The Good Apprentice (65 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: The Good Apprentice
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He had now spent two nights in his old room. There had been an efficacy, what Thomas believed in, but it was over, had done what it could, perhaps only in the meeting with Brownie there. It afforded him no more wholesome thoughts. There were evil spirits there, spirits of guilt and terror. Most of all, Edward was now afraid that in the end he might begin to hate Mark, to see him as a demon who had ruined his life. An evil Mark was sometimes in the room at night, standing beside Edward’s bed. Why should not Mark desire revenge? He had ruined Edward’s life, but Edward had taken his life away entirely. This was a new and dreadful idea, emerging from the mass of poisonous spiders with which he had told Brownie his head was crammed. He must find somewhere else to live. He thought of returning home, but he felt afraid of Harry. He could imagine, from the automatic workings of his own imagination, how much Harry might, simply because of what he knew, hate the sight of him. Harry would bitterly resent any ‘loss of face’ and any witnesses thereof. Edward wondered, but without any lively speculation on the matter, what had happened to Midge and Harry. Living isolated in a world of his own, Edward had not seen any newspapers or ‘naming of names’. He thought about Midge and about how he ought perhaps to go and see her, but he reflected that she too might find him hateful, and he did not feel strong enough to risk it. If he were rebuffed now he would weep.
So Edward walked along, watching the people pass, suffering a vivid phantasmagoria of hope and fear which moved faster and faster through his exhausted mind. Because of the evil spirits he had been unable to sleep. He saw Jesse at Seegard, sitting up in bed waiting for him to come. He saw Brownie in the pub telling him that she would no longer see him, that she had realised that she could never forgive him. He saw Ilona dancing upon the tips of the grass. Then he saw her drowned in the river, rapidly swept along towards the sea, her long hair dark like river weed. He saw Harry leaning forward and saying, ‘You are
ill,
it is an
illness,
you will receive help, you will recover.’ He saw Thomas’s gleaming spectacles and his neat fringe and heard Thomas’s Scottish voice saying, ‘In every grain of dust there are innumerable Jesses.’ He saw Stuart’s yellow eyes full of love and judgment.
Edward walked on and on; then he stopped. He had seen something which he had passed by and which had registered in a violent flash upon his mind, not understood at first. He turned back and walked slowly, looking at the houses. Then he saw it, quite small, a little yellow card pinned onto the wood at the side of a door.
Mrs D. M. Quaid, Medium.
Below it another card exibited the reverse side.
DO THE DEAD WISH TO SPEAK TO YOU?
Edward put his hand to his throat. He had been looking for Mrs Quaid, but now he felt afraid, he trembled. Had he been
led
here, and if so for some evil purpose? If he saw her again would he
go mad?
It seemed to him now that he had simply forgotten how awful, how weirdly unsavoury, it had been up in that room, what Mrs Quaid did and what she was. How could it be a good thing to see her again? Had he not better go on, ignore the little yellow card, take to his heels and run? He had in his imaginings thought of Mrs Quaid as a tool, a means to an end, a
method
of finding Jesse. What Mrs Quaid might really do and say, what terrible thing she might reveal, or seem to reveal, what lie or sickening image she might plant in his mind forever, was now vivid in his imagination. Mrs Quaid was dangerous. But of course it was now impossible to go away. He pushed the door. It was open. He went in.
When he came to the door of the flat it was closed and, he tried it, locked. There was no notice on it. It was not a seance day. There was no bell, so he tapped on the door, first softly, then loudly. After a long time the door was opened on a chain and someone peered through the slit. ‘Yes?’
‘I wanted to see Mrs Quaid,’ said Edward.
‘She’s not here.’
The door started to close, but Edward had put his foot against it. ‘Mrs Quaid, please let me in, please. I’m a client of yours. I came to a seance. You helped me a lot. I know it’s not the right day, but I
must
see you.’
Mrs Quaid undid the chain and Edward pushed the door. He had recognised her voice with its slight Irish tone. Her appearance had changed. She was much thinner. She was not wearing her turban and straggling grey hair clung to her neck and strayed over her hunched shoulders. She stood in the hallway, stooping, the neck of her dress hanging open and her beads hanging free and swinging. She looked sideways at Edward, then shuffled away along the corridor. He closed the door and followed her into the large room where the seance had been held. The curtains were partly pulled and the room was obscure. The chairs, no longer arranged in a semicircle, had been pushed away, some on top of each other, into a corner. Two armchairs stood beside the fireplace where a small lamp was alight and an electric fire occupied the empty grate. The television set, unveiled, stood opposite one of the chairs. Mrs Quaid, stooping, shuffled along, trundling forward like a hedgehog, picked up a bottle which was standing on a small nearby table, and after some hesitation put it into a coal scuttle. She sat down in an armchair, and stared up at Edward, twisting a strand of grey hair round and round her finger. He fetched an upright chair from the other side of the room and set it near her and sat down. He did not fancy the other armchair. During his excursion Mrs Quaid’s eyes had closed.
