The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  I was shaken and a bit ashamed when I saw her grief and terror, but I also thought: let there be disaster upon disaster, crisis on crisis, let it all break down quickly into a shambles. That will benefit me. And then I thought too: unless he kills her. And then I thought: I must keep her here. That settles it, it must all be achieved now. I must not let her go home.

  ‘I can’t go back, I can’t stay. I shall have to tell him I’ve been with you, but how can I, it’ll be like those nights, oh I shall die, I shall die, I want to be dead, why do I have to suffer and suffer like this. Oh what can I do, what can I do?’

  ‘Hartley, stop being hysterical. Just make up your mind to stay here.’

  ‘I can’t stay, I must run, run. But it’s no good. He must be home now, and he’ll be so worried and so angry. I can’t do it, I can’t go back, oh why have I been so thoughtless and so foolish, it’s like what I always do, making things worse and worse, I should have known the time—’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, think of it this way, you left your watch behind on purpose so as to commit yourself to me and if you’ve now made it impossible to go back, so much the better!’

  ‘I shouldn’t have come here, I shouldn’t have told you those things, he’ll know I’ve told you, he’ll make me tell him everything I said.’

  ‘You came here to see an old friend, there’s nothing wrong in that, and I am your friend, you said so, and I’m so glad you did, and friends help each other—’

  ‘Oh if only I’d gone an hour ago everything would have been all right! I must run, I must get out of here—’

  ‘Hartley, be calm! If you insist on going I will walk along with you—’

  ‘No, you must leave me alone, we must never meet again! Oh how I wish I were dead!’

  ‘Stop this wailing, I can’t stand it!’

  As she was crying out Hartley had been running to and fro in the kitchen like a demented animal, taking a few little rushing steps towards the door, then a few steps back to the table. In her agitation she even picked up the tea towel and stuffed it into her pocket. The spectacle of this frightened anguish was beginning to appal me and I was now feeling frightened too. To allay my own fear I ran to her and seized her in my arms. ‘Oh my darling, don’t be so afraid, stop it, stay here, I love you, I’ll look after you—’

  She then began to fight me, silently, violently, and with a surprising strength, kicking my ankles, writhing her body about, one hand pinching my arm, the other pressed hard against my neck. I caught a glimpse of her open mouth and of her glistening frothy teeth. I tried to lift her and to capture one of her hands, and then it became too dreadful and too hard to attempt to crush this pinching, kicking animal into submission and I abruptly let her go, and with the impetus staggered backwards, banged into the table and upset the candles. In that instant Hartley was gone, rushing out of the kitchen, not towards the front door but out of the back door straight onto the grass and onto the rocks.

  I ought to have rushed after her like a flash, like a faithful dog. I ought to have dragged her back and kept her in the house by force. Instead some stupid instinct made me pause to pick up the candles. Then, leaving them fallen awry in their tea cups, I ran out into the blue almost-darkness and the silent emptiness of the rocky shore. After looking at the bright candles I could at first see nothing, and it struck me in an odd way that while I was talking to Hartley I had forgotten about the sea, forgotten it was there and now felt confounded and at a loss to find myself half blind among those terrible rocks.

  There was no sign of Hartley, she must immediately have clambered and sprung with the agility of a girl somewhere over the ring of rocks which surrounded my small lawn. I called out ‘Hartley! ’ and the sound was dreadful, dangerous. Which way had she gone? There was no easy way back to the road in either direction, either on the village side or on the tower side. There was nothing in that blue dimness all round about but wrinkled, folded rocks and slippery pools and deep sudden crevasses. I stood there and listened, hoping to hear her call me or to hear the sound of her scrambling.

  What had seemed to be silence now revealed itself as a medley of small sounds, though no sound could tell me which way Hartley had gone. There was a faint lapping and sucking of the wavelets touching the foot of the little cliff, and then retreating and then touching again. There was the very distant murmur of a car on the road near the Raven Hotel. There was a scarcely audible humming which was perhaps, as a result of the wine I had drunk, inside my head. And there was a rhythmical hissing noise followed by a muted echoing report which was the sound produced by the water retreating from Minn’s cauldron.

  The thought of the cauldron now shocked me into another awful fear: could Hartley swim? I had not till now formulated the thought that she might have run straight out of the house to hurl herself into the sea. She had cried out, ‘I want to die.’ Had she, in those years, contemplated suicide, indeed how could she not? A strong swimmer would scarcely cast himself into a calm sea hoping for death, but to a non-swimmer the sea might be the very image of restful death itself. Could she swim? She had never learnt in the old days, when the sea was for both of us a far-off dream. It had never occurred to us to venture together into the black canal, although I had become a diffident swimmer at the age of fourteen, when I went to Wales with Mr McDowell. In our first talk at the bungalow she had said Ben could not swim, but had said nothing about herself. Had she now run straight from my arms and from my deception into the easeful peace of the drowning sea?

