The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [98]
I then searched quickly for a picture of my mother, and soon found one, not anxious-looking but broad-faced and grinning with a jocund yet powerful expression that was terribly familiar to me. Her scraped-back hair revealed her bulky rounded brow, and her commanding wide-apart eyes gazed straight at the beholder. She would never have made an intellectual, but there were many careers in which she might have succeeded. She was often merry, but with a merriment almost ostentatiously derived from, or associated with, an ascetic simple blameless life. The jazz age passed my parents by. I also found, though I was not looking for it, a touching (too touching) picture of my father, very young, in the uniform of an infantry officer of the first war. How on earth had he survived that holocaust, and why had I never asked him really detailed questions about it? He too was looking at me, but unsmiling, diffident, with anxious eyes. How soft and young his mouth looked. However had that gentle timid being managed as a soldier? It was my mother who made decisions and argued with the tradesmen. Perhaps it was some of her northern toughness in me which had made me so browbeat the world as to accept me at my own valuation.
Then I saw, peeping out from under some horrible pictures of James on his pony (why ever had I kept those?), a photograph of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle dancing together. I pulled it out. They were in evening dress and holding each other rather far apart for what was obviously, from the way they were looking at each other, a moment only. The next moment they would be closely embraced. Tango? Waltz? Slow foxtrot? There was something in their attitude which announced not only their happiness but their mutual dependence, their absolutely satisfactory relationship; he so burly, so masterly, so elegant, so protective, she so frail, so graceful, so trustful and submissive, so confidently loving. So bloody beautiful. Poor lucky Aunt Estelle, she never lived to lose those charms. However had I got hold of that photo? I now quite suddenly recalled that I had stolen it from the family album at Ramsdens. I turned the stiff brown photo over, and saw the glue on the back and a little dark brownish fur of the thick page from which I had removed it.
As I had been bowling along the motorway with Rosina in the sunny early morning and chattering about California and the latest row in Equity, I had been composing a letter which I intended to write to Hartley as soon as I got to London. But after I arrived I felt, first of all, a more urgent need to clear my mind and somehow to steady and console myself by writing a full account of what had happened. Then I found other reasons for not, as yet, writing that letter. I was in fact in a terrible ferment, not exactly of indecision, but of anxious impatient frightened emotion. I was still struggling to hold off a frightful crippling mindless jealousy-pain which was waiting just round some corner in my distracted soul. I had to keep that away from me by thinking; and the fruit of my thought was somewhat as follows.
When I left Ben after that rather horrible interview, I felt dark feral glee because I realized that I was now free to detest him; and I was free to do more, oh ever so much more, than that. The crude summary of the matter was that I was now able to think in terms of rescuing Hartley. There was a kind of dreadful violent leaping ahead in this thought, as if I were being powerfully jerked by something which already existed in the far-off future. Hatred, jealousy, fear and fierce yearning love raged together in my mind. Oh my poor girl, oh my poor dear girl. I felt an agony of protective possessive love, and such a deep pain to think how I had failed to defend her from a lifetime of unhappiness. How I would cherish her, how console and perfectly love her now if only . . . But I still had just enough prudence left to go on thinking.
I reviewed the evidence and I had very little doubt about what it pointed to. Hartley loved me and had long regretted losing me. How could she not? She