The Good Apprentice (39 page)

Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: The Good Apprentice

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Of course, he thought,
this
of mine is a matter of love and passion, which somehow denies time and yet also creates it, creates its own necessity and pace. It’s a matter of looking elsewhere. Then I orient myself as I move.
This
, which he did not want to name, not with the abhorrent name of God, not either with the awkward dry old name of religion. He did not reject religion as he rejected God, but his private language excluded the word. It was a necessary passion, a necessary love, which was cunning so to station itself as to be attracted by what was holy. What an apparatus; and how difficult and yet how easy it all was. God had been convenient, a permanent non-degradable love-object, to use Thomas’s phrase, automatically purifying desire. But it must all be able to happen without God. Could one not surely love everything so? Somewhere, in his weakness, there lurked the desire for a sign, for an indubitable light to shine so upon something. Yet did it not shine so upon
everything
? Upon evil too? Can one be a spectator of evil? To be a spectator of suffering was difficult enough: the mysterious awful untouchable suffering of others. Edward’s suffering. The suffering of animals. The suffering of the whole planet burdened with hardship and injustice and unquenchable grief. The whole of creation groaning and travailing together in misery and sin. There was no solution to that, even at the end of the world no holy man in a cave, or working in a field or office, who knew the answer. Here were the negative things, the deprivation of understanding. To prise open a door of holiness and knowledge with a narrow but very pure instrument: had that once seemed to be his aim? Where on earth do such ideas come from, and such images, surgical, sexual? Is it a form of madness, or an ecstasy? The negation of such ambitions, such formulations, came as a kind of pleasure, like opening one’s eyes into total darkness. Kneel and let the darkness flow over you, kneel and ask pardon for the sin of existing. Someone had described God as boiling over in the dark, a vast dark boiling of perpetually self-creating being. Something that Keats saw too. The mystical Christ walking upon the boiling sea. Christ in Limbo. Angels embracing repentant sinners in a picture by Botticelli.

Stuart was conscious of a feeling which he often now experienced of almost falling asleep yet of being intensely alert at the same time. What odd fragments of images came then, so vivid and charged with sense. These were the sort of things (but indeed they were all sorts of things) he had, he now remembered, told Edward to hang on to, talismans, sacraments, holy objects, existing in corners of the mind as they might in corners of a church or shrine. Surely Edward too had such things? Stuart had a mental picture of a small image of a god, or perhaps it was just a stone, upon a wet shelf of rock beside a fountain or waterfall. He could not recall ever having seen anything like this, perhaps he had dreamt it. What was it, this ‘holiness’ idea which he seemed to recognise as so ubiquitous and important? Was it perhaps dangerous, an ambiguous face of good, a blank face of sex? Where was Edward anyway and was it not time that he reappeared from whatever safe retreat Thomas, that magician, had despatched him to? Stuart felt a strong desire to see Edward, to help him, to
find out
how to. He had been no use to Edward at the start. Could he help him now? Could he help anybody? Sometimes he felt so alone with
this
that it seemed to cut him off from other people, and that couldn’t be right. Would all that change when he found a job? Job: odd blunt word for it. He loved Edward, he loved Harry. He loved Meredith. Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy. He had, or had had, more or less vague sexual feelings about all sorts of things and people, school-masters, girls seen in trains, mathematical problems, holy objects, the idea of being good. Sex seemed to be mixed into everything. Was this unusual? Was he perhaps ’over-sexed‘, whatever that meant? The mechanical superficial aspects of the desires characteristic of his youthful age he dealt with himself, privately and without guilt, easily blanking out any tendency to erotic fantasy.

