The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [133]
‘He thinks Titus is your son.’
‘What?’
‘He thinks Titus is your son.’
Hartley had laid her hands flat on the table. Brightly lit by the candles she looked now like an interrogated prisoner.
I sat up very straight, blushing with amazement and shock, and found that I had put my hands flat on the table too. We stared at each other. ‘Hartley, you can’t be serious, he can’t be serious! How could Titus be my son? Your husband isn’t insane, is he? He knew Titus was adopted, he knew where he came from—’
‘No, that’s the point—he didn’t know where Titus came from. I was the one who brought Titus into our lives, it was my idea, I arranged it all. Ben was in a state of shock throughout the whole business, he never did anything but sign papers without reading them. Once, somebody from the adoption people came to the house and saw Ben, but I did all the talking. Ben was like a zombie.’
‘But Hartley, wait a minute, he knew I was a thing of the past, you didn’t adopt Titus until years and years after you left me.’
‘He thought we’d kept up. He thought we met secretly.’ Hartley, tearless and staring-eyed, was almost, with her glare of misery and her pale pitted forehead, accusing.
‘Hartley, darling, people can’t believe things which are totally crazy and for which there is absolutely no evidence. He must have known you hadn’t been seeing me.’
‘How could he know? I was alone all day, sometimes all night. He had to go away travelling.’
‘All right—let’s stay sane about this—let’s say it was extremely improbable! Besides—oh, how could he not believe you, how could he torture you with such mad imagined invented things!’
‘It didn’t happen all at once,’ said Hartley. She gulped some more wine. ‘He took against Titus from the start, perhaps because the adoption was the only thing I’d ever forced him to do against his will and he resented it and somehow deeply wanted it to fail. You see, he’d gone on and on up to that time saying that of course you had been my lover and you probably still were, and I’d gone on and on denying it till I was tired, I think we were both tired, I used to try to think about something else when he was talking about you. I thought at first he didn’t really believe I’d kept up with you but only said it to spite me, and perhaps at first he didn’t believe that, but I’m sure he thought we’d been lovers. And of course we couldn’t forget you because you were always in the papers and then later on we saw you on telly—’
‘God—’
‘And this had gone on sort of festering in his mind, and then suddenly, it was as if he had worked it out, it was like a sort of revelation, he connected you with Titus. There were two bad things in his life and he went on brooding on them until he felt they must connect, they must connect, and they were both my fault.’
‘But how old was Titus then and what sort of evidence—?’
‘I can’t remember how old Titus was, and perhaps it didn’t happen all that suddenly. He was always harsh with Titus even when he was a tiny child, and later on it was worse. He may have said it just as a crazy thing to hurt me, and then when I was so upset he began to think about it and to see everything I said as a proof of guilt.’
‘But, Hartley, this is madness, he must be mad, clinically mad—’
‘He isn’t mad.’
‘That’s what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe.’
‘He says that Titus resembles you—’
‘Well, there you are.’
‘And the funny thing is that he does look a bit like you.’
‘He looks like you because you brought him up, and you look like me because we gazed and gazed at each other for so many years. Loving couples come to resemble each other.’
‘Really? Perhaps you’re right. It did seem odd, uncanny almost. ’ This idea seemed to strike Hartley more than anything I had said, even for a moment to please her.
‘Besides, there must have been independent proof of Titus’s birth and his