The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  The problem was the same, only the light was different. I must get Hartley away, get her to myself, and awaken her, make her quiver and twitch with a sense of possible freedom. Yes, aloneness was the key, I understood that now. I must be alone with her soon, and then thereafter, forever. When she had been my prisoner how humiliated she must have been by the presence of other people in the house. There must be no more witnesses. I would tell her that. She did not have to join my grand intimidating alien world. To wed his beggar maid the king would, and how gladly, become a beggar too. The vision of that healing humility would henceforth be my guide. This was indeed the very condition of her freedom, why had I not seen this before? I would at last see her face changing. It was, I found, a part of my thought of the future that when she was with me Hartley would actually regain much of her old beauty: like a prisoner released from a labour camp who at first looks old, but then with freedom and rest and good food soon becomes young again. The pain and anxiety would leave her face and she would be calm and beautiful; and I saw that rejuvenated face shining like a lamp out of the future. When I had left the theatre I had desired a solitude: now it was set before me in the very form of my Beatrice. Only here was happiness for me an innocent and permissible goal, even an ideal. Everywhere else where I had pursued it it had proved either a will-o’-the-wisp or a form of corruption. To find one’s true mate is to find the one person with whom happiness is purely innocent.

  The immediate question however was a technical one. How to get her away? A long wait was now out of the question, since I must use my new power over Ben while it was still fresh. What I was beginning to envisage this time was not a kidnap but a bombardment. First of all I would write Hartley a letter. Then I would call with Titus. Why would Ben let us in? Because he would be guilty and frightened. He would want to see what we were up to. How was he to know that there was no proof? How was he to know there had been no witness? On this I paused. Well, why should there not have been a witness? I could tell him there had been a witness! I could even ask somebody (Gilbert? Perry?) to say that he had seen what happened. After all, anyone might have done, and very nearly did! That would scare him completely. Why should I not blackmail Ben into letting Hartley go? If I could only make him say: go then. How near was he in any case to saying this? Did his long silence after the kidnap perhaps mean that he was in two minds about wanting her back? If he could only consent, the chains would fall and my angel would step out free. Or if she could see him revealed as a murderer, that might bring her the blessing of a total revulsion: horror, disgust, fear, in a more effectively violent form. If only there was some genuine clue. What on earth had I written on that piece of paper which I had so cleverly hidden from myself?

  Yes, it was vital to act soon, before Ben should have time to recover. He must be in a state of considerable shock; although unfortunately he would by now know, from the silence of his radio and television sets, that he had failed to kill famous Charles Arrowby. However, and this was now plain, I could not proceed farther than my letter to Hartley while Lizzie and James were in the house. It would be unfair to Lizzie to expect her to witness or even assist the rescue of her rival. And James: well, James made moral judgments and confused me. So I would have to get rid of those two. Gilbert and Peregrine might be useful for a little while longer. And of course Titus . . .

  At this point I began to reflect and to wonder if I had not, in relation to Hartley, seriously misconceived Titus’s role. Would Titus fit into the paradise à deux which I had lately been envisaging? No. That need not matter of course. People often had to separate conjugal and filial relationships. I would have a quite separate connection with Titus; and indeed he had already indicated that that was what he wanted. But still I had assumed that Hartley would want Titus in the picture somehow. Was this a wrong assumption? And at about that moment the young man himself came through the door.

  I had not had a peaceful serious talk with Titus for some time, and I blamed myself. Quite apart from my concern with Hartley, I was absolutely committed to the boy, he was literally a ‘godsend’. It remained to be seen how far I could, with him, make sense of the role of ‘father’. I had by now been made aware that Gilbert, and even Peregrine, saw my relation with Titus in quite another light!

