The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [85]
I went back to the church. After that chase, after that awful enclosed space with the dustbins and the rock and the bicycle, I too was trembling. She came in ten minutes. I went to take her heavy basket from her. I simply did not know how to behave to her, there was some profound awful barrier of what I felt as embarrassment, though it was also dread. If only some touch of grace could turn all this pain into communication and the gestures of love. But grace in every sense was lacking. I felt now a frantic desire to touch her, to hold her, but I could think of no way of achieving this, as if it would have been an amazing physical feat. We sat down where we had sat before, she in the pew in front, turning round to me.
‘Why did you hide? I can’t bear this. We must—we must somehow get a grip on this situation—I shall go mad—’
‘Charles, please don’t be so—and please don’t call round unexpectedly like that—’
‘I’m sorry—but I’ve got to see you—I still care about you. What do you expect me to do? At least we’ve got to be friends, now we’ve got this chance to—this chance—Of course I won’t do anything you don’t want—Please—look, couldn’t you and your husband come round and see me, come round for drinks tomorrow at six, well at five, at seven, any time that suits you. Come to funny old Shruff End, I want you to see the house. Why not?’
Hartley was hunched up, her head shrunk into her neck, the rumpled collar of her blue dress cupping her hair. She was looking down, almost hidden by the pew. ‘Please don’t expect anything of us, I mean don’t call on us or ask us to—we don’t go to parties—’
‘It’s not a party!’
‘It’s not necessary for us to be like that just because—And please don’t run after me in the street, people will notice.’
‘But you ran away from me, you hid—’
‘Where we live people don’t sort of entertain because they’re neighbours, they keep themselves to themselves.’
‘But you already know me! And there needn’t be any “entertaining” if you mean ridiculous formalities, I hate that anyway. Hartley, I won’t put up with this. Can’t you just explain?’
Hartley now looked at me properly. I noticed that today she was wearing no lipstick, and this helped me to read her, to read her young look into her old look. Her tired pale wrinkled soft round face now looked very sad, with a kind of resigned sadness, as I had never seen it then, even when she was leaving me. But her sadness was resolute, almost wary, and she was entirely attentive, the vivid eyes no longer vague. She revealed her red slightly swollen hands, and clawed ineffectually at her rumpled collar.
‘What is there to explain, why should I—?’
‘You mean I’m not behaving like a gentleman?’
‘No, no—Look, I must go to the hairdressing lady.’
‘I behaved like a gentleman then and look where it got me! I never pressed you. I believed you when you said you’d marry me. I loved you. I love you. All right, you said then that you couldn’t trust me, you thought I’d be unfaithful and so on, oh God! Perhaps you feel something like that, that you couldn’t trust me now—But believe me, there are no women, no one with me, I’m alone, really alone. I want you to know that.’
‘There’s no need to say, it doesn’t matter—’
‘Yes, don’t misunderstand me. I just want you to know it’s simply me, and I’m like I always was, so there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘I must go to the hairdresser.’
‘Hartley, please—Oh all right, why indeed should you explain? Do you want me to go away now and never try to see you again?’
Of course I did not intend her to say yes, and she did not.
‘No, I don’t want that. I don’t know what I want.’
The desolate sound of this, the sound of need at last, made me feel much happier and much more clear-headed. ‘Hartley darling, you’ve got to talk to me, you know you have. After all there’s so much to talk about, isn’t there? I won’t do you any harm. My love for you then was mixed up, with all sorts of conflicts which don’t exist now, so it can all be better and we’ve sort of got it back again after all. Don’t you see? We can be real