The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  Postscript:

  LIFE GOES ON

  THAT NO DOUBT is how the story ought to end, with the seals and the stars, explanation, resignation, reconciliation, everything picked up into some radiant bland ambiguous higher significance, in calm of mind, all passion spent. However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after; so I thought I might continue the tale a little longer in the form once again of a diary, though I suppose that, if this is a book, it will have to end, arbitrarily enough no doubt, in quite a short while. In particular I felt I ought to go on so as to describe James’s funeral, although really James’s funeral was such a non-event that there is practically nothing to describe. Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

  As I write this it is August, not the yellow Provençal August of the English imagination, but an ordinary cool London August with the wind beating down the Thames at the end of the street. For, yes, I am living in James’s flat. From a legal point of view it is my flat, but of course it remains really James’s. I dare not alter anything, I scarcely dare to move anything. The idols of ‘superstition’ surround me. I have ventured to put some of the odder ‘fetishes’ away in a cupboard, I hope they will not mind, and I took down the glass pendants in the hall because their tinkling disturbed my sleep. But the ornate wooden box with the captive demon inside is still perched on its bracket. (James never denied that there was a demon in it. He merely laughed when I asked him.) The innumerable Buddhas are still in their places, except for one that I gave to Toby Ellesmere because he seemed annoyed at not being mentioned in James’s will. The will left everything to me and, should I predecease him, to the British Buddhist Society. I gave them a Buddha too.

  Another peevish shifty letter from the house agent today. Shruff End is up for sale. I never spent another night there after the night of the stars when the seals came in the morning. While sorting out my belongings for removal I stayed at the Raven Hotel. I could see the tower from my bedroom but not the house. No one seems to want to buy the place, perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons. The Arkwrights at Amorne Farm, who have the key, said they would get the roof mended, but according to the agent have not done so. Fortunately I do not need the money urgently since James’s will has left me comfortably off.

  I suppose I must describe James’s funeral as I said I was going to. There was something curiously blank about it. I did not have to organize it, thank heaven. It was organized by a Colonel Blackthorn who appeared for this purpose and then vanished. When I got to London on the day after the doctor’s letter I found Colonel Blackthorn and the doctor both actually in James’s flat. The colonel explained that he had organized the funeral (a cremation) because they had been unable to get in touch with me, but that if I wished for something different . . . I did not. I tried to talk to the doctor but he faded away while Blackthorn was still explaining to me how to get to the crematorium. ‘James’ had already mercifully been removed to the ‘chapel of rest’. I did not visit him.

  The cremation took place two days later at one of those huge garden places in north London. There is something comfortlessly empty about a ‘garden of remembrance’ after the loquacious populated feeling of a graveyard. It was a stiff graceless business, rather hurried on by the staff, who kept us waiting outside while the previous ‘customer’ was disposed of. Doubtless the worthy colonel’s despatch in booking our ‘slot’ had been a prudent one. He was there, also the doctor. Toby Ellesmere came and seemed genuinely upset. I had never reflected before (and have not since) upon the nature of his relation with James, but whatever it was I imagine it belonged to the remote past. James and Toby had not only been young soldiers together, they had been school boys together. Perhaps Toby had simply admired him at school; such bonds can be life-long. Four other well-dressed men in smart black suits turned up, I presume they were soldiers. They showed no signs of knowing who I was, and they were unknown to Toby, with whom I exchanged a few words; indeed no one except Toby talked to me at all. The business took minutes. There was no prayer of course, only a little soft listless music and then a standing in silence, which was broken by some official noisily opening the door at the back. I wished then that there could have been a proper ceremony of some sort. But any ritual I could have devised would probably have offended James’s shade. I only wish I had had the wit to demand some decent music to see him off with.

  We went outside into the garden. Colonel Blackthorn shook hands with me. Everybody began to go away. Again I tried to speak to the doctor, but he said he was expected at the hospital. Perhaps he was feeling a bit nervous about that death certificate. Toby rather half-heartedly offered me a lift in his car, but I declined. I think he wanted to be alone too. I walked about for a long time in shabby sad back-streets and lost myself.

  I have just found in a drawer in the kitchen the hammer which I was trying to mend on the last evening when James came to Shruff End. He must have taken the precaution of carrying it away with him. I like the kitchen. There is a large dry larder, completely empty when I arrived. There is also a view of Battersea Power Station, which in the evening looks like an Assyrian monument.

