Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

I think I shall marry much later on or not at all. But why not simply have what you want ? People don’t enough, which is what is the matter with our civilization, I don’t mean like people starving, but like not having the courage to grab their heart’s desire even when it’s in front of their noses. About me, I am seventeen, and in perfect health. I’m a virgin and I want someone special to take me over that border, you in fact. I enclose a photograph, and you can see how I have changed. What about it, Charles? I am serious. Not least in saying that I love you, and am if and when you want me yours,

Angela Godwin.

I pulled the photograph out of the envelope and inspected a coloured picture of a rather pretty intelligent-looking girl with large eyes and a bright tender diffident unformed face. I crumpled this missive up and thrust it into the soft ash of the woodfire. There were various other letters, but I felt I had had enough of letters for the moment.

I went out to see what the horrible sea was up to. It was calm and slippery, sliding in among the rocks like oil. I went as far as Minn’s cauldron and stood on the bridge. The tide was going out and the cauldron was emptying in a whirling gushing frenzy of hasty bubbling waters whose white flux was absorbed by the calmer sea beyond. I looked down. How deep it was, how steep and smooth the sides. Surely no power on earth could have got me out of that hole. Yet I had got out, I was alive, and poor swimming holidaying Titus was dead. I went on over the rocks as far as the tower and climbed down to the steps. The sleek water was rising and falling, but not too violently, the tide was right, the iron banister reaching down as far as the waves. I felt in my body, as if scarcely yet in my mind, a flicker of life, the old familiar semi-sexual twitch of fear, such as I used to feel on those high diving boards in California or before plunging into lethally cold waters off Ireland.

Trembling with emotion I tore my clothes off and walked into the sea. The cold shock, then the warmth, then the strong gentle lifting motion of the quiet waves reminded me terribly of happiness. I swam about feeling the loneliness of the sea and that particular sensation which I now identified as a sense of death which it seemed to have always carried into my heart. Not that I then wished to die or thought that I might drown. My strong limbs responded to the moving water, my breath came easily, the sky was blue above me and the sun was everywhere, and I watched the near horizon of the approaching waves, their tops a little whipped by the breeze, and they were strong and gentle. They toyed with me. I swam and floated until I began to feel cold; then I climbed out and returned naked to the house carrying my clothes.

The sea had restored my hunger and when it seemed to be lunch time I heated up the remains of the consommé and opened a tin of frankfurters and a tin of sauerkraut. I half decided to go to London tomorrow. I half thought of telephoning James who might after all still be around, and I got as far as looking up his number and writing it down on the pad beside the telephone. I half intended to ring up the taxi man to ask him to take me to the early train. Though the sun was warm, I was a bit chilled after the swim and I put on the white Irish jersey. I got out a suitcase and began to pack up a few clothes. I even went into the book room to find a book to read on the journey. It occurred to me that although my plan for my retirement had included a regime of reading I had not opened a book since I arrived at Shruff End. I turned the books over. James had inspected them, Titus had slept on them. I needed something a bit lurid and absorbing. It was a moment even for pornography, only I cannot really stand pornography. I eventually chose The Wings of the Dove, another story of death and moral smash-up.

The day seemed to be passing, the evening was arriving, and I had not telephoned either James or the taxi man. I decided it was too late to decide to go early in the morning. I would ring the taxi man tomorrow and take the later train. What I would do when I got to London I did not consider. Arrange my flat, order curtains? Such things belonged to another world. Although the evening was warm I lit the fire for company in the little red room, thus consuming Rosemary’s and Angie’s letters and the photo of the intelligent diffident girl. I took my supper in to the fireside and sat for a while trying to start reading The Wings of the Dove, but its marvellous magisterial beginning failed to grab me. It was still daylight and I could see without the lamp. I sat for a while with glazed eyes, listening to the stomp of the sea and the beating of my heart. I began to feel slightly sleepy or comatose. That swim had certainly done something to me. I thought about Titus. Then I began to think about myself as a drowned man and I remembered how I had slept, on the night of my resurrection from Minn’s cauldron, upon the floor in this room, in front of the glowing fire, wondering gratefully why I was still alive. And I seemed to see myself lying there, moving my limbs gently in the warmth to make certain that I was whole.

My eyelids drooped a little and then I very clearly saw something concerning which I was not afterwards able to say whether it was a hallucination or a memory image. It certainly presented itself to me, quite suddenly, as a memory. I had been vaguely, driftingly, thinking of that awful fall into the churning pit of water, my ‘knowledge’ of my death, the way the water showed green above me even in the dim light. Then I remembered that, just before my head cracked against the rock and the blackness came upon me, I had seen something else. I had seen a strange small head near to mine, terrible teeth, a black arched neck. The monstrous sea serpent had actually been in the cauldron with me.

I opened my eyes wide and, now panting and with a violently pounding heart, looked around me. All was as usual, the fire blazing, the scattering of unopened letters upon the table, my half-drunk glass of wine. I was sure I had not been asleep. I had simply remembered something which I had for some reason totally forgotten. This was indeed the forgetting which the doctor had said I must expect, the result of the concussion, where memory traces are lost. But now I could recall the black coiling thing, very close, reared over me and quite unmistakable in the dim light, its head and neck for a moment outlined against the sky. I saw in memory its green luminous eyes. The sight had lasted for seconds, perhaps a second, but it had been clear and not to be doubted. Then after that second had come the blow on the head.

But no, there was something else to remember, something else had happened just before I lost consciousness. But what, what? Trembling with excitement and fear I sat holding my head and tormenting my memory. There was something there waiting agonizingly to be remembered, something very important and extraordinary, waiting just outside my range of vision, waiting for me to grasp it, only I could not. I groaned aloud, I got up and walked into the kitchen and back, I drank a little more wine, I closed my eyes, I opened them. I watched my mind, as if hardly daring to touch it in case it should shift or harden and destroy some perhaps momentary proximity. But the hidden thing would not come; and I had a terrified sense that if I did not catch it now it would disappear forever, sinking into the deep total darkness of the unconscious. Just now, for perhaps the last time, it heaved to touch the surface.

After a while I gave up straining, though I still hoped that the final, the somehow essential, memory would suddenly come. I sat down again at the table and began thinking about the sea serpent and going back over my earlier theories concerning LSD. I tried to remember whether I had felt the coiling creature as well as seen it. I had a memory vision of the animal but none of my state of mind at the time, although I could remember my ‘drowning’ thoughts when I was under the wave. I thought of going out to inspect the cauldron in case this would help my memory, but now it was almost dark and I dared not. I felt frightened, then positively shaken by death fear. I tried to light the lamp but for some reason could not. I lit several candles, then went and locked the front door and the back door and returned to the little red room.