The Sea, the Sea

craving for the vanished Hartley well on into Clement’s regime, but the memory must be misleading. How could Clement not have cured me? Clement when I first met her was a dazzling figure, beautiful and clever and at the top of her fame; and still young, though I thought of her as old. I was twenty. She was thirty-nine, forty. My God, she was younger than Lizzie is now. When I first met her I was a green awkward ignorant graceless boy, it is a miracle that she ever looked at me. Later on, I treated her coldly, her possessiveness irritated me, I found her love a nuisance. I went away, she went away, yet I always came back and she always came back. We never really got lost, and at the end when she was dying I drove all the others out.

Clement was a long time dying. They had the headlines set up in type for weeks. I lay on the bed beside her and stroked her face, which had become, just very lately, so much more wrinkled with pain and fear. My fingers can still remember those soft wrinkles and the tears that quietly filled them. She said she wanted to die in a storm of noise and for days we had the hi-fi turned up playing Wagner and we drank whisky and together we waited. It was the strangest waiting I ever remember for it was and it was not waiting. There was a sort of intense timelessness in the way in which we kept each other company. Our fear divided us, her fear, my fear, of the event: two different sharp fears which we had to overcome by a constant force of mutual attention, laying our hands upon each other’s hearts. We became tired and we turned off the noise and we wept and still we waited. My God, Clement’s tears, how much I had seen of them before and how much they had sickened me. Now I felt they would make a saint of me, and perhaps for a month they almost did. In the end she died when I was asleep. Every morning I had thought I might find her dead, but had then seen her breathing, the little rhythmic rising and falling of the bedclothes that covered her body which had become so shrunken and small. Then one day there was no movement and I saw her eyes open and her face changed.

That time of attentive mourning for her death was quite unlike the black blank horror of the thing itself. We had mourned together, trying to soothe each other’s pain. But that shared pain was so much less than the torment of her vanishing, the terrible lived time of her eternal absence. How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

I did not intend to write about Clement’s death. I have made myself wretched by doing so and am still haunted by it although several days have passed. Of course I recovered from that bereavement, probably quite quickly. She left me her money, but in the end there was nothing but debts.

Since silencing my telephone I have received fewer invitations. In any case I think people have got over the excitement of my return to London. Just lately I have been spending my evenings at home drinking wine and listening to music, almost any music, on the radio. I have a record player, but it was broken in the move. I cook myself a supper of rice or lentils or spiced cabbage. I eat Cox’s Orange Pippins and go to bed early quite drunk. I don’t think I have the makings of an alcoholic. I have a pain in my chest, but I think this is just something to do with Clement.

I wonder if James was mad? I have found myself thinking this for the first time. Would not this hypothesis explain many things? For instance his illusion that he lifted me up out of that whirlpool by some sort of abnormal power? But wait a moment, was not that my illusion? Perhaps I am mad? I am certainly drunk and I was dozing just now. It is later than my bed time. The Buddhas close in. To bed, to bed.

Thinking further about James something obvious has only just occurred to me. He is not dead at all, he has simply gone underground! The whole charade was organized by the intelligence service! I was too upset at the time to see how extremely fishy it all was. I never saw James’s body. By the time I arrived the mysterious Colonel Blackthorn was already in charge and the ‘body’ had been removed. I never even discovered who was supposed to have identified it. The extremely shifty Indian doctor was obviously also in the pay of British Intelligence. His letter was a masterpiece of bafflement. I was so confused and impressed by it, I was unable to reflect on the extreme oddness of what was going on. James was in perfect health when I last saw him. The notion of his killing himself by will power was just as absurd as the idea of his walking on the water. It occurs to me that I have never found his passport in the flat. Where is my cousin now? Not in purgatory or nirvana, but seated upon an army-issue yak, proceeding to a snowy rendezvous with some slit-eyed informer!

Since writing the above I have noticed several oriental persons hanging around in the streets nearby. I hope they are not the others, who are mistaking me for James? As for that tulpa tribesman, he was certainly an intelligence agent, which was why James was so annoyed that I saw him.

I have just heard the terrible shocking news that Peregrine has been murdered by terrorists in Londonderry. I can hardly believe it. I realize now that I regarded his activities as purely comic. Some men play their whole lives as a comedy. Only death is not comic-but then it is not tragic either. That blank horror touches me again, with a grief that is pure fear, but I know I am not really grieving for Perry but for other deaths, perhaps my own. Poor Perry. He was a brave man. I cannot pretend I ever really loved him, but I do admire him for trying to kill me, and if it hadn’t been for that freak wave he would have succeeded too. That weird vision of James which seemed so important must have been a result of the blow on the head. It was a lucky escape.

There have been a number of tributes to Peregrine from Catholic and Protestant bishops. He is quite a martyr. They are setting up a Peregrine Arbelow Peace Foundation. Rosina, returned from California to bask in the martyr’s glory, is organizing a lot of American money. Lizzie says she heard that Rosina had actually left Perry before his death with no intention of returning, but this may be just malicious gossip.

The shock of Perry’s death has, in a curious way, made me a good deal less certain about James’s. The theory I deployed above remains a good one, extremely plausible. I just feel less inclined to believe it. Perhaps I would prefer to think of him as dead, the spirit that disturbed me for so long at peace at last. There are no mysteries after all. James died of a heart attack. As for the ‘oriental persons’, I realize now that they are simply waiters from an Indian restaurant in the Vauxhall Bridge Road.

No, I do not want to believe that cousin James is alive and well and living in Tibet, any more than I want to believe that Hartley is alive and well and living in Australia; and there are times when I actually feel persuaded that she too has died.

Peregrine opened the door and fell to the ground riddled with bullets. After all, he died a hero with his boots on.

To lunch with Miss Kaufman. Sidney has arrived to talk things over with Rosemary. Rosina has spoken at a meeting in Trafalgar Square. Lizzie and I watch Gilbert on television.

Uncle Abel dancing with Aunt Estelle so lightly touches her hand, so lightly touches her shoulder, as if he were lifting her off the ground simply by the force of his love. They look intently at each other; he protectively, she with absolute trust. Were they waltzing, at that fleeting moment which the camera seized and tossed on into the future? Her feet seem scarcely to touch the dance floor.

My father was something which I was destined never to be: a gentleman. Was Uncle Abel one? Not quite. Was James one? The question is absurd.

James said I was in love with my own youth, not with Hartley. Clement stopped me from finding Hartley. The war destroyed any ordinary world in which I might have married my childhood sweetheart. There were no trains going where she was.

I have just had a drunken evening with Toby Ellesmere and feel rather ashamed of it. Toby said James was ‘a bit potty’ and that he was ‘a sphinx without a secret’. I did not disagree. I even felt some satisfaction in hearing James belittled. Ellesmere still wants those poems but I will not give them up; nor have I looked at them, not at so much as a line. Even if James is the greatest poet of the century he must wait a little longer to be recognized. I think he will have to wait until after I am dead.