The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  James said, ‘Can you hear the sea?’

  ‘That was Keats’s favourite quotation from Shakespeare.’ I listened. The beating sound had stopped and been succeeded by a kind of regular wailing hiss as the large methodical waves climbed the rocks and drenched them and fell back. The wind must have increased. ‘Yes.’

  After another pause he said, ‘Anything to eat?’

  ‘Vegetable protein stew.’

  ‘Oh good, I’m sick of eggs.’

  We sat on drinking for a while. James poured water into his wine and I followed suit. Then I got up to heat the stew. (I had thrown it together that morning as an emergency ration, it keeps well.) As I did so I reflected that the machine which I had ingeniously constructed to separate myself from my cousin forever did not seem to be working very well.

  ‘Bread?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Hell, there’s no bread, only biscuits.’

  ‘OK, anything.’

  We settled down to the stew.

  ‘When are you coming back to London?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about Hartley?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Any news, views?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve given up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Seen her?’

  ‘I had tea with her and Ben.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Polite. More wine?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I was afraid that James was going to pester me with more questions, but he did not, he seemed to have lost interest. With an air now of generalizing he said, ‘I think you’re nearly through, out of it. You’ve built a cage of needs and installed her in an empty space in the middle. The strong feelings are all around her—vanity, jealousy, revenge, your love for your youth—they aren’t focused on her, they don’t touch her. She seems to be their prisoner, but really you don’t harm her at all. You are using her image, a doll, a simulacrum, it’s an exorcism. Soon you will start seeing her as a wicked enchantress. Then you will have nothing to do except forgive her and that will be within your capacity.’

  ‘Thank you—but as it happens I don’t love her image, I love her, even what’s awful.’

  ‘Her preferring him to you? That would be a feat.’

  ‘No, wreckage, carnage, what’s in her mind.’

  ‘Well, what is in her mind? Perhaps she was simply bound to your memory by a sense of guilt. When you released her from it she was grateful, but then her own resentment was set free, her memories of how tiresome you were perhaps, and after that she could revert to a state of indifference. Any cheese?’

  ‘James, you understand absolutely nothing here. And I have not given up, nor am I nearly, as you put it, out or through!’

  ‘It may even be your destiny to live alone and be everybody’s uncle like a celibate priest, there are worse ends. Any cheese?’

  ‘I’m not ending just yet I hope! Yes, there is cheese.’ I set out the cheese and opened another bottle of wine.

  ‘By the way,’ said James, ‘I hope you believed what I said to you about Lizzie?’

  I filled our glasses. ‘I can believe it was all her idea and you had to be a gent about it.’

  James sat for a moment concentrating. I guessed that he was wondering whether to start again on details about how often they had met and so on. I decided it didn’t matter. I believed him. ‘It doesn’t matter. I believe you.’

  ‘I’m sorry it happened,’ he said. It was not exactly an apology.

  ‘OK. OK now.’

  James returned to making patterns on the table and I felt embarrassed again. I said rather awkwardly, ‘Well, tell me about yourself, what are you up to?’

  ‘I’m going away—’

  ‘Aha, so you said, you said you were going on a journey. To where there are mountains maybe, and snow maybe, and demons in and out of boxes maybe?’

  ‘Who knows? You’re a sea man. I’m a mountain man.’

  ‘The sea is clean. The mountains are high. I think I am becoming drunk.’

  ‘The sea is not all that clean,’ said James. ‘Did you know that dolphins sometimes commit suicide by leaping onto the land because they’re so tormented by parasites?’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that. Dolphins are such good beasts. So even they have their attendant demons. Well, you’re off are you, let me know when you’re back.’

  ‘I’ll do that thing.’

  ‘I can’t understand your attitude to Tibet.’

  ‘To Tibet?’

  ‘Yes, oddly enough! Surely it was just a primitive superstitious mediaeval tyranny.’

  ‘Of course it was a primitive superstitious mediaeval tyranny,’ said James, ‘who’s disputing that?’

