The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [76]
‘Yes.’
‘I only recognized you then. I’ve been in a frenzy ever since. I wouldn’t have pretended not to know you, what a terrible thing! How could you think I’d blame you or forget you! You are my love, you are still that, you are still what you were for me—’
She gave an odd little grimace like a smile and shook her head, still not looking at me.
I could not say more, I had to blunder on into the terrible things. ‘You’re still with the same—husband—the one you married—then? ’
‘Yes, the same one.’
‘I never knew his name, I—I don’t know your married name.’
‘I’m Mrs Fitch. His name is Fitch, Benjamin Fitch.’
I bowed over this as over a stomach blow. There was now a name attached to this horror of her being married, this horror that I would have to live with somehow. An awful wave of self-pity overcame me and I wrinkled up my face with pain. ‘Hartley—what does he do, I mean, what does he, does he work at?’
‘He’s disabled a bit, he went about in a car as a representative, did various jobs, like a salesman, he’s retired now. We came here, we were in the Midlands, we came here, to the bungalow to live—’
‘Oh isn’t it strange, Hartley, we both came here to meet each other again, and we didn’t know. It seems like fate, doesn’t it?’ But oh the pain of it.
Hartley said nothing. She looked at her watch.
‘And—children—have you?’
‘We have a son. He’s eighteen. He’s away just now.’
She spoke more calmly and with a sort of deliberation, as if getting some necessary task over.
‘What’s his name?’
She said after a moment. ‘Titus.’ She repeated, ‘Titus—is his name.’ Then she said, looking at her watch again, ‘I must go, I must go to the shop, I shall be late.’
‘Hartley, please, stay here please, I must go on talking to you, tell me—oh—tell me, what did your husband do, sell, before he retired?’ I must just keep on asking questions.
‘Fire extinguishers. He was in fire extinguishers.’ She added, ‘He was always so tired in the evenings.’
This sudden vista of her evenings, years and years of her evenings, led me on blunderingly to ask, ‘And are you happily married, Hartley, have you had a good life?’
‘Oh yes, yes, I’ve been very happy, a very happy marriage, yes.’
It was impossible to tell if she was sincere. Probably she was. A good life. What an odd phrase I had used. And had both our lives passed, and had they somehow been completed, since we last met? Hartley’s voice, retaining the thin droning slightly monotonous, to me so immensely attractive, sound which it had always had, with the touch of the local accent, made me realize how much my own voice had changed.
I was suddenly breathless and put both of my hands onto the back of the pew. My little finger touched her dress and she moved slightly again. Something black seemed to threaten me from a little way above my head. She had been happy all these years, yes, why not, and yet I could not believe it, could not bear it. She had existed all these years and our lives were gone. I breathed quickly through my mouth and the darkness went away. I thought, I must be ingenious, and the word ‘ingenious’ seemed like a help to me. I must be ingenious and see to it that I do not suffer too much. I must look for some happiness, simply for some comfort, here, ingeniously.
I said, not knowing quite what I meant to say nor why, ‘That woman in the car last night, she’s a well-known actress, Rosina Vamburgh, she was just visiting me—’
‘We hardly ever go to the theatre—’
‘She was just visiting me on business—’
‘I saw you on telly.’
‘Did you, what was it—?’
‘I forget. I must go now,’ she repeated and got up and retrieved her shopping bag.
I felt panic. ‘Hartley, don’t go, you look—oh so tired—’ This was not the best thing to say, but it expressed a sort of anguish of protectiveness and tenderness and pity and a kind of humility which I felt about her then as I saw her standing there before me in the guise of an old woman. She did look tired, tiredness was somehow the expression of her face, not sadness or suffering so much as a vast weariness as