Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

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.

C.

I had considered writing directly to Ben, but it seemed better to prepare Hartley first. The difficulty was, once more, how to get it to her. I did not want to risk spoiling my entrance by delivering it myself. I did not like to ask Titus to go, and Gilbert, whom I sounded, said he was afraid. And I did not want James or Lizzie, or Peregrine for that matter, to know anything about it. I thought of sending it by post in a typed envelope, but of course he opened all her letters. Perhaps it did not matter too much if he opened this one. The game was nearing its end.

It was the following day and I had written my letter in the morning, but was still undecided about what to do with it. It remained now to get rid of James and Lizzie. I could simply ask James to go. Lizzie might have to be told some lie.

James was, rather surprisingly, still in bed. He had slept, on and off, for many hours. Whereas I, who had had the real ordeal, was now feeling better. I went up to see him.

‘James, you slug. Are you all right? Touch of the old malaria?’

James was lying back in my bed, propped up in a cunningly arranged nest of pillows, his arms stretched out straight over the blankets. He had not been reading. He looked alert, as if he had been thinking. Yet his body looked floppy with relaxation. He had some growth of beard which changed his face, making him look Spanish, an ecclesiastic, perhaps an ascetic warrior. Then he smiled cheerfully, and I remembered how much that inane smile used to irritate me, how it had seemed to betoken a facile superiority. There was quietness in the room and the sound of the sea was dulled.

‘I’m all right. Must have caught a chill. I’ll get up soon. How are you feeling?’

‘Fine. Can I get you anything?’

‘No, thanks, I don’t want to eat. Lizzie brought me some tea.’

I frowned.

‘Where’s Titus?’ said James.

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Keep an eye on him.’

‘He can look after himself.’

There was silence for a moment. ‘Sit down,’ said James, ‘don’t look as if you’re going.’

I sat down. James’s relaxation seemed to have affected me. I stretched out my legs and felt as if I might sleep myself, even though I was sitting in an upright chair. I felt my shoulders and arms become soft and heavy. Of course I was very exhausted.

‘You’re not still wanting Titus to go back to Ben, are you?’ I said.

‘Did I say that?’

‘You implied it.’

‘He does in a way belong with them.’

‘With them ?’ Soon, very soon, there would be no more ‘them’.

James, following this, said, ‘Are you still dreaming of that rescue?’

‘Yes.’

There was another silence as if we were both going to sleep. Then James went on, ‘After all, he is in a real and deep sense their child. My impression was that that relationship was not beyond salvage.’

I was irritated by his ‘impression’. What could it be based on? The horrible answer occurred to me: conversations with Titus. I had come up to see James in order to hasten his departure, and I had decided not to say anything to him about Ben’s crime. This revelation would be too interesting. But now I felt tempted to shake his complacency. While I reflected on this I said, ‘I am going to adopt Titus.’

‘Adopt him, legally, can you?’

‘Yes.’ In fact I did not know. ‘I am going to make his career. And I shall leave him my money.’

‘It’s not so easy.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘To establish relationships, you can’t just elect people, it can’t be done by thinking and willing.’

I was tempted to reply, I daresay you don’t find it easy! Then I recalled Titus’s voice saying ‘Where does your cousin live?’ And I remembered what Toby Ellesmere had told me about the sherpa whom James was fond of who died on the mountain, and I felt a momentary nervous urge to ask him about this ‘attachment’. But it would have been a dangerous impertinence. I was never unaware that James retained the power to hurt me very much. How odd it was that even now my fear was an ingredient of our converse! Cousinage, dangereux voisinage. I felt annoyance with him all the same, he was making me feel awkward and incompetent, and I wanted to stir up his sleepy calm. I could not decide whether or not to tell him about Ben. If I told him would that delay his departure? Yet I very much wanted to tell him. It is indeed awe-inspiring to think that every tiny action has its consequences, and can mark a parting of ways which lead to vastly separate destinations.

James said, pursuing the topic, ‘Most real relationships are involuntary.’

‘As in a family, what you were saying about Titus?’

‘Yes. Or sometimes they just seem destined. A Buddhist would say you had met in a previous life.’

‘Would you say you were a superstitious man? And don’t say it depends what you mean by superstition.’

‘In that case I can’t answer you.’

‘Do you believe in reincarnation? Do you think that if one hasn’t done well one will be reborn as a-as a-hamster-or a-woodlouse?’

‘These are images. The truth lies beyond.’

‘It seems to me a creepy doctrine.’

‘Other people’s religions often seem creepy. Think how creepy Christianity must seem to an outsider.’

‘It seems so to me,’ I said, though I had never thought this before. ‘Do Buddhists believe in life after death?’

‘It depends-’

‘Oh all right!’

‘Some Tibetans,’ said James, ‘believe-’ He corrected himself. He now always spoke of that country in the past tense as a vanished civilization. ‘Believed that the souls of the dead, while waiting to be reborn, wander in a sort of limbo, not unlike the Homeric Hades. They called it bardo. It can be rather unpleasant. You meet all kinds of demons there.’

‘So it’s a place of punishment?’

‘Yes, but a just automatic sort of punishment. The learned ones regard these figures as subjective visions, which depend on the sort of life the dead man has led.’

‘ “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come”…’

‘Yes.’

‘But what about God, or the gods? Can’t a soul go to them?’

‘The gods? The gods themselves are dreams. They too are merely subjective visions.’

‘Well, at least one might hope for some happy illusions hereafter! ’

‘Just possibly,’ said James, with a judicious air, as if he were discussing the likelihood of catching a train. ‘But very few people… are without… attendant demons…’

‘And does everybody go to bardo ?’

‘I don’t know. They say that you have a chance at the moment of death.’

‘A chance?’

‘To become free. At the moment of death you are given a total vision of all reality which comes to you in a flash. To most of us this would be-well-just a violent flash, like an atom bomb, something terrifying and dazzling and incomprehensible. But if you can comprehend and grasp it then you are free.’