by Iris Murdoch
‘I don’t want to talk about him,’ I said. And I thought, if only I had a car and could drive, I’d take her right away now, this instant.
‘Charles, listen, please, I haven’t come to you like you think, like you said in the letter you wanted, that isn’t possible. I’ve just come to tell you some things and—oh Charles—it’s so extraordinary to see you. I thought it could never be, that it was a sort of impossibility of the world, that we two could ever be together again. I never thought I ever would—see you again and touch you—it’s like a dream.’
‘That’s better. Only it’s not a dream. Your life without me has been a dream. You are awaking from a dream, a nightmare. Oh why did you ever leave me, how could you have done, I nearly died of grief—’
‘We can’t talk about that now—’
‘Yes we can, I want to talk about the old days, I want us to remember everything, to understand everything, to relive everything, to establish ourselves together as one being, one being that ought never to have been divided. Why did you leave me, Hartley, why did you run away?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t remember—’
‘You must remember. It’s like a riddle. You’ve got to remember. ’
‘I can’t, I can’t—’
‘Hartley, you’ve got to. You said that I wouldn’t be faithful to you. Was it really that? You can’t have thought that, you knew how much I loved you!’
‘You went to London.’
‘Yes, but I had to, I wasn’t leaving you, I thought about you all the time, you know that, I wrote to you every day. It wasn’t anyone else, was it? It wasn’t him?’ Strangely enough this terrible thought had only just this moment come to me.
‘No.’
‘Hartley, did you know him then, did you know him before you left me?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Of course you can remember!’
‘Please stop, please.’
The way she spoke these words, almost mechanically, with a kind of evasive animal instinct, words so like those which I had overheard her say so recently, made me want to cry out with pain and rage and a sort of awful pity for her.
‘Did you know him then?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter, every little tiny thing matters and must be found again and must be picked up and must be redeemed, we’ve got to relive the past and clarify it and purify it, we’ve got to save each other at last, to make each other whole again, don’t you see—’
‘I didn’t know him then, he was sort of engaged to one of my cousins, to Edna, you remember, well, no, you won’t, and then she dropped him and I felt sorry for him—’
‘But where did you meet him, was it after you ran away?’
‘Yes, I went away to one of my aunties at Stoke-on-Trent, where Edna was. I didn’t know him when we were together. It wasn’t that, it wasn’t anything, I didn’t want you to be an actor, it wasn’t anything, please don’t.’
‘But, Hartley, do be calm and answer my questions, I’m not angry with you and it is important. You didn’t want me to be an actor! You never said so.’
‘I did, I wanted you to go to the university.’
‘But, Hartley, it can’t have been just that.’
‘It wasn’t just anything, oh don’t upset me so, we were too much like brother and sister and you were so sort of bossy and I decided I didn’t want to.’ Some tears spilled again. ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’
I brought her a clean tea towel and she wearily wiped her eyes, her face, her neck. A button had come off the tight yellow dress at her breast. I had an impulse to grab her and tear the dress.
I sat down again. ‘Hartley, if you had all these misgivings why didn’t you utter them? We could have done something about it. It was so terrible to go away without a word, it was wicked.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had to go like that, it was the only way, it wasn’t easy. Oh it’s cold, it’s so cold, I must put my coat on again.’ She put it on and pulled it round her, turning up the collar.
‘How can it have happened, you can’t simply have decided, there must be something else, something you haven’t told me. Do you remember that day—’
‘Charles, there isn’t time, and I really can’t remember. It’s so long ago, it’s a lifetime ago.’
‘To me it’s yesterday. I’ve been living with it ever since, reliving it and recalling it and going over and over it and wondering what went wrong and what happened to you and where you were. I think I’ve wondered where you were every day of my life. And I’ve been alone all this time, I’ve stayed in freedom, because of you. It’s yesterday, Hartley. That was the only real time I ever lived through.’
‘Alone. I’m sorry.’
