by Iris Murdoch
‘Won’t you come down?’
‘No, I’ll stay here.’
‘I’ll bring you something.’
‘I feel sick, the wine has made me sick.’
‘Would you like tea, coffee?’
‘I feel sick.’ She lay down again and pulled up the blanket.
I looked at her with despair, then went out. I closed and locked the door. I did not exclude the possibility that after this show of apathy she might suddenly run for it, rushing out of the house and disappearing among the rocks, hurling herself into the sea.
I went downstairs and found Gilbert sitting at the kitchen table. He rose respectfully as I entered. Titus was at the stove, which he had mastered, cooking eggs. He seemed now to be completely at home in the house. At this I felt both pleasure and displeasure.
‘Morning, guv’nor,’ said Gilbert.
‘Hello, dad.’
I did not care for this pleasantry from Titus.
‘If you must be familiar, my name is Charles.’
‘Sorry, Mr Arrowby. How is my mother this morning?’
‘Oh, Titus, Titus—’
‘Have a fried egg,’ said Gilbert.
‘I’ll take her up some tea. Does she take milk, sugar?’
‘I can’t remember.’
I made up a little tray with tea, milk and sugar, bread, butter, marmalade. I carried it up, balanced it, unlocked the door. Hartley was still lying under the blanket.
‘Lovely breakfast. Look.’
She stared at me with almost theatrical misery.
‘Wait. I’ll get a table and chair.’ I ran downstairs and came back with the little table and a chair. I unpacked the tray onto the table. ‘Come, darling, don’t let your tea get cold. And look, I’ve brought you such a lovely present, a stone, the most beautiful stone on the shore.’ I laid down beside her plate the elliptical stone, my very first one, the prize of my collection, hand-sized, a mottled pink, irregularly criss-crossed with white bars in a design before which Klee and Mondrian would have bowed to the ground.
Hartley came slowly, crawling then rising, and stood by the table, pulling the dressing gown round her. She did not look at the stone or touch it. I put my arms round her for a moment and kissed her wig-like hair. Then I kissed her warm silk-clad shoulder. Then I left her and locked the door. At any rate she had said no more about going back. No doubt she was afraid; and if she feared to think of returning now, then every hour which kept her here would help to gain my point. But her air of apathetic misery appalled me. Later I was not surprised to find that she had drunk a little tea but eaten nothing.
I looked at my watch. It was still not eight o’clock. I wondered when, and how, Ben would arrive. I remembered uneasily what Hartley had said about his having kept his army revolver. I went down to the kitchen to issue orders.
Gilbert was eating fried eggs, fried bread, grilled tomatoes.
‘Where’s the boy?’
‘He’s gone to swim. How’s Hartley?’
‘Oh—terrible. I mean, all right. Listen, Gilbert, could you go outside and keep watch? All right, finish your breakfast first, you’re doing well, aren’t you!’
‘What do you mean, keep watch?’ said Gilbert suspiciously.
‘Just stand, or if you like sit, on the road, at the end of the causeway, and come in and tell me when you see him coming.’
‘How am I to know him? By his horsewhip?’
‘He’s unmistakable.’ I described Ben minutely.
‘Suppose he creeps up on me or something? He can’t be feeling very pleased. You said he was a tough, a sort of thug. I love you, darling, but I’m not going to fight.’
‘Nobody is going to fight.’ I hope.
‘I don’t mind sitting in the car,’ said Gilbert. ‘I’ll sit in the car with the doors locked and watch the road. Then if I see him I’ll hoot the horn.’
This seemed a good idea. ‘All right, but make it snappy.’
I went out of the back and across the grass and climbed over the rocks as far as the little cliff in time to see Titus’s long pale legs elevated to heaven as he dived under the green water. He reminded me of Breughel’s Icarus. Absit omen.
I had not the heart to swim, and anyway I did not want Ben to find me trouserless; and there was enough of a swell on for me to see that I might have difficulty getting out. Titus would be all right of course. I must remember to fix another ‘rope’ at the steps.