  During my reflections the rain had stopped and between lumpy dark grey leaden clouds the sun was managing to shine upon an extremely wet world. The lawn was waterlogged, the rocks contrived to look like sponges. Upstairs I could hear Gilbert and Lizzie shouting to each other, the former up in the attics inspecting the roof, the latter in the bathroom mopping up the flood. When Titus appeared I decided to go outside to avoid interruption and ensure privacy. I was a bit stronger and the giddiness had not returned. But as he helped me slowly over the rocks I felt like an old person; and when we reached Minn’s bridge I could hardly bring myself to cross it. How had I survived that deep pit, those smooth walls, that ferocious water?

  The rocks were beginning to steam in the sun. It was as if there were hot springs everywhere. We sat down on towels which sensible Titus had brought from the kitchen, on a rock overlooking Raven Bay, not far from where I had sat with James. The sea, although it looked calm because it was so exceedingly glossy and smooth after the rain, was in a quietly dangerously violent mood, coming in in large sleek humpbacked waves which showed no trace of foam until they met the rocks in a creamy swirl. The sun continued to shine although a grey sheet of rain now obscured the horizon. A rainbow joined the land and the sea. Raven Bay was a bottle green colour which I had never seen it wear before. I wondered for a moment where Rosina was.

  We had made our climb in silence and a kind of silence held us still. I kept looking at him and he kept gazing at the bay. His handsome face had an expression of discontent, the sulky shapeless look of youth was upon his mouth. The hare lip scar was deepening, seeming to pulsate, opening and closing a little with some perhaps unconscious lifelong habitual movement. His hair was extremely tangled and untidy.

  ‘Titus.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you call me “Charles”? Could you get used to it? I feel it would help us both.’

  ‘OK, Charles.’

  ‘Titus—I—You are very important to me and I need you—’

  Titus worked at his scar, then put a finger on it to stop its little quivering. It only then occurred to me that Titus might have been reflecting on those ambiguities in our relationship which struck Gilbert so much, might indeed have been put in mind of them by some crude jest of Gilbert’s. I had not thought of this fairly obvious idea before partly because I had been distracted from Titus, partly because I had somehow spread over him a canopy of innocence which derived from the suffering Hartley.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ I added.

  Titus’s moist discontented mouth twitched in a smile or sneer.

  I went on, ‘I want to tell you something.’ I had suddenly decided that I must tell Titus about Ben’s attempt to kill me.

  ‘If it’s about Mary—’

  ‘Yes—’ I had not talked to Titus since the awful scene at Nibletts when the ‘delegation’ brought the erring wife back to the hateful husband.

  ‘All that makes me sick. I’m sorry, forgive me. But I just don’t want to be involved. I left home so as not to be bothered with muddles like that, I hate muddles, and I’ve had them all my life with those two, muddle, muddle, muddle. They’re not bad people really, they’ve just got no sense of how to live a human life.’

  ‘She’s not a bad person, I agree—’

  ‘I can’t tell you how sick I felt when we went over to their place in the car, I wish to God I hadn’t come and seen it all, now I’ll never forget it. I felt so humiliated. Mary was being treated like a bit of property or a child. You mustn’t interfere in other people’s lives, especially married people. That’s in a way why marriage is so awful, I can’t think how anyone dares to do it. You’ve got to leave them alone. They’ve got their own way of hating each other and hurti
ng each other, they enjoy it.’

  ‘If it’s so awful one ought to interfere. You mustn’t be so cynical and pessimistic.’

  ‘I’m not cynical and pessimistic, that’s the point, I don’t care, you think I think about it, I don’t, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to know, I don’t care a fuck about their bloody misery!’

  ‘Well, I do, and I’m going to get your mother out of it, I’m going to get her right out.’

  ‘You tried, and she just squealed to go home. I’d have let her walk. Sorry, I don’t mean that. You made a mistake, that’s all, now forget it. Honestly, I can’t understand why you should want her, I mean I can’t see it, is it sentimental or Salvation Army or something—you can’t want someone like that, I don’t see it, I don’t get the point. There’s that woman Lizzie Scherer who seems to like you a lot, and Rosina Vamburgh—’

  ‘I happen to love your mother.’

