The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [269]
Why did I imagine Hartley was consumed by a death wish? She was a survivor, tough as old boots.
If this diary is ‘waiting’ for some final clarificatory statement which I am to make about Hartley it may have to wait forever. It is not of course a full account of my doings, and events and people unconnected with what went before are omitted from it. I have also omitted the dates from this meditation. Time has passed and it is October, with bright cool sunny days and an intense blue northern sky and scattered flying memories of other autumns. It is mushroom weather, and I have been having feasts of real mushrooms, the big slimy black things, not the little tasteless buttons. Crumpets too have appeared in the shops and already one can look forward to the so familiar London winter, dark afternoons and fogs and the glitter and excitement of Christmas. And however unhappy I am I cannot help responding automatically to these stimuli, as no doubt I did in the past in other unhappy autumns.
Since writing that stuff about Clement I have been missing her. Odd that one can identify a pain as ‘missing so and so’. I keep seeing Clement in the street when I am on a bus, on an escalator going up when I am going down, jumping into a taxi and disappearing. Perhaps it will be like this in bardo. My God, if she is there, what a time she will be having! Talk of attachments, Clement had enough torment in her head to last ten thousand years.
Of course I do not believe in those ‘blasphemies’ which I wrote earlier.
When did I begin to relax my hold upon Hartley, or rather upon her image, her double, the Hartley of my mind? Have I relaxed my hold, did it happen before, or is it only happening now, when I can look back over the summer and see my acts and thoughts as those of a madman? I remember Rosina saying to me that her desire for me was made of jealousy, resentment, anger, not love. Was the same true of my desire for Hartley? Was the aim of the whole operation, the whole obsession, that I should be able in the end to see her as a harpy, a semi-conscious trouble-making sorceress, unworthy of my devotion, and whom I would cast off with a relieved disgust? James said I would come to see her as a wicked enchantress and then I would forgive her. But would not forgiving her finally defeat the purpose of this psychological game I have been playing with myself? Have I indeed relived my love simply in order to explain to myself that it was a false love, compounded of resentment stored from long ago and the present promptings of mad possessive jealousy? Was I so resentful long ago? I cannot remember. Hartley said, so strangely, that she had to think of me as hating her in order to reduce the attractive power of my image. Now as I think about it all, trying in vain swoops to recover the far past, it seems to me that perhaps what I felt about Hartley then, at any rate after I had been captured by Clement, was a kind of guilt that I was not suffering enough, not seeking her earnestly enough. Damn it, I was in love with Clement, I must have been, though I tormented her by denying it! Was it possible that, by then, I was relieved that I could not find Hartley? I have no diary to tell me and even if I had I might not believe it. I cannot now remember the exact sequence of events in those prehistoric years. That we cannot remember such things, that our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both.
Whatever the cause, it is now clear that something is over. My new, my second love for her, my second ‘innings’, seemed at its height a thing