The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [79]
It was not until I was actually ringing the bell at Nibletts that it occurred to me to wonder whether in all those years Hartley had ever actually told him anything about me at all!
Nibletts is a small square bungalow built of a red brick which has been partly and mercifully whitewashed. Without compromise it squats upon the hill, with a group of wind-tormented trees opposite to it, beside it the slope to the village, behind it the slope to the sea, beyond and above it, woodland. It has a firm solid air. Other houses might be built upon sand or even be made of sand, but not so Nibletts. The bricks are unchipped, sharp and uneroded at the corners. There is no moss upon the roof and one feels that none will ever grow there. An equally undimmed red-tiled path leads to the front door between beds of spiky little rose bushes in their first flowering. A fuzzy mass of white clematis, growing up one of the wooden posts of the porch, soothes with some grace the blue front door which is covered with very thick, very shiny paint. The door has an oval panel of opaque frosted glass which seems to creep before the eyes. Nibletts is not a charmless house, it is pretty and homey, with its discreet patchy whitewash and its bright flower-fringed door. Within there are four main rooms, the sitting room and kitchen-dining room being both at the back where a descending lawn is overwhelmed by the view of the sea. But I anticipate.
The day had become hot. The temperature had risen to eighty degrees in the afternoon and the air was still shimmering with heat. From the hillside one could see the distant headlands of the bay couchant in a light-brownish heat haze. The vast bowl of the sea was glowing a very pale blue with silvery mirages and streaks of light. The crowded roses were hotly odorous. The bell, which I rang just as I suddenly thought that perhaps Mr Fitch was unaware that I knew his wife, and that this accounted for her panic, was penetratingly sweet, like a tuning fork struck for a choir of angels. Low voices were at once heard within. Then, after a moment, Hartley opened the door.
I got the shock again of her changed appearance, since in my intense and cherishing thought she had become young again, before I saw on her face a look of fear which instantly vanished. Then I could see nothing but her large eyes, seeming violet and somehow glazed and veiled as if they were looking beyond me. I could feel myself blushing, the accursed red wave surging up through my neck and face.
I had deliberately prepared nothing to say. I said, ‘Oh excuse me, I was passing by, returning from a walk and I just thought I’d call in for a moment.’
I had time before she replied to think: I ought to have let her speak first! Then if she had indeed never told her husband about me she could pretend I was selling brushes. I was wearing my jeans with a clean white shirt and my faded but decent cotton jacket. I tried to look into her eyes but it was impossible, and the fear or whatever it was had gone.
She said nothing to me but turned to speak back into the house. It sounded like—‘It’s him—’ As she spoke she swung the door back, half closing it in my face, and for a moment I thought she was simply going to shut it.
There was the sound of an ejaculation within, perhaps just ‘Oh’.
The door swung open again and Hartley was smiling at me. ‘Do come in for a minute.’
I wiped my feet on the large clean bristly orange mat and stepped into the hall, blinded by the change of light.
All the way from Shruff End, and indeed all day since my resolve to call on Hartley, I had been feeling sick with excitement, sick with a blend of obscure bodily agitation and clarified fear, not unlike (only this was much worse) what I used to feel when I dived off very high boards in California to impress Fritzie. I could not now see Hartley properly in the sudden darkness of the interior, but I felt her presence as a violent diffused magnetism which somehow pervaded the whole house, as if Hartley were the house and as if I had been swept