The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [156]
‘This is my friend Mr Opian. Mrs Fitch. Step on it, Gilbert.’
Hartley turned to me as the car sped along the coast road, but she said nothing. She clutched, perhaps unconsciously, the sleeve of my jacket with one hand. I sat relaxed, content to feel the touch of her fingers and of her knee. Her eyes had their violet tint and her face the strained fey expression which when she was young had made her look so desirably wild. Now it made her look almost mad. I found myself smiling with joy at the enclosed safe feeling of the car, at its speed. The sense of a successful escape was overwhelming. I smiled at her crazily.
When the car stopped at the causeway she was reluctant to get out. ‘Does he know I’m coming? Couldn’t he come out here to the car?’
‘Hartley, darling, do what you’re told!’
When I had got her out Gilbert, as instructed, drove the car on. It disappeared round the corner in the direction of the Raven Hotel.
I had told Titus to stay in the kitchen, but when we were half-way across the causeway he opened the front door.
I had been so absorbed in my mind with the mechanical detail of my plan that I had not really reflected upon what this meeting would be like. My intentions had far overleapt it and my hopes were assembling a much less awkward future. Now however I was jerked back into the present and an alarmed confused sense of what I had brought about.
As soon as she saw Titus, Hartley stopped and an almost terrible change came over her face. Her mouth opened and drooped in an ugly way as if she might cry and her eyes half closed and her forehead had the ‘pitted’ appearance which I had seen before; only what all this expressed was not shock or some sad overwhelming joy, but guilt and supplication. At the same time she quite unconsciously spread out her hands wide on either side of her, again not for an embrace but as a petition.
I took all this in quickly and was so instantly hurt by it I wanted to cry out, stop, stop! I wanted to interfere mercifully as between two unequal combatants. But I was already excluded from the scene. Titus came forward, frowning, manly, with screwed-up eyes, determined to be hard and calm and display no emotion. He could not however conceal, for it showed in his every gesture, even in the way he walked, that he was bent on raising a suppliant. He came to Hartley and somehow gruffly gathered her, hustling her towards the door. I saw him push her in through the doorway, his hands in the middle of her back. I hastened to follow.
When I got in they were already conversing, standing in the hall, and I felt: it’s not like mother and son. And yet why not? Family relations are all awkward, funny. Or had Hartley never managed to become his mother, never been allowed to? What would they say?
‘We didn’t know where you were, where you’d gone, we tried and tried to find out, we did try, we did ask—’ This as if Titus were accusing her of having failed to find him.
‘Yes, yes, I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right, I’m fine,’ answering a question not put yet.
‘And you are well and have your work or are you still—where are you living?’
‘I’m unemployed and I’m not living anywhere.’
‘We left our address with the people in case you’d lost it, in case you came back. And I wrote a letter—’
‘It’s all right, Mary, it’s all right—’
To check this conversation which I found somehow awful (I could not bear to hear him reassuring her and calling her ‘Mary’) I said, ‘Why don’t you go through to the kitchen? Would you like a drink?’ I needed one, and in their situation I would have been frantic for one, but neither of them seemed to feel the necessity and in fact they ignored the question.
Titus went through into the kitchen and Hartley followed and they stood beside the table, holding on to it, and looking at each other with stricken glaring faces. Hartley’s look expressed timid supplication and fear, his a kind of shamed disgusted pity. There was so much pain in the room, it was like a physical