  ‘You seem to be. You seem to regard it as a lost Buddhist paradise. ’ I had never ventured to say anything like this to James before, it must have been the drink.

  ‘I don’t regard it as a Buddhist paradise. Tibetan Buddhism was in many ways thoroughly corrupt. It was a wonderful human relic, a last living link with the ancient world, an extraordinary untouched country with a unique texture of religion and folklore. All this has been destroyed deliberately, ruthlessly and un-selectively. Such a quick thoughtless destruction of the past must always be a matter of regret whatever the subsequent advantages. ’

  ‘So you speak as an antiquarian?’

  James shrugged his shoulders. He was examining several moths which were circling about the lamp. ‘You have some splendid moths here. I haven’t seen an Oak Eggar for ages. Oh dear, I think that poor fellow’s had it. Do you mind if I close the window? Then they won’t come in.’ He deftly caught two of the moths and put them outside, together with the corpse of their handsome companion, and closed the window. I noticed that it had stopped raining and the air was clearer. The wind had blown the mist away.

  ‘But then you were just keen on studying the superstition?’ I said. I felt that this evening, in spite of our embarrassments, my cousin was more open to me than I had ever known him.

  ‘What after all is superstition?’ said James, pouring some more wine into both glasses. ‘What is religion? Where does the one end and the other begin? How could one answer that question about Christianity?’

  ‘But I mean you were just a student of—not a—’ What did I mean? I could not get my question clear.

  ‘Of course,’ said James, on whom the wine seemed simply to have the effect of speeding his utterance, ‘you are right to keep using the word “superstition”, the concept is essential. I asked where does the one end and the other begin. I suppose almost all religion is superstition really. Religion is power, it has to be, the power for instance to change oneself, even to destroy oneself. But that is also its bane. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. The short path is the only path but it is very steep.’

  ‘I thought religious people felt weak and worshipped something strong.’

  ‘That’s what they think. The worshipper endows the worshipped object with power, real power not imaginary power, that is the sense of the ontological proof, one of the most ambiguous ideas clever men ever thought of. But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arrives by way of consolation. We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another. All spirituality tends to degenerate into magic, and the use of magic has an automatic nemesis even when the mind has been purified of grosser habits. White magic is black magic. And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition. Yet how does it happen? Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.’

  Perhaps James was drunk after all. I said, ‘Well, I don’t understand the half of what you say. Maybe I
’m just an old-fashioned ex-Christian, but I always thought that goodness was to do with loving people, and isn’t that an attachment?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said James, rather I thought too casually, ‘yes—’ He poured himself out some more wine. We had opened another bottle.

  ‘All this giving up of attachments doesn’t sound to me like salvation and freedom, it sounds like death.’

  ‘Well, Socrates said we must practise dying—’ James was now beginning to sound flippant.

  ‘But you yourself,’ I said, for I wanted to hold on to him and bring all this airy metaphysic down to earth, and also to satisfy my curiosity when for once he was in a talkative mood, ‘you yourself have loved people, and after all why not, though God knows who they are, since you’re so damn secretive. You’ve never introduced me to any of your friends from the east.’

  ‘They never visit me.’

  ‘Yes, they do. There was that thin bearded chap I saw in your flat once, sitting in a back room.’

  ‘Oh him,’ said James, ‘he was just a tulpa.’

  ‘Some sort of inferior tribesman I suppose! And talking of tulpas, what about that sherpa that Toby Ellesmere said you were so keen on, the one that died on the mountain?’

  James was silent for a while and I began to think that I had gone too far, but I let the silence continue. The sea was audible but quieter.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said at last, ‘oh well—’, and then was silent again, but was clearly going to tell something, so I waited.

  ‘There’s not much to that story,’ he said, rather disappointingly, ‘at any rate it’s soon told. You know that some Buddhists believe that any earthly attachment, if it persists until death, ties you to the Wheel and prevents you from attaining liberation.’

