The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [207]
‘How, later?’
‘You don’t remember James giving you the kiss of life?’
‘Ah—well—sort of—’
‘You see, we thought you were drowned. He had to go on for about twenty minutes before you began to breathe properly. It was terrible—’
‘Poor Lizzie. Anyway, here I still am, ready to make more trouble for all concerned. Where did you all sleep last night? This place is getting like the Raven Hotel.’
‘I slept on the sofa in the middle room here, James has got your bed, Perry is in the book room and Gilbert is in the dining room and Titus slept outside. There’s just enough cushions and things to go round!’
‘Fancy old James bagging my bed.’
‘They felt they couldn’t get you up the stairs, and anyway the fire could be lit here—’
‘James hasn’t been to see me yet.’
‘I think he’s still asleep, he was rather knocked out.’
‘Well, I’m sorry my misadventure spoilt the party. I can remember you singing Voi che sapete.’
‘I hoped you’d be able to hear it. Oh Charles—’
‘Now, Lizzie, don’t please—’
‘Will you marry me?’
‘Lizzie, do stop—’
‘I can cook and drive a car and I love you and I’m very good-tempered and not a bit neurotic and if you want a nurse I’ll be a nurse—’
‘That was a joke.’
‘You did care about me when you wrote—’
‘I was dreaming. I told you, I love somebody else.’
‘Isn’t that the dream?’
‘No.’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Yes—but now—Lizzie—I’ve just been given a strange marvellous sign—and the way is suddenly—open.’
‘Look, it’s beginning to rain.’
‘Let us just love each other in a free way like I was saying yesterday.’
‘If you go to her, you will never want to see me again.’
It suddenly came home to me that this was true. If I came to possess Hartley I would take her right away. I would hide her, I would hide with her.
We would not go away together, not to Paris or Rome or New York, these were unreal visions. I could not introduce Hartley to Sidney Ashe or Fritzie Eitel or smart Jeanne who now styled herself a princess. I could not even take her out to dinner with Lizzie or Peregrine or Gilbert. She was in this splendid sense insortable. Hartley and I would live alone, secretly, incognito, somewhere in England, in the country, in a little house by the sea. And she would sew and go shopping and I would do the garden and paint the hall and have all the things which I had missed in my life. And we would gently cherish each other and there would be a vast plain goodness and a sort of space and quiet, unspoilt and uncorrupted. And I would join the ordinary people and be an ordinary person, and rest, my God how much I wanted to rest; and this would connect my end with my beginning in a way that was destined and proper. This, just this, was what all my instincts were seeking when I amazed everybody by giving up my work and coming here, here. Hartley and I would be alone together and see almost nobody and our faithfulness to each other would be remade and the old early innocent world would quietly reassemble itself round about us.
Lizzie, to whom I uttered none of the above, went away at last. I could see that she was sustained by hope; whatever I said she could not altogether believe in Hartley. The others looked in, at least Peregrine, Gilbert and Titus did. No one now talked of departure. It looked as if the holiday was to continue. What other joys would it provide? I asked for James but Gilbert told me that James was still resting upstairs, in my bed, suffering from total exhaustion. He had perhaps got a chill out on the rocks, leaning over my dripping and apparently lifeless body.
The rain came down, straight and silvery, like a punishment of steel rods. It clattered onto the house and onto the rocks and pitted the sea. The thunder made some sounds like grand pianos falling downstairs, then settled to a softer continuous rumble, which was almost drowned by the sound of the rain. The flashes of lightning joined into long illuminations which made the grass a lurid green, the rocks a blazing ochre yellow, as yellow as Gilbert’s car. Tension and excitement and a kind of fear filled the house, the