The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [55]
This morning I swam in the rain from the stony beach. The beach is about a mile from the house on the village side, so I took bathing trunks, but did not don them as there was no one there. The rain had a quieting effect on the sea, making it smooth and pitted, almost oily. I had no difficulty getting out. I collected more stones. Then I went home and sat naked in the warmish rain on Minn’s bridge and watched the glossy water running into the deep enclosure. Even on a calm day it runs in and out like a tidal wave.
I was unable last night to check my theory that my ghostly ‘face’ was a reflection of the moon, since the sky was cloudy. But I feel sure now that it was an optical illusion and needs no further explanation. I occupied the little red room in the evening and lit the fire there. The chimney smoked again, perhaps because of the direction of the wind. As I rescued a spider running upon a half-burning piece of wood I remembered my father. Since I came here I have lived with naked flames for the first time for some years. Clement always loved an open fire. What a strange process burning is. How utterly and sort of calmly it transforms things, it is so clean, as clean as death. (Shall I be cremated? Who will arrange it? Let me not think of death.) So far I have been keeping my wood in the larder, only there is not enough space and the floor is curiously damp. I might make the downstairs inner room into a fuel store. The driftwood is so beautiful, smoothed by the sea and blanched to a pale grey colour, it seems a shame to burn it. I set several pieces aside and admired the grain. Perhaps I shall make a collection of driftwood ‘sculpture’.
It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves. Thank heavens I have had no more such hallucinations, and the extent to which I have forgotten what I saw persuades me that it was indeed an after-effect of that drug which I so foolishly took. Or did I really ‘see’ anything which needs even this much of an explanation? I keep a careful watch upon the flattened rainy sea but no great coiling form comes rising up! (No seals either.) It did, oddly enough, occur to me afterwards to reflect upon what the Black Lion yokels said about ‘worms’. ‘Worm’ is an old word for dragon. Well, this is getting a little too picturesque: dragons, poltergeists, faces at windows! And how restless this rain makes me feel.
I reread my pieces about James and Peregrine and was quite moved by them. Of course they are just sketches and need to be written in more detail before they become really truthful and ‘lifelike’. It has only just now occurred to me that really I could write all sorts of fantastic nonsense about my life in these memoirs and everybody would believe it! Such is human credulity, the power of the printed word, and of any well-known ‘name’ or ‘show business personality’. Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’. I trust this passing reflection will not lead anyone to doubt the truth of any part of this story! When I come to describe my life with Clement Makin credulity will be strained but will I hope not fail!
Since I started writing this ‘book’ or whatever it is I have felt as if I were walking about in a dark cavern where there are various ‘lights’, made perhaps by shafts or apertures which reach the outside world. (What a gloomy image of my mind,