  ‘Oh yes, that wheel—’

  ‘Of spiritual causality. But that’s by the way.’

  ‘I remember I asked you if you believed in reincarnation and you said—’

  ‘The sherpa in question,’ said James, ‘was called Milarepa. Well, that wasn’t his real name, I called him that after a—after a poet I rather admire. He was my servant. We had to go on a journey together. It was winter and the high passes were full of snow, it was a pretty impossible journey really—’

  ‘Was it a military journey?’

  ‘We had to get through this pass. Now you know that in India and Tibet and such places there are tricks people can learn, almost anybody can learn them if they’re well taught and try hard enough—’

  ‘Tricks?’

  ‘Yes, you know, like—like the Indian rope trick—anything—’

  ‘Oh, just that sort of trick.’

  ‘Well, what is that sort of trick? As I say, all sorts of people can do them, they can be jolly tiring but—you know they have nothing to do with—with—’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘One of these tricks is raising one’s bodily warmth by mental concentration.’

  ‘How’s it done?’

  ‘It’s useful in a primitive country, like being able to go on walking for forty-eight hours at five miles an hour without eating or drinking or stopping.’

  ‘No one could do that.’

  ‘And to be able to keep oneself warm by mental power is obviously handy on a winter journey.’

  ‘Like good King Wenceslas!’

  ‘I had to cross this pass and I decided to take Milarepa with me. It would involve spending a night in the snow. I didn’t have to take him. But I reckoned I could generate enough heat to keep us both alive.’

  ‘Wait a minute! You mean you can do this thing of generating bodily heat by mental concentration?’

  ‘I told you it’s a trick,’ said James impatiently. ‘It’s got nothing to do with anything important, like goodness or anything like that.’

  ‘And then—?’

  ‘We got up to the top of the pass and got caught in a blizzard. I thought we’d be all right. But we weren’t. There wasn’t enough heat for two. Milarepa died in the night, he died in my arms.’

  I said, ‘Oh God.’ I couldn’t think what further to say. My mind was confused and I was beginning to feel very drunk and sleepy. I heard James’s voice continuing to speak and it seemed to come from very far away. ‘He trusted me . . . It was my vanity that killed him . . . The payment for a fault is automatic . . . They can get to work on any flaw . . . I relaxed my hold on him . . . I lost my grip . . . The Wheel is just...’ By this time my head was down on the table and I was falling quietly asleep.

  I awoke and it was day. A clear grey light of dawn, the sun not yet risen, illuminated the kitchen, showing the wine-stained table, the used dishes, the crumbled cheese. The wind had dropped and the sea was silent. James had gone.

  I leapt up and called, running out onto the lawn. Then I ran back into the house, calling again, and then through and out of the front door onto the causeway. The blank grey silent light revealed the rocks, the road, and James just getting into his car. The car door closed. I called and waved. James saw me and lowered the window, he waved back but he had already started the engine and the car was moving.

  ‘Let me know when you’re back!’

  ‘Yes. Goodbye!’ He waved cheerily and the Bentley sped off and turned the corner and its sound fell into the silence. I returned slowly to the house.

  I walked back over the causeway, aware now of a dreadful headache and a swinging sensation in the head: not surprising, since, as I established later, James and I had drunk between us nearly five litre bottles of wine. There was also a rapid sliding crowding curtain of spots before the eyes. I got inside, reached the kitchen and sat down again at the table, resting my head in my hands. I carefully worked out where I could find a glass of water and some aspirins and I got up and found them and sat down again and dozed. The sun came up.

  I woke again, sitting at the table with my head lolling about and a violent pain in my neck. I recalled that I had had a curious dream about freezing to death in a snow-storm. Then I remembered that James had told me some very odd story about a journey in Tibet. And I half remembered a lot of other strange things that James had been saying. I got up, feeling horribly giddy and climbed upstairs and lay down on my bed and fell into a sort of sleep coma. I woke later on, not sure if it was morning or afternoon and feeling less giddy but rather mad. I went down to the kitchen and ate some cheese, then went back to bed again.

