The Sea, the Sea

his wife. However these were unsavoury or at any rate premature speculations.

What I must now concentrate upon was the possibility of love in the form of a pure deep affectionate mutual respect, a steady constant binding awareness. Of course it would be, it would have to be, love between us, but love purged of possessive madness, purged of self, disciplined by time and the irrevocability of our fates. We must find out how at last to be absolutes to each other, never to lose each other, without putting any foot wrong or spilling one drop of some brimming vessel of truth and history which was held up austerely between us. I will respect her, I will respect her, I kept saying to myself. I felt a tenderness for her that was deep and pure, a miracle of love preserved. How clear it flowed, that fountain from the far past. Yes, we must quietly collect our past, collect it up with tacit understanding, without any intensity or drama, blaming and exonerating ourselves with a difference. And how wonderfully possible it seemed, this silent process of redemption, as I rethought our passionate, yet gentle and divinely inept little conversation in the church. Was that what it was like, meeting the great love of one’s life again after all those years? And had we not been for each other the shy direct innocent creatures we had once been? The nature of our converse had never been spoilt, and in that blundering conversation its note could unmistakably be heard again. Perhaps I would indeed, through her and through our old childish love, now irremediably chaste, be enabled to become what I had hoped to become when I came away to the sea, pure in heart.

The question: is she a widow? already seemed to belong to the remote past, to some vanished and entirely obsolete method of thinking. The question which was now, in spite of the programme for rational survival with which I was consoling myself, in danger of becoming agonizingly urgent, was: is she happy? To decide this it was necessary to inspect Mr Fitch. And moreover it was quite impossible to wait. As I walked slowly back to Shruff End I thought: I have got to see Mr Fitch today. I will call on them about six o’clock this evening.

It was not until I was actually ringing the bell at Nibletts that it occurred to me to wonder whether in all those years Hartley had ever actually told him anything about me at all!

Nibletts is a small square bungalow built of a red brick which has been partly and mercifully whitewashed. Without compromise it squats upon the hill, with a group of wind-tormented trees opposite to it, beside it the slope to the village, behind it the slope to the sea, beyond and above it, woodland. It has a firm solid air. Other houses might be built upon sand or even be made of sand, but not so Nibletts. The bricks are unchipped, sharp and uneroded at the corners. There is no moss upon the roof and one feels that none will ever grow there. An equally undimmed red-tiled path leads to the front door between beds of spiky little rose bushes in their first flowering. A fuzzy mass of white clematis, growing up one of the wooden posts of the porch, soothes with some grace the blue front door which is covered with very thick, very shiny paint. The door has an oval panel of opaque frosted glass which seems to creep before the eyes. Nibletts is not a charmless house, it is pretty and homey, with its discreet patchy whitewash and its bright flower-fringed door. Within there are four main rooms, the sitting room and kitchen-dining room being both at the back where a descending lawn is overwhelmed by the view of the sea. But I anticipate.

The day had become hot. The temperature had risen to eighty degrees in the afternoon and the air was still shimmering with heat. From the hillside one could see the distant headlands of the bay couchant in a light-brownish heat haze. The vast bowl of the sea was glowing a very pale blue with silvery mirages and streaks of light. The crowded roses were hotly odorous. The bell, which I rang just as I suddenly thought that perhaps Mr Fitch was unaware that I knew his wife, and that this accounted for her panic, was penetratingly sweet, like a tuning fork struck for a choir of angels. Low voices were at once heard within. Then, after a moment, Hartley opened the door.

I got the shock again of her changed appearance, since in my intense and cherishing thought she had become young again, before I saw on her face a look of fear which instantly vanished. Then I could see nothing but her large eyes, seeming violet and somehow glazed and veiled as if they were looking beyond me. I could feel myself blushing, the accursed red wave surging up through my neck and face.

I had deliberately prepared nothing to say. I said, ‘Oh excuse me, I was passing by, returning from a walk and I just thought I’d call in for a moment.’