‘Mrs Quaid — ’
‘Oh — yes — what did you want?’
‘I want — ’ What did he want? Edward had not prepared the necessary speech. He said, ‘Last time I was here you said something about a man with two fathers. Well, that was me. Do you remember?’
‘Of course not,’ said Mrs Quaid. ‘I am but the vehicle. The spirits speak, not I.’
‘Well, a voice spoke to me, it spoke my name and told me to come home. I think that was my father. Well, I went to him, I went home, but now I’ve lost him again. I don’t know where he is, he may be dead only I don’t think so, and I thought you might help me.’
‘There’s no seance this week,’ said Mrs Quaid, ‘and anyway they only talk with the dead, so unless he’s dead there’ll be no communication.’
‘But there was a communication and he was alive. If you could only get in touch with him again — ’
‘I don’t know anything about that. People imagine all sorts of things, they hear what they want to hear, they see what they want to see, it’s not
my
fault. Not everyone is able to understand the voices that come from the other side, not everyone is worthy.’
Edward saw that Mrs Quaid was shuddering. She had put the shawl which had been on the television set round her shoulders and pulled it close up to her neck. Her face was thinner and her white scalp showed through the scanty limp grey locks. Her head, bowed forward so that her eyes, turned up, could barely see him, was nodding compulsively, her long glittering earrings scraping her gaunt neck. With a fussy movement she released the shawl and pulled out the beads which had disappeared inside her dress. She arranged the shawl underneath the beads, tried to tie its corners in a knot but failed, and peered up at Edward with an old cross sad thin-lipped face. It occurred to him that he had not really seen her face on the last occasion, it had been a blank underneath the big jewelled turban.
‘Are you ill, Mrs Quaid?’ said Edward. ‘Can I help you?’ He stood up and moved nearer to her.
‘Of course I’m ill. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not catching. What did you say you wanted?’
‘About my father. I can’t find him. He’s lost. His name is Jesse — ’
‘I can’t help you. It’s not what I do. You have to wait for the spirits. They decide. It’s no use saying to them find the boy’s father.’
Edward sat down in the armchair. He said, ‘If you could just try — I could come to a seance next week — ’
Mrs Quaid had closed her eyes and now lay back in the chair her head ‘lolling a little. Her breathing became audible. Edward thought, hell, she’s fallen asleep. And how dim the lamp is, she must have put something over it. And the television is on, only I never noticed, there’s a picture but no sound. Edward lay back in the chair, breathing in the dust which his movement had raised. He began to look at the television screen. The set was badly adjusted and some shadowy things, perhaps branches of trees, were jigging about. Then the light became brighter, a strong grey light composing a steadier image. There was a line across the screen which Edward soon interpreted as the horizon. He was looking at the sea. He thought, it’s a monochrome set, they look awfully dull after colour, or perhaps it’s an old film. But there’s a lot of light, like a rainy afternoon when the sun’s coming through the clouds. The picture changed, showing the edge of the sea, small waves silently breaking, drawing pebbles back after them. The camera moved along the beach, showing sand dunes with wispy grass waving in the wind. Edward thought, it’s very soporific, this sort of picture, how slowly it moves, with silent waves breaking and silent wind blowing. Now there was an estuary, the mouth of a river, land on the other side, poplar trees, reeds, birds rising, some big geese heavily getting themselves up, their wings beating on the water. I’d like to hear that sound, thought Edward. The camera was moving inland following the river bank, passing a little stony beach, the river was becoming less wide. Then there was a group of graceful willow trees reflected in the smooth water, and beyond them something jutted out, a wall, like a broken jetty, reaching out into the stream. Then suddenly the camera became still and there was a man. He was standing a little way from the bank, with his back to Edward, a tall man in dark clothes. Then he moved and turned round and the camera focused on his face, a young man with straight dark hair falling across his brow. Edward did not move except that his finger nails dug into the arms of the chair. As the face came closer Edward thought,
but that’s me.
Then he thought, no it isn’t, it’s
Jesse.
