salad of grated carrot, radishes, watercress and bean shoots. (I went through a period of grated carrot with everything, but recovered.) Then cherry cake with ice cream. I had mixed feelings about ice cream until I realized that it must always be eaten with a cake or tart, never with fruit alone. By itself it is of course pointless, even if stuffed with nuts or other rubbish. And by ‘ice cream’ I mean the creamy vanilla sort. ‘Flavoured’ ice cream is as repugnant to the purist as ‘flavoured’ yoghurt. Nor have I ever been able to see the
I have reread what I wrote about Hartley and feel moved simply by the fact that I was able to write it. It is but a shadowy tribute; if I can bear to write more on the subject I may try to improve it. How strange memory is. Since I wrote, so many more pictures of her, stored up in the dense darkness of my mind, have become available. Her long legs bicycling, her bare dusty feet in sandals. Her lithe movement from crouching to standing, balanced upon the parallel bar in the gym display. The feel of her strong hands through my shirt, holding on to my shoulders. We did not caress each other in an immodest way. Our burning youth was docile to the chivalry of a pure passion. We were prepared to wait. Alas and alas. Never so pure and gentle, never so intense did it come to me after, that absolute and holy yearning of one human body and soul for another. But reading my story I feel again the terrible mystery of it. When did she start to turn away? Did she deceive me? Oh why did it happen?
I have spent the afternoon tidying the house. I carried two dustbins to the end of the causeway-I note with displeasure that the dustmen last time let some rubbish fall down onto the rocks below. I have had to climb down and collect it. I cleaned the kitchen and washed the huge black slates of the floor. They are worthy of a cathedral. A man came to deliver calor gas cylinders, rather to my surprise. (I had mentioned the matter in the Fishermen’s Stores.) I must remember to enquire if they can supply a calor gas fridge. The remainder of the ice cream has melted. My larder is still damp. I have lit a fire in the little red room and left the downstairs doors open. I moved quite a lot of wood into the downstairs inner room where I hope it will get dry. I am getting used to the smell of wood smoke which now pervades the house.
It has stopped raining and the sun is shining, but over most of the sea the sky is a thick leaden grey. The sunny golden rocks stand out against that dark background. What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky. If I could only carry a chair and table over the rocks to the tower I could sit and write there with the view of Raven Bay. I must go out and study my rock pools while this intense light lasts. I think I am becoming more observant-I lately noticed a colony of delightful very small crabs, like little transparent yellow grapes, and some ferocious-looking tiny fish with whiskers which resemble miniature coelacanths.
I feel calmer now already about Hartley, as if the thought of her has been somehow mercifully absorbed into the sane open air of my home. This is indeed a test of my new environment. (‘You’ll go mad with loneliness and boredom’, they said!) All my instincts were right.
I would like to tell all these things to someone, perhaps to Lizzie. I left in store with that first love so much of my innocence and gentleness which I later destroyed and denied, and which is yet now perhaps at last available again. Can a woman’s ghost, after so many years, open the doors of the heart?
History
ONE
I DID NOT LOOK at the crabs after all. I became obsessed with the idea of carrying a chair and table out to the tower, and I set off across the rocks with the little folding table which I had moved from the middle room to the drawing room. This object soon began to seem absurdly heavy, and I found to my annoyance that the smooth steep faces of the rocks were too difficult to climb while I was holding the table in one hand. Eventually I let the thing fall into a crevasse. I must try to pioneer some easier way to get to the tower.
I climbed onward and sat on a wet rock overlooking Raven Bay. The sun was still shining and the seaward sky was still grey. The smooth foamless sea was rising and falling against the rocks with a gentle inviting rhythm. The longer shadows made the big spherical stones of the bay stand out, half dark, half gleaming. The long quite pretty facade of the Raven Hotel showed very clear and detailed in the odd brilliant light.
I was just getting over my annoyance about the table when I noticed a man walking along the road in the direction of Shruff End, having just turned the corner from the bay side. He was dressed in a smart suit and a trilby hat, and looked in that vivid landscape like an incongruous figure in a surrealist picture. I surveyed his oddity. Walkers on that road were even rarer than cars. Then he began to look familiar. Then I recognized him. Gilbert Opian.
My first instinct was to hide, and in fact I moved into the moist salt-smelling interior of the tower, under the bright round of sky, feeling a small unpleasant shock. However I could not seriously regard Gilbert as a menacing figure and it then occurred to me that of course he was bringing Lizzie; so I hurried out again and began to scramble over the rocks in the direction of the road. By the time I reached the tarmac Gilbert had seen me and turned back. We met each other, he smiling.
Gilbert was wearing a light-weight black suit with a striped shirt and flowery tie. When he saw me he took off his hat. It was three or four years since I had seen Gilbert and he had aged a lot. The mysterious awful changes which alter the human face from youth to age may gently dally and delay, then act decisively all at once. Gilbert in young middle age looked rosy and boyish. Now he was all wrinkled and humorous and dry, with that faint air of quizzical cynicism which clever elderly people often instinctively put on, and which may be quite new to them, a final defence. When I last saw him he still wore a fresh unselfconscious air of childish conceit. Now his face was full of wary watchful anxiety masquerading as worldly detachment, as if he were cautiously trying out his new wrinkles as a mask. Though podgier, he still contrived to look handsome, and his white curly hair still had a jaunty look, had not learnt to seem old.
I was wearing jeans and a white shirt which had escaped from them. Seeing Gilbert’s tie, his tie-pin, his (or was I mistaken?) discreet make-up, I felt a quick contemptuous pity for him, together with a sense of how fit I was, how hard. I could see Gilbert taking these things in, the pity, the fitness. His moist light-blue faintly pinkish eyes flickered anxiously between their dry layers of wrinkles.
‘Darling, you look marvellous, so brown, so young-my God, your complexion’-Gilbert always speaks in a rich fruity ringing voice as if addressing the back of the stalls.
‘Have you brought Lizzie?’
‘No.’
‘A letter, message?’
‘Not exactly-’
‘What, then?’
‘Is that funny-looking house yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wouldn’t mind a drink, guv’nor.’
‘Why have you come?’
‘Darling, it’s about Lizzie-’
‘Of course, but get on with it.’
‘It’s about Lizzie and me. Please, Charles, take it seriously and don’t look like that or I shall cry! Something has really happened between us, I don’t mean like that sort of thing, but like real love like, God, in this awful world one doesn’t often have such divine luck, sex is the trouble of course, if people would only search for each other as souls-’
‘Souls?’
‘Like just