I had time before she replied to think: I ought to have let her speak first! Then if she had indeed never told her husband about me she could pretend I was selling brushes. I was wearing my jeans with a clean white shirt and my faded but decent cotton jacket. I tried to look into her eyes but it was impossible, and the fear or whatever it was had gone.

She said nothing to me but turned to speak back into the house. It sounded like-‘It’s him-’ As she spoke she swung the door back, half closing it in my face, and for a moment I thought she was simply going to shut it.

There was the sound of an ejaculation within, perhaps just ‘Oh’.

The door swung open again and Hartley was smiling at me. ‘Do come in for a minute.’

I wiped my feet on the large clean bristly orange mat and stepped into the hall, blinded by the change of light.

All the way from Shruff End, and indeed all day since my resolve to call on Hartley, I had been feeling sick with excitement, sick with a blend of obscure bodily agitation and clarified fear, not unlike (only this was much worse) what I used to feel when I dived off very high boards in California to impress Fritzie. I could not now see Hartley properly in the sudden darkness of the interior, but I felt her presence as a violent diffused magnetism which somehow pervaded the whole house, as if Hartley were the house and as if I had been swept into a cavern where she embraced me and I could not touch her. Indeed the impossibility of touching her made my whole body shake with a kind of negative electricity. At the same time I was sickeningly conscious of the invisible husband. I had vividly imagined and reimagined beforehand the moment of arrival, ringing the bell, meeting Mr Fitch, and this had seemed in anticipation like a dive into the unknown, indeed into the irrevocable. Only now it was proving an agonizingly slow dive, as if the water towards which I was moving was receding, leaving me falling slowly through the air.

Hartley actually left me standing in the hall and went back into a room for a whispered consultation, almost closing the door. The hall was tiny. I was now conscious of an altar-like table with a rose bowl, and above it a large brown print of a mediaeval knight. Hartley emerged and threw open another door, ushering me into an empty room which proved to be the sitting room. She said, ‘I’m so sorry, we’re in the middle of our tea, we’ll join you in a moment. ’ Then she left me again, closing the door.

I realized now how dangerously I had acted and how foolish I had been. Six o’clock for me meant drinks. I had imagined it would be a sensible and humane time to call. In fact I had interrupted their evening meal. To beguile the frightful interval I looked round the room. A large bow window with a big semicircular white-painted window- ledge gave a partial view of the village and a full view of the harbour and the sea. A pair of expensive-looking field glasses lay on the ledge beside a massive bowl of roses. The sea was shining into the room like an enamelled mirror with its own especial clear light. This light excited and upset me, and dazzled me so that now I could scarcely see my surroundings. There was a thick carpet underfoot and the room was hot and stuffy and smelt excessively of roses.

Hartley came in followed by her husband. In my first dazzled view of him Fitch looked grossly boyish. He was rather short and thick-set and had a bullet-headed boy’s look, with a thick neck and short mousy hair. He had very dark brown narrow eyes, a rather large clear-cut sensual mouth, and a prominent shiny nose with broad flaring nostrils. He was broad shouldered and powerful looking. If he was crippled it certainly did not show. He came in smiling. I beamed, blinking a little, and we spontaneously shook hands. ‘Glad to meet you.’ ‘I hope you didn’t mind my calling? ’ ‘Not at all.’

Hartley, who had been wearing something blue, perhaps an overall, when she opened the door, was now revealed in a yellow cotton dress with a tight bodice and a big skirt. She moved nervously about, not looking at me. ‘Oh dear, I must open a window. How stuffy this room is. Won’t you sit down?’

I sat down in, or got stuck into, a tubby velvety low-slung arm-chair.

Hartley said to Fitch, ‘Shall we bring our meal in here?’

He said, ‘Why not?’

Hartley went back into the kitchen where they had evidently been eating and returned with two plates, while Fitch pulled a gate-leg table out from the wall and set it up rather uncertainly upon the thick carpet. Hartley then handed the two plates to Fitch, who stood holding them while she fussed looking for table mats to put them on. The