Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

We did in fact, inconsequentially and at odd intervals, manage to converse. When I tried to remind her of old times she did not always fail to respond; and at moments in my ‘treatment’ of her I felt, loving her and pitying her so intensely, that I was making a little progress. Once, quite out of the blue, she asked, ‘What happened to Aunt Estelle?’ I could not remember having spoken to her about Aunt Estelle, so much had I made my uncle’s family into a taboo subject. Another time she said, ‘Philip never liked you.’ Philip was her brother. ‘What’s Philip doing now?’ ‘He was killed in the war.’ She added, ‘You were my brother really.’ She never asked me anything about my life in the theatre and I did not try to tell her anything. I think she was really without curiosity about it. It had in any case by now dawned on me that she felt little or no regret at having failed to marry a famous man. She did ask once or twice if I had met this or that well-known actor, but she clearly knew very little about the theatre and did not pursue anything that I said. Once she asked, ‘Did you ever know an actress called Clement Makin?’ After a moment’s reflection I said, ‘Yes, I knew her well, she loved me, we lived together for a bit.’ ‘You mean-?’ ‘She was my mistress.’ ‘But she must have been years and years older than you.’ ‘Yes, but that didn’t seem to matter much.’ ‘She must have been an old woman.’ A little while after this Hartley began to cry and let me put my arms round her. She did not speak of Clement again. That was one of the moments when hope itself seemed to come to me out of the pity and the love. And I reflected upon the mystery that Hartley had as large a consciousness and as long a history as I had myself and I would never know, never have access to, that interior being. Of course I was impatient. I had expected her, after despair, to be in such need that she would have to turn to me completely, having no other recourse. It was indeed her failure to break down that now left me so terribly at a loss.

Herein I did expect Titus to help me, but he was unwilling to, perhaps unable to. He seemed almost frightened of Hartley, frightened of her situation, her captivity, her awful helplessness, what he imagined of her mind. He hated her humiliation. He did not want to be involved in it. He seemed to feel, about the whole business, my ‘device’ or ‘game’ as he had called it, a mixture of disgust and complicit guilt. And no doubt, at least vicariously, he was afraid of Ben. He complained of the smell in Hartley’s room and said he could not breathe there, and yet he was too embarrassed to exert himself to persuade her to emerge. He begged me to stay with him when he talked to her, and if I left him alone with her he soon ran out. I suppose the difficulty was that they were unable to talk about Ben and there were so few subjects which did not relate to that gentleman. Also, I had already noted that Titus was inclined to be secretive about what he had been doing since he left home; he had been very unwilling to answer questions which I had put to him on the subject, and this evasiveness cut out another possible topic of conversation. In fact Hartley did not show any urgent curiosity about his doings. They talked, indeed, almost politely. At least they did on the first day. After that Titus was increasingly unwilling to see her, and she being more distraught I was more reluctant to ask him to.

I could not get used to hearing him call her ‘Mary’.

‘Mary, why not come out in the sun, it’s cold in here.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Are you feeling better?’ The convention that she was ill had usefully arrived from somewhere. With an appearance of banal complacency they discussed the bungalow. But perhaps they scarcely knew what they were saying.

‘And there’s a nice garden? We didn’t have a proper garden at number thirty-four, did we? More like a yard.’

‘Yes, more like a yard at number thirty-four.’

‘I always remember the old mangle in the shed there. Remember the old mangle?’

‘Yes-’

‘So now you can grow roses. You always wanted that, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, lots of roses, all colours.’

‘And you can see the sea right out of the window like we used to say would be so nice?’

I could not make out what this did for Hartley. I realized I had been naïve in imagining that mother and son would clasp each other and at once discover a language of love. Well, perhaps this was a language of love. Love was there, I have no doubt, but the two of them remained amazingly awkward and tongue-tied with each other. The dialogue was forced clumsily along mainly by Titus. They soon exhausted the charms of the bungalow, to my relief. Their most successful conversations then consisted of childishly simple reminiscence concerning pointless details of houses and gardens in Titus’s childhood.

‘Remember the hole in the fence I used to look through when we lived at number sixty-seven?’

‘Yes-’

‘I stood on a box, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, on a box.’

Why could they not talk? Had her sympathy with Titus been really broken in those years, and his with her? A dreadful thought. Later I saw that of course it was the whole situation which made them speechless; and it was I who created and who maintained that situation.

This time of Hartley’s incarceration stretches out in my memory as if it contained a whole history of mental drama, vast developments, changes, checks, surprises, progresses, revulsions, crises. In fact it was a period of only four to five days. History, drama, change it did indeed contain. It is odd that after the first day I stopped worrying terribly about Ben. Of course I did not forget him, of course I expected him. I locked the doors carefully at night. It did occur to me that he might try to set fire to the house, and this haunted me a bit; after all he was a sort of professional fireman. But I ceased being obsessed with him, perhaps because I had by now succeeded in imprisoning myself mentally as well, and the danger of Ben seemed less real. Why did he not move? Was he making an elaborate plan or did he just prefer to torment himself by waiting and thus feed his rage? Was it possible that he was afraid of Titus? I soon ceased to wonder.

As for Titus and Gilbert, as soon as they could get away from Hartley and me they behaved as if they were on holiday. Titus did not want to discuss his mother or his father. He had opted out of these problems. He swam every day, always from the little cliff, sometimes twice or three times a day. He covered himself in suntan lotion and lay about naked on the rocks. Any scruples about ‘cadging’ now seemed to be completely gone. He accepted my hospitality as of right and gave nothing in return, no help, no warmth. Of course this is an unfair judgment. I cannot blame Titus for ‘not wanting to know’ what was going on upstairs. I think he did not even speculate; and indeed it would have been difficult to do so. Moreover, I gave him very little of my time and he may have resented this rather crucial neglect. I had decided by now that Titus was a simpler character than I had imagined at first; or perhaps, faced with horrors, he had chosen simplicity.

Gilbert was a good deal more curious and also good-naturedly anxious to help (he even wanted to put flowers in Hartley’s room), only I kept him well out of it. He remained essential of course. He cooked. He shopped while Titus sunbathed. But I did not let him come to the upper landing. A curious feature of the time and one which can still terribly bring it back to me was that Gilbert and Titus discovered that they were both singers. Gilbert was quite a good baritone, Titus turned out to be a tolerable tenor, and could also sing falsetto. What was more, they seemed to possess an extremely large common repertoire. Until I ordered them fiercely to go out onto the rocks they made the house ring with their noise. Of course they would have liked to have me as an audience to show off to (all singers are vain), and of course they would have liked to sit up half the night carolling and drinking my wine. (They both drank a good deal and I had to send Gilbert to the Raven Hotel for more.) Even from outside and at a distance they were audible, so loud were their voices and so pleased were they with the mutual exhibition of their talents. (Hartley never mentioned the singing; perhaps she was beyond caring or perhaps like her husband she was a bit deaf.) They roared out pieces from operas and musical comedies, madrigals, pop songs, folk songs, rounds, lewd ballads and love ditties in English, French and Italian. I think they became positively drunk with their music during this time; perhaps it was a natural reaction to the tension inside the house.