The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
There was a moment’s silence.
I said, ‘But if you’re so pleased about it, why tell? You only had to keep quiet—or did you want me to know?’
‘I don’t care what you know or don’t know. Your cousin got it out of me by one of his interrogation techniques. He said you thought it was Ben and you were working yourself up.’
‘You pretend you always detested me, it isn’t true. You aren’t all that good an actor. You told me about your Uncle Peregrine.’
‘I have no Uncle Peregrine.’
I felt totally confused. I said, ‘But what about Titus?’
‘What do you mean?’ said James.
‘What happened to Titus? Who killed Titus? I mean—I thought—surely Ben killed him?’
Lizzie answered this after a moment. She said, ‘Charles, it was an accident, no one killed him.’
Peregrine got up. He said, ‘Well, that’s that, that’s sorted that out, and I hope the General is satisfied. I’m going back to London. Goodbye Lizzie, nice to have seen you.’ He marched out and I could hear him collecting his things. Then there was the sound of the Alfa Romeo backing violently onto the causeway, and then its diminishing roar.
James had got up and was looking out of the window. Lizzie, soundlessly crying, was filling the kettle at the tap. She put it on the stove and turned the gas up.
I said to James, ‘You said you didn’t want to leave me behind here with a false notion in my head. Well, now it’s gone, so there’s nothing to detain you.’
James turned round. ‘Won’t you come to London?’
‘No.’
‘But what are you going to do about them?’
‘Nothing. It’s over. It’s over.’
But of course that was not true.
That day and the next day passed in a sick trance, a period of time which seemed like the peace of resignation and hopeless quiet mourning, but was really full of fear and venom. I passionately wanted James to go, his appearance, his company, his obtrusive unseen presence irritated me into torments. Lizzie irritated me too, partly by her frequent tears, which she seemed unable to control, and partly by a silly beseeching sympathetic expression which she put on when I looked at her, and which made me suddenly see the picture which Peregrine had sketched of me as an ageing powerless ex-magician for whom people were sorry.
I could understand why Lizzie refused to go. She wanted to be in at the kill. She was waiting for the moment when I could stand no more and would turn to her helplessly to be seized and carried off. Why James wanted to hang around was less clear. He certainly believed what I told him, that I no longer regarded Ben as a murderer. He might suspect that I had not given up my idea of rescuing Hartley, but after all he could not go on watching me forever. It was quite plain that I was not proposing to return to London in his Bentley. A little tact, and he was not usually deficient in tact, might have prompted him now to leave me and Lizzie alone. He did not even seem to want to talk to me any more. It was as if he was staying on for some purpose of his own. I guessed that he was brooding on Titus and somehow blaming himself, as I blamed myself, for not having attended more to what the boy was doing. At this time I avoided the rocks and the sea, but James was always out there, walking about on the cliff, standing on Minn’s bridge, and climbing up to the tower, almost as if he were measuring the distances involved.
On several afternoons Lizzie and I walked inland, past the place where in a previous existence I had intended to put my herb garden, into the country which I had never explored. The region just beyond the road was bog, full of outcrops of rock and gorse and little black pools. There was some scrappy heather and a lot of those tiny yellow plants that catch flies, and purple and white flowers that looked like miniature orchids. Two pairs of buzzards inhabited the blue air. After the bog there was ordinary farm land, sheep-scattered hillsides, distant mustard fields catching the sunlight with their huge patches of glowing yellow. There were many ruined stone cottages, roofless and full of willow-herb and wild buddleia and butterflies, and we came on the ruin of a big house, with the box hedges of the formal garden grown into a forest and covered with rambler roses. I record these details, which I recall so clearly, because they are the very image of sorrow; things seen which might have given pleasure, but could not.
I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart. Lizzie, walking with me, had wept her fill for Titus, and was still often weeping, but now more privately and self-indulgently; with a woman’s economy in grief, I could feel her tentacles clasping me. Lizzie was not going to perish, not for anyone, if she could help it. If I had fallen dead she would soon have been crying in someone else’s arms. These are unkind words; but I felt a special localized bitterness against Lizzie then because I knew how temporary her affliction was, and how soon, if I required her sympathy, it could turn into a possessive triumph. Lizzie is one of those very sweet, very kind kittenish women whom men love for their sympathetic gentleness, but who have a truly relentless power of self-preservation. Well, why not? We spoke little as we walked and I could see Lizzie looking at me now and then and she was thinking to herself: it is a relief to him to walk with me thus in silence. My presence, my silence is healing him. With no one else could he quietly walk and walk like this. (This last belief was probably justified.) Of course guilt too had fed my rage. My responsibility for Titus’s death, which now so largely occupied my mind, amounted to this: I had never warned him about the sea. Why had I not done so? Out of vanity. I recalled now very clearly that first day when Titus and I had dived in off the cliff. I had wanted to show him that I too was strong and fearless. It would have spoilt the charm of that moment if I had said, ‘It’s rather dangerous’ or ‘It’s not easy to get out’ or ‘I don’t think I’ll swim here’. I had to dive in with him and conceal the difficulties I knew so well. I never stressed the impossibility of climbing out in other places. I never recommended the tower steps; in fact I had not renewed the rope there, and with a strong sea running the steps would be as dangerous as the cliff. I never, for Titus, watched the sea. I acted out of vanity, and out of a silly vicarious pride in his youth and his strength, in the agility which I had seen him display upon the tower on the first day. Of course he always wanted to dive in. No young boy climbs cautiously into the sea if he can dive. I did not want to spoil my picture of Titus or Titus’s picture of me by any mean prudence.
