The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Yes,’ said James. ‘Well, I must go. I’ve got to go along with Peregrine to the garage and drive him back. See you at lunch. I suppose there will be lunch.’

  There was lunch, though it was not a very cordial affair. We had fresh mackerel which Gilbert had procured from somewhere. He had also found some wild fennel. He cooked of course. No one ate much except Titus. I was very relieved when he turned up, returned like a dog to prove where its home is. Yes, I would help him, I would cherish him, would make of him an occupation and a preoccupation; only at present we avoided each other’s eyes. A kind of shame hung on us both. He felt ashamed of his parents, of his unhappy ageing mother, of his stupid brutish father. I felt ashamed of having failed to keep Hartley, of having been forced to let her go back, indeed to take her back, to that matrimonial hell. Yes, I was forced to do it, I thought, somehow by James, and not only by James, but by Gilbert, by Peregrine, even by Titus. If only I had been left alone I would have had faith and I would have succeeded, would have kept her. I had been demoralized by all these spectators.

  Peregrine had recovered, or feigned to have recovered, his usual aggressive equanimity. He and Gilbert kept up some sort of chatter. Gilbert exuded the secret satisfaction of one who has come unscathed through a fascinating adventure which he looks forward to gossiping about in another context. James was gently abstracted, perhaps melancholy. Titus was ashamed and resentful. I asked the other three when they would be going and expressed the wish that it might be soon, the show being over. There was general agreement that tomorrow would be departure day. Perry’s car would be ready then. James would drive him to the garage. Gilbert rather reluctantly agreed to go too, though cheered by the prospect of bringing news of me to London. After that I would be alone with Titus.

  After lunch I made out, at his intelligent suggestion, a longish shopping list for Gilbert so that he could stock me up with food and drink while I still had a car available. He then went off again to the village. Titus went to swim from the cliff. Peregrine, now lobster-coloured and shining with suntan lotion, lay on the grass beside the tower. James settled in the book room on the floor, combing through my books and reading here and there. Gilbert came back with a loaded car and the report, which he had heard in the shop, that Freddie Arkwright had arrived at Amorne Farm for his holidays. Peregrine staggered back to the house with a blinding headache and went to lie down in the book room with the curtains pulled. James emerged onto the lawn and began taking the stones out of the trough and arranging them on the grass in a complicated circular design. The afternoon advanced, very hot, with renewed grumblings of distant thunder. The sea was like liquid jelly, rising and falling with a thick smooth dense movement. Then some time after Titus returned from his swim it began to change its mood. A brisk wind started to blow. The smooth swell became more powerful, the waves higher and stronger. I could hear them roaring into the cauldron. There was a long line of puffy clouds low on the horizon, but the sun was descending through a blue celebration of cloudless light. Gilbert and Titus were now over by the tower, sitting in the shadow which it cast upon the grass. I could hear them singing Eravamo tredici.

  I had deliberately declared, for my maddened wounded mind, an interim. It was indeed clear that what had happened had been engineered against my will by James. If I had kept my nerve, if I had persevered, if I had only had the sense to take her right away at the start, Hartley would have abandoned herself to me. She would have given up, she would have given in, at first with the weak despair of one in whom the hope of happiness had simply been killed. It was my task and my privilege to teach her the desire to live, and I would yet do so. I, and I only, could revive her; I was the destined prince. Perhaps in a way, I reflected, it was just as well to let her go back, this time, for a short period. My shock tactics would not after all have proved useless, she would have time to reflect, to compare two men and evolve a concept of a different future. The lessons I had tried to teach her would not be lost. A dose of Ben, after having been with me, after having had the seeds of liberty sown in her mind, might very well wake her up to the possibility, then the compelling desirability, of escape. A dose of Ben would make her concentrate at last. It would in fact be better thus, because she would make her own clear decision, not simply acquiesce in mine. If she could feel a little less frightened, a little less trapped, she would reflect and she would decide to come. My mistake had been to act so suddenly and so relentlessly. I ought never to have locked her up, I saw that now. I could easily have kept her, for a short time, by strong persuasions. Then I could have touched her reason. As it was she was too shocked to take it all in. I had given her the role of prisoner and victim, and this in itself had numbed her powers of reflection. Now at least, at ‘home’ in that horrible den, she would be able to think. He could not always batter her mind and supervise her body. I would wait. She would come. I would not leave the house. She might come at any hour of the day or night. And, I thought, with a final twist, yes, and if she does not come I shall do what I said to James, I shall simply start the whole thing again from the beginning.