It took me a moment to realize that she was not being sarcastic. Alone? Well, yes. Her tone suggested that she had not imagined, not speculated.
‘You say you just decided you didn’t want me, but that isn’t an explanation, I want to know—’
‘Oh stop—it just didn’t happen. If I’d loved you enough I would have married you, if you’d loved me enough you would have married me. There aren’t any reasons.’
‘You say if I’d loved you enough—Don’t drive me mad! I loved you to the limit, I still do, I tried to the limit, I didn’t run away, I didn’t marry anyone else, it was all your fault, you’ll drive me crazy if you start—’
‘We mustn’t talk of these things—we’re just sort of—plunging about—and it doesn’t mean anything now. Look, I must tell you certain things only you won’t listen—’
I thought, I mustn’t go mad with emotion, I must stop questioning her now, though I will find out, I will. ‘Hartley, have some wine.’ I poured out a glass of the Spanish wine and she began mechanically to sip it. ‘Have an olive.’
‘I don’t like olives, they’re sour. Please listen to me—’
‘I’m sorry it’s so cold here, this house manages to be cold even when—All right, you tell me things. But just remember, you’re here and you stay—whatever happened or didn’t happen in the past you belong to me now. But tell me one thing, that night when you were on the road here and that car shone its lights on you, were you coming to see me then, that night?’
‘No—but I—I just wanted to look at your house. It was a woodwork night, you see.’
‘You wanted to look at my house. To stand in the road and look at the lighted windows. Oh my dear, you do love me, you can’t help it.’
‘Charles, it doesn’t matter—’
‘What do you mean, you’ll make me mad again!’
‘There isn’t any place, any possibility, any sort of—structure—everything’s broken down, you’ll understand when I’ve told you—what I came to tell you—’
‘All right, I’ll listen now, but first let me kiss you. Then everything will be well. The kiss of peace.’ I leaned over and very gently but persistingly let my dry lips touch her wet lips. How different different kisses are. This was a sort of holy kiss. We both closed our eyes. ‘OK, now go on.’ I filled up her wine glass. My hand was shaking and the wine splashed on the table.
She said again, ‘There’s so little time, and we’ve spent some of it.’ Then she said, ‘Oh God, I haven’t got my watch with me, what time is it?’
I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. I said, ‘It’s ten past nine.’
‘Charles, it’s about Titus.’
‘Titus?’ Titus? I had given no serious thought to Titus, and I felt dismayed.
‘Yes, now I want to tell you. Oh God I feel drunk already, I’m not used to wine. I must tell you. I’ve sometimes thought, since I saw you in the village, that perhaps you could help somehow, but really you can only help by keeping away, by keeping right away—’
‘That’s nonsense—’
‘You see, I told you Titus was adopted—’
‘Yes, yes—’
‘We hoped for a child, Ben wanted one, so did I, and we waited. And then I wan
ted to adopt and he didn’t, he kept hoping. And I began to be so anxious because of the time limit, they only let you adopt if you’re under a certain age, even then I had to lie about my age. Ben’s younger than me and with him it was—’
‘Is he? I thought he was in the war.’
‘He was, but only in the later part—’
‘What did he do in the war?’
‘He was in the infantry. He doesn’t talk about it much. He was captured, he was in a prisoner of war camp.’
‘I was in ENSA—’
‘I think he quite enjoyed the war, he saw himself as a soldier. He kept his army revolver, he was so fond of it, he wasn’t supposed to. He never really settled down in civilian life. Sometimes he says, “Roll on the next war.” ’
‘But you were married then, when he was a prisoner? Where were you?’
‘I was living in Leicester, on a housing estate. I worked as a clerk in the ration book office. It was a lonely time.’
