The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  I was of course aware that one point of the ‘extreme idea’ was that it consoled me with an offer of happiness, though of an extremely refined and attenuated sort. Other prospects, more closely related to the horror of recent events, were less vague and less pleasing; and I had an urgent dark desire to act which was not illumined by my aspirations to sanctity. But what could I do? Start looking for Titus? My central question at least was now answered: Hartley was unhappy. But this brought forward a further central question. Why was she unhappy? Was it simply because her son had vanished or were there other reasons? Why would she not let me help her, why would she not let me in? Or was it naïve to expect confidences from a woman I had not seen for more than forty years? I had kept her being alive in me, but to her I might simply be a shadow, an almost forgotten schoolboy. I could not believe this. Was she perhaps on the contrary still so much in love with me that she dare not trust herself to see me? Did she imagine I had smart handsome mistresses of whom she would be miserably jealous? What had she been doing down on the sea road when Rosina’s headlights suddenly revealed her to me? Had she come to spy, to find out?

  She had promised to write, but would she write, and if she did would she ‘explain’? Could I, was I capable of it, simply wait, and perhaps wait and wait, for that letter, and, obeying her, do nothing? I so intensely wanted to ‘explain’ myself, to pour out everything I felt and thought, and which in those miserable scrappy encounters I had not managed to say. Should I write her a long letter? If I did I would certainly not entrust it to the post. That brought me back again to le mari. Why was she unhappy? Was it because he was jealous, a tyrant, a bully, who never let anyone come near her? Was that it? And if so . . . How my mind leapt forward at this thought, and how many lurid vistas and fiery hollows were suddenly opened up. At the same time I knew that sanity, and a faithfulness to Hartley which must be kept untainted, forbade this kind of speculation.

  I had no heart to cook lunch. I fried an egg but could not eat it. I drank some of the young Beaujolais which had been delivered from the Raven Hotel. (I found the wine, Beaujolais and some Spanish stuff, outside the door when I got back from the village.) Then I occupied myself by writing the letter to Lizzie which I have copied out above. After that I thought it might do my soul some good if I went swimming. The tide was in and the sea was very calm, and clearer than usual. Looking down from my cliff before I dived in I could see tall dark trees of seaweed gently waving and fishes swimming between them. I swam about quietly, looking at that special ‘swimmer’s view’ of the sea, and feeling, for the time, possessing and possessed. The sea was a glassy slightly heaving plain, moving slowly past me, and as if it were shrugging reflectively as it absent-mindedly supported its devotee. Some large seagulls with the yellowest conceivable beaks gathered to watch me. I felt no anxiety about getting out, and when I swam back to my cliff face I was able quite easily to cling on to my handholds and footholds and pull myself up out of the water. In fact the little cliff is not in itself very hard to climb, it is just that, as I explained, if one is being constantly lifted up and abruptly dropped again by the movement of the waves, it is impossible to keep one’s fingers and toes in place long enough to get a proper grip. When I was in the sea I thought to myself how little it mattered to me that Hartley was no longer beautiful. This seemed a good thought and I held on to it and it brought me, together with tenderness, a little calm.

  After that I stupidly sat in the sun but it was too hot and my immersion had after all brought me little wisdom. Perhaps I had not been wrong in thinking of the sea as a source of peace, but it was an ineffective medicine thus taken in a gulp. It required a regime. I walked about, scorching my feet and looking into one or two of my pools but the pleasure had departed and I could no longer concentrate upon those brilliant lucid little civilizations, although in the strong light the coloured pebbles and the miniature seaweed trees looked like jewels by Fabergé. I watched a dance of prawns and the progress of a green transparent sea-slug, and saw again the long coiling red worm which had somehow reminded me of my sea serpent. Then I noticed to my annoyance some tourists from, I suppose, the Raven Hotel who were actually standing on my land and inspecting the tower. I went into the house with burning shoulders and a splitting headache.

  It was now obvious that I would soon have to do something, to perform some ritual act which would relate to my situation and perhaps alter it. What I wanted to do, of course, was to run straight to Hartley. I had not even kissed her yet. How timid and feeble I had been this morning in the church. But I would have ‘ingeniously’ to find some substitute for this headlong rush. Like the deprived addict I found ordinary diversions useless. Everything I did now had to relate to the one world-centre. I decided, just in order to keep moving, to walk down to the village and post the letter to Lizzie. Of course I hoped to see Hartley, but I did not really imagine that I would. It was now late afternoon, the kind of vivid light which would have made me want to shout with joy a little while ago. When I had crossed the causeway I saw some letters lying in my dog kennel and I picked them up. One of them was from Lizzie. I tore it open and read it as I walked along.

