by Iris Murdoch
‘Oh. I was there this evening. They wouldn’t let me into the dining room.’
‘I’m not surprised, you look like a filthy student. Seaside life suits you. You look twenty. Well, thirty. I heard them discussing you in the bar. You seem to have annoyed everyone already.’
‘I can’t have done, I haven’t met anyone—’
‘I could have told you the country is the least peaceful and private place to live. The most peaceful and secluded place in the world is a flat in Kensington.’
‘You mean the waiter turned me out even though he knew who I was?’
‘Well, he may not have recognized you. You aren’t all that famous. I’m far more famous than you.’
This was true. ‘Stars are always more famous than those who create them. May I ask what you are doing at the Raven Hotel?’
‘Visiting you.’
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Oh ages, a week, I don’t know. I just wanted to keep an eye on you. I thought it might be rather fun to haunt you.’
‘To haunt me? You mean—’
‘Haven’t you felt haunted? Not that I’ve done very much, no turnip lanterns, no dressing up in sheets—’
I wanted to shout with exasperation and relief. ‘So it was you—you broke the vase and the mirror, and you’ve been creeping round at night and peering at me—’
‘I broke the vase and the mirror, but I haven’t been creeping round at night, I wouldn’t come in here in the pitch dark. This house is creepy.’
‘But you did, you looked at me through the glass of that inner room.’
‘No, I didn’t. I never did. That must have been some other ghost.’
‘You did, someone did. How did you get in?’
‘You leave your windows open downstairs. You shouldn’t, you know.’
I suddenly then, as I was staring at her, saw a vision: it was as if her face vanished, became a hole, and through the hole I saw the snake-like head and teeth and pink opening mouth of my sea monster. This lasted a second. I suppose it was not really a vision but just a thought. My nerves were still terribly on edge. I could hear the sea again, louder. But as I could hardly suppose that Rosina had arranged for me to be haunted by a sea monster I decided not to mention it.
‘But why did you persecute me in this way? And why did you decide to let me discover you now, if you did?’
‘I saw Lizzie Scherer in the village today.’
‘Yes, she was here, she’s gone. But what has that got to do with it? I can’t understand what this is all about.’
‘Can’t you, Charles? Have you forgotten? Let me remind you.’ Rosina leaned across the table, laying her hands flat and pointing her long fingernails at me like little spears. The nails were painted a dark purple. The bracelets grated on the wooden table. ‘Have you forgotten? You promised that if you ever married anybody you would marry me.’
Fear returned to me, a vista of cold dismay, the emergence in life of the unpredictable and dangerous. Rosina’s unnervingly blue eyes were sparkling, her rings were glistening. What she said was perfectly true.
I said lightly, ‘Did I? I can’t remember. I must have been drunk. Anyway I’m not proposing to get married.’
‘No? And you promised that if you ever settled permanently with anyone you would settle with me.’
This also was unfortunately true.
Rosina smiled. She has slightly irregular long, white teeth and a kind of ‘smile’ whereby she advances her lower teeth to meet her upper ones and draws back her lips. The effect is terrible. ‘You were not drunk. And you remember, Charles.’
I was trying to think what line I had better adopt with this dangerous woman. I had certainly not expected her to reappear in my life. But now that she had done so I recognized and respected her style. The broken vase, the smashed mirror were not idle portents. Why these reminders now, what had set it all off? The reference to Lizzie was the clue, though unfortunately I had no time to reflect upon it. If that was her drift, suppose I told her that Lizzie’s presence here meant nothing? This would only put off the crisis whose nature I was just beginning to grasp. Had I, in my recent thoughts, considered Lizzie in the hypothetical light of a permanent partner? Possibly. Had I thought seriously of marrying Lizzie? No. But Rosina’s terrorism was intolerable, an impertinence. I decided it was better to be aggressively firm and direct straightaway.
‘Look here, just stop this, will you. I forget what I said exactly but it was momentary emotional nonsense, as you perfectly well know. One can’t bind oneself like that and I’m not bound. Those were just words, not a promise.’
