The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  Titus now looked curiously at Gilbert and Gilbert’s too impeccable performance, but asked no questions. I vaguely volunteered, ‘He’s an old actor, down on his luck’ and that seemed to account for him sufficiently for the present.

  At dinner we talked of theatre and television. He seemed to have seen a remarkable number of London plays and knew the names of a great many actors. He described how he had directed The Admirable Crichton at school. He was modest, diffident about his ambition. ‘It’s just an idea.’ I did not press him, about this or about anything. We laughed a good deal.

  He went to bed early, sleeping on cushions among my books in the front room downstairs. He expressed great interest in the books, but blew his candle out early. (I was watching from the stairs). At breakfast, he agreed to stay to lunch. I allowed the obsequious Gilbert to join us for general conversation at breakfast time. I did not want Gilbert to become an interesting mystery.

  After breakfast I turned Titus loose to swim and explore the rocks, indicating that I would be busy with my ‘writing’. I thought it better not to crowd him with my company and in any case I wanted time to think. Titus seemed very happy, playing boyishly by himself. I watched his agile appearances and disappearances from the window with a piercing mixture of affection and envy. He returned at last bearing the errant table ostentatiously raised with one arm above his head. He put the table on the grass, then suggested that we should eat outside, but I vetoed this. (I agree with Mr Knightley about al fresco meals.) Gilbert meanwhile had been out shopping and had made, under my direction, a decent kedgeree with frozen coley.

  At lunch, where Titus and I were again tête-à-tête, I decided it was time to speak seriously. I had had enough of gaining his confidence and refraining from scaring him. In any case my nerve was giving out and I wanted to know my fate.

  ‘Titus, listen, there’s something important I want to say to you.’

  He looked alarmed and put one hand flat on the table as if ready to leap up and bolt.

  ‘I want you to stay here, for a time at any rate. I’ll explain why. I want you to see your mother.’

  The eyes narrowed further, the pretty lips almost sneered. ‘I’m not going over there.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you should. She will come over here.’

  ‘So you’ve told them. You said you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I haven’t told them. I’m just suggesting, asking you. If your mother knows you’re here she’ll come. There’s no need to tell him.’

  ‘She’ll tell him. She always does.’

  ‘She won’t this time, I’ll persuade her not to. I just want her to visit you here. Anyway, what can he do, even if he does know? He’s got to pretend to be pleased. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘I’m not afraid!’

  This was a bad start, I was fumbling and confused, and even as I spoke I imagined Ben snarling at the door.

  Titus said thoughtfully, ‘I’m sorry for him in a way. He hasn’t had much of a life either, to use your phrase.’

  ‘A life is a life, to use yours. If you’re sorry for him you should all the more be sorry for her. She has grieved about you so much. Won’t you see her and make her happy?’

  ‘Nothing could make her happy. Nothing. Ever.’ The bland finality of the reply was dreadful.

  ‘Well, you can try!’ I said with exasperation. ‘It can’t be very nice for her not knowing what’s happened to you.’

  ‘OK then, you can tell her you saw me.’

  ‘That’s not enough. You must see her yourself. She must come here.’

  Titus was looking handsomer again today, his cheeks lightly touched by the sun, his brighter softer hair framing the bony lumpiness of his face. The horrible tee shirt was already dry, but he was again wearing the striped shirt with the collar open.

  ‘Look, you said you saw them “occasionally”. That sounds odd to me. You were the bogy man for years, the devil himself. I can remember the desperate look in her eyes when your name came up. They can’t have forgiven you? All right, you haven’t done anything, but you know what I mean. Do you go round and play bridge or what?’

  ‘No, of course not. He still detests me, I imagine, and God knows what he really believes. Maybe he doesn’t know himself. But I’m beginning to think he doesn’t matter much.’

  ‘Why, pray?’

  ‘Because I think your mother is going to leave him.’

  ‘She never would. Never. No way.’

  ‘I think she would under certain circumstances. I think she would if she could only conceive of it as possible. If she saw it as possible she would see it as easy.’

  ‘But where would she go to?’

  ‘To me.’

