The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  As the sun began to go down and the sea was turning gold under a very pale green sky I laid my empty glass in a cranny and crawled up to a higher rock from which I could get a view of the whole expanse of water. In the lurid yet uncertain light I found that I was now suddenly scanning the scene and watching it intently. What was I looking for? I was looking for that sea monster.

  The next day before nine o’clock I was entering the church. I had reached it by a roundabout route, first climbing over the rocks on the other side of the road, then veering away through the gorse in the direction of the Raven Hotel, crossing the bog on the seaward side of Amorne Farm, going through three fields and three prickly hedges, and approaching Narrowdean from inland along the main road. By this method I did not at any point enter the Nibletts ‘view’. I tried not to feel sure that Hartley would come to the church; in any case I decided that it was the only place where it was worth keeping a vigil, since it was more unlikely that she would walk out to Shruff End. Of course there was no one there, although someone had been in since yesterday and had put upon the altar a vast odorous bowl of white roses which disturbed me with all sorts of deep incoherent unconceptualized apprehensions. Time had suffered a profound disturbance, and I could feel all sorts of dark debris from the far past shifting and beginning to move up towards the surface. I sat feeling sick and reading the Ten Commandments which were almost illegibly inscribed upon a brown board behind the roses, and trying not to pay any special attention to the tenth and seventh and trying not at every moment to expect Hartley. The bright sun was blazing in through the tall rounded leaded faintly-greenish glass windows of the church and making the big room, for that after all was all that it was, feel weird and uneasy. There was a good deal of dust about, moving idly and airily in the sunlight, and the smell of the roses mingled with the dust and with some old musty woody smell, and the place seemed unused and very empty and a little mad. It seemed a suitable spot for a strange momentous interview. I felt frightened. Was I frightened of Fitch?

  I waited in the church for more than an hour. I walked up and down. I read all the memorial tablets carefully. I smelt the roses. I read pieces of the horrible new prayer book (no wonder the churches are empty). I inspected the embroidered hassocks wrought by the local ladies. I climbed onto the pews and looked out of the windows. I thought of poor Dummy lying out there in the churchyard, scarcely more speechless now than he ever was. At about twenty past ten I decided that I had to get out into the air. It was all a great mistake, hiding in the church when Hartley might be walking openly about the streets. I wanted to see her so much that I was nearly moaning aloud. I ran out and went down through the iron gate and sat on a seat where I could see quite a lot of the little ‘high street’, but without being visible from the hillside. After a few minutes I saw a woman who looked like Hartley creeping along by the wall on the far side of the street, going in the direction of the shop. I say ‘creeping along’ because that was part of my first vision of her as an old woman, before I knew who she was, and it was this ‘old woman’ image that I was seeing now. I jumped up and set off after her. As she crossed the road she turned slightly and saw me and increased her pace. It was Hartley all right and she was running away from me! She did not go into the shop, but whisked round into what I called Fishermen’s Stores Street. When I reached the corner running, she was nowhere to be seen. I went into the Fishermen’s Stores, but she was not there. I wanted to howl with exasperation. I ran along to the end of the street where it petered out in a few derelict cottages and a five-barred gate and a large meadow fringed by trees. She could not have crossed that meadow. Had she gone into one of the houses? I ran back; then I saw a little alleyway leading off the street, a narrow sunless fissure between the blank sides of two houses. I ran down it, stumbled over a strewing of pebbles, and turned a sharp corner into a square enclosed space between the low whitewashed walls of backyards, where there were a number of overflowing dustbins and old cardboard boxes and an abandoned bicycle. And there, standing quite still in the middle of this scene, was Hartley. She was standing just behind a low outcrop of the sparkling yellow rock which surrounded my house.

  She looked at me out of a sort of resigned trance-like calm, staring and unsmiling, and yet I could see that inwardly she was trembling like a quarry. The dark shadow of a wall fell across the yard, dividing the rock and somehow composing the picture, covering Hartley’s feet as she stood there holding a basket and her handbag. She was wearing a blue cotton dress today with a closely packed design of white daisies, and a loose baggy brown cardigan over it, although the day was already hot.

  I ran up to her and seized hold not of her arm but of the handle of her shopping basket. This chase, this catch, had frightened us both. ‘Oh Hartley, don’t do it, don’t run away from me, it’s mad, thank God I found you, if I hadn’t I’d have gone crazy! I must talk to you. Come to the church, please.’

  I pulled at the handle of the basket and she walked in front of me down the narrow alley.

  ‘You go to the church. I’ll follow you after I’ve shopped. Yes, I promise.’

  I went back to the church. After that chase, after that awful enclosed space with the dustbins and the rock and the bicycle, I too was trembling. She came in ten minutes. I went to take her heavy basket from her. I simply did not know how to behave to her, there was some profound awful barrier of what I felt as embarrassment, though it was also dread. If only some touch of grace could turn all this pain into communication and the gestures of love. But grace in every sense was lacking. I felt now a frantic desire to touch her, to hold her, but I could think of no way of achieving this, as if it would have been an amazing physical feat. We sat down where we had sat before, she in the pew in front, turning round to me.

