The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [153]
‘And you stayed because you like me.’
‘And the food. And the swimming. OK!’
‘Put it this way, and for the moment as hypothetically as you please. You are searching for a father. I am searching for a son. Why don’t we make a deal?’
He refused to be impressed or startled. ‘I suspect you’ve just thought of this son idea. Anyway, I’m looking for my real father, and not because I need one or want one, but just to kill a devil of miserable biting curiosity that I’ve lived with all my life.’
No, he was not at all what I had expected, though I could not now think why I had expected a dullard. Something in Hartley’s rather desperate account of him had suggested this perhaps. He was a clever attractive boy and I was going to do my damnedest to get hold of him. To get hold of him and then of his mother.
‘Well, think it over. It’s a proposition, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a deeply serious one. You see—in a curious way—because of my old relation to your mother—I am cast in the role of your father. I know this is nonsense, but you’re clever enough to understand nonsense. You might have been my son. I’m not just anybody. Fate has brought us together. And I could help you a lot—’
‘I don’t want your money or your bloody influence, I didn’t come here for that!’
‘So you said, and we passed that stage some time ago, so shut up about it now. I want to take your mother away, and I want at last to make her happy, which you think is impossible and I don’t. And I want you to be in the picture too. For her sake. For my sake. In the picture. I’m not suggesting more than that. You can work it for as much or as little as you like.’
‘You mean you’d take us both away and we’d all three live together in a villa in the south of France?’
‘Yes. If you’d like! Why not?’
He uttered an explosive yelp, then with a theatrical gesture spread out his hands, which were cleaner now. ‘You love her?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t know her.’
‘The odd thing is, my dear boy, that I do know her.’
‘Well,’ said Titus, and there was at last a look of admiration, ‘let’s just suppose . . . that you did . . . ask her to come and see me . . .’
I was lying in tall luscious green grass which was just coming out into pink feathery flower. The grass was cool and very dry and squeaked slightly as I moved. I was lying on the edge of the wood, on the far side of the footpath, just level with the garden of Nibletts. I was holding a pocket mirror. Hartley had just come out into the garden.
Titus had promised, for the future, nothing. He had treated the matter with an affected cynicism and had allowed me no glimpse of the emotions which were certainly there behind it. He pretended to treat the whole thing almost as a joke, a game, at any rate as something which he was prepared to do simply to oblige me, for the hell of it, to ‘see what happened’. He had agreed to stay on, ‘since he had nothing better to do’, and to ‘say hello’ to his mother. Though he added, with a slightly grimmer note, that he was pretty sure she would not come.
That remained to be seen; and it was also unclear to me how exactly, after all those years during which she ‘went along’ with Ben because she ‘had to’, he felt about her. Where and how did forgiveness figure in that scene? Mercy, loyalty, love? Was I not perhaps meddling with something dreadful? Unpredictable it certainly was. What kept me more boldly on was an optimism which Titus himself had rather crazily engendered with that image of the three of us living together in the south of France! If he would stick to me, and she would come out, there would be, for all of us, some tremendous spiritual release, like the sudden ecstasy which Titus and I had experienced in the sea. I would make her happy, I would. And I would make him happy and successful and free.
Another matter had come up between us after Titus had agreed, as he again cynically put it, to be a ‘hostage’. After he had agreed to stay on, if I wished it, ‘for a while’, I had said casually, boldly, ‘You haven’t anyone waiting for you then anywhere? I mean a girl or anything?’
He