The sun was already high and the sea was a lucid green nearer to the rocks, a glittering azure farther out, shifting and flashing as if large plates of white were floating on the surface. The horizon was a line of gold. A surge of rather large but very smooth slow waves was coming in towards me and silently frothing up among the rocks; there was a quiet menace in the graceful yet machine-like power of their strong regular motions.
I waited rather impatiently for young Titus to finish his swim. He had no business to be diverting himself at a moment of crisis. He saw me, waved, but was clearly in no hurry. He shouted to me to come in but I shook my head.
I urgently wanted Titus on the land, partly because I wanted to efface the rather raw impression of our stupid exchanges in the kitchen. Also I wanted Titus beside me, clothed and efficient and in his right mind, when the gentleman turned up. I did not really imagine that Ben would come round and murder us all, but unless there was some show of strength he might possibly wish to punch my head; and while I am athletic and fairly strong, the arts of aggression have never been among my accomplishments. I often wondered during the war how it was that men were able to face other men and kill them. Training helped and I suppose fear. I was glad that it had not been my lot.
It also then occurred to me, as I dourly watched Titus’s dolphin antics, that I did not really know how he would react. He had fairly indicated that he detested his adoptive father. But the young mind is mysterious. Confronted with him he might be cowed, or else moved by sudden sympathy. Or by old deep resistless filial emotions. Could Titus change sides? Did Titus himself know?
At last he swam back to the steep rock, and clinging with fingers and toes easily levered his naked body up out of the strong rising and falling surge. He crawled up, swung over the edge and lay panting.
‘Titus, dear boy, get dressed, quick, here’s your towel.’
He obeyed, eyeing me. ‘What’s the matter? Are we going somewhere?’
‘No, but I’m afraid your father may arrive any moment.’
‘Looking for my mother. Well, I suppose he may. What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. What will he do? Listen, Titus, and please forgive my clumsy haste, there’s so much I want to say to you. Titus, we must hold on to each other, you and me—’
‘Oh yes, I’m a very important property, I’m the decoy duck, I’m the hostage!’
‘No, this is exactly my point. This is what I came out here to say to you. Not for that. For you. I mean I want you, I want to be your father, I want you to be my son, whatever happens. I mean even if your mother won’t stay with me—but I hope and believe she will—but even if she weren’t to, I still want you to accept me as your father.’
‘It’s a funny action,’ he said, ‘accepting somebody as your father, when you’re grown up. I’m not sure how it’s done.’
‘Time will show us how it’s done. You must just have the will, the intent. Please. I feel there is a real bond between us, it will grow stronger, naturally. Don’t think I’m just using you, I’m not. I feel love for you. Excuse the clumsy awkwardness of what I say, I haven’t time to think of a graceful speech. I feel that fate or God or something has given us to each other. Let us not stupidly miss this chance. Don’t let idiotic pride or suspicion or failure of imagination or failure of hope spoil this thing for us. Let us now and henceforth belong together. Never mind what it means exactly or what it will involve, we can’t see that yet. But will you accept, will you try?’
I had not prepared or anticipated quite such passionate pleading. I stared a
t him anxiously, hoping I had made some impression.
He was clothed by now, and we stood together on the high rock above the water. He looked at me frowning and screwing up his eyes. Then he looked away. ‘All right—I suppose—yes—OK. I’m in fact, well, a little overwhelmed, actually. I’m glad you said that about wanting me for me. I wasn’t sure. I believe you—I think. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking about you so much of my life, and I always knew I’d have to come and look at you one day, but I kept putting it off because I was afraid. I thought that if you rejected me—I mean, thought I was a sort of lying scrounger, just wanting money and that—and, well, why shouldn’t you have thought so, it’s all so odd—it would have been a sort of crippling blow. I can’t see how I would have recovered, I’d have felt so dishonoured and awful, I’d have been saddled with it somehow forever after. There was so much at stake.’
‘So much, yes, but all is well, here at least. We won’t misunderstand each other. We won’t lose each other.’
‘It’s all happened so fast.’
