Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

I spent a little time with Hartley. It was very odd. I told her that she was going home tomorrow. She nodded, blinking her eyes intelligently. I asked her if she wanted to come down and have supper with the others. She declined, to my relief. I did not ask her again if she was content to go. We sat on the floor and played cards, a form of ‘snap’ which we had invented for ourselves when we were children. Everyone in the house went to bed early.

History

THE NEXT DAY was one of the worst days of my life, perhaps the worst. I awoke as for execution. No one except Titus had any interest in breakfast. The hot stuffy weather continued, with a few distant grumblings of thunder now.

Hartley looked terrible. She had made up her face with especial care and this made her look pathetically older. Her yellow dress was dirty, crumpled and torn. I could not send her back to her husband in my dressing gown. I searched among my clothes and found a sort of blue unisex beach coat which I made her put on. I also found a light scarf to put over her head. It was like dressing a child. We did not dare to say much to each other. By now I wanted the whole thing to be over. I could scarcely endure the idea that she might even now say ‘I don’t think I want to go after all’; and the impulse to cry out ‘Stop!’ was a pain which I urgently wanted to be without. Perhaps she felt much the same. And I thought at one moment: why, it’s just like it was then. I’ve done everything I can for her, everything. And she’s just leaving me. I put into a plastic bag her make-up and the mottled pink stone with the white bars which I had given her (and which she had apparently not looked at since). She said nothing, but she watched me put the stone into the bag. Gilbert shouted up that the car was ready.

While Hartley was in the bathroom I went on downstairs carrying the bag and waited in the hall. They had decided that what Peregrine called ‘the delegation’ should be carried in Peregrine’s white Alfa Romeo. James and Perry and Titus were already outside. Gilbert came out of the kitchen. He said to me, ‘Charles, a funny thing, last night, I didn’t tell you.’

‘What?’

‘When I delivered that letter at his place I thought I heard a woman talking inside.’

‘It was TV.’

‘I don’t think so. Charles, there won’t be a fight, will there? I mean his asking us not to come till today. Perhaps he’s mustered all his pals to beat us up.’

This idea had occurred to me too. ‘He has no pals.’ The woodwork class?

Hartley began to come down the stairs. I pushed Gilbert and he went out. She walked slowly, clutching the banister, as if walking were difficult. She was wearing the scarf over her head, as I had intended her to, and her face was shadowed. I would have liked her to wear a veil. It was our last moment, our last second, alone together. I took her hand and pressed it and kissed her cheek and said, as if it were something quite ordinary, ‘It’s not goodbye. You will come to me. I shall be waiting.’ She squeezed my hand but said nothing. She was not tearful. Her eyes looked far away. We went out together onto the causeway. The others were waiting by the car. It was curiously like the emergence of a bride and bride-groom.

All eyes were averted as we approached the car. I had not arranged the seating. Titus opened the rear door and I hustled Hartley in and followed her, and Titus got in next to me. The other three squashed up in the front. Hartley drew her scarf forward to veil her face. The three in front did not look round.

Peregrine, who was driving, said, ‘It’s straight on and then right?’

Gilbert said, ‘It’s through the village, I’ll direct you.’

Hartley was crushed against me. She was stiff, stiff. Titus was stiff too, his eyes staring and unseeing, his pink mouth slightly open. I could feel his fast breathing. Everyone was gazing straight ahead. I folded my hands together. The sun was shining. It was a bright day for the wedding.

We were just approaching the big rocks through which the road passed in a narrow defile, the place which I called the Khyber Pass, when a stone struck the windscreen with amazing force. Everyone in the car came abruptly out of whatever trance he was in. Then another stone struck the car and then another. Peregrine stopped. Another driver might have accelerated, but not Perry. ‘What the hell is going on? Somebody’s throwing stones at us, they’re throwing on purpose.’ He got out of the car.

We were now inside the defile with yellow rocks towering up on either side. James was saying something to Peregrine, perhaps telling him to get back into the car. I had time to think: Ben has arranged a brilliant ambush, he has chosen just the right place. Then the windscreen suddenly shattered. A sizable rock, pushed over the edge from above, had fallen directly upon it. With a sizzling report the glass became white, crackled and opaque. The rock rebounded on the radiator, dinting it, and scudded onto the road. Peregrine uttered a cry of rage.

Titus had jumped out of the car and I followed him. Gilbert stayed where he was. James moved into the driver’s seat and, with a handkerchief wrapped around his hand, punched a hole in the glass. Then he too got out.

‘There! There!’ Peregrine was shouting and pointing upward.

A stone flew past my head. I looked up and outlined against the blue sky I saw Rosina. She was kneeling on one knee on top of one of the highest rocks and had evidently provided herself beforehand with an arsenal of missiles. She was black, a black witch, wearing something that looked like a peasant woman’s shawl. I saw her snarling mouth and her teeth. It soon too became apparent that her main target was Peregrine. A stone struck him on the chest, another on the shoulder.

Instead of seeking cover he began, still bellowing, to return the fire. Stones were flying round Rosina’s head, but I think none of them hit her.

‘Who is this lady?’ said James in his rather fastidious tone.

‘Peregrine’s former wife.’

‘Need she detain us?’

‘Perry, get back in the car, get back in the car! ’ I grabbed his coat tail. He pulled himself angrily away and stooped to pick up more ammunition.

A stone struck me painfully upon the hand and I returned hastily towards the car.

‘Rosina! Rosina!’ It was Titus, shouting, waving. It was like a war cry. He gesticulated and danced. I pulled him back with me. James got hold of Perry. In a moment we were all back inside and Peregrine was accelerating violently. The car flashed onward and round the curve to where the village road forked inland.

Here Peregrine stopped the car with a jerk, went round to the boot and came back with a jack with which he violently knocked out the rest of the windscreen, showering us all with white fragments of glass. He inspected the dint on the radiator. ‘What the hell is that bloody bitch doing here?’ he said, but not in a tone that seemed to require an answer. A little later he said thoughtfully, ‘She used to play cricket at school.’

The bizarre violence of the incident had left me dazed, and I returned with a sick shock to my acute consciousness of Hartley who, during the whole of the episode, had not moved, and seemed not to have noticed what was happening. Then I suddenly remembered what Gilbert had said about hearing a woman talking in the bungalow last night. Had Rosina carried out her obscene threat of going to ‘console’ Ben, and if so had that been why Ben was not ready to receive Hartley last night? How else had Rosina known we were coming? This thought filled me with confused helpless anger.

By now we had passed through the village, past the church where I had talked so shyly with Hartley so long ago, and turned up the hill towards the bungalows. Peregrine, driving savagely, was red in the face, and remained so completely absorbed in his own thoughts that he took no further active part in the proceedings and seemed scarcely to know what was going on.