The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [103]
Peregrine leapt to his feet, rushed to kick the door violently shut, then picked up his glass and hurled it into the fireplace. It failed to break. He ran round the table literally foaming at the mouth, lifted it high with a cry of ‘Aaaagh!’, a sound like a spitting cat only with the volume of a lion. I rose and took the glass out of his hand and put it on the table. He then walked slowly towards the door, looked at the place where Pamela had spat, tore a piece off one of the filthy newspapers and carefully laid it over the spittle. Then he returned to his seat. ‘Drink up, Charles, dear chap. You aren’t drinking. You’re sober. Drink up.’
‘You were saying about the theatre.’
‘You were so right not to publish your plays, they were nothing, nothing, froth, but at least they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Now you’re offended, vanity, vanity. Yes, I hate the theatre.’ Perry meant the London West End theatre. ‘Lies, lies, almost all art is lies. Hell itself it turns to favour and to prettiness. Muck. Real suffering is—is—Christ, I’m drunk—it’s so—different. Oh Charles, if you could see my native city—And that spitting bitch—How can human beings live like that, how can they do it to each other? If we could only keep our mouths shut. Drama, tragedy, belong to the stage, not to life, that’s the trouble. It’s the soul that’s missing. All art disfigures life, misrepresents it, theatre most of all because it seems so like, you see real walking and talking people. God! How is it when you turn on the radio you can always tell if it’s an actor talking? It’s the vulgarity, the vulgarity, the theatre is the temple of vulgarity. It’s a living proof that we don’t want to talk about serious things and probably can’t. Everything, everything, the saddest, the most sacred, even the funniest, is turned into a vulgar trick. You’re quite right, Charles, I remember your saying about old Shakespeare that he was the—he was the—only one. Him and some Greek chap no one can understand anyway. The rest is a foul stinking sea of complacent vulgarity. Wilfred felt that. Sometimes I remember he looked so sad, after he’d had them laughing themselves sick. Oh Charles, if only there was a God, but there isn’t, there isn’t, at all—’ Perry’s big round brown eyes were filling with tears. He fumbled for a handkerchief, then used the tablecloth. After a moment he added, ‘I wish I’d stayed at Queen’s and become a doctor. As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?’
‘No.’
‘No. You still have the joie de vivre of a young man. In your case it is nothing to do with goodness. You are ungood. It is just a natural endowment, a gift of nature, like your figure and your girlish complexion. But remember and beware—there are those who live in hell.’
I said, ‘Do you ever hit Pamela? Did you ever hit Rosina?’ I must have been drunker than Perry thought.
This question seemed to cheer him up a little. ‘Funny you should ask that, Charles, I was thinking about it just today and wondering why I never do, I never did. No. Never raised my hand to anybody. It’s the inanimate world that gets it. Glasses, plates, anything I can kick and smash. I think—you know—that’s something to do with Ireland, something I do for Ireland, in a funny way. Doesn’t help the bitch of course. But—you know—as soon as—anybody hits anybody, instead of screaming or—or spitting or—there’s a barrier passed—perhaps it’s the last barrier of civilization—and after that—it’s machine guns and shooting people’s knee caps off. God, why did I agree to play in that bloody TV series, it’s muck. They hit me of course, Pam and Rosina, no inhibitions there—’
‘A scratched face?’
‘Scratch be damned, they punch. Well, I deserve it. I’m a skunk—a—skunk. Yes. Yes. Drink up.’
As Perry was again applying the tablecloth to his eyes the door opened and a tall thin boy with a crew cut and a black leather