Read Online Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch - Free Book Online Page B

I could, I’m going into protection, going to employ little kids, scare the shopkeepers silly.’ ‘You ought to go to college and learn things.’ ‘I learnt something yesterday.’ ‘What?’ ‘How to slash a pig with a razor and be sure of leaving a scar.’ ‘Violence won’t get you anything that you really want.’ ‘Won’t it? Show a man a knife and he’ll do anything. Isn’t that pleasure?’ Another time he said, ‘I want to get in with the Mafia. I know someone who knows a big man.’ Such talk was clearly designed to shock and to provoke arguments and reproofs, and Cato did not take it too seriously, though he believed that Joe probably did, in a small way, ‘nick things’. On other days Joe was a revolutionary, talking about joining the IRA, destroying capitalism, bombing the prots, bombing the Jews. ‘I’m an anarchist, see. The straight world is just a racket, business, capitalism, TV, money, sex, all a racket. Look what happened to the Beatles. They just got bloody rich!’
    When Cato realized how much he was enjoying these conversations and observed that, however busy he was, he always somehow had time for Joe, he became nervous. All his old fears about collusion came back to him. He made feeble efforts to get rid of Joe, to pass him on to Father Thomas. ‘Talk to that square? You’re the only one who understands me, Father, you’re the only one who can get through to me.’ Cato was touched. He had no evidence, unless the continued conversations were themselves evidence, that he was having any sort of influence on the boy. But surely it was better to go on talking to him and holding onto him, rather than to abandon him to the world about which he talked so glibly and whose reality round about him Cato had already come to discern. Of course Joe was not ‘vicious’, he could be saved. He was just a young person with different principles, a young person in revolt against a society with which Cato was in his own way at odds. ‘You’re the only one who has ever cared for me, Father, you’re the only one who can really see me at all.’ This was irresistible. If this is even half true, Cato thought, I must stick to this boy through thick and thin. But of course he had already decided that it was his duty to go on talking to Joe. They argued about property, about capitalism, about freedom, often having the same argument over and over again. Cato tried eloquence, persuasion, logic, everything except anger. He knew that anger, which was what Joe wanted, would be the worst collusion of all. Surely that grain of truth could be deposited somewhere. Beautiful Joe was respectful, flatteringly devoted, yet also stubborn, curiously aloof and full of pretences of iniquity. Would he come to confession, would he come to mass? Maybe, one day. When? Maybe, maybe. Is he just amusing himself, Cato wondered.
    Beautiful Joe was now always in Cato’s prayers. The image of the youth caused him exasperation, excitement, pity. Of course he loved Joe, after all nothing less than loving him would help him at all. How terribly he loved Joe only dawned upon him gradually. Visiting Brendan he said, ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with one of those boys, the one you met.’ ‘The angel with the hexagonal glasses? Don’t worry, we all fall for lovely boys.’ Cato could not get Brendan to take his new predicament seriously. Besides, by now there was the other far more awful question: was there a God? On one hideous sleepless night, smoking cigarette after cigarette (he had started smoking again), Cato suddenly began to realize that the two things must be connected, they must be connected. Perhaps Beautiful Joe had been sent especially to tempt him. When had he begun to doubt God? At the time when Beautiful Joe came into his life. Was not the boy playing with him, coolly probing him, reaching