The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [137]
‘My help! My dearest girl, I’ve been telling you, I am all help! Let’s go, let’s just go, we can go to London tomorrow, even tonight if there’s a train—’
‘No, no, no. You see, I can’t decide, I’ve kept swinging to and fro. I thought first I’d simply ask you to go away, to sell your house and go away. If once you understood how much it mattered to me and Ben, how awful, what a nightmare it was that you’re here, you would go at once.’
‘Hartley, we are going, you and I are going, that is the answer.’
‘I thought I’d write you a letter asking you to go, but it would have been so hard to explain it all in a letter.’
‘Hartley, will you come, tonight, tomorrow? You will?’
‘And then I thought—but perhaps this really is mad—that you could somehow persuade Ben, make him see, that I’ve been telling the truth all these years, impress him somehow—’
‘How?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, swear on something sacred or with a notary or—’
The word ‘notary’ seemed to gather round it some of the sheer insanity of what she was saying. So now we were to be involved with notaries! I could imagine how much that would impress Ben. At the same time, in the swift way of thought, I was making realistic plans. Of course I still hoped that, when it came to it, Hartley would decide to stay with me now, tonight. However it was possible that she would not, and even if she did there might be some terrible revulsion of feeling afterwards. Such shock tactics might do more harm than good. Better perhaps to let her reflect quietly upon her reunion with me and draw her own conclusions. She seemed to me to be still in a dream, a woman locked up inside her own nightmare. She would emerge, but it might be slowly. I might even have a long work to do, to give her back hope and life and stir in her the instinct of freedom, which it still seemed to me was so natural to her. Meanwhile I must find ways of keeping contact with her and of making her plan, making her construct futures which contained me. Surely, once she conceived of happiness she would spring towards it. But for the moment it might be wise to humour her lunatic idea that I might ‘persuade’ Ben. If she just, bleakly, blankly, asked me to go away my task would be much harder, though it was still certain to be successful in the end. Hartley was a sick woman.
I said, ‘I think your idea about Ben is a good one, I might be able to solve that problem anyway, to make him see and believe the truth about what happened or rather didn’t happen in the old days, we must consult about how it could be done. But, Hartley, listen, the important thing is this. You are going to leave Ben and come to me, for good, forever—’
Hartley, who had been sitting entranced, absorbed in her own unusual eloquence, looked suddenly terrified. She jerked back her head and began to stare about the room. ‘Charles, what is the time?’
It was nearly eleven o’clock. I said, ‘Oh, it’s about ten to ten. Darling, why not stay here now, please?’
‘It can’t be as early as that. It will take me thirty-five minutes to get home, and Ben usually gets back about eleven.’ She got up and said, ‘I feel drunk, I’m not used to wine, I must go.’ She turned, then made a sudden pounce towards my hand and peered at my watch, then uttered a high-pitched wailing cry. ‘It’s eleven, it’s eleven! Oh why did you do it! Why did I believe you! Why didn’t I bring my watch! What shall I do, oh what shall I do! What shall I tell him, he’s sure to know where I’ve been! Oh I’ve been so careful and I haven’t told him lies and now he’ll think—It’s as bad as can be, oh I am stupid, stupid, whatever can I do?’
‘Stay here, you don’t have to go back!’
I was shaken and a bit ashamed when I saw her grief and terror, but I also thought: let there be disaster upon disaster, crisis on crisis, let it all break down quickly into a shambles. That will benefit me. And then I thought too: unless he kills her. And then I thought: I must keep her here. That settles it, it must all be achieved now. I must