  Evening approached. Titus and Gilbert came in to make tea, then went off in Gilbert’s car to the Black Lion. Peregrine emerged to dose his headache with whisky, then retired again. James wandered off in search of more stones for his mandala or whatever it was. Thinking these thoughts about Hartley and feeling slightly less desperate because of them, I clambered a little way over the rocks in the village direction. I could see the spray from the increasingly wild waves thrown up from the sea’s edge in a rainbow, and the droplets were reaching me in a fine rain. I slithered into a long cleft, a secret place I had discovered earlier, where the tall rocks made a deep V-shape. Part of the floor of the cleft was occupied by a narrow pool, the other part by a rivulet of pebbles. The smooth rocks were very hot and the warmth in the enclosed space comforted my body. I sat down on the pebbles. I turned some of them over. They were damp underneath. I sat still and tried to silence my mind. A pebble came rolling down the rock into my rivulet and I looked at it idly. A moment or two later another pebble rolled down. Then another. I looked up. A head, framed by two clinging hands, gazed down on me from the crest above. A tendril or two of frizzy brown hair, tugged by the wind, had also come over the top of the rock. Two bright light-brown eyes peered short-sightedly down at me, half laughing, half afraid.

  ‘Lizzie!’

  Lizzie levered herself up onto the sharp rocky crest, got one brown leg, already grazed and bleeding slightly, over the top, then, impeded by the full skirt of her blue dress, swung the other leg over, lost her balance and slid down the long smooth surface into the pool.

  ‘Oh, Lizzie!’

  I pulled her out and hugged her, laughing with that agonized laughter which is so close to a mixture of wild exasperation and tears.

  Now Lizzie, laughing too, was squeezing out the wet hem of her dress.

  ‘You’ve cut yourself.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You’ve lost a shoe.’

  ‘It’s in the pool. Can I have that one, or are you collecting my shoes? Oh Charles—you don’t mind my coming?’

  ‘You know Gilbert’s here?’

  ‘Yes, he wrote to me, he couldn’t help boasting that he was staying with you.’

  ‘Did he ask you to come?’

  ‘No, no, I think he wanted to have you to himself. But I suddenly so much wanted to come and I thought, why not?’

  ‘You thought “why not”, did you, little Lizzie. Did you drive?’

  ‘No, I came by train, then taxi.’

  ‘Just as well. There soon won’t be any more parking space left out there. Come on inside and get dry. Don’t slip again, these rocks are tricky.’

  I led her back towards the house, onto the lawn.

  ‘What are those stones?’

  ‘Oh just a sort of design someone’s making. You’re thinner.’

  ‘I’ve been slimming. Oh Charles—dear—are you all right?’

&n
bsp; ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know—’

  We went into the kitchen. ‘Here’s a towel.’ I was not going to enquire what vulgar impertinent travesty of the facts had been offered by Gilbert in his letter. The thought of how the story would be told would have tormented me if I had not had greater troubles.

  Lizzie was wearing a peacock blue summer dress made out of some light bubbly material with a low V-neck and a wide skirt. She was indeed thinner. Her curling hair, wind-tangled, blown into long gingery corkscrews, strayed about on the brilliant blue collar. Her pale brown eyes, moist and shining with the wind, with tenderness, with relief, gazed up at me. She looked absurdly young, radioactive with vitality and unpredictable gaiety, while at the same time she looked at me so attentively, so humbly, like a dog reading his master’s tiniest movements. I could not help seeing how different this alert healthy being was from the heavy confused creature whom I had allowed to be carried away from my house veiled and silent. Yet love seeks its own ends and discerns, even invents, its own charms. If necessary I would have to explain this to Lizzie.

  Lizzie, sitting on a chair, had thrown off her sandals and crossed one bare leg over the other, hitching up the wide trailing blue skirt, half darkened with sea water, and was drying one foot.

  James came in and stopped amazed.

  I said to him, ‘Another visitor. This is a theatre friend, Lizzie Scherer. This is a cousin of mine, James Arrowby.’

  They said hello.

