“Being So Utterly Private”

It made no sense for me to read Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. I found the title to be offensive, and the first line of the book revealed that it involved an extramarital affair. My exam was only a few weeks away—I should have been studying intensely. A slender justification was that Iris was the wife of my supervisor John Bayley, and I thought the book might be set in Oxford. A passage at the end of the first chapter stayed with me:

“Part of the nature, almost charm, of this relation is its being so utterly private.”

“You mean its being clandestine is of its essence,” said Georgie, “and if it were exposed to the daylight it would crumble to pieces? . . .”

“I didn’t quite say that . . . But knowledge, other people’s knowledge, does inevitably modify what it touches.”¹

I wondered what a secret relationship would be like, so I kept reading until round 8:00 p.m. when someone knocked at the door of my room.

A Bottle of Wine

When I opened the door, Victor Lal was standing there with a bottle of wine. I wondered how he had gotten into the college after the gates were locked and located my room. It seemed a bit cheeky to show up unannounced with a bottle of wine. He hastily explained that K.P. had asked him to deliver the wine to me and showed me an envelope with a note. So, I invited him to come in and sit down.

If K.P. was interested in me, he had made a grave error in sending Victor as the messenger. In no time at all, we had opened the wine and were toasting K.P. for generously providing us with this opportunity to be together. If you are familiar with Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages, then you will have surmised that K.P.’s love language was “receiving gifts.” The other four languages are acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, and physical touch. Typically, a person expresses their love for someone in the way that makes them feel loved. The problem arises when two people speak different love languages, which was the case between myself and K.P. Receiving a gift meant nothing to me because my love language was “quality time” and Victor was providing that in abundance.

Victor came to Oxford in 1984 as a Reuter’s Fellow. Prior to his arrival in the United Kingdom, he had been an investigative journalist on the Fiji Sun. After the fellowship, he stayed on in Oxford to write a book about race and ethnic politics in Fiji, which he was working on at the moment. His own great-great-grandfather had been brought to Fiji by the British as a bonded laborer in exile from India to work on the sugar plantations. As a result, Victor was part of the majority Indo-Fijian population on the island.

Although Fiji had obtained independence in 1970, the Queen was still (until October 7, 1987) the constitutional head of Fiji and her birthday was a public holiday. As Victor explained, the Fijian chiefs were not inclined to sever their connection to the British monarchy, and the Fijians, himself included, viewed themselves as citizens of the empire. He said that as far back as last June he had been concerned that a coup was imminent. There seemed to be some agitation in Victor as he told me these things. I got the impression that his outspokenness (and awareness of the potential coup) had made him a threat to powerful people who were planning a takeover. Perhaps even his life was in danger. Here in my room, at least for little while, he could relax and feel safe behind the locked gate of Keble College.

I decided that I should look at the note that K.P. sent to me. I read it out loud to Victor. “Would you like to have dinner with me at Brown’s restaurant to go over an article that I am writing about our trip to hear Salman Rushdie? Please send me a response . . .” It seemed like a reasonable request and Brown’s restaurant was nearby Keble, so I could easily walk there.

“Don’t tell him that we drank his wine,” said Victor laughing. I remembered the passage from The Severed Head, so I suggested that we keep our relationship a secret from K.P. But it had to be a secret from Mark as well. So, in the end, we decided that the only places that we could be together were my room or his room. If we ran into each other in a public place or at an event, we would not talk to each other and pretend we were not acquainted. I wasn’t sure if I could pull that off. If I looked across the room at him, it would be hard to hide my feelings; and I might just accidentally find myself edging closer to where he was standing. I can’t remember for sure, but I think he ended up sleeping on the couch cushions on the floor that night.

Brown’s Restaurant

My finances were still quite bad. I earned a small amount of money each week by doing childminding for the Goldeys as I had last term. It was not enough for me to ever eat in a restaurant or pub, so I appreciated K.P.’s invitation to Brown’s restaurant, which at the time was very popular and had a reputation for excellent food.

After we ordered, he showed me the article that he had written. It included a direct quotation from me. He wanted to verify that it was accurate. There was a problem in my mind. While the quotation was accurate, it was completely superfluous and rather weakened the article’s impact. It seemed to me that he had included the quotation either to flatter me or as an excuse to meet me. If it was the former, then he had completely misread me. The absolutely last thing that I wanted was to have my name published or for anyone to read something that I had said or wrote. It may occur to you to wonder why I am writing and publishing this if I am so afraid of being read by anyone. Sometimes the thing we fear most is exactly the thing we must do. But at Brown’s that night, I said that I preferred that he not include the quotation.

As dinner progressed, K.P. became more personal. He said that he had seen me at the lectures on Indian music during Michaelmas term. My mind spiraled out of control. I speculated that he too had met Mark at those lectures and perhaps had even asked Mark to invite me to the Rushdie book launch. Maybe it was not an accident that he was sitting near me at the Lamb & Flag that night. None of this may have been true, but I had managed to make myself feel a bit uncomfortable. Maybe he was not pursuing me, but I felt like I was being hunted like an object of prey. When he offhandedly mentioned that he was married and his wife was not in Oxford, it was game over. But not quite . . .

Back to A Severed Head

I quickly read the remainder of the book. Its plot was convoluted: Martin and Georgie are having an affair, Martin’s wife asks for a divorce because she is having an affair with her therapist Palmer, Martin doesn’t tell Georgie about the divorce, Palmer’s sister who is Georgie’s former supervisor discovers Martin’s affair and reveals it to his wife, his wife falls out of love with Palmer, Georgie decides to marry Martin’s brother who knows nothing, and Martin then falls in love with Palmer’s sister. In the end, nearly everyone has been deceived and ends up hurt and damaged. There is a stinging humiliation when you learn that you have been kept in the dark. This should have been a warning to me that this was a dangerous game. But I took an entirely different message.

I saw Oxford as a complicated, sophisticated place with many interlacing relationships. The goal was to know as much as possible in every situation. In a place that was filled with intelligent people, you could be sure that there was someone who knew more than you did and that secrets were shared by some in the room. I wanted to walk into the room and be aware of the connections between the people who were there, and to this end I began to observe people very closely. For example, on the way back from lecture, I noticed that one of the female English Department graduate students was walking down South Parks Street with our much older Bibliography and Textual Criticism professor. He was pushing his bike as he walked alongside of her. I accurately gauged their relationship (and was proven correct when they married several years later).

There was another sentence in A Severed Head that stuck in my mind and I wondered where it would lead me. “Extreme love is fed by everything.”

1. Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head: A Novel about the Frightfulness and Ruthlessness of Being in Love (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 13.