The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [175]
‘But what makes you think my marriage is so unhappy?’ She was gazing at me now with an almost cunning look, as if she were about to produce a devastating refutation of anything I might say in answer.
‘Hartley, darling, you’re in a muddle. You admitted you were unhappy, you spoke just now about the pain of it!’
‘Pain is different, in any marriage there is pain, life is pain—but perhaps for you—it all just passed you by.’
‘Perhaps it did, thank God.’
‘You know, so many nights quietly at home I used to think of people in labour camps—’
‘If you had to cheer yourself up by thinking that at least you weren’t in a labour camp you can’t have been very happy!’
‘But what makes you think my marriage is so bad, how can you judge? You can’t see, you can’t understand—’
‘I can judge: I know.’
‘But how can you know, it’s just an idea, you don’t understand about marriage, you’ve just lived with women, it’s different, you haven’t any evidence.’
‘About you and him—I have, yes, evidence.’
‘You can’t have. You’ve only just met us, you don’t know anyone who knows us, well, like that, no one knows us, you can’t have evidence.’
‘Yes, I have, I’ve heard you talking to each other; the way you talk to each other—’ I said this in a final burst of exasperation and I have to confess with some desire to hurt. The calm obstinate persistence and now that superior cunning expression was driving me wild.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I listened, I hid outside the window and listened to you and him talking, I heard his coarse voice, his brutal bullying manner, the way he shouted at you, the way he made you say over and over again “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”. I wish I’d broken the window, I wish I’d broken his bloody neck. I’ll kill that man. I wish I’d pushed him into the sea.’
‘You listened—you heard—when?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember, a week ago, two weeks—I’m so upset I’ve lost all count of time—so you see you can’t pretend any more, you can’t whitewash him and tell me you’re happily married, because I know the truth!’
‘The truth—oh, you don’t understand! You listened—how long?’
‘Oh, ages, an hour, no, I can’t remember—you were shouting at each other, it was perfectly horrible, at least he was shouting and you were whining, it was disgusting—’
‘How can you—you don’t know what you’ve done—how could you push in, spy on us like that—it was nothing to do with you—how could you intrude into secret things which you couldn’t possibly understand—it’s the wickedest vilest most hurtful thing anybody’s ever done to me—’
‘Hartley, darling, you know I only did it to help, I mean because I had to know, I had to be sure, to be certain—’
‘As if you could know anything—oh, you’ve hurt me so much, I’ll never forgive you, never, it’s like, it’s like a murder, a killing—you don’t understand—Oh, it hurts so much, so much—’
‘Darling, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t imagine—’
Sitting bolt upright against the wall she was now crying as I have never seen any woman cry (and I have seen many). Tears seemed to shoot out of her eyes in torrents, then her wet mouth opened in a sort of strangled shout, an animal cry of tortured pain. Then she gave a low shuddering wail, and fell over sideways, grasping at her neck, pulling at the dressing gown as if she were suffocating. The wail was followed by a shuddering gasp, and in a moment she was in hysterics.
I jumped up and watched her, appalled. Well then did I understand what Titus had said about it: it is frightening and it is meant to be. I felt that the most violent assault was being made on my spirit, on my sanity. I had witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this. I knelt again and tried to hold her, to shake her, but she seemed suddenly so strong and I so weak, and also to touch her had become terrible. She was shuddering rigidly with a dreadful damaging electricity. Her face was red, wild with tears, her mouth dribbling. Her voice, raucous, piercing, shrieked out, like a terrified angry person shrieking an obscenity,