Read Online The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch - Free Book Online

He wondered if he were drunk, then, how drunk he was. The telephone rang. He lifted the receiver. ‘Hello.’
    ‘Could I speak to Mr Hernshaw, if he’s there?’
    ‘Pat –’
    ‘Oh Gerard – Gerard – he’s gone –’
    Gerard reassembled his thoughts. His father was dead.
    ‘Gerard, are you still there?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘He’s died. We didn’t expect it, did we, the doctor didn’t say – it just happened – so – suddenly – he – and he was dead –’
    ‘Are you alone?’
    ‘Yes, of course! It’s five o’clock in the morning! Who do you think I could get to be with me?’
    ‘When did he die?’
    ‘Oh – an hour ago – I don’t know –’
    Gerard thought, what was I doing then? ‘And were you with him –?
    ‘Yes! I was asleep with the doors open – about one or so I heard him moaning and I went in and he was sitting up and – and mumbling in a ghastly high voice, and he kept jerking his arms and staring all round the room, and he wouldn’t look at me – and he was white, as white as the wall, and his lips were white – and I tried to give him a pill but – I tried to make him lie back, I wanted him to sleep again, I thought if he can only rest, if he can only sleep – and then his breathing – became so awful –’
    ‘Oh God,’ said Gerard.
    ‘All right, you don’t want to know – I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages, ever since, the porter kept telephoning various rooms, I just got a lot of drunks. Are you drunk? You sound as if you are.’
    ‘Possibly.’ He thought, of course Levquist has no telephone over there – but that was earlier anyway – what was I doing? Watching Crimond dance? Poor Patricia. He said, ‘Bear up, Pat.’
    ‘You are drunk. Of course I’m bearing up. What else can I do. I’m just half mad with grief and misery and shock and I’m all by myself –’
    ‘You’d better go to bed.’
    ‘I
can’t
. How long will it take you to get here, an hour?’
    ‘I can do it in an hour,’ said Gerard, ‘or less, but I can’t leave immediately.’
    ‘Why ever not?’
    ‘I’ve got a lot of people here, I can’t just leave them, I can’t go without telling them and God knows where they all are at the moment.’ He thought, I can’t go without seeing Duncan.
    ‘Your father’s dead and you want to stay on dancing with your drunken friends.’
    ‘I’ll come soon,’ said Gerard, ‘I just can’t come at once, I’m sorry.’
    Patricia put down the receiver.
    Gerard sat with closed eyes in the silence that followed. Then he started saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God’, and hid his face in his hands and panted and moaned. Of course he had known it was coming, he had calmly mentioned it to Levquist, but
this
was unlike anything which cowardly imagination could have schooled him with beforehand. He had known what he did not will to imagine, the
fact
, the irrevocable
fact
. Love, old love, sensibilities and dimensions and powers of love which he had forgotten or never recognised, came speeding in from all the far-spread regions of his being, hot with pain, crying and wailing with the agony of that severance. Never to speak to his father again, to see his smiling welcoming face, to be happy in his happiness, to experience the absolute comfort of his love. He felt remorse, not because he had been a bad son, he had not, but because he was no longer a son, and there was still so much to say. A
place
wherein he himself
was
as in no other place had been struck out of the world. Oh my father, oh my father, oh my dear father.
    He heard steps upon the stairs and hastily rose to his feet and rubbed his face although there were no tears on it. He turned a calm gaze to the door. It was Jenkin.
    Gerard decided instantly not to tell Jenkin about his father.He would tell him later when they were driving back together to London. He did not want to start to tell and then be interrupted by one of the others. Better to say nothing. Jenkin would