The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  I woke up. The lightning flash of thought which showed me the dream showed me at the same moment that it was a dream. I was lying in my bed. I had not been to Hartley’s room and found her dead, having hanged herself with one of her stockings from the cast-iron lamp bracket, climbing up onto the table and casting herself off. I felt intense violent relief: and then the thought, but supposing it is true? Sick and trembling I got up, lit my candle, and quietly opened my bedroom door. The candlelight illumined the barrier of the bead curtain but nothing beyond. The curtain was clicking softly, no doubt as a result of the draught from the door. I carefully plucked the bead strings apart and glided on to Hartley’s room and turned the key very quietly. I leaned through the doorway and peered in.

  There she was, in the light of my candle, lying curled up on the mattress, covered by a blanket, her hand over her face. I watched and heard her steady quiet breathing. Then I silently withdrew and locked the door again. I went back through the bead curtain, trying not to agitate it too much, and in sheer distraction went into the drawing room. I had, since Hartley’s incarceration, kept out of the drawing room, out of a sort of sense of propriety, because of the long window which gave onto Hartley’s room. I went in now, vaguely with the idea of making sure there was no one there, and of course there was not. I stood, holding my candle, and looking at the long inner window which was now like a glossy black mirror; and it occurred to me that I was shunning the drawing room not out of propriety but because of the appalling possibility that I might see Hartley actually looking out. And then I suddenly remembered the face which I had seen looking at me through the dark glass; and I thought, that face was too high up. It could not have been the face of someone standing on the floor. It was just at the level at which Hartley’s face would have been if she had really hanged herself.

  Then I thought, my candle is shining into her room, making a faint ghostly light in her room. What dreads and fears did she have, poor captive, if she woke in the night? Did she climb on a chair to peer into the dim empty moonlit drawing room? Did she very quietly try the locked door, hoping and fearing to be able to creep downstairs and run away into the dark night? I hurriedly returned to my bedroom and closed the door. I sat on my bed shuddering and looked at my watch. It was half-past two. What was I doing, or rather what was happening to me? I held my head in my hands. I was totally vulnerable and helpless. I had lost control of my life and of the lives with which I was meddling. I felt dread and a terrible fatalism; and bitter grief, grief such as I had never felt in my life since Hartley had left me so many years ago. I had wakened some sleeping demon, set going some deadly machine; and what would be would be.

  The next morning something did happen, which was that Rosina turned up.

  I had, after my horrible night interlude, managed to sleep. Perhaps sheer fatalism sent me to sleep. Let Ben come, let him set fire to the house, let him kill me. I deserved to die. I felt a good deal less fatalistic and more anxious when I woke up in the morning. It seemed urgently necessary to make a decision, but there was no material, no data, no evidence on which a decision could be made. I passionately wanted to take Hartley away, to London, to anywhere, or rather I wanted to want it enough to be able to do it now. But against her will, should I, could I? Could I pull a resisting, screaming woman into Gilbert’s car and have her driven off? Could I deceive her into thinking she was going home? Would Gilbert let me? Would Titus let me? If I took her away by force, it might harden her against me, and impede that precious movement of her will for which I was so impatiently waiting.

  Yet could the situation go on? And if not what else could possibly come of it? I felt it absolutely unthinkable to let Hartley go back to that man, especially after what she had said yesterday about how he would never, never believe her now. Suppose I let her go back and he killed her? I would have murdered her. Could I imagine myself opening the door and saying, all right, I give up, you can go home? No. The only piece of rational discourse which I could hang on to, and it was of great value, was what Hartley had said about the miracle in her mind which had not come about. If she could even utter such words, did not this indicate that her mind was divided and that she had some grain of hope that was favourable to me, some tiny pure inclination to make herself want what I wanted? But she must want to be free and happy, everybody did. She must, somewhere in her tormented soul, want me to take her away, out of misery, out of servitude. She must be moved by the idea of Titus, and the redemption of her love for him, a new family, a new world. She had only to open her eyes and stretch out her hand and say yes. There were vast liberating forces pent up somewhere which were bound to break out. It was just a matter of waiting and keeping her here and letting time enlighten her will.

