The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [135]
‘Hartley, don’t tell me any more of these horrors please. I don’t want to hear them and anyway it’s all over.’
‘Oh I’ve been so stupid, so stupid, and of course Titus never settled down at school and everything went wrong, everything, and I’m not even sure that Ben believed it all at the start or that he always really believed it later, only everything I did seemed to make things worse, it was as if he hypnotized me into acting as if I was guilty. And I’m not sure what Titus believed or what he believes. Titus used to sit there hearing Ben saying one thing and me saying the other, it was like a sort of litany, an awful poem—and I don’t know whether he knew what the truth was or whether there was any truth, it was all a kind of fog of awful senseless argument and row. It all got ravelled up into a nightmare and in the end he blamed me for it and in a way he was right, sometimes I think he blamed me and resented me more than he did Ben. Of course when Titus was small he was frightened all the time and he kept quiet and he’d sit all the evening on his little chair against the wall, all white and tense and quiet, dreadfully quiet. Later on when he was about fifteen he used to pretend sometimes that he was your child, and once or twice he told Ben that I’d told him he was. But I think he did this just to spite Ben when Titus was too big for Ben to hit him any more.’
‘Hartley, stop. Just tell me more about Titus now. When did he go away? Where do you think he is?’
‘When he left school he went into the poly, you know, the polytechnic, where we used to live, he had a student grant, he was studying electricity. He lived at home, but he sort of ignored us, he sent us to Coventry. I sometimes felt he really hated us, both of us. And he could never forgive me for not protecting him when he was small. Then just before we moved down here he went into digs, and then he just vanished. He left the digs and never let us know or sent an address. I went round there and asked about him but no one seemed to know or care where he’d gone, and he never wrote. He knew we were coming here. I think he went to look for his real parents, he always said he would. He went on and on about them sometimes and how perhaps they were rich. Anyway, he’s gone now. Gone.’
‘Don’t be so tragic, Hartley, he’ll turn up again. He knows where you live, doesn’t he? He’ll turn up. He’ll come home when he’s short of money, they always do.’
She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I don’t want him to come back. Sometimes I believe he’s dead. Sometimes I almost wish he were dead, and that I could hear that he was dead, so that the anguish of the hope and the fear and the dread could just stop, and we could be at peace. If he came back—it could be—terrible—’
‘You mean?’
‘Terrible.’ The slow tears were coming and she kept drooping her eyelids to make them slide down her cheeks. She said, ‘I wish we’d never adopted a child, it was my fault, Ben was quite right, we were better without. I could have managed then and Ben would have been—like I wanted—’
In spite of the pain and horror of her story my mind was leaping ahead into a bright land, into all sorts of almost detailed vistas of sudden hope. I would take Hartley away and together we would find Titus. In some strange metaphysical sense it was true, I would make it true: Titus was my son, the offspring of our old love!
‘Hartley, my little one, stop crying, you’ve had your orgy of horrors, now stop it. You’re mine now and I’m going to look after you and protect you—’
She began shaking her head again. ‘And I married him to make him happy! But you mustn’t think it’s been all bad, it hasn’t. What I’ve told you is the bad part, but I’ve probably given you a quite wrong impression.’
‘Now you’re going to tell me you’ve had a happy marriage!’
‘No, but it’s not been all bad, Ben wasn’t always awful