His gaze began to articulate his surroundings of which he had not been unaware. Stuart, not blessed with a classical education beyond the stage of elementary Latin, had rather unclear ideas about the Greeks with whom however he ardently identified. In an ignorantly attentive way, he knew the Parthenon frieze very well. He liked the young horsemen. He had always seen himself as a horseman, although he had never been on a horse in his life. By an odd quirk of association, the kind of association of floating fragments which interested him in himself, he connected the idea of riding a horse with the image of his grandfather’s death which Harry, without intending it to haunt the boy, had early imparted to him: the helpless swimmer, the white sail of the ghosting vanishing yacht slowly drawing away. Perhaps the connection came somehow through the Greeks, something dangerous and heroic and awfully lonely and sad, clearly delineated in a pure light. In Stuart’s picture of his grandfather’s death it was always early morning, with a cool clear sky and a calm sea.

The Parthenon procession was, in its stillness, so purposive, moving or waiting to move, prancing horses, swaying riders, all immobile, pressing forward, pressing onward, a procession to a mystery. No, it was not innocent; those careless young men were too beautiful. The gods, so relaxed, so calmly seated in repose, were not innocent either. The only blameless ones were the animals, the horses, and the sacrificial beasts lifting their fine heads, lifting up their touching unsuspecting heads to heaven; and one little boy, a page or groom, younger even than Meredith. Not innocent, but not evil either. These images belonged to fate. And rising up by an association of contrast Stuart saw a girl’s plaited hair, plaits of hair severed at the nape lying in huge mounds. Did she plait it on the day she died, upon a day when she knew that she would die? One might plait one’s hair on any terrible day, like shaving before the scaffold. Oh it was the details, the details that were so unendurable.

And now Meredith had appeared, materialising in front of the line of riders, the soldierly boy, neat, solemn, compact, dandyish in his dark clothes.

‘There was an exhibition for blind people in the Museum,’ said Meredith.

They were walking, perhaps aimlessly, perhaps led by the boy, and had crossed Tottenham Court Road. This took them out of Bloomsbury, both the area and the concept. The Museum was different of course, that was a palace of light and wisdom, floating like a great liner on that dark sea. Stuart did not like the handsome gloomy streets, full of memories of all those smart know-alls, people who had patronised his grandfather and his great-grandfather, and whom even Harry doffed his cap to. How Stuart resented that uncritical obeisance. Across the road was north Soho, reeking with sin of course, but also, in all those messy streets and real little shops, murmurous with humanity.

‘There was this exhibition for blind people, sculptures of animals for them to touch, old stuff you know, Greek and Egyptian and Chinese, lovely animals. Anyone could come and touch them. I did, I touched them and stroked them, and a lot of people did, but not the blind people,
they
weren’t there. I’d have liked to see the blind people touching the animals. But they weren’t there. If I was blind I wouldn’t go about, I’d stay at home. I wouldn’t come to exhibitions for the blind. I’d be too shy — I’d be too proud, too ashamed — ’

‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Stuart. But he knew what Meredith meant. How would he act if he were blind?

‘People look down on cripples, they can’t help it. I’d hide.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Stuart. ‘You’d be a different person, a braver one.’

‘You think courage is a product of circumstances?’ said Meredith in his harsh prim childish Scottish voice.

‘Partly. But courage isn’t just a thing on its own, it’s part of your whole attitude to the world. With something awful like being blind you can’t know beforehand how brave you’d be or what you’d do — ’

‘You might fail.’

‘Yes, but one’s always failing, there are infinite ways of doing that. Our courage and our desire to be good are tested every day — ’ Stuart was about to add ‘every moment’, but he refrained.

‘You don’t fail, do you? I can’t see that you fail. You’re the only person I know who’s not all messy.’

Stuart wondered how to answer this. He said, ‘I’m messy, only you can’t see.’ He thought, yet I do believe I’m different. What is this idea? Is it a good or bad idea? He also thought, I mustn’t ever disappoint Meredith.

‘Well, if it doesn’t show that’s everything, isn’t it? Thoughts don’t matter.’

‘Oh yes they do!’ said Stuart. ‘They matter a lot. They make it easier or harder to
do
things. And anyway they matter in them-serves -’

‘Because God sees them? I don’t believe in God. Neither do you.’