  The front door bell jangled.

  I ran out, already seeing Hartley on the step, wind-tormented, distraught, falling into my arms.

  A man with a cap stood there. ‘Laundry.’

  ‘Laundry?’

  ‘Laundry. You wanted the laundry to call. I’m it.’

  ‘Oh God, yes, nothing at the moment, thank you, call again could you, next week or—’

  I ran back to the kitchen. Peregrine had arrived. He of course knew Lizzie, though not well. They were still exchanging greetings when Gilbert came in with Titus.

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘Gilbert!’

  ‘Is this your suitcase? We found it outside.’

  The front door bell rang again. Would it be Hartley now? Oh let it be.

  ‘Telephone?’

  ‘You wanted a telephone. I’ve come to install it.’

  By the time I had settled where the telephone was to be the company in the kitchen were all singing Cherry Ripe.

  And they went on singing. And we got drunk. And Gilbert had made a great salad and set out bread and cheese and cherries. And Titus was looking so happy, sitting in the midst with Lizzie perched on the table near him and feeding him cherries. And I thought of that stuffy room on the other side of the village where Hartley was hiding her face and saying again and again and again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ I took some more wine. There was plenty of it, purchased by Gilbert at my expense. Then when it was getting dark, and they had moved on from Abide with me to The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended, we all went out onto the lawn. James’s stone-design had already been disordered by people tripping over it. I wanted to get Lizzie to myself and explain things to her. I led her a little way across the rocks and we sat down, hidden from the house. At once she gave me one of her chaste drying clinging kisses.

  ‘Lizzie—’

  ‘Darling, sweetheart, you’re drunk!’

  ‘Lizzie, you’re my friend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, forever and ever.’

  ‘Why did you come to me, what do you want?’

  ‘I want to be with you always.’

  ‘Lizzie, it can never be, you know that, it can never be.’

  ‘You did ask me—you asked me something—have you forgotten? ’

  ‘I forget so many things. I forgot the windscreen got broken.’

  ‘The—?’

  ‘Oh never mind. Listen. Listen, Lizzie. Listen—’

  ‘I’m listening!’

  ‘Lizzie, it cannot be. I am committed to this very unhappy person. She is going to come back to me. Did Gilbert tell you?’

  ‘Gilbert wrote something. You tell me.’

  ‘I can’t remember what you know.’

  ‘Rosina said you were going to marry a bearded lady, and you said that you’d met this woman from the past and that what you’d said to me was a mistake—’

  ‘Lizzie, I do feel love for you, but not like that. I’m bound to her, bound, it’s—it’s absolute.’

  ‘But she’s married.’

  ‘She’s going to leave her husband and come to me. He’s a vile man and she hates him.’

  ‘And she loves you?’

  ‘Yes—’

  ‘And is she really so ugly?’

  ‘She’s—Lizzie, she’s beautiful. I wonder if you know what it’s like when you have to guard somebody, to guard them in your heart against all damage and all darkness, and to sort of renew them as if you were God—’

  ‘Even if it’s all—not true—like in a dream?’

  ‘There’s a way in which it must be true, it can’t be a dream, pure love makes it true.’

  ‘I know—you pity her—’

  ‘It’s not pity—it’s something much greater, much purer. Oh Lizzie—my heart could break with it—’ I dropped my head onto my knees.

  ‘Oh my dear—’ Lizzie touched my hair, stroking it very gently, very tenderly, as one might touch a child or a small quiet pet.

  ‘Lizzie darling, are you crying? Don’t cry. I do love you. Let us two love each other whatever happens.’

  ‘You want everything, don’t you, Charles.’

  ‘Yes, but not like that. Let’s love in a free open way, like you said in your letter, free and separate and not holding on like crazy—’

  ‘It was a stupid letter. I think holding on like crazy is the only thing I understand—’

  ‘But with her, with Hartley—it’s like something eternal that’s always existed, something far greater than either of us. She will come to me, she has got to. She has always been with me and she is coming home to herself. I feel in such an odd way that my retiring, my coming here, was all a sort of giving up the world just for her. I gave her the meaning of my life long ago, I gave it to her and she still has it. Even if she doesn’t know she has it, she has it.’

  ‘Just like even if she’s ugly she’s beautiful and even if she doesn’t love you she loves you—’

  ‘But she does—’

  ‘Charles, either this is very fine, very noble, or else you’re mad.’

