The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  The scene is such that it must be listed rather than described. James’s rooms are full of what I can only call, though I daresay he would dislike the word, fetishes: oddly shaped stones, sticks, shells, to which other things such as feathers have been (why, by whom?) tied or stuck, uneven bits of wood carved with crude faces, large teeth and even bones with strange marks (writing?) upon them. The walls are entirely covered either with books or with embroideries, or rather brilliant blue hangings, upon which have been fixed various far from reassuring masks. A lot of necklaces (rosaries?) lie about, tangled in bowls or hanging down in front of scrolls or mandala-pictures or photos of a place picturesquely called Kumbum. There are also a number of very exquisite have-worthy jade animals which I used to feel tempted to pocket, and plates and bowls of that heavenly Chinese grey sea-green colour wherein, beneath the deep glaze, when you have mopped the dust off with your handkerchief, you can descry lurking lotuses and chrysanthemums. On little lacquer altars, as I presume they are, stand, or sit, the Buddhas, what I take to be prayer wheels, and also miniature pagodas and curious boxes with complicated towers on top of them, some studded with coral and turquoise and other semi-precious stones. There is also, perched upon a bracket, an ornate pagoda-shaped wooden casket which James says is like the ones in which lamas are accustomed to keep demons prisoner. (When I asked if there was a demon in that one James just laughed.) Bejewelled too are the sheaths and handles of daggers, one of which (it is usually on James’s desk) has a long curving golden handle. I once saw it lying on his bed. I sometimes think there is something rather childish about my cousin.

  The flat has an odd unique sweetish smell which I attribute to incense, though when I once asked James about it he said ‘mice’, which was I suppose a joke. Odd intermittent tinkling sounds are caused (I think) by pendant glass ornaments hanging in the recesses of the rather long and obscure hallway. These sounds reminded me of the faint clicking of my bead curtain at Shruff End; and it gave me a weird feeling to think of my ‘funny house’ all empty and silent (at least I hope so!) except for the tap-tap of that curtain swaying gently in the moving air. James’s flat is situated in one of those long Pimlico streets leading down to the river, which used to be so shabby but are now becoming so smart. It is a large flat, but unusually dark because of a lot of dusky and rather randomly placed painted screens, and of James’s habit of keeping the curtains half drawn by day and lighting only one lamp in each room. It took me some time to appreciate James’s stuff partly because it was usually too dark to see it. The place is also of course full of books, many in languages which I cannot identify. This has been James’s London base for many years, and as he has been abroad so much it is perhaps no wonder that it looks like a mere cluttered-up dumping ground.

  We had been drinking tea out of little incredibly frail transparent porcelain bowls, and eating the custard cream biscuits which I remember James liking so much when he was a boy. I had no sensibility about food when I was young, but James was always choosey and faddish. He is of course a vegetarian, but was so even as a child, having made his decision, then a very odd one, entirely by himself. He was now just opening a window (the room was very stuffy and fragrant of ‘mice’), to let out a fly which he had carefully caught with a tumbler and a sheet of paper which I think he kept handy for this purpose. He closed the window. I sneezed. A distant bell tinkled. I wondered how long James had been watching me in the picture gallery before I noticed him, and why indeed he had been there at all on that particular day at that particular hour.

  Let me now try once more to describe my cousin’s appearance. His face seems dark though he is not really swarthy. He has to shave twice a day. Sometimes he looks positively dirty. His hair, now a fairly copious untidy ruff around a little bald spot, is dark brown, like Aunt Estelle’s, only very dry and floppy, whereas hers was glossy. His eyes are a murky brown, an indeterminate un-specifiable shade which seems to change, now blackish, now a dark earthy yellow. He has a thin hooked nose and thin clever-looking lips. His face is unmemorable, by which I do not mean dull, it is indeed a rather intense face, but I mean that when I picture it in absence I can only conjure up a set of features, not a coherent whole. Perhaps it is just not a very coherent face. It is as if a fuzzy cloud hangs over it, and this goes with, or perhaps is, my idea that James is rather dark or dirty. At the same time, his inane boyish square-toothed grin can often make him look almost silly. His ‘muddy look’ is not furtive and certainly not sinister, but just somehow occluded. I wondered once again, as I now watched him smiling slightly as he let the fly out of the window, how exactly it was that he managed to resemble Aunt Estelle. Perhaps it was some trick of expression, a glow of concentration which in Aunt Estelle’s case was a kind of joy, but in James’s case was something quite else.

  ‘So your house stands there by the sea, all alone, on the rocks really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s good.’ James’s murky eyes widened and then became for an instant vacant, as if he were voyaging elsewhere. This momentary absence was characteristic too, it never lasted more than seconds. I used to wonder if he took drugs (many of those old eastern hands do) but it may simply have been boredom. How I used to worry when I was young about whether I bored James! ‘But don’t you miss the bustle of the theatre? You never had any hobbies that I can remember. Whatever do you do with yourself all day? Paint the house? I am told that’s what retired people do.’

