by Iris Murdoch
“Oh Mingo, Mingo,” said Pierce. He pushed the dog up a little on to the slimy incline of the seaweed and laid his head against the wet warm flank, holding himself close to the rock with a stiffening grip. Hot tears began to run suddenly down his face.
Thirty-five
“WHATEVER shall we do?” said Paula. She looked at Ducane. Barbara clutched the sleeve of his coat. The twins clutched each other.
“A motor boat?” said Ducane.
“There’s one in the village,” said Paula, “but by the time—”
“It’s hired out for the afternoon,” said Edward. “We saw it going away.”
“We’d better ring up the coastguards,” said Ducane. “Not that that—How long is it since he went in?”
“It must be nearly fifteen minutes,” said Barbara.
“More,” said Henrietta.
“You see,” said Barbara, her voice becoming high and tearful, “I didn’t really believe him at first. I kept waiting for him to come out again. Then I suddenly felt sure he meant it. Then it was quite a long way to swim back.”
“We were there too,” said Edward. “I was sure he meant it, I said so at once.”
“We may see the young fool swimming back any—”
“No, no, no!” wailed Barbara. “He’s inside, he’s going to stay inside, I know it!”
Ducane held his head. He thought as quickly as he could, his eyes fixed on Paula, who seemed to be trying desperately to help him. “How long is it before the entrance closes?”
“Half an hour,” said Edward.
“Twenty-five minutes,” said Henrietta.
Ducane looked at his watch. “Look,” he said to Paula. “We’d better assume the worst. You give the alarm. Ring the coastguards, ring the village. If you see a motor boat stop it. Find out if anyone knows the cave. Find out if there’s frogman gear available and anyone who can use it. Though I don’t see what the hell—I’ll swim round now and investigate. He may be hanging about just inside the entrance trying to frighten us.”
“We’ll come with you!” cried the children.
“No, you won’t,” said Ducane. “You’re chilled, you’ve been in too long.” All three children were shivering. “Anyway it’s you Pierce is trying to impress, especially you, Barbara. If he thinks you’re there he may not come out. You go along with Paula.”
“John, you won’t go into the cave, will you?” cried Paula.
“No, no. Just a little way. I’ll probably meet Pierce swimming back. Go on, the rest of you, and don’t panic.”
Ducane took off his jacket and his tie. He kicked off his shoes and socks and stepped out of his trousers. “Go on!” he shouted at them.
Paula and the children set off over the pebbles at a run. Ducane put his shoes on again and began to run in the opposite direction along the beach to the point where the red cliff descended. He abandoned his shoes and slipped into the sea.
He swam with a quick vigorous sidestroke, keeping as close as he could to the foot of the cliff. He could feel the tug of one of those currents which made the region unpopular with bathers. It seemed to be coming against him and his progress was slow. He had never felt swimming to be so like an agonised strenuous standing still. He was panting already. The sleeves of his shirt, now clinging, now ballooned with water impeded him and, still swimming, he began to try to pull the shirt off. He got it over his head and abandoned it in the water. Then the current seemed to give as he turned the point of rock which took him into the next bay and out of sight of Trescombe.
Now nothing was visible except the still sea and the sky and the inward and outward curve of the cliff which hid the land on both sides. Ducane felt suddenly very small and alone. The red cliff, which close to showed a brownish terracotta streaked with slatey blue, descended sheer into the sea, looking so dry and crumbling it seemed it must dissolve at the touch of the water. A broad stripe along its lower half marked the level of the high tide, and seaweeds, baked already in the sun since the sea had last abandoned them, hung in dark ugly bunches like superfluous hair. Up above clumps of white daisies floated, adhering somehow to the rising wall. Ducane could smell their light odour mingled with the baked sea smell of the half-dried seaweed.
He could see the entrance to the cave now, an irregular dark brown streak above the water. As he approached it he looked at his watch, which seemed to be still going. On Henrietta’s estimate there was just under fifteen minutes before the mouth was closed. A few more strokes brought Ducane suddenly in out of the sunshine, and as the shadow of the cliff fell upon him he called out, “Pierce! Pierce!” Silence.
