The Sea, the Sea

In fact not a very long time passed. I stopped drinking whisky. I hate the stuff really. I walked all round the house, entering every room. I even climbed up to the attic and looked at the hole in the roof. The place was still very damp up there. Lizzie and Gilbert had put two buckets under the hole. These were both brimming full. I left them there. I searched the house as if I were looking for something, and all the time now I was holding Hartley’s letter in my hand. At last I threw myself down on my bed and began to open the letter as if I were a child and this were some strange treat which I had carried off to enjoy at last in secret. What spurred me to end the play of hopes was the thought that if I were to carry Hartley off effectively I had better book the taxi at once. And at the very last moment I fell into a frenzy because it occurred to me that I might already have delayed too long.

Then real absolute panic came. My teeth were chattering, my trembling clumsy fingers tore the envelope, tore the letter, spread it out. Then I had to get up and run to the window for a better light.

Dear Charles,

We would be very glad if you would come and see us for tea. Four o’clock on Friday would suit and we will expect you then unless you write otherwise. I hope that you can come.

Yours truly,

Mary Fitch.

This letter stunned me partly because I could not think or feel how to react to it. Was it good or bad? It asked for a meeting, but with ‘us’. If Hartley simply wanted me to do nothing, her best course was to do nothing herself. But here was a letter. What did it mean, what was its deep meaning? Friday was tomorrow.

I stared at the letter blushing and trembling and tried to understand it. I was not very bright. It even took me a little time to realize that it was not a real letter from Hartley at all. It was signed ‘Mary Fitch’. She had written it but not composed it. It was a letter written for the eye of her husband, even perhaps under his dictation. But then what did that mean? Had she perhaps cunningly put it into his head to agree to my visit? But how had she done it and what did she want to happen? Had Hartley, in order to see me, perhaps simply to see my face, argued Ben into inviting me? And would she, when I arrived, give me some cue? Or was it perhaps a trap, a dreadful revenge plan with which she had been forced to cooperate? If Ben blamed me for Titus’s death he might now be half mad with his own remorse and resentment against me. Now he would feel how much he loved Titus, and the only relief might be to feel how much he hated me. Just as I had sought relief from Titus’s death in blaming Ben. Well, even if it was a trap, I would walk straight in.

I kept looking at the letter and turning it over and over and even holding it up to the light in case there was some hidden message. The time of the appointment had been changed. What had originally been written was six o’clock, but this had been altered to four o’clock. This could be made sense of. Under Ben’s dictation, under his eye, she had written six, then hastily just as she was putting it into the envelope she had changed it to four, knowing that at four Ben would be absent. Perhaps away fetching somebody or something for the trap? So perhaps she would be alone after all? And she would throw herself into my arms as she had done on that night, the night when she had run away onto the rocks because she was so afraid of Ben, afraid of returning to him, afraid of staying with me. She had come to me then of her own accord. That was a piece of evidence, in fact the chief one.

I then thought, supposing she is alone then and supposing she says: take me away. I must have a car. I reflected rather desperately and miserably on this, hope fighting with fear, as I imagined how awful it would be to have the car and no Hartley: the symbol of escape but not the princess. I decided however that I must trust hope and plan for it, so I rang up the taxi man and asked for the taxi to be waiting outside the village church from four o’clock onward tomorrow. After I had done this I felt very much better, as if I had actually improved my chances.

By this time it was after nine o’clock and I decided to go to bed. I drank some wine and ate some bread and honey and then took a sleeping pill. As I lay down I remembered that I had lost James. And as it seemed to me then I had lost him not so much because of his sin, the ‘flaw’ he had spoken of, but simply because he had gone away in his big black car with Lizzie. Gone to perdition, by my doing. There was no getting back to my cousin now ever, through the barrier which he and I between us had so ingeniously erected. We were eternally divided. And it somehow seemed strange to me that this had not happened earlier, so dangerous were we to each other.

