The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [136]
‘What were they like?’
‘Oh just ordinary times, you might think it was dull, we had a quiet life—’
‘A quiet life!’
‘Ben didn’t much like his job but he liked doing things about the house, he likes DIY.’
‘DIY?’
‘Do It Yourself. We went to London once to the exhibition at Olympia. He used to go to evening classes.’
‘What was he learning at the class on that quiet evening when you left the chain on the door?’
‘He was learning to rivet china.’
‘Oh—Lord—! Hartley, what did you do all the time? Did you entertain, have friends?’
‘Well, Ben didn’t like social life. I didn’t mind. We don’t really know anybody here either.’
‘And did you go to evening classes too?’
‘I once started German, but he didn’t like me to go out in the evening and the classes were different nights.’
‘Oh—Hartley—And in all those years was he faithful to you, did he ever have anyone else?’
For a moment she seemed not to understand. ‘No, of course not!’
‘I wonder how you can be so sure. And you, did you ever have anyone else?’
‘No, of course I didn’t!’
‘Well, I suppose it would have been as much as your life would have been worth.’
‘You see really we were very wrapped up in each other, we are very—’
‘Wrapped up! Yes! I can see it all.’
‘No, you can’t see it all,’ she said, suddenly turning towards me, blinking and drawing her fingers across her eyes and her mouth. ‘You can’t see it, nobody can understand a marriage. I’ve prayed and prayed to go on loving Ben—’
‘It’s a travesty, Hartley. Don’t you see now at last that the situation is intolerable, impossible? Stop playing Jesus Christ to that torturer, if that’s what you’re doing.’
‘He suffers too and I can be—oh so unkind. It’s not his fault, and it was my fault in the beginning.’
‘You gorge me full of these awful stories and then expect me to sympathize with him! Why did you come here, why did you come to me, why did you tell me these things at all?’
Hartley, still staring at me, seemed to reflect. She said slowly, ‘Perhaps because I had sometime, and I’ve always known this, to tell someone, to say it, to say these blasphemies, what you call these horrors to someone. And, as I told you, I’ve never really had any friends, Ben and I have lived so much together, so much on our own, so sort of secretly, a kind of hidden life, like criminals. I never had anyone to talk to, even if I had wanted to talk.’
‘So it turns out I’m your only friend!’
‘Yes, I suppose you are the only person I could inflict this on—’
‘Inflict it—you want me to share the pain—’
‘Well, in a way you were responsible—’
‘For your ruined life? Just as you were responsible for mine! So this is your revenge? No, no, I’m not serious—’
‘I didn’t mean that, just that Ben’s ideas about you have been like—like demons in our lives. But of course it wasn’t just wanting to tell someone. You know, when I saw you in the village for the first time I nearly fainted. I had just come round the corner from the bungalows and you were just going into the pub, and my knees gave way and I had to go a bit up the hill and sit on the grass. Then I thought I must be dreaming, I thought I must be mad, I didn’t know what to do. Then the next day I heard somebody talking about you in the shop, saying you’d retired and come here to live. And I wondered for a bit whether I’d tell Ben, because he mightn’t have been able to recognize you, you don’t look quite like your pictures, but then I thought he’s bound to hear anyway, someone at the boat-building class will know, so I told him I’d seen you and he was in a frenzy and said we must sell the house at once and go away, and of course he believed, or said he believed, that you’d come on purpose because of me, and of course it was very odd—’
‘But is he selling the house?’
‘I don’t know, he said he’d see the house agent, he may have done, I didn’t ask. But really I came here tonight