by Iris Murdoch
‘No. I expect it’s too late anyway.’
‘And you won’t run away from me?’
‘I won’t run away from you.’
He went out of the back door.
Outside it was a hazier later evening and the shadows of the rocks were long, long on the grass. I did not look at my watch. I sat down beside Hartley.
She had taken her hands from her face and was sitting limp, staring at the table. Where I had dragged at her dress there was a little triangular tear. I could see the deep reddish streak of sunburn that led downward from her throat. I could see her brassière and the roundness of her contained breasts. The quick almost panting movement of her breath.
It was indeed obscene. I had, from the inception of this plan in my mind, intended to keep Hartley here, by force if necessary; but I had not imagined the details, and I had somehow hoped that as soon as she saw Titus in my house she would make the great mental leap, the intuition, the necessary conjecture: she would see her freedom and the possibility of living with Titus and me. And once she had grasped her freedom I had the strong and reasonable hope that she would come to me, even though Titus was an unknown quantity and had his own freedom to dispose of. But perhaps I had indeed, inspired by the boy’s providential appearance, tried to move too fast. The horrors of the last half hour had shaken my resolution so that I nearly conceived of, after all, taking her home. Yet could I, now? He was almost certainly back and had read that letter and—my plan had succeeded so well that it had trapped me also. I did now look at my watch. It was twenty-five past nine.
I took her hands and put them neatly one on top of the other, and my hand above them. Then I turned her face round to look at me. She had not been crying. To my unspeakable relief I received, not the harsh anxious glare that I so much dreaded, but a new quiet look, gentle and reflective; and although she looked so sad yet she seemed younger, more like her old self, and also more alive, less apathetic, more intelligent. My confidence returned. Perhaps, after all, her freedom was stirring. Perhaps my plan had been right. It was a question of a cure, a psychological cure. And in the instant I decided that it would now be fatal to show any weakness. I must be absolute, I must be to the full the being who had made Titus breathless with admiration.
‘I’m not going to let you go, Hartley. Not tonight, not ever. You can’t go back tonight anyway. It’s too late to get that letter. He’s got it now. Let him think what he pleases. Why should you fear him and lie to him? That hurts me so. I can’t bear it, Titus can’t bear it. Titus wants you, but he doesn’t want him. Doesn’t that suggest anything to your mind? I like Titus, Titus likes me. Why shouldn’t Titus be my son, why shouldn’t you be my wife? It’s fate, Hartley, it’s fate. Why should Titus turn up just now, why should he come to me? Why should I be here at all? You must see how extraordinarily it’s all worked out. Titus so much wanted to be with you, but he would never have gone over there, never. And you were glad to see him, weren’t you? And you were able to talk to him. What did you talk about?’
‘The dogs—’
‘The dogs?’
‘He was remembering the dogs we had when he was little, he likes animals.’
‘Oh—good. Hartley, just relax, let it go, let it drop.’
‘Let what drop?’
‘You know—this burden, this useless fruitless loyalty, this pointless sacrifice. You’re making his life a misery too, let it go, let him go. You’re like a half-dead person.’
‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve felt half dead—yes—often. I think quite a lot of people do. But you can live on half dead and even have pleasures in your life.’
The reflective tone of her voice made me want to sing out with joy. I was reaching her. She was speaking of it, of it. I was waking up my sleeping princess. ‘You must be hungry. Have some wine. Have some kedgeree, there’s a bit left.’
‘I’ll just have some wine. And some of that bread.’
‘And cheese. And olives.’
‘I don’t like olives, I told you before.’
She ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese, then thrust it aside. She drank some wine. I drank a little too. I could not eat.
‘Hartley, do you know, I think you’ve crossed the Rubicon. And what’s on the other side? Freedom, happiness.’
