by Iris Murdoch
‘God—’
‘And this had gone on sort of festering in his mind, and then suddenly, it was as if he had worked it out, it was like a sort of revelation, he connected you with Titus. There were two bad things in his life and he went on brooding on them until he felt they must connect, they must connect, and they were both my fault.’
‘But how old was Titus then and what sort of evidence—?’
‘I can’t remember how old Titus was, and perhaps it didn’t happen all that suddenly. He was always harsh with Titus even when he was a tiny child, and later on it was worse. He may have said it just as a crazy thing to hurt me, and then when I was so upset he began to think about it and to see everything I said as a proof of guilt.’
‘But, Hartley, this is madness, he must be mad, clinically mad—’
‘He isn’t mad.’
‘That’s what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe.’
‘He says that Titus resembles you—’
‘Well, there you are.’
‘And the funny thing is that he does look a bit like you.’
‘He looks like you because you brought him up, and you look like me because we gazed and gazed at each other for so many years. Loving couples come to resemble each other.’
‘Really? Perhaps you’re right. It did seem odd, uncanny almost. ’ This idea seemed to strike Hartley more than anything I had said, even for a moment to please her.
‘Besides, there must have been independent proof of Titus’s birth and his parentage.’
‘That was part of the trouble. You see, when I got Titus I simply didn’t want to know who his parents were, I didn’t want to think he was not entirely mine. The adoption society gave me a lot of stuff, they even gave me a letter from his mother, but I didn’t read any of it, I destroyed it at once. I didn’t want to give any part of my thoughts to his real parents. I didn’t want to remember anything connected with Titus before I carried him home with me, and I didn’t remember, I blotted it out of my mind. So when Ben became so interested and so suspicious and began to question me I didn’t know how to answer, at first I couldn’t even properly remember the name of the adoption society. It must all have sounded so bad, so like a lie—’
‘But there are records, aren’t there, official records?’
‘There are now, but things were less formal then, and there wasn’t any law about children having the right to know who their parents were. Of course there must have been records I suppose, but by the time Ben wanted to know the details the adoption society had ceased to exist, and I think a lot of papers had been destroyed in a fire, so someone said anyway. Ben never believed any of it, and no one would answer letters. I did try to find out, I went to London, he wouldn’t come, and I stayed in a hotel—’
‘Oh Hartley, Hartley—’ I was picturing this journey, and the return home.
‘I did try, but I couldn’t find out, and somehow even then I didn’t want to.’
‘But I still don’t understand, what did he think had happened? What did he think we’d been doing?’
‘He thought we’d been going on seeing each other, perhaps not all the time, but on and off, secretly. He thought I’d become pregnant and—’
‘But he was living with you!’
‘That was another odd thing. Just before the adoption was finally fixed up I was away for quite a long time, it was about the only time I was away. I went to my father who was ill, he died then—and in this time away Ben thought the baby had come. I wasn’t slim any more at all, I could have been pregnant, you see it all fitted in. And he thought I had invented all the adoption business so as to bring your child into his house.’
‘But he saw the papers—’
‘Well, I could have got hold of the papers somehow, he didn’t read them anyway. And the visitor from the society could have been an accomplice.’
‘Your husband is a most ingenious man. A vile hateful cruel half-mad ingenious torturer.’
Hartley, staring now at the candle flames, simply shook her head.
‘But Titus himself, he didn’t know, I suppose, I mean what Ben thought?’
‘Well, he did know,’ she said, ‘later on, I mean when he was about nine or ten. Of course we’d always told him that he was an adopted child, like you’re supposed to. But then Ben started telling him that he was the child of his mother’s lover and that his mother was a whore.’
‘What perfectly monstrous wickedness—’
‘Ben did go through a phase of knocking Titus about. Some neighbours called the prevention of cruelty people. I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t defend him, I had to sort of take Ben’s side, it was an awful time, everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one’s bones were broken, all the bones and the little joints were broken, one wasn’t whole any more, one wasn’t a person any more.’ Slow tears came and still staring at the candles she blindly felt about on the table for the towel. I pushed it towards her.
‘But why couldn’t you defend him—oh, stupid question. Hartley, I can’t bear this—’
‘He felt it was all my fault, and it was all my fault, I ought to have told him at the start, he asked me if there had ever been anyone else, and I lied really because there had been you although we weren’t lovers, and later on when I told it, it sounded so mysterious and big. And I married him because I was sorry for him and I wanted to make him happy—and then—and then—’
‘Oh Hartley, stop.’
‘And I somehow got into a kind of fatal way of getting everything wrong, doing everything wrong, and hurting him, as if I were doing exactly the thing that would make him angry. One night when he was out at an evening class I accidentally put the chain on the door and went to bed and slept and he couldn’t get in till I woke up at three and it was raining and then he started hitting me and wouldn’t let me go to sleep—’
‘Hartley, don’t tell me any more of these horrors please. I don’t want to hear them and anyway it’s all over.’
