk. The key skidded over the painted surface seeking the hole. He found it and opened the door, entered and closed the door. The darkened room with its one shaded lamp was curiously cold. Edward saw at once that the newspaper he had put over the lamp was brown and scorched. He quickly removed it, then turned to the divan. The divan was empty. Edward looked quickly about the room, there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. There was no one there. Mark was gone. Then he saw the chair drawn up beside the window and the window wide open.
 
 
 
 
So it was that Edward Baltram’s life was profoundly and permanently altered. At the police station, and again at the inquest, he described how he had climbed on the chair and leaned out of the window and seen Mark’s body lying in the area below the street, illumined by a light from a basement room. Nobody had seen or heard him fall. He described how he ran moaning down the stairs, out onto the pavement, and down the steps to the basement. Mark’s body lay there, huge in the small space, stretched out and broken, a blood-stained sack. The blood smeared Edward’s shoes. He knocked at the lower flat. The people there telephoned the police. A fruitless ambulance arrived. Someone went to break the news to Mark’s mother. ‘What happened?’ everyone asked Edward. At the inquest he was asked more detailed questions. Yes, he had given Mark the drug. At Mark’s request? Yes. Why had he left him alone? He went out for a breath offresh air. How long was he away? Ten minutes. Drugs, which he had not had the presence of mind to remove, were found in Edward’s room. It emerged that he had, on one occasion, casually sold some of the stuffto a fellow student. Mark’s mother, a widow, a powerful and frightening woman, terrible in her grief, declared that Mark abominated drugs and would never have taken any of his own accord. She accused Edward of having murdered her son. The authorities were merciful to Edward. His college suspended him until the next academic year. He saw a hospital psychiatrist who bullied him. He was let off on condition that he gave up drugs and agreed to receive regular psychiatric treatment. This his uncle by marriage, Thomas McCaskerville, who also gave evidence at the inquest, agreed to arrange or provide. The newspapers lost interest in him. Thus Edward passed out of the public eye into his private hell.
Dear Edward Baltram,
Think
what you have done. I want you to think of it at every moment, at every second. I would like to stuff it down your throat like a black ball and choke you. You told vile unforgivable lies at the inquest. I
know
Mark would never have taken that drug. You gave it to him, fed it to him without his knowing, fed him his death,
poisoned
him as surely as with cyanide. You are a murderer. You killed him out of envy, to destroy something beautiful and good which you knew your mean soul could never equal. You killed my beloved son, blackening for ever my life and the life of his sister. You took his whole life away, which I shall have to live in pain as the years go by. You have got off scot free, but I shall not let you forget. God knows how many other young lives you have destroyed, peddling your poison. You ought to die of shame, you ought to be punished, you ought to be in prison, people like you should be put away. May you pay for this with your life’s happiness. I hope that you will never be forgiven and that people will turn from you with horror, I hope and pray that you will never be happy again. My only consolation is that you will never recover from the drugs to which you are addicted, their effects are irreversible, you have destroyed your mind and will live the life of an idiot, tormented by fantasies. I wish my hatred could kill you. I curse you, I condemn you to a miserable haunted life. The claws which I drive into you now will never release their hold.
Jennifer Wilsden.
 
 
This letter from Mark’s mother arrived soon after the inquest. Edward thought of writing to her to say that whatever misery she wanted to curse him with was less than what he felt now and would for ever feel. However he did not write. Another similar letter arrived from her in the following week, then another. It was now March. Mark had been dead for nearly a month.
Edward was entirely occupied with his misery, he had no other occupation. He took the tranquillisers and sleeping pills prescribed by the family doctor. He slept as long and as often as possible, he longed for sleep, unconsciousness, blackness, the absolute absence of light. He found it difficult, indeed pointless, to get up in the morning; curled up, hiding his head, he lay in bed till noon. There was nobody he wanted to see, and nothing he wanted to do except sleep and, when this was impossible, read thrillers. He avidly and quickly read dozen after dozen of the coarsest trashiest most violent thrillers he could lay his hands on. It was at least an occupation to go as far as the library or to the secondhand bookshops in Charing Cross Road. He could, in his state, have readily used pornography too if he had known how to get it. He wandered around Soho and looked into the windows of sex shops and at the photos outside strip joints. But he had not the nerve or particularity of will required to enter any of these establishments. He brooded over the cover pictures of terrible little magazines which had been soiled by eager hands, then slouched guiltily on, afraid of being visible. He wandered a good deal in London, vaguely hoping he might be run over. He stood in underground stations and watched the merciful tube trains thunder in. He did not visit pubs or bars. He had no desire for alcohol, and his old drug was now nothing to him; he could not imagine how he had ever wanted it. All that belonged to a childish phase which he could so gladly and easily have given up, which would be an incident in his past, were it not that now nothing of it could be left behind, he was arrested forever in the place of his crime. Something blood-stained and heavy would travel on with him always, through all of his life. How does one live after total wickedness, total failure, total disgrace? The plough had gone over him and he was dismembered. Grief and remorse were pale names for his condition. He recalled the innocence he had once had which he would never have again; and how happy he had been not so very long ago when, not knowing how blessed he was, he had carelessly thrown away all his possibilities of good. Oh why could not the past be undone, since he regretted it so bitterly and so sincerely? One momentary act of folly and treachery had destroyed all his
time.
He had no time now, only the dead task of passing the hours, there was no live time, no future, he hated everyone. He especially hated Sarah Plowmain, who had brought it all about by that homicidal seduction in her suffocating Sibyl’s cave. Sexual desire had left him, he could not conceive of feeling it again. The craving for pornography was something else, and even that was dull and lacked intensity. His fantasy life was deadened, he had become an obsessive machine, mechanically afraid of the police and of men in white coats. All cravings were mean now, since he himself was utterly without identity or value. Only occasionally when he woke from sleep did he for seconds recover his lost self, his happy self who did not know that his life was irrevocably smashed and over. Waking perhaps from a happy dream he would exist for seconds as that old self, the lively self that could anticipate a happy busy significant day. Then black memory would come, the blackness that covered everything, blinding his eyes and annihilating space and time. Thus did day bring back his night.

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