The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [230]
Yours truly,
Mary Fitch.
This letter stunned me partly because I could not think or feel how to react to it. Was it good or bad? It asked for a meeting, but with ‘us’. If Hartley simply wanted me to do nothing, her best course was to do nothing herself. But here was a letter. What did it mean, what was its deep meaning? Friday was tomorrow.
I stared at the letter blushing and trembling and tried to understand it. I was not very bright. It even took me a little time to realize that it was not a real letter from Hartley at all. It was signed ‘Mary Fitch’. She had written it but not composed it. It was a letter written for the eye of her husband, even perhaps under his dictation. But then what did that mean? Had she perhaps cunningly put it into his head to agree to my visit? But how had she done it and what did she want to happen? Had Hartley, in order to see me, perhaps simply to see my face, argued Ben into inviting me? And would she, when I arrived, give me some cue? Or was it perhaps a trap, a dreadful revenge plan with which she had been forced to cooperate? If Ben blamed me for Titus’s death he might now be half mad with his own remorse and resentment against me. Now he would feel how much he loved Titus, and the only relief might be to feel how much he hated me. Just as I had sought relief from Titus’s death in blaming Ben. Well, even if it was a trap, I would walk straight in.
I kept looking at the letter and turning it over and over and even holding it up to the light in case there was some hidden message. The time of the appointment had been changed. What had originally been written was six o’clock, but this had been altered to four o’clock. This could be made sense of. Under Ben’s dictation, under his eye, she had written six, then hastily just as she was putting it into the envelope she had changed it to four, knowing that at four Ben would be absent. Perhaps away fetching somebody or something for the trap? So perhaps she would be alone after all? And she would throw herself into my arms as she had done on that night, the night when she had run away onto the rocks because she was so afraid of Ben, afraid of returning to him, afraid of staying with me. She had come to me then of her own accord. That was a piece of evidence, in fact the chief one.
I then thought, supposing she is alone then and supposing she says: take me away. I must have a car. I reflected rather desperately and miserably on this, hope fighting with fear, as I imagined how awful it would be to have the car and no Hartley: the symbol of escape but not the princess. I decided however that I must trust hope and plan for it, so I rang up the taxi man and asked for the taxi to be waiting outside the village church from four o’clock onward tomorrow. After I had done this I felt very much better, as if I had actually improved my chances.
By this time it was after nine o’clock and I decided to go to bed. I drank some wine and ate some bread and honey and then took a sleeping pill. As I lay down I remembered that I had lost James. And as it seemed to me then I had lost him not so much because of his sin, the ‘flaw’ he had spoken of, but simply because he had gone away in his big black car with Lizzie. Gone to perdition, by my doing. There was no getting back to my cousin now ever, through the barrier which he and I between us had so ingeniously erected. We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.
The next day was simply a problem of filling the time until four. At first I thought the problem insoluble and that I should run screaming mad with anxiety. However, I managed to pass the time without excessive anguish by busying myself continually with little tasks which had to do with Hartley. I paid some attention to my appearance, though there was an element of pretence in this, since I could not imagine Hartley cared about the details of my looks, and anyway I was quite sufficiently