‘Promises are words. You are bound, Charles. Bound.’ She repeated the word softly with an intense emphasis.
‘Rosina, don’t talk rubbish. People say all sorts of things during love affairs which they don’t mean, you know that. Or if you prefer, all right I promised, but I shall break my promise just as soon as it suits me, like everybody else.’
‘So you are going to marry her?’
‘Who? What are you talking about? Do you mean Lizzie?’
‘So it’s true?’
‘No, of course I’m not going to marry her.’
‘So you’re not going to marry her?’
‘Rosina, will you leave me alone? Whatever put this idea into your head anyway?’
‘Oh, as to that,’ said Rosina, snapping her fingers, ‘it’s all over London. She had to crow. She’s gone round telling everybody that you’re plaguing her with proposals.’
I did not believe this of course.
Rosina went on, ‘Gilbert Opian has rushed about trying to make up some sort of party against you. Everyone is very amused.’
Gilbert was the culprit.
‘And I gather you didn’t even know Lizzie was living with Gilbert. Surprise, surprise. Everybody knew that. If you aren’t interested enough to know who she’s living with you aren’t interested enough in her to marry her.’
‘I’m not going to marry her.’
‘You’ve said that twice.’
‘I mean—oh go away, Rosina. And they aren’t lovers.’
‘You believe that?’
‘I mean I shall do what I want to do.’
‘You’ve always known who I was living with.’
‘You flatter yourself. I don’t care what you do or who you’re with so long as you keep away from me. Now clear off.’
Rosina did not move, except that she stretched out one hand across the table until the long pointed nail of her middle finger touched my shirt sleeve. Then I could feel the nail sticking into my arm. I sat rigid, not wincing. ‘You have not understood,’ she said. ‘Why do you think I have come to you now? I did not enter your house and break things just to amuse myself and laugh with you afterwards. I want to tell you this. You may or you may not marry me, but I am not going to permit you to marry anybody else. I shall hold you to your promise.’
‘You can’t. You are living in a dream world.’
‘Oh you can go through a marriage ceremony, or settle down with a lovebird of your choice, but you will not live happily ever after. If you set up with Lizzie I shall spoil your life as you spoilt mine. You will not be able to hide from me. I will be with you all the time, I will be in your mind day and night, I will be a demon in your life and in her life. Until she cries with misery because she ever met you. It is very easy to frighten people, Charles. I know, I have done it. It is easy to maim people and utterly destroy their peace of mind and cripple all their joy. I shall not tolerate your marriage, Charles. If you wed this wench, or if you keep her as your love, I shall dedicate my life to spoiling yours, and I shall find it very easy.’
She drew her hand back. A stain of blood appeared on the sleeve of my shirt. These were not the idle momentary ravings of a jealous woman. This was hatred, and hatred can destroy, it has its own magic. Rosina had the will and the power to do exactly what she threatened. And as I thought this I felt with a pang that this black will was, when it w
as otherwise directed, the very thing which had made me love her. She was smiling again, showing her white fishy teeth.
I took a reasonable tone, which did not deceive her, for she could feel my fear. ‘Your threats are rather premature, but if you bother me for any reason I shall certainly retaliate. Why have a war on your hands, why waste your life and your time? This is hate not love. You’re a rational woman. Forget it. Why make yourself miserable with these paroxysms of peevish jealousy?’ These words were a bad mistake.
Rosina struck the table with the flat of her hand and her eyes sparkled with violence. ‘You dare to talk of jealousy! As if I cared about that little lump you are running after! All right, you left me, me, to take up with her, and I haven’t forgotten. I could have maimed her or maddened her, only I knew you’d get tired of her, and you did, you get tired of everybody. You wrecked my marriage, you prevented me from having children, for you I made a slaughter of all my friends. And when you’d begged me on your knees to leave my husband, and when I’d left him, you abandoned me for that baby-face. Do you not remember what our love was like? Have you forgotten why you uttered those words?’
‘Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.’
