The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘She’s not here, if that’s what you imagine.’

  ‘Oh I don’t—’

  ‘I suppose you think it’s my fault, is that what you came to say?’

  ‘No, no, I accuse no one. Destiny, God perhaps, myself. The battle of life and how to fight it. Whoever conscripted me made a big mistake. Now she’s gone, it seems incredible she could have cared for me and made that house with me, we chose things together like real people. No, I just thought I’d come. You’ve always been a magnet to me, and now I’m getting old I don’t care what people think or how much they snub me, it’s always worth trying, I only wish I’d been more forward when I was young. You know how I feel about you, all right you hate that bit, you despise it, it disgusts you, though actually anybody’s lucky to be loved by anybody and ought to be grateful, well anyway as I haven’t a job at present I thought I’d come and see you and maybe you would let me stay for a while and be useful, I can’t bear being alone at home without her where everything reminds me—’

  ‘Useful?’

  ‘Yes, I could cook or clean up, do odd jobs, why not? I’ve always felt I ought to belong to somebody, I mean really legally as a sort of possession, just a chattel, not anything troublesome, not with rights, I mean. I often think I have the soul of a slave. Perhaps I was a Russian house-serf in a previous incarnation, I should like to think I was, all cosy and protected with simple things to do, kissing my master’s shoulder and sleeping on the stove—’

  ‘Do you want to be my house-serf?’

  ‘Yes, please, guv’nor. I’ll live in that dog kennel if you like.’

  ‘OK, you’re engaged.’

  Thus began an odd little period of my life to which strangely enough I look back with a certain sad nostalgia, perhaps simply because it was such a dead calm before such a terrible storm. I even became rather fond of Gilbert in his role as serf. In the past, although his servility had inhibited my regard, yet his devotion to me had proved that he had some sound ideas. And he was, even at this stage, useful; later on he was essential. My standard of living rose. Gilbert cleaned the house, he even got the stains off the bath. I let him cook in a style which was a compromise between his own and mine. I could not bring him up to my level of simplicity and it would have been cruelty to attempt it. Grilled sardines on toast and bananas and cream were not Gilbert’s idea of a good lunch, and equally I had no use for his thick over-rich Gallic messes. We ate exquisitely dressed green salads and new potatoes, a favourite dish of mine. (The shop now had lettuces and young spuds.) I let him concoct vegetarian soups and stews and I taught him to make fritters in the Japanese style, which he was at once able to do better than me. I also let him bake cakes. He shopped for me in the village and fetched Spanish wine from the Raven Hotel, where he amused himself by posing as my butler. At night he slept on the big broken-bellied sofa in the middle room downstairs, among the driftwood. The sofa was damp, but I let him have the hot water bottle.

  I swam every day, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the rain, and began to feel soaked in the sea as if it were penetrating my skin. When the sun shone I spent time out on the rocks. Gilbert kept watch over the front door and went out to look for letters, only no one called and Hartley did not write. I returned to my obsessive task of collecting stones, picking them out of tide-washed crannies and rock pools and carrying them back to the lawn, where Gilbert helped me with my border round the edge of the grass. The stones, so close-textured, so variously decorated, so individual, so handy, pleased me as if they were a small harmless tribe which I had discovered. Some of them were beautiful with a simple wit beyond that of any artist: light grey with thin pink traceries, black with elaborate white crosses, brown with purple ellipses, spotted and blotched and striped, and their exquisitely smooth forms lightly dinted and creased by the millennial work of the sea. More and more of them now found their way into the house, to lie upon the rosewood table or on my bedroom window ledge.

  Gilbert would have liked to collect stones too, and to pick flowers, but as soon as he ventured onto the rocks in his leather-soled London shoes he immediately fell. He bought some plimsolls at the Fishermen’s Stores, but still tumbled. He never, of course, ventured into the sea. However he sawed wood and carried it into the house and this activity, which he felt to be in some way symbolic, gave him much satisfaction. He continued to be busy all day long with self-invented serf activities. He washed the bead curtain with Vim, making it shine and removing the slightly sticky filthy surface to which I had become accustomed. Thus, for a brief time, we lived together, each absorbed in his own illusions, and together we regressed into a life of primal simplicity and almost fetishistic private obsession.

  When I grew tired of hunting for stones I used to sit for long periods upon the rocky archway bridge beneath which the angry tide raced in and out of Minn’s cauldron, dangling my bare feet over the edge and letting them bathe in the flying rainbow of the spray. It gave me a gloomy fatalistic pleasure to observe the waves, as they rushed into that deep and mysteriously smooth round hole, destroy themselves in a boiling fury of opposing waters and frenzied creaming foam. Then when the tide was receding the cauldron became an equally furious sucking whirlpool as the water churned itself into a circling froth in its desperate haste to escape through the narrow outlet under the arch, and as it met head-on the whipping power of the sea wind. The wind blew continually during those days and when it was strong the waves slapped the rocks and wailed and sucked in and out of the crannies with a noise which in my tense fretful state I was beginning to find tiring. I would never have imagined that I would dislike the sound of the sea, but sometimes, and especially at night, it was a burden to the spirit.