  I had given her breakfast and tried to talk to her and to explain what I have just written here, only she kept saying that she wanted to go home. Her ringed eyes and puffy face and the unnerving languor of her bearing made me wonder if she were not really ill, and whether I should call a doctor. Then, more exasperated than pitying, I wondered if I could not better serve my cause by being brusque, and I left her rather abruptly, and then was sorry. I was standing beside the bead curtain and touching it, uncertain what to do next, when I heard a sudden loud outburst of laughter from down below, followed by some part-singing with a female voice.

  I ran down to the kitchen. Rosina was sitting on the table swinging her legs and being (there is no other word for it) worshipped by Gilbert and Titus. She was wearing a dark grey very fine check, very smart lightweight coat and skirt and a white silk blouse and very long wrinkled white high-heeled boots. Her glossy glowing dark hair had been cut or piled by a clever hairdresser into a rounded segmented composition which looked both complex and casual. (Horace would have liked it.) Her intense animal face was blazing with health and vitality and feral curiosity. She was entirely in control of a situation where the other two, perhaps as a result of prolonged strain, had now broken down into helpless crazy giggling and fou rire. My appearance provoked another outburst of slightly hysterical laughter, and they all spontaneously broke into song again. They sang in round, and showed no sign of stopping, an Italian catch whose words I can remember since Titus and Gilbert had been singing it obsessively in the preceding days. Titus taught it to Gilbert and now Rosina had got it too. It went Eravamo tredici, siamo rimasti dodici, sei facevano rima, e sei facevan’ pima-poma-pima-poma. God knows what it was supposed to be about. Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey. Intoxicated by their own voices they now roared it out, round and round, Gilbert’s fruity baritone, Titus’s pseudo-Neapolitan tenor and Rosina’s strong rather harsh contralto. I shouted ‘Stop! Stop! Stop that bloody row!’ But they went on singing at me, their bright eyes, moist with laughter, fixed upon me, waving their arms in time to the tune; until at last they wearied, stopped, and went off into another crazy laughing fit.

  I sat on a chair and watched them.

  Coherent at last, Rosina said, wiping her eyes, ‘Charles, you’re so funny, you are an endless source of amusement to your friends. I hear you’ve got your lady-love here, hidden away upstairs! You really are priceless!’

  ‘Why the hell did you have to tell her?’ I said to Gilbert and Titus.

  Gilbert, attempting unsuccessfully to erase the laughter wrinkles from his face, avoided my look. He started rolling and swinging his eyes.

  Titus said rather sulkily, ‘You didn’t say not to tell.’ Then he caught Rosina’s eye and beamed.

  Gilbert had of course met Rosina before and knew her slightly. He had hitherto regarded her with the prudish hostility which some male homosexuals instinctively feel towards very feminine predatory women (whereas with gentle sweet women such as Lizzie they got on very well). However he seemed now to have suffered an instant conversion. Titus was simply a boy absolutely thrilled to see a famous actress in the flesh and to fin
d that she not only noticed him but appreciated the charms of his youth. They kept eyeing each other, he shyly, she with bold amusement. Titus’s appearance had profited, as Gilbert’s had, from sun and sea. His reddish blond hair had been burnished and enlivened into a halo of fine wire, and his shirt, scarcely buttoned, showed the glowing skin and blazing red curls of his chest. His trousers were rolled up to reveal long elegant bronzed legs. He was barefoot. The scarred lip gave a twisted male force to his pretty mouth. Rosina was at her sleekest, delighted and amused by her exercise of power. As she held court, her piercing cross-eyed glance kept moving encouragingly from one of the bemused enthralled men and back again. They seemed to be quite dazed by her attractions. It was certainly a change from the increasingly charnel house atmosphere of Shruff End.

  ‘What do you want, Rosina?’

  ‘What do you mean, “What do you want?” What a way to greet a visitor. “What do you want?” ’ She mimicked me. ‘What sort of a question is that?’