It was a lonely time. So when I was frigging around with Clement and travelling the counties in a bus to bring theatre to the war effort, Hartley was unhappy and alone. Christ, I even went to Leicester. ‘Oh my God—’
‘But listen, about Titus—you see, I did at last, at the last moment as it were, persuade Ben that we should adopt. He didn’t really want to, but he did it because, I suppose, he saw what a state I was in—I was nearly—I was nearly—I was very upset—and really I arranged it all, I did it all, all the formalities, all the papers and so on, and Ben just signed the things without looking, he did it in a dream, he didn’t want to know. I could see he was unhappy about it, but I thought that—when the little baby was there—he’d love it—everything would be different—and we’d all be happy—’
‘Don’t cry, Hartley darling, here, let me hold your hand, I’ll look after you now—’
‘Titus was such a poor little mite, with a hare lip, they had to operate—’
‘Yes, yes, stop crying and get on with the story, if you must tell it.’
‘Now I made a great mistake—’
‘Hartley, don’t grieve so, I can’t bear it, have some more wine—’
‘I made a terrible terrible mistake—and I have paid for it terribly—I ought to have known better—’
‘Well, what was it?’
‘I never told Ben about you. I mean, I didn’t at the start tell him, and then later on it seemed more and more impossible to tell him—’
‘Never told him how we’d grown up together, loving each other—?’
‘Never told him how things were. When he asked had there been anybody, I said no. And of course he didn’t know anything about it, my cousins didn’t know, you remember how we were so sort of secretive, when we were children—’
‘Yes. It was so precious, Hartley. Of course we were secretive. It was precious and secret and holy.’
‘So there was really no danger that anyone else would tell him—’
‘Danger? But why did it matter? After all you’d left me.’
‘Ben was so jealous, he’s such a terribly jealous person—and at first I didn’t understand about jealousy, I mean I didn’t understand it could be like madness.’
Yes, like madness. I understood that all right.
‘And before we got married he used—almost to threaten me. If I annoyed him he’d say, “I’ll pay you out when we’re married!”, and I was never sure if it was a joke. And it was usually about jealousy things. If I looked at another man, I mean just literally looked, he got so angry—and that went on and on after we got married—And then at last I just got frightened and lost my head and told him.’
‘Told him you had loved me, and I had loved you?’
‘Told him, sort of. I didn’t want to make it seem important, but of course the fact I hadn’t told him earlier made it look so terribly serious—’
‘It was important, it was serious!’
‘If only I had had the sense and the nerve either to tell him at the start or never to tell him at all. But you see, when I saw how jealous Ben was, what an angry jealous man he was, I began to be terrified in case one day—you would turn up—’
‘And I have!’
‘And I had to protect myself by at least having mentioned you before. You see, I was afraid someone might say something or that you’d find out where I was—I tried so hard not to let anyone know, anyone who could tell you, I cut off all the connections, and my parents had moved, I thought you might try to find me and—’
‘You cut the connections all right! But, Hartley, if you were so frightened of him at the very start, why did you marry the blighter?’
‘I always thought it would get better later on.’
‘You were never frightened of me, were you?’
‘No, no. But I was afraid that you would find out where I was and write to me. He always looked at my letters. For years and years I always got up first and ran down every morning so as to find the post first in case there was a letter from you.’
‘Oh God.’
‘I did this after I told him too, I was always terrified of the post, in case there was anything he could pick on and misunderstand. Anyway I felt it was too awful living with the risk of his finding out, so I did tell him—and it was—terrible.’
‘He was furious, jealous?’
‘It was terrible. You see, he couldn’t believe it was innocent.’
‘Hartley,’ I said, ‘it was innocent, but it was serious, something happened to us forever in those years. So in a way Ben was right to be impressed, you were telling him something which made everything different. I can understand that.’
‘He wouldn’t believe we hadn’t been lovers, he thought I’d lied when I said I was a virgin. It was so especially terrible because what he thought wasn’t true and I could never convince him, though I told him again and again. Sometimes he’d try to trap me by saying he’d forgive me if only I’d admit it, but I knew he wouldn’t. He kept asking and pressing me and asking again and again and again, he just couldn’t believe it.’