‘Something has certainly happened,’ she said, and she gave me her calmer face, deliberately smoothing out her brow with her hand. Then she smoothed her cheeks, moulding her face and making it calm and open. There was a capability, a capacity there which heartened me. I saw again the way her ‘wildness’ was also a kind of serenity. ‘But it’s not what you think. It isn’t anything to do with happiness. I’m not going to struggle with you, dear Charles, I mean to struggle physically, to try to rush away, and to weep and scream when I can’t, though that is just what I am doing now in my mind, weeping and screaming. There are moments, I’ve learnt, when one has to fold one’s hands. I can see what you want to do and why. You want to make my marriage crash, explode. But it won’t. It’s indestructible.’
‘You speak as if it were a prison.’
‘People live in prisons.’
‘Not if they can get out.’
‘Then too, sometimes. But—oh you don’t understand. You can only make things worse. And you have done so tonight.’
Her words, her tone, now sounded terrible, like a calm judge pronouncing a fatal sentence. Yet I thought, if she desperately, absolutely wanted to go she would weep and scream, and could reasonably believe that this would make me give in. So, since she was, though tragically, calm she must be a little bit glad to be forced to stay. No doubt her feelings were wretchedly mixed, positively minced up.
It was getting a little darker in the kitchen now. Titus came in through the outside door and went over to the stove. He did not look at us. He found the plate with the remains of the kedgeree. I was suddenly reminded of Gilbert who would still be at his post outside. I called after Titus, who was disappearing into the hall with the kedgeree, ‘Go and tell Gilbert to come in. He’s up by the tower with the car. Then lock the front door.’
I gave her some more wine. There was now something almost alarming about her resigned quietness. Did she expect I would suddenly take her home after all? Perhaps it was her dread of just this prospect which made her so quiet?
I did not immediately follow up what she said. I got up and locked the outside door and pocketed the key. I was faintly sure Ben would not turn up tonight. I was feeling so strong now that I hardly cared whether he did or not. I heard Gilbert coming in, complaining loudly to Titus, and I heard the key turn in the front door. I lit a candle and pulled the curtains although it was still light outside with a huge dull moon the colour of Wensleydale cheese. It was the first time I had been with Hartley without an urgent time limit. The sense of solitude with her, of the extension of time, was uncanny. I felt both exultant and unreal. I drank some more wine.
‘Hartley, I don’t think I’ve been perfectly happy—at all—since you went away. You can’t conceive how I suffered then. But we were happy, weren’t we? When we were on our bikes. That was youth, like it ought to be, joyous, perfect. I’ve never loved anybody else. That is why, really, you must excuse me if I now go to some lengths—’ I adopted a light tone, hoping to entice her into some gentleness of response. And I thought, oh God, if only I’d found her during the war, if only I’d run into her in the street in Leicester! And with the speed of the cinema-reeling imagination I saw how I might have met her, how she would have told me her marriage was a failure, or better still Ben would already have met a hero’s death, and . . . I even got as far as composing my explanation to Clement before Hartley spoke again.
‘You think it odd I’m so quiet. It’s like a sort of peace. Sometimes I feel I haven’t much further to go.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Sometimes I wish he would—’
‘Would what? Has he threatened you?’
‘No, no—that wasn’t wh
at I was going to say.’
‘What do you mean then? Look, you can’t go back to him, I won’t let you, even if you don’t want to stay with me.’ But what did I think I would do then, set her up in a flower shop?
‘Hartley, you’ve got to stay with me and Titus, it’s your place. Apart from anything else, Titus having come to me will confirm Ben’s idea that he is my son.’
‘Have you only just thought of that?’
‘Oh, Hartley, darling, be gentle with me, don’t be so sort of remote. Admit it, say it, you’ve never really loved anybody but me, you’ve come home at last. That night when I saw you in the car headlights you had come here, you had to come. Say that you love me, say that it will be all right, that we’ll be happy. Christ, don’t you want to be happy at last and live with a man who loves you and is kind to you and believes what you say? Hartley, look at me. No, come in here, I don’t know why we’re sitting at this stupid table.’