  I have sold my flat in Shepherds Bush and brought some of the furniture here. I brought back my own stuff from Shruff End, but none of Mrs Chorney’s. I resisted a temptation to keep the art nouveau oval mirror which Rosina broke and which I never had reglazed. I have put most of my things into James’s dressing room. This is now, inside James’s temple, a little Charles shrine. I go there sometimes and sit. My books are still in crates in the hall. My clothes are mostly in suitcases, since I cannot yet bring myself to touch James’s neatly hanging, neatly folded garments. The big wardrobe in his bedroom is like the entrance to another world. I cannot say I feel at home in the flat, but I would not think of living anywhere else. Sometimes it seems incredible that he is not here too. Last night I was so persuaded that he was in the next room that I had to go and look.

  I saw Lizzie and Gilbert on Friday, at their maisonette in Golders Green. I visit them now and then and they produce their smelly messes which they have spent all day cooking. Gilbert has now become very successful as the comic hero of that ludicrous interminable television series. He is famous for the first time in his life and people come up and touch him in the street. The critics even compare him with Wilfred Dunning, which is absurd. Lizzie seems happy. She has given up her hospital job and got fatter. They both still talk of how one day they will share a house with me and I will live upstairs and they will live downstairs and be my ‘staff’. We make jokes about this.

  Are they beginning to treat me like an elderly invalid? They think James’s flat is an appalling place to live. Of course I never invite them here. I never invite anybody here.

  Am I settling into my role as a celibate uncle-priest? Yesterday I took my secretary Miss Kaufman, whom I may not have mentioned before, out to coffee and listened to a tale of woe about her aged mother. Then I took Rosemary Ashe to lunch at a pub and heard all about Sidney and Maybelle. Maybelle is twenty. Rosemary still hopes Sidney may recover. The children are loving Canada. Rosemary thinks they are too philosophical about the divorce. I was glad to find that Rosemary had a very unclear idea about what had happened at Shruff End, and I did not enlighten her. Her information seemed to be that I had been persecuted by some mad village woman and a boy friend of Gilbert’s had been drowned. Fortunately she did not want to discuss my problems.

  It is late in the evening in the flat. The Buddhas seem to be lookin
g at me, although I know that beneath their drooping eyelids they do not see the world of appearance. The place is getting rather dusty as I cannot risk having a charwoman. I have done a little superficial dusting but I do not like moving things, some of them are fragile. I am especially careful with that demon-cage up on the bracket! Is the scene beginning to look more and more like a museum as James’s spirit gradually withdraws? The area which I inhabit does not increase. I eat in the kitchen, then scuttle back to this desk in the sitting room. I dress in the hall. I sleep in the larger spare bedroom. Of course I dare not sleep in James’s bed. James’s handsome bedroom is unused and I have closed the door.

  At least I have now taken possession of the desk, and collected there my favourites from among the have-worthy jade animals. Weighing down my letters and papers (Miss Kaufman still helps, thank God) are two stones, the mottled pink chequered stone which I gave to Hartley, and the brown stone with the blue lines which I gave to James. I was glad to find that lying here when I arrived. I often handle these stones. I have also propped up two photographs, the one of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle dancing, and a photo of Clement when she was young in the role of Cordelia. I cannot seem to find any suitable pictures of my parents, and of course I have no recent one of James. It is clear that his preparations for his journey were extremely thorough. There were no personal papers to be found in the flat. (I wonder if Colonel Blackthorn removed anything?) There were no interesting relics at all, no old letters, photos, bills. The will was tied up in a slim package together with a statement from his bank about investments. There was no trace of James having dealt with a lawyer. The will was written in his own hand. The two witnesses appeared to be uneducated people. For some time, stupidly, I searched for a hidden letter addressed to me. I even looked into cracks in the wall.

  Last night at a little party given by Gilbert and Lizzie I heard that Peregrine is doing well with his theatre in Londonderry and is becoming quite famous as a propagandist for peace in Ireland. Rosina is equally enthusiastic and is rumoured to have become politically conscious and power-mad. Gilbert says Fritzie’s Odyssey is off.

  Yes, I go to parties now. I go about in London, I eat and drink and gossip just as if I were an ordinary person. Well, am I not one? I wonder what happened to that precious talisman which I was going to unwrap in a lonely cave beside the sea?

  Perhaps it is a sign of age that I am busy all day without really doing anything. This diary has trailed on, it is company for me, an illusion of occupation. I now feel uneasily that before I end it I ought to offer some sort of reflective summing up of—of what? I shrink from this. There is so much pain. I have not recorded the pain.

  What an egoist I must seem in the preceding pages. But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. Thus we must live unless we are saints, and are there any? There are spiritual beings, perhaps James was one, but there are no saints.

  Well, I will try to reflect, but not today. When this is all done, will I ever write anything else? The story of Clement? Or that book about the theatre that my friends kindly profess to think so necessary? Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies? There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the whole world.