  As I was thinking this I was climbing over the rocks towards the right, in the direction of the village, since if she was running home she would instinctively turn in this direction. The easier way back to the road was by way of the tower, because of a deep gulley between the road and the rocks on the village side, not too hard to negotiate by daylight, but very hazardous in the dark. Hartley might not know this however. I clambered and slithered, now calling again and able to see a little more in the diffused half-darkness. The evening star was present, perhaps other stars, a blanched moon. I thought and I prayed: let her just fall and sprain her ankle and I will carry her back to the house and keep her and let that devil do what he will.

  It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me. I kept trying to get near to the edge of the sea but the rocks kept defeating me, not by malign interest but by sheer muddle, and I kept slipping down slopes into seaweedy pools and confronting black clefts and holes and smooth unclimbable surfaces. I had an intuition of light over the sea and I wanted to be able to look there and be sure there was not somewhere the dark head of a drowning woman and her desperate arms breaking the calm surface. I moaned softly as I clutched and skipped, hallooing her name at intervals like an owl’s call, and at last I came unexpectedly over the smooth dome of a tall rock and found myself just above the water. I stood up on the highest point of the dome and looked out to sea. There was nothing upon the luminous faintly-wrinkled expanse except wavery yellow replicas of the evening star and the low crouching moon. The sky was still a dimmed glowing blue, not yet sunk into the blackish blue of night. One or two pin-point stars were just visible beyond the big jagged lamp of the evening star. I turned to look inland. I was conscious now of the warm air, the warm rocks, after the strange chill of my house. The rocks stretched away, visible as almost colourless lumps above black hollows. Beyond was the road, and some scattered distant lights of the village and of Amorne Farm. I shouted out more loudly now, ‘Hartley! Hartley! Call to me and I’ll come to you.’ Call and I’ll come: that was it indeed. But there was no answer, only the silence made up of little noises.

  I wondered what to do next. Had Hartley managed to get across the gulley onto the road? Possibly she knew those rocks better than I did. Possibly she and Ben used to come and have picnics here. It was true that marriages were secret places. What was it like in there, and were Hartley’s out-pourings the exag
gerated half-dreams of a hysterical woman? What did Ben really believe? I decided to get back onto the road and return towards the tower. It took me about five minutes of cautious scrambling to cross the gulley, and then I ran back, calling out, until I had passed the house and reached the turn in the road from which I could see the lights of the Raven Hotel. Nothing, no one. By now it was getting really dark and it seemed pointless to do any more rock scrambling. Was Hartley home by now—or was she lying unconscious in one of those dark clefts in the rocks—or worse? What was I to do next? One thing I clearly could not do was to go back to Shruff End and blow out the candles and go to bed.

  It was obvious by now that I would have to go to Nibletts, either to assure myself by eavesdropping that Hartley was back there, or—I was not sure what the alternative was. I set off briskly walking back again towards the village. I realized I was still wearing the Irish jersey and by now felt very hot, so I pulled the jersey off and stuffed it down behind the Nerodene milestone and went on, almost running, and tucking my shirt in. I had intended at first to go the longer, safer way round by the harbour and up beside the wood, approaching the house by the back way, but my anxiety was too extreme and I took the usual diagonal path towards the village. Three yellow street lamps shone upon an empty scene as I ran past the silent darkened shop and under the hanging sign of the rampant Black Lion. The pub too was shut, few windows were lit, the villagers were early bedders. My running footsteps echoed the sound of urgency and fear. I reached the church and turned panting up the hill. There were no lights here and the road lay dark under the shadow of the hanging woodland beyond. I slowed to a walk and realized that I had almost reached my objective. There were the lights of Nibletts, the door of the bungalow wide open, and there, standing at the gate and gazing down the road towards me, was Ben.

  It was too late to hide and in any case I now had no desire to do so. The pettiness of concealment seemed out of place and was, I suddenly hoped, now in any case a thing of the past. I hurried on towards Ben, who had come out of the gate to peer at me. Perhaps in the dark he thought that the approaching figure might be his wife.

  ‘Is Hartley back?’

  Ben stared at me and I thought, how idiotic, he calls her Mary, he has probably never heard her real name.

  I said, ‘Is Mary back?’

  ‘No. Where is she?’

  The light from the front window and from the open door showed Ben’s cropped boyish bullet head and the blue colour of the military style jacket of blue denim which he was wearing. He looked worried and young and for a second I saw him, not as the ‘devil’ of Hartley’s awful stories, but as an anxious young husband wondering if his wife has met with an accident.

  ‘I met her in the village and asked her back for a drink, but she only stayed a short while and then she said she’d take a short cut home across the rocks and after she’d gone I suddenly wondered if she might have fallen and sprained her ankle.’ It sounded so feeble and false.

  ‘A short cut across the rocks?’ This was an almost senseless conception, but Ben seemed too worried to challenge it or even to exhibit hostility. ‘You mean the rocks near your house? She could have fallen there. We’d better go and look, or—I’ll get a torch—’

  As he went into the house I turned from the window and the lighted path and looked away down the road. After a moment I saw a dark figure. It was Hartley, slowly coming towards me up the hill.