  My darling, of course the answer will have to be yes. My fears were foolish and unworthy, please forgive my confused response to your wonderful offer. I am your page, as I always was, and shall I not come to you if, even for a moment, you need me? I haven’t said anything to Gilbert yet and I don’t know how to. When we meet will you please be gentle and help me about this? I can’t just abandon him. There must be some way of not hurting him too much. Please understand. And let me see you soon, I want to say so many things. Shall I come to you, or will you be in London? I wish I could telephone you. (Don’t ring here because of Gilbert.) By the way, I told Gilbert I was writing to you because he asked, and he says will you have dinner with us here Monday of next week if you’re in town? I pass this on, but I imagine in the circumstances you won’t want to.

  I love you so much.

  Lizzie.

  I am so frightened that you are angry with me. Please reassure me soon.

  I sighed over this rather shifty missive, which gave me so little pleasure. What was this ‘offer’ I was supposed to have made her? She almost made it seem as if she was endeavouring to oblige me. I noted that she had not yet told Gilbert, and showed no signs of leaving him. But I felt no urge to reflect upon the state of Lizzie’s mind, it did not matter now.

  I hastened my steps and reached the Post Office just before it closed. I posted my letter to Lizzie and sent her a telegram which ran as follows. Your first idea was right. See my letter which crossed with yours. In London soon and gratefully accept dine you and Gilbert. Love Charles. That should make the situation sufficiently clear and also keep Lizzie in London. I had of course no intention of dining with them, and would send a cancellation at the last moment.

  I emerged into the street where it was still sunny, and the evening light was making even the slates on the roofs cast little shadows, and the whitewashed walls were silver-gilt. I walked up to the church and looked inside. It was empty and already in shadow and full of the smell of the roses which were a white blur in the hazy dusty air. I came out into the light and spent some time looking at the various sailing ships on the tombstones which the slanting illumination had brought out in strong relief; walking back down the street it occurred to me that the Black Lion was open and I went in. There was the usual sudden hush.

  ‘Seen any more ghosts?’ said Arkwright, as he served me with cider.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wasn’t you asking about big eels,’ said someone else, ‘seen any?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Seen any seals?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He ain’t seen nothing.’

  A titter.

  I was feeling hungry, so I ate a cheese sandwich and a horrible pork pie. I sat for a while and looked at the rest of my mail. I did not care a fig for the company and I did not mind if they knew it. The letters, sent on by M
iss Kaufman, were all personal but of little interest. They included one which would formerly have pleased me from Sidney Ashe describing comical goings-on in Stratford, Ontario. There was also one from my physicist friend (previously mentioned I think) Victor Banstead of Cambridge. I crumpled all the letters up, including Lizzie’s, and dropped them into a nearby basket, and then had to scrabble in it, under the amused gaze of the company, to get them out again. I crammed them in my pocket and said goodnight. No one answered. Once I had closed the door there was prolonged laughter.

  I did not take the diagonal footpath but followed the road which led straight on towards the harbour. Once I was clear of the village I stopped and looked up at the hillside. The sun was low and a few lighted windows already shone here and there, weirdly pale. I am very long-sighted, and although I had needed my pincenez to read the letters, I could see the bungalows quite clearly. There seemed to be a faint light in the sitting room at Nibletts. Supper would be over and they would be watching television. In silence? It occurred to me: I could not conceive of married life. How was such a state of affairs possible? I felt a very strong desire to go up the hill and knock on the door. Supposing I arrived with a bottle of champagne . . . ? But I had now invented a device for getting through the next hours. There might very well be a letter from Hartley tomorrow morning. And if by any chance there was not . . . I would . . . decide what to do. Then I wondered, in that little house, how, where can she write a private letter? In the bathroom? He must go away sometimes. Would it be a private letter? Marriage was indeed a mystery.

  I walked on down to the harbour where the calm, calm sea was just audibly lapping. The harbour was empty and quiet and darkish within the firm arm of its stone quay which seemed to be exuding the thick powdery light. As I loitered I could feel the warmth of the stone under my feet. A cormorant passed by, low over the waves, a black cross-shaped portent. Now there was a big pale crumbly moon and a brilliant evening star. Just beyond, in the ladies’ bathing place, two boys were playing on the dark seaweed, but silently as if magicked by the hour. I walked slowly along the coast road in the direction of Shruff End, then on past it, and spent some time looking at Raven Bay with the hotel lights reflected in the water. The evening star changed from gold to silver and the moon diminished and gained a hard-edged brilliance. I walked back at last and as I turned onto the causeway I saw a curious flicker within the house as if a light were moving. I stopped and watched. There was a momentary clear flicker which ducked and then became hazy behind one of the front windows, then vanished. Someone inside was walking about carrying a candle. My first thought was that it was Hartley. Then I thought it was more likely to be Rosina. I walked back along the road and sure enough, hidden behind the projecting rock where it had been before, was her horrible little red car.

