Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

‘Our love wasn’t real, it was childish, it was like a game, we were like brother and sister, we didn’t know what love was then.’

‘Hartley, you know that we loved each other-’

‘Yes, but we didn’t make love properly, I wish we had.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to, I wanted to all right-Oh, Christ!’

‘We were children. You never became part of my real life.’

‘What you call your real life appears to have been hell on earth! Damn it, you said so yourself. A happy woman doesn’t talk about death.’

‘I wish I hadn’t told you things, I’ll regret having told you things. Of course it’s a muddle, but it’s my muddle, it’s where I live and what I am. I can’t run out of it and leave it behind all jagged and loose like a broken shell.’

‘That’s exactly what you can do! Escape, run, leave it all behind! See that the pain can stop!’

‘Can it? Can the pain stop?’

As she now stared at me, wide-eyed with a sudden pausing puzzlement, I wondered, is she mad, is her mind totally astray, is she just a poor wreck, or has she become some sort of fey spiritual being, refined by suffering? Had that strange wild look of her youthful beauty which I had loved so and worshipped been the first prophetic flush of a weird spirituality? There are secret saints with strange destinies. Yet no, she was a wreck, a poor broken twig, her integrity, her last identity, destroyed by the cruel force which had made her abandon Titus. But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

‘Yes, my darling, my queen, my angel, it can stop.’

Oh if only I could touch and liberate her mind! I wanted to see her hoping, to see some dawn of hope or desire, the desire for cherishing, for a happy life. But she frowned now in her puzzlement and reverted to Ben.

‘I’ve never been good enough to him.’

‘I’m sure you’ve been a saint, a long-suffering saint!’

‘No, I’ve been bad.’

‘Oh all right, call it bad if you want to! Whatever it is, it’s finished.’

I saw her then as innocent, as men in the past used to see cloistered girls and think: ‘We are beasts, but they are angels, pure, not soiled like us.’ I saw her as beautifully innocent, simple-minded, silly, understanding nothing: a reproach to me who had lived my life among vain egoistic men and pert, knowing women. Yet also I saw her guilt as real guilt for real failures. How could it be otherwise? And I remembered Peregrine’s words: the partner who feels guilty, however irrationally, becomes the slave of the other and can take no moral stand. She had taken upon herself, as well as her peccadilloes, his guilt. She felt herself guilty of his sins against her, against Titus. I could see it all. And as she took up the guilt, appropriated it as her own, she revered the guilty one and held him as holy. Oh, if only I could release her from that maiming crippling guilt and from that empty reverence! God, she even felt guilty about me and had to console herself by thinking I hated her! She was spell-bound, bound by a self-protective magic, which she had developed over the years to defend herself against the horrible pain of having married a foul insanely jealous bullying maniac. She had been brainwashed through fear of him, brainwashed by hearing the same things repeated to her again and again and again: that it was her fault, always her fault. No wonder Titus wanted to go and sing on the rocks rather than be reminded of those scenes.

She had cried a little. The tears of age are not the tears of youth. ‘Stop crying, Hartley, you look like the pig-baby in Alice, like you used to.’

‘I know I’m ugly, horrible-’

‘Oh, my dear, come out of it, come right out of it, come out of the nightmare-’

She dabbed her eyes with my handkerchief, let me hold her hand for a moment, began again to reflect.

‘But what makes you think my marriage is so unhappy?’ She was gazing at me now with an almost cunning look, as if she were about to produce a devastating refutation of anything I might say in answer.

‘Hartley, darling, you’re in a muddle. You admitted you were unhappy, you spoke just now about the pain of it!’

‘Pain is different, in any marriage there is pain, life is pain-but perhaps for you-it all just passed you by.’

‘Perhaps it did, thank God.’

‘You know, so many nights quietly at home I used to think of people in labour camps-’

‘If you had to cheer yourself up by thinking that at least you weren’t in a labour camp you can’t have been very happy!’

‘But what makes you think my marriage is so bad, how can you judge? You can’t see, you can’t understand-’

‘I can judge: I know. ’

‘But how can you know, it’s just an idea, you don’t understand about marriage, you’ve just lived with women, it’s different, you haven’t any evidence.’

‘About you and him-I have, yes, evidence.’

‘You can’t have. You’ve only just met us, you don’t know anyone who knows us, well, like that, no one knows us, you can’t have evidence.’

‘Yes, I have, I’ve heard you talking to each other; the way you talk to each other-’ I said this in a final burst of exasperation and I have to confess with some desire to hurt. The calm obstinate persistence and now that superior cunning expression was driving me wild.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I listened, I hid outside the window and listened to you and him talking, I heard his coarse voice, his brutal bullying manner, the way he shouted at you, the way he made you say over and over again “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”. I wish I’d broken the window, I wish I’d broken his bloody neck. I’ll kill that man. I wish I’d pushed him into the sea.’

‘You listened -you heard -when?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember, a week ago, two weeks-I’m so upset I’ve lost all count of time-so you see you can’t pretend any more, you can’t whitewash him and tell me you’re happily married, because I know the truth!’

‘The truth -oh, you don’t understand! You listened -how long?’

‘Oh, ages, an hour, no, I can’t remember-you were shouting at each other, it was perfectly horrible, at least he was shouting and you were whining, it was disgusting -’

‘How can you-you don’t know what you’ve done-how could you push in, spy on us like that-it was nothing to do with you-how could you intrude into secret things which you couldn’t possibly understand-it’s the wickedest vilest most hurtful thing anybody’s ever done to me-’

‘Hartley, darling, you know I only did it to help, I mean because I had to know, I had to be sure, to be certain-’

‘As if you could know anything-oh, you’ve hurt me so much, I’ll never forgive you, never, it’s like, it’s like a murder, a killing-you don’t understand-Oh, it hurts so much, so much -’

‘Darling, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t imagine-’

Sitting bolt upright against the wall she was now crying as I have never seen any woman cry (and I have seen many). Tears seemed to shoot out of her eyes in torrents, then her wet mouth opened in a sort of strangled shout, an animal cry of tortured pain. Then she gave a low shuddering wail, and fell over sideways, grasping at her neck, pulling at the dressing gown as if she were suffocating. The wail was followed by a shuddering gasp, and in a moment she was in hysterics.

I jumped up and watched her, appalled. Well then did I understand what Titus had said about it: it is frightening and it is meant to be. I felt that the most violent assault was being made on my spirit, on my sanity. I had witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this. I knelt again and tried to hold her, to shake her, but she seemed suddenly so strong and I so weak, and also to touch her had become terrible. She was shuddering rigidly with a dreadful damaging electricity. Her face was red, wild with tears, her mouth dribbling. Her voice, raucous, piercing, shrieked out, like a terrified angry person shrieking an obscenity, a frenzied panic noise, a prolonged ‘aaah’, which turned into a sobbing wail of quick ‘oh-oh-oh’, with a long descending ‘ooooh’ sound ending almost softly, and then the scream again: this continuing mechanically, automatically, on and on as if the human creature were possessed by an alien demonic machine. I felt horror, fear, a sort of disgusted shame, shame for myself, shame for her. I did not want Titus and Gilbert to hear this ghastly rhythmical noise, this attack of aggressive mourning. I hoped they were far away on the rocks singing their songs. I shouted ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I felt I should go violently mad if it went on for another minute, I felt I wanted to silence her even if it meant killing her, I shook her again and yelled at her, ran to the door, ran back again. I shall never forget the awful image of that face, that mask, and the relentless cruel rhythmical quality of that sound…