The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [149]
I made a little polite conversation by way of introduction, and while Gilbert was still in evidence. ‘I expect you’re very leftwing, like most of the young.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Interested in politics?’
‘Party politics? No.’
‘But some kind of politics?’
He admitted to being interested in the preservation of whales. We discussed that. ‘And I’m against pollution, I think the problem of nuclear waste is terrible.’ We discussed that too.
At the next pause I said, ‘So you didn’t come here to see them?’
‘No, I came to see you.’
‘To ask me that question?’
‘Yes. Thanks for answering it. Needless to say I won’t bother you again.’
‘Oh, don’t say that. But—so—you aren’t going to call on them, to let them know you’re here?’
‘No.’
‘Oughtn’t you to? Of course I quite understand you mightn’t want to. Now I had a very happy relation with my parents, but—’
‘I had a very unhappy one with mine.’
Drink had loosened his tongue. I had been doing a lot of urgent thinking. A plan, the plan, was emerging. ‘With both of them?’
‘Yes. Well, it wasn’t her fault so much. He took against me. She went along with him. I suppose she had to.’
‘She was frightened.’
‘Well, it was a bad scene. He stopped her from talking to me. And she always felt she had to tell him lies, little lies just so as to make life easier. I hated that.’
‘You mustn’t blame her.’ That was important.
‘I suppose he wasn’t a bad chap. But he couldn’t succeed at anything and that was depressing and maybe made him a bit spiteful, and he took it out on us. She couldn’t do a thing. Well, I do exaggerate. There were good times or goodish times, only the bad ones were so—crucial.’ Again the hesitation. Perhaps the tone of someone else’s voice? Whose?
‘I understand.’
‘You never knew when it was going to start again. You had to be careful what you said.’
The bruising and breaking of that child’s pride must have been something appalling, unspeakable. I recalled Hartley’s picture of the white-faced silent boy. Poor Hartley! She was the helpless witness of it all. ‘Your mother must have suffered very much, for you and with you.’
He gave me one of his quick suspicious frowning stares, but did not pursue the point. On closer inspection he seemed less handsome, or perhaps just more dirty and untidy. He had the pale complexion of a redhead, but his long unkempt hair was greasy and in need of a wash. His face was thin and a little wolfish, the cheeks almost sunken. The eyes had a bright cold blue-grey glint (they were a little spotted and mottled like one of my stones) but always narrowed. Perhaps he was short-sighted. He had a small pretty mouth, the lips scarcely disfigured, and a firm straight little nose, such as a girl might have envied. He was decently shaved, his beard showing in bright points of reddish gold, but the unusually dark stubble growing inaccessibly in the scar looked like a tiny lopsided moustache. He was obviously self-conscious about the scar and kept touching it. His hands were very dirty and the nails bitten.
‘And then there was this business about me.’ I did not speak portentously, but I wanted to keep him on the subject.
‘Oh well, yes, it came up now and then. But I don’t want you to get the idea—’
‘I expect you know that I loved your mother very much when we were young. I haven’t seen her since then, till we suddenly met here—’
‘She must have changed a bit!’
‘I still love her. But we never had a love affair.’
‘That’s nothing to me. Sorry, that’s not the phrase I want, I must be getting drunk. I mean, don’t tell me things like that, I’m not—I’m not interested. I