Charles opens the Postscript by announcing that the end of Chapter 7 reflects the proper ending of a story: “That no doubt is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation […] in calm of mind, all passion spent” (472). He then proceeds to push back against that idea. The line he half-quotes is from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a poem about a hero who has renounced the world; Charles invokes the cadence of spiritual closure but then immediately disavows it, noting that “life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions” (472). This refusal of the tidy seals-and-stars ending brings the theme of The Futility of Renouncing One’s Nature to a close, as for the first time, Charles rejects the impulse to direct the story. At the beginning of the novel, the retreat to Shruff End was framed as a relinquishment of power; here Charles inherits James’s flat, sells the sea house without ever returning, and lunches with London friends. His plan to be a “hermit” collapses back into the social calendar of a London theatre man. Even as he cedes control, Charles names the pattern: “[O]ne surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another” (494). The Postscript watches the renouncer slide back into the world he claimed to have left, but that move, ironically, exhibits Charles’s movement along his character arc; he is now self-aware enough to understand his own nature and stop performing the role he set out to inhabit.

Charles’s revisions of his own story in the Postscript correct the perspectives that he offered earlier in the narrative, showing a more contemplative man. He works through and discards his theory that James faked his death and is a spy for British Intelligence; he entertains and abandons the theory that the Fitches faked Australia; he concedes that Peregrine pushed him into the cauldron, and reevaluates his summer accordingly: “I do admire him for trying to kill me, and if it hadn’t been for that freak wave he would have succeeded too” (481). These reevaluations contribute to the theme of Jealousy as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy from a different angle. The “evidence” Charles gathered against Ben is not refuted point by point so much as shown to have been generated by the same imagination that produced the British Intelligence plot. He even reaches the most uncomfortable formulation: “Did I ever really intend to kill Ben? No, those were consolation fantasies. Yet such fantasies too can cause ‘accidents’” (484). This comment also shows Charles’s increasing awareness as he accepts that his dramatics that summer caused actual damage. The summer’s catastrophes (Titus dead, Hartley’s marriage left as it was found) are routed back through a perceptual mechanism Charles can now describe from a distance.

The most sustained revision of his past and recent history concerns Hartley, and it is here that the Postscript dismantles the founding premise of the entire memoir. Charles has spent the previous pages organizing his life around a single French idiom, On n’aime qu’une fois, la première, and he now writes: “What a lot of folly I have run through in aid of that stupid gallicism!” (486). He goes further in his reassessment, wondering whether what he felt was love at all, or “jealousy, resentment, anger” (485), the diagnosis Rosina once offered him about her own desire. He considers that Hartley left him in their youth not from some hidden wound but because “she simply did not like me enough, because I was too selfish, too dominating, as she put it ‘so sort of bossy’” (492). With these thoughts, the narrative illustrates how The Nostalgic Power of First Love in Charles has been diminished. The preserved childhood bond, which Charles defended against Hartley’s plain refusals all summer, is reframed as a structure he had been maintaining alone, and as a structure that required her to be a phantom rather than a person. He admits, in James’s terms, “I fought for a phantom Helen” (486). He even allows that the bond between them may not have been love but guilt, hers for leaving and his for the accusation, “the original explosion of the universe” still reverberating decades later (491). The myth of their love survives only as something he can now hold lightly, “a blank ignorant quiet unpossessive souvenir” (494).

The pacing of the Postscript matters as much as its content. Murdoch writes the section as a thinning diary as the entries grow shorter and shorter (“Rosina has gone to America on a job” [484]; “Crumpets too have appeared in the shops” [485]), interleaved with the long meditative paragraphs on Clement, Hartley, and James. The three deaths are reported almost as news bulletins: Peregrine murdered in Londonderry, James cremated in a hurried slot at a north London garden, and Clement remembered dying to Wagner in a passage Charles claims he “did not intend to write” (480). Against these, Charles’s own life shrinks: He lives in James’s apartment like a visitor; he doesn’t sleep in James’s bedroom and eats in the kitchen. He also reverts to his former contemplation of Clement as possibly the love of his life, reflecting, “She was certainly the reason why I did not seek and find Hartley at a time when it might have been quite easy to do so” (479). The woman whom Charles constantly mentions but never writes about turns out to have been the actual center of Charles’s adult life, strengthening his idea that his romance with Hartley wasn’t as central as he thought: The intensity was not that the first love was real and absolute, but that Charles needed it to be, and he reorganized 40 years of memory to keep the story neat.

The wooden casket in James’s flat is the last thing Charles records in his diary. Throughout the Postscript, Charles reports tending it carefully, putting other “fetishes” away in a cupboard but leaving the casket on its bracket, even running forward panicked when a British Museum visitor reaches for it. In the novel’s closing, however, Charles exclaims, “My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out” (495). The wording is deliberately vague: There is no inventory of what the box contained beyond James’s story that it contained a demon, no confirmation that anything was inside, only the loose phrasing “whatever was inside it” (495). The opening of the casket and its potential release of a demon acts as a closing metaphor for the release of Charles’s own demons (jealousy, possessiveness, and control). They are released by an ordinary household accident in a neighboring flat, not by any spiritual reckoning of his own, reinforcing his lack of control over the situation. In the Postscript, Charles reverts to his earlier self but with a new awareness. The man who came to the sea to “abjure magic” ends in a borrowed flat in Pimlico, surrounded by another man’s spirituality, signing off his diary with a question, “what next I wonder?” (495). The diary ends with a question instead of a statement, highlighting Charles’s new understanding of his lack of control over his own life. Although he has returned to London, he doesn’t fully resume his role as a director, knowing now that he can’t control the action of reality.