I picked up the candle and pulled her into the little red room and drew the curtains. I sat in the armchair and wanted to take her on my knee, but she slipped to the floor at my feet and held on to my hand. I began very slowly and carefully to kiss her, then to caress her breasts. We were like children, adolescents. I felt for her a desire which was marvellously indistinguishable from pure love, reverent, strong, consumingly protective. And my desire was also that of a boy, incompetent, unskilled and humble. I did not know how to hold her or how to make her dry lips respond. Finally I got down on the floor too, manœuvred her to lie full length beside me, and clasped her, peering awkwardly into her face.
‘Hartley, you love me, don’t you, don’t you?’
‘Oh—yes—but what does it mean?’
‘We’re close, we know each other.’
‘Yes, it’s strange, but in a way I do know you, and there isn’t anyone else who’s near me like that. I suppose it’s just because we were young, and later you can’t know people, or I couldn’t.’
‘You know me. I know you.’
‘I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was my fault.’
‘I can see you, Hartley, you exist, you’re here. I love you, Titus loves you. We’ll all be together.’
‘Titus stopped loving me long ago.’
‘Don’t cry. He loves you, I know he does, he told me so. All will be well now that you’ve got away from that hateful man.’
I kept touching the quiet tears upon her cheek, and at last, half thrusting me away, she began to caress my face. ‘Oh, Charles—Charles—so strange.’
‘We’re like we used to be, lying in the woods—Hartley, will you be with me tonight please at last, just to be together quietly? We don’t have to lie here like this all night, do we?’
She became rigid, then sat up. ‘It’s the wine—I’m not used to it—I must be drunk—drunk—’
‘Well, don’t ask me to take you back now! It’s much too late, from every possible point of view!’
She got to her knees, then stiffly to her feet. I rose and faced her, gently touching her elbows with my fingertips.
‘Charles, you don’t know what you’ve done. Of course I shall go back tomorrow. I must sleep now, I just want to sleep now, by myself, I wish I could die in my sleep, I wish I could run out and fall into the sea.’
‘What rubbish. Can you swim?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s go upstairs, promise me you won’t run away in the night.’
‘Tomorrow I must go back there. This is just more of my stupidity, oh I am so stupid, always stupid, I should never have left the house. I’m not angry with you. It’s my fault, everything is my fault. Yes, I suppose I love you, I’ve never forgotten you, and when I saw you I felt it all again, but it’s something childish, it isn’t part of the real world. There was never any place for our love in the world. If there had been it would have won and we wouldn’t have parted. It wasn’t just me, it was you, you went away, you can’t remember how it was—and there isn’t any place for this love in the world now, it’s pointless, it’s irrelevant, it’s a dream, we’re in a dream place and tomorrow we must leave it. You say it was fated, perhaps it is but not like you think. It’s an evil fate, it’s my fate, I made it happen somehow, this muddle, this horror. Why did you come here? I somehow made you come, like people are lured to destruction, not for any good but just for disaster and death. That’s what I’ve been making all my life, not a home, not a child, but just horrors.’
I recalled Titus’s words, ‘She’s a bit of a fantasist.’ And no doubt she was indeed quite drunk. There was certainly no point in arguing now with the madness of her words. I hugged her hard. ‘Stop it, old thing, darling little Hartley. I did not go away from you, not like that, you know you’re only making excuses! Our love will make its place in the world, you’ll see, now that you’re here, it’s all very simple really. Just wait till the morning and the daylight and then you’ll feel brave. Come along upstairs with me and you shall sleep where you like.’
I led her out through the kitchen, carrying the candle. As we came to the stairs I saw a faint light under the door of the front room where Titus was sleeping, and I heard the murmur of voices. At the thought of Titus and Gilbert sitting on the floor on those cushions by candlelight I felt a quick spasm of jealousy. Hartley and I went upstairs.
