The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch Page B

committee?’
    ‘The book committee. He was on it, to represent the family. Now I should be.’
    ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ said Gerard.
    ‘It’s our money you’re spending.’
    ‘No, it isn’t.’
    ‘That’s how Dad saw it.’
    Gerard went upstairs into his bedroom. The sun was blazing in. He pulled the curtains and dragged the bed clothes aside and began to undress. As he lay down he began to remember the strange events of the night which were now confused, ugly and sinister, with his sister’s words into a cloud of fantasy which seemed to be hanging above the heavy weight of that dead body which lay so still and so close, its face blinded. Oh my poor dead father, he thought, and it was as if his father were in terrible pain, the pain of death itself. He turned on his face and groaned and shed some tears of misery into the pillow.

    ‘Well, what do you propose to do?’ said Duncan Cambus.
    ‘I’m going,’ said Jean.
    ‘You’re going back to him.’
    ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Did you arrange to meet him?’
    ‘No!’
    ‘So you decided this with him last night?’
    ‘Last night – it is last night, isn’t it – or this morning. We didn’t say anything to each other last night.
We didn’t exchange a single word.
’ Jean Cambus’s eyes widened and glowed as she said this.
    ‘You think he’ll expect you?’
    ‘I don’t think anything – I’m going. I’ve got to. I’m very sorry. Now.’
    ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Duncan, ‘and I advise you to do the same. I advise you, I
ask
you, not to go. Stay, wait, please.’
    ‘I must go now,’ said Jean, ‘I can’t wait. To wait would be – impossible – all wrong.’
    ‘An error of taste, a lapse of style?’
    These were the first words exchanged by Duncan and his wife since their departure from Levquist’s rooms. The walk to the car, the drive to London, during most of which Duncan had slept, had been accomplished in silence. Now they were home, back in the sitting room of their flat in Kensington. On arrival there both of them had felt it imperative to step out of their crumpled evening clothes, and had, in different rooms, hastily, as if arming for battle, put on more sober gear. Duncan, seated, had taken off his damp and muddy evening trousers and put on some old corduroys, with a voluminous blue shirt, not buttoned, not tucked in. Jean, standing before him, had covered her black petticoat and black stockings with a yellow and white kimono, pulled in fiercely at the waist. Duncan was no longer flushed with alcohol, but his tired face looked disintegrated, wrecked, a senseless massive face, paleand flabby, covered in soft pencilled-in lines. He sat very still, staring at his wife, leaning forward a little, his big hands pendant from the arms of the chair. He had washed his face and his hands and cleaned his teeth. Jean had washed off her elaborate make-up and brushed her thick dark straight hair, which stayed where it was put, back over the crown of her head. She had been a striking beauty when, in another era, in that now so remote, so dream-like past, she had flirted with Sinclair Curtland. Jean had known Sinclair, through Rose, when they were all children. He and she had been ‘close’ before Sinclair went up to Oxford, they had somehow, inconclusively, remained so, after, always, in spite of Gerard. Had they ever seriously considered that match which everyone seemed so anxious to bring about? Jean’s older face was beautiful too, a little sulkier, still delicately china-pale, wilful and keen, often now recalling that of her Jewish father, so obsessively devout, so obsessively successful. Her mother, also Jewish, had been a talented pianist. They had observed the festivals. Jean had cared for none of these things, not synagogue or music, or the romance of business in which her father had tried to interest her, his only child. She had been obsessively intellectual. Some wondered why she married Duncan, others why she