Under The Net - Iris Murdoch [91]
mad by the smell of money. Or perhaps Madge's protector was some shrewd Englishman: a middle-aged man, I pictured him, with long experience of the film business. Perhaps a failed director who had turned his artistic talents into the business side of the industry, consoling himself by making money for the loss of a vision of beauty which would nevertheless haunt him all his life, and make him short-tempered whenever he came near the set and saw other men struggling with the problems which had given him ecstasy at twenty-five, and sleepless nights at thirty, and finally brought him to despair. Where had Madge met him? Possibly at one of those parties of 'film people' which Sammy had said that Madge frequented on the occasion when he had warned me that not letting them out of your sight was the only way. Or perhaps--the devastating thought struck me at last--perhaps Madge's friend was Jean Pierre himself? I absolutely hated this idea. But it was by no means impossible. I had never introduced Madge to Jean Pierre although she had often asked me to do so. Some instinct of caution had deterred me from promoting this particular juxtaposition. There are Englishwomen for whom Frenchmen are, as it were, ex officio romantic, and I think I suspected Madge of being one of these. Madge was, however, perfectly capable of having introduced herself to Jean Pierre without telling me. I remembered the familiar way she had referred to him by his Christian name in our recent talk; and although she might have simply picked this up from me, or from her new milieu, it was also possible that she had in fact cast Jean Pierre in the role of her fortune maker. He was not my idea of a charmer, but women are funny. I thought about this a bit longer and then decided that after all it was unlikely. Of my three hypotheses the second one was doubtless the most probable. A while later I felt that I didn't care anyhow. One glass of pernod had taken me some way; a second glass took me further still. The sun began to rise over my intellectual landscape and I saw at last, in an outburst of clarity, the real shape of that which had before so obscurely compelled me to what had seemed to be a senseless decision. It wasn't just that I didn't want to enter Madge's world and play Madge's game. I had so littered my life already with compromises and half-truths, I could have picked my way through a few more. The twisting hills of falsehood never cease to appal me, but I constantly enter them; possibly because I see them as short corridors which lead out again into the sun: though, perhaps, this is the only fatal lie. I didn't care for the role of valet de sentiment which Madge had prepared for me, but I could perhaps have supported it because I really liked Madge and because of the cash prizes, if there had been nothing else at stake. I had said to Madge that it wasn't Anna, and I think that that was true. What my relations with Anna might or mightn't compel me to do in the future remained to be seen. I felt, indeed, almost fatalistic about it. If Anna was strong enough to draw me to her over every obstacle she was strong enough to draw me, and the obstacles would be overcome at the proper time. Meanwhile Madge was in no position to make complaints. It wasn't that. When I asked myself what it was, there rose authoritatively before me the shop window which I had seen earlier that morning surmounted by the words Prix Goncourt. As for the Prix Goncourt itself, je m'en fichais, that was just a label. What mattered was what Jean Pierre had done. Or rather even that didn't matter. Even if Nous Les Vainqueurs turned out to be just as bad as Jean Pierre's other books, this was of no importance either. All that mattered was a vision which I had had of my own destiny and which imposed itself upon me as a command. What had I to do with script-writing? When I had told Madge that it was not my genre I had not been thinking what I was saying; but it was true all the same. The business of my life lay elsewhere. There was a path which awaited me and which if I failed to take it would