  The other two roared with laughter. They seemed to find everything Rosina said vastly clever and funny.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Can’t you make an effort to be civil to an old friend?’

  ‘I’m not in a social mood.’

  ‘So I see. Yet you already have two charming guests, in fact three guests, including lady-love. All right, I’m not angling for an invitation to stay. I think this is the nastiest meanest most unpleasant house I’ve ever entered.’

  ‘It has bad vibes,’ said Titus.

  ‘You can say that again,’ said Gilbert.

  They were ganging up against me.

  ‘But is your funny lady really upstairs? Whatever are you going to do with her? You know, you promised to tell me what was going on in your interesting love life, only of course I ought to know by now that you don’t keep promises. Anyway I decided I’d come and see how you were getting along. I’ve been working hard and I thought I needed a holiday. I’m at the Raven Hotel again, I like it there, I like the bay and those extraordinary boulders. And the food is excellent, not your style.’

  ‘I hope you have a pleasant stay at the Raven Hotel.’

  ‘The most amazing rumours about you are circulating in London.’

  ‘I’m sure everyone is fascinated.’

  ‘Well, they’re not actually. I had to start a few rumours myself to keep your memory a bit greenish. They’ve forgotten you already. You were pretty old hat when you were still with us, now you’re ancient history. The young people have never heard of you, Charles. You’re exploded, you’re not even a myth. I can see it now, Charles dear, you’re old. Where’s all that charm we used to go on about? It was nothing but power really. Now you’ve lost your power you’ve lost your charm. No wonder you have to make do with a Bearded Lady.’

  ‘Just buzz off, Rosina, will you?’

  ‘But what’s happening, Charles? I’m mad with curiosity. I gather from these two that she’s a sort of prisoner here. May I go up and poke her through the bars?’

  ‘Rosina, please—’

  ‘But, Charles, what are you up to? There’s a husband in the case, isn’t there, if I remember? Not that husbands ever worried you much. But you can’t be going to carry her off, you can’t want to marry her! Really, you are becoming ridiculous. You were never ridiculous in the old days. You used to have dignity and style.’

  Titus and Gilbert, less amused, were looking embarrassed and studying the great slate flagstones of the kitchen floor.

  ‘I’ll see you to the road, Rosina. Is your car out there?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to go yet. I want to sing some more. Who’s pretty-boy?’ She indicated Titus.

  ‘That is my son Titus.’

  Titus frowned and stroked his scarred lip. Gilbert raised his eyebrows, Rosina changed colour, shot me a quick look of piercing malignancy, then laughed. ‘Well, well—All right, I’ll go. My car’s outside. You may escort me to it. Goodbye, you two, I enjoyed the sing-song.’ She marched out of the kitchen swinging her handbag and I followed.

  Rosina walked straight out of the front door and across the causeway without looking back. I followed her as far as her horrible red car.

  There she turned on me, her vixen face pointed with rage. ‘Is that boy really your son?’

  ‘Well, no, I’ve sort of taken him on. I always wanted a son. He’s their son, he’s the adopted son—of—of Hartley and her husband.’

  ‘I see. I might have known it was a stupid joke. For one moment I thought perhaps—what are you going to do about that woman? You can’t collect a half-crazy female at this stage of her life. You can’t keep her like a mad thing on a chain. Or have I got it all wrong?’

  ‘She’s not a prisoner. She loves me. She’s just been brainwashed. ’

  ‘Marriage is brainwashing. Not necessarily a bad thing. Your brain could do with a wash. Oh God, I feel so tired. That bloody long drive—I think your mind’s going, you’re getting senile, you’re living in a dream world, a rather nasty one. Shall I tell you something to wake you up?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘You say you “always wanted a son”. That’s just a sentimental lie, you didn’t want trouble, you didn’t want to know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a real son. Your sons are fantasies, they’re easier to deal with. Do you imagine you could really “take on” that silly uneducated adolescent boy in there? He’ll vanish out of your life like everything else has done, because you can’t grasp the stuff of reality. He’ll turn out to be a dream child too—when you touch him he’ll fade and disappear—you’ll see.’