‘You never had any imagination, no wonder you couldn’t write plays. You are a cold child. You want women but you are never interested in the people you want, so you learn nothing. You’ve had love affairs but somehow you’ve stayed innocent, no not innocent, you are fundamentally vicious, but somehow immature. Your first mistress was your mother, Clement was baby-snatching. But don’t you see that it has all been a mirage? Those women loved you for your power, your magic, yes, you have been a sorcerer. And now it’s over—I am the only one who loved you for yourself and not your invincible locks.’
‘This speech would be more impressive if you had uttered it earlier and not just because you’ve heard a rumour about Lizzie!’
‘I was waiting to see if you would really give up the world, as you boasted you would. I wanted you stripped and alone. Then you might have been almost worthy of me. Well, what a fool I was to think that I would ever be able to admire you for anything except that facile sorcery! But the fact remains that you made that promise to me in a moment of truth, in an absolute of love such as few men are privileged to have in their lives ever. And that promise belongs to me, it is all I have got in exchange for my broken marriage and for the love which I poured out for you as I have never done for any man. I have got that promise and I will hold it and use it even if there is nothing I can do with it except make your life a desolation and a ruin.’
I got up suddenly, and she became tense and actually lifted up her glittering hands like clawed paws. She looked like a ballet dancer playing a cat.
‘Listen, my cross-eyed beauty, it’s late, just get along will you, go back to the Raven Hotel. I’m going to bed. And please don’t creep around this house any more breaking things and peering through panes of glass. I have no plans for getting married or settling down with any female.’
‘Do you swear that?’
‘No arrangement exists. Lizzie is living with Gilbert. That’s how it is. And of course I never proposed to her, that was just a crazy rumour. Now go, I’m exhausted, and you must be too after that long performance.’
She got up and pulled her cloak more closely around her, her arms emerging through the slits, gripping each other in front. She stood for a moment glaring at me. ‘I will go. But tell me you believe what I have said.’
‘I believe some of it.’
‘Tell me you believe what I have said.’
‘I believe it. Now for Christ’s sake get out.’
I walked out with the lamp towards the front door and she followed. I opened the door. The light of the lamp revealed a mist which was waiting outside like a presence. It was impossible to discern the end of the causeway.
‘I’ll light you to the road,’ I said, and I went back for the electric torch. ‘But look, I’d better walk with you to the hotel. Oh hell.’
‘You needn’t,’ she said in a dull lifeless tone. ‘My car is near.’
I lighted her across the causeway with the torch. The mist was less thick on the road. ‘Where is your car?’
‘It’s here, in this place behind the rock.’
We walked to it and she got in. I said, ‘Goodnight.’
She said, ‘Remember.’
She switched on the headlights and I made out the form of a low red two-seater. She backed the car onto the road. As she turned it now and as it began to move in the direction of the hotel, a figure suddenly materialized, someone who had evidently been walking along the road. Rosina had stepped hard on the accelerator and the car leapt suddenly forward and the pedestrian was caught for a moment in the headlights, cowering back against the rock. The car swerved with a screech and then roared away down the road. I dropped my torch into the long grass and was left in darkness.
The pedestrian whom Rosina had almost run down was the old village woman who had so strangely reminded me of Hartley. Now in that moment of bright light, I saw. The old woman did not resemble Hartley. She was Hartley.
History
TWO
NOW IN LONDON I am writing the story of Rosina’s arrival and of what happened just after it. After Rosina’s car raced away I stood quite still in a condition of total shock, the kind of shock which annihilates space and time and renders one almost contemplative. I was paralysed. I cannot think why I did not fall to the ground, the revelation was, in its initial impact, so terrible. I grasped it first, I do not quite know why, in this way, not as something unwelcome or horrible, but purely as the impossible come true, like what we cannot imagine about the end of the world. And indeed it was the end of the world. I remember then very slowly reaching out my hand so that I could support myself against the rock. By the time I was able to reach down to the ground and pick up the torch I somehow knew that Hartley must have gone, must have continued down the road and by now be far ahead, or that perhaps she was taking a short cut across the fields. I was in any case not sure which way she had been going when the car lights caught her. My mind was so shocked I could not make the simplest decision about what to do. I started off hurrying towards the village and then stopped. It did not occur to me to call out her name, that would have been impossible. I hardly indeed remembered her name, it would have emerged, as in a dream, as an incoherent bellow. I hurried back and stupidly shone the torch about, inspecting the place where I had seen her. The bright light revealed the marks of the car tyres, the trampled grass, the yellow pock-marked rock, the mist moving. At last slowly, and like a man returning from a funeral, I walked back across the causeway to the house. The lamps were still burning in the kitchen, the fire was alight in the little red room. It was all quiet and as it had been when, in a previous age of the world, I had been talking with Rosina.
