The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [161]
‘I’ll just have some wine. And some of that bread.’
‘And cheese. And olives.’
‘I don’t like olives, I told you before.’
She ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese, then thrust it aside. She drank some wine. I drank a little too. I could not eat.
‘Hartley, do you know, I think you’ve crossed the Rubicon. And what’s on the other side? Freedom, happiness.’
‘Something has certainly happened,’ she said, and she gave me her calmer face, deliberately smoothing out her brow with her hand. Then she smoothed her cheeks, moulding her face and making it calm and open. There was a capability, a capacity there which heartened me. I saw again the way her ‘wildness’ was also a kind of serenity. ‘But it’s not what you think. It isn’t anything to do with happiness. I’m not going to struggle with you, dear Charles, I mean to struggle physically, to try to rush away, and to weep and scream when I can’t, though that is just what I am doing now in my mind, weeping and screaming. There are moments, I’ve learnt, when one has to fold one’s hands. I can see what you want to do and why. You want to make my marriage crash, explode. But it won’t. It’s indestructible.’
‘You speak as if it were a prison.’
‘People live in prisons.’
‘Not if they can get out.’
‘Then too, sometimes. But—oh you don’t understand. You can only make things worse. And you have done so tonight.’
Her words, her tone, now sounded terrible, like a calm judge pronouncing a fatal sentence. Yet I thought, if she desperately, absolutely wanted to go she would weep and scream, and could reasonably believe that this would make me give in. So, since she was, though tragically, calm she must be a little bit glad to be forced to stay. No doubt her feelings were wretchedly mixed, positively minced up.
It was getting a little darker in the kitchen now. Titus came in through the outside door and went over to the stove. He did not look at us. He found the plate with the remains of the kedgeree. I was suddenly reminded of Gilbert who would still be at his post outside. I called after Titus, who was disappearing into the hall with the kedgeree, ‘Go and tell Gilbert to come in. He’s up by the tower with the car. Then lock the front door.’
I gave her some more wine. There was now something almost alarming about her resigned quietness. Did she expect I would suddenly take her home after all? Perhaps it was her dread of just this prospect which made her so quiet?
I did not immediately follow up what she said. I got up and locked the outside door and pocketed the key. I was faintly sure Ben would not turn up tonight. I was feeling so strong now that I hardly cared whether he did or not. I heard Gilbert coming in, complaining loudly to Titus, and I heard the key turn in the front door. I lit a candle and pulled the curtains although it was still light outside with a huge dull moon the colour of Wensleydale cheese. It was the first time I had been with Hartley without an urgent time limit. The sense of solitude with her, of the extension of time, was uncanny. I felt both exultant and unreal. I drank some more wine.
‘Hartley, I don’t think I’ve been perfectly happy—at all—since you went away. You can’t conceive how I suffered then. But we were happy, weren’t we? When we were on our bikes. That was youth, like it ought to be, joyous, perfect. I’ve never loved anybody else. That is why, really, you must excuse me if I now go to some lengths—’ I adopted a light tone, hoping to entice her into some gentleness of response. And I thought, oh God, if only I’d found her during the war, if only I’d run into her in the street in Leicester! And with the speed of the cinema-reeling imagination I saw how I might have met her, how she would have told me her marriage was a failure, or better still Ben would already have met a hero’s death, and . . . I even got as far as composing my explanation