  A few letters have arrived for James but they are all from scholars. It appears that my cousin was quite a well-known orientalist who corresponded with learned men all over the world. I have sent the letters on to a man at the British Museum who rang me up asking about the fate of James’s books. I asked the BM man round to look at the books and he came yesterday. When he saw all the stuff in the flat he nearly fainted with emotion and cupidity.

  I cannot think what to do about James’s poems. Yes, James’s POEMS! I think I have not mentioned these before! So James did, in some sense at any rate, do what he said he would do: join the army and become a poet. There, in the otherwise bare top drawer of this desk, they were, and indeed there they are: all neatly typed out and filling several large looseleaf books. A ‘personal relic’ no doubt, but with no directions, no covering letter. Toby Ellesmere, who, as I think I mentioned, is now a publisher, has got wind of their existence and has rung up about them twice. Perhaps James mentioned them to him sometime. He has never seen them, and I have not shown them to him. In fact I cannot bring myself to look at them, even to glance at them, for fear that they should turn out to be embarrassingly bad! I had almost rather destroy them unread.

  It occurs to me that the only lines of poetry I ever heard James quoting, and he quoted them often, were Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not!

  Of course this chattering diary is a façade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretences are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

  I have had another letter from Angie, sending another photo and repeating her kind offer.

  Gradually autumn is taking charge of London. It is remarkable how early it seems to arrive. The leaves of the plane trees, yellow and red and brightly spotted, appear like little messages stuck upon the damp pavements. Cox’s Orange Pippins are to be found in the shops. I am storing them on the top shelf of my larder. I walk down the street to the embankment every morning and evening and see the turbulent skies over the august towers of Battersea Power Station, and the eternal drama of the Thames rising and falling. I wait. Peregrine is to receive some sort of award for his services to peace. Rosina has gone to America on a job. I have had lunch with Rosemary, with Miss Kaufman, with poor old Fabian, with a frenetic young actor called Erasmus Blick. Of course I have not troubled to record that I am constantly badgered by theatre people to return to the old game. When will they realize I am not interested? I have silenced my telephone with a screw of paper. I have not entered a theatre, even to see Mr Blick’s new Hamlet, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread.

  Yes, I wonder if I shall ever write that book about Clement? It is as if this book has taken up forever the space which I might have given to her. How unjust this seems now. Clement was the reality of my life, its bread and its wine. She made me, she invented me, she created me, she was my university, my partner, my teacher, my mother, later my child, my soul’s mate, my absolute mistress. She, and not Hartley, was the reason why I never married. She was certainly the reason why I did not seek and find Hartley at a time when it might have been quite easy to do so. Why did I not try harder, longer? Clement stopped me. In memory I have extended the time of my frantic craving for the vanished Hartley well on into Clement’s regime, but the memory must be misleading. How could Clement not have cured me? Clement when I first met her was a dazzling figure, beautiful and clever and at the top of her fame; and still young, though I thought of her as old. I was twenty. She was thirty-nine, forty. My God, she was younger than Lizzie is now. When I first met her I was a green awkward ignorant graceless boy, it is a miracle that she ever looked at me. Later on, I treated her coldly, her possessiveness irritated me, I found her love a nuisance. I went away, she went away, yet I always came back and she always came back. We never really got lost, and at the end when she was dying I drove all the others out.

  Clement was a long time dying. They had the headlines set up in type for weeks. I lay on the bed beside her and stroked her face, which had become, just very lately, so much more wrinkled with pain and fear. My fingers can still remember those soft wrinkles and the tears that quietly filled them. She said she wanted to die in a storm of noise and for days we had the hi-fi turned up playing Wagner and we drank whisky and together we waited. It was the strangest waiting I ever remember for it was and it was not waiting. There was a sort of intense timel
essness in the way in which we kept each other company. Our fear divided us, her fear, my fear, of the event: two different sharp fears which we had to overcome by a constant force of mutual attention, laying our hands upon each other’s hearts. We became tired and we turned off the noise and we wept and still we waited. My God, Clement’s tears, how much I had seen of them before and how much they had sickened me. Now I felt they would make a saint of me, and perhaps for a month they almost did. In the end she died when I was asleep. Every morning I had thought I might find her dead, but had then seen her breathing, the little rhythmic rising and falling of the bedclothes that covered her body which had become so shrunken and small. Then one day there was no movement and I saw her eyes open and her face changed.

  That time of attentive mourning for her death was quite unlike the black blank horror of the thing itself. We had mourned together, trying to soothe each other’s pain. But that shared pain was so much less than the torment of her vanishing, the terrible lived time of her eternal absence. How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.