The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [141]
By the time I had thought all this in about four seconds I had run down the hill as fast as I could and met Hartley. I did not touch her; I said very quickly, but distinctly, in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I got worried, I told him we met accidentally in the village and I asked you for a drink, and then you set off home over the rocks. I can’t stay now, but come to me soon. Come soon and come forever. You must not continue your life here. I shall be waiting for you every day.’
I could not see Hartley’s face, but her whole figure expressed not fear so much as a total dejected resigned misery which had passed beyond fear. She had an air of being dripping wet as if she had in truth been drowned and this was her ghost.
Ben was back at the gate now, and I called to him, ‘She’s here!’ and Hartley and I walked on to meet him.
Ben came out onto the pavement. As we approached he said ‘OK then. OK. Goodnight.’ Then he turned and went back into the house, not waiting to see if Hartley would follow. I held the gate open. She passed me with her blind dripping drowned head.
I had an impulse to follow, to push after her into the house, to sit down, make conversation, demand coffee. But it was impossible, it would only make things worse for her. Everything had gone amiss. The door banged.
I had no wish now to eavesdrop, indeed I had almost no curiosity left, so strongly did my mind shy away in horror from the interior of that house and of that marriage. I felt disgust with myself, with him, even with her.
I walked home, neither fast nor slowly. I remembered to pick up my jersey, which was now wet with dew. I found the house in darkness. The candles had fallen over again and burnt themselves out on the wooden top of the table, making long dark burns which remained there ever after to remind me of that terrible night.
History
FOUR
WHAT FOLLOWS THIS, and also what directly precedes it, has been written at a much later date. What I have now written is therefore more deeply reflected and more systematically remembered than it would be if I were continuing to write a diary. Events, as it happened, did not subsequently leave me much time for diary-writing, although what immediately follows has something of the air of an interlude (perhaps a comic one). This novelistic memoir, as it has now become, is however, as far as its facts are concerned (though, as James would say, what indeed are facts?), accurate and truthful. I have in particular, and this may be a professional attribute, an extremely good memory for dialogue, and I am sure that a tape-recording of my candlelit conversation with Hartley would differ but little from what I have transcribed. My account is curtailed, but omits nothing of substance and faithfully narrates the actual words spoken. How very deeply indeed many of the conversations, past and to come, recorded in this book, are engraved upon my mind and my heart!
After my return on the evening described I had had enough and I went to bed and to sleep. (I did not eat the Korean clams; later on I threw them away.) I awoke after nine the next morning and it was raining. The English weather had put on another of its transformation scenes. The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound