A Word Child by Iris Murdoch Page A

hastily pulled down her sleeve. Crystal returned.
    â€˜Well — ’ I said, and almost imperceptibly nodded, the sign for Tommy to go.
    She got up hastily, her face stiffened, on the verge of tears. ‘I must go now. Thank you so much, Crystal.’
    I watched Tommy put on her raincoat. She was struggling hard to repress the tears and succeeding. They would have constituted yet another serious crime.
    â€˜Good-bye — ’ in a trembling voice.
    I let her make for the door. ‘Good night, Tommy dear.’
    Relief. Mercy had prevailed. ‘Good night — Hilary — see you next week — and I’ll write Monday as usual. Good night then.’
    Of course Crystal made no comment on the fact that I had sent Tommy away half an hour early.
    Crystal and I now faced each other.
    I should make it clear that there was nothing physical in my relation with Crystal. (Except in the sense, which I must leave to the reader to determine, that anything mental is physical.) I did not want to go to bed with her or kiss her or caress her or even touch her more than minimally. (Though if I had been told that I could never touch her I should have gone mad.) I did not ‘find her attractive’. I simply was her. I had to have her there, like God. And by ‘there’ I mean again, not necessarily in my presence. I needed to see her regularly but not very often. She just had to be always available in a place fixed and controlled by me. I had to know, at any moment, where she was. I needed her sequestered innocence, as a man might want his better self to be stored away separately in a pure deity. Did I want her to remain a virgin? Yes.
    None of all this however decided anything about Arthur. I wanted Crystal to go on forever being whatever it was she was to me, but I also wanted her to be happy, and had perhaps too long been content with the formula that her happiness was to make me happy, or as near to it as I could ever be, which was certainly not very near, since the Oxford smash up. Of course Crystal had not married because of me, though this too could be a little hazed over by the thought that she was the old maid type anyway and being no beauty would never have been likely to have suitors. There had been in fact one or two, a chap in the north and a Canadian in London, but I thought poorly of them and Crystal never really took them seriously at all. A few years ago I had actually been settling down to the comfortable feeling that the dangerous time was over and Crystal had passed the marrying age. Then somehow, as I explained earlier, I had begun to see a new picture. Two things had come up to change the world. One was that Crystal wanted a child. This surprised me, and how she had put it into my head I do not know. She never said so in plain words, but I was by now thoroughly aware of it. The other thing of course was Arthur.
    If Arthur had been either wonderful or impossible the situation would have been a good deal easier. As it was Arthur was not at all what I would have chosen (but then what would I have chosen, would I ever have chosen?), yet he was a possibility. He was not clever or impressive or rich (but then someone clever or impressive or rich would not have loved Crystal). Arthur was indeed something of a ‘wet’. He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal? I was not so sunk in egoism that I could not see that Crystal’s life was dreary. In an abstract way I wanted her to go away and be saved and not to be damned with me, and yet of course I did not and could not want her to go away. If she could have been metamorphosed into a happy well-off wife and mother living in a big country house with a huge garden and six dogs (she wanted a dog, I never let her have one) I should have been, not pleased, but satisfied that this had to be and also somehow glad of a new happiness for her; at least, this was what I sometimes