Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

I got up suddenly, and she became tense and actually lifted up her glittering hands like clawed paws. She looked like a ballet dancer playing a cat.

‘Listen, my cross-eyed beauty, it’s late, just get along will you, go back to the Raven Hotel. I’m going to bed. And please don’t creep around this house any more breaking things and peering through panes of glass. I have no plans for getting married or settling down with any female.’

‘Do you swear that?’

‘No arrangement exists. Lizzie is living with Gilbert. That’s how it is. And of course I never proposed to her, that was just a crazy rumour. Now go, I’m exhausted, and you must be too after that long performance.’

She got up and pulled her cloak more closely around her, her arms emerging through the slits, gripping each other in front. She stood for a moment glaring at me. ‘I will go. But tell me you believe what I have said.’

‘I believe some of it.’

‘Tell me you believe what I have said.’

‘I believe it. Now for Christ’s sake get out.’

I walked out with the lamp towards the front door and she followed. I opened the door. The light of the lamp revealed a mist which was waiting outside like a presence. It was impossible to discern the end of the causeway.

‘I’ll light you to the road,’ I said, and I went back for the electric torch. ‘But look, I’d better walk with you to the hotel. Oh hell. ’

‘You needn’t,’ she said in a dull lifeless tone. ‘My car is near.’

I lighted her across the causeway with the torch. The mist was less thick on the road. ‘Where is your car?’

‘It’s here, in this place behind the rock.’

We walked to it and she got in. I said, ‘Goodnight.’

She said, ‘Remember.’

She switched on the headlights and I made out the form of a low red two-seater. She backed the car onto the road. As she turned it now and as it began to move in the direction of the hotel, a figure suddenly materialized, someone who had evidently been walking along the road. Rosina had stepped hard on the accelerator and the car leapt suddenly forward and the pedestrian was caught for a moment in the headlights, cowering back against the rock. The car swerved with a screech and then roared away down the road. I dropped my torch into the long grass and was left in darkness.

The pedestrian whom Rosina had almost run down was the old village woman who had so strangely reminded me of Hartley. Now in that moment of bright light, I saw. The old woman did not resemble Hartley. She was Hartley.

History

NOW IN LONDON I am writing the story of Rosina’s arrival and of what happened just after it. After Rosina’s car raced away I stood quite still in a condition of total shock, the kind of shock which annihilates space and time and renders one almost contemplative. I was paralysed. I cannot think why I did not fall to the ground, the revelation was, in its initial impact, so terrible. I grasped it first, I do not quite know why, in this way, not as something unwelcome or horrible, but purely as the impossible come true, like what we cannot imagine about the end of the world. And indeed it was the end of the world. I remember then very slowly reaching out my hand so that I could support myself against the rock. By the time I was able to reach down to the ground and pick up the torch I somehow knew that Hartley must have gone, must have continued down the road and by now be far ahead, or that perhaps she was taking a short cut across the fields. I was in any case not sure which way she had been going when the car lights caught her. My mind was so shocked I could not make the simplest decision about what to do. I started off hurrying towards the village and then stopped. It did not occur to me to call out her name, that would have been impossible. I hardly indeed remembered her name, it would have emerged, as in a dream, as an incoherent bellow. I hurried back and stupidly shone the torch about, inspecting the place where I had seen her. The bright light revealed the marks of the car tyres, the trampled grass, the yellow pock-marked rock, the mist moving. At last slowly, and like a man returning from a funeral, I walked back across the causeway to the house. The lamps were still burning in the kitchen, the fire was alight in the little red room. It was all quiet and as it had been when, in a previous age of the world, I had been talking with Rosina.

I was trembling. Eating, drinking, were equally impossible. I went into the little red room and sat down by the fire. Is she a widow? This agonizing question had somehow, it seemed, formulated itself at once, in the very first awful moment of recognition. Awful, not because she had so almost completely changed, but because I knew that everything was in ruins about me, every old assumption was gone, every terrible possibility was open. That there could soon be dreadful pain did not then occur to me at all, I think. It was not envisaging pain that made me feel so shattered, it was just experience of the change itself. I felt a present anguish such as an insect must feel as it emerges from a chrysalis, or the crushed foetus as it batters its way into the world. It was not, either, a removal to the past. Memory seemed now almost irrelevant. It was a new condition of being.

I did eventually go to bed where I slept instantly like a dead thing. I had by then composed one or two more simple thoughts or questions. Is she a widow? was so pervasive as to be scarcely a question, it was the atmosphere I breathed. I wondered had she seen me in the village and if so had she recognized me? I had seen her distantly several times. Oh my God how terrible. I had seen her and not known her. But surely I, who was scarcely changed, must have been recognizable at once. Why then had she not spoken to me? Perhaps she had chanced not to see me, perhaps she was short-sighted, perhaps-what was she doing in the village anyway? Did she live here, or was she on holiday? Perhaps she would disappear tomorrow, never be seen again. Where was she going to along the misty sea road at night? The idea came to me that she might be working at the Raven Hotel. But she was over sixty, Hartley was over sixty. I had never put it to myself that Hartley too was growing old. Then I wondered if she had seen me in the dark, and if so had she realized that I had recognized her? Then I thought: she saw me with Rosina. What might she have overheard, what had we been saying? I could not remember. Then I decided she could not possibly have seen me as I was behind the headlights. And tomorrow: tomorrow I would search and search for her and find her and then…

I woke up next morning to an instant sense of a changed world. The awful feeling was less, and there was a new extremely anxious excitement and a sheer plucking physical longing to be in her presence, the fierce indubitable magnetism of love. There was also a weird hovering joy, as if I had been changed in the night into a beneficent being powerful for good. I could produce, I could bestow, good. I was the king seeking the beggar maid. I had power to transform, to raise up, to heal, to bring undreamt-of happiness and joy. My God, I had come here, to this very place, and against all the chances I had found her at last! I had come here because of Clement, and I had found Hartley. But: is she a widow?

I was in the village before nine o’clock. It was a sunny morning promising heat. I walked quickly round the little streets. Then I went down to the harbour and back by a footpath which led up the hill to the bungalows. As soon as the two shops were open I visited both of them. I walked round again. Then I went into the church, which was empty, and sat for a while with my head in my hands. I found that I was able to pray and was indeed praying. This was odd since I did not believe in God and had not prayed since I was a child. I prayed: let me find Hartley and let her be alone and let her love me and be made happy by me forever. My being able to make Hartley happy had become the most desirable thing in the world, something the possession of which would crown my life and make it perfect. I went on praying and then in a strange way it was as if I had fallen asleep. I certainly had the experience of waking up and feeling panic in case I had lost Hartley, as my only chance to find her had come and gone while I was sleeping. Her holiday was over, she had gone home, she had run away, she had suddenly died. I jumped up and looked at my watch. It was only twenty past nine. I ran out of the church. And then at last I saw her.