  After that things became yet more confused. I must have stayed in bed quite a lot of that day. I remember waking during the night and seeing the moon shining. The next morning I came downstairs early and was suddenly persuaded, or perhaps I had had the idea in the night, that since I had given up swimming it was time that I had a bath. I did not fancy the labour of carrying hot water up to the bathroom. This time however I succeeded in lugging Mrs Chorney’s old hip bath out of its refuge under the stairs and started to boil saucepans of water on the gas stove. Halfway through this proceeding I felt a sharp pain in the chest and began to feel faint. I gave up the bath idea and made some tea, but could eat nothing. I felt a bit sick and decided to go back to bed. I was now sure that I had a temperature but possessed no thermometer. I stayed in bed. My bed felt rather like a hammock in a storm-tossed ship. I had coloured cloudy thoughts, or visions and was never sure if my eyes were shut or open. I wondered if I was seriously ill. Now I had a telephone but no doctor. I did not fancy summoning the one who had seen me at two a.m. after my ‘mishap’, anyway I never knew his name. I considered telephoning my London doctor and describing my symptoms, but decided not to since the symptoms would sound uninteresting and it was hard at the best of times to interest my London doctor. I comforted myself by reflecting that no doubt I had caught the ’flu or whatever it was that James had suffered from after I had survived my sea ordeal, and that James’s ailment had not lasted long.

  Mine lasted I think longer. At any rate some days passed during which I remained prostrate, reluctant to move, unable to eat. No one called, no one telephoned. I crawled out to the dog kennel
but no one had written either. Perhaps there was a prolonged bank holiday or a postal strike. I was not too worried at the lack of news. I was entirely occupied with my illness. For the time it absorbed me, as if it were something that I was working at. I even ceased to worry about it; and generally, as I had anticipated, it began to go away. I could walk downstairs once more without resting on every step, and I was comforted by sensations of hunger. I ate a few biscuits and enjoyed them.

  That day, or perhaps the next day, as I remember I was feeling stronger and more normal, the telephone rang in the morning. I was now well aware what this strange sound was. I had been thinking urgently about Hartley and when I heard the shrill dreadful bell I said to myself at once, This is it. I ran, falling over my feet, to the bookroom. I grabbed the phone, dropped it, picked it up.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Charles!’

  It was Lizzie.

  I said, ‘Hello, wait a minute.’

  I put the instrument down on some books and sat there trying to calm myself and collect my wits. I had a misery-pain in the stomach about Hartley which I knew would now not go away. Everything now was urgent.

  ‘Sorry, Lizzie, I was just turning off the gas.’

  ‘Charles, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, why shouldn’t I be? Well, I’ve been having ’flu, but I’m better. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m at the Black Lion. Can I come and see you?’

  ‘No. Stay there. I’ll come and see you. What’s the time? My watch stopped days ago.’

  ‘Oh about ten or something.’

  ‘Are they open?’

  ‘Who? Oh, the pub. No, but they will be by the time you come.’

  ‘I’ll be along.’

  At the sound of Lizzie’s voice I felt a sudden frantic desire to get out of the house. I ran into the kitchen and looked at myself in the little mirror above the sink. I had not shaved during my illness and had developed a repulsive reddish beard. I shaved, cutting myself, and combed my hair. I found my very crumpled jacket and my wallet. A watery sun was shining but the air was cold. I ran out of the house and over the causeway and turned towards the village. I soon stopped running however as a sort of cloud of weakness enveloped my body and twirled it about. I walked on rather slowly, breathing carefully; and only then did it occur to me to wonder whether James had tipped Lizzie off to come and see me. I was glad to find that I did not care, and I stopped thinking about it. When I turned into the village street the first thing I saw was Gilbert’s yellow Volkswagen parked outside the Black Lion.