The Sea, the Sea

‘I always thought it would get better later on.’

‘You were never frightened of me, were you?’

‘No, no. But I was afraid that you would find out where I was and write to me. He always looked at my letters. For years and years I always got up first and ran down every morning so as to find the post first in case there was a letter from you.’

‘Oh God.’

‘I did this after I told him too, I was always terrified of the post, in case there was anything he could pick on and misunderstand. Anyway I felt it was too awful living with the risk of his finding out, so I did tell him-and it was- terrible.’

‘He was furious, jealous?’

‘It was terrible. You see, he couldn’t believe it was innocent.’

‘Hartley,’ I said, ‘it was innocent, but it was serious, something happened to us forever in those years. So in a way Ben was right to be impressed, you were telling him something which made everything different. I can understand that.’

‘He wouldn’t believe we hadn’t been lovers, he thought I’d lied when I said I was a virgin. It was so especially terrible because what he thought wasn’t true and I could never convince him, though I told him again and again. Sometimes he’d try to trap me by saying he’d forgive me if only I’d admit it, but I knew he wouldn’t. He kept asking and pressing me and asking again and again and again, he just couldn’t believe it.’

‘My darling, we were lovers, though not in that sense-’

‘He kept asking and asking, every day, sometimes every hour. And he’d ask the same question in the same words over and over and over, whatever answer I gave him. And of course the more angry he got the more clumsy and stupid and wretched I got so that it must have sounded as if I was lying-’

‘I’d like to kill that man.’

She had drunk some more wine and was now sitting shivering, no longer crying, her wide eyes darkened, the pupils expanded, staring at the candle, with the tea towel unconsciously held up to her face, pressing it against her cheekbone like a veil. Her large brow, which looked white in the candlelight, was puckered and pitted with little shadows, but the way she had turned up the collar of her green cotton coat behind her hair gave her a girlish look. Perhaps that was what she used to do with her mackintosh collar in the days when we went bicycling. And even as I was listening intently to her words I was all the time gazing with a kind of creative passion at her candlelit face, like some god reassembling her beauty for my own purposes.

‘Wait, Hartley, it’s all right,’ for she had suddenly looked up in alarm, ‘I’m just going to light more candles, I want to look at you.’ It was getting darker outside. I rattled out a box of candles and lit four more, dripping the wax into tea cups and standing them upright. I ranged them round her like lights at an altar. Then I went and sat opposite to her, not near but looking. I so much wanted to see her smile. That would help the process of re- creation.

‘Hartley, take away that veil. Won’t you smile at me?’

She lowered the tea towel and I saw the wet drooping wretchedness of her mouth. ‘Charles, what’s the time?’

It was twenty-five past ten. ‘Oh, half past nine, earlier. Look, Hartley, dearest, none of this matters, it’s all over, don’t you see? All right, he was a jealous stupid man, a horrible man who deserves to be punished, only it doesn’t matter now, you don’t have to go back into that hell. But what has all this got to do with Titus? You were going to tell me something about Titus.’

‘He thinks Titus is your son.’

‘What?’

‘He thinks Titus is your son.’

Hartley had laid her hands flat on the table. Brightly lit by the candles she looked now like an interrogated prisoner.

I sat up very straight, blushing with amazement and shock, and found that I had put my hands flat on the table too. We stared at each other. ‘Hartley, you can’t be serious, he can’t be serious! How could Titus be my son? Your husband isn’t insane, is he? He knew Titus was adopted, he knew where he came from-’

‘No, that’s the point-he didn’t know where Titus came from. I was the one who brought Titus into our lives, it was my idea, I arranged it all. Ben was in a state of shock throughout the whole business, he never did anything but sign papers without reading them. Once, somebody from the adoption people came to the house and saw Ben, but I did all the talking. Ben was like a zombie.’

‘But Hartley, wait a minute, he knew I was a thing of the past, you didn’t adopt Titus until years and years after you left me.’

‘He thought we’d kept up. He thought we met secretly.’ Hartley, tearless and staring-eyed, was almost, with her glare of misery and her pale pitted forehead, accusing.

‘Hartley, darling, people can’t believe things which are totally crazy and for which there is absolutely no evidence. He must have known you hadn’t been seeing me.’

‘How could he know? I was alone all day, sometimes all night. He had to go away travelling.’

‘All right-let’s stay sane about this-let’s say it was extremely improbable! Besides-oh, how could he not believe you, how could he torture you with such mad imagined invented things!’

‘It didn’t happen all at once,’ said Hartley. She gulped some more wine. ‘He took against Titus from the start, perhaps because the adoption was the only thing I’d ever forced him to do against his will and he resented it and somehow deeply wanted it to fail. You see, he’d gone on and on up to that time saying that of course you had been my lover and you probably still were, and I’d gone on and on denying it till I was tired, I think we were both tired, I used to try to think about something else when he was talking about you. I thought at first he didn’t really believe I’d kept up with you but only said it to spite me, and perhaps at first he didn’t believe that, but I’m sure he thought we’d been lovers. And of course we couldn’t forget you because you were always in the papers and then later on we saw you on telly-’

‘God-’

‘And this had gone on sort of festering in his mind, and then suddenly, it was as if he had worked it out, it was like a sort of revelation, he connected you with Titus. There were two bad things in his life and he went on brooding on them until he felt they must connect, they must connect, and they were both my fault.’

‘But how old was Titus then and what sort of evidence-?’

‘I can’t remember how old Titus was, and perhaps it didn’t happen all that suddenly. He was always harsh with Titus even when he was a tiny child, and later on it was worse. He may have said it just as a crazy thing to hurt me, and then when I was so upset he began to think about it and to see everything I said as a proof of guilt.’

‘But, Hartley, this is madness, he must be mad, clinically mad-’

‘He isn’t mad.’

‘That’s what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe.’

‘He says that Titus resembles you-’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘And the funny thing is that he does look a bit like you.’

‘He looks like you because you brought him up, and you look like me because we gazed and gazed at each other for so many years. Loving couples come to resemble each other.’

‘Really? Perhaps you’re right. It did seem odd, uncanny almost. ’ This idea seemed to strike Hartley more than anything I had said, even for a moment to please her.

‘Besides, there must have been independent proof of Titus’s birth and his parentage.’

‘That was part of the trouble. You see, when I got Titus I simply didn’t want to know who his parents were, I didn’t want to think he was not entirely mine. The adoption society gave me a lot of stuff, they even gave me a letter from his mother, but I didn’t read any of it, I destroyed it at once. I didn’t want to give any part of my thoughts to his real parents. I didn’t want to remember anything connected with Titus before I carried him home with me, and I didn’t remember, I blotted it out of my mind. So when Ben became so interested and so suspicious and began to question me I didn’t know how to answer, at first I couldn’t even properly remember the name of the