But what’s happening, they must be showing some old film about Jesse, what a coincidence, how strange, how
awful.
Jesse was pushing back his lock of hair with one hand, and now walking away toward the river bank. He paused at the bank looking down into the water. Then he turned round again and smiled at Edward.
Edward woke up. There was a strange regular sound. He was lying sprawled in the armchair in Mrs Quaid’s big room, the television screen was blank. Mrs Quaid, sitting opposite to him, illumined by the lamp, was asleep. The sound he had heard, and which had perhaps awakened him, was her snoring. Edward sat up. There had been a film about Jesse. The television was switched off. He must have dreamt it. He stood up. Then a fear came to him, a terrible sickening suffocating fear like he had had out in the dark that night at Seegard. He made for the door, was unable to open it, twisted the slippery handle to and fro, then wrenched it open. He closed the door of the room behind him, got to the door of the flat and closed that behind him too and went leaping down the stairs. Out in the street he felt almost incredulous, amazed to find ordinary daylight and people walking about on the pavement. He began to walk too. He looked at his watch. It was after four o‘clock. He had slept for hours. Then he remembered.
Brownie.
He began helplessly to run, but he knew it was no use, the pub would be shut now. She would have waited and waited and then gone away. He had missed her, he had lost her.
In her first instalment of ‘memoirs’ Mrs Baltram treated us to a recent piece from her thrilling diary (upon which she tells us the ’memoirs’ are based), brought in as an example of the ‘electrical band’, to use her words, which she says surrounds her husband. Some might describe the goings-on at their country residence more simply as evidence of a disorderly life. Mrs Baltram seems to think that being a genius excuses every excess, and being married to one every indiscretion. One almost begins to be sorry for the poor man who is, we gather on other evidence, a sick and senile recluse who gave up working years ago. He appears nevertheless, as of now, as her ‘lord’, ‘a king in full beauty’, ‘a sorcerer upon a flying horse’ and so on. Mrs Baltram’s rather banal prose has its purple patches, spurred onward by hyperbole and sugared by sentimentality. She tells us she has ‘had to survive’, hints that she has ‘had her consolations’, there are ‘penalties attached to marrying a genius’. There certainly are, it seems. The second instalment now tells us in some detail how poor May stood aside while Jesse, ‘his eyes ablaze’, carried his model Chloe Warriston up to his room. (‘Of course to be Jesse’s “model” meant only one thing, there was a long line of tawdry maidens’ etc.) If they keep up this standard the ’memoirs’ promise to be, and are no doubt intended to be, an orgy of indiscretion and revenge. Every page glows with malice. Mrs Baltram is expert in the art, practised it must be admitted by almost every biographer, of seeming to utter warm assessments and even adulation while quietly and ruthlessly diminishing the object of attention. Perhaps we all want to diminish those whose stature accuses us of being small. Few however are able (or willing) to mount such a rich operation of belittlement. Mrs Baltram emerges as an obsessive diarist. The diaries from which her saga derives might indeed make more interesting, even more attractive, reading. Perhaps in due course we shall be treated to the diaries as well! As ‘literature’ Mrs Baltram’s complaint, judging by the first two extracts, seems likely to be worthless, but as a social document it may well be of value. ‘May Baltram knew everybody’, the effusive introduction tells us. I suppose scandals about the love affairs of clapped-out painters are good for some mileage. Just how good a painter Jesse Baltram was seems, judging from the controversy his wife’s writings has already stirred up, to be a matter of considerable dispute. She has certainly made publicity for her own hoard of pictures by enticing references to ‘late erotic works not yet known to the public’. The discerning sociologist, now and in the future, will no doubt treat these ramblings as a text for the psychology of women who imagine they are liberated and are emphatically not: a phenomenon of our age. Mrs Baltram has suffered no doubt many stings and arrows of jealous pain. She has clearly planned a plump revenge upon all those pretty models who warmed Jesse’s bed. (See the treatment of Chloe Warriston in the current offering.) What she suffered from even more bitterly however, and which she would be reluctant to admit although her epic seems to reek of it, is envy. She was a little woman married to, however one regards him, a considerable man. Her revenge on Jesse for being famous, attractive, talented, charismatic, everything she was not, is likely to be a thorough one. However we need not feel too sorry for Mrs Baltram. She is onto a good thing. After two more newspaper instalments to whet our appetite we are promised the publication of volume one of the memoirs. This book (and there are more to come) will be a best-seller. There is even talk of film rights.

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