I went over and over and over these things in my mind, thinking of what I might have done and what I should have done, just as James was perhaps doing as he paced it all out upon those rocks which I now could not bear to look upon. And my misery about Titus, my sobbing grasping sense of the loss from my life of what might have become its greatest blessing was the more intense now that my obsessive belief about Ben had been taken away. It had indeed been a consolation, and Ben had carried my guilt. That madness was gone, but did not leave behind a saner or purer mourning. My burden of sin and despair was constant and had simply been redistributed. New aspects of grief were opened to me. I had killed Hartley’s child, I had wantonly entered her life and taken away her blessing, which was hers in a way that it could never be mine. I did not dare to imagine her sorrow and how it might affect her feelings about me. Would she now see me as a murderer? Sometimes I felt that, in an odd way, it would not occur to her to blame me, she would not be capable of such a thought, of seeing me simply as a wanton wandering cause. And sometimes I felt that our grief for Titus might actually, excluding Ben, draw us together. For the moment I could only wait. I even felt that it was now likely that she would give me a sign. And in thinking this I was, as it turned out, right.
And so, waiting, watching, brooding, mourning, Lizzie and I walked the countryside. And then we began to talk about the old days, about Wilfred and about Clement, and Lizzie said how jealous she had been of Clement even when I was no longer living with her. ‘I always felt that, whatever happe
One afternoon we came back by a road which led unexpectedly past Amorne Farm, which I had usually tried to avoid. We passed quickly by to a chorus of yapping collies, and I was just feeling relieved when suddenly the Black Lion man, Bob Arkwright, came round the corner out of a side lane. He approached us, with the quiet intent look of a dog who approaches silently, about to snarl and bite.
‘That was a bad business, Mr Arrowby.’
‘Yes.’
‘I warned you about the sea, didn’t I.’
‘Yes.’
‘He couldn’t get out, that was it.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I seen him, just the day before, I was up near the tower and I seen him trying and trying to get up that sheer rock near your house, and he kept falling back. It was mad crazy to swim with the waves like that. Then he managed to get up somehow, but he was dead beat. When he got up the top he just flopped. What must have happened he tired himself out and then the waves threw him against the rocks. That was what happened, I bet. He shouldn’t have been let swim there. That sea’s a killer, I told you, didn’t I, didn’t I?’
‘Yes. It shouldn’t have happened.’ I moved on.
He called after me. ‘My brother Freddie knows you. He knows you.’
I did not turn round. Lizzie and I were silent all the way home. I decided I would tell James to go tomorrow, and I would despatch Lizzie the following day. I could not cashier them together because I did not want James to give Lizzie a lift to London. I felt I no longer needed her, and I could certainly dispense with him, and it was beginning to be intolerable to have them as witnesses of what I increasingly felt to be the punishing horror of my degradation.
I entered the house resolved to seek my cousin out and tell him to leave the next morning, when I heard a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound. It took me a moment to realize that it was the telephone, whose presence I had forgotten. This was the first time that it had rung, and I immediately thought that it might be Hartley. Then of course I could not find the thing, could not remember which room it was in. I located it at last in the bookroom and ran to it with desperate hope.
It was Rosina’s voice.
‘Charles. It’s me.’
‘Hello.’
‘I say, I’m sorry about that wretched boy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Very sorry. Well, what can one say? But listen, Charles, I want to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Is it true that Peregrine tried to kill you?’
‘He pushed me into the sea. He wasn’t trying to kill me.’
‘But he pushed you into that awful hole where the sea churns about.’
‘Yes.’
‘Good heavens.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the Raven Hotel. I’ve got a bit of news.’
‘What?’
‘You know that monster epic film of the Odyssey that Fritzie Eitel is going to make?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s offered me the part of Calypso!’
‘That should suit you.’
‘Isn’t it marvellous? I don’t know when I’ve felt so delighted and so happy.’
‘Good. Just leave me alone, will you, Rosina?’
‘I am leaving you alone.’ She rang off.
