The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [231]
After lunch I went round the house carefully closing and fixing all the windows. I emptied the water out of the buckets in the attic and replaced them under the hole in the roof. As I came downstairs and into the little red room I suddenly saw, lying on the table and partially concealed by blotting paper, the envelope which contained the long letter which I had written to Hartley before Titus died and which I had never managed to deliver: the letter about how Ben had tried to kill me and about ‘tramping in and out’ and about the little quiet secret life we were going to lead together. Much of this had been made horribly out of date by Perry’s confession and Titus’s death, and I saw it with pain and was about to destroy it but decided to read it first. That I should actually reconsider this letter belonged somehow to the macabre economy of that day. It seemed a pity to waste the eloquence of the early part and the important explanation which it contained, so I destroyed only the last two pages which referred to Titus and Ben. Then I wrote on a separate sheet: I wrote this letter to you earlier but never delivered it. Read it carefully. I love you and we will be together. I also added my telephone number. I sealed it all up in a new envelope and put it in my pocket.
I set off early for the village, carrying my suitcase, and changed a cheque at the shop. I bought, together with razor blades, some cream and face powder of the kind which Hartley used. It was still not yet half past three, and I walked down towards the church. I was feeling sick with fear and hope, ready to vomit, ready to faint. The taxi was already waiting since the taxi man, as he told me, had nothing else to do. I told him to wait until I came. He said laughingly, ‘Three hours?’ I said, ‘If necessary.’ I went into the churchyard and looked at Dummy’s grave and remembered how I had meant to show it to Titus. I went inside the church and sat there panting and then suddenly thought I was going to be late and ran out and hurried up the hill. It was a warm day, but with plenty of sea breeze.
I came up as far as the house and stopped to get my breath with my hand on the blue wooden gate with the complicated latch. The blaze of big garish roses, every possible colour, flickered in the sun. I found that I was still carrying my suitcase, which I had intended to leave in the taxi, and Hartley’s make-up in a paper bag, which I had intended to put in the suitcase. Then I heard something awful, horrible, which chilled my blood and made me gasp with emotion. Inside the house a treble recorder and an alto recorder were in unison playing Greensleeves.
It was not simply that a recorder duet was the last thing I now expected to hear. Greensleeves had been, for Hartley and me, in the old days, our signature tune. I had had a recorder on which I laboriously rendered it, and we used to pick it out on her parents’ old piano. We sang it to each other. It was our theme song, our love song. If I had heard it played now on one recorder I would have taken it instantly as a secret message of hope. But on two recorders . . . was it possible that it was a deliberate insult, an intentional desecration of the past? No. She had simply forgotten.
All this passed through my mind during the time it took my fingers to undo the gate. I stepped slowly onto the path. The music ceased and a dog began to bark hysterically. I walked up to the door controlling my mind and already having fresh thoughts. The Greensleeves sacrilege meant nothing. Perhaps he liked the song