Free The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) by Iris Murdoch Page A

and give yourself another drink,’ I told him.
    ‘I wouldn’t mind a drink,’ said Francis.
    ‘Oh don’t be angry with me, darling—’
    ‘Could you chuck out my mac,’ said Francis. ‘I left it in there on the floor.’
    I went in and threw the macintosh out and closed the door again. I heard retreating steps as Arnold and Francis went away down the stairs.
    ‘Lock the door, please.’
    I locked it.
    Francis had pulled the curtains and there was a sort of thick pink twilight in the room. The evening sun, now palely shining, made the big floppy flowers on the chintz curtains glow in a melancholy way. The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing-table can be a terrible thing. The Baffins had placed theirs in the window where it obstructed the light and presented its ugly back to the road. The plate glass ‘table’ surface was dusty and covered with cosmetic tubes and bottles and balls of hair. The chest of drawers had all its drawers gaping, spewing pink underwear and shoulder straps. The bed was chaotic, violent, the green artificial silk coverlet swooping down on one side and the sheets and blankets creased up into a messy mass, like an old face. There was a warm intimate embarrassing smell of sweat and face powder. The whole room breathed the flat horror of genuine mortality, dull and spiritless and final.
    I do not know why I thought then so promptly and prophetically of death. Perhaps it was because Rachel, half under the bedclothes, had covered her face with the sheet.
    Her feet, with glossy high-heeled shoes on, protruded from under the green coverlet. I said timidly, almost as if making conversation and to establish a rapport, ‘Here, let me take your shoes off.’
    She remained stiff while, with some difficulty, I pulled off both shoes. I felt the soft warmth of the damp brown stockinged foot. A pungent sour odour joined the vapid smell of the room. I wiped my hands on my trousers.
    ‘Better get properly into bed. Look, I’ll straighten out your bedclothes a bit.’
    She shifted slightly, removing the sheet from her face, and even lifting her legs so that I could pull out a blanket from under them. I arranged her a little bit, pulling the blankets up and turning the sheet back over them. She had stopped crying and was stroking the bruise on her face. The bruise seemed bluer, creeping round the eye socket, and the eye itself was reduced to a watery slit. She lay there, her moist disfigured mouth slightly open, staring at the ceiling.
    ‘I’ll fill you a hot water bottle, shall I ?’
    I found a hot water bottle and filled it from the hot tap in the wash basin. Its soiled woolly cover smelt of sweat and sleep. I got it a bit wet on the outside, but it felt quite warm. I lifted the sheet and blanket and thrust it in beside her thigh.
    ‘Rachel, aspirins? These are aspirins, aren’t they?’
    ‘No, thank you.’
    ‘Do you good.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You’ll be all right, the doctor said so.’
    She sighed very deeply and flopped her hand back on to the bed, lying now with both hands symmetrically by her side, palms upward, like a limp disentombed Christ figure, still bearing the marks of ill-treatment. Tufts of cut hair adhered to the dried blood on the bosom of her blue dress. She said in a hollow louder voice, ‘This is so awful, so awful, so awful.’
    ‘You’ll be all right, Rachel, the doctor says—’
    ‘I feel so utterly – defeated. I shall – die of shame.’
    ‘Nonsense, Rachel. It’s just one of those things.’
    ‘And he asks you round – to see it all.’
    ‘Rachel, he was shaking like a leaf, he thought you were unconscious in here, he was terrified.’
    ‘I shall never forgive him. Be my witness now. I shall never forgive him. Never, never, never. Not if he were to kneel at my feet for twenty years. A woman does not forgive this ever. She won’t save a man at the end. If he were drowning,