The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [217]
‘James, I want you to go, I want you all to go. Tomorrow. OK?’
James frowned. ‘Only if you come too. Come and stay with me in London.’
‘No, I must stay here.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve got things to do.’
‘What?’
‘Oh this and that, things about the house, maybe I’ll sell it after all. I want to be by myself now. I’m all right.’
James picked up a stone from the trough, a golden-brown one with two light blue lines running round it. ‘I like your collection of stones. Can I have this one?’
‘Yes, of course. So that’s settled, is it? I’ll tell the others.’
‘What are you going to do about Ben and Hartley?’
‘Nothing. That’s over.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
I shrugged my shoulders and was about to get up only James held the sleeve of my shirt.
‘Charles. Tell me what you think you are going to do. I know you are planning to do something.’
What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so. I wanted to kill Ben.
When I say that I wanted to kill him I do not mean that I had yet a definite plan or a definite programme with a date. That would come to me, and come soon, once I was alone. The necessary period of sheer miserable brooding was over, and I would soon be able to make decisions. Ben had attempted to kill me; and it now amazed me in retrospect that I had been able so far to overlook or ‘forgive’ this crime, this insult, as not to feel compelled to punish it as such. My late and now outdated plan to besiege Hartley by ‘tramping in and out’ had had as its end her rescue, not his chastisement. I had proposed to intimidate him simply in order to get her away; to destroy him had not been my prime object. But now the situation was entirely different. I could not ‘overlook’ the murder of Titus or let it go unavenged. Because I had failed to die, Ben had struck Titus on the head and drowned him. He had killed the boy out of pure hideous spite against me; and that he could be crazy enough to do so I could well believe as I considered how crazy I now was myself. In truth the basis of my madness was sheer grief, the loss of that precious precious child, the horror of his sudden death, together with a sense of having been the victim of a wanton wickedness. The only balm for Titus’s death was hatred and the immediate transformation of misery into revengeful purposeful rage. As in a civil war, further killing was the only consolation; and, as it seemed to me then, to survive the murder of Titus I had to become a terrorist.
During the last days, as I allowed myself to be quietly watched by James and Lizzie, and as I played my part of simple mourning, I had filled out in imagination how terribly Ben, with his mad beliefs, must have hated me, and because of me, Titus, throughout the miserable years of Titus’s childhood. The connection between me and Titus in his mind must have become a dynamic obsessional pattern. The boy, continually before him, was (as he thought) the visible symbol of his wife’s inconstancy and of the jaunty unpunished escape of the hated rival, whose jeering image he so regularly saw in the newspapers and on the television screen. Ben was a naturally violent man, a destroyer, a killer. How he must have loathed me and