  In the evenings I sat beside the wood fire in the little red room. Sometimes Gilbert sat in the kitchen, enjoying himself being a servant. (I suspect he would have liked to dress as a housemaid, but was right in assuming that this would not please me.) Sometimes he sat with me, in silence like a dog, gazing at me and rolling his eyes about in that disconcerting manner. Sometimes we talked a little. In the lamplight now and then he came to look uncannily like Wilfred Dunning, a resemblance of course created by Gilbert’s unconscious acquisition of his hero’s facial mannerisms. Yet to my vulnerable attentive nerves, it seemed more than that, something more like a real visitation. If so, it did Gilbert credit that he should be the vehicle. We talked about the past, about Wilfred and Clement and the old days. A shared past, that is something. And I thought about Clement. In a way, if there were justice, it was Clement who spanned my life and made me, and about whom this book should be written. But in such matters there is no justice, or rather justice is cruel.

  ‘Charles, darling.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t mind my asking? Did you really love Clement or was it just that Clement loved you? People often wondered.’

  ‘Of course I loved Clement.’

  Well, I came to love her. Did I love her at first? I loved her beauty, her fame, her talent, her flattery, her help. Would I have found Hartley if I had not become Clement’s possession? Clement stretched over the years, she was the one permanent thing, only removed by death. I had been her boy lover, her creation, her business partner, the nearest thing she ever had to a husband, finally her middle-aged never-estranged son. The transformation of my love for Clement, its metamorphoses, had been one of the main tasks and achievements of my life: that love which so often almost failed but never quite failed. Would I ever sit by the fire with Hartley and tell her about Clement? Would she understand, would she want to know? How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.

  ‘Charles.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I heard something funny in the pub today.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That chauffeur you had, Freddie Arkwright, he’s the brother of the pub man, he’s coming to stay at Whitsun.’

  ‘Oh.’ Shame, guilt, another demon
trail.

  ‘Funny isn’t it, the way people come back into one’s life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Charles, darling.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you lived with Lizzie I could be the butler. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Mind if I do? I wish I could give up drink, it’s a symbol of depravity, a proof that one’s a slave. Being in love, that’s another slavery, stupid when you come to think of it, mad really. You make another person into God. That can’t be right. Thank heavens I’m out of that trap. Real love is free and sane. Obsession, romance, does one grow out of them? Lizzie and I used to talk about that. Real love is like in a marriage when the glamour is gone. Or love when you’re older, like love I feel for you, darling, only you don’t want to know. It’s good to feel how different it is from the old craving. Not exactly that I don’t want anything for myself, but going that way. Love. God, how often we uttered that word in the theatre and how little we ever thought about it.’

  ‘Freddie’s coming to stay at the pub?’

  ‘No, at Amorne Farm, that’s where the other Arkwrights live. Such a nice boy. Did you know he was queer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘God, it was such hell being queer when I was young.’

  And of course all the time, whether I was talking to Gilbert or remembering Clement or watching the waves destroying themselves in the cauldron, I was thinking about Hartley and waiting for her and wondering how soon my nerve would break. I had already decided in general outline what my next move would be should she make none, but I was superstitiously reluctant to make detailed plans before I felt the time had come to change the world by force. I was continually conscious of Hartley, as of her real presence, and she was with me as Jesus used to be with me when I was a child. And I thought about her intensely, and yet, again superstitiously, deliberately, in a respectfully abstract way. I let memories from the far past come and go as they would. But about the terrible present and the gulf of those suffering years my imagination was squeamish and discreet. I did not want to become simply obsessed with her misery. I did not want to waste my energy on hating that man. It would soon be irrelevant. So I reverted to the past when she was the unspoilt focus of my innocent love, seeing her as she had been when she seemed my future, my whole life, that life which had been taken from me and yet still seemed to exist somewhere as a packaged stolen possibility.

  However, in the event, before I had time to decide to move upon my waiting and upon the fact of her silence, something else, quite unexpected and extraordinary, took place.

  I may have described the period of my odd quiet tête-à-tête with Gilbert as if it could have covered weeks, but in fact it covered days. Upon the last of these days, the one on which the tête-à-tête came to an abrupt end, I felt, in the morning, an exceptional restlessness. Avoiding Gilbert, I went out onto the rocks with my field glasses hung round my neck, intending to look at birds. I also had it in mind that I might see a seal, since Gilbert said that he thought he had seen one. However, once I was out there, upon the top of my minuscule cliff, I was assailed by a kind of fear which seemed familiar. To begin with I felt giddy, as if the sea were a hundred feet below me, instead of being, at that state of the tide, about twelve feet, and I had to sit down. Then I felt a nervous need to scan the surface of the sea carefully with the glasses: but not looking for seals.

