The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I didn’t say that! Look, I’m going to talk to Lizzie upstairs. You stay here. I’ll come back.’

  ‘You’d better come back. I’ll give you five minutes. If you two set off for London I’ll follow you and smash you into the ditch.’

  ‘I promise I’ll come back. And, yes, I’ll tell her. Just please don’t break anything. Come, Lizzie.’

  Lizzie picked up her scarf from the table and her handbag from the floor. She did not look at Rosina. I led her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. When we got to the upper landing I hesitated. The bead curtain was immobile and I decided not to pass through it. I led Lizzie into the little middle room and shut the door. The room was dark, since not much light was coming through the long window which gave onto the drawing room, either because of the fog or because I had failed to raise the blinds. It was also empty, since I had removed the table which was still lying in the rocky crevasse where I had dropped it on my way to the tower. There was a square of threadbare carpet. There was also, now suddenly conspicuous and rather sinister, the curly cast-iron lamp bracket rather high up on the wall. The carpet emitted a damp smell when trodden on.

  ‘I’m so frightened of that woman. Charles, you aren’t tied up with her, are you?’

  ‘No, no, no, she’s just persecuting me. Lizzie—’

  ‘I don’t know what she was saying, but it doesn’t matter. Listen, Charles darling, I’m yours, and I must have been mad not to say so at once. I was stupidly frightened, I felt I just couldn’t bear another broken heart, I thought I wanted peace, and I imagined I could check myself from running straight back into that old terrible madness, but it’s no good, I’ve run back, I’m mad again. I felt sorry for Gilbert and I wanted time to think of a compromise but there isn’t any compromise. I don’t care what happens or what you do to me, I don’t care if I die of it. I don’t want you to be unselfish and scrupulous and generous, I want you to be the lord and the king as you’ve always been. I love you, Charles, and I belong to you and I’ll do from this moment on forever whatever you ask of me.’

  We stood staring at each other and trembling in that little dark cell-like room underneath the cast-iron lamp bracket. ‘Lizzie, forgive me, it was a mistake. Sweet Lizzie, it’s no use, we cannot ever be together, I can’t take you and keep you like I thought, I can’t be the king any more. I’m sorry I wrote to you. I’m very fond of you, I love you, but not like that. It was just an empty idea, an abstract idea, like you said, you were quite right, it wouldn’t have worked, it wouldn’t have lasted. You see, I’ve met someone else, no, not Rosina, a woman I knew and loved long ago, you remember I told you, the first one. So I can’t ever be yours, little Lizzie, and you can’t be mine. You must go back to Gilbert, make him happy, let things be as they were. Oh please believe me and please forgive me. It was a mistake.’

  ‘A mistake,’ said Lizzie, looking down at her shiny black high-heeled shoes which were wet from the grass of the causeway. ‘I see.’ She lifted her head and looked at me, her face crimson, her lower lip trembling, her eyes vague and terrible.

  ‘You do remember about that girl, I told you once, well I met her again, she’s here and—’

  ‘I’ll say goodbye then.’

  ‘Lizzie, darling, don’t go like that, we’ll be friends, won’t we, won’t we, like you asked in your first letter. I’ll come and see you and Gilbert—’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be with Gilbert any more. Things can’t be as they were. I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

  ‘Lizzie, just hold my hand for a moment—’

  She gave me her limp hand. It felt damp and unresponsive and small and I could not continue the gesture into an embrace. She withdrew her hand and began to fiddle in her handbag. She brought out a fragment of the mirror which had been broken by Rosina’s kick, then a small white handkerchief. As soon as she had the handkerchief in her hand she began very quietly to cry.

