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By Root 2177 0

much, that wrong choice. She must have spent her life regretting that she had not married me. ‘I saw you on telly.’ What was that like? What mean gnawing pains of remorse did she feel when she saw me as a ‘celebrity’? How could she know that I was still just me and that I still missed her? And must she not think of me as surrounded by attractive women, as probably possessing a permanent mistress? She had seen Rosina, she might have seen Lizzie. Perhaps, it suddenly occurred to me, and this was so painful and so sweetish too, she is reluctant to see me precisely because of her regrets: remorse, jealousy, the waywardness of fruitless daydream. She does not want to know any more about what might have been. Oh God, those years, our whole life, that we might have spent together. She does not want . . . to start to love me . . . all over again . . .

I already had enough instinct for dangerous thoughts to thrust this one aside. I was indeed, as I leaned back against the sun-warmed lichen-spotted surface of Dummy’s laconic monument, sketching a kind of programme for survival. Roughly, the programme was like this. There was no doubt that I must now somehow contrive to devote the rest of my life to Hartley. (I quickly banished the idea that Mr Fitch was seriously ill and would shortly die.) This could only be done if I accepted their marriage and could successfully attempt to construct a friendship with her, and presumably with him. Hartley and I were not just revisiting each other as tourists, that was out of the question. At the least, the husband must tolerate me. Perhaps I could be allowable as a figure of fun? I did not quite care for this, but so quick is imagination that I already heard Hartley saying to her spouse, ‘Why there’s dear old Charles again, he can’t keep away!’—while she felt—something a little different. Perhaps the husband might even be flattered that a ‘show business personality’ admired his wife. However these were unsavoury or at any rate premature speculations.

What I must now concentrate upon was the possibility of love in the form of a pure deep affectionate mutual respect, a steady constant binding awareness. Of course it would be, it would have to be, love between us, but love purged of possessive madness, purged of self, disciplined by time and the irrevocability of our fates. We must find out how at last to be absolutes to each other, never to lose each other, without putting any foot wrong or spilling one drop of some brimming vessel of truth and history which was held up austerely between us. I will respect her, I will respect her, I kept saying to myself. I felt a tenderness for her that was deep and pure, a miracle of love preserved. How clear it flowed, that fountain from the far past. Yes, we must quietly collect our past, collect it up with tacit understanding, without any intensity or drama, blaming and exonerating ourselves with a difference. And how wonderfully possible it seemed, this silent process of redemption, as I rethought our passionate, yet gentle and divinely inept little conversation in the church. Was that what it was like, meeting the great love of one’s life again after all those years? And had we not been for each other the shy direct innocent creatures we had once been? The nature of our converse had never been spoilt, and in that blundering conversation its note could unmistakably be heard again. Perhaps I would indeed, through her and through our old childish love, now irremediably chaste, be enabled to become what I had hoped to become when I came away to the sea, pure in heart.

The question: is she a widow? already seemed to belong to the remote past, to some vanished and entirely obsolete method of thinking. The question which was now, in spite of the programme for rational survival with which I was consoling myself, in danger of becoming agonizingly urgent, was: is she happy? To decide this it was necessary to inspect Mr Fitch. And moreover it was quite impossible to wait. As I walked slowly back to Shruff End I thought: I have got to see Mr Fitch today. I will