The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch Page B

and failures he felt cold, no warmth was generated there. So little did he feel himself menaced from that quarter that in prayer he would even say (for he used words) dominus et deus, without attaching the old meaning to those dread sounds. (Perhaps it was important that the words were Latin, not English.) He knew there was no supernatural being and did not design to try to attach the concept in any way to his absolutes. If something, ‘good’ or something, was his ‘master’, it was in no personal or reciprocal relation. His language was thus indeed odd as when he sometimes said ‘forgive me’, or ‘help me’, or when he commended others, Edward for instance, to the possibility of being helped. Stuart understood the phrase ‘love is only of God’; his love went out into the cosmos as a lonely signal, but also miraculously could return to earth. His belief that his supplication for Edward, his concern for Edward, could help Edward was not a hypothesis about actions which he might, as a result of well-intentioned thoughts, later perform for his brother (though this aspect of the matter was not excluded); nor of course was he resorting to some paranormal telepathic form of healing. He simply felt sure that the purer his love the more efficacious it would be in some ‘immediate’ sense which put in question the ordinary pit-pat of time.
    Stuart’s ‘hedonism’ was an instinctive craving for nothingness which was also a desire to be able to love and enjoy and ‘touch’ everything, to help everything. To this end, celibacy and solitude appeared as essential means. This reasoning seemed to him obvious. Of course when Harry had said of Stuart (as he said, understood differently, of Edward) that he was in love with death, he had meant something more banal, a commonplace of popular psychology. Stuart certainly wanted happiness, his own particular brand of that which we are told all men pursue. He was however well aware, however much his deepest feelings might deny time, that he was not living in a timeless world. He had certainties so tremendous that he was not even concerned about the sin of pride, which he regarded as a low personal matter. But he was also aware that he was young and inexperienced, clumsy and often stupid, and in need of a job. Like everyone else, he must settle down, and earn money. He had not yet been tested. Can a man live with no evil, no shadow, no ego? Has any man ever lived so? He knew his present failings, and that he would descend further into it all, into the mess and muddle of wrong-doing, like everyone else. He was certainly not, as Harry had conjectured, waiting for the perfect romance with the virgin princess. But he was, in all his more mundane fumblings, waiting for something. He had abjured, he thought, all superstition. Yet still, in some way, he was waiting for a sign.
    Edward Baltram was crossing Fitzroy Square. It was raining.
    It was the day following Stuart’s homily and Edward’s discovery of the card about the seance. It was a Thursday, half-past four in the afternoon. Edward was going to hear the dead speak.
    Edward did not exactly believe that this would happen. He was impressed by the strange way in which the card had suddenly appeared on the floor of his room. He had of course later realised how it had come there. He remembered that on that terrible night Sarah Plowmain had said something about a seance, and that it would be ‘fun’ to go to one. No doubt she had slipped the card into the pocket of his jacket, and he had pulled it out accidentally without noticing. Nevertheless he felt he could recognise the hand of fate, and fate was just what, at that moment, he needed in his life more than anything, some significant compulsion, even if the significance were dark. To be under orders, to have something he must do. He felt weak and fatalistic. But suppose the dead did speak, and in terrible tones, the message of Mark’s mother spoken by Mark, denouncing him as a