  I felt so touched and sad, and yet so oddly proudly detached and somehow sentimental, as I seemed to see in a second, all rolled up into a ball and all vanishing, some life that I might have had with Lizzie, my Cherubino, my Ariel, my Puck, my son: some life we might have had together if I had been different, and she had been different. Now it was gone, whatever happened next, and the world was changed. I repeated with a kind of sad self-tormenting pleasure, ‘No, Lizzie, dear heart, little brave Lizzie, it cannot be. I am so grateful to you for your—for your—’

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Lizzie, speaking almost calmly through her quiet tears, ‘it’s funny. The drive from London, it’s such a long way, I hired a car, I didn’t drive Gilbert’s, all the way I had a sort of marvellous love conversation with you, if only it hadn’t been for that long drive, it all came to a climax, like a coronation, I was thinking how surprised and pleased you’d be to see me, and how perfectly happy we’d both be and we’d laugh and laugh like we used to, and I kept picturing it and I felt such love and such joy—even though I was saying to myself that I might end up with a broken heart and this time it would kill me—but I thought I don’t care how it ends or how much I suffer, so long as he wants me and takes me in his arms—and now it’s ended before it even began, and I never imagined it would all be spoilt and broken at the start—and now I’ve got nothing—except my love for you—all wakened up again and rejected—all wakened up again—forever and ever—’

  ‘Lizzie, it will be quiet, it will sleep, it did sleep.’

  She shook her head, gripping her handkerchief in her teeth.

  ‘Lizzie, I’ll write to you.’

  Her tears had ceased. She put away the handkerchief and the broken mirror and unwound the yellow scarf. ‘Don’t write, Charles, it’s kinder. It’s funny, I thought it was the ending then, and it wasn’t, it’s the ending now. Please don’t write to me if you want to be kind. I don’t want—any more—’

  She crumpled up the scarf and stuffed it in her pocket. Then she turned and quickly swung open the door, nearly running into Rosina who was standing just outside. Rosina jumped back, and Lizzie ran away down the stairs, leaning hard on the banister, her high-heeled shoes clattering and slithering. I tried to follow her, but Rosina grasped my arm, exerting quite a lot of force and bracing one of her booted feet against my foot. We reeled against the wall. ‘Let her go.’ The front door banged.

  I stood for a moment staring at the bead curtain which was swaying and clicking. Then I walked slowly downstairs. Rosina followed me. We went into the kitchen and sat down again at the table.

  ‘Don’t worry, Charles, that lusty little animal won’t break its heart.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Now I suppose you want me to discuss poor Lizzie with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Poor old Charles, you’re demoted as God.’

  ‘OK. Please go.’

  ‘If you ever set up with Lizzie Scherer I’ll kill both of you.’

  ‘Oh Rosina, don’t be stupid, don’t be vulgar. Just please go away. Well, I suppose you’d better let Lizzie get a start if you’re going back to London.’

  ‘I’m not, I’m going to the Raven Hotel to have a very good lunch alone. Then I’m going to Manchester to do some filming. I shall leave you to your thoughts and I hope they hurt. I won’t interfere with your caper with the bearded lady on one condition. ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That you promise to tell me everything about it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Get up, Charles.’

  I rose mechanically to my feet. Rosina came round the table and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me. She gave me one of her wet kisses. ‘Well, goodbye, I’ll be back.’

  The front door banged again, and a moment later I heard the departing scream of the little red car. For a moment only I hoped that Lizzie might return. Then I thought what luck it was that Lizzie had not come running to me after my first letter.

  I went into the next room and tried to light the f
ire but failed. There was not enough kindling wood. I was feeling thoroughly disturbed by Lizzie’s crying and Rosina’s kiss. I was miserable about Lizzie but in rather a blank way and I was reluctant to think about her. I wanted her sympathy. I was already regretting my thoroughly vulgar conversation with Rosina. It had seemed a smart thing to do at the time, to tell her about Hartley, but now I was filled with forebodings. In effect, I had given Rosina another weapon. Then I began to wonder a little about cousin James and how he had come unstuck. Homosexuality? Or had the army decided that a crazy Buddhist was a bad security risk? My neck was beginning to hurt where Rosina’s red finger nails had reached it. I wanted to take my temperature but could not find the thermometer.