  ‘Oh—love—you mean—’

  ‘You may be too young to understand.’

  ‘I suppose it’s natural for me to be interested in girls in a normal way. When you’re old I daresay it may be different.’

  I was stiff and bruised. It had been foolish to come so far. I was feeling tired, weak and exasperated. Titus’s sheer youth, his unspoilt youthful hopeful strength annoyed me to the point of screaming. His long bare brown legs, covered with reddish hairs, emerging from his roughly rolled-up trousers annoyed me. I felt I was losing touch with him, might be sharp with him and then be reduced to making an appeal.

  ‘I’m sorry it all upsets you so. I partly understand. But I do want your help, well, your support. And I want to tell you something rather important about your father.’

  ‘About Ben. Not my father. God knows who my father is. I’ll never know. Look, don’t let’s talk about Ben, he bores me. I’m not happy about this thing—’

  ‘What thing are we onto now?’

  ‘This thing between you and me. Let’s forget about them. Let’s talk about you and me.’

  ‘OK. I want to talk about that too. Titus, I’m not trying to kidnap you.’

  ‘Yes, I know—’

  ‘We’re free, we two, in relation to each other. There’s no need to define things.’

  ‘ “Father” is a definition, I should think!’

  ‘It’s an idea. Let’s just be friends if you prefer it. Let’s wait and see. You know there’s nothing sort of—sinister—here—you know what I mean—’

  ‘Oh I know that!’

  ‘I just want to feel that there’s a bond, a special relationship, a special connection.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Titus. ‘Sorry, I’m being ungrateful—and I’ve been here and eaten your food and drunk your drink I know—but I’ve been thinking—after all, why should you bother about me? If you’d been my real father, great, though even then—well, anyway what I wanted to say was this. I’ve enjoyed meeting you, I’ve enjoyed being here, in spite of the horrors. Later on I’ll maybe think: that was a good time, yes, good. But I want to earn my own living and lead my own life and I want to do it in the theatre. I’m not a silly stage-struck kid, I don’t imagine I’ll be a star, I don’t even know yet if I’ll be any good at acting, but I want to work with theatre people, I guess that’s my scene. This place is fine for a holiday, but I want to get back to London where the real things happen.’

  ‘Don’t real things happen here?’

  ‘Oh—you know what I mean. Where does your cousin live?’

  ‘In London.’ Again the bite of the serpent of jealousy. Had James got Titus on a lead? There had seemed to be a bond between them from the start. I said quickly, ‘Please don’t talk to any of the others about, you know—’

  ‘Of course not, not a word, you don’t have to say that, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Good—’

  ‘The thing is, I don’t want you to feel any special obligation to me. If you have obligations I’ll have to have obligations. I don’t want to live here at your expense any longer, I want to get cracking. I don’t mind your helping me a bit if you like. Maybe you could help me get into an acting school. If I could get a place in a school I could get a grant and I’d be independent. Maybe it’s a bit of a fiddle to ask you to get me in, but I don’t mind fiddling that much. Then I can be on my own and we can be friends or whatever you want, but I’ve got to be on my own, see?’

  How weak and helpless I felt before that brutal innocent free power. He would wriggle away before I had even learnt how to love him or learnt the trick of holding him.

  ‘Yes, I’ll help you into an acting school, but we’ll have to think about it. I’ll come with you to London later on. Meanwhile maybe you can help me here. But I want to tell you something about Ben, something that you ought to know. You say he’s not a bad person, but he is. He’s a wicked violent man. He tried to kill me.’ I wanted to impress Titus and to shake his appalling detachment.

  ‘To kill you? How?’

  ‘He pushed me in. I didn’t fall accidentally into that sea hole. He pushed me.’

  Titus showed little emotion. He leaned forward scratching an insect bite on his ankle. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘No, but I felt him!’

  ‘How do you know it was him?’

