Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

‘Were you there?’ said Gilbert.

‘No, I was somewhere else, but it was my outfit that relieved the camp and someone told me about it. I remember seeing a picture of the chap, he hasn’t changed. And I recalled his name, and it all somehow remained in my memory, it appealed to my imagination. He was a brave man. How odd coming across him like that!’

‘A rather unattractive sort of courage,’ I said.

‘There was a rather unattractive sort of war on,’ said James.

‘The man’s a killer.’

‘Some people are better at killing than others, it needn’t mean a vicious character. He behaved like an able soldier.’

We had reached the house. Peregrine scraped the car on a rock and it stopped with a jolt. We all got out. I looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock. The day lay ahead.

I went into the house, passed automatically through the kitchen and out onto the lawn. James, who had followed on my heels, was standing at the kitchen door looking at me. I said to him, ‘Thank you for your help. Now you’ve finished your job here I expect you’ll want to be off.’

He said, ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay till tomorrow. ’

‘Please yourself.’

I went away across the rocks in the direction of the tower, passing over Minn’s bridge. I found a place down on the edge of the water where I could see into Raven Bay. A hot wind was blowing in from the sea and there was a slightly menacing swell, but the atmosphere was less thundery. Perhaps the storms had passed by.

My hand was hurting where it had been struck by Rosina’s stone. A bruise was appearing. I found that I had been sweating profusely. The hot wind was drying my shirt and denim jacket, both of which had been sticking to my back. I pulled the jacket off and loosened the shirt. There was a haze over the bay, the water was pale blue, fringed by a pretty lace of breaking waves. The big round boulders looked hot, as if the stored-up heat which they were exuding were shimmering visibly. They had a solemn, almost religious look. The dark yellow seaweed stains upon them looked like hieroglyphs. Beyond the other arm of the bay the sea was spotted with purple. I sat with my feet almost within reach of the strongly rising and falling water which was spattering the yellow rocks with a quick-drying foam. I felt that I had made a fool of myself in the recent scene and felt sad to think that in relation to anything so awful I should look ridiculous.

I heard a soft footfall and saw a shadow and James came and sat down beside me. I paid no attention to him and we sat for a while in silence.

James started fingering around in the rocks, finding small stones and tossing them into the water. He said at last, ‘Don’t worry too much, I think she’ll be all right, I’m sure she will.’

‘Why?’

‘My general assessment of the situation.’

‘I see.’

‘And also that odd episode.’

‘You think Staff-Sergeant Fitch’s respect for General Arrowby will be such-?’

‘Not exactly. But it’s as if something passed between us.’

‘Military telepathy.’

‘Sort of. I think-it’s hard to put-some vein of honour is touched-’

‘Oh rubbish,’ I said. ‘It’s funny, James, but whenever you start talking soldiery you seem to me to become utterly stupid. Military vanity, I suppose.’

We were silent for a bit longer. I found a few stones myself and dropped them in, after examining each one to see if it was worth keeping. I imagined Ben would soon throw away that pretty stone in the plastic bag. Perhaps he would throw it at the dog. I felt sorry for that dog.

James said, ‘I hope you don’t feel that I’ve influenced you in any way against your better judgment?’

‘No.’ I was not going to argue that point. Of course he had influenced me. But what was my judgment, let alone my better judgment?

‘What are you going to do about Titus?’

‘What?’

‘What are you going to do about Titus?’

‘I don’t know. He’ll probably clear off.’

‘He won’t if you hold on to him, but you’ll have to hold. He says he wants to be an actor.’

‘He told me that, oddly enough.’

‘Can you get him into an acting school?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Titus will be an occupation for you.’

‘Thanks for thinking about my occupations.’

‘I suppose you’ll leave this house now?’

‘Why the hell should I?’

‘Well, wouldn’t it be better-?’

‘This is my home. I like it here.’

‘Uh-huh-’

We threw a few more stones.

‘Can I go on talking, Charles?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been thinking-Are you sure you don’t mind?’

‘Oh go on, what does it matter.’

‘Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.’

‘You think I’m fighting for a phantom Helen?’

‘Yes.’

‘She is real to me. More real than you are. How can you insult an unhappy suffering person by calling her a ghost?’

‘I’m not calling her a ghost. She is real, as human creatures are, but what reality she has is elsewhere. She does not coincide with your dream figure. You were not able to transform her. You must admit you tried and failed.’

I said nothing to this. I had certainly tried and failed to do something. But what, and what did this failure prove?

‘So having tried, can you not now set your mind at rest? Don’t torment yourself any more with this business. All right, you had to try, but now it’s over and I’m sure you’ve done her no lasting harm. Think of other things now. There’s a crime in the Army called deliberately making oneself unfit for duty. Don’t do that. Think about Titus.’

‘Why keep dragging Titus in?’

‘Sorry. But seriously, look at it this way. Your love for this girl, when she was a girl, was put by shock into a state of suspended animation. Now the shock of meeting her again has led you to re-enact all your old feelings for her. It’s a mental charade, a necessary one perhaps, it has its own necessity, but not like what you think. Of course you can’t get over it at once. But in a few weeks or a few months you’ll have run through it all, looked at it all again and felt it all again and got rid of it. It’s not an eternal thing, nothing human is eternal. For us, eternity is an illusion. It’s like in a fairy tale. When the clock strikes twelve it will all crumble to pieces and vanish. And you’ll find you are free of her, free of her forever, and you can let the poor ghost go. What will remain will be ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. And you’ll feel relief, you’ll feel free. At present you’re just obsessed, hypnotized.’

While James was speaking he was leaning down over the water and skimming some of the flatter stones so that they leapt upon the surface; only there was too much of a swell for them to jump very far. Watching the skimming stones I was filled with anguish because I remembered playing just that game with Hartley on an old pond near our house. She did it better than I did.

I replied, ‘What you say sounds clever but it’s empty. Love makes nonsense of that sort of mean psychology. You seem unable to imagine that love can endure. But just that endurance belongs to its miraculous nature. Perhaps you’ve never loved anybody all that much.’

As I said this I recalled something that Toby Ellesmere had said to me in some context where I was wondering whether James was homosexual. Toby had told me that James had had a great affection for some soldier servant in India, a Nepalese sherpa, who had died somehow on a mountain. Of course one never knows about other people’s loves, and I would certainly never know about James’s. To cover my crude remark I went on, ‘You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all. It isn’t just a case of sentimentality about an old flame. It’s a principle of life, it’s a project.’