‘Oh I’ve been so stupid, so stupid, and of course Titus never settled down at school and everything went wrong, everything, and I’m not even sure that Ben believed it all at the start or that he always really believed it later, only everything I did seemed to make things worse, it was as if he hypnotized me into acting as if I was guilty. And I’m not sure what Titus believed or what he believes. Titus used to sit there hearing Ben saying one thing and me saying the other, it was like a sort of litany, an awful poem—and I don’t know whether he knew what the truth was or whether there was any truth, it was all a kind of fog of awful senseless argument and row. It all got ravelled up into a nightmare and in the end he blamed me for it and in a way he was right, sometimes I think he blamed me and resented me more than he did Ben. Of course when Titus was small he was frightened all the time and he kept quiet and he’d sit all the evening on his little chair against the wall, all white and tense and quiet, dreadfully quiet. Later on when he was about fifteen he used to pretend sometimes that he was your child, and once or twice he told Ben that I’d told him he was. But I think he did this just to spite Ben when Titus was too big for Ben to hit him any more.’
‘Hartley, stop. Just tell me more about Titus now. When did he go away? Where do you think he is?’
‘When he left school he went into the poly, you know, the polytechnic, where we used to live, he had a student grant, he was studying electricity. He lived at home, but he sort of ignored us, he sent us to Coventry. I sometimes felt he really hated us, both of us. And he could never forgive me for not protecting him when he was small. Then just before we moved down here he went into digs, and then he just vanished. He left the digs and never let us know or sent an address. I went round there and asked about him but no one seemed to know or care where he’d gone, and he never wrote. He knew we were coming here. I think he went to look for his real parents, he always said he would. He went on and on about them sometimes and how perhaps they were rich. Anyway, he’s
gone now. Gone.’
‘Don’t be so tragic, Hartley, he’ll turn up again. He knows where you live, doesn’t he? He’ll turn up. He’ll come home when he’s short of money, they always do.’
She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I don’t want him to come back. Sometimes I believe he’s dead. Sometimes I almost wish he were dead, and that I could hear that he was dead, so that the anguish of the hope and the fear and the dread could just stop, and we could be at peace. If he came back—it could be—terrible—’
‘You mean?’
‘Terrible.’ The slow tears were coming and she kept drooping her eyelids to make them slide down her cheeks. She said, ‘I wish we’d never adopted a child, it was my fault, Ben was quite right, we were better without. I could have managed then and Ben would have been—like I wanted—’
In spite of the pain and horror of her story my mind was leaping ahead into a bright land, into all sorts of almost detailed vistas of sudden hope. I would take Hartley away and together we would find Titus. In some strange metaphysical sense it was true, I would make it true: Titus was my son, the offspring of our old love!
‘Hartley, my little one, stop crying, you’ve had your orgy of horrors, now stop it. You’re mine now and I’m going to look after you and protect you—’
She began shaking her head again. ‘And I married him to make him happy! But you mustn’t think it’s been all bad, it hasn’t. What I’ve told you is the bad part, but I’ve probably given you a quite wrong impression.’
‘Now you’re going to tell me you’ve had a happy marriage!’
‘No, but it’s not been all bad, Ben wasn’t always awful with Titus. Ben’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, perhaps all men are. It was just that you kept cropping up and that always set him off, and we couldn’t just forget you because you were so famous, but we’ve had better times too—’
‘What were they like?’
‘Oh just ordinary times, you might think it was dull, we had a quiet life—’
‘A quiet life!’
‘Ben didn’t much like his job but he liked doing things about the house, he likes DIY.’
‘DIY?’
‘Do It Yourself. We went to London once to the exhibition at Olympia. He used to go to evening classes.’
‘What was he learning at the class on that quiet evening when you left the chain on the door?’
‘He was learning to rivet china.’
‘Oh—Lord—! Hartley, what did you do all the time? Did you entertain, have friends?’
‘Well, Ben didn’t like social life. I didn’t mind. We don’t really know anybody here either.’
‘And did you go to evening classes too?’
‘I once started German, but he didn’t like me to go out in the evening and the classes were different nights.’
‘Oh—Hartley—And in all those years was he faithful to you, did he ever have anyone else?’
For a moment she seemed not to understand. ‘No, of course not!’
‘I wonder how you can be so sure. And you, did you ever have anyone else?’
‘No, of course I didn’t!’
‘Well, I suppose it would have been as much as your life would have been worth.’
‘You see really we were very wrapped up in each other, we are very—’
‘Wrapped up! Yes! I can see it all.’
‘No, you can’t see it all,’ she said, suddenly turning towards me, blinking and drawing her fingers across her eyes and her mouth. ‘You can’t see it, nobody can understand a marriage. I’ve prayed and prayed to go on loving Ben—’
‘It’s a travesty, Hartley. Don’t you see now at last that the situation is intolerable, impossible? Stop playing Jesus Christ to that torturer, if that’s what you’re doing.’
‘He suffers too and I can be—oh so unkind. It’s not his fault, and it was my fault in the beginning.’
‘You gorge me full of these awful stories and then expect me to sympathize with him! Why did you come here, why did you come to me, why did you tell me these things at all?’