  ‘Who else could it have been? He said he’d kill me the last time we met!’

  ‘I can’t imagine him doing that, it’s not in character, it’s most unlikely,’ said Titus in a maddeningly bovine manner.

  ‘I was pushed! Someone pushed me in the back!’

  ‘Are you sure? You could have fallen backward on a rock and then slipped into the water and it would feel like being pushed. You’d had some drinks, you know. And the doctor said you might be a bit confused about the whole business afterwards.’

  I felt too tired and wretched to go on. It was foolish to have walked so far. ‘All right, Titus, let’s leave it there. Don’t repeat what I’ve said to anyone.’

  Titus looked at me out of his narrowed stone-coloured eyes. ‘You see it’s not so much fun as you expected, playing at fathers and sons.’ This was the kindest thing he had said.

  I said, ‘I’ll help you about acting school. We’ll talk of that later. Now bugger off, will you.’

  He got up. ‘I must help you back.’

  ‘I can manage.’

  ‘You can’t. Besides it’s beginning to rain.’

  He held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up, and then still held me. He said, ‘We’ll get to know each other one day. There’s time.’

  ‘There’s time.’

  Hartley, dearest, listen to me. I want to say several things. First, that I am sorry I took you away like that and kept you with me. It was an act of love, but I now see that it was foolish. I frightened you and confused you. Forgive me. It was at least a demonstration that I care absolutely and am in earnest about taking you away. You belong to me and I am not going to give you up. So you will be seeing me again soon!

  I expect you have been thinking things over since you got back and may now see them a little bit more from my point of view. After all, my darling, why stay in the land of unhappiness? It isn’t as if I were a stranger offering you someone and something you know nothing of. You said yourself I was your only friend! And you seemed, when you were here, almost ready to say ‘yes’—only you were frightened of him. Fear is a habit after all. But do you not feel in your heart now that you are changing? One day soon you’ll be able to do what you’ve wanted to do for years—walk out of the door!

  And listen—I want to tell you this. I don’t want to take you into some grand glamorous world full of actors and famous people. I don’t live in that sort of world anyway. You said you liked a quiet life. Well, so do I. That’s why I came here, after all! We’ll go away, just the two of us, and live simply in a little house in a little place, in England in the country, near the sea if you like, and we’ll make each other happy in simple ways. That’s the life I’ve always wanted and now I’m free of the theatre I can
have it at last, with you. We’ll live quietly, Hartley, and enjoy simple things. Can you not want that sufficiently to walk out of a house where you are bullied and unloved? And of course we shall help Titus and he will come to us in freedom and all those old scars will heal. We shall care for him. But what will always matter most is you and me.

  Now I want to tell you something else, something rather terrible. Two nights ago Ben tried to kill me. He pushed me off the rocks in the dark into a frightful tide race. God knows how I managed to survive it. I’ve got concussion and am generally knocked about. I’ve been seeing the doctor. (But don’t worry, I am all right.) Attempted murder is not the sort of thing which one can quietly ignore and carry on as if nothing had happened. I have not yet been to the police. Whether I go to them or not depends on Ben. I should add, a very material point, that there was a witness of what happened.

  However I am not concerned about revenge. I want simply to take you away. Apart from anything else, you surely cannot want to stay with a man who has proved himself capable of murder. Just stop wanting to suffer, will you? And please start sorting out your things, deciding what clothes to take with you, and so on. I’m not going to hurry you. But now I am going to be around the place, I’m going to be a regular intruder, I shall tramp in and out! If Ben objects he can either consent to your departure or force me to go to the police. This isn’t blackmail, it’s a fair field at last!

  No need to tell Ben about this, unless you want to. I’ll be along pretty soon on the heels of this letter and I’ll tell him myself! As my death hasn’t been announced he will know by now that he is not a murderer. Relax, darling, and don’t worry, and now leave it all to me. Sort out those clothes. I love you. We’ll be together, dear one.