The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
I experienced his eternal absence as something almost impossible to comprehend. He had been with me such a short time; and he had come to me as to his death, as to his executioner. By what strange path of accidents, alive with so many other possibilities, had he made his way to the base of that sheer rock where he had tried again and again to pull himself out of the moving teasing killing sea? I ought to have warned him, I ought never to have dived in with him on that first day; I had destroyed him because I so rejoiced in his youth and because I had to pretend to be young too. He died because he trusted me. My vanity destroyed him. It is a matter of causality. The payment for faults is automatic. I relaxed my hold and he lay dead. Such thoughts as these carried me at last into a wretched comatose slumber; and when I awoke I had forgotten that Hartley was gone and I started at once on my old activity of planning what I would do to get her back.
My watch had stopped again, but the sky had an evening look with a lot of orange clouds pierced by holes of very cold very pale blue. I went downstairs and made some tea and then began drinking wine. I began to think about Hartley but cautiously, as if trying out the thoughts to see whether they would drive me mad with pain. They had to be thought, I had to take it in. I had seen the empty house, the postcard from Sydney. I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone’s uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?
It began to grow dark and I lit the lamp. I closed the window to keep the moths out. It dawned on me with a vague wonderment that it had not at any point occurred to me to take a plane to Sydney. I could not remember whether Ben had said they would be living in Sydney, but Australia was not all that large and I had friends there who would be delighted to join a hunt for a girl. I could search, enquire, advertise. It would be an occupation. But it was somehow clear that I would not do so, I had given up. Follow her humbly at a distance, simply keep letting her know that I was still there? How like a frightful ghost I might become then. No, I had given up and, as it now seemed, I had done so prophetically just before her awful final flight. Why, after that unspeakable tea party, had I simply sat around waiting, imagining she would ring up? Did I really think she would ring up? Did I really imagine that she would leap, at the last moment, down into my boat? Surely I must have known by then that she was incapable of leaping. And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two. If only Hartley had been my sister, I could have looked after her so happily and cared for her so tenderly.
I could not decide to eat anything. I had no desire for food or any sense that I would ever want to eat again. I went upstairs at last feeling drunk and sick. The bead curtain was jangling in some sea wind which was getting in somehow. There was a small moon racing through ragged clouds and the speed of it made me feel giddy. Perhaps she had to love Ben, hers was a loving nature and she had no alternative, no other possible object. She had wanted to love Titus but Ben had destroyed her love for Titus and in doing so destroyed her. What I had seen was a shell, a husk, a dead woman, a dead thing. Yet this was just the thing which I had so dearly wished to inhabit, to reanimate, to cherish. I took three sleeping pills. As I was falling asleep I wondered, why did she keep the letter, even though she did not read it? Why did she put the stone in the garden where I would be sure to see it? Were these, after all, hopeful signs?
I woke rather late the next morning and established from the telephone that it was nine thirty. I had a headache. I went into the kitchen and fell over the hip bath which was still standing there half full of water. I managed to empty the bath, half over the slates and half onto the lawn, and to put it back under the stairs. I tried to eat some biscuits but they had become soft and curiously wet. There was no bread and no butter and no milk. In any case I was not hungry. I thought of going shopping but I was not sure what day it was. I thought I heard distant church bells, so it might be Sunday. In a rather abstract way I wondered if I should not go to London. However I had no particular motive for going there. There was no one I wanted to see and nothing I wanted to do.
I walked out to the road to look at the weather. It was warmer and more blue. I noticed some letters in Gilbert’s clever basket. The strike or holiday or whatever it was was evidently over. Of course there was no letter from Hartley, but there was one from Lizzie. I took the letters into the little red room and sat at the table.
My dear, I am unhappy about our meeting. You were generous and sweet but I wish I had seen you alone. All that laughing was somehow awful. What were you really thinking? I feel I am somehow in the wrong, but you must put me in the right. Love me, Charles, love me enough. Since your letter I have been reliving my love for you like an inoculation, not to be ‘cured’, never that, but so that I can love you properly at last, and not just be stupidly ‘in love’. Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now, Charles, no more mean possessive passions and scheming. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Please, my darling.
Lizzie.
P.S. Come and see us soon in London.
