Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

After my return on the evening described I had had enough and I went to bed and to sleep. (I did not eat the Korean clams; later on I threw them away.) I awoke after nine the next morning and it was raining. The English weather had put on another of its transformation scenes. The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound of pattering. I got up and staggered around in the kitchen making myself tea and lowering my head like a sullen beast against any urgency of reflection. I did not wonder what had happened at Nibletts after I left. All that would soon be past history. Then as I sat in the little red room, with my head still sullenly lowered against the light of the rainy morning, I made it out that perhaps I had achieved something by thrusting the situation on into an area of crisis. Really I need not at present do anything at all but wait. Surely she would come. And… if she did not… there were other plans which I was already quietly making. I would not be without resources. I would wait. And with that I settled into a weird uneasy sort of peace.

A little later, I mean a day or two later in my condition of sursis, like a half-expected apparition Gilbert Opian made his appearance. Why was I not really surprised when a timid brief tinkle of the mid-morning bell revealed a nervously smiling Gilbert, and beyond him at the end of the causeway his yellow car? Oddly enough I had already made a sort of plan which included someone like Gilbert, and he would certainly do. Fate was co-operating for once. ‘Lizzie?’ ‘No.’ Just as well. It was still raining.

I put on a show of surprise and annoyance.

‘What is it then?’

‘May I come in, king of shadows? The rain is running down my neck.’

I led the way back into the kitchen where I had been eating chocolate digestive biscuits and drinking Ovaltine. A feature of my interim condition was that, from ten thirty in the morning onwards, I had to have regular treats and snacks all day long. A wood fire was blazing in the little red room, its lively mobile structures showing bright through the open door, and casting a flickering glow into the rain-curtained kitchen.

Gilbert was dripping.

‘Well?’

‘My dear, Lizzie has left me.’

‘So?’

‘So I decided to come here, I felt the urge. I wanted to tell you about Lizzie, I somehow felt I ought to. She’s sick, you know, I mean in her mind. She’s madly in love with you again, it’s the old disease, I was afraid it would come back. And one of the symptoms is she can’t stand me. Well, I suppose our cohabitation was a sort of precarious miracle. Anyway it’s all over now, our idyll is over, our little house is smashed. I’m bombed out. She’s gone. I don’t even know where she is.’

‘She’s not here, if that’s what you imagine.’

‘Oh I don’t-’

‘I suppose you think it’s my fault, is that what you came to say?’

‘No, no, I accuse no one. Destiny, God perhaps, myself. The battle of life and how to fight it. Whoever conscripted me made a big mistake. Now she’s gone, it seems incredible she could have cared for me and made that house with me, we chose things together like real people. No, I just thought I’d come. You’ve always been a magnet to me, and now I’m getting old I don’t care what people think or how much they snub me, it’s always worth trying, I only wish I’d been more forward when I was young. You know how I feel about you, all right you hate that bit, you despise it, it disgusts you, though actually anybody’s lucky to be loved by anybody and ought to be grateful, well anyway as I haven’t a job at present I thought I’d come and see you and maybe you would let me stay for a while and be useful, I can’t bear being alone at home without her where everything reminds me-’

‘Useful?’

‘Yes, I could cook or clean up, do odd jobs, why not? I’ve always felt I ought to belong to somebody, I mean really legally as a sort of possession, just a chattel, not anything troublesome, not with rights, I mean. I often think I have the soul of a slave. Perhaps I was a Russian house-serf in a previous incarnation, I should like to think I was, all cosy and protected with simple things to do, kissing my master’s shoulder and sleeping on the stove-’

‘Do you want to be my house-serf?’

‘Yes, please, guv’nor. I’ll live in that dog kennel if you like.’

‘OK, you’re engaged.’

Thus began an odd little period of my life to which strangely enough I look back with a certain sad nostalgia, perhaps simply because it was such a dead calm before such a terrible storm. I even became rather fond of Gilbert in his role as serf. In the past, although his servility had inhibited my regard, yet his devotion to me had proved that he had some sound ideas. And he was, even at this stage, useful; later on he was essential. My standard of living rose. Gilbert cleaned the house, he even got the stains off the bath. I let him cook in a style which was a compromise between his own and mine. I could not bring him up to my level of simplicity and it would have been cruelty to attempt it. Grilled sardines on toast and bananas and cream were not Gilbert’s idea of a good lunch, and equally I had no use for his thick over-rich Gallic messes. We ate exquisitely dressed green salads and new potatoes, a favourite dish of mine. (The shop now had lettuces and young spuds.) I let him concoct vegetarian soups and stews and I taught him to make fritters in the Japanese style, which he was at once able to do better than me. I also let him bake cakes. He shopped for me in the village and fetched Spanish wine from the Raven Hotel, where he amused himself by posing as my butler. At night he slept on the big broken-bellied sofa in the middle room downstairs, among the driftwood. The sofa was damp, but I let him have the hot water bottle.

I swam every day, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the rain, and began to feel soaked in the sea as if it were penetrating my skin. When the sun shone I spent time out on the rocks. Gilbert kept watch over the front door and went out to look for letters, only no one called and Hartley did not write. I returned to my obsessive task of collecting stones, picking them out of tide-washed crannies and rock pools and carrying them back to the lawn, where Gilbert helped me with my border round the edge of the grass. The stones, so close-textured, so variously decorated, so individual, so handy, pleased me as if they were a small harmless tribe which I had discovered. Some of them were beautiful with a simple wit beyond that of any artist: light grey with thin pink traceries, black with elaborate white crosses, brown with purple ellipses, spotted and blotched and striped, and their exquisitely smooth forms lightly dinted and creased by the millennial work of the sea. More and more of them now found their way into the house, to lie upon the rosewood table or on my bedroom window ledge.

Gilbert would have liked to collect stones too, and to pick flowers, but as soon as he ventured onto the rocks in his leather-soled London shoes he immediately fell. He bought some plimsolls at the Fishermen’s Stores, but still tumbled. He never, of course, ventured into the sea. However he sawed wood and carried it into the house and this activity, which he felt to be in some way symbolic, gave him much satisfaction. He continued to be busy all day long with self-invented serf activities. He washed the bead curtain with Vim, making it shine and removing the slightly sticky filthy surface to which I had become accustomed. Thus, for a brief time, we lived together, each absorbed in his own illusions, and together we regressed into a life of primal simplicity and almost fetishistic private obsession.