‘My darling, we were lovers, though not in that sense—’
‘He kept asking and asking, every day, sometimes every hour. And he’d ask the same question in the same words over and over and over, whatever answer I gave him. And of course the more angry he got the more clumsy and stupid and wretched I got so that it must have sounded as if I was lying—’
‘I’d like to kill that man.’
She had drunk some more wine and was now sitting shivering, no longer crying, her wide eyes darkened, the pupils expanded, staring at the candle, with the tea towel unconsciously held up to her face, pressing it against her cheekbone like a veil. Her large brow, which looked white in the candlelight, was puckered and pitted with little shadows, but the way she had turned up the collar of her green cotton coat behind her hair gave her a girlish look. Perhaps that was what she used to do with her mackintosh collar in the days when we went bicycling. And even as I was listening intently to her words I was all the time gazing with a kind of creative passion at her candlelit face, like some god reassembling her beauty for my own purposes.
‘Wait, Hartley, it’s all right,’ for she had suddenly looked up in alarm, ‘I’m just going to light more candles, I want to look at you.’ It was getting darker outside. I rattled out a box of candles and lit four more, dripping the wax into tea cups and standing them upright. I ranged them round her like lights at an altar. Then I went and sat opposite to her, not near but looking. I so much wanted to see her smile. That would help the process of re-creation.
‘Hartley, take away that veil. Won’t you smile at me?’
She lowered the tea towel and I saw the wet drooping wretchedness of her mouth. ‘Charles, what’s the time?’
It was twenty-five past ten. ‘Oh, half past nine, earlier. Look, Hartley, dearest, none of this matters, it’s all over, don’t you see? All right, he was a jealous stupid man, a horrible man who deserves to be punished, only it doesn’t matter now,
you don’t have to go back into that hell. But what has all this got to do with Titus? You were going to tell me something about Titus.’
‘He thinks Titus is your son.’
‘What?’
‘He thinks Titus is your son.’
Hartley had laid her hands flat on the table. Brightly lit by the candles she looked now like an interrogated prisoner.
I sat up very straight, blushing with amazement and shock, and found that I had put my hands flat on the table too. We stared at each other. ‘Hartley, you can’t be serious, he can’t be serious! How could Titus be my son? Your husband isn’t insane, is he? He knew Titus was adopted, he knew where he came from—’
‘No, that’s the point—he didn’t know where Titus came from. I was the one who brought Titus into our lives, it was my idea, I arranged it all. Ben was in a state of shock throughout the whole business, he never did anything but sign papers without reading them. Once, somebody from the adoption people came to the house and saw Ben, but I did all the talking. Ben was like a zombie.’
‘But Hartley, wait a minute, he knew I was a thing of the past, you didn’t adopt Titus until years and years after you left me.’
‘He thought we’d kept up. He thought we met secretly.’ Hartley, tearless and staring-eyed, was almost, with her glare of misery and her pale pitted forehead, accusing.
‘Hartley, darling, people can’t believe things which are totally crazy and for which there is absolutely no evidence. He must have known you hadn’t been seeing me.’
‘How could he know? I was alone all day, sometimes all night. He had to go away travelling.’
‘All right—let’s stay sane about this—let’s say it was extremely improbable! Besides—oh, how could he not believe you, how could he torture you with such mad imagined invented things!’
‘It didn’t happen all at once,’ said Hartley. She gulped some more wine. ‘He took against Titus from the start, perhaps because the adoption was the only thing I’d ever forced him to do against his will and he resented it and somehow deeply wanted it to fail. You see, he’d gone on and on up to that time saying that of course you had been my lover and you probably still were, and I’d gone on and on denying it till I was tired, I think we were both tired, I used to try to think about something else when he was talking about you. I thought at first he didn’t really believe I’d kept up with you but only said it to spite me, and perhaps at first he didn’t believe that, but I’m sure he thought we’d been lovers. And of course we couldn’t forget you because you were always in the papers and then later on we saw you on telly—’
