The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  I took James by the sleeve of his immaculate white coat and pulled him back into the hall. ‘Look, you can’t stay here, I suggest you—’

  At that moment I saw James’s eyes widen, looking behind me, and I realized that Hartley was standing on the stairs.

  At our sudden silence the other three emerged. We all stood there looking up at Hartley.

  She was still wearing my black silk dressing gown with the red rosettes. It reached to her feet and with the collar turned up to frame her hair it had something of the effect of an evening dress. Her eyes, startled and large, had their violet tint; and although, with her disordered grey hair she looked old and mad, she seemed in that arrested moment like a queen.

  I recovered in a second or two and made for the stairs. As she saw me move Hartley turned and fled. I saw the flash of a bare ankle, a bare foot. I caught her at the curve of the stairs and hurried her towards the upper landing.

  We almost ran together along the landing and I pushed her in through the door of her room. She went at once and sat down on the mattress, like an obedient dog. I do not think that in the whole period of her incarceration I ever saw her sit upon the chair.

  ‘Hartley, darling, where were you going? Were you coming down to look for me? Or did you think that Ben had come? Or were you going to run away?’

  She pulled the dressing gown closer about her and simply shook her head several times. She was breathless with agitation. Then she peered up at me with a sad timid sweet look which suddenly reminded me of my father.

  ‘Oh, Hartley, I love you so much!’ I sat down on the chair and lifted my hands to my face. I grimaced into my hands. I felt so helplessly, vulnerably close to my childhood. ‘Hartley, don’t leave me. I don’t know what I’d do if you went away.’

  Hartley said, ‘Who was that man?’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man you were with when I was on the stairs?’

  ‘My cousin James.’

  ‘Oh yes—Aunt Estelle’s son.’

  This unexpected exhibition of memory made me sick with shock.

  Down below in the kitchen I could hear a lively murmur of voices. Gilbert and Titus, feeling released by Hartley’s apparition from any necessity to be discreet, were doubtless telling all they knew and more to James and Peregrine.

  I groaned into my hands.

  That night we slept as follows: I slept in my bedroom, Hartley slept in the middle room, Gilbert slept on his sofa, Peregrine slept on the cushions in the bookroom, James slept on a couple of chairs in the little red room, and Titus slept out on the lawn. It was a very hot night but there was no storm.

  The next morning there was a holiday atmosphere among my guests. Titus swam from the cliff as usual. James, after exploring the tower and uttering various historical conjectures about it, swam from the tower steps. (I had still forgotten to fix a rope, but it was high tide.) Peregrine, a great white blob, lay half-naked sun-bathing upon the grass and got thoroughly burnt. Gilbert drove into the village and came back with a mass of foodstuffs and several bottles of whisky which he put down to my account at the shop. Later James drove to the village to get The Times and failed. There was general amazement at my ability to live without ‘news’. ‘Who’s dead, who’s hijacked, who’s on strike,’ as Perry summed it up. He had brought a transistor set with him, but I told him to keep it out of my way. James pioneered a popular plan to go to the Raven Hotel to watch the Test Match on television, only Gilbert, again despatched to shop, this time for sunburn lotion for Peregrine, reported that electrical disturbances had put the local TV out of order. Gilbert and Titus, hoping to find recruits for their choir, succeeded with Perry who sang a gruff and shaggy bass, but failed with James, who could not sing a note. I had managed on the previous evening to warn Titus and Gilbert not to tell Peregrine about Rosina’s visit. This was just as well, since in the morning I was almost incapable of rational thought. I felt as if something had snapped inside my head, a brain tumour had burst or something.

  My desperate state was caused partly by the presence of James, who seemed to be a centre of magnetic attraction to the other three. Each of them separately told me how much he liked James. No doubt they expected to please me by this information. Titus said, ‘It’s funny, I feel as if I’d met him before, and yet I know I haven’t. Perhaps I saw him in a dream.’ The other thing which drove me half mad was a sudden change in Hartley’s tone. She had been saying that she must go home, but she had lately said it almost listlessly as if she knew it was becoming impossible. Now she began to say it as if she meant it, and to back it up with almost-rational arguments.

  ‘I know that you think you’re being kind to me—’

  ‘Kind! I love you.’

  ‘I know you think it’s for the best and I’m grateful—’

  ‘Grateful! Oh good!’

  ‘But it’s all a nonsense, an accident, an incident—we can’t stay together, it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I love you. You love me.’

  ‘I do care for you—’

  ‘Don’t use that whimsy language. You love me.’

  ‘All right, but in an unreal way, in a dream, in a might-have-been. Really, all this was over long ago and we’re dreaming it.’

  ‘Hartley, have you no sense of the present tense, can’t you live in the present? Wake up and try it!’

  ‘I live in long-times, not in sudden present moments, don’t you see—I’m married, I’ve got to go back to where I am. If you took me to London like you just said I’d have to run away from you. You make everything worse and worse, you won’t understand—’

  ‘OK, you’re married, so what? You haven’t been happy.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter—’

  ‘I should say it matters a lot. I can’t think of anything that matters more.’