  James did not always, in talking to me, avoid a perhaps instinctive reversion to a slightly patronizing jokey tone which used to madden me when we were boys, especially since he was the younger. The banal phrase ‘the bustle of the theatre’ and the equation of me with ‘retired people’ seemed with an easy gesture to consign my activities past and present to unimportance. Or perhaps I was still being too sensitive.

  ‘I am writing my memoirs.’

  ‘Theatre chat? Anecdotes about actresses?’

  ‘Certainly not! I want to do the deep thing, real analysis, real autobiography—’

  ‘Not easy to do.’

  ‘I know it’s not easy to do!’

  ‘We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus. Vain wars for phantom goods. I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity. People lie so, even we old men do. Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art. Proust is our authority on French aristocrats. Who cares what they were really like? What does it mean even?’

  ‘I should say it meant something simple and obvious, but then I am no philosopher! And I should say that it mattered too. It matters to the historian, it even matters to the critic.’ Nor did I care for ‘we old men’. Speak for yourself, cousin.

  ‘Does it signify what really happened to Lawrence at Déraa? If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did? We have to pretend in law courts that such things can be done, but that is just a matter of convenience. Well, well, it doesn’t signify. I must come and see your seaside house and your birds. Are there gannets?’

  ‘I don’t know what gannets look like.’

  James was silent, shocked.

  I was beginning to have an old familiar sensation which, oddly enough, I tended to forget in the interim, a feeling of disappointment and frustrated helplessness, as if I had looked forward to talking to James an
d had then been deliberately excluded from some kind of treat; as if something significant which I wanted to tell him had been, inside my very soul, shrivelled, trivialized by a casual laser beam of his intelligence. James’s mode of thought, his level of abstraction, was entirely unlike mine and he seemed to be sometimes almost frivolously intent upon exhibiting the impossibility of any communication between us. But of course really there was no intent, and indeed no treat, and in many ways my cousin could be seen as a bore, as an eccentric pedant with a kind of world-weariness which was simply tedious. He too after all had had his disappointments and about the most important of these I would doubtless never know. I suppose what I wanted was simply some ordinary amicable converse with James, which never happened, and which I was perhaps wrong in thinking that I could even imagine. After all, he was all that was left of my father and mother and Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle.

  ‘The sea, the sea, yes,’ James went on. ‘Did you know that Plato was descended from Poseidon on his father’s side? Do you have porpoises, seals?’

  ‘There are seals, I’m told. I haven’t seen any.’

  I put my little fragile tea bowl down with such force that I had to lift it up again to make sure it was not cracked. I held on to the sides of my chair. It had just occurred to me that the weird feeling I had experienced in the gallery, and which James’s potion had cured, was not just a hangover, but the threatened recommencement of the hallucination induced by LSD. I quite suddenly began to have something like the same feeling again, combined with a vivid image of the open mouth of Titian’s sea dragon.

  ‘What is it, Charles? You’re wrought up about something. You were distressed in the gallery. I was watching you. What is it? Are you ill?’

  ‘Do you ever remember my mentioning a girl called Mary Hartley Smith?’

  I had certainly not intended to talk to James about Hartley, I had not conceived of such a confidence. It was as if I had been driven into some corner or put under some spell where the only efficacious charm was the actual mention of her name.

  James, reverting to his bored air, reflected, ‘No, I can’t say that I do.’

  In fact I was pretty sure that I had been careful never to mention Hartley to James.

  ‘Who is she then?’

  ‘She was the first girl I ever loved, and I don’t think I’ve ever really loved anyone else. She loved me too. We were at school together. Then she went off and married another man and disappeared. I never stopped thinking about her and caring about her, and that’s why I never got married. Well, I’ve just come across her again, she’s there, down there by the sea, living in the village with her husband, I’ve seen her, I’ve talked to her, it’s incredible, and all that old love is still there, stretched out right from the beginning of my life till now—’

  ‘You relieve my mind,’ said James, ‘I thought you might be sickening for the ’flu, and I’m very anxious not to catch it myself just now.’

  ‘I’ve met her husband. He’s nothing, a little ignorant bullying fellow. But she—oh she was so glad to see me, she still loves me—I can’t help feeling it’s a sign, a new beginning—’

  ‘Is it the same man?’

  ‘How do you mean—oh yes, it’s the same man.’

  ‘Have they children?’

  ‘A boy, eighteen or something, he’s adopted, but he’s run away and they don’t know where he is, he’s lost—’

  ‘Lost—that must be sad for them.’

  ‘But oh—Hartley, of course she’s changed, and yet she hasn’t changed—and I mean what incredible luck to meet her again like that, it’s the hand of destiny. And she’s had such an unhappy life, it’s as if she has prayed for me and I have come.’

