The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [134]
‘That was part of the trouble. You see, when I got Titus I simply didn’t want to know who his parents were, I didn’t want to think he was not entirely mine. The adoption society gave me a lot of stuff, they even gave me a letter from his mother, but I didn’t read any of it, I destroyed it at once. I didn’t want to give any part of my thoughts to his real parents. I didn’t want to remember anything connected with Titus before I carried him home with me, and I didn’t remember, I blotted it out of my mind. So when Ben became so interested and so suspicious and began to question me I didn’t know how to answer, at first I couldn’t even properly remember the name of the adoption society. It must all have sounded so bad, so like a lie—’
‘But there are records, aren’t there, official records?’
‘There are now, but things were less formal then, and there wasn’t any law about children having the right to know who their parents were. Of course there must have been records I suppose, but by the time Ben wanted to know the details the adoption society had ceased to exist, and I think a lot of papers had been destroyed in a fire, so someone said anyway. Ben never believed any of it, and no one would answer letters. I did try to find out, I went to London, he wouldn’t come, and I stayed in a hotel—’
‘Oh Hartley, Hartley—’ I was picturing this journey, and the return home.
‘I did try, but I couldn’t find out, and somehow even then I didn’t want to.’
‘But I still don’t understand, what did he think had happened? What did he think we’d been doing?’
‘He thought we’d been going on seeing each other, perhaps not all the time, but on and off, secretly. He thought I’d become pregnant and—’
‘But he was living with you!’
‘That was another odd thing. Just before the adoption was finally fixed up I was away for quite a long time, it was about the only time I was away. I went to my father who was ill, he died then—and in this time away Ben thought the baby had come. I wasn’t slim any more at all, I could have been pregnant, you see it all fitted in. And he thought I had invented all the adoption business so as to bring your child into his house.’
‘But he saw the papers—’
‘Well, I could have got hold of the papers somehow, he didn’t read them anyway. And the visitor from the society could have been an accomplice.’
‘Your husband is a most ingenious man. A vile hateful cruel half-mad ingenious torturer.’
Hartley, staring now at the candle flames, simply shook her head.
‘But Titus himself, he didn’t know, I suppose, I mean what Ben thought?’
‘Well, he did know,’ she said, ‘later on, I mean when he was about nine or ten. Of course we’d always told him that he was an adopted child, like you’re supposed to. But then Ben started telling him that he was the child of his mother’s lover and that his mother was a whore.’
‘What perfectly monstrous wickedness—’
‘Ben did go through a phase of knocking Titus about. Some neighbours called the prevention of cruelty people. I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t defend him, I had to sort of take Ben’s side, it was an awful time, everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one’s bones were broken, all the bones and the little joints were broken, one wasn’t whole any more, one wasn’t a person any more.’ Slow tears came and still staring at the candles she blindly felt about on the table for the towel. I pushed it towards her.
‘But why couldn’t you defend him—oh, stupid question. Hartley, I can’t bear this—’
‘He felt it was all my fault, and it was all my fault, I ought to have told him at the start, he asked me if there had ever been anyone else, and I lied really because there had been you although we weren’t lovers, and later on when I told it, it sounded so mysterious and big. And I married him because I was sorry for him and I wanted to make him happy—and then—and then—’
‘Oh Hartley, stop.’
‘And I somehow got into a kind of fatal way of getting everything wrong, doing everything wrong, and hurting him, as if I were doing exactly the thing that would make him angry. One