  ‘I can—’

  ‘You admit you love me.’

  ‘One can love a dream. You think that makes a sort of push to action—’

  ‘A motive, yes!’

  ‘No, because it is a dream. It’s made of lies.’

  ‘Hartley, we have futures. That means we can make things true.’

  ‘I have to go back.’

  ‘He’ll kill you.’

  ‘I have to go through that door, it’s the only way for me.’

  ‘I won’t let you.’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘What about Titus? He’ll be with me. Don’t you want to be with Titus?’

  ‘Charles, I must go home.’

  ‘Oh stop, can’t you just think of something better and want it?’

  ‘One can’t do that to one’s mind. You don’t understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You’re like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don’t look—’

  ‘Hartley, trust me, come with me, ride on my back. You too can move about and look at things—’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  I left her and locked the door and rushed out of the house. I climbed over a rock or two and saw my cousin standing on the bridge over the cauldron. He waved and called to me and I went to join him.

  ‘Charles, just look at the force of that water, isn’t it fantastic, isn’t it terrifying?’ I could just hear his voice above the roar of the outgoing tide.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s sublime, yes, in the strict sense, sublime. Kant would love it. Leonardo would love it. Hokusai would love it.’

  ‘I daresay.’

  ‘And the birds—just look at those shags—’

  ‘I thought they were cormorants.’

  ‘They’re shags. And I saw some choughs, and oyster-catchers. And I heard a curlew round in the bay.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘I say, I like your friends.’

  ‘They like you.’

  ‘The boy seems good.’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘My h
at, look at that water, what it’s doing now!’

  We began to walk back towards the house. It was nearly time for lunch, if such conventions still existed.

  James, who had evidently brought his seaside holiday outfit, had on some very old cotton khaki trousers, rolled up, and a clean but ancient blue shirt which he wore loose and unbuttoned, revealing the upper part of his thin scantily-haired pink body. He was also wearing sandals which exposed his skinny white feet with long prehensile bony toes which used to appal me when I was young. (‘James has feet like hands’ I told my mother, as if discovering a secret deformity.)

  As we neared the house, he said, ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About her.’

  ‘I don’t know. When are you leaving?’

  ‘May I stay till tomorrow?’

  ‘All right.’

  We came into the kitchen and I automatically picked up the tray which Gilbert had put out for Hartley. I carried it upstairs, unlocked the door, and went in and put the tray on the table as usual.

  She was crying and would say nothing to me.

  ‘Oh, Hartley, don’t destroy me with this grief, you don’t know what you’re doing to me.’

  She said nothing and made no sign, just continued to cry, leaning back against the wall and gazing in front of her, mopping the slow tears occasionally with the back of her hand.

  I sat with her for a little while in silence. I sat on the chair and looked about me as if so ordinary an occupation could bring her comfort. I noted a damp patch on the ceiling, a crack in one of the panes of the long window. Purple fluff on the floor, doubtless from Mrs Chorney’s furniture. At last I got up, touched her shoulder gently and went away. I never stayed to see her eat. I locked the door.

  When I came back to the kitchen I found all four of them there, standing round the table where Gilbert had laid out a lunch of ham and tongue with green salad and new potatoes, and hard-boiled eggs for James. By now of course I took no interest in their food and very little in my own. Two open bottles of white wine were cooling in the sink. Peregrine, improved by being clothed, was drinking whisky and listening to the cricket on his transistor. They fell silent when I entered. Perry switched off the radio. There was an air of expectancy.

  I poured myself out a glass of wine and picked up a slice of ham. ‘You carry on. I’m going to eat outside.’

  ‘Don’t rush away, we want to talk to you,’ said Peregrine.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘We want to help you,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  ‘Please stay a minute,’ said James. ‘Titus has something to say to you. Haven’t you, Titus?’

  Titus, red in the face, not looking at me, mumbled, ‘I think you ought to let my mother go home.’

  ‘This is her home.’

  ‘But seriously, old man—’ said Peregrine.

  ‘I don’t want your advice. I didn’t ask you to come here, any of you.’

  James sat down, and the other three followed suit. I remained standing.

  ‘We don’t want to intrude—’ said James.

  ‘Don’t then.’

  ‘And we don’t in fact want to force any advice on you. We can’t see what this situation is, how could we? My impression is that you hardly understand it yourself. We don’t want to persuade you—’

  ‘Then why did you put Titus up to saying what he just said?’

  ‘Because it’s part of the evidence. It’s something that Titus thinks, but which he was afraid to tell you.’

  ‘Oh bosh.’

  ‘You have got a difficult and, as far as I can see, fairly urgent decision to make and if you would only consent to talk to us we could help you to make it in a rational way, and we could also help you to carry it out in a rational way. You must see that you need help, you need it.’

  ‘I need a chauffeur. Nothing else.’