The roof of the cave was about seven feet above the water at the entrance. Ducane swam a little farther in, noticing that the roof seemed to fall a little. Farther on it rose into invisibility in the darkness and the cave grew wider. Ducane swam into the larger space and called again.
Ducane had said that he would swim to the cave because that was the only thing he could think of to do. He had vaguely imagined that he would easily be able to find Pierce and would use his authority to make the boy come out. Now everything seemed different. The sheer solitude of the sunlit bay, followed by this plunge into the cool half-dark, had already done something to him. He felt removed from reality. He called again. He became aware that the sea was now running fairly fast in through the cave mouth and had already carried him farther away from the entrance. He swam a few strokes back to make sure he could easily get out again. Then he allowed the current to carry him a little farther on in the darkness, still shouting at intervals.
As Ducane swam in the great pool of the cavern he had a sudden mental image of the picture in Through the Looking Glass of Alice and the mouse swimming in the Pool of Tears. He had a clear memory of the grace with which Alice swam, her dress so elegantly spread out in the water. Something about that picture must have affected him when he was a child. Girls and their dresses. He called again. Silence.
He could see more clearly now in the brown tea-coloured light of the cavern, and discerned to his left a blackness in the cavern wall which seemed like a hole. He swam towards it, breast stroke now, keeping his head well up and listening. Then it was as if someone had touched his head very lightly with a black cushion and he had swum in through the entrance of the hole.
Ducane was not afraid of the sea, but he was very much afraid of confined spaces. He back-paddled, touching the wall. Then he called out. A very very faint cry answered. Ducane let the water sweep him back against the wall. He listened to the silence which was edged by the faint hiss of the moving water. He turned away from the dim light behind him and looked into the jet dark and called again. He had not imagined it. The faint cry replied, eerie, distant, lost.
Ducane began to have a new kind of picture. He saw Pierce somewhere at the end of the tunnel with cramp perhaps, hurt in some way, trapped in some way, calling out desperately for help. At the same time, as if the darkness itself had become a screen upon which the contents of his mind could be projected physically, he saw before him with absolute clarity the sallow anxious face of Mary Clothier. “I’m coming!” he shouted, and launched out into the current.
The faint light behind him diminished and went out. The current now took him so quickly along that he scarcely needed to swim. The tunnel seemed to be turning sharply. Ducane caught hold of something, wet smooth rounded rock, and tried to hold on. Then he was whirled away by the current and twisted around as if some great hand had spun him between its fingers. He swallowed some water.
Ducane felt panic. He reached out trying to find something to hold on to. He was afraid he might at any moment strike his head violently against some projection of rock. The thick shut-in darkness frightened him. He struck his knee against a knob of rock just beneath the water and managed by resting against it and bracing his hands against the side of the tunnel to stop himself from moving. He called out as loudly as he could:
“Pierce! Pierce!”
“Pierce! Pierce!”
It’s an echo, Ducane said to himself. He said it coldly, uttering it articulately inside his head. He called again, “Hello!”
“Hello!”
I must get back, he thought. He let go of his rock and struck out vigorously to swim back the way he had come. But the strong current seized hold of him and hurried him with it, on, on.
Ducane was now very much afraid. He fought his way to the wall where the water seemed less swift and tried to cling to it. The absolute darkness confused his sense of direction, confused his sense of his body. He had to use mental imagery to tell himself how to swim. He thought to himself, strength will do it, every bit of strength I have, supernatural strength. He began half to edge, half to swim, along the wall of rock in what seemed to be the direction from which he had come. He moved very slowly, but at least now he seemed to be moving. He thought he was coming back to the place where the tunnel turned. For a moment he seemed entirely out of the current. Then he sensed a change of direction and the tunnel seemed airier, wider, and the force of the water less strong. He must be nearly back in the main cavern.