  I had a large number of instant thoughts. One was that it had been crazy of me to come here as now I had ruined whatever lying excuse for her absence Hartley might meanwhile have invented. I also thought that I must instantly warn her that I had told Ben of her visit. I also thought that I must somehow now stay with them so as to protect her against him. I also thought with anguish that this was impossible. I also thought, well why not just run down the hill, seize her by the hand, and pull her away with me, run away, anywhere, through the village, out into the fields. Spend the night at Amorne Farm and go to London by train tomorrow. Or get a lift on a lorry going anywhere: Manchester, York, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Carlisle. This seemed impossible too, for reasons which I could not quite work out. (I had no money, Ben would follow us, she would be too frightened to come etc. etc.) I also thought, let it crash, let them have the awfullest beastliest row they’ve ever had. She ran to me once. She will run to me again. I have only to wait.

  By the time I had thought all this in about four seconds I had run down the hill as fast as I could and met Hartley. I did not touch her; I said very quickly, but distinctly, in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I got worried, I told him we met accidentally in the village and I asked you for a drink, and then you set off home over the rocks. I can’t stay now, but come to me soon. Come soon and come forever. You must not continue your life here. I shall be waiting for you every day.’

  I could not see Hartley’s face, but her whole figure expressed not fear so much as a total dejected resigned misery which had passed beyond fear. She had an air of being dripping wet as if she had in truth been drowned and this was her ghost.

  Ben was back at the gate now, and I called to him, ‘She’s here!’ and Hartley and I walked on to meet him.

  Ben came out onto the pavement. As we approached he said ‘OK then. OK. Goodnight.’ Then he turned and went back into the house, not waiting to see if Hartley would follow. I held the gate open. She passed me with her blind dripping drowned head.

  I had an impulse to follow, to push after her into the house, to sit down, make conversation, demand coffee. But it was impossible, it would only make things worse for her. Everything had gone amiss. The door banged.

  I had no wish now to eavesdrop, indeed I had almost no curiosity left, so strongly did my mind shy away in horror from the interior of that house and of that marriage. I felt disgust with myself, with him, even with her.

  I walked home, neither fast nor slowly. I remembered to pick up my jersey, which was now wet with dew. I found the house in darkness. The candles had fallen over again and burnt themselves out on the wooden top of the table, making long dark burns which remained there ever after to remind me of that terrible night.

  History

  FOUR

  WHAT FOLLOWS THIS, and also what directly precedes it, has been written at a much later date. What I have now written is therefore more deeply reflected and more systematically remembered than it would be if I were continuing to write a diary. Events, as it happened, did not subsequently leave me much time for diary-writing, although what immediately follows has something of the air of an interlude (perhaps a comic one). This novelistic memoir, as it has now become, is however, as far as its facts are concerned (though, as James would say, what indeed are facts?), accurate and truthful. I have in particular, and this may be a professional attribute, an extremely good memory for dialogue, and I am sure that a tape-recording of my candlelit conversation with Hartley would differ but little from what I have transcribed. My account is curtailed, but omits nothing of substance and faithfully narrates the actual words spoken. How very deeply indeed many of the conversations, past and to come, recorded in this book, are engraved upon my mind and my heart!

  After my return on the evening described I had had enough and I went to bed and to sleep. (I did not eat the Korean clams; later on I threw them away.) I awoke after nine the next morning and it was raining. The English weather had put on another of its transformation scenes. The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound of pattering. I got up and staggered around in the kitchen making myself tea and lowering my head like a sullen beast against any urgency of reflection. I did not wonder what had happened at Nibletts after I left. All that would soon be past history. Then as I sat in the little red room, with my head still su
llenly lowered against the light of the rainy morning, I made it out that perhaps I had achieved something by thrusting the situation on into an area of crisis. Really I need not at present do anything at all but wait. Surely she would come. And . . . if she did not . . . there were other plans which I was already quietly making. I would not be without resources. I would wait. And with that I settled into a weird uneasy sort of peace.

  A little later, I mean a day or two later in my condition of sursis, like a half-expected apparition Gilbert Opian made his appearance. Why was I not really surprised when a timid brief tinkle of the mid-morning bell revealed a nervously smiling Gilbert, and beyond him at the end of the causeway his yellow car? Oddly enough I had already made a sort of plan which included someone like Gilbert, and he would certainly do. Fate was co-operating for once. ‘Lizzie?’ ‘No.’ Just as well. It was still raining.

  I put on a show of surprise and annoyance.

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘May I come in, king of shadows? The rain is running down my neck.’

  I led the way back into the kitchen where I had been eating chocolate digestive biscuits and drinking Ovaltine. A feature of my interim condition was that, from ten thirty in the morning onwards, I had to have regular treats and snacks all day long. A wood fire was blazing in the little red room, its lively mobile structures showing bright through the open door, and casting a flickering glow into the rain-curtained kitchen.

  Gilbert was dripping.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘My dear, Lizzie has left me.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I decided to come here, I felt the urge. I wanted to tell you about Lizzie, I somehow felt I ought to. She’s sick, you know, I mean in her mind. She’s madly in love with you again, it’s the old disease, I was afraid it would come back. And one of the symptoms is she can’t stand me. Well, I suppose our cohabitation was a sort of precarious miracle. Anyway it’s all over now, our idyll is over, our little house is smashed. I’m bombed out. She’s gone. I don’t even know where she is.’