  I felt such intense annoyance that I actually kicked one of the wheels. I decided that I could not bear to see Rosina. Her unspeakable presence in my house was a sacrilege. The sight of her impertinent face would provoke me to unreasoning anger. The horror and vulgarity of a quarrel would be unbearable; and there would be no getting rid of her. I glided with long tip-toe strides along the causeway and round the side of the house onto the lawn. I could now see into the kitchen. Yes, there was Rosina, with two lighted candles on the kitchen table, trying unsuccessfully to light one of my lamps, and probably ruining the wick in the process. I saw her intent cross-eyed stare and the bad-tempered movements of her mouth as she twiddled the wick roughly up and down and poked it with the lighted match. The lamp flared up, then went out. She was wearing something black, with a white shirt, and her dark hair, which was hanging loose, was swinging almost into the candle flame. I receded quietly, picking up as I did so the rugs and cushions which were lying on the grass. It was just as well I had eaten something in the pub, otherwise hunger would have driven me into the house.

  I clambered over the rocks until the house was invisible and found, very close to the sea and just above it, a long shallow depression where I had sunbathed once or twice in the prehistoric days. The night was very warm, very still, and as I put my glasses in a place of safety and composed myself for sleep I wondered sadly why it had never occurred to me to sleep out here in the days when I was happy. It was so close to the sea which was gently slapping the rock just below, it was like being in a boat. And as my rocky bed sloped a little down towards the water, I could lie with my head on a cushion, looking straight out at the horizon, where the moon was making an almost but not quite motionless rift of silver. The first stars were already sharp and bright. More stars were coming, more, more. Lying on my back, wrapped in my rug, my hands clasped in front of me, I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good! And then, as if the spirit that I prayed to had admonished me in reply, I tried to put myself out of the picture and to pray only for Hartley: that she might be happy, that Titus might come home, that her husband might love her and she him. This was more difficult. In fact it was so difficult that the temptation of which I had been aware earlier, and which I had so firmly driven away, began to creep in again from the side, however hard I tried to think only good thoughts. Is her husband, Fitch, Ben, whatever his name is, a jealous tyrant, is he the cause of her unhappiness? If so then perhaps . . . ? I decided at last that if there was no letter from Hartley in the morning I would call at the bungalow and damn the consequences. Because . . . I had to know . . . the answer . . . to that question.

  Then I found that I was not thinking about Hartley any more, but about my mother. I saw her face covered with wrinkles of anxiety and disapproval and love. Then I was seeing Aunt Estelle, wearing a little round straw hat, sitting at the wheel of the white Rolls-Royce. I know that it excited my father to see her drive that big car. It excited Uncle Abel. It excited me. Aunt Estelle wearing a broad band round her head like a ‘fillet’, which we used to make such silly jokes about at school when we were translating Latin. She played tennis so well. They had a hard court at Ramsdens. How was it that she resembled James, she so pretty, so gay, he with his silences and his occluded lowering face? Some gauzy mask of similarity had been put over his head, like the Hartley-mask that so many women had worn for me through the years, even that funny old woman in the village who was so unlike her. But had I forgotten already, that funny old woman was Hartley! Then was James really Aunt Estelle? Now Aunt Estelle was dancing on a dark rotating gramophone record, dancing in the middle where the label was, and somehow she was the label, a face, with torn paper, torn paper, turning and turning with the record. And all this time I was keeping my eyes open, or trying to, only they kept closing, because I wanted to go on watching the stars, where the most extraordinary things were happening. A bright satellite, a man-made star, very slowly and somehow carefully crossed the sky in a great arc, from one side to the other, a close arc, one knew it was not far away, a friendly satellite slowly going about its business round and round the globe. And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled. And I wanted to show all these things to my father.

  Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars. The moon was gone. The water lapped higher, nearer, touching the rock so lightly it was audible only as a kind of vibration. The
sea had fallen dark, in submission to the stars. And the stars seemed to move as if one could see the rotation of the heavens as a kind of vast crepitation, only now there were no more events, no shooting stars, no falling stars, which human senses could grasp or even conceive of. All was movement, all was change, and somehow this was visible and yet unimaginable. And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold.

  Later still I awoke and it had all gone; and for a few moments I thought that I had seen all those stars only in a dream. There was a weird shocking sudden quiet, as at the cessation of a great symphony or of some immense prolonged indescribable din. Had the stars then been audible as well as visible and had I indeed heard the music of the spheres? The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing them out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. I discovered that I was feeling very stiff and rather cold. The rock beneath me was very hard and I felt bruised and aching. I was surprised to find my rugs and cushions were wet with dew. I got up stiffly and shook them. I looked around me. Mountainous piled-up rocks hid the house. And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself and quickly lay down again and settled my rug and closed my eyes, lying there stiffly and not imagining that I would sleep again.