  ‘You mean—you want her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so you want me to persuade my mother to leave my father? You’ve got to be joking! That’s a lot to expect in return for lunch and dinner.’

  ‘And breakfast and tea.’

  ‘You’re a cool one.’

  I was not feeling cool. Everything in this conversation was going wrong, being crudely, grossly presented. I was anxious not to drive him to any sudden reaction by striking too portentous a note. At the same time he must appreciate my seriousness. The maddening fact was that I now had all the pieces for a solution, but would I be allowed to fit them together? ‘My dear Titus, of course I don’t want you to persuade your mother of anything. I want you to see her because I know this would very profoundly relieve her mind. And I want you to see her here because it would only be possible here.’

  ‘I’m to be a lure—a kind of—hostage—’

  This was dreadfully near the truth, but I had left out something very important which I now saw I ought to have mentioned at the start. ‘No, no. Just listen carefully. I want to tell you something else. Why do you think I persuaded you to stay here instead of letting you go away?’

  ‘I’m beginning to think it’s because you want my mother to come to you because of me.’

  The wording of this went so far that I could scarcely say again: no. It was true in a way, but true in a harmless way, an innocuous way, even a wonderful way. As we stared at each other I hoped that he might suddenly, in this light, see it. But he kept, rather deliberately perhaps, his hard suspicious mask. I said, holding his eyes and frowning with intent, ‘Yes, I do want that. But I want it also because of you, through you, for you, you’re part of it, you’re part of everything now. You’re essential.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I persuaded you to stay here because I like you.’

  ‘Oh, thanks a lot!’

  ‘And you stayed because you like me.’

  ‘And the food. And the swimming. OK!’

  ‘Put it this way, and for the moment as hypothetically as you please. You are searching for a father. I am searching for a son. Why don’t we make a deal?’

  He refused to be impressed or startled. ‘I suspect you’ve just thought of this son idea. Anyway, I’m looking for my real father, and not because I need one or want one, but just to kill a devil of miserable biting curiosity that I’ve lived with all my life.’

  No, he was not at all what I had expected, though I could not now think why I had expected a dullard. Something in Hartley’s rather desperate account of him had suggested this perhaps. He was a clever attractive boy and I was going to do my damnedest to get hold of him. To get hold of him and then of his mother.

  ‘Well, think it over. It’s a proposition, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a deeply serious one. You see—in a curious way—because of my old relation to your mother—I am cast in the role of your father. I know this is nonsense, but you’re clever enough to understand nonsense. You might have been my son. I’m not just anybody. Fate has brought us together. And I could help you a lot—’

  ‘I don’t want your money or your bloody influence, I didn’t come here for that!’

  ‘So you said, and we passed that stage some time ago, so shut up about it no
w. I want to take your mother away, and I want at last to make her happy, which you think is impossible and I don’t. And I want you to be in the picture too. For her sake. For my sake. In the picture. I’m not suggesting more than that. You can work it for as much or as little as you like.’

  ‘You mean you’d take us both away and we’d all three live together in a villa in the south of France?’

  ‘Yes. If you’d like! Why not?’

  He uttered an explosive yelp, then with a theatrical gesture spread out his hands, which were cleaner now. ‘You love her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t know her.’

  ‘The odd thing is, my dear boy, that I do know her.’

  ‘Well,’ said Titus, and there was at last a look of admiration, ‘let’s just suppose . . . that you did . . . ask her to come and see me . . .’

  I was lying in tall luscious green grass which was just coming out into pink feathery flower. The grass was cool and very dry and squeaked slightly as I moved. I was lying on the edge of the wood, on the far side of the footpath, just level with the garden of Nibletts. I was holding a pocket mirror. Hartley had just come out into the garden.

  Titus had promised, for the future, nothing. He had treated the matter with an affected cynicism and had allowed me no glimpse of the emotions which were certainly there behind it. He pretended to treat the whole thing almost as a joke, a game, at any rate as something which he was prepared to do simply to oblige me, for the hell of it, to ‘see what happened’. He had agreed to stay on, ‘since he had nothing better to do’, and to ‘say hello’ to his mother. Though he added, with a slightly grimmer note, that he was pretty sure she would not come.

