The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [181]
‘No, thank you.’
‘You say you “always wanted a son”. That’s just a sentimental lie, you didn’t want trouble, you didn’t want to know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a real son. Your sons are fantasies, they’re easier to deal with. Do you imagine you could really “take on” that silly uneducated adolescent boy in there? He’ll vanish out of your life like everything else has done, because you can’t grasp the stuff of reality. He’ll turn out to be a dream child too—when you touch him he’ll fade and disappear—you’ll see.’
‘All right, you’ve had your say, now go.’
‘I haven’t started yet. I never told you this at the time, I thought I never would. You made me pregnant. I got rid of the child.’
I drew a circle in the dust on the radiator of the car. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because you weren’t there to tell, you’d gone, gone off with Lizzie or whoever was the next dream girl. God, the sickening casual brutality of men—the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone. I made that decision alone. Christ, how I wish I hadn’t done it. I was crazy. I did it partly out of hatred of you. Why the hell didn’t I keep that child. He’d have been nearly grown up by now.’
‘Rosina—’
‘And I’d have taught him to hate you—that would have been a consolation too.’
‘I’m sorry—’
‘Oh, you’re sorry. And I daresay I wasn’t the only one. You broke up my marriage deliberately, industriously, zealously, you worked at it. Then you walk off and leave me with nothing, with less than nothing, with that horrible crime which I had to commit by myself, I cried for months—for years—about that—I’ve never stopped crying.’ Her dark eyes filled with tears for a second, and then she seemed to magic them away. She opened the door of the car.
‘Oh—Rosina—’
‘I hate you, I loathe you, you’ve been a devil in my mind ever after—’
‘Look, all right, I left you, but you drove me to it, you were responsible too. Women’s Lib hasn’t stopped women from putting all the blame on us when it suits them. You tell me this terrible story now to—’
‘Oh shut up. What’s the name of that female?’
‘You mean—Hartley—?’
‘Is that her surname?’
‘No, her surname is Fitch.’
‘Fitch, OK. Mr Fitch, here I come.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘He lives here, doesn’t he? I shall find out where he lives and I shall go and console him. It’ll do him good to meet a real live woman instead of an old rag-bag. He’s probably forgotten what women are like. I won’t hurt him, I’ll just cheer him up, I’ll do him less harm than you’re doing her. I’ve got to have some amusement on my holiday. I thought of seducing pretty-boy, but it would be too easy. The father would be a far more interesting project. After all, life is full of surprises. The only thing that’s become absolutely dull, dull, dull is you, Charles. Dull. Goodbye.’
She got into the car and slammed the door. The car shot off like a red rocket in the direction of the village.
I stared after her. Soon there was nothing on the road but a cloud of dust and above it the pale blue sky. For a short while I felt that I should go mad if I reflected too much on what Rosina had told me about what happened in the past.
The rest of the day (before something else happened in the evening) passed like a feverish dream. The weather, sensing my mood, infected by it perhaps, became hotter but with that sinister breathless heat that betokens a thunderstorm. The light was darkened although the sun blazed from a cloudless sky. I felt weak and shivery as if I were developing the ’flu. My impression increased that perhaps Hartley was ill. Her eyes glittered, her hands were hot. Her stuffy smelly room had become that of an invalid. She was rational, not frenzied, she actually argued with me. I begged her to come downstairs, to come outside into the sun and air, but she lay back as if exhausted at the very thought. Even her rationality had something unnerving about