The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [174]
‘You want to make him unreal, but he’s real.’
‘Real things become unreal when you enter into the truth.’
‘Our love wasn’t real, it was childish, it was like a game, we were like brother and sister, we didn’t know what love was then.’
‘Hartley, you know that we loved each other—’
‘Yes, but we didn’t make love properly, I wish we had.’
‘I thought you didn’t want to, I wanted to all right—Oh, Christ!’
‘We were children. You never became part of my real life.’
‘What you call your real life appears to have been hell on earth! Damn it, you said so yourself. A happy woman doesn’t talk about death.’
‘I wish I hadn’t told you things, I’ll regret having told you things. Of course it’s a muddle, but it’s my muddle, it’s where I live and what I am. I can’t run out of it and leave it behind all jagged and loose like a broken shell.’
‘That’s exactly what you can do! Escape, run, leave it all behind! See that the pain can stop!’
‘Can it? Can the pain stop?’
As she now stared at me, wide-eyed with a sudden pausing puzzlement, I wondered, is she mad, is her mind totally astray, is she just a poor wreck, or has she become some sort of fey spiritual being, refined by suffering? Had that strange wild look of her youthful beauty which I had loved so and worshipped been the first prophetic flush of a weird spirituality? There are secret saints with strange destinies. Yet no, she was a wreck, a poor broken twig, her integrity, her last identity, destroyed by the cruel force which had made her abandon Titus. But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.
‘Yes, my darling, my queen, my angel, it can stop.’
Oh if only I could touch and liberate her mind! I wanted to see her hoping, to see some dawn of hope or desire, the desire for cherishing, for a happy life. But she frowned now in her puzzlement and reverted to Ben.
‘I’ve never been good enough to him.’
‘I’m sure you’ve been a saint, a long-suffering saint!’
‘No, I’ve been bad.’
‘Oh all right, call it bad if you want to! Whatever it is, it’s finished.’
I saw her then as innocent, as men in the past used to see cloistered girls and think: ‘We are beasts, but they are angels, pure, not soiled like us.’ I saw her as beautifully innocent, simple-minded, silly, understanding nothing: a reproach to me who had lived my life among vain egoistic men and pert, knowing women. Yet also I saw her guilt as real guilt for real failures. How could it be otherwise? And I remembered Peregrine’s words: the partner who feels guilty, however irrationally, becomes the slave of the other and can take no moral stand. She had taken upon herself, as well as her peccadilloes, his guilt. She felt herself guilty of his sins against her, against Titus. I could see it all. And as she took up the guilt, appropriated it as her own, she revered the guilty one and held him as holy. Oh, if only I could release her from that maiming crippling guilt and from that empty reverence! God, she even felt guilty about me and had to console herself by thinking I hated her! She was spell-bound, bound by a self-protective magic, which she had developed over the years to defend herself against the horrible pain of having married a foul insanely jealous bullying maniac. She had been brainwashed through fear of him, brainwashed by hearing the same things repeated to her again and again and again: that it was her fault, always her fault. No wonder Titus wanted to go and sing on the rocks rather than be reminded of those scenes.
She had cried a little. The tears of age are not the tears of youth. ‘Stop crying, Hartley, you look like the pig-baby in Alice, like you used to.’
‘I know I’m ugly, horrible—’
‘Oh, my dear, come out of it, come right out of it, come out of the nightmare—’
She