Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

I was lying on my back on the rocks. I opened my eyes and saw a star. I had been having an odd familiar dream, and yet I had never had that dream before. I dreamt that cousin James was kissing me on the mouth. I was aware of the star and of a marvel: that I was breathing. I apprehended my breath as a great thing, a sort of cosmic movement, natural and yet miraculous. Slowly, gently, deeply, decisively, I was breathing. Somewhere beneath me there was a dull steady uproar, and I lay in the cup of it and looked at the star. I felt pain and yet I felt at ease, detached from it. I lay relaxed as if I had woken from some golden sleep and would now perhaps sleep again. I closed my eyes. I breathed.

Mingled with the noise, then separated from it, I heard other sounds, discerned voices, and I knew where I was. I was lying on the flat piece of rock that led to the bridge. I was also aware, but in an entirely detached way, of what had happened to me. I heard someone groan, perhaps Perry, someone sob, perhaps Titus or Lizzie. James’s voice said, ‘Keep back, don’t crowd.’ Another voice said, ‘I think he’s breathing.’ I thought, I suppose I ought to tell them I’m all right. Am I all right? I composed a sentence which I thought I might utter soon: I am perfectly all right, what is this fuss about? I felt curiously unwilling to speak, it seemed so difficult. I realized that my mouth was open. I made an effort of will and closed my mouth, then opened it again and began ‘I’m-’, and could go no further. Some sort of sound had emerged. I made a convulsive movement, an embryonic attempt to rise. I went on breathing.

Someone said, ‘Thank God.’

The voices went on talking.

‘I think we could move him now.’

‘But suppose some bones are broken?’

‘We must keep him warm, he can’t stay here.’

This argument went on for some time. Then they argued about whether they could improvise a stretcher and which was the best way to go. At last they carried me, or hauled me, with what seemed extreme roughness, in a blanket. The journey over the rocks was a nightmare. I tried to say I could walk but (as I gathered later) produced only unintelligible moaning. All my pains had now located themselves. My head was very painful and the movement made lights flash in my eyes. There was a terrible pain like toothache in my arm. I wondered if my arm was broken and the bone was beginning to break through the skin. There was a plate of anguish in my back. My bearers were fantastically inefficient and confused, constantly quarrelling about the route, and slipping and banging me against the rocks.

At last they got me into the kitchen and, with indescribable clumsiness, pulled all my clothes off and pummelled me with towels and pulled other clothes on and had arguments about whether I should be given soup, brandy, aspirins. When they had the bright idea of lighting a fire they could not find any dry wood, then could not find the matches. At last I was lying on cushions on the floor in front of the fire in the little red room. As I became warm I felt less pain, and when I was lying undisturbed I relaxed and began to feel sleepy. I felt relief and something of the strange ease which I had felt as I looked up at the star. And only then, just before I slept, did I remember that it was not an accident. Somebody pushed me.

I must here record something which I only remembered later and which I was then half disposed to think was a dream. I was lying on the floor, underneath a pile of blankets, alone, seeing the room by the flickering light of the fire. I had the urgent feeling that there was something I must do quickly before someone came back, and especially before I should forget some fact of the utmost importance which was about to vanish from my mind. I had to record this important thing, to catch it and hold it before it disappeared. I got up on my knees and reached a pen and paper from the table where I sometimes worked, and I wrote down what it was that I absolutely had to remember. What I wrote covered perhaps half a page or less. I wrote quickly but even then was not sure that I had remembered everything. I carefully folded up the paper and hid it somewhere in the room. All this, that I had written something and hidden it, I recalled rather dreamily upon the following morning. But-I could not remember what the thing was which I had thought so important or what I had written about it, and I could not, though I searched the room minutely, find the writing. An atmosphere of extreme and crucial emotion surrounded ‘the thing’; but although I constantly peered at it in my mind I could not discern what it was. And of the paper there was no trace. Possibly I had dreamt the whole episode. I had, of course, little doubt what the writing, if it existed, must concern: it concerned the identity of my would-be assassin.

‘But how on earth did I get out?’ I asked Lizzie. I was sitting up in an armchair in the little red room drinking tea and eating anchovy toast.

A rather exasperated doctor had arrived about two o’clock in the morning and woken me up and pulled me about and pronounced me sound. He said I had no broken bones and was suffering concussion and shock. I was to rest, keep warm and in future not wander about the rocks at night when I had had too much to drink. This was the first point at which it entered my confused mind that of course no one, except the assassin and me, knew that it was not an accident.

It was now about ten o’clock in the morning. It was very hot again with sounds of thunder, louder, nearer. The lightning flashes came like scarcely visible shocks. I had been visited, asked how I was, congratulated on my narrow escape. There was a slightly brusque air about these felicitations, perhaps because my friends felt they had been quite emotional enough about me last night and now felt more curt, or because they shared the doctor’s view of the matter. There was in fact a slight feeling that I had caused a lot of trouble by my stupidity. An instinct which I had not yet had time to examine advised me not, or not yet, to reveal that my fall was not accidental.

In a little while I would have to decide what to do. I was sorry I could not find my precious piece of paper. But of course I had no doubt about the identity of the murderer.

‘James thinks a freak wave lifted you up,’ said Lizzie.

Lizzie was looking radiant, her long frizzy hair tangled and bushy, growing like a healthy plant. She was wearing a striped shirt and lineny pants roughly cut off at the knee. Even after slimming she was a little too plump for this gear, but I did not object. Her skin shone with health. Only the tiny tight wrinkles round her eyes would have enabled one to guess her age. She shared none of the vague annoyance of the male contingent at my exploit. She was prepared to enjoy the drama in retrospect, since it had had a happy ending, and my survival had in some way increased her sense of owning me.

‘It can’t have done,’ I said, ‘the hole is too deep. Who actually pulled me out?’

‘Oh everybody did. When we heard you shout we all converged, only I got there last. By then Titus and James were pulling you off the bridge towards that flat rock, and Gilbert and Peregrine were helping.’

‘I can imagine how helpful they were. Funny, I can’t remember shouting.’

‘The doctor said you might not remember things which happened just before and just after the accident. It’s an effect of concussion. The brain doesn’t process it or something.’

‘Will the memory come back?’

‘I don’t know, he didn’t say.’

‘I remember being carried back to the house. I think I got as many bruises then as in the water. God, I’m bruised!’

‘Yes, that was awful, you were like a great dark dripping sack, so heavy, and we nearly dropped you down a crevasse. But that was much later.’