Morse's voice trailed off, and his eyes drifted along the other tables in the lounge bar where groups of people sat exchanging the amusing ephemera of a happier, if somewhat shallower, life than Anne Scott could ever have known. His glass was empty, and Lewis, as he picked it up and walked over to the bar, decided on this occasion not to remind Morse whose turn it was.
'So,' resumed Morse, lapping his lips into the level of his pint without a word of gratitude, 'Anne Scott's making a bit of a mess of her life. She's still attractive enough to middle-aged men like you and me, Lewis; but most of those are already bespoke, like you, and the ones that are left, like me, are a load of old remaindered books-out of date and going cheap. But her real tragedy is that she's still attractive to some of the young pupils who come along to that piddling little property of hers in Jericho. She's got no regular income except for the fees from a succession of halfwits whose parents are rich enough and stupid enough to cough up and keep hoping. She goes out quite a bit, of course, and occasionally she meets a nice enough chap but… No! Things don't work out, and she begins to think-she begins to believe-that they never will. She's got a deeply pessimistic and fatalistic streak in her make-up, and in the end, as you know, she abandons all hope. Charles Richards, as she thinks, doesn't give a sod about her any longer: just at the time when she desperately needs a friend, he can't even fork out an envelope and stamp. But she was a pretty tough girl, I should think, and she'd have been able to cope with her problems-if it hadn't been for that shattering revelation at the bridge evening.'
'She'd been reading the Oedipus story again in the Penguin translation-probably with one of her pupils-and the ground's all naked and ready for the seeds that were sown that fateful evening. Adoption and birthdays-they were the seeds, Lewis, and it must have been the most traumatic shock of her whole life when the terrible truth dawned on her: Michael Murdoch was her own son. And as the implications whirled round in her mind, she must have seen the whole thing in terms of the fates marking her out as another Jocasta. Everything fitted. Her husband had been killed-killed in a road accident-killed by her own son-a son with whom she'd been having sex-a son who was the father of the child she was expecting. She must have felt utterly powerless against the workings of what she saw as the preordained tragedy of her own benighted life. And so she decides to do the one thing that was left open to her: to stop all the struggling and to surrender to her fate; to co-operate with the forces that were now driving her inexorably to her own death-a death she slowly determines, as she sits through that long and hopeless night, will be the death that Queen Jocasta chose. And so, my old friend, she hanged herself… And had she but known it, the curse had still not finally worked itself out. Michael Murdoch is in the Intensive Care Unit at the J.R.2, and he's blinded himself, Lewis-just as Oedipus did. The whole wretched thing's nothing less than a ghastly re-enactment of the old myth as you can read it in Sophocles. And as I told you, if there was one man guilty of Anne Scott's death, that man was Sophocles.'
The beer glasses were empty again and the mood of the two men was sombre as Morse took out his wallet and passed a five-pound note over to Lewis.
'My round, I think.'
It was a turn up for the books; an even bigger one when Morse insisted that Lewis kept the change.
'You've been far too generous with your round recently, Lewis. I've noticed that. But over-generosity is just as big a fault as stinginess, you know. That's what Aristotle said, anyway.'
Lewis was feeling a little light-headed in the rarefied air of these Greek philosophers and tragedians, but he was anxious to get one thing straight.
'You still don't believe in fate, sir?'
''Course I bloody don't!' snapped Morse.
'But you just think of all those coincidences-'
'What are you talking about? There's only one real coincidence in the business: the fact that Anne Scott should find that one of her pupils is her own son. That's all! And what's so odd about that, anyway? She's had hundreds of pupils, and Oxford's not all that big-'
'What about the accident?'
'Augh! There are millions of accidents every year-thousands of 'em in Oxford-'
'You exaggerate a bit, sir.'
'Nonsense! And that's where the coincidences stop, isn't it? Anne Scott decided to hang herself-she decided that. It was a conscious human decision, and had nothing to do with those wretched fates spinning your threads or lopping 'em off or whatever else they're supposed to do. And the fact that Michael Murdoch squirted so much dope into himself and then did what he did-well, that was a sheer fluke, wasn't it? He could have done anything.'
'Fluke, sir? You seem to want to have it all ways. Flukes, coincidences, decisions, fates…'
Morse nodded rather sadly. He wasn't quite sure where his own pervasively cynical philosophy of life was leading him, but the facts in this particular case remained what they were; for the life and death of Anne Scott had traced with awesome accuracy those murderous, incestuous, and self-destructive patterns of that early story…
'Do you know, Lewis, I could just do justice to some egg and chips.'
Lewis was losing count of his surprises. 'I reckon I'll join you, sir.'
'I'm afraid you'll have to treat me, though. I don't seem to have any money left.'
Chapter Thirty-Four
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.