  ‘All right, you’ve had your say, now go.’

  ‘I haven’t started yet. I never told you this at the time, I thought I never would. You made me pregnant. I got rid of the child.’

  I drew a circle in the dust on the radiator of the car. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because you weren’t there to tell, you’d gone, gone off with Lizzie or whoever was the next dream girl. God, the sickening casual brutality of men—the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone. I made that decision alone. Christ, how I wish I hadn’t done it. I was crazy. I did it partly out of hatred of you. Why the hell didn’t I keep that child. He’d have been nearly grown up by now.’

  ‘Rosina—’

  ‘And I’d have taught him to hate you—that would have been a consolation too.’

  ‘I’m sorry—’

  ‘Oh, you’re sorry. And I daresay I wasn’t the only one. You broke up my marriage deliberately, industriously, zealously, you worked at it. Then you walk off and leave me with nothing, with less than nothing, with that horrible crime which I had to commit by myself, I cried for months—for years—about that—I’ve never stopped crying.’ Her dark eyes filled with tears for a second, and then she seemed to magic them away. She opened the door of the car.

  ‘Oh—Rosina—’

  ‘I hate you, I loathe you, you’ve been a devil in my mind ever after—’

  ‘Look, all right, I left you, but you drove me to it, you were responsible too. Women’s Lib hasn’t stopped women from putting all the blame on us when it suits them. You tell me this terrible story now to—’

  ‘Oh shut up. What’s the name of that female?’

  ‘You mean—Hartley—?’

  ‘Is that her surname?’

  ‘No, her surname is Fitch.’

  ‘Fitch, OK. Mr Fitch, here I come.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘He lives here, doesn’t he? I shall find out where he lives and I shall go and console him. It’ll do him good to meet a real live woman instead of an old rag-bag. He’s probably forgotten what women are like. I won’t hurt him, I’ll just cheer him up, I’ll do him less harm than you’re doing her. I’ve got to have some amusement on my holiday. I thought of seducing pretty-boy, but it would be too easy. The father would be a far more interesting project. After all, life is full of surprises. The only thi
ng that’s become absolutely dull, dull, dull is you, Charles. Dull. Goodbye.’

  She got into the car and slammed the door. The car shot off like a red rocket in the direction of the village.

  I stared after her. Soon there was nothing on the road but a cloud of dust and above it the pale blue sky. For a short while I felt that I should go mad if I reflected too much on what Rosina had told me about what happened in the past.

  The rest of the day (before something else happened in the evening) passed like a feverish dream. The weather, sensing my mood, infected by it perhaps, became hotter but with that sinister breathless heat that betokens a thunderstorm. The light was darkened although the sun blazed from a cloudless sky. I felt weak and shivery as if I were developing the ’flu. My impression increased that perhaps Hartley was ill. Her eyes glittered, her hands were hot. Her stuffy smelly room had become that of an invalid. She was rational, not frenzied, she actually argued with me. I begged her to come downstairs, to come outside into the sun and air, but she lay back as if exhausted at the very thought. Even her rationality had something unnerving about it, as if it were the reasoning of a quiet maniac or an exercise undertaken simply for its own sake. She constantly said she wanted to go home, that there was no alternative, and so on and so on, but she seemed to me to lack the final real will to go. I kept on trying to regard this absence of will as a hopeful factor, but somehow now it was beginning to frighten me.

  And Ben’s silence was getting me down. What did it mean? Had he decided on reflection that he did not want Hartley back? Was he settling down to a happy bachelor life with the dog? Or had he some secret girl friend to whom in relief he had now run away? Was he making complex plans either to rescue her or to take some terrible revenge on me? Had he summoned some roughs, old army friends perhaps, who would arrive any moment to beat me up? Had he gone to a lawyer? Or was he just playing a subtle game, waiting for my nerve to break, waiting for me to come to him? Or perhaps he too had fallen into some kind of entranced nervous apathy, unsure of what he wanted, unsure of what to do? I myself felt at some moment that to be forced to act, even by the police, would be preferable to this empty echoing space of attentive possibilities.