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By Root 2257 0

was, and how soon, if I required her sympathy, it could turn into a possessive triumph. Lizzie is one of those very sweet, very kind kittenish women whom men love for their sympathetic gentleness, but who have a truly relentless power of self-preservation. Well, why not? We spoke little as we walked and I could see Lizzie looking at me now and then and she was thinking to herself: it is a relief to him to walk with me thus in silence. My presence, my silence is healing him. With no one else could he quietly walk and walk like this. (This last belief was probably justified.) Of course guilt too had fed my rage. My responsibility for Titus’s death, which now so largely occupied my mind, amounted to this: I had never warned him about the sea. Why had I not done so? Out of vanity. I recalled now very clearly that first day when Titus and I had dived in off the cliff. I had wanted to show him that I too was strong and fearless. It would have spoilt the charm of that moment if I had said, ‘It’s rather dangerous’ or ‘It’s not easy to get out’ or ‘I don’t think I’ll swim here’. I had to dive in with him and conceal the difficulties I knew so well. I never stressed the impossibility of climbing out in other places. I never recommended the tower steps; in fact I had not renewed the rope there, and with a strong sea running the steps would be as dangerous as the cliff. I never, for Titus, watched the sea. I acted out of vanity, and out of a silly vicarious pride in his youth and his strength, in the agility which I had seen him display upon the tower on the first day. Of course he always wanted to dive in. No young boy climbs cautiously into the sea if he can dive. I did not want to spoil my picture of Titus or Titus’s picture of me by any mean prudence.

I went over and over and over these things in my mind, thinking of what I might have done and what I should have done, just as James was perhaps doing as he paced it all out upon those rocks which I now could not bear to look upon. And my misery about Titus, my sobbing grasping sense of the loss from my life of what might have become its greatest blessing was the more intense now that my obsessive belief about Ben had been taken away. It had indeed been a consolation, and Ben had carried my guilt. That madness was gone, but did not leave behind a saner or purer mourning. My burden of sin and despair was constant and had simply been redistributed. New aspects of grief were opened to me. I had killed Hartley’s child, I had wantonly entered her life and taken away her blessing, which was hers in a way that it could never be mine. I did not dare to imagine her sorrow and how it might affect her feelings about me. Would she now see me as a murderer? Sometimes I felt that, in an odd way, it would not occur to her to blame me, she would not be capable of such a thought, of seeing me simply as a wanton wandering cause. And sometimes I felt that our grief for Titus might actually, excluding Ben, draw us together. For the moment I could only wait. I even felt that it was now likely that she would give me a sign. And in thinking this I was, as it turned out, right.

And so, waiting, watching, brooding, mourning, Lizzie and I walked the countryside. And then we began to talk about the old days, about Wilfred and about Clement, and Lizzie said how jealous she had been of Clement even when I was no longer living with her. ‘I always felt that, whatever happened, Clement owned you.’ We talked about the theatre and how wonderful it was and how awful it was and how glad Lizzie was to be out of it. Lizzie asked me about Jeanne and I told her a little and regretted it because it clearly hurt her so much. Lizzie on these walks, sweating, puffing, wearing crumpled faded dressed, her face shiny and red with sunburn and with sudden tears, looked her age. She was a woman whose appearance varied immensely. She could still look childish, in the mysterious way that old and young can mingle in a woman’s looks. But she had lost her radiance, or else my vision of her was dulled. She was faithful and sweet and