  That remained to be seen; and it was also unclear to me how exactly, after all those years during which she ‘went along’ with Ben because she ‘had to’, he felt about her. Where and how did forgiveness figure in that scene? Mercy, loyalty, love? Was I not perhaps meddling with something dreadful? Unpredictable it certainly was. What kept me more boldly on was an optimism which Titus himself had rather crazily engendered with that image of the three of us living together in the south of France! If he would stick to me, and she would come out, there would be, for all of us, some tremendous spiritual release, like the sudden ecstasy which Titus and I had experienced in the sea. I would make her happy, I would. And I would make him happy and successful and free.

  Another matter had come up between us after Titus had agreed, as he again cynically put it, to be a ‘hostage’. After he had agreed to stay on, if I wished it, ‘for a while’, I had said casually, boldly, ‘You haven’t anyone waiting for you then anywhere? I mean a girl or anything?’

  He said rather stiffly, ‘No. There was somebody. But that’s over.’

  I wondered: did he then come to me in loneliness, in desperation? And if so would this not make him all the more ready to accept—my overtures—my love?

  It was the evening of the same day. There seemed no point in waiting longer. I had even told Gilbert the outline of the plan, though part of it I still concealed, even from Titus. Gilbert, who was now to play the key part which I had envisaged earlier, was enjoying the whole drama disgracefully. I had waited, hidden in the wood, for nearly an hour when Hartley appeared. There was no sign of the gentleman.

  I watched her for a moment quietly. She was wearing the yellow dress with the brown flower pattern, and over it a loose blue overall. She walked a little awkwardly, her shoulders hunched, her head down, her hands deep in the pockets of the overall. She came down to the end of the garden and stood there for a while, like an animal, staring dully at the grass. Then she lifted her head and started looking at the sea, image of an inaccessible freedom. Then she removed one hand from her pocket and touched her face. She must be crying. I could scarcely bear it.

  Cautiously I uncovered the pocket mirror and leaning forward tilted it to catch the sun. The little running bright reflection, like a tiny live creature, appeared at once upon the hillside just below the garden. I was careful to keep it well away from the house. I brought the brilliant little patch of light slowly up the hill towards her feet; and in a moment I knew that she had noticed it, and that she realized what it meant. This was a trick which we used to play on each other in summers when we were children. I sent the flash up for a moment to her face, and then began to lead it away, making a line across the grass in the direction of the wood.

  Hartley stood staring towards me. I rose to a kneeling position and gently stirred the creamy-flowering branch of an elder bush. Hartley made a gesture, lifting her hand to her throat. Then she turned and moved back towards the house. I nearly called out with vexation, but then realized that she was probably going to check on Ben’s activity and whereabouts. Perhaps he was riveting china. I waited for an anxious minute, and then she came out again, minus the overall, ran to the fence, stooped through the wire, and came running across the grass towards me.

  I retreated a bit into a little glade underneath an ash tree. A large branch had been wrenched from the tree by some winter gale, and through the gap the sun shone down upon a wild rose bush in pallid flower and a mass of fading cow parsley and buttercups. I stood beside the ash tree whose dense-textured grey smooth trunk brought back some elusive childhood memory connected with Hartley. I could now see her thrusting aside the big flat flower-heads of the elder. In a moment she had come to me, and I noticed how she instinctively avoided the patch of sunlight.

  I put my arms around her and she consented to be held, a little stiff, bowing her head. I drew my hand down her back, pressing her against me, feeling her soft warmth, my knee touching her knee. She sighed and turned her head sideways but her hands still hung limply. The warmth of her body beneath the frail dress made me close my eyes and almost forget my plan and its urgency.

  ‘Oh, Hartley, my darling, my own.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘I love you.’ I sat down at the foot of the tree, leaning against it, and drew her down beside me. I wanted her to lie relaxed with her head on my breast. ‘Come. We were often like this, weren’t we. Remember?’ But she would not. I saw her in the sunny shady light, her breasts straining the buttons of her dress, as so much lovelier, so much like her old self, as if some woodland magic had made her young again.