  ‘And—so—?’

  ‘Well, so, I shall rescue her and make her happy for whatever time remains to us.’ Yes, it was simple, and nothing less than that great solution would serve. I lay back in my chair.

  ‘More tea?’

  ‘No thanks. I think I’d like a drink now. Dry sherry.’

  James began fiddling in a cupboard. He poured out a glass for me. He seemed in no hurry to comment on my amazing revelation, as if he had already forgotten it. He continued quietly drinking tea.

  ‘Well,’ I said after a minute, ‘that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself, James, how is the army treating you these days? Off to Hong Kong or somewhere?’ Two could play at that game.

  ‘I know you want me to say something’, said James, ‘but I can’t think what to say, I don’t know what it means. This old flame turning up, I don’t know how to react. I have various thoughts—’

  ‘Tell me a few.’

  ‘One is that you may be deluding yourself in thinking that you have really loved this woman all these years. What’s the proof? And what is love anyway? Love’s all over the mountains where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it’s something you’ve invented now. Though of course what follows from that is another matter. Another thought I have is that your rescue idea is pure imagination, pure fiction. I feel you cannot be serious. Do you really know what her marriage is like? You say she’s unhappy, most people are. A long marriage is very unifying, even if it’s not ideal, and those old structures must be respected. You may not think much of her husband, but he may suit her, however impressed she is by meeting you again. Has she said she wants to be rescued?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘What does the husband think of you?’

  ‘He warned me off.’

  ‘Well, my advice is stay warned.’

  I was not completely surprised by James’s line, his refusal to express a lively interest in my situation. I had noticed in the past that my cousin did not like any discussion of marriage. The subject embarrassed, perhaps depressed him.

  I said, ‘The voice of reason.’

  ‘Of instinct. I feel it could all end in tears. Better to cool down. One should not come too close to what one may intuit as the misery of others.’

  ‘Thanks for your reactions, cousin. Now tell me about yourself. ’

  ‘You mustn’t miss your train. But I can order a taxi by telephone, there is quite a reliable firm at Victoria. What is his name?’

  ‘The husband?’

  ‘No, sorry, I meant the lost boy, the son.’

  ‘Titus.’

  ‘Titus,’ said James thoughtfully. He went on, ‘And have they searched for him? Told the police and so on, whatever one does?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has he been gone long, have they no clue, no theory about where he is? Have they had a letter?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know—’

  ‘It must be terrible—’

  ‘Yes, no doubt. Now let’s forget my antics. What about your plans, what’s the latest in army life?’

  ‘The army—oh—I’ve left the army.’

  ‘Left the army?’ I was perhaps stupidly surprised and oddly dismayed, as if the army had somehow been keeping James safe, or safely caged up, or innocuously occupied, or something. I suppose I always felt that his soldiering made it happily impossible for us ever to collide or compete. Whereas now . . . ‘Oh well, you’ve retired, of course, golden handshake and all that. So we are both retired generals!’

  ‘Not exactly retired, no.’

  ‘You mean—?’

  ‘I have, as the expression goes, left the army under a cloud.’

  I put my glass down and sat up straight. Now I was really amazed and upset. ‘No! James, you can’t—I mean—’ Speculations, of a not too improbable kind, about what sort of cloud my cousin had left the army under, crowded my mind and reduced me to silence.

  I looked at James’s darkened face. He was sitting with his back to the lamp. The evening, through the gap in the curtains, was still brilliantly blue. James was smiling slightly, as he had smiled when he released the fly, and I saw now that he was looking at another fl
y which was perched on his finger. This fly was washing its front paws, then it was vigorously drawing its paws forward over its head. It stopped washing. James and the fly looked at each other.

  ‘Not to worry however,’ said James. He moved his finger and the fly flew off. ‘I had effectively come to the end of my career in any case and I shall not lack occupations.’

  ‘You can paint the house.’

  James laughed. ‘Would you like to see a picture of a gannet? Well, another time perhaps. A pity you aren’t here tomorrow, we could go to Lord’s. The Test Match is in an interesting condition. I had better telephone for your taxi. Here, take some of these biscuits, I know you like them, Aunt Marian always used to stuff some secretly into my pocket when I was leaving your place!’

  After James had rung for the taxi I said, ‘Who was that old man I saw here last time?’ I had suddenly recalled, and felt that I had entirely forgotten in the interim, that on the last occasion in James’s flat, and just as I was leaving, I had seen, through a half open door, in another room, a little oriental old man with a wispy beard, sitting quietly upon a chair.

  James seemed a little surprised. ‘Oh him—no one in particular—he’s gone, I’m glad to say. There now, there’s the bell for your taxi. I hope you’ll get a decent dinner on the train.’