Ducane felt an enlargement and the tunnel wall, which he had been touching, disappeared. He could swim quite easily now. He took several strokes. He must have reached the main cavern. But it was dark now. There was a faint greenish line ahead of him of subaqueous light. But the low sun-streaked gap of the cavern mouth was not to be seen. The cave was closed.
Now there were new pictures. Ducane seemed to have been swimming for some time. Coloured images appeared upon the darkness with such brightness that it seemed as if he must be able to see the cavern walls by their light. He saw Alice standing upon the mantelpiece, at the moment when the looking glass begins to turn into a silvery gauze through which she can pass. He saw Mary Clothier’s face, no longer anxious but looking tender and sad. We have both died, he thought, and then could not recall who ‘we’ were. Himself and Pierce of course. He called out to Pierce at intervals but received no reply. The sound echoed close about him as if unable to penetrate further, but telling him at least that the channel along which he was swimming was still reasonably large.
He was beginning to feel cold and his limbs were very tired, but the swimming had now become automatic, as if he were in a natural element. Something very dreadful moved along with him, just above his head, a noiseless black crow made of ectoplasm. It was fear, panic fear, such as would disfigure a man and make him disintegrate and scream. Ducane was very conscious of its presence. He tried to breathe slowly and evenly. He pictured the cavern rising, rising, into the dry safety of the cliff side. He tried not to picture other things. At least the cavern went on and there was nothing else to do but to go on with it, to go on and on as far as one could go. But so far there had been nothing to touch, as he constantly tested his surroundings with outstretched hands, except the sheer walls of wet stone containing the moving water. No cranny of pebbles, no strand, no rock even on which to rest. And now he was seeing Alice falling down the rabbit hole, falling slowly, slowly.
Ducane thought, in this sort of darkness I could pass within a yard of the way to safety and not know. It’s all chance, utter chance. The current was not very fast now and he could easily swim to and fro across it touching the walls of the channel which were now about fifteen feet apart. The channel seemed to be narrowing very slightly. There were irregularities in the wall, but these were merely bumps, projections, worn to a slimy roundness by the water which proceeded onward into the depths of the cliff along its black interminable pipe. The air was still fresh, but it carried a faintly rotten sea smell, as if the water itself were decomposing, and indeed it did seem as if the stuff were becoming thicker and oilier. Amid the extinction or derangement of all his other senses Ducane smelt the smell with a monstrous clarity as if the smell itself were a black structure of gluey air and water within which, perhaps without moving at all, he made, more and more feebly, the yearning movement of swimming, of praying.
It seemed to him that he had not called out for some time and he called now, hoarsely, not very loudly, “Pierce!”
“Hello.”
“Pierce!”
“Hello there.”
The cry was from near. Ducane stopped swimming. Everything was changed. He inhabited his body again, he felt his extremities moving in the water. All round him he could feel things resuming their sizes. The darkness was no longer a stuff of which he was part, but a veil, an accident.
“Where are you?”
“Here, here.”
Ducane was suddenly brought up against a ridge of rock, its surface soft with slime. He could feel the water dividing about him, holding him against the rock.
“Where?”
“This way.”
Ducane edged round the rock and let the water take him. His knees suddenly touched bottom, then his hand. He was no longer swimming but crawling. He felt something touch his shoulder and grip him. The touch was painful, as if dazzling. He realised he must be almost anaesthetised by cold. He crawled further and lay full length. He could feel pebbles under his hand.
“I am terribly sorry,” said Pierce’s voice beside him.
The earnest serious boy’s voice sounded strange in the blackness, with its ring of the ordinary world, apologising.
“Could you just try to massage me or something,” said Ducane. “I feel absolutely numb.” The brilliant pain returned and moved over his back. He began to twist and stretch his limbs. He now felt so tired he could not understand how a moment ago he could have been capable of swimming. “What’s that?”
