The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  We were both surprised at how pleasant the journey turned out to be. We spoke of nothing personal but chattered and gossiped all the way and, in that enclosed time, enjoyed each other’s company as we used to do in the days before Rosina loved me and I was crazed by her. Tactfully she told me only what I wanted to hear about, failures and flops and bankruptcies and personal disaster. Fritzie’s plan to film the Odyssey had run into money trouble, Marcus was suing Al over Nell’s contract, Rita’s third husband had run off with a male dancer, Fabian was back in a mental home. Après moi le déluge. While I amused her with descriptions of my misadventures at the Black Lion. And without seeming in the least preoccupied I managed to think about Hartley all the way to London. After all I am an actor. Rosina dropped me in Notting Hill. We parted with amicable vagueness. She was too intelligent to press me at this point, especially if she believed that she had won some sort of advantage by a successful exercise of power. I had no idea what she thought or what she wanted and I soon forgot her. I gave myself up to that not unpleasing slightly mad feeling that always comes over me when I enter London, the scattering anonymous feeling of returning into oneself in the great tragi-comic metropolis when the bond of society, whether in train or car, is suddenly snapped. I walked to my flat (I would not let Rosina drive me there) and did some shopping on the way. I let myself in in a state of painful excitement. The alien jumbled rooms, still smelling of other lives, greeted me with hostility. I at once began searching for photographs of Hartley. I thought they might have got lost in the move, but all was well. I poured them from an envelope onto the table and spread them out, all brown and faded and curling at the edges. They were almost all snaps I had taken of her. Hartley always smiling or laughing, the wind blowing her hair and her skirt, posed upon a canal bridge, holding her bike, leaning against a five-barred gate, kneeling in buttercups and looking at me with a face blazing with love. I kept trying to trace the similarities, to build connections between the young face and the old, the old face and the new. But the images were too terrible, too agonizing, because of the overwhelming smell of youth and happiness which emanated from them. Prudent, careful of myself, I quickly gathered them all together and put them back into the envelope to take to Shruff End.

  I then searched quickly for a picture of my mother, and soon found one, not anxious-looking but broad-faced and grinning with a jocund yet powerful expression that was terribly familiar to me. Her scraped-back hair revealed her bulky rounded brow, and her commanding wide-apart eyes gazed straight at the beholder. She would never have made an intellectual, but there were many careers in which she might have succeeded. She was often merry, but with a merriment almost ostentatiously derived from, or associated with, an ascetic simple blameless life. The jazz age passed my parents by. I also found, though I was not looking for it, a touching (too touching) picture of my father, very young, in the uniform of an infantry officer of the first war. How on earth had he survived that holocaust, and why had I never asked him really detailed questions about it? He too was looking at me, but unsmiling, diffident, with anxious eyes. How soft and young his mouth looked. However had that gentle timid being managed as a soldier? It was my mother who made decisions and argued with the tradesmen. Perhaps it was some of her northern toughness in me which had made me so browbeat the world as to accept me at my own valuation.

  Then I saw, peeping out from under some horrible pictures of James on his pony (why ever had I kept those?), a photograph of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle dancing together. I pulled it out. They were in evening dress and holding each other rather far apart for what was obviously, from the way they were looking at each other, a moment only. The next moment they would be closely embraced. Tango? Waltz? Slow foxtrot? There was something in their attitude which announced not only their happiness but their mutual dependence, their absolutely satisfactory relationship; he so burly, so masterly, so elegant, so protective, she so frail, so graceful, so trustful and submissive, so confidently loving. So bloody beautiful. Poor lucky Aunt Estelle, she never lived to lose those charms. However had I got hold of that photo? I now quite suddenly recalled that I had stolen it from the family album at Ramsdens. I turned the stiff brown photo over, and saw the glue on the back and a little dark brownish fur of the thick page from which I had removed it.

  As I had been bowling along the motorway with Rosina in the sunny early morning and chattering about California and the latest row in Equity, I had been composing a letter which I intended to write to Hartley as soon as I got to London. But after I arrived I felt, first of all, a more urgent need to clear my mind and somehow to steady and console myself by writing a full account of what had happened. Then I found other reasons for not, as yet, writing that letter. I was in fact in a terrible ferment, not exactly of indecision, but of anxious impatient frightened emotion. I was still struggling to hold off a frightful crippling mindless jealousy-pain which was waiting just round some corner in my distracted soul. I had to keep that away from me by thinking; and the fruit of my thought was somewhat as follows.

  When I left Ben after that rather horrible interview, I felt dark feral glee because I realized that I was now free to detest him; and I was free to do more, oh ever so much more, than that. The crude summary of the matter was that I was now able to think in terms of rescuing Hartley. There was a kind of dreadful violent leaping ahead in this thought, as if I were being powerfully jerked by something which already existed in the far-off future. Hatred, jealousy, fear and fierce yearning love raged together in my mind. Oh my poor girl, oh my poor dear girl. I felt an agony of protective possessive love, and such a deep pain to think how I had failed to defend her from a lifetime of unhappiness. How I would cherish her, how console and perfectly love her now if only . . . But I still had just enough prudence left to go on thinking.