  ‘Why did you hide? I can’t bear this. We must—we must somehow get a grip on this situation—I shall go mad—’

  ‘Charles, please don’t be so—and please don’t call round unexpectedly like that—’

  ‘I’m sorry—but I’ve got to see you—I still care about you. What do you expect me to do? At least we’ve got to be friends, now we’ve got this chance to—this chance—Of course I won’t do anything you don’t want—Please—look, couldn’t you and your husband come round and see me, come round for drinks tomorrow at six, well at five, at seven, any time that suits you. Come to funny old Shruff End, I want you to see the house. Why not?’

  Hartley was hunched up, her head shrunk into her neck, the rumpled collar of her blue dress cupping her hair. She was looking down, almost hidden by the pew. ‘Please don’t expect anything of us, I mean don’t call on us or ask us to—we don’t go to parties—’

  ‘It’s not a party!’

  ‘It’s not necessary for us to be like that just because—And please don’t run after me in the street, people will notice.’

  ‘But you ran away from me, you hid—’

  ‘Where we live people don’t sort of entertain because they’re neighbours, they keep themselves to themselves.’

  ‘But you already know me! And there needn’t be any “entertaining” if you mean ridiculous formalities, I hate that anyway. Hartley, I won’t put up with this. Can’t you just explain?’

  Hartley now looked at me properly. I noticed that today she was wearing no lipstick, and this helped me to read her, to read her young look into her old look. Her tired pale wrinkled soft round face now looked very sad, with a kind of resigned sadness, as I had never seen it then, even when she was leaving me. But her sadness was resolute, almost wary, and she was entirely attentive, the vivid eyes no longer vague. She revealed her red slightly swollen hands, and clawed ineffectually at her rumpled collar.

  ‘What is there to explain, why should I—?’

  ‘You mean I’m not behaving like a gentleman?’

  ‘No, no—Look, I must go to the hairdressing lady.’

  ‘I behaved like a gentleman then and look where it got me! I never pressed you. I believed you when you said you’d marry m
e. I loved you. I love you. All right, you said then that you couldn’t trust me, you thought I’d be unfaithful and so on, oh God! Perhaps you feel something like that, that you couldn’t trust me now—But believe me, there are no women, no one with me, I’m alone, really alone. I want you to know that.’

  ‘There’s no need to say, it doesn’t matter—’

  ‘Yes, don’t misunderstand me. I just want you to know it’s simply me, and I’m like I always was, so there’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I must go to the hairdresser.’

  ‘Hartley, please—Oh all right, why indeed should you explain? Do you want me to go away now and never try to see you again?’

  Of course I did not intend her to say yes, and she did not.

  ‘No, I don’t want that. I don’t know what I want.’

  The desolate sound of this, the sound of need at last, made me feel much happier and much more clear-headed. ‘Hartley darling, you’ve got to talk to me, you know you have. After all there’s so much to talk about, isn’t there? I won’t do you any harm. My love for you then was mixed up, with all sorts of conflicts which don’t exist now, so it can all be better and we’ve sort of got it back again after all. Don’t you see? We can be real friends. And I do want to get to know your husband.’ I then felt bound to add, ‘I did like him so much, by the way.’ This rang false. Hartley had hunched herself up again behind the pew. ‘Anyway we must talk. There’s so much I want to tell you before it’s too late. And I want to ask you hundreds of questions. I don’t mean about what happened then. I mean about you and how you’ve lived and about—oh—Titus. I’d love to meet him. Perhaps I could help him.’

  ‘Help him?’

  ‘Yes, why not? Financially for instance, or—I know a lot about the world, Hartley—about some worlds, anyway. What does he want to do, what is he studying?’

  Hartley gave a deep sigh, and then rubbed her cheeks with her red hands. She produced her handkerchief, still stained with lipstick. Tears had risen into her eyes.

  ‘Hartley—dear—’

  ‘He’s gone, he ran away, he’s lost, we don’t know where he is. We haven’t heard anything from him for nearly two years. He’s gone away.’

  ‘Oh God—’ So cunning and vile is the human soul that I felt instantly glad that Hartley had this understandable cause of grief and had told me about it and was weeping about it in my presence. Suddenly there was sympathy, communication.

  ‘I’m so sorry. But can’t he be found, have you told the police? There are ways of finding people. I could help there.’

  Hartley mopped her face, then took a mirror and powder compact out of her bag and dabbed powder round her eyes. I had seen so many women powder their faces. I was seeing Hartley perform this little ritual of vanity for the first time. She said, ‘You can’t help and please don’t try to. Better to leave us alone and—’

  ‘Hartley, I’m not going to leave you alone, so you must make up your mind to that and invent some humane way of dealing with me! Are you just afraid of falling in love with me again, is that it?’