  Of course, with every day that passed, I knew that something which frightened me was coming nearer, the need to initiate what I must think of as a rescue; or at any rate to initiate something in response to Hartley’s dreadful silence, the causes of which I did not yet want to reflect upon. When you rush the house to rescue the hostage from the gunman how will the gunman behave, how will the hostage behave? It may have been this fear which had now decided to inhabit the huge empty scene. It was a sunny day, cool, with a certain wind. The sea was a choppy dark blue, the sky pale, with a smooth gleaming buff-coloured cloud just above the horizon like a long tatter of silk. I was wearing Doris’s Irish jersey. I began to study the sea through the glasses. I searched the restless white-flecked surface with an increasing anxiety, realizing that what I was now looking for and expecting momently to behold was my snake-necked sea monster. I put the glasses down and found that my heart was beating fast, thumping with an accelerating sound like that of the hyoshigi which I had last heard in that sombre vaporous gallery in the Wallace Collection.

  With deliberation and to calm myself by the discovery that there was of course nothing to see I began again to study the jumping waters. One or two thick darker patches I identified as floating seaweed, there was a piece of wood which kept lifting its end up jerkily, some floating glassy-eyed gulls, a cormorant which passed suddenly through the bright circle of vision. Then, for no particular reason, I shifted so that my charmed and magnified gaze could move from the sea to the land. I could see the waves breaking on the yellow rocks at the foot of the tower, the foaming water spilling back from folds and crevices. The wet rocks, then the dry rocks, then some patches of the fleshy cactus-like grass, then a wind-blown clump of the papery white campion. Then the level grass beside the tower. Then the base of the tower itself, the big cut stones blotched with ochre-coloured lichen, patched with black crannies. Then, part way up the tower, a human foot encased in a shabby gym shoe.

  At the sight of that foot I dropped the glasses, and looking with dazzled eyes and shading my brow I could see quite clearly half-way up the tower a figure straddled frog-like against the stones, clawing for handholds, dabbling for footholds, descending. In fact, for an agile person, the tower was not an impossibly difficult climb, but I felt an immediate pang of fear which made me seize the glasses and raise them again. In that interval the climber had descended further and now leapt the remaining distance to the ground, and when I had again focused upon him had turned round, leaning back against the tower, with his hands spread out on either side, and looking straight towards me, reminding me suddenly of a figure caught in the headlights of a car and pinned against a rock. My climbing intruder, now gazing into the lifted glasses, was a boy, or rather a being in the full yet indeterminate efflorescence of earliest manhood. He was wearing brown trousers rolled up almost to the knee, and a white round-necked tee shirt with something written upon it. His face was bony, with a freckled pallor which brought out the rather sugary pinkness of his parted lips. His fairish faintly reddish brown hair, tangled rather than curly, fell to his shoulders, some of it actually spread out upon the rough stone behind him and adhering to it. He was staring back towards me with a marked attention. There was nothing so very unusual about a trespasser on my little promontory. But this was no ordinary trespasser.

  I got up hastily and began to move across the rocks. It was somehow clear that I was to come to him, not he to me. The glasses impeded my progress, so I paused to perch them on top of a rock and clambered on, now losing the boy to sight. I crossed Minn’s bridge. The final climb, up from a gully to the level above, required all my strength, and I was breathless when I got up onto the grass and stood there, breathing deeply and resisting an impulse to sit down. The boy had moved and was standing near to the further edge of the grass with the sea behind him.

  I spoke first. ‘Is it—by any chance—is your name Titus?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Amid the whole surprise that ‘sir’ was a separate little shock. Then I sat down, and he, approaching me, sat down too, kneeling and looking at me. I could see his quick breathing, the dirty tee shirt with the legend Leeds University, the moist pinkness of his lips, the stubble growing in the scar. He had put one hand, with a gesture of unconscious grace, upon his heart.

  ‘Are you—Mr Arrowby—Charles Arrowby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His eyes were long rather than large, narrow, a wet grey-blue, like stones. His freckled mobile brow was puckered with anxiety. I had of course, in the first instant, apprehended a resemblance to Hartley, a ghostly resemblance which
hung upon him or about him, as the resemblance to Wilfred Dunning hung upon Gilbert. And I had seen the hare lip.

  The next thing he said was, ‘Are you my father?’

  I was sitting holding my knees, with my feet tucked sideways. I felt now the desire to leap up again, to beat my breast, to make some absolute declaration of emotion, as if this question should be celebrated rather than answered. I also felt a distinct impulse to say Yes, and a stronger clearer veto on any lie, to this boy, ever. But why had I not thought about just this, this apparition, this question, why had I not expected it? I was confused, taken by surprise, and did not know how to address him.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ The words were weak and I could see his face unchanged, still frowning. I knew that it was very important to convince him at once. Any muddle here could breed horrors. I moved into a kneeling position so that I faced him level. ‘No. Believe me. No.’

  He looked down and his lips pouted and trembled. There was a momentary childish look. He drew his lower lip in and clasped it with his teeth. Then with a quick movement which startled me he stood up, and I stood up too. We were now close to each other. He was slightly taller than me. Enormous vistas of thought were unrolling in my mind.

  He was frowning again now, looking stern, his head thrown back, stretching his long thin neck. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry I troubled you.’

  ‘Oh, Titus, I’m so glad you’ve come!’ This was the most immediate of a great number of things which I wanted to say to him and which I was already inhibiting and placing in order in my mind. I held out my hand to him.

  With a little air of dignified surprise he shook my hand rather formally and then took a step backward. ‘I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. And perhaps—impertinent.’