The Sea, the Sea

He said you thought it was Ben and you were working yourself up.’

‘You pretend you always detested me, it isn’t true. You aren’t all that good an actor. You told me about your Uncle Peregrine.’

‘I have no Uncle Peregrine.’

I felt totally confused. I said, ‘But what about Titus?’

‘What do you mean?’ said James.

‘What happened to Titus? Who killed Titus? I mean-I thought-surely Ben killed him?’

Lizzie answered this after a moment. She said, ‘Charles, it was an accident, no one killed him.’

Peregrine got up. He said, ‘Well, that’s that, that’s sorted that out, and I hope the General is satisfied. I’m going back to London. Goodbye Lizzie, nice to have seen you.’ He marched out and I could hear him collecting his things. Then there was the sound of the Alfa Romeo backing violently onto the causeway, and then its diminishing roar.

James had got up and was looking out of the window. Lizzie, soundlessly crying, was filling the kettle at the tap. She put it on the stove and turned the gas up.

I said to James, ‘You said you didn’t want to leave me behind here with a false notion in my head. Well, now it’s gone, so there’s nothing to detain you.’

James turned round. ‘Won’t you come to London?’

‘No.’

‘But what are you going to do about them?’

‘Nothing. It’s over. It’s over.’

But of course that was not true.

That day and the next day passed in a sick trance, a period of time which seemed like the peace of resignation and hopeless quiet mourning, but was really full of fear and venom. I passionately wanted James to go, his appearance, his company, his obtrusive unseen presence irritated me into torments. Lizzie irritated me too, partly by her frequent tears, which she seemed unable to control, and partly by a silly beseeching sympathetic expression which she put on when I looked at her, and which made me suddenly see the picture which Peregrine had sketched of me as an ageing powerless ex-magician for whom people were sorry.

I could understand why Lizzie refused to go. She wanted to be in at the kill. She was waiting for the moment when I could stand no more and would turn to her helplessly to be seized and carried off. Why James wanted to hang around was less clear. He certainly believed what I told him, that I no longer regarded Ben as a murderer. He might suspect that I had not given up my idea of rescuing Hartley, but after all he could not go on watching me forever. It was quite plain that I was not proposing to return to London in his Bentley. A little tact, and he was not usually deficient in tact, might have prompted him now to leave me and Lizzie alone. He did not even seem to want to talk to me any more. It was as if he was staying on for some purpose of his own. I guessed that he was brooding on Titus and somehow blaming himself, as I blamed myself, for not having attended more to what the boy was doing. At this time I avoided the rocks and the sea, but James was always out there, walking about on the cliff, standing on Minn’s bridge, and climbing up to the tower, almost as if he were measuring the distances involved.

On several afternoons Lizzie and I walked inland, past the place where in a previous existence I had intended to put my herb garden, into the country which I had never explored. The region just beyond the road was bog, full of outcrops of rock and gorse and little black pools. There was some scrappy heather and a lot of those tiny yellow plants that catch flies, and purple and white flowers that looked like miniature orchids. Two pairs of buzzards inhabited the blue air. After the bog there was ordinary farm land, sheep-scattered hillsides, distant mustard fields catching the sunlight with their huge patches of glowing yellow. There were many ruined stone cottages, roofless and full of willow-herb and wild buddleia and butterflies, and we came on the ruin of a big house, with the box hedges of the formal garden grown into a forest and covered with rambler roses. I record these details, which I recall so clearly, because they are the very image of sorrow; things seen which might have given pleasure, but could not.

I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart. Lizzie, walking with me, had wept her fill for Titus, and was still often weeping, but now more privately and self-indulgently; with a woman’s economy in grief, I could feel her tentacles clasping me. Lizzie was not going to perish, not for anyone, if she could help it. If I had fallen dead she would soon have been crying in someone else’s arms. These are unkind words; but I felt a special localized bitterness against Lizzie then because I knew how temporary her affliction was, and how soon, if I required her sympathy, it could turn into a possessive triumph. Lizzie is one of those very sweet, very kind kittenish women whom men love for their sympathetic gentleness, but who have a truly relentless power of self-preservation. Well, why not? We spoke little as we walked and I could see Lizzie looking at me now and then and she was thinking to herself: it is a relief to him to walk with me thus in silence. My presence, my silence is healing him. With no one else could he quietly walk and walk like this. (This last belief was probably justified.) Of course guilt too had fed my rage. My responsibility for Titus’s death, which now so largely occupied my mind, amounted to this: I had never warned him about the sea. Why had I not done so? Out of vanity. I recalled now very clearly that first day when Titus and I had dived in off the cliff. I had wanted to show him that I too was strong and fearless. It would have spoilt the charm of that moment if I had said, ‘It’s rather dangerous’ or ‘It’s not easy to get out’ or ‘I don’t think I’ll swim here’. I had to dive in with him and conceal the difficulties I knew so well. I never stressed the impossibility of climbing out in other places. I never recommended the tower steps; in fact I had not renewed the rope there, and with a strong sea running the steps would be as dangerous as the cliff. I never, for Titus, watched the sea. I acted out of vanity, and out of a silly vicarious pride in his youth and his strength, in the agility which I had seen him display upon the tower on the first day. Of course he always wanted to dive in. No young boy climbs cautiously into the sea if he can dive. I did not want to spoil my picture of Titus or Titus’s picture of me by any mean prudence.

I went over and over and over these things in my mind, thinking of what I might have done and what I should have done, just as James was perhaps doing as he paced it all out upon those rocks which I now could not bear to look upon. And my misery about Titus, my sobbing grasping sense of the loss from my life of what might have become its greatest blessing was the more intense now that my obsessive belief about Ben had been taken away. It had indeed been a consolation, and Ben had carried my guilt. That madness was gone, but did not leave behind a saner or purer mourning. My burden of sin and despair was constant and had simply been redistributed. New aspects of grief were opened to me. I had killed Hartley’s child, I had wantonly entered her life and taken away her blessing, which was hers in a way that it could never be mine. I did not dare to imagine her sorrow and how it might affect her feelings about me. Would she now see me as a murderer? Sometimes I felt that, in an odd way, it would not occur to her to blame me, she would not be capable of such a thought, of seeing me simply as a wanton wandering cause. And sometimes I felt that our grief for Titus might actually, excluding Ben, draw us together. For the moment I could only wait. I even felt that it was now likely that she would give me a sign. And in thinking this I was, as it turned out, right.

And so, waiting, watching, brooding, mourning, Lizzie and I walked the countryside. And then we began to talk about the old days, about Wilfred and about Clement, and Lizzie said how jealous she had been of Clement even when I was no longer living with her. ‘I always felt that, whatever happened, Clement owned you.’ We talked about the theatre and how wonderful it was and how awful it was and how glad Lizzie was to be out of it. Lizzie asked me about Jeanne and I told her a little and regretted it because it clearly hurt her so much. Lizzie on these walks, sweating, puffing, wearing crumpled faded dressed, her face shiny and red with sunburn and with sudden tears, looked her age. She was a woman whose appearance varied immensely. She could still look childish, in the mysterious way that old and young can mingle in a woman’s looks. But she had lost her radiance, or else my vision of her was dulled. She was faithful and sweet and she tried so hard to console me, always speaking of peripheral things, not of the centre. ‘Of course Perry didn’t hate you, he never did, he just said that. He loved you, he was devoted to you, he always spoke of you with such admiration.’

One afternoon we came back by a road which led unexpectedly past Amorne Farm, which I had usually tried to avoid. We passed quickly by to a chorus of yapping collies, and I was just feeling relieved when suddenly the Black