  ‘You need support. I am your only relation. Gilbert and Peregrine are your close friends.’

  ‘They aren’t.’

  ‘Titus says he regards you as his father.’

  ‘You all seem to have had a jolly good talk about me.’

  ‘Don’t be angry, Charles,’ said Peregrine. ‘We didn’t expect to be landed in this soup. We came here for a holiday. But we see you in trouble and we want to back you up.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do for me.’

  ‘There is,’ said James. ‘I think it would help you a great deal to discuss the whole business with us, not necessarily the details, but the sort of strategy of it. You could do this without disloyalty. Now roughly there are two possible courses of action: you keep her or you return her. OK? Well, let’s consider first what happens if you return her—’

  ‘I’m not going to return her, as you put it. She’s not a bottle.’

  ‘I gather from Titus that one of your reasons for not taking her back, even if she wants to go—’

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘Is that you fear that her husband may be violent to her.’

  ‘That’s one reason, there are about a hundred others.’

  ‘But supposing his violence depended on a misunderstanding, and supposing that that misunderstanding could be removed—’

  ‘James, don’t be a fool, you know perfectly well that there isn’t any explanation or any excuse for what I have done, whatever it may be. And I advise you to be careful what you say to me.’

  ‘Look,’ said James, ‘I’m saying two things. First, that if you are going to take her back it must be done intelligently. We should all go with you, as a show of force, but also to back up your statement. ’

  ‘My statement?!’

  ‘And secondly, that if fear of violence is one of your reasons for not returning her, and if that fear can be reduced, this could be relevant to what you decide to do.’

  ‘Do you see what he means?’ said Peregrine.

  ‘Yes! But as James admits, you cannot understand the situation! You speak of explaining or making statements—you might as well try to explain to a bison. In any case this whole argument is beside the point since there are not two possibilities. I do not admit her return to her husband as possible.’

  ‘Well, then let us consider the other course—’ said James.

  ‘We will consider nothing! I don’t want you lot tramping around over this problem. You are being impertinent, and I resent it extremely! But since the matter has come up I should like to ask Titus why he thinks I ought to let his mother go home.’

  Titus, who had been staring at the ham (perhaps he was hungry) all this time, seemed reluctant to answer, blushed and would not look up. He said, ‘Well—you see—I feel I may be to blame—’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘It’s so difficult, one has so many sort of—emotions, and sort of—prejudices, about fathers and mothers. I feel I may have made you think it was awfuller than it was, though it was awful. And she does exaggerate, she has fantasies and ideas in her head. I don’t know. Maybe she does prefer to be with him, and I’m against forcing people, I think they should be free. You’re in a hurry to fix it all at once. But if she wants to come to you she can come better later on when she’s had time to think it over.’

  ‘Well said, Titus,’ said James.

  Titus gave James a look which stirred my ever-vigilant jealousy.

  Peregrine said, ‘You don’t understand marriage, Charles, you’ve never been in it, it’s deep. You think a tiff means shipwreck, the end, it’s not so.’

  I said, ‘To begin with, “free” doesn’t apply here, we’re dealing with a frightened person, a prisoner. She has to be pulled out, she’ll never walk. So it’s got to be fixed now. If she goes back she’ll never leave him, she’ll never escape.’

  James said, ‘Well, isn’t that significant too? Isn’t that to admit that she ought to go back? That she’ll choose to stay there? Oftener than you might think what human beings actually do is what they wa
nt to do.’

  ‘She may stay. But “choose”? This isn’t a matter of a “tiff”, to use Perry’s ludicrous word which shows that he has no idea what this is all about. She’s a bullied terrorized woman who has never been happy with that man, she told me so herself.’

  ‘Her marriage may not have been happy, but it has survived a long time. You think too much about happiness, Charles. It’s not all that important.’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Titus,’ I said, ‘is happiness important?’

  ‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said, and looked at me at last.

  ‘There you are,’ I said to James.

  ‘A young man’s reply,’ said James. ‘Now let me make a further point—’

  ‘Your trouble, Charles,’ said Peregrine, who was still drinking whisky, ‘as I said before, is that you despise women, you regard them as chattels. You regard this woman as a chattel—’

  ‘A further point. This drama has been developing very fast and it’s a whirling mass of emotions and ideas. You say you’ve kept this image of a pure first love beside you all these years. You may even have come to think of it as a supreme value, a standard by which all other loves have failed—’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But should you not criticize this guiding idea? I won’t call it a fiction. Let us call it a dream. Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one’s aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You’ve made it into a story, and stories are false.’

  (At this point Titus, who could bear it no longer, surreptitiously seized a piece of ham and some bread.)

  ‘And you are using this thing from the far past as a guide to important and irrevocable moves which you propose to make in the future. You are making a dangerous induction, and induction is shaky at the best of times, consider Russell’s chicken—’

  ‘Russell’s chicken?’

  ‘The farmer’s wife comes out every day and feeds the chicken, but one day she comes out and wrings its neck.’