  I reviewed the evidence and I had very little doubt about what it pointed to. Hartley loved me and had long regretted losing me. How could she not? She did not love her husband. How could she? He was mentally undistinguished; there was no wit or spiritual sweetness in that man. He was physically unattractive, with his big unshapely sensual mouth and his look of a cropped school-boy. And he was, it seemed, a barbarian and a bully. He was a tyrant, probably a chronically jealous man, a dull resentful dog, a limited shut-in fellow with no sense of the joy of life. Hartley had been a captive all these years. She may, in the earlier times, have thought of escape; but gradually she fell, as so many bullied isolated women do, into a gradual despair. Better not to fight, not to hope. The shock of seeing me again must have been enormous. Of course she had digested some of it by the time I discovered her. Her frightened negative behaviour was easy to explain. She was probably afraid of her husband; but she was much more afraid of her old love for me, still alive, blazing away there like an underground oil fire: a love which, at the very least, could now utterly destroy her small despairing peace of mind.

  About all this, and about how I could and would, if she wished it, take her away, I had intended to write to her in the letter, which I would of course deliver secretly. But reason and reflection, together with fear, suggested a delay. Fear said that if anything were to go terribly badly wrong now I should lose my mind. Reason said that the evidence was not conclusive and could be read in other ways. My anti-Ben persona was perhaps not a very reliable witness. Had Ben revealed himself as so very unpleasant in our meeting, given that my own conduct had been so exasperating? Well, he had, until the end, controlled himself; but I had felt, from the start, a fierce and unreasoning degree of hostility. Then there was the mystery of Titus. Why had he run away? Had he turned out a problem child, perhaps a delinquent? Had the tragedy of his departure, the shared grief, brought them closer together? The shared grief, the shared bed. My thoughts had still to be kept on a leash, and there were long dark passages down which they were straining to run. And of course there was (and this was something huge) the possibility that although he was ugly and charmless and brutal and dull she loved him and had been rea
sonably contented with him. I had answered, to my satisfaction, a series of questions. This one remained, and it was the last. Did she after all love him? But it was impossible. And yet I must find out. I must find out before I could proceed with the plans and projects which were tugging and tugging at my attention and my will. I must wait, everything must wait, until I had found out the answer to that question.

  But how? I dared not simply write and ask her, there was too much at stake, and I realized as I thought carefully about it that her reply was bound to be obscure. Then (and I am speaking of yesterday) I saw the solution, the rather horrible but necessary solution to the problem. And about this, I will write in due course. Meanwhile let there be an interval of rest. In order to start resting I rang up Peregrine and went round last night and got drunk with him, and what we talked about I will now recount, since some of it is relevant to my situation. Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation. Of course I did not tell Peregrine anything about Hartley. I have never mentioned her to him, though I may once have dropped a hint about a ‘first love’.

  I did some more shopping and brought the ingredients of our supper round to his flat in Hampstead. It has taken me a long time to persuade Perry that it is stupid and immoral to go to expensive crowded restaurants to be served with bad food by contemptuous waiters and turned out before one is ready to go. As it was we had a long relaxed evening, ate a delicious curry (cooked by me, Perry cannot cook) with rice and a green salad, followed by an orgy of fresh fruit, with shortcake biscuits, and drank three bottles of Peregrine’s excellent claret. (I am not a petty purist who refuses to drink wine with curry.) We then went on to coffee and whisky and Turkish delight. Thank God I have always had a good digestion. How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.

  I confess I went to Peregrine not only for a drinking bout and a chat with an old friend, but for male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around. In my case, I should however add, this did not include coarse and obscene conversation. I abhor artless bawdy. I had, long ago, to give some rather sharp lessons on this subject to Perry and to some others. Not Wilfred. He was never foul-mouthed.

  So, having done my thinking and made my resolution, I had the relaxed sense of an interval, wherein I might rest and gather my strength. Hartley would wait. She would not run away. She could not run away.

  ‘Every persisting marriage is based on fear,’ said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you put the boot in or whether it makes you cower. As for marriage, people simply settle into positions of domination and submission. Of course they sometimes ‘grow together’ or ‘achieve a harmony’, since you have to deal rationally with a source of terror in your life. I suspect there are awfully few happy marriages really, only people conceal their misery and their disappointment. How many happy couples do we know? All right, Sid and Rosemary, and they’ve got nice children, and they talk to each other, they never stop chattering, it’s a kind of miracle, but do we really know, and how much longer will it last? I can’t think of any others, though I know several that look OK, only I happen to see behind the scenes! God, Charles, you were a wise man never to get married. You stayed free. Like Wilfred Dunning. Never put on a collar and chain. Christ, I loathe women. But I can’t get going on the other tack either. And you needn’t blush and look coy, I never fancied you. I know what you got up to with Fritzie Eitel! No—but I’d have had old Wilfred if he’d asked me. What did old Wilfred do for sex? No one ever knew. Perhaps he didn’t have any, and if so good on him. I still miss Wilfred. He was a sweet man. And he was generous, he liked to be the cause that wit is in other men. God, he inspired me. Getting drunk with old Wilfred was like—hell, what was it like? Did you know Lizzie Scherer was living with Gilbert Opian? I think that’s smart of both of them.’