What a touching letter, ending with an invitation from ‘us’! And ‘I am in the wrong but you must put me in the right.’ Typical Lizzie. I opened another letter. It was from Rosemary Ashe.
Dearest Charles,
This is just to bring you the sad news that Sidney and I have split up. He wants a divorce. We are being peaceful about it all for the sake of the children and they don’t seem to mind too much. It’s a younger actress of course, our occupational hazard—that, and the transatlantic atmosphere which seems to have driven Sidney mad. Perhaps it’s temporary, I haven’t given up hope, only hoping is so painful. I’m coming home and I long to see you. May I visit you in your lovely peaceful house by the sea? That’s just what I need.
Much love,
Rosemary.
So much for the ideal marriage. I had better start polishing up my celibate uncle role. I opened another letter and for some time could not think who it was from, even though I could easily read the signature, Angela Godwin.
Dear Charles,
Listen, it’s me. And listen carefully. You don’t have to put up with the old ones, why should you? Maybe you thought you couldn’t get a young one? But you don’t look your age, you know. You don’t have to have old bags like Lizzie Scherer and Rosina Vamburgh, why should you when you can have ME? I do rather like Rosina, though, at least she’s clever, and things are decenter at home since Pam went so don’t think I regard you as an escape route, I don’t! I’ve been thinking a lot these last months and I think I’ve changed a lot and come to terms with myself at last. I’ve been thinking about my identity. I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with my life, not acting, so you needn’t think I’m after that either! I’m good at maths and I think I may become a physicist, I’m doing the Cambridge exam in the autumn. Anyhow I shall jolly well be somebody. The reason for this letter? I have had an idea of genius. That night you came to see Peregrine I was (of course) listening at the door and I heard him say how you wanted a son, or maybe you said it, I forget, but anyway it stayed in my mind. Now comes the idea. Why shouldn’t I give you one? He could be yours
I think I shall marry much later on or not at all. But why not simply have what you want? People don’t enough, which is what is the matter with our civilization, I don’t mean like people starving, but like not having the courage to grab their heart’s desire even when it’s in front of their noses. About me, I am seventeen, and in perfect health. I’m a virgin and I want someone special to take me over that border, you in fact. I enclose a photograph, and you can see how I have changed. What about it, Charles? I am serious. Not least in saying that I love you, and am if and when you want me yours,
Angela Godwin.
I pulled the photograph out of the envelope and inspected a coloured picture of a rather pretty intelligent-looking girl with large eyes and a bright tender diffident unformed face. I crumpled this missive up and thrust it into the soft ash of the woodfire. There were various other letters, but I felt I had had enough of letters for the moment.
I went out to see what the horrible sea was up to. It was calm and slippery, sliding in among the rocks like oil. I went as far as Minn’s cauldron and stood on the bridge. The tide was going out and the cauldron was emptying in a whirling gushing frenzy of hasty bubbling waters whose white flux was absorbed by the calmer sea beyond. I looked down. How deep it was, how steep and smooth the sides. Surely no power on earth could have got me out of that hole. Yet I had got out, I was alive, and poor swimming holidaying Titus was dead. I went on over the rocks as far as the tower and climbed down to the steps. The sleek water was rising and falling, but not too violently, the tide was right, the iron banister reaching down as far as the waves. I felt in my body, as if scarcely yet in my mind, a flicker of life, the old familiar semi-sexual twitch of fear, such as I used to feel on those high diving boards in California or before plunging into lethally cold waters off Ireland.
Trembling with emotion I tore my clothes off and walked into the sea. The cold shock, then the warmth, then the strong gentle lifting motion of the quiet waves reminded me terribly of happiness. I swam about feeling the loneliness of the sea and that particular sensation which I now identified as a sense of death which it seemed to have always carried into my heart. Not that I then wished to die or thought that I might drown. My strong limbs responded to the moving water, my breath came easily, the sky was blue above me and the sun was everywhere, and I watched the near horizon of the approaching waves, their tops a little whipped by the breeze, and they were strong and gentle. They toyed with me. I swam and floated until I began to feel cold; then I climbed out and returned naked to the house carrying my clothes.