“It’s Mingo. He followed me in. I am so very sorry—”
“That’s enough. Is there any way on here?”
“I don’t know,” said Pierce’s voice. “I’ve just arrived. At any rate we’re out of the water, for the moment. I tried one of the other channels and it just ended in a wall and the roof was pretty low so I thought I’d better get out quick. It wasn’t too easy to get back against the tide. Then I came in here and reached this—place—and then I heard you call.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Are you warmer now?”
“Yes.” If I don’t drown I shall die of exposure, Ducane thought. He sat up, chafing his arms and legs. His flesh felt alien to him, like ice-cold putty.
“We’d better move on,” said Pierce. “This one may be a cul-de-sac too. Or shall I go ahead and look and then come back for you?”
“No, no. I’ll come too.” For God’s sake don’t leave me, he thought. He got to his knees and then to his feet. Something touched his head lightly. It was the roof of the tunnel. “What’s that noise?”
“I think it’s the tide running through holes in the rock.”
There was a slightly irregular moaning sound nearby, punctuated by soft hollow reports.
“That’s the water hitting the roof of the next cave,” said Pierce. “It seems to be getting more excited.”
The water, which had flowed so calmly on into the darkness, now seemed in these more confined inner spaces to be becoming violent. Ducane felt an impact at his feet. “Get on, Pierce. The bloody sea’s beginning to arrive.”
“Have you got shoes?”
“Get on.”
They began to shuffle forward in the blackness. The ground seemed to be rising a little but in such complete darkness it was hard to tell, and Ducane’s feet, contracted into rounded hobbling balls of pain, could not discern whether he was still walking in the water. The low keening noise and the echoing slapping noise continued.
“It goes on anyway,” said Pierce. His voice sounded a little high and wavery. The noise behind them, which was increasing a little, was hard to bear. “You’ll have to stoop here.”
“It’s so damn black. Keep on talking, I don’t want to lose you.”
“Oh God, it’s coming right down. I think we’ll have to crawl.”
“What’s the point of this,” said Ducane, stopping. He had an image of crawling onward, onward, to end wedged in some nar
row pocket of wet rock waiting for the tide. “If this one’s packing up we’d better try another one while there’s still time. The water’s just behind us.”
“It’s here,” said Pierce in a cracked voice. “Stay still, I’m coming back past you.”
Ducane stood rigid and felt Pierce’s hands fumble him while the wet jersey slid past. There was barely room in the space for them to pass each other. There was a damp warmth on his legs as Mingo scrabbled by after Pierce.
In a moment Pierce’s voice came out of the darkness. “I’m afraid the water has practically filled the entrance. It seems to be coming up much faster now. We’ve had it in here one way or the other.”
Ducane gripped himself, almost physically, as one might grip and shake an alter ego, and then realised that he had hold of Pierce who had blundered up against him. “Well, we must go on, then.” Ducane’s voice was high too, raised as if to cross a vast auditorium. It seemed to echo away into the hidden spaces and honeycombs of the dark.
The water was making a new noise now, a grinding sucking sound of advance and retreat over pebbles in a narrow place. Pierce, who had got past Ducane, moved away.
Ducane ran his knuckles along the slimy descending rock and began to stoop. Bent double he moved forward, reaching out to touch the limp tail of Pierce’s jersey. Mingo passed him again, a long sliver of darkened warmth. The roof rose a little, then began to fall again. It was difficult to tell if they were going upward. Movement had become something different, a slow and painful pistoning of bones inside a mass of black matter.
“We are rising, aren’t we, Pierce?”
“I think so.”
“Are we walking in water?”
“No, we’re out of the water. Watch out, the roof’s coming down again.”
Ducane was moving three-legged, one hand touching the pebbly floor of the cave. His head came into contact with Pierce’s back. pierce seemed to be on his knees.
“What is it?”
“It’s come to an end.”
“Feel, feel, feel all round,” said Ducane. He moved his hands about him, stroking the smooth damp chunks of solid blackness which hemmed them in.