Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

Lizzie did the cooking. We lived on pasta and cheese. It was impossible to return to the ordinary feasts and festivals of human life, the meals to which people look forward and which they enjoy. We all, except James, drank a lot.

On the day which I shall now describe I woke up in the early morning and realized I had had a terrible terrible nightmare. I had dreamt that Titus was drowned. I experienced the relief of the awaking dreamer. And then remembered…

I got up and went to the window. It was about six o’clock and the sun had been up for some time. Cool summer weather had come back with a misty sky and a calm sea. The water was a very pale luminous grey-blue, almost white, the same colour as the sky, shifting with a quick small dancing movement, and scattered by the misted sun with little explosions of metallic pale-gold light. It had the look of a happy sea and I felt I was seeing it through Titus’s eyes.

I had returned to my own bedroom. The other three, though I disliked their proximity to each other, slept downstairs. I had decided that today I would tell them all to go. I felt strong enough now to do this, and although in a way I dreaded to be alone, my plans demanded solitude. I dressed quickly and went downstairs to the kitchen. Peregrine was there shaving. He ignored me and I went through onto the lawn. James was just climbing down from the rocks. A moment later I could hear Lizzie talking to Peregrine. We were all early risers on that day.

James sat down on the natural seat beside the trough where I put the stones I collected, or rather used to collect. Someone, perhaps Titus, had picked up the scattered stones from the lawn after the destruction of James’s ‘mandala’ on the night of the party. My stone ‘border’ was comparatively undisturbed. I went and sat down too. The rocks were already warm.

James had shaved; his face, reddened and browned by the sun, was very smooth above the dark stippling of his beard. He seemed somehow clearer and more visible than usual, or perhaps it was just that the light was better. His murky brown eyes were displaying their ochre-coloured streaks, his thin clever lips were finely textured, ruddy, his dark hair more vital and glossy, hiding his bald spot. The mysterious mask-resemblance to Aunt Estelle was more present than usual, though he was not smiling.

‘James, I want you to go, I want you all to go. Tomorrow. OK?’

James frowned. ‘Only if you come too. Come and stay with me in London.’

‘No, I must stay here.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got things to do.’

‘What?’

‘Oh this and that, things about the house, maybe I’ll sell it after all. I want to be by myself now. I’m all right.’

James picked up a stone from the trough, a golden-brown one with two light blue lines running round it. ‘I like your collection of stones. Can I have this one?’

‘Yes, of course. So that’s settled, is it? I’ll tell the others.’

‘What are you going to do about Ben and Hartley?’

‘Nothing. That’s over.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

I shrugged my shoulders and was about to get up only James held the sleeve of my shirt.

‘Charles. Tell me what you think you are going to do. I know you are planning to do something.’

What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so. I wanted to kill Ben.

When I say that I wanted to kill him I do not mean that I had yet a definite plan or a definite programme with a date. That would come to me, and come soon, once I was alone. The necessary period of sheer miserable brooding was over, and I would soon be able to make decisions. Ben had attempted to kill me; and it now amazed me in retrospect that I had been able so far to overlook or ‘forgive’ this crime, this insult, as not to feel compelled to punish it as such. My late and now outdated plan to besiege Hartley by ‘tramping in and out’ had had as its end her rescue, not his chastisement. I had proposed to intimidate him simply in order to get her away; to destroy him had not been my prime object. But now the situation was entirely different. I could not ‘overlook’ the murder of Titus or let it go unavenged. Because I had failed to die, Ben had struck Titus on the head and drowned him. He had killed the boy out of pure hideous spite against me; and that he could be crazy enough to do so I could well believe as I considered how crazy I now was myself. In truth the basis of my madness was sheer grief, the loss of that precious precious child, the horror of his sudden death, together with a sense of having been the victim of a wanton wickedness. The only balm for Titus’s death was hatred and the immediate transformation of misery into revengeful purposeful rage. As in a civil war, further killing was the only consolation; and, as it seemed to me then, to survive the murder of Titus I had to become a terrorist.

During the last days, as I allowed myself to be quietly watched by James and Lizzie, and as I played my part of simple mourning, I had filled out in imagination how terribly Ben, with his mad beliefs, must have hated me, and because of me, Titus, throughout the miserable years of Titus’s childhood. The connection between me and Titus in his mind must have become a dynamic obsessional pattern. The boy, continually before him, was (as he thought) the visible symbol of his wife’s inconstancy and of the jaunty unpunished escape of the hated rival, whose jeering image he so regularly saw in the newspapers and on the television screen. Ben was a naturally violent man, a destroyer, a killer. How he must have loathed me and my changeling brat, and torn his own entrails with that loathing. Punishing the wife and the boy could never be enough while the prime culprit ran scot free and laughing. Sheer hatred can be a commanding form of madness. Many and many a time, in all those years, Ben must have killed me in his imagination.

When we at last met he was soon to see that his own violence and anger were matched by equally fierce emotions in me. He knew perfectly well of my impulse to push him in, on that occasion when we faced each other on the rocky bridge. He knew that I wanted him out of my way, and may have conjectured how very far I might, in the end, be prepared to go. He could even argue that he had tried to kill me in self-defence. Then when I had so disobligingly failed to die and was still there, taunting him with my free existence and brazenly protecting as my ‘son’ the hated bratling, what could be more natural than that Ben’s mad rage should turn against me through the boy, bringing about perhaps an even more satisfying act of vengeance? I recalled Ben’s last words to me, wherein a curse on the ‘vile brat’ was joined with ‘I’ll kill you’.

Could I now walk away into the world and ‘get over’ this act, this fact? It was unthinkable. Act must match act. But how? In all these thoughts I was just sane enough to try to steady myself by the image of Hartley. I tried to see her face looking at me, wistful and calm, beautiful as it had once been and perhaps would be again. Later, I would move to her and embrace her and we would console each other at last. What I could not really get myself to see or feel however was just how the path through the destruction of Ben led to Hartley or what exactly the destruction of Ben would be like. Now that I felt free to destroy him I sometimes felt that I hated him even more obsessively than I loved her; at least I knew, watching my obsession, that I was not now wanting to remove him simply because of her. The removal had become an end in itself.