The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [259]
I went into the little red room where the candles, as on an altar, flanked my wine glass and the almost empty bottle. I poured out the rest of the wine and sat and reflected. I tried to recall more things. I was sure that none of the others had noticed anything odd. Peregrine said he had pushed me and walked on. He was very drunk and may genuinely not have known exactly what happened. By the time there was a general alarm I was already lying on top of the rock with James trying to revive me. I had not questioned James properly because he had become ill immediately afterwards, he had had some sort of collapse and retired to bed. Why was he so exhausted? Because of what he had endured in rescuing me, the physical and mental energy which he had expended in that unimaginable descent. I recalled his words about ‘those things that people do, they can be jolly tiring’. No wonder James was knocked out and seemed to have lost his grip. But then . . . ‘I relaxed my hold on him, I lost my grip.’ Whom had James been speaking of as I fell asleep that night, his sherpa or perhaps . . . Titus? How was it that Titus had come to me just then? Why had James so pointedly asked for Titus’s name? A name is a road. And why had Titus said that he had seen James ‘in a dream’? James had always been the finder of lost things. Had he stretched out some tentacle of his mind and found Titus and brought him here and kept him as it were under his care upon a binding thread, a thread of attention which was broken when James became so strangely ill after I had been lifted from the sea? James’s reaction to Titus’s death had been ‘it ought not to have happened’, almost as if he felt that it was his own fault. But then if it was his fault it was my fault. There is a relentless causality of sin and in a way Titus died because, all those years ago, I had taken Rosina away from Peregrine. And of course my vanity had killed Titus just as James’s vanity had killed the sherpa. In each case our weakness had destroyed the thing we loved. And now I remembered something else which James had said. White magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. Had one of these demons, with whose help James had saved me, taken advantage of James’s collapse to seize Titus and crash his young head against the rock?
These thoughts were so mad and their implications so hideously frightening that I decided I must stop thinking and try to sleep. I felt that in spite of everything, I should sleep well. I wanted most intensely to talk to James about all these things, or, supposing he had already left, to write to him. But how could I find his address, would he have an address? I really knew nobody who knew him except Toby Ellesmere, and Toby often seemed entirely mystified or ignorant about James’s doings and his way of life. Could I go to some army headquarters or to the Ministry of Defence and ask? Of course they would ‘know nothing’.
I had finished the wine and the fire had sunk into a pile of ash dully smudged with red. I sighed deeply as I thought of all the years I had wasted when James and I might have been friends, instead of just awkward embarrassed relatives or something almost more like enemies. I reached out to the table and began pushing the pile of unopened letters about to see if I recognized any of the writings. Of course there was nothing from James, I would have spotted