I showed her the bathroom. I waited for her. I led her up and into my bedroom, but it was quite clear that she would not sleep with me. It was in any case better now to leave her alone. A kind of superstitious terror had taken hold of her, which took the form of a frenzied desire for unconsciousness. ‘I want to sleep, I must sleep, only sleep matters, sleep, I will sleep.’ I had had the sense to anticipate this situation and had made up a bed on the floor of the little centre room upstairs, with the mattress off my divan. I had also provided a candle, matches, even a chamber pot. I offered her a pair of pyjamas, but she lay down at once in her dress and pulled the blanket up over her head as if she were a corpse covering itself. And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.
I withdrew and left her. I closed the door and quietly locked it on the outside. I would never now lose that nightmare image of a distraught woman rushing to drown herself in the sea. I went to my room and kicked my shoes off and crawled into bed. I was completely exhausted, but imagined I would be too excited to sleep. I was wrong. I was fast asleep in seconds.
The next morning I woke to a sense of an utterly changed and perhaps dreadful world, like on the first day of a war. Joy, hope, came too, but fear first, and a black sense of confusion as if the deep logic of the universe had suddenly gone wrong. What was it that I had been so certain of, so confident about? What exactly was I up to? Had I done something mad and frightful yesterday, like a crime committed when drunk, remembered sober? There was also, to be expected, a visit from Ben.
The presence of Hartley in the house was itself like a dream, her sheer survival overnight now something urgently in question. I felt like a child who rushes to the cage of its new pet fearing to find only a lifeless body. With a sick stomach and a pounding heart I ran out into the corridor, beat my way through the bead curtain, softly unlocked her door and tapped. No response. Had she died in the night like a captured animal, had she somehow escaped and drowned herself? I opened the door and peered in. She was there and awake. She had pushed the pillows up against the wall and lay upon the mattress with her head propped, the blanket pulled up over her mouth. Her eyes stared at me under drooped lids. Her head kept moving slightly and I saw she was shivering.
‘Hartley, darling, are you all right, did you sleep? Were you warm enough?’
She lowered the blanket a little and her mouth moved.
‘Hartley, you’re going to stay with me forever. This is the first day of our new world—isn’t it? Oh, Hartley—’
She began very awkwardly to pull herself up, leaning her back against the wall, still hiding behind the blanket.
She said in a mumbling, gabbling tone, not looking at me, ‘I must go home.’
‘Don’t start that again.’
‘I came without my bag, without anything, I’ve got no make-up or anything.’
‘God, as if that mattered!’
I could see that, for her, it might matter however. In the bleak drained morning light which filtered in from the window which gave onto the drawing room she looked terrible. Her face was puffy and greasy, her brow corrugated, lines of haggardness outlined her mouth. Her tangled hair, dry and frizzy, looked like an old wig. As I gazed at her I felt a kind of new strength composed of pity and tenderness. And as I thought to show her how little I minded her shabby helplessness, my titanic love could even have wished for greater odds.
‘Come on, old thing,’ I said, ‘get up. Come on down and we’ll have breakfast. Then I’ll send Gilbert over to Nibletts for all your things. It’s perfectly simple.’ Or at least I hoped it would seem so to her.
She pulled herself up slowly, and then got onto all fours and rose laboriously to her feet. Her yellow dress was horribly hopelessly crumpled and she pulled at it ineffectually. Her whole body expressed the slightly ashamed awkwardness of the very afflicted person.
‘Look, I’ll lend you my dressing gown, I’ve got such a nice one.’ I ran to my bedroom and brought her my best black silk dressing gown with the red rosettes. She stood at the door of her room staring at the bead curtain.
‘What’s that?’
‘Well may you ask. A bead curtain. Now put this on. There’s the bathroom, you remember.’
She let me help her into the dressing gown, then walked slowly down to the bathroom. I waited, sitting on the stairs. When she emerged she climbed back up towards her room, moving heavily like an old woman.
‘Wait then, I’ll get you a comb, or you can come and use the mirror in my room, would you like, it’s brighter in there.’
She went on back into her own room. I fetched the comb and a hand mirror. She combed her hair, not looking into the glass, then sat down again on the mattress. There was indeed no other furniture, since the table which Titus had retrieved from the rocks was still downstairs.
