The Sea, the Sea

fate, doesn’t it?’ But oh the pain of it.

Hartley said nothing. She looked at her watch.

‘And-children-have you?’

‘We have a son. He’s eighteen. He’s away just now.’

She spoke more calmly and with a sort of deliberation, as if getting some necessary task over.

‘What’s his name?’

She said after a moment. ‘Titus.’ She repeated, ‘Titus-is his name.’ Then she said, looking at her watch again, ‘I must go, I must go to the shop, I shall be late.’

‘Hartley, please, stay here please, I must go on talking to you, tell me-oh-tell me, what did your husband do, sell, before he retired?’ I must just keep on asking questions.

‘Fire extinguishers. He was in fire extinguishers.’ She added, ‘He was always so tired in the evenings.’

This sudden vista of her evenings, years and years of her evenings, led me on blunderingly to ask, ‘And are you happily married, Hartley, have you had a good life?’

‘Oh yes, yes, I’ve been very happy, a very happy marriage, yes.’

It was impossible to tell if she was sincere. Probably she was. A good life. What an odd phrase I had used. And had both our lives passed, and had they somehow been completed, since we last met? Hartley’s voice, retaining the thin droning slightly monotonous, to me so immensely attractive, sound which it had always had, with the touch of the local accent, made me realize how much my own voice had changed.

I was suddenly breathless and put both of my hands onto the back of the pew. My little finger touched her dress and she moved slightly again. Something black seemed to threaten me from a little way above my head. She had been happy all these years, yes, why not, and yet I could not believe it, could not bear it. She had existed all these years and our lives were gone. I breathed quickly through my mouth and the darkness went away. I thought, I must be ingenious, and the word ‘ingenious’ seemed like a help to me. I must be ingenious and see to it that I do not suffer too much. I must look for some happiness, simply for some comfort, here, ingeniously.

I said, not knowing quite what I meant to say nor why, ‘That woman in the car last night, she’s a well-known actress, Rosina Vamburgh, she was just visiting me-’

‘We hardly ever go to the theatre-’

‘She was just visiting me on business-’

‘I saw you on telly.’

‘Did you, what was it-?’

‘I forget. I must go now,’ she repeated and got up and retrieved her shopping bag.

I felt panic. ‘Hartley, don’t go, you look-oh so tired-’ This was not the best thing to say, but it expressed a sort of anguish of protectiveness and tenderness and pity and a kind of humility which I felt about her then as I saw her standing there before me in the guise of an old woman. She did look tired, tiredness was somehow the expression of her face, not sadness or suffering so much as a vast weariness as of one who has worked too hard for years and years.

‘I’m very well, apart from endless tummy trouble. You look well, Charles, and so young. I must go.’ She shuffled past me in the direction of the door.

I leapt up and followed her. ‘But what shall we do?’

Hartley looked at me as if she was not sure what this question meant.

I repeated, ‘What shall we do? I mean-oh, Hartley, Hartley, when shall I see you, can we meet after you’ve done your shopping, can we meet in the pub, or would you come down to my house-’ Vistas of madness opened beyond these words.

Hartley opened the church door, pulling at it laboriously, and over her shoulder I could see Dummy’s grave and the criss-cross iron gate and the village street with people in it and the far horizon line of the sea. I said wildly, ‘Of course I’ll call on you, I’d so much like to meet your husband, you must both come down to my funny house and have a drink, you know I live-’

‘Yes, I know, thank you, but not just now, my husband is not too well-’

‘But I’ll see you, I must-what’s your address, which bungalow? ’

‘It’s called Nibletts, it’s the last one, but don’t-I’ll let you know-’

‘Please, Hartley, see me after you’ve done your shopping, let me help you-’

‘No, no, I’m late. Don’t come, you stay here. I’ll see you later, I mean on another day, please don’t do anything, I’ll let you know. I must run now, I’ll let you know. Please stay here. Goodbye.’

