The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [132]
‘It was important, it was serious!’
‘If only I had had the sense and the nerve either to tell him at the start or never to tell him at all. But you see, when I saw how jealous Ben was, what an angry jealous man he was, I began to be terrified in case one day—you would turn up—’
‘And I have!’
‘And I had to protect myself by at least having mentioned you before. You see, I was afraid someone might say something or that you’d find out where I was—I tried so hard not to let anyone know, anyone who could tell you, I cut off all the connections, and my parents had moved, I thought you might try to find me and—’
‘You cut the connections all right! But, Hartley, if you were so frightened of him at the very start, why did you marry the blighter?’
‘I always thought it would get better later on.’
‘You were never frightened of me, were you?’
‘No, no. But I was afraid that you would find out where I was and write to me. He always looked at my letters. For years and years I always got up first and ran down every morning so as to find the post first in case there was a letter from you.’
‘Oh God.’
‘I did this after I told him too, I was always terrified of the post, in case there was anything he could pick on and misunderstand. Anyway I felt it was too awful living with the risk of his finding out, so I did tell him—and it was—terrible.’
‘He was furious, jealous?’
‘It was terrible. You see, he couldn’t believe it was innocent.’
‘Hartley,’ I said, ‘it was innocent, but it was serious, something happened to us forever in those years. So in a way Ben was right to be impressed, you were telling him something which made everything different. I can understand that.’
‘He wouldn’t believe we hadn’t been lovers, he thought I’d lied when I said I was a virgin. It was so especially terrible because what he thought wasn’t true and I could never convince him, though I told him again and again. Sometimes he’d try to trap me by saying he’d forgive me if only I’d admit it, but I knew he wouldn’t. He kept asking and pressing me and asking again and again and again, he just couldn’t believe it.’
‘My darling, we were lovers, though not in that sense—’
‘He kept asking and asking, every day, sometimes every hour. And he’d ask the same question in the same words over and over and over, whatever answer I gave him. And of course the more angry he got the more clumsy and stupid and wretched I got so that it must have sounded as if I was lying—’
‘I’d like to kill that man.’
She had drunk some more wine and was now sitting shivering, no longer crying, her wide eyes darkened, the pupils expanded, staring at the candle, with the tea towel unconsciously held up to her face, pressing it against her cheekbone like a veil. Her large brow, which looked white in the candlelight, was puckered and pitted with little shadows, but the way she had turned up the collar of her green cotton coat behind her hair gave her a girlish look. Perhaps that was what she used to do with her mackintosh collar in the days when we went bicycling. And even as I was listening intently to her words I was all the time gazing with a kind of creative passion at her candlelit face, like some god reassembling her beauty for my own purposes.
‘Wait, Hartley, it’s all right,’ for she had suddenly looked up in alarm, ‘I’m just going to light more candles, I want to look at you.’ It was getting darker outside. I rattled out a box of candles and lit four more, dripping the wax into tea cups and standing them upright. I ranged them round her like lights at an altar. Then I went and sat opposite to her, not near but looking. I so much wanted to see her smile. That would help the process of re-creation.
‘Hartley, take away that veil. Won’t you smile at me?’
She lowered the tea towel and I saw the wet drooping wretchedness of her mouth. ‘Charles, what’s the time?’
It was twenty-five past ten. ‘Oh, half past nine, earlier. Look, Hartley, dearest, none of this matters, it’s all over, don’t you see? All right, he was a jealous stupid man, a horrible