A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch

to you and seeing you feed the pigeons.’
    ‘You lie. Don’t forget to tell your husband it all went wrong from the start. He can put that in his book.’
    ‘I’ll tell him. Cheerio then, Leonard.’
    Hilda turned away and hurried across the road. By the time she reached the opposite pavement she had forgotten Leonard’s existence. The vague optimism which she had felt last night about Peter had entirely vanished. The impact of Morgan’s return, more violent than anything that she had expected, had laid her soul open to fears. And when the prospect of meeting Peter was close it was now always rather alarming.
    The door was still slightly off its hinges and lurched back, grinding along the floor. It only needed five minutes’ work with a screwdriver. When Hilda had mentioned the door to Tallis once he had said that it was never locked at night as if this was an answer. Hilda went in, tugged and lifted the door back into its place, and found herself in semi-darkness. The indescribably horrible smell of the house assailed her. The smell was really mysteriously unpleasant. Hilda had never experienced anything quite like it. Old dirty lodging houses usually have a stale odour, stale sweat, stale food, stale urine and the dark brooding smell of dirt. The smell in Tallis’s house was fresh and bitter and at the same time nauseating. Hilda wondered if it were not caused by some extremely recherché form of dry rot. Or possibly by some insects too loathsome to think of. She shuddered and listened. Silence. She pushed open the kitchen door.
    There was no one in the kitchen, which was a relief. When Tallis was at home he was usually in the kitchen during the day, where he worked at the big kitchen table. In fact an open notebook and several well-worn and learned-looking volumes from the London Library were lying about on the table together with stained newspapers, jam-smeared plates, brown-rimmed tea cups and a milk bottle half full of solidified sour milk. Hilda moved over to the table and looked at the notebook. At the top of the empty pages in Tallis’s rather large hand was written In my last lecture I.
    Hilda inspected the kitchen. It looked much as usual. The familiar group of empty beer bottles growing cobwebs. About twenty more unwashed milk bottles yellow with varying quantities of sour milk. A sagging wickerwork chair and two upright chairs with very slippery grey upholstered seats. The window, which gave onto a brick wall, was spotty with grime, admitting light but concealing the weather and the time of day. The sink was piled with leaning towers of dirty dishes. The draining board was littered with empty tins and open pots of jam full of dead or dying wasps. A bin, crammed to overflowing, stood open to reveal a rotting coagulated mass of organic material crawling with flies. The dresser was covered in a layer, about a foot high, of miscellaneous oddments: books, papers, string, letters, knives, scissors, elastic bands, blunt pencils, broken biros, empty ink bottles, empty cigarette packets and lumps of old hard stale cheese. The floor was not only filthy but greasy and sticky and made a sucking sound as Hilda lifted her feet. She resisted her usual impulse to start washing up straightaway. She did not want to dally in case Tallis returned. And the tap gave no hot water and the gas stove would take at least ten minutes to boil a kettle.
    Hilda mounted the stairs feeling a bit sick inside and knocked on Peter’s door. She entered on his murmur. Peter was reposing on his bed as usual, propped up against a grey mound of pillows, dressed in shirt and trousers, barefoot. His hands were clasped upon his breast and his eyes were dreamy. Peter was a good-looking boy, very blond like his father, and inclined to plumpness in the face. He had a good straight nose and long intelligent eyes of bright blue which gave him, possibly through some reminiscence of the youthful Napoleon, the look of a young soldier. He looks like a