As I came out of the book room I could now hear Lizzie talking to James in the kitchen. The door was shut, but something about the tone of the conversation struck me as odd. I paused, then went and opened the kitchen door. James, looking at me over Lizzie’s shoulder, said, ‘Charles.’
Prophetic terror pounces quickly. My heart became fast, my mouth dry.
‘Yes?’
They came out into the hall. Lizzie was red-faced, frightened.
‘Charles, Lizzie and I want to tell you something.’
Very fast does the human mind rush towards the most precise visions of disaster. I lived in two seconds through a long experience of mental torture. I said, ‘I know what you are going to say.’
‘You don’t,’ said James.
‘You are going to say that you have become very attached to each other and feel that you must tell me so. OK.’
‘No,’ said James, ‘Lizzie is attached to you, not to me. That is the point, and that is why I have got to tell you something which I ought to have told you long ago.’
‘What?’
‘Lizzie and I have known each other for a long time, only we decided not to tell you because you would be sure to be irrationally jealous. That is the matter in a nutshell.’
I stared at James. He looked as I had I think never seen him look in all his life. He looked not exactly guilty but somehow confused and at a loss. I turned round for a moment and opened the front door wide.
‘You see—’ said Lizzie, near to tears.
‘Let me do this,’ said James.
‘I don’t think you need to say anything more,’ I said.
‘You are leaping to conclusions,’ said James.
‘What do you expect me to do?’
‘Listen to the truth. I met Lizzie a long time ago at a party which you gave for a first night. I happened to be in London, I happened to come.’
‘For once. I think I can even remember the occasion.’
‘Lizzie remembered me simply because I was your cousin. Then at a later time, after you’d left her and when she was unhappy, she rang me up to ask if I knew your address in Japan—that was when you were working in Tokyo.’
‘I wanted to write to you, I felt I had to,’ said Lizzie in a choked voice. ‘It was my idea, I pushed him into it—’
‘But you met each other,’ I said, ‘you didn’t just talk on the telephone.’
‘Yes, we did meet, but very very rarely, perhaps in all those years six times.’
‘Do you expect me to believe that?’
‘He was sorry for me,’ said Lizzie.
‘You bet he was! So you met to discuss me.’
‘Yes, but only in what I might call a business-like way.’
‘Oh, very business-like!’
‘I mean, Lizzie just wanted to know where you were, how you were. We never otherwise discussed you. Our acquaintance was slight and it was impersonal and unemotional.’
‘That cannot be true.’
‘It was entirely concerned with you, not with Lizzie and me. And as I say, we scarcely ever met or indeed communicated in any way.’
‘He told me to stop bothering him,’ said Lizzie, ‘but sometimes I so much wanted to know how you were—’
‘James is the last person who ever knew how I was!’
‘Of course,’ said James, ‘we ought to have told you long ago that we knew each other slightly. But the nature of the acquaintance was likely to irritate you. I know, if you will forgive my saying so, what an insanely jealous disposition you have.’
‘You have been at pains to make clear that I had left Lizzie at the time your acquaintance ripened—’
‘It never ripened. And la jalousie naît avec l’amour . . .’
‘That’s true enough.’
‘What does it mean?’ said Lizzie, who was still looking red and frightened and miserable.
‘But why tell me now?’ I asked James. ‘You could both have gone on fooling me forever.’
‘I should have told you earlier,’ he repeated, ‘it should not have happened at all. Any lie is morally dangerous.’
‘You mean you may be found out!’
‘It has been a barrier. And a—and a—’ he found the word judiciously, ‘a flaw.’
‘In your conception of yourself.’
‘In our—our—’ he searched again, ‘friendship, and—yes—in me.’
‘Friendship! Whatever it is between you and me it certainly isn’t friendship!’
‘And earlier I felt I must protect Lizzie.’
‘Of course!’
‘But now—lately—it becomes necessary to tell you, for Lizzie’s sake, so that there may be no impediment.’
‘Impediment to what, for God’s sake?’
‘To her loving you, to your loving her. Secrets are almost always a mistake and a source of corruption.’
‘And then there was Toby,’ blurted Lizzie.
‘Toby? Christ in heaven, how does Toby come into this? You don’t mean Toby Ellesmere, do you?’ I asked Lizzie.
‘He saw me and Lizzie in a bar together,’ said James. He hated this bit.
‘Talking about me of course!’
‘Yes.’
‘And as you were afraid he’d tell me you felt you had to! Otherwise you’d have gone on and on lying.’
‘We would have told you anyway,’ said Lizzie. ‘We felt we had to. It was beginning to be a nightmare, at least it was to me. It seemed such a little thing to begin with, there was so little to it, and it just seemed sensible, not to tell you, knowing what you’re like. And you must understand, we only met sort of every other year for five minutes. And I very very occasionally rang him up to ask about you. Usually he wasn’t there anyway—’