  There was no fog now. Twilight had just been overtaken by darkness, and a bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance onto the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees. The sky was a clear blackish-blue, entertaining the abundant light of the moon but unillumined by it. The earth and its objects were a thick fuzzy brown. Shadows were strong, and the brooding identity of everything I passed so powerful that I kept nervously looking back. The silence was vast, different in quality from the foggy silence of the morning, punctured now and then by an owl’s cry or the barking of a distant dog.

  I did not go through the village. I walked along the coast road in the direction of the harbour, through the defile which I called ‘the Khyber Pass’, where the big yellow rocks had invaded the land, heaping themselves up against the side of the hill into a lumpy mound in which a narrow cleft had been cut to allow the passage of the road. The rocks in the moonlight were dark brown, but covered with innumerable sparkling points of light where the moon caught the tiny facets of the quartz. I went through the dark cleft and on past the harbour to where, a little way further on, there was a footpath which led up the hill, skirting a wood, and joined the tarmac road where it petered out just beyond the bungalows. All this I had checked in a daylight reconnaissance, when I had also worked out how to get into the garden of Nibletts. This was not difficult, since the lower end of the garden was separated only by a line of posts, joined by slack wire, from the long sloping field, full of gorse bushes and outcrops of rock, which bordered the mounting footpath on the village side. The main drawback to my expedition, apart from the nightmarish possibility of being discovered, was that when it was late enough for me to get into the garden unobserved, it might also be late enough for the married pair to be in bed. There was also of course the possibility that they might be watching television in silence.

  I had earlier rejected the idea of spying on Hartley and Ben, not for moral reasons, but because it made me feel sick with emotion and terror. A marriage is so hideously private. Whoever illicitly draws back that curtain may well be stricken, and in some way that he can least foresee, by an avenging deity. Some horrible and quite unexpected revelation could persecute the miscreant henceforth forever with an almost obscene haunting. And I had to struggle here with my own superstitious horror of the married state, that unimaginable condition of intimacy and mutual bondage. However, the logic of the situation now forced this dangerous and distasteful adventure upon me. It was the next step, the attempt to answer the next question. I had to discover, in so far as I could possibly do so, what this marriage was really like and what these two were for each other.

  The moon, shining from the sea, was casting the shadows of the wooden posts onto the sloping lawn of Nibletts. The grass looked as if it was covered with frost. I had already discerned, from below, that the curtained ‘picture window’ of the sitting room was glowing with light. I stepped over the slack wire and began to walk very quietly up the lawn in the direction of the house, listening to my practically noiseless footsteps in the already dewy grass, listening to my deep breathing and to the hurtful beating of my heart. In spite of a little rain earlier, the ground was hard after the sunny weather and I did not think I would leave noticeable footprints. At about fifteen yards from the house I stopped. Except for a small vent at the top, the window was closed. The curtains were unlined, and the light within illumined, like stained glass, a bright design of green parrots in a lemon tree. There was a narrow slit in the centre where the curtains failed to meet. I moved again, then listened. There was a sound of voices. Television? Avoiding the dangerous area of the slit, and feeling as if I were about to hurtle into space, I now nerved myself to move steadily, silently, right up to the window and to kneel, touching the brick wall, and then to sit down with my head just below the level of the low sill.

  Anticipating encounters with rose bushes, though not foreseeing the dew, I was wearing a mackintosh. The moonlight had showed me the whereabouts of the various flower beds, but as I approached the house I must have been dazzled by the lighted window, or else become blind with fear, since I seemed to have sat down on a rose bush. There was a faint awful crackling sound and a small sharp spear pierced the calf of my leg. I sat, awkward, frozen, leaning back against the wall, my eyes and my mouth wide open, suddenly staring at the vast moonlit sea below me and waiting with horror for some terrible ‘Who’s there?’