‘It’s happened fast because it’s right, it’s easy because it’s right.’
‘Well then, I’ll try, as you say God knows what it means, but I accept, at least I’ll try.’
He held out his hand and I grasped it and for a moment we stood there, moved and embarrassed.
Then I heard, from the roadway, the loud urgent hooting of Gilbert’s horn.
‘That’s him!’ I jumped up and began to scramble towards the house. Titus passed me and raced on before me over the grass. When I reached the kitchen door Gilbert was holding on to Titus.
‘He’s here, he came walking along the road, he stopped at the causeway but when he saw me in the car and when I started hooting he walked on.’
‘Walked on past the house?’
‘Yes. Maybe he’s going to come round the back over the rocks.’ Gilbert seemed to be really frightened.
I ran through the hall and out onto the causeway and up to the road. There was no sign of Ben. I noticed that Gilbert, no doubt to secure his own retreat, had parked the car right across the end of the causeway as if it were intended as a barricade. That no doubt was why Ben had walked on. As I was still hesitating and staring about I heard Titus shouting from the other side of the house.
I passed Gilbert, who was gabbling something or other, at the door and rushed out again through the kitchen. Titus was standing up on top of one of the highest rocks, and pointing. ‘He’s there! There! I can see him. He’s coming along from the tower.’
By now I felt no more doubt about whose side Titus was on. Thank goodness for that.
I called to Titus, ‘You wait there, I’ll go and meet him. If I want you I’ll shout.’
I began to climb over the rocks keeping the tower in view, and in a moment I saw Ben, also clambering, with an impressive agility, in the direction of the house.
The place where our two paths converged, and indeed the only fairly easy way from the house to the tower, was Minn’s bridge, the rocky arch under which the sea entered the cauldron. Towards this natural meeting place we both scrambled and slid until we came onto the bridge and faced each other some ten feet apart. I wondered quickly and a bit anxiously whether we were, as I hoped, still within the view of Titus upon his high rock. I looked quickly round. We were not.
Ben was wearing blackish corduroy trousers, rubbed bald at the knees, probably from the Fishermen’s Stores, and a white shirt. No jacket, though the morning was still chilly. Had he donned this stripped gear to assure me he was carrying no weapon, or was he simply dressed for fighting? He looked burly, a bit tight for his trousers, but compact and business-like. He appeared to have shaved, which I had not. He had shaved alone over there in that suddenly empty house with God knows what thoughts in his mind as he faced himself in the mirror. His cropped mousy hair, his big boyish head, broad shoulders and short build were reminiscent of a little ram or other smallish but aggressive male animal. By contrast with his thick heavy look I felt positively willowy, loose, untidy, with uncombed hair and, I suddenly realized, my striped pyjama jacket still on over my trousers.
I advanced a little onto the bridge and so did he. The tide was coming in and the strong large waves were crowding in and washing hungrily round inside the deep smooth space of the cauldron. There was a low sibilant roar, not loud enough to impede a parley. I stood, checking on my pyjama buttons, and waiting for him to begin. The roaring sound comforted me. I hoped it disconcerted Ben. Noise has always been my friend.
I was now seeing Ben’s face closely in a good light for the first time. He was rather better-looking than I had imagined earlier. He had long brown eyes with long lashes, and a large well-formed and, though perhaps only now, slightly sneering and fastidious mouth. His chin receded into his thick neck. I was at once aware that he was, and I was relieved to see it, extremely nervous, though also extremely angry. Was he perhaps a bit frightened of me? Guilt? Guilt makes fear.
‘Where is my wife?’
‘Here, in my house, where she wants to stay. And Titus too, he wasn’t my son, as you perfectly well know, but he is now, I’ve adopted him.’
‘What?’
‘Yes!’
‘What did you say?’
I realized with further satisfaction that Ben was a bit deaf, deafer than me at any rate, and the noise was bothering him. I had rather gabbled my statement it is true. I said, with loud insulting clarity, ‘She is—here. Titus is—here. They stay—here.’
‘I’ve come to take her home.’