  She knelt beside me, clasping one of my hands, and staring at me with her big darkened eyes. Then, suddenly, and tenderly, she lifted my hand and kissed it.

  This gesture moved and upset me so much that it actually served to bring me to my senses. The urgent matter was to get the girl away, and I had not even started my argument.

  ‘Hartley, my little one, you do love me, oh, I’m so glad! But listen, I’ve got something to tell you. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s out. I just went to make sure. But, oh you shouldn’t have come like this—’

  ‘Where to, how long?’

  ‘He’s gone to see a man about a dog. He’ll be some time.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘Yes. It’s quite a long way, over at Amorne Farm. And as it’s such nice weather he decided to walk.’

  ‘Walk? I thought he was crippled—had a bad leg—’

  ‘His leg’s stiff, it slows him down, but he likes walking, and the exercise does him good. You see, there was an advertisement in the shop, they were going to have a dog put down if they couldn’t find an owner, it’s a Welsh collie, a grown-up dog, not a puppy. It’s not good with the sheep. And we thought we’d look at it. We rang up and they sounded very nice, some people called Arkwright. ’

  ‘Oh—Arkwright. But you didn’t go—you decided to stay here in case I came—’

  ‘Ben thought I’d better not be there, I would get all excited about the dog and he’d rather decide by himself. It’s always a risk taking a grown-up dog—’

  ‘Hartley, listen. Titus is back. He’s at my house.’

  She toppled sideways into the grass, releasing my hand. ‘No—’

  ‘Yes. He doesn’t want to
see him—only you—he very much wants to see you. Come, come quickly.’

  ‘Titus—but why did he come to you—? Oh how strange, how awful—’

  ‘I thought you’d be glad!’

  ‘But that he should come to you—oh dear, what shall I do, what shall I do—’ She was suddenly a whimpering distracted child.

  ‘Come and see him, come on, get up.’ I pulled her up. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you want to see your son, isn’t it wonderful that he’s back?’

  ‘Yes, wonderful—but I must stay here—tell him to come here. He mustn’t say he was with you—’

  ‘He won’t come here, that’s the point! Come on, Hartley, stop behaving like a sleepwalker, move, act! He’ll never come here, you know that. Come along, he’s waiting for us. There’ll be plenty of time to see him before Ben gets back. I’ve got a car waiting at the bottom of the hill.’ I began to pull her back towards the meadow and the footpath, but she resisted, maddeningly sitting down again on the ground.

  ‘But tell me, Titus—is he—?’

  ‘Oh hurry! If you want Titus not to say he saw me you’d better come along and tell him yourself!’

  This argument, vague enough, seemed to impress her, at any rate touched her through her panic. ‘All right, but I’ll only stay a few minutes, and you must bring me back at once!’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes’—I pulled her to her feet again.

  ‘And we must stay in the wood, someone might see us—’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know anybody here! Now do hurry—’

  We went down by the woodland path. It was overgrown in places and rather dark and we stumbled along, whipped by twigs, clung to by brambles, and constantly impeded by little saplings growing in the middle of the pathway. The sheer stupid awkwardness of our progress made me want to scream. Hartley’s body moving beside me was jerky and clumsy, it was like conducting a log of wood.

  We came out bedraggled and panting, onto the coast road. Gilbert had drawn the Volkswagen up onto the grass verge. When he saw us emerging he started the engine and backed towards us.

  A few days of seaside holiday had transformed Gilbert. He looked younger, fitter, even his white curls were looser and more natural. He had been to the Fishermen’s Stores and kitted himself out with plimsolls and light canvas trousers and a big loose cotton jersey which he now wore over a white shirt. He had left off the deplorable make-up. These were fine times for Gilbert. He was a necessary man. He was helping me to acquire a woman other than Lizzie, and he was engaged in an adventure which featured a charming boy. His eyes blazed with vitality and curiosity. I handed Hartley into the back of the car and got in after, suddenly trying to see each of them through the eyes the other. Gilbert appeared as a handsome well-fed rather wealthy-looking holiday gentleman. The butler act was switched off. Now he was playing a man who owned a yacht. But no, I could not imagine how Gilbert saw my darling, or what he had expected the ‘one love’ to be like.