The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [73]
History
TWO
NOW IN LONDON I am writing the story of Rosina’s arrival and of what happened just after it. After Rosina’s car raced away I stood quite still in a condition of total shock, the kind of shock which annihilates space and time and renders one almost contemplative. I was paralysed. I cannot think why I did not fall to the ground, the revelation was, in its initial impact, so terrible. I grasped it first, I do not quite know why, in this way, not as something unwelcome or horrible, but purely as the impossible come true, like what we cannot imagine about the end of the world. And indeed it was the end of the world. I remember then very slowly reaching out my hand so that I could support myself against the rock. By the time I was able to reach down to the ground and pick up the torch I somehow knew that Hartley must have gone, must have continued down the road and by now be far ahead, or that perhaps she was taking a short cut across the fields. I was in any case not sure which way she had been going when the car lights caught her. My mind was so shocked I could not make the simplest decision about what to do. I started off hurrying towards the village and then stopped. It did not occur to me to call out her name, that would have been impossible. I hardly indeed remembered her name, it would have emerged, as in a dream, as an incoherent bellow. I hurried back and stupidly shone the torch about, inspecting the place where I had seen her. The bright light revealed the marks of the car tyres, the trampled grass, the yellow pock-marked rock, the mist moving. At last slowly, and like a man returning from a funeral, I walked back across the causeway to the house. The lamps were still burning in the kitchen, the fire was alight in the little red room. It was all quiet and as it had been when, in a previous age of the world, I had been talking with Rosina.
I was trembling. Eating, drinking, were equally impossible. I went into the little red room and sat down by the fire. Is she a widow? This agonizing question had somehow, it seemed, formulated itself at once, in the very first awful moment of recognition. Awful, not because she had so almost completely changed, but because I knew that everything was in ruins about me, every old assumption was gone, every terrible possibility was open. That there could soon be dreadful pain did not then occur to me at all, I think. It was not envisaging pain that made me feel so shattered, it was just experience of the change itself. I felt a present anguish such as an insect must feel as it emerges from a chrysalis, or the crushed foetus as it batters its way into the world. It was not, either, a removal to the past. Memory seemed now almost irrelevant. It was a new condition of being.
I did eventually go to bed where I slept instantly like a dead thing. I had by then composed one or two more simple thoughts or questions. Is she a widow? was so pervasive as to be scarcely a question, it was the atmosphere I breathed. I wondered had she seen me in the village and if so had she recognized me? I had seen her distantly several times. Oh my God how terrible. I had seen her and not known her. But surely I, who was scarcely changed, must have been recognizable at once. Why then had she not spoken to me? Perhaps she had chanced not to see me, perhaps she was short-sighted, perhaps—what was she doing in the village anyway? Did she live here, or was she on holiday? Perhaps she would disappear tomorrow, never be seen again. Where was she going to along the misty sea road at night? The idea came to me that she might be working at the Raven Hotel. But she was over sixty, Hartley was over sixty. I had never put it to myself that Hartley too was growing old. Then I wondered if she had seen me in the dark, and if so had she realized that I had recognized her? Then I thought: she saw me with Rosina. What might she have overheard, what had we