Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

As I came back into the room I saw almost straight ahead of me, as if my eyes had suddenly been switched onto a new narrow wavelength, a crack in the white wooden panelling, just below the top where, a few feet from the ground, the panelling ended in a small ledge. There were quite a lot of cracks between the panels, some of them partially covered by the paint. This crack was quite short, about six inches long, and there was something in it: something white which stuck out a little way. Suddenly breathless, giddy with memory, I went across the room and pulled out a piece of paper. It was the piece of paper upon which, when I awoke in the night after being ‘drowned’, I had written down that very important thing which I was on no account to forget. Even as I held the paper in my hand I could not remember what it was that I had written, though I at once assumed that it had to do with the sea serpent. I unfolded the paper, and what I read was this.

I must write this down quickly as evidence, since I am beginning to forget it even as I write. James saved me. He somehow came down right into the water. He put his hands under my armpits and I felt myself coming up as if I were in a lift. I saw him against the sheer side of the rock leaning down to me, and then I rose up and he held me against his body and we came up together. But he was not standing on anything. One moment he was against the rock as if he were clinging onto it like a bat. Then he was simply standing on the water. And then

Here the writing ended, trailing away into illegible scrawls. I sat at the table gasping and I read the thing through several times, and then the dark thing that had been touching the surface of my mind broke through and I found I could remember the scene. This memory was not like my memory of the serpent. It was like my memory of Lizzie singing or of Titus lying dead, except that it was a memory of an impossibility.

I could now recall perfectly clearly what I had tried to express by saying that he was against the sheer rock ‘like a bat’ and that I came up ‘as in a lift’. It was after the green wave had broken over me and I remember my head came above the surface and I was spewing water from my mouth and trying to shout. Then I saw James already half-way down the rock, sort of kneeling against the side of it, and coming down like some animal. The bat image was not quite right, he might have been more like a lizard, but the point was that he was not climbing down with footholds and handholds like a man, he was creeping down on the smooth surface like some sort of beast. I remember trying to reach out a hand towards him, but the water was in total control of my body and hurling me about like a cork. I had in any case swallowed so much I was nearly at the end of breathing and struggling. I particularly recall that James at that moment looked like a drowned man himself, soaked with water, the leaping sea streaming down from off his head. In so far as I had any thought then I seem to recapture a sense of: so James is drowning too. Only somehow this was not a despairing thought. Then James, as he crept right down into the churning whirlpool, detached himself from the rock like a caterpillar. There was an effect as of something sticky and adhesive deliberately unsticking itself. He did not take the hand which I was trying to reach out to him, but leaned down over me and got his hands under my armpits, as I described in the writing. I could now recall the feel of his hands as he touched me, and then the extraordinary sensation which I described as rising ‘in a lift’. I could not remember being pulled or dragged up, there was no sense of effort. I rose up until my head was level with James’s head and my body pressed against his body. I remember a sense of warmth, and also that it was at that moment that I lost consciousness.

But then was I not knocked on the head, and did I not suffer from concussion? I touched the back of my head and felt a distinct and still rather tender bump there. Of course I could have knocked my head earlier without being made unconscious. And when did I see the serpent, if I saw the serpent? And did James see the serpent too? And why did my little piece of mnemonic writing contain no reference to the serpent? And what had I just been going to say when the writing ended? Of course if I struck my head on the rock just after seeing the serpent I could have already forgotten about it when I came to write, even though I could still remember James’s rescue. And why had I then forgotten that too, and why should I suddenly remember it now?

I leapt up in a state of the greatest excitement. My memory of James’s exploit was certainly no hallucination. After all, how had I got out of that churning death pit? Only today I had concluded, looking at it, that no human force could have raised me nor could the waves possibly have lifted me to the top of the rock. My cousin had rescued me by the exercise of those powers which he had so casually spoken of as ‘tricks’. I thought again about the story of the sherpa whom James had intended to preserve by such ‘trickery’. Had I then doubted James’s reference to ‘increase of bodily heat by mental concentration’? I had scarcely reflected on the matter. The story could be seen in quite an ordinary light. Two men cling together for warmth in a tent, in a bag, in the snow, and one dies. What touched and interested me was that, whatever it was that James thought he was going to do, he had failed. As for the claim itself, it did not now seem to me too incredible that some weird eastern ascetic could learn to control his body temperature. But to creep down a sheer rock and stand upon, or (as I now recalled it) just below the surface of, raging waves, and raise a man weighing eleven stone upwards for a matter of sixteen to twenty feet simply by placing one’s hands in his armpits: that was a rather different task for the credulity of a sceptical westerner. Yet I remembered it. And there was also the evidence of the writing. And something very odd had certainly happened.

I sat down again at my table, trying to breathe regularly, and at the idea that my cousin had used some strange power which he possessed to save my life I was suddenly filled with the most piercing pure and tender joy, as if the sky had opened and a stream of white light had descended. I felt like Danae. When, after my last talk with James, I had felt myself at the start of a new and more open relationship with him, that had been the merest prophetic glimmer of what I felt now. I also thought, in a curious ridiculous way, what fun ! And I recalled James’s saying, ‘What larks we had!’ And I wanted to thank him and in doing so to laugh.

I looked at my watch. It was only just after eleven o’clock, still not too late to telephone. I ran out to the book room, carrying a candle and choking and exclaiming with emotion. I dialled James’s number. I had no idea what I was going to say to him. I thought, I must remember to ask him whether he saw the sea serpent. The telephone began to ring, and as it rang and rang my excitement turned to disappointment. Perhaps he had already gone to Tibet? Or was he perhaps simply out for the evening, dining at some club with some soldier? My God, how little I knew about his life. I decided to telephone him again in the morning, and then to get away to London.

I went back into the kitchen and unlocked and opened the back door. The cold fear which I had felt earlier had entirely gone. I went out onto the lawn. The house had been dark and cool, but there was plenty of light outside and the air was warmer. I decided to sleep out, and I went and collected some cushions from the book room and brought blankets and a pillow down from upstairs. I climbed over to the place beside the sea where I had slept on the previous occasion and laid out my bed. Then I went back towards the house where the candles made a friendly glow in the window of the little red room. The sky, though dim and faded, was still light enough to prevent the stars, except for the evening star which shone out jagged and enormous. The low and sinking half moon was cheese-pale.