‘They matter. They exist. And bad thoughts are better not existing.’

‘I don’t see how anyone can get rid of bad ones, they just come. I have
awful
thoughts. You’ve no notion!’

Stuart resisted the temptation to ask what they were. The boy was simply wanting to shock him, to make a little exciting emotional drama by eliciting a reproof. Stuart was increasingly wary of such ‘advances’ in his relation with Meredith. In any case filth is better not uttered, utterance gives it more reality and an easier lodgement. Stuart did not want to reflect about Meredith’s bad thoughts, he even felt afraid to hear them. ’People used to pray,‘ he said, ’to get rid of bad thoughts, I’ve said this to you before. You should sit quietly every night and let them all fade away. See how unreal they are, based on false ideas and selfish attitudes.‘

‘I don’t see how they can be unreal if they’re there. You think I mean thoughts about sex. Some people say they don’t matter, they’re healthy.’

‘You said they were awful. One has to judge one’s thoughts. It’s not all that difficult. Anyway you can try. Sitting still helps, get some distance and quietness in your mind, think of good things, perhaps.’

‘Good things. Are there any?’

‘Meredith, you know there are, and all sorts.’

‘Do I know? I think everything in the world is covered with a sort of grey dust. Anyway, I can’t see the point if there’s no God. Is it true that Newton would have discovered relativity if he hadn’t believed in God?’

‘Who put that into your head?’

‘Ursula. She said so at that dinner party, you were there, I was listening at the door, I always do.’

‘I don’t think so — ’

‘You’ll say listening at doors is wrong.’

‘Shut up. I don’t think so. Mathematics is — ’

‘Stronger than God?’

‘Such a powerful self-generating force. I doubt if the notion of explanation by deity would have stopped Newton if he had been capable of conceiving of relativity. It just wasn’t possible for him to because of the whole intellectual context.’

‘Is that why you gave up mathematics?’

‘Because it’s stronger than God? No.’

‘Ought I to give up maths, history, Latin?’

‘Of course not. Whatever can you mean? You must study as hard as you can!’

‘I don’t see — oh never mind — I won’t be able to get a job anyway — except I will because Dad will wangle me one — it’s nice to belong to the establishment. Dad told me you didn’t like those posters in my room, so I took them down.’

‘Good.’

‘The ones of girls, and chimps on loos.’

‘I can’t think what you saw in that muck. And so unkind to poor animals to insult them with our human vulgarity.’

‘There were such nice animals in that exhibition. Is that what’s wrong then, vulgarity?’

‘I hope you haven’t been looking at any more of those filthy pornographic videos.’

‘Dad told me not to. I told him I wouldn’t.’

‘But have you been looking at them?’

‘Yes. All the others do. And I don’t think Dad really minds.’

‘I mind.’

‘You didn’t tell me not to look at that Greek vase in the Museum, with those satyrs chasing those nymphs.’

‘That’s a work of art.’

‘I don’t see why it’s different.’

‘It’s beautiful, and — ’

‘You didn’t like my looking actually, you pulled me.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘So it is just vulgarity after all, not good and bad. It’s whether something’s beautiful or elegant not what it’s about.’

‘It is good and bad — it’s how the thing is — presented sort of — it’s the thought — ’ Stuart was not able to explain very clearly. ‘And anyway, things connect. You not only looked at that muck, you lied to your father.’

‘Is that worse?’

‘It’s deep. Don’t start to lie, Meredith. Just don’t
start
.’

‘Oh I’ve started. I’m well on the way. I don’t suppose he believed me anyway. He doesn’t expect me to tell him the truth.’

‘I’m sure he does. Don’t talk about your father in that way.’

‘Sorry. Of course I don’t lie to you.’

‘I’m glad of that.’

‘But that’s partly because I can predict you. I know what you’ll say. I know you won’t be
really
angry.’