I was trembling. Eating, drinking, were equally impossible. I went into the little red room and sat down by the fire. Is she a widow? This agonizing question had somehow, it seemed, formulated itself at once, in the very first awful moment of recognition. Awful, not because she had so almost completely changed, but because I knew that everything was in ruins about me, every old assumption was gone, every terrible possibility was open. That there could soon be dreadful pain did not then occur to me at all, I think. It was not envisaging pain that made me feel so shattered, it was just experience of the change itself. I felt a present anguish such as an insect must feel as it emerges from a chrysalis, or the crushed foetus as it batters its way into the world. It was not, either, a removal to the past. Memory seemed now almost irrelevant. It was a new condition of being.
I did eventually go to bed where I slept instantly like a dead thing. I had by then composed one or two more simple thoughts or questions. Is she a widow? was so pervasive as to be scarcely a question, it was the atmosphere I breathed. I wondered had she seen me in the village and if so had she recognized me? I had seen her distantly seve
ral times. Oh my God how terrible. I had seen her and not known her. But surely I, who was scarcely changed, must have been recognizable at once. Why then had she not spoken to me? Perhaps she had chanced not to see me, perhaps she was short-sighted, perhaps—what was she doing in the village anyway? Did she live here, or was she on holiday? Perhaps she would disappear tomorrow, never be seen again. Where was she going to along the misty sea road at night? The idea came to me that she might be working at the Raven Hotel. But she was over sixty, Hartley was over sixty. I had never put it to myself that Hartley too was growing old. Then I wondered if she had seen me in the dark, and if so had she realized that I had recognized her? Then I thought: she saw me with Rosina. What might she have overheard, what had we been saying? I could not remember. Then I decided she could not possibly have seen me as I was behind the headlights. And tomorrow: tomorrow I would search and search for her and find her and then . . .
I woke up next morning to an instant sense of a changed world. The awful feeling was less, and there was a new extremely anxious excitement and a sheer plucking physical longing to be in her presence, the fierce indubitable magnetism of love. There was also a weird hovering joy, as if I had been changed in the night into a beneficent being powerful for good. I could produce, I could bestow, good. I was the king seeking the beggar maid. I had power to transform, to raise up, to heal, to bring undreamt-of happiness and joy. My God, I had come here, to this very place, and against all the chances I had found her at last! I had come here because of Clement, and I had found Hartley. But: is she a widow?
I was in the village before nine o’clock. It was a sunny morning promising heat. I walked quickly round the little streets. Then I went down to the harbour and back by a footpath which led up the hill to the bungalows. As soon as the two shops were open I visited both of them. I walked round again. Then I went into the church, which was empty, and sat for a while with my head in my hands. I found that I was able to pray and was indeed praying. This was odd since I did not believe in God and had not prayed since I was a child. I prayed: let me find Hartley and let her be alone and let her love me and be made happy by me forever. My being able to make Hartley happy had become the most desirable thing in the world, something the possession of which would crown my life and make it perfect. I went on praying and then in a strange way it was as if I had fallen asleep. I certainly had the experience of waking up and feeling panic in case I had lost Hartley, as my only chance to find her had come and gone while I was sleeping. Her holiday was over, she had gone home, she had run away, she had suddenly died. I jumped up and looked at my watch. It was only twenty past nine. I ran out of the church. And then at last I saw her.