  But the voices continued and now I could hear them quite clearly. How easy it is to spy on unsuspecting people. The experience that followed was so weird, and so literally maddening to me, that I will not attempt to describe my feelings. I will simply, as in a play, give you the dialogue. It will be clear who is speaking.

  ‘Why did he come here then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You keep saying “I don’t know, I don’t know”, can’t you say anything else, or are you mentally deficient? Of course you know, you must know. Do you think I’m a perfect fool? I’m not that thick.’

  ‘You don’t believe it—’

  ‘Don’t believe what?’

  ‘You don’t believe what you say—’

  ‘What on earth do you mean, what do you mean, what did I say that you think I don’t believe? Am I supposed to be a liar then?’

  ‘You say you think I knew, but you can’t think that, it’s insane—’

  ‘So I’m either mad or a liar. Is that it? Is that it?’

  ‘No, no—’

  ‘I don’t understand you, you’re babbling. Why did he come here?’

  ‘I don’t know, it was an accident, it was a chance—’

  ‘Funny sort of chance. My God, you’re clever, it’s the one bloody thing that would torment me more than anything else. Sometimes I think you want to drive me out of my mind and make me mad enough to—’

  ‘Darling, dear heart, dear Binkie, please don’t—I’m so sorry oh I’m so sorry—’

  ‘It’s no use saying that you’re sorry or that you don’t know, that’s all you say over and over again. I’d like to split open your head and find out what you do know. Why don’t you explain at last? Why don’t you admit at last? It’s been going on long enough. It’d be a relief to me if you’d only tell me—’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell!’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘You did believe it.’

  ‘I never believed it, I just pretended to, Christ, I wanted to forget, I got tired of living with it all, I got tired of living with your dreams.’

  ‘There weren’t any dreams.’

  ‘Oh you bloody—’

  ‘There weren’t any dreams.’

  ‘Don’t tell lies and don’t shout at me either. Oh God, the lies you’ve told me! I’ve lived in a sort of soup of lies ever since the start. And then the boy—’

  ‘No, no—’

  ‘Well, I was pretty thick about it all, but I just couldn’t credit—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Christ, and when I think of other lucky men with their wives and their families and their simple decent lives and ordinary love and kindness, while here—’

  ‘We’ve had ordinary love and kindness and—’

  ‘It’s only been a pretence because we we
re both tired, it was too exhausting to be honest. We got tired of telling each other the truth about the hellish cage we live in, we had to rest sometimes and pretend things were all right when they weren’t and put up with this sham, this bloody sham you call a marriage. We had to stop stabbing ourselves and each other with the ghastly truth. So now we’re both sunk in lies, your lies, they’re everywhere like a stinking bog, we’re drowning in them. And, Jesus, I thought it might be better when we got away, when we got away to the sea, I thought at least I’d have a garden, I thought—But then lo and behold he’s here! That’s funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t—You do like it here, you did like it here—’

  ‘Well, don’t say that to me now, do you want me to spit in your face? We just pretended to be nice quiet people—’

  ‘You didn’t pretend much.’

  ‘Don’t start that again.’

  ‘Well then, don’t you.’

  ‘You’d better be careful. Another thing I’ve got against you is that you’ve made me into such a—you’ve made me so bad—oh Christ, why can’t we get out? If only you’d tell the truth for once. I just want to know where I am. Why did that man come here, to this village, here to this very place?’

  ‘You keep asking the same questions again and again. I don’t know. I didn’t want him here—’

  ‘Liar. How often have you seen him?’

  ‘Just that one time.’

  ‘Liar. I actually saw you with him twice. And God knows how many more times you’ve been with him. Why do you lie to me so stupidly? And you put him up to calling round here.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to see him again.’

  ‘I don’t want to!’

  ‘It’s the past, the past, the bloody past—there’s never been anything for us, everything’s spoilt, you’ve spoilt everything, you and your—’

  ‘Darling, dear dear Binkie, don’t—’