The next day was simply a problem of filling the time until four. At first I thought the problem insoluble and that I should run screaming mad with anxiety. However, I managed to pass the time without excessive anguish by busying myself continually with little tasks which had to do with Hartley. I paid some attention to my appearance, though there was an element of pretence in this, since I could not imagine Hartley cared about the details of my looks, and anyway I was quite sufficiently presentable when shabby and untidy, perhaps more so. I washed one of my better shirts and dried it in the sun. I got out my light black jacket and clean socks, and chose a smart pretty tie. I washed my hair and made it fair and fluffy. I had given up swimming, but it was still a bit stiff and salty. I decided it would be wise to pack a small suitcase, ready for possible instant flight, and I did so with a fast beating heart. At lunch time I ate sufficiently, not with appetite but out of a sense of duty, and drank no alcohol.

After lunch I went round the house carefully closing and fixing all the windows. I emptied the water out of the buckets in the attic and replaced them under the hole in the roof. As I came downstairs and into the little red room I suddenly saw, lying on the table and partially concealed by blotting paper, the envelope which contained the long letter which I had written to Hartley before Titus died and which I had never managed to deliver: the letter about how Ben had tried to kill me and about ‘tramping in and out’ and about the little quiet secret life we were going to lead together. Much of this had been made horribly out of date by Perry’s confession and Titus’s death, and I saw it with pain and was about to destroy it but decided to read it first. That I should actually reconsider this letter belonged somehow to the macabre economy of that day. It seemed a pity to waste the eloquence of the early part and the important explanation which it contained, so I destroyed only the last two pages which referred to Titus and Ben. Then I wrote on a separate sheet: I wrote this letter to you earlier but never delivered it. Read it carefully. I love you and we will be together. I also added my telephone number. I sealed it all up in a new envelope and put it in my pocket.

I set off early for the village, carrying my suitcase, and changed a cheque at the shop. I bought, together with razor blades, some cream and face powder of the kind which Hartley used. It was still not yet half past three, and I walked down towards the church. I was feeling sick with fear and hope, ready to vomit, ready to faint. The taxi was already waiting since the taxi man, as he told me, had nothing else to do. I told him to wait until I came. He said laughingly, ‘Three hours?’ I said, ‘If necessary.’ I went into the churchyard and looked at Dummy’s grave and remembered how I had meant to show it to Titus. I went inside the church and sat there panting and then suddenly thought I was going to be late and ran out and hurried up the hill. It was a warm day, but with plenty of sea breeze.

I came up as far as the house and stopped to get my breath with my hand on the blue wooden gate with the complicated latch. The blaze of big garish roses, every possible colour, flickered in the sun. I found that I was still carrying my suitcase, which I had intended to leave in the taxi, and Hartley’s make-up in a paper bag, which I had intended to put in the suitcase. Then I heard something awful, horrible, which chilled my blood and made me gasp with emotion. Inside the house a treble recorder and an alto recorder were in unison playing Greensleeves.

It was not simply that a recorder duet was the last thing I now expected to hear. Greensleeves had been, for Hartley and me, in the old days, our signature tune. I had had a recorder on which I laboriously rendered it, and we used to pick it out on her parents’ old piano. We sang it to each other. It was our theme song, our love song. If I had heard it played now on one recorder I would have taken it instantly as a secret message of hope. But on two recorders… was it possible that it was a deliberate insult, an intentional desecration of the past? No. She had simply forgotten.

All this passed through my mind during the time it took my fingers to undo the gate. I stepped slowly onto the path. The music ceased and a dog began to bark hysterically. I walked up to the door controlling my mind and already having fresh thoughts. The Greensleeves sacrilege meant nothing. Perhaps he liked the song and she had not been able to prevent its becoming a favourite. The recorder playing meant nothing. Obviously if she were intending to run she would be careful to behave as usual. Or perhaps the tune really had been