  ‘I miss Wilfred too. Yes, I heard about Lizzie.’ One of my minor motives in going to see Peregrine had been to find out if there was really any gossip going round about me and Lizzie, and if so to scotch it. Apparently Perry had heard nothing. ‘So you and Pamela—?’

  ‘That’s over, really. I mean, she still lives in the house, but we don’t communicate. That’s hell, Charles, hell, like you don’t know. To be tied to someone where all the sources of speech are fouled up and poisoned. Everything you say is wrong or vile. Christ, I’m a rotten picker. First that bitch Rosina, then a friend like Pam. Seen Rosina lately?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor have I, but every time I turn on the television there she is, that’s a bloody curse. I suppose I loved her once. Or it was just that she made me feel like Mark Antony. Penché sur elle l’ardent impérator . . . All I saw in Rosina’s eyes was a reflection of myself. Then I saw the divorce court. The trouble with Rosina is she wants every man: Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Leonardo, Mozart, Wilamowitz, Mr Gladstone, D. H. Lawrence, Jimmy Carter—you name him, she wants him. I suppose you wouldn’t like to take Pam off my hands too, would you? No? Ah well, I can’t convey to you what it’s like, like a fight with knives, and really it’s still going on—we haven’t either of us got the sheer bloody strength to start arranging the divorce. Divorce proceedings are hell, you’ve got to think, you’ve got to decide, you’ve got to lie. I believe she’s got another chap, I don’t want to know. She goes away a lot, I only wish she didn’t keep coming back, I suppose it’s convenient. The sheer endless destructive bloody spitefulness, the wanton breaking of all the little tentacles of tenderness and joy, all the little spontaneous nonsenses that connect one human being with another. I do try to communicate with her sometimes, and she says the most hurtful thing she can think of in reply. One’s soul becomes numb with the endless blows—and of course one becomes a sort of fiend oneself, that goes without saying, one becomes ingenious in evil. I’ve seen it in other cases, the spouse who feels guilty, even irrationally, is endlessly the victim of the whims of the other, and can take no moral stand. That leads to mutual terrorism. And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one’s only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one’s partner’s head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow! Ah, Charles, Charles, you know nothing of these marital joys. Have some more whisky.’

  ‘Thanks. And how’s the little girl? What’s her name? Angela.’ This was Pamela’s daughter by her previous marriage to ‘Ginger’ Godwin.

  ‘She’s not so little now. Oh, she’s at school. At least I suppose she is, she goes somewhere every day. I ignore her, she ignores me, we never got on. I don’t think Pam sees her either. Pam is drunk a lot of the time now. It’s an edifying scene. Oh Charles, you’re so lucky to have escaped bloody scot free from all those frightful wounding traps where one’s blood flows and one yells with pain and watches oneself becoming a devil. You’re so out of it all, God, you’re clever. You’re such a smooth clean bugger, Charles, your face is so clean and so smooth and pink like a girl’s, I bet you only shave once a month, and your hands are so clean and your bloody nails are clean (look at mine) and you’ve got away with everything, scot free, scot bloody free. Yes, yes, I must get on with getting the bloody divorce, but that means communicating with Pamela and I can’t—I can’t face sitting down with her, or trying to sit down, we don’t sit down any more in each other’s presence, and trying to make a rational plan to rid each other of each other. Maybe she doesn’t want it anyway! It may suit her to live here and use this house as a base for whatever she’s doing! I pay a pretty large amount into her bank every month—’

  ‘Can’t she get a job or—’

  ‘Fob? Pam? Laissez-moi rire! Pam was ne
ver an actress, she was a starlet. She can’t do anything. She’s lived on men all her life. She lived on Ginger and she lived on some other poor American fish before that and God knows who before that. Ginger still pays her fantastic sums in alimony. And of course she’ll only consent to leave me if I agree to do the same. And do you know, I’m still paying alimony to Rosina, though she’s earning five times what I am. Suis-je un homme, ou une omelette? Sometimes I wonder. I was so bloody fed up and anxious to get rid of her I signed everything. God, if you would only remove Pamela too! You’re a lucky dog. Good clean fun every time and then you ditch them. Christ, you even got away from Clement. Why did I never learn?’

  ‘If you think I had a joy-ride with Clement—’

  ‘The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not.’

  ‘I don’t despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare’s heroines before I was twelve.’

  ‘But they don’t exist, dear man, that’s the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.’

  It might seem from this account that Perry was doing all the talking, and indeed by the end of the evening he was. He is endowed with an Irish flow of words, and when thoroughly drunk is difficult to interrupt. I was in any case in a mood to incite him rather than to talk myself. I was soothed by his eloquent lamentations and I must confess rather cheered up by his troubles. I am afraid that I was pleased rather than otherwise that his second marriage had failed; I should have felt a certain chagrin had I been the involuntary cause of his being happy en deuxième noces. Such feelings do me no credit; but they are not uncommon ones.