The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [72]
‘Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.’
‘You never had any imagination, no wonder you couldn’t write plays. You are a cold child. You want women but you are never interested in the people you want, so you learn nothing. You’ve had love affairs but somehow you’ve stayed innocent, no not innocent, you are fundamentally vicious, but somehow immature. Your first mistress was your mother, Clement was baby-snatching. But don’t you see that it has all been a mirage? Those women loved you for your power, your magic, yes, you have been a sorcerer. And now it’s over—I am the only one who loved you for yourself and not your invincible locks.’
‘This speech would be more impressive if you had uttered it earlier and not just because you’ve heard a rumour about Lizzie!’
‘I was waiting to see if you would really give up the world, as you boasted you would. I wanted you stripped and alone. Then you might have been almost worthy of me. Well, what a fool I was to think that I would ever be able to admire you for anything except that facile sorcery! But the fact remains that you made that promise to me in a moment of truth, in an absolute of love such as few men are privileged to have in their lives ever. And that promise belongs to me, it is all I have got in exchange for my broken marriage and for the love which I poured out for you as I have never done for any man. I have got that promise and I will hold it and use it even if there is nothing I can do with it except make your life a desolation and a ruin.’
I got up suddenly, and she became tense and actually lifted up her glittering hands like clawed paws. She looked like a ballet dancer playing a cat.
‘Listen, my cross-eyed beauty, it’s late, just get along will you, go back to the Raven Hotel. I’m going to bed. And please don’t creep around this house any more breaking things and peering through panes of glass. I have no plans for getting married or settling down with any female.’
‘Do you swear that?’
‘No arrangement exists. Lizzie is living with Gilbert. That’s how it is. And of course I never proposed to her, that was just a crazy rumour. Now go, I’m exhausted, and you must be too after that long performance.’
She got up and pulled her cloak more closely around her, her arms emerging through the slits, gripping each other in front. She stood for a moment glaring at me. ‘I will go. But tell me you believe what I have said.’
‘I believe some of it.’
‘Tell me you believe what I have said.’
‘I believe it. Now for Christ’s sake get out.’
I walked out with the lamp towards the front door and she followed. I opened the door. The light of the lamp revealed a mist which was waiting outside like a presence. It was impossible to discern the end of the causeway.
‘I’ll light you to the road,’ I said, and I went back for the electric torch. ‘But look, I’d better walk with you to the hotel. Oh hell.’
‘You needn’t,’ she said in a dull lifeless tone. ‘My car is near.’
I lighted her across the causeway with the torch. The mist was less thick on the road. ‘Where is your car?’
‘It’s here, in this place behind the rock.’
We walked to it and she got in. I said, ‘Goodnight.’
She said, ‘Remember.’
She switched on the headlights and I made out the form of a low red two-seater. She backed the car onto the road. As she turned it now and as it began to move in the direction of the hotel, a figure suddenly materialized, someone who had evidently been walking along the road. Rosina had stepped hard on the accelerator and the car leapt suddenly forward and the pedestrian was caught for a moment in the headlights, cowering back against the rock. The car swerved with a screech and then roared away down the road. I dropped my torch into the long grass and was left in darkness.
The pedestrian whom Rosina had almost run down was the old village