  She stood up, lifted her shopping basket, which was beside me, and dropped her handbag into it. I came round into her pew and put my arms firmly round her shoulders. It still felt like doing the impossible. For a moment she bowed her head and rolled her brow quickly to and fro against my shirt, and I felt the blazing warmth of her flesh against mine. Then she pushed past me and began to walk to the door. I followed.

  ‘When shall I see you?’

  ‘Please don’t, you’ll worry us, and please don’t write.’

  ‘Hartley, what is it? Let go. Let yourself love me a bit, there’ll be no harm. Or do you think I’m such a grandee? I’m not, you know. I’m just your oldest friend.’

  ‘Don’t do anything, I’ll write to you, later.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll write. Only don’t come.’

  ‘Won’t you explain?’

  ‘There’s nothing to explain. Stay here please.’ And she went away.

  Dearest Lizzie, I have been reflecting on what you said in your sweet and wise letter, and what you said also when we met at the tower. I have to ask your pardon. I think perhaps that you are right after all. I love you, but it may be that my rather (as you say) ‘abstract’ idea of our being together is not, for either of us, the best expression of that love. We might just create confusion and unhappiness for both. Your ‘suspicions’ of me may indeed be just, and you are not the first one to express such doubts! Perhaps I am by now too much of a restless Don Juan. So let us play it differently. This is not necessarily a sad conclusion, and we must both be realistic, especially as someone else’s happiness is also at stake. I was very touched and impressed by the spectacle of your relationship with Gilbert. It is an achievement and must of course be respected. What does it matter what people exactly ‘are’ to each other, so long as they love and cherish each other and are true to each other? You were so right to emphasize that word. You doubted my capacity to be loyal and I am near enough to sharing your doubts to be anxious for us not to take the risk. It is just as well that we never defined what we expected. We are both fortunate in being happy as we are, and we can simply count our old affectionate friendship, now so happily revived, as a bonus. We don’t want, do we, any more anguish or muddle. You are quite right. I shall respect your wisdom and your wishes and the rights of my old friend Gilbert! It is, as you said, important that we all three like each other; and let us, as you urged, enjoy a free and unpossessive mutual affection. So please forget my original foolish letter, to which you so bravely and rationally responded, and also my somewhat bullying tactics at our last meeting! I am lucky to have friends such as you and Gilbert and I intend to treasure them in a sensible and I hope generous way. I shall look forward to seeing you soon in London where I shall be arriving shortly. I will let you know. Accept, both of you, my affectionate best wishes and, if I may belatedly offer them, my congratulations.

  Be well, little Lizzie, and remember me.

  Your old friend,

  Charles.

  This was the letter, partly disingenuous, partly sincere, which I wrote to Lizzie on the afternoon of the day when I saw Hartley in the church for the second time. I returned home in a frenzy of misery and indecision, and after a while spent fruitlessly wondering what to do next, I decided that one sensible thing at least which I could do to pass the time would be to get rid of Lizzie. This involved no mental struggle and no problem except the labour of writing a suitable letter and concentrating upon Lizzie long enough to complete it. How totally in every atom I had been changed was shown by the fact that my ‘idea’ about Lizzie now seemed to me an insane fancy from whose consequences I had been mercifully saved by Lizzie’s own common sense; and for this I blessed her. A flame had licked out of the past and burnt up that structure of intentions completely. What had been made clear in the last two days (which seemed like months) was how far I had been right in thinking that there was only one real love in my life. It was as if I had in some spiritual sense actually married Hartley long ago and was simply not free to look elsewhere. Of course I had really known this all along. But on seeing her again the sense of absolute belongingness had been overwhelming; in the teeth of our fates’ most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.

  I did in fact manage to think quite intensely about Lizzie while I was writing the letter, and to think of her with a kind of generous resigned affection. I saw her laughing radiant face as it had been when she was younger, when we used to laugh so much about her loving me. In spite of the incredible gaucherie of my ‘idea’ it was possible that I had, quite accidentally, acquired Lizzie as a friend whose affection and loyalty might even one day be of value. But now the decks must be cleared. There must be absolutely no problem, no ‘interesting connection’ involving discussions or letters or visits. I had no time and no strength for any such muddle and it would be criminal to risk one. My hint about coming
to London was of course simply a ploy to keep Lizzie there. I could not have endured the arrival of an emotional Lizzie on my doorstep now. There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained. So let little Lizzie remain safely in storage with Gilbert; I could now even feel benevolent towards him. Was this new detached generosity, I wondered in passing, a first symptom of that changed and purified form of being which the return of Hartley was going to create in me? Was Hartley, seen not touched, loved not possessed, destined to make me a saint? How strange and significant that I had come precisely here to repent of my egoism! Was this perhaps the final sense of my mystical marriage with my only love? It was an extreme idea, but it had its own deep logic, and flourished somewhat upon the absence of alternatives. There was, for me, surely no other move?