  ‘Dear Lizzie—I feel so full of love tonight because of her.’

  ‘You’ve got it to give away.’

  ‘Yes, but not to anybody. When you feel full to the brim with your own life, committed, given, complete, it makes you feel so free too. I don’t know what the future holds, Lizzie. I just know it’s all to do with her. But that makes other love in a way all the more real if it exists at all, because it’s pure, it’s unselfish, it’s for nothing. Will you love me for nothing, Lizzie, asking nothing, going nowhere, just because we’re us?’

  ‘Either this is wisdom or you’re cheating. You’re certainly drunk.’

  ‘Will you, Lizzie dear?’

  ‘Yes.’ She took my hands and began kissing them.

  ‘Lizzie. Lizzie, where are you?’ The voice of Gilbert.

  It had become almost dark, though there was still a little light over the sea where the sunken sun was still illuminating the line of white clouds which shone like pale lamps over the waves which were racing landward. The tide was rising.

  ‘Lizzie, come back, we want you to sing Voi che sapete.’

  She was away from me in a moment, a long bare leg stretched. I could see Gilbert now, reaching his hand down to her from above. I stayed where I was.

  What a weird uncanny simulacrum of happiness the evening was, like a masque put on by the spirit of melancholy. Would I be able not to go to that house, not to know what was happening, not to b
urst into their lives like a storm, like rain beating upon them, like thunder?

  After a little while I came back towards Shruff End. It seemed to be unusually illuminated and looked like a doll’s house. Gilbert must have bought several more lamps at my expense. Some light fell onto the lawn. As I drew near to it Lizzie was still singing solo. Her true truthful small voice wandered in the air patterning it high up, making utterly still the group of men surrounding her. Perry, who was very drunk, was standing with folded arms near the kitchen door. He checked occasional swaying movements. Gilbert, smiling sentimentally, was sitting cross-legged. Titus was kneeling, his lips apart, his face concentrated with emotion and pleasure, his eyes wide. At first I could not see James. Then I discerned him just below me reclining on the grass. A family party.

  Voi che sapete had been over for some time and Lizzie was now singing Roses in Picardy. This was a song which Aunt Estelle used to sing, accompanying herself on the piano in the drawing room at Ramsdens. There came to me, with the peculiar pain of that memory, the idea that James might have asked Lizzie to sing it. Then I remembered that I had told Lizzie I liked it, but not why. Lizzie was singing it for me.

  Roses in Picardy was a bit much. As I climbed down onto the lawn James, sensing me, sat up. I sat down near him but would not look at him, though he was now looking at me. After a moment he reached out and touched me, and I murmured ‘Yes, yes’. The song ended.

  After that, and until the terrible thing happened, the evening seemed quietly to break up, or to become diffused and gently chaotic like the later stages of a good party. Or perhaps it is all just confused in my memory. There was some light over the rocks, though I do not recall where it came from. Perhaps the clouds were still giving off light. A moon had made its appearance, randomly shaped and spotty, large and pale as a cloud itself. The fierce foam at the edge of the sea seemed luminous. I wandered looking for Lizzie, who had vanished. Everyone seemed to be walking about on the rocks, precariously holding glasses in their hands. An owl was hooting somewhere inland and the intermittent voices of my guests sounded equally distant, equally frail and hollow. I also wanted to find James, because I felt that perhaps I had been rude to him. I wanted to say something to him, I was not sure what, about Aunt Estelle. She had shone somehow upon my childhood. Che cosa è amor indeed. I went to the cliff and watched the waves pounding it. There was a soft growling of thunder. I could see the glowing whitenesses of the wave-crests out to sea. Gilbert’s babbling baritone started up not far off. Stay dainty nymphs and speak, shall we play barley-break, tra la la? Then later on, in another quarter, Titus also by himself could be heard rendering Jock of Hazeldean. There was something absurd and touching about the solipsistic self-absorption and self-satisfaction of these drunken singers. Then at last I heard Lizzie’s voice distantly singing Full Fathom Five. I listened carefully but could get no sense of direction, so loud was the accompaniment of the restless rushing sea. Then I thought, how strangely her voice echoes. It seems almost amplified. She must be singing inside the tower.