The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [84]
I waited in the church for more than an hour. I walked up and down. I read all the memorial tablets carefully. I smelt the roses. I read pieces of the horrible new prayer book (no wonder the churches are empty). I inspected the embroidered hassocks wrought by the local ladies. I climbed onto the pews and looked out of the windows. I thought of poor Dummy lying out there in the churchyard, scarcely more speechless now than he ever was. At about twenty past ten I decided that I had to get out into the air. It was all a great mistake, hiding in the church when Hartley might be walking openly about the streets. I wanted to see her so much that I was nearly moaning aloud. I ran out and went down through the iron gate and sat on a seat where I could see quite a lot of the little ‘high street’, but without being visible from the hillside. After a few minutes I saw a woman who looked like Hartley creeping along by the wall on the far side of the street, going in the direction of the shop. I say ‘creeping along’ because that was part of my first vision of her as an old woman, before I knew who she was, and it was this ‘old woman’ image that I was seeing now. I jumped up and set off after her. As she crossed the road she turned slightly and saw me and increased her pace. It was Hartley all right and she was running away from me! She did not go into the shop, but whisked round into what I called Fishermen’s Stores Street. When I reached the corner running, she was nowhere to be seen. I went into the Fishermen’s Stores, but she was not there. I wanted to howl with exasperation. I ran along to the end of the street where it petered out in a few derelict cottages and a five-barred gate and a large meadow fringed by trees. She could not have crossed that meadow. Had she gone into one of the houses? I ran back; then I saw a little alleyway leading off the street, a narrow sunless fissure between the blank sides of two houses. I ran down it, stumbled over a strewing of pebbles, and turned a sharp corner into a square enclosed space between the low whitewashed walls of backyards, where there were a number of overflowing dustbins and old cardboard boxes and an abandoned bicycle. And there, standing quite still in the middle of this scene, was Hartley. She was standing just behind a low outcrop of the sparkling yellow rock which surrounded my house.
She looked at me out of a sort of resigned trance-like calm, staring and unsmiling, and yet I could see that inwardly she was trembling like a quarry. The dark shadow of a wall fell across the yard, dividing the rock and somehow composing the picture, covering Hartley’s feet as she stood there holding a basket and her handbag. She was wearing a blue cotton dress today with a closely packed design of white daisies, and a loose baggy brown cardigan over it, although the day was already hot.
I ran up to her and seized hold not of her arm but of the handle of her shopping basket. This chase, this catch, had frightened us both. ‘Oh Hartley, don’t do it, don’t run away from me, it’s mad, thank God I found you, if I hadn’t I’d have gone crazy! I must talk to you. Come to the church, please.’
I pulled at the handle of the basket and she walked in front of me down the narrow alley.
‘You go to the church. I’ll follow