The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) by Murdoch Iris

Author:Murdoch, Iris [Murdoch, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2003-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

What it was that had happened the percipient reader will not need to be told. (Doubtless he saw it coming a mile off. I did not. This is art, but I was out there in life.) I had fallen in love with Julian. At what point during our conversation I realized this fact is hard to determine. The consciousness darts back and forth in time like a weaver and can occupy, when busy with its mysterious self – formings and self gatherings, a very large specious present. Perhaps I realized it when she said, in that beautiful resonant tone of hers, ‘Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice.’ Perhaps it was when she said ‘Black tights and black velvet shoes with silvery buckles’. Or perhaps it was when she took her boots off. No, not as early as that. And when I had had that mystical experience, looking at her legs in the shoe shop, had that been a veiled realization of being in love? It had not seemed so. Yet that too was part of it. Everything was part of it. After all, I had known this child since her birth. I had seen her in her cradle. I had held her in my arms when she was twenty inches long. Oh Christ.

‘I had fallen in love with Julian.’ The words are easily written down. But how to describe the thing itself? It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter – natural, than life’s horrors. (I do not of course refer to mere ‘sex’.) It is sad that, like the experience of bereavement, the experience of love is usually, like a dream, forgotten. Furthermore, those who have never fallen desperately in love with someone whom they have known for a long time may doubt whether this can occur. Let me assure them that it can. It happened to me. Was it always there cooking, incubating, in the warm inwards of time, as the girl grew and filled out into bloom? Of course I had always liked her, especially when she was a little child. But nothing really had prepared me for this blow. And it was a blow, I was felled by it physically. I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole. My knees dissolved, I could not stand up, I shuddered and trembled all over, my teeth chattered. My face felt as if it had become waxen and some huge strange weirdly smiling mask had been imprinted upon it, I had become some sort of god. I lay there with my nose stuck into the black wool of the rug and the toes of my shoes making little ellipses on the carpet as I shook with possession. Of course I was sexually excited, but

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