Hartley, still staring at me, seemed to reflect. She said slowly, ‘Perhaps because I had sometime, and I’ve always known this, to tell someone, to say it, to say these blasphemies, what you call these horrors to someone. And, as I told you, I’ve never really had any friends, Ben and I have lived so much together, so much on our own, so sort of secretly, a kind of hidden life, like criminals. I never had anyone to talk to, even if I had wanted to talk.’
‘So it turns out I’m your only friend!’
‘Yes, I suppose you are the only person I could inflict this on—’
‘Inflict it—you want me to share the pain—’
‘Well, in a way you were responsible—’
‘For your ruined life? Just as you were responsible for mine! So this is your revenge? No, no, I’m not serious—’
‘I didn’t mean that, just that Ben’s ideas about you have been like—like demons in our lives. But of course it wasn’t just wanting to tell someone. You know, when I saw you in the village for the first time I nearly fainted. I had just come round the corner from the bungalows and you were just going into the pub, and my knees gave way and I had to go a bit up the hill and sit on the grass. Then I thought I must be dreaming, I thought I must be mad, I didn’t know what to do. Then the next day I heard somebody talking about you in the shop, saying you’d retired and come here to live. And I wondered for a bit whether I’d tell Ben, because he mightn’t have been able to recognize you, you don’t look quite like your pictures, but then I thought he’s bound to hear anyway, someone at the boat-building class will know, so I told him I’d seen you and he was in a frenzy and said we must sell the house at once and go away, and of course he believed, or said he believed, that you’d come on purpose because of me, and of course it was very odd—’
‘But is he selling the house?’
‘I don’t know, he said he’d see the house agent, he may have done, I didn’t ask. But really I came here tonight because I wanted to tell you about Titus and about what Ben imagines and to ask your help—’
‘My help! My dearest girl, I’ve been telling you, I am all help! Let’s go, let’s just go, we can go to London tomorrow, even tonight if there’s a train—’
‘No, no, no. You see, I can’t decide, I’ve kept swinging to and fro. I thought first I’d simply ask you to go away, to sell your house and go away. If once you understood how much it mattered to me and Ben, how awful, what a nightmare it was that you’re here, you would go at once.’
‘Hartley, we are going, you and I are going, that is the answer.’
‘I thought I’d write you a letter asking you to go, but it would have been so hard to explain it all in a letter.’
‘Hartley, will you come, tonight, tomorrow? You will?’
‘And then I thought—but perhaps this really is mad—that you could somehow persuade Ben, make him see, that I’ve been telling the truth all these years, impress him somehow—’
‘How?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, swear on something sacred or with a notary or—’
The word ‘notary’ seemed to gather round it some of the sheer insanity of what she was saying. So now we were to be involved with notaries! I could imagine how much that would impress Ben. At the same time, in the swift way of thought, I was making realistic plans. Of course I still hoped that, when it came to it, Hartley would decide to stay with me now, tonight. However it was possible that she would not, and even if she did there might be some terrible revulsion of feeling afterwards. Such shock tactics might do more harm than good. Better perhaps to let her reflect quietly upon her reunion with me and draw her own conclusions. She seemed to me to be still in a dream, a woman locked up inside her own nightmare. She would emerge, but it might be slowly. I might even have a long work to do, to give her back hope and life and stir in her the instinct of freedom, which it still seemed to me was so natural to her. Meanwhile I must find ways of keeping contact with
her and of making her plan, making her construct futures which contained me. Surely, once she conceived of happiness she would spring towards it. But for the moment it might be wise to humour her lunatic idea that I might ‘persuade’ Ben. If she just, bleakly, blankly, asked me to go away my task would be much harder, though it was still certain to be successful in the end. Hartley was a sick woman.
I said, ‘I think your idea about Ben is a good one, I might be able to solve that problem anyway, to make him see and believe the truth about what happened or rather didn’t happen in the old days, we must consult about how it could be done. But, Hartley, listen, the important thing is this. You are going to leave Ben and come to me, for good, forever—’
Hartley, who had been sitting entranced, absorbed in her own unusual eloquence, looked suddenly terrified. She jerked back her head and began to stare about the room. ‘Charles, what is the time?’
It was nearly eleven o’clock. I said, ‘Oh, it’s about ten to ten. Darling, why not stay here now, please?’
‘It can’t be as early as that. It will take me thirty-five minutes to get home, and Ben usually gets back about eleven.’ She got up and said, ‘I feel drunk, I’m not used to wine, I must go.’ She turned, then made a sudden pounce towards my hand and peered at my watch, then uttered a high-pitched wailing cry. ‘It’s eleven, it’s eleven! Oh why did you do it! Why did I believe you! Why didn’t I bring my watch! What shall I do, oh what shall I do! What shall I tell him, he’s sure to know where I’ve been! Oh I’ve been so careful and I haven’t told him lies and now he’ll think—It’s as bad as can be, oh I am stupid, stupid, whatever can I do?’
‘Stay here, you don’t have to go back!’
