The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [208]
My assailant was of course Ben, there could be no possible doubt of that. His last words to me had been ‘I’ll kill you’. What made me the more certain was that I had myself drawn Ben’s attention to this particular spot as an excellent place for a murder. I had myself felt the impulse to push him in and he had certainly perceived my thought. There was even a certain element of nemesis involved. And that he should act now was a psychological probability. He had put up with a humiliating assault which, when he reflected upon it afterwards, his pride could not tolerate or endure. Was the act premeditated? Had he waited, hidden beside the bridge? Or had he come snooping to indulge his private hate, and then seen this irresistible opportunity? Whichever it was, he must have felt certain of doing the job properly. My survival was a truly amazing fluke, and, for him, a sickening portent.
But what next? What do you do in a civilized society when someone tries to kill you? I could not involve the law, and not only because there was no proof. I could not accuse Hartley’s husband in a law court or let the law’s vulgarities touch this situation. Neither would I consider going round with my friends and doing Ben a mischief. I wanted somehow to confront him, but the confrontation by itself would be merely a luxury, much as I should enjoy effacing the servile impression which I had made in my last interview with Ben. I must do something with what I knew, and with what I now was: a survivor with a moral fury and a motive. That was what I had meant when I had spoken to Lizzie of a strange marvellous sign. The gods who preserved me had opened a door and intended me to go through it.
The problem was the same, only the light was different. I must get Hartley away, get her to myself, and awaken her, make her quiver and twitch with a sense of possible freedom. Yes, aloneness was the key, I understood that now. I must be alone with her soon, and then thereafter, forever. When she had been my prisoner how humiliated she must have been by the presence of other people in the house. There must be no more witnesses. I would tell her that. She did not have to join my grand intimidating alien world. To wed his beggar maid the king would, and how gladly, become a beggar too. The vision of that healing humility would henceforth be my guide. This was indeed the very condition of her freedom, why had I not seen this before? I would at last see her face changing. It was, I found, a part of my thought of the future that when she was with me Hartley would actually regain much of her old beauty: like a prisoner released from a labour camp who at first looks old, but then with freedom and rest and good food soon becomes young again. The pain and anxiety would leave her face and she would be calm and beautiful; and I saw that rejuvenated face shining like a lamp out of the future. When I had left the theatre I had desired a solitude: now it was set before me in the very form of my Beatrice. Only here was happiness for me an innocent and permissible goal, even an ideal. Everywhere else where I had pursued it it had proved either a will-o’-the-wisp or a form of corruption. To find one’s true mate is to find the one person with whom happiness is purely innocent.
The immediate question however was a technical one. How to get her away? A long wait was now out of the question, since I must use my new power over Ben while it was still fresh. What I was beginning to envisage this time was not a