The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [77]
‘I’m very well, apart from endless tummy trouble. You look well, Charles, and so young. I must go.’ She shuffled past me in the direction of the door.
I leapt up and followed her. ‘But what shall we do?’
Hartley looked at me as if she was not sure what this question meant.
I repeated, ‘What shall we do? I mean—oh, Hartley, Hartley, when shall I see you, can we meet after you’ve done your shopping, can we meet in the pub, or would you come down to my house—’ Vistas of madness opened beyond these words.
Hartley opened the church door, pulling at it laboriously, and over her shoulder I could see Dummy’s grave and the criss-cross iron gate and the village street with people in it and the far horizon line of the sea. I said wildly, ‘Of course I’ll call on you, I’d so much like to meet your husband, you must both come down to my funny house and have a drink, you know I live—’
‘Yes, I know, thank you, but not just now, my husband is not too well—’
‘But I’ll see you, I must—what’s your address, which bungalow? ’
‘It’s called Nibletts, it’s the last one, but don’t—I’ll let you know—’
‘Please, Hartley, see me after you’ve done your shopping, let me help you—’
‘No, no, I’m late. Don’t come, you stay here. I’ll see you later, I mean on another day, please don’t do anything, I’ll let you know. I must run now, I’ll let you know. Please stay here. Goodbye.’
I had wanted to touch her, but somehow only with my fingertips as if she were a ghost which might dissolve, I had wanted to hold her dress between my fingers. Now I felt a more precise need to take her head and draw it quietly against me and hear her heart beating. Old desires were suddenly present. I saw her blue, blue eyes and the curious mad look of her round face which was so unchanged. And her lips which had been so white and so cold.
I started to say, ‘I’m not on the telephone—’
She went quickly out of the church and closed the door carefully. Obeying her I stayed. I went back to the same place and sat down and once more put my hands where her hands had been.
What was I going to do, how was I going to manage myself for the rest of my life now that I had found Hartley again? Was I going to go round to ‘Nibletts’ once a week and have tea with Mr and Mrs Benjamin Fitch? Or entertain them to beans and sausages and claret at Shruff End? Take them up to London for a show? Take an interest in Titus’s future? Look after them all? Leave Titus my money? My mind leapt wildly about, huge vistas opened, immense areas of the future were suddenly live and quick with possibilities, all of them terrible. Ingenious, I thought, I must be ingenious. I looked at my watch. It was ten twenty. So much awful thought in so little time. I sat for a while until I reckoned that Hartley would have done her shopping and gone back up the hill, and then emerged from the church and sat on Dummy’s grave, leaning against the gravestone which bore the image of the ‘foul anchor’. From there I could see, over some trees, the roofs of the bungalows, including the last one, the residence of Mr and Mrs Fitch. A disabled travelling salesman. What was the matter with him? A cripple? I knew that I would have to go and take a look at Mr Benjamin Fitch, very soon.
Why had Hartley been so reluctant, why had she not said ‘Yes, come and see us’ or ‘We’d love to come and see you’? Sanity demanded such gestures, whatever she felt. Politeness demanded them and by politeness one might, for the present at any rate, be saved. Or was the crippled husband really ill, suffering, peevish and bedridden perhaps? But oh what did Hartley feel, what made her seem so strained and anxious? Her reluctance to invite me to her house was perhaps understandable, indeed very understandable. ‘You are so grand and famous.’ She was perhaps a little bit ashamed of her house and her husband. That need not mean she did not love him. But did she love him? I had to know. Was she really happy? I had to know. And that old horrible sweetish thought now kept coming to me: she must regret it so