Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

‘Tell me about yourself. What are you doing now?’

‘Nothing. I’m on the dole. Unemployed. Like everyone else.’

‘But did you finish your training-electricity, was it?’

‘No. The college was closed down. I couldn’t get into another. Well, I didn’t try. I took the dole. Like everyone else.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘Hitch-hike. I’m sorry. I’ve bothered you, taken up your time. I’m going now.’

‘Oh, I hope not. I’ll go with you to the road, it’s easier this way. But first, would you mind fetching my field glasses? They’re over there on that rock.’

Titus seemed pleased to be asked this. In a second he had slithered down the steep incline which I had so laboriously ascended, and was leaping goat-like from rock to rock in the direction of the bridge. I wanted a short interval in which to think. Oh, he was slippery, slippery, touchy, proud. I must hold him, I must be tactful, careful, gentle, firm, I must understand how. Everything, everything, I felt, now depended on Titus, he was the centre of the world, he was the key. I was filled with painful and joyful emotions and the absolute need to conceal them. I could so easily, here, alarm, offend, disgust.

He was back but too soon, coming up the steep rock in a precarious scrabbling run, handing me the glasses with the first smile I had seen on that reserved suspicious still half-childish face. ‘Here. Did you know there’s quite a good table lying over there in the rocks?’

I had forgotten the table. ‘Oh yes, thanks. Maybe you could help me with it later. Look, don’t go away, I’d like to talk to you. Won’t you stay to lunch? You must be hungry. Aren’t you hungry?’

It was at once evident that he was hungry. I felt a rush of concern and pity, of all those dangerously joyously strong emotions which were biding their luxurious secret moment.

He hesitated. ‘Thank you. Well, OK, I’ll stay for a quick bite. I have to be-somewhere else-’

I did not believe too much in that somewhere else.

By this time, by the easy route, we had almost reached the road. We climbed up the last bit and stood a moment looking out over Raven Bay where the calmer shallower sea was the colour of turquoise.

‘Lovely country, isn’t it. Do you know this part of the world?’

‘No.’ He said, suddenly stretching out his hands, ‘Oh, the sea, the sea-it’s so wonderful.’

‘I know. I feel that too. I grew up in the middle of England. So did you, I think?’

‘Yes.’ He turned to me. ‘Look-’

‘Yes?’

‘Why did you-I mean-did you come here for my mother?’

There was so much to discover, so much to explain, and it must be done so carefully and in the right order. I said, ‘I’m glad you call her your mother. She is, you know, even if you are adopted. There’s a kind of reality, a kind of truth. They are your real parents, it would be unjust to deny it.’

‘Yes, I understand about that. But there are-other things-’

‘Won’t you tell me-?’ This was a mistake, too much, too soon.

He frowned, repeating his question. ‘You came here for my mother, after her, or what?’ The tone was austere, accusing.

I faced him, resisting an urge to take him by the shoulders-

‘No, believe me, I didn’t come, as you put it, after her. My coming here was pure chance. It was the oddest coincidence. I didn’t know she was here. I didn’t know where she was. I lost touch with your mother completely a very long time ago. I was absolutely-stunned, amazed-to meet her again-it was the purest accident.’

‘A funny sort of accident-’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Yes. I think so. Yes. All right. Anyway, it’s none of my business. ’

‘I’ve told you the truth.’

‘OK, OK. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter.’

‘They-?’

‘Ben and Mary. They don’t matter. You very kindly offered me food. Perhaps I could just have some cheese or a sandwich. Then I must push off.’

Ben and Mary was a shock too. We began to walk slowly back towards the house. Titus picked up two plastic bags which were lying on a roadside rock.

‘Your wordly goods?’

‘Not quite all.’

As we turned onto the causeway Gilbert came out of the front door, and stopped in amazement. It occurred to me that I had never mentioned Titus’s existence to either Lizzie or Gilbert. Gilbert knew what Lizzie had told him about the ‘old flame’, but I had checked his eager attempts to pursue the matter. Titus had not appeared to be part of the story; and what a ghost he had seemed in Hartley’s own mentions of him. Whereas now…

As we neared I said to Gilbert in my ringing tones, ‘Oh, hello, this is young Titus Fitch, the son of Mr and Mrs Fitch, you know, my friends in the village. And this is Mr Opian who helps me in the house.’ The tone and the description were designed to establish Gilbert, for the present at any rate, as being beyond some unspecified barrier. Gilbert’s eyes had already taken on a dazed and gauzy look. I did not want any trouble of that sort; and, to tell the truth, I was already feeling rather possessive about Titus.

‘Come along,’ I said. As I hustled Titus through the door I gave Gilbert a kick on the ankle by way of ambiguous warning. ‘Gilbert, could you set lunch for me and Titus in the red room? Titus, a drink?’

He drank beer and I drank white wine while Gilbert, who had now donned his apron, quickly and discreetly laid out and then served luncheon for two on the bamboo table. I think Gilbert would have been glad to serve me thus every day, only he feared to annoy me by suggesting it. His studied and meticulous ‘butler’ would have graced any drawing room comedy. At one point, catching my eye over Titus’s head, he winked. I gazed coldly back. We had ham cooked in brown sugar to a recipe of Gilbert’s, with a salad of Italian tinned tomatoes and herbs. (These excellent tomatoes are best eaten cold. They may be warmed, but never boiled as this destroys the distinctive flavour.) Then cherries with Gilbert’s little lemon sponge cakes. Then double Gloucester cheese with very hard biscuits which Gilbert had rebaked in the oven. Our butler, instructed by telepathy, soon made himself scarce. We drank white wine with the meal. Titus ate ravenously.

I made a little polite conversation by way of introduction, and while Gilbert was still in evidence. ‘I expect you’re very leftwing, like most of the young.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Interested in politics?’

‘Party politics? No.’

‘But some kind of politics?’

He admitted to being interested in the preservation of whales. We discussed that. ‘And I’m against pollution, I think the problem of nuclear waste is terrible. ’ We discussed that too.

At the next pause I said, ‘So you didn’t come here to see them ?’

‘No, I came to see you.’

‘To ask me that question?’

‘Yes. Thanks for answering it. Needless to say I won’t bother you again.’

‘Oh, don’t say that. But-so-you aren’t going to call on them, to let them know you’re here?’

‘No.’

‘Oughtn’t you to? Of course I quite understand you mightn’t want to. Now I had a very happy relation with my parents, but-’

‘I had a very unhappy one with mine.’

Drink had loosened his tongue. I had been doing a lot of urgent thinking. A plan, the plan, was emerging. ‘With both of them?’

‘Yes. Well, it wasn’t her fault so much. He took against me. She went along with him. I suppose she had to.’

‘She was frightened.’

‘Well, it was a bad scene. He stopped her from talking to me. And she always felt she had to tell him lies, little lies just so as to make life easier. I hated that.’