The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [139]
The thought of the cauldron now shocked me into another awful fear: could Hartley swim? I had not till now formulated the thought that she might have run straight out of the house to hurl herself into the sea. She had cried out, ‘I want to die.’ Had she, in those years, contemplated suicide, indeed how could she not? A strong swimmer would scarcely cast himself into a calm sea hoping for death, but to a non-swimmer the sea might be the very image of restful death itself. Could she swim? She had never learnt in the old days, when the sea was for both of us a far-off dream. It had never occurred to us to venture together into the black canal, although I had become a diffident swimmer at the age of fourteen, when I went to Wales with Mr McDowell. In our first talk at the bungalow she had said Ben could not swim, but had said nothing about herself. Had she now run straight from my arms and from my deception into the easeful peace of the drowning sea?
As I was thinking this I was climbing over the rocks towards the right, in the direction of the village, since if she was running home she would instinctively turn in this direction. The easier way back to the road was by way of the tower, because of a deep gulley between the road and the rocks on the village side, not too hard to negotiate by daylight, but very hazardous in the dark. Hartley might not know this however. I clambered and slithered, now calling again and able to see a little more in the diffused half-darkness. The evening star was present, perhaps other stars, a blanched moon. I thought and I prayed: let her just fall and sprain her ankle and I will carry her back to the house and keep her and let that devil do what he will.
It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me. I kept trying to get near to the edge of the sea but the rocks kept defeating me, not by malign interest but by sheer muddle, and I kept slipping down slopes into seaweedy pools and confronting black clefts and holes and smooth unclimbable surfaces. I had an intuition of light over the sea and I wanted to be able to look there and be sure there was not somewhere the dark head of a drowning woman and her desperate arms breaking the calm surface. I moaned softly as I clutched and skipped, hallooing her name at intervals like an owl’s call, and at last I came unexpectedly over the smooth dome of a tall rock and found myself just above the water. I stood up on the highest point of the dome and looked out to sea. There was nothing upon the luminous faintly-wrinkled expanse except wavery yellow replicas of the evening star and the low crouching moon. The sky was still a dimmed glowing blue, not yet sunk into the blackish blue of night. One or two pin-point stars were just visible beyond the big jagged lamp of the evening star. I turned to look inland. I was conscious now of the warm air, the warm rocks, after the strange chill of my house. The rocks stretched away, visible as almost colourless lumps above black hollows. Beyond was the road, and some scattered distant lights of the village and of Amorne Farm. I shouted out more loudly now, ‘Hartley! Hartley! Call to me and I’ll come to you.’ Call and I’ll come: that was it indeed. But there was no answer, only the silence made up of little noises.
I wondered what to do next. Had Hartley managed to get across the gulley onto the road? Possibly she knew those rocks better than I did. Possibly she and Ben used to come and have picnics here. It was true that marriages were secret places. What was it like in there, and were Hartley’s out-pourings the exaggerated half-dreams of a hysterical