‘Look, you don’t really believe that Titus is my son, do you? I assure you he isn’t.’
‘I want my wife.’
‘I’m telling you something that ought to interest you. Titus is not my son.’
‘I don’t care about that story any more, it’s over, I want Mary.’
‘She wants to stay here.’
‘I don’t believe you—you are keeping her by force. You kidnapped her. I know she wouldn’t stay of her own free will, I know.’
‘She came to me, she ran to me, like she did before, that evening when you were at your woodwork class. Do you imagine that I could or would remove her from your house by force?’
‘She left her handbag behind.’
‘You don’t love her, she doesn’t love you, she’s terrified of you, why not admit it to yourselves? Why go on living this horrible lie?’
‘Release Mary, or I shall go to the police.’
‘They’d laugh at you. You know quite well the police wouldn’t interfere in a case of this sort.’
‘I want my wife.’
‘She doesn’t want to go back to you, she’s had enough. I’m going to send the car round for her things.’
‘What lies has she told you?’
‘That’s your line now is it? Vilify her, put the blame on her! How splendidly you give yourself away!’
‘She’s a hysterical person who imagines a lot of things, she isn’t well.’
‘She certainly imagines she’s had enough of your cruelty. Go on, just try the police, see what happens!’
‘You don’t know what you’re meddling with, you don’t understand. She’s my wife and I love her and I’m going to take her back to her home, where she belongs and where she wants to be. Why have you suddenly come interfering in our lives, why did you decide to come and live here and pester us, we didn’t want you, we don’t want you. I know what sort of person you are, I’ve read about you, you’re a rotten man, a shit, a destroyer, you’re filth. Mary isn’t one of your show-business whores, she’s a decent woman, like you aren’t worthy to touch. Leave us alone, if you don’t want to get very hurt. I’m warning you. Leave us alone.’
Ben, incoherently searching for words to match his anger, his big bull head thrust forward, was showing his strong teeth, wet with spittle. The rhythmic hissing roar of the powerful mechanical waves entranced me for a moment, as without looking down I could sense their churning movement in the rocky pit below. I thought
to myself quite clearly, with a precision which involved my whole body, I have only to step quickly forward and pitch that hateful thug over the edge. He may be stronger, but I am more agile. He cannot swim; and even a good swimmer would die at once in that boiling cauldron. No one sees us. I can say he attacked me. I have only to push him in and all my troubles are over.
As I thought this I was fixing Ben with my eyes. I felt an embryonic movement of my body, though no doubt in reality I did not visibly stir. My eyes were enough, however, and I had the certainty that he had read my intention, if indeed it could be called an intention, for of course I would never have carried it out. He retreated to the far end of the bridge and I unclenched my hands and lowered my eyes. I retreated too.
‘Bring her back!’ he said, raising his voice, as the din of the water rose like a wall between us. ‘Bring her back this morning. Or else I’ll go every possible way to destroy you. I’m telling you. I mean that.’
I said nothing.
He said, as if suddenly confused and with a catch in his voice, ‘Consider her. She wants to come home. I know she does. You don’t understand. Don’t let this go on. It’s worse for her. She’ll have to come home in the end. Don’t you see?’
I said, inaudibly, ‘Fuck off.’
He began to move away. Then he turned back and called out, ‘Tell her I brought the dog back last night. I thought she’d be so pleased.’
I watched him as, more slowly, and seeming now at last like a cripple, he climbed over the rocks, appearing and disappearing, until he had nearly reached the road. I shook myself out of my trance and began to make my way back to the house as fast as I could. I wanted to be sure he was really going away.
Titus, who was still sitting on his high rock, jumped up and followed. Gilbert was on the lawn. They both immediately started to question me, but I ran past them. They ran after me and we emerged all three onto the causeway and advanced as far as Gilbert’s car, which was still in position. We stood in a row behind the car. Ben was walking along the road towards us. Titus gazed at him for a moment, then turned round and stood there with his back to the road. The gesture was impressive. Ben passed us by, grim-faced, without a word, without a look, and walked onward unhurried in the direction of the village.