The sea had restored my hunger and when it seemed to be lunch time I heated up the remains of the consommé and opened a tin of frankfurters and a tin of sauerkraut. I half decided to go to London tomorrow. I half thought of telephoning James who might after all still be around, and I got as far as looking up his number and writing it down on the pad beside the telephone. I half intended to ring up the taxi man to ask him to take me to the early train. Though the sun was warm, I was a bit chilled after the swim and I put on the white Irish jersey. I got out a suitcase and began to pack up a few clothes. I even went into the book room to find a book to read on the journey. It occurred to me that although my plan for my retirement had included a regime of reading I had not opened a book since I arrived at Shruff End. I turned the books over. James had inspected them, Titus had slept on them. I needed something a bit lurid and absorbing. It was a moment even for pornography, only I cannot really stand pornography. I eventually chose The Wings of the Dove, another story of death and moral smash-up.
The day seemed to be passing, the evening was arriving, and I had not telephoned either James or the taxi man. I decided it was too late to decide to go early in the morning. I would ring the taxi man tomorrow and take the later train. What I would do when I got to London I did not consider. Arrange my flat, order curtains? Such things belonged to another world. Although the evening was warm I lit the fire for company in the little red room, thus consuming Rosemary’s and Angie’s letters and the photo of the intelligent diffident girl. I took my supper in to the fireside and sat for a while trying to start reading The Wings of the Dove, but its marvellous magisterial beginning failed to grab me. It was still daylight and I could see without the lamp. I sat for a while with glazed eyes, listening to the stomp of the sea and the beating of my heart. I began to feel slightly sleepy or comatose. That swim had certainly done something to me. I thought about Titus. Then I began to think about myself as a drowned man and I remembered how I had slept, on the night of my resurrection from Minn’s cauldron, upon the floor in this room, in front of the glowing fire, wondering gratefully why I was still alive. And I seemed to see myself lying there, moving my limbs gently in the warmth to make certain that I was whole.
My eyelids drooped a little and then I very clearly saw something concerning which I was not afterwards able to say whether it was a hallucination or a memory image. It certainly presented itself to me, quite suddenly, as a memory. I had been vaguely, driftingly, thinking of that awful fall into the churning pit of water, my ‘knowledge’ of my death, the way the water showed green above me even in the dim light. Then I remembered that, just before my head cracked against the rock and the blackness came upon me, I had seen something else. I had seen a strange small head near to mine, terrible teeth, a black arched neck. The monstrous sea serpent had actually been in the cauldron with me.
I opened my eyes wide and, now panting and with a violently pounding heart, looked around me. All was as usual, the fire blazing, the scattering of unopened letters upon the table, my half-drunk glass of wine. I was sure I had not been asleep. I had simply remembered something which I had for some reason totally forgotten. This was indeed the forgetting which the doctor had said I must expect, the result of the concussion, where memory traces are lost. But now I could recall the black coiling thing, very close, reared over me and quite unmistakable in the dim light, its head and neck for a moment outlined against the sky. I saw in memory its green luminous eyes. The sight had lasted for seconds, perhaps a second, but it had been clear and not to be doubted. Then after that second had come the blow on the head.
But no, there was something else to remember, something else had happened just before I lost consciousness. But what, what? Trembling with excitement and fear I sat holding my head and tormenting my memory. There was something there waiting agonizingly to be remembered, something very important and extraordinary, waiting just outside my range of vision, waiting for me to grasp it, only I could not. I groaned aloud, I got up and walked into the kitchen and back, I drank a little more wine, I closed my eyes, I opened them. I watched my mind, as if hardly daring to touch it in case it should shift or harden and destroy some perhaps momentary proximity. But the hidden thing would not come; and I had a terrified sense that if I did not catch it now it would disappear forever, sinking into the deep total darkness of the unconscious. Just now, for perhaps the last time, it heaved to touch the surface.
After a while I gave up straining, though I still hoped that the final, the somehow essential, memory would suddenly come. I sat down again at the table and began thinking about the sea serpent and going back over my earlier theories concerning LSD. I tried to remember whether I had felt the coiling creature as well as seen it. I had a memory vision of the animal but none of my state of mind at the time, although I could remember my ‘drowning’ thoughts when I was under the wave. I thought of going out to inspect the cauldron in case this would help my memory, but now it was almost dark and I dared not. I felt frightened, then positively shaken by death fear. I tried to light the lamp but for some reason could not. I lit several candles, then went and locked the front door and the back door and returned to the little red room.
As I came back into the room I saw almost s