I had wanted to touch her, but somehow only with my fingertips as if she were a ghost which might dissolve, I had wanted to hold her dress between my fingers. Now I felt a more precise need to take her head and draw it quietly against me and hear her heart beating. Old desires were suddenly present. I saw her blue, blue eyes and the curious mad look of her round face which was so unchanged. And her lips which had been so white and so cold.

I started to say, ‘I’m not on the telephone-’

She went quickly out of the church and closed the door carefully. Obeying her I stayed. I went back to the same place and sat down and once more put my hands where her hands had been.

What was I going to do, how was I going to manage myself for the rest of my life now that I had found Hartley again? Was I going to go round to ‘Nibletts’ once a week and have tea with Mr and Mrs Benjamin Fitch? Or entertain them to beans and sausages and claret at Shruff End? Take them up to London for a show? Take an interest in Titus’s future? Look after them all? Leave Titus my money? My mind leapt wildly about, huge vistas opened, immense areas of the future were suddenly live and quick with possibilities, all of them terrible. Ingenious, I thought, I must be ingenious. I looked at my watch. It was ten twenty. So much awful thought in so little time. I sat for a while until I reckoned that Hartley would have done her shopping and gone back up the hill, and then emerged from the church and sat on Dummy’s grave, leaning against the gravestone which bore the image of the ‘foul anchor’. From there I could see, over some trees, the roofs of the bungalows, including the last one, the residence of Mr and Mrs Fitch. A disabled travelling salesman. What was the matter with him? A cripple? I knew that I would have to go and take a look at Mr Benjamin Fitch, very soon.

Why had Hartley been so reluctant, why had she not said ‘Yes, come and see us’ or ‘We’d love to come and see you’? Sanity demanded such gestures, whatever she felt. Politeness demanded them and by politeness one might, for the present at any rate, be saved. Or was the crippled husband really ill, suffering, peevish and bedridden perhaps? But oh what did Hartley feel, what made her seem so strained and anxious? Her reluctance to invite me to her house was perhaps understandable, indeed very understandable. ‘You are so grand and famous.’ She was perhaps a little bit ashamed of her house and her husband. That need not mean she did not love him. But did she love him? I had to know. Was she really happy? I had to know. And that old horrible sweetish thought now kept coming to me: she must regret it so much, that wrong choice. She must have spent her life regretting that she had not married me. ‘I saw you on telly.’ What was that like? What mean gnawing pains of remorse did she feel when she saw me as a ‘celebrity’? How could she know that I was still just me and that I still missed her? And must she not think of me as surrounded by attractive women, as probably possessing a permanent mistress? She had seen Rosina, she might have seen Lizzie. Perhaps, it suddenly occurred to me, and this was so painful and so sweetish too, she is reluctant to see me precisely because of her regrets: remorse, jealousy, the waywardness of fruitless daydream. She does not want to know any more about what might have been. Oh God, those years, our whole life, that we might have spent together. She does not want… to start to love me… all over again…

I already had enough instinct for dangerous thoughts to thrust this one aside. I was indeed, as I leaned back against the sun-warmed lichen-spotted surface of Dummy’s laconic monument, sketching a kind of programme for survival. Roughly, the programme was like this. There was no doubt that I must now somehow contrive to devote the rest of my life to Hartley. (I quickly banished the idea that Mr Fitch was seriously ill and would shortly die.) This could only be done if I accepted their marriage and could successfully attempt to construct a friendship with her, and presumably with him. Hartley and I were not just revisiting each other as tourists, that was out of the question. At the least, the husband must tolerate me. Perhaps I could be allowable as a figure of fun? I did not quite care for this, but so quick is imagination that I already heard Hartley saying to her spouse, ‘Why there’s dear old Charles again, he can’t keep away!’-while she felt- something a little different. Perhaps the husband might even be flattered that a ‘show business personality’ admired