The Sea, the Sea

colour of the military style jacket of blue denim which he was wearing. He looked worried and young and for a second I saw him, not as the ‘devil’ of Hartley’s awful stories, but as an anxious young husband wondering if his wife has met with an accident.

‘I met her in the village and asked her back for a drink, but she only stayed a short while and then she said she’d take a short cut home across the rocks and after she’d gone I suddenly wondered if she might have fallen and sprained her ankle.’ It sounded so feeble and false.

‘A short cut across the rocks?’ This was an almost senseless conception, but Ben seemed too worried to challenge it or even to exhibit hostility. ‘You mean the rocks near your house? She could have fallen there. We’d better go and look, or-I’ll get a torch-’

As he went into the house I turned from the window and the lighted path and looked away down the road. After a moment I saw a dark figure. It was Hartley, slowly coming towards me up the hill.

I had a large number of instant thoughts. One was that it had been crazy of me to come here as now I had ruined whatever lying excuse for her absence Hartley might meanwhile have invented. I also thought that I must instantly warn her that I had told Ben of her visit. I also thought that I must somehow now stay with them so as to protect her against him. I also thought with anguish that this was impossible. I also thought, well why not just run down the hill, seize her by the hand, and pull her away with me, run away, anywhere, through the village, out into the fields. Spend the night at Amorne Farm and go to London by train tomorrow. Or get a lift on a lorry going anywhere: Manchester, York, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Carlisle. This seemed impossible too, for reasons which I could not quite work out. (I had no money, Ben would follow us, she would be too frightened to come etc. etc.) I also thought, let it crash, let them have the awfullest beastliest row they’ve ever had. She ran to me once. She will run to me again. I have only to wait.

By the time I had thought all this in about four seconds I had run down the hill as fast as I could and met Hartley. I did not touch her; I said very quickly, but distinctly, in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I got worried, I told him we met accidentally in the village and I asked you for a drink, and then you set off home over the rocks. I can’t stay now, but come to me soon. Come soon and come forever. You must not continue your life here. I shall be waiting for you every day.’

I could not see Hartley’s face, but her whole figure expressed not fear so much as a total dejected resigned misery which had passed beyond fear. She had an air of being dripping wet as if she had in truth been drowned and this was her ghost.

Ben was back at the gate now, and I called to him, ‘She’s here!’ and Hartley and I walked on to meet him.

Ben came out onto the pavement. As we approached he said ‘OK then. OK. Goodnight.’ Then he turned and went back into the house, not waiting to see if Hartley would follow. I held the gate open. She passed me with her blind dripping drowned head.

I had an impulse to follow, to push after her into the house, to sit down, make conversation, demand coffee. But it was impossible, it would only make things worse for her. Everything had gone amiss. The door banged.

I had no wish now to eavesdrop, indeed I had almost no curiosity left, so strongly did my mind shy away in horror from the interior of that house and of that marriage. I felt disgust with myself, with him, even with her.

I walked home, neither fast nor slowly. I remembered to pick up my jersey, which was now wet with dew. I found the house in darkness. The candles had fallen over again and burnt themselves out on the wooden top of the table, making long dark burns which remained there ever after to remind me of that terrible night.

History

FOUR

WHAT FOLLOWS THIS, and also what directly precedes it, has been written at a much later date. What I have now written is therefore more deeply reflected and more systematically remembered than it would be if I were continuing to write a diary. Events, as it happened, did not subsequently leave me much time for diary-writing, although what immediately follows has something of the air of an interlude (perhaps a comic one). This novelistic memoir, as it has now become, is however, as far as its facts are concerned (though, as James would say, what indeed are facts?), accurate and truthful. I have in particular, and this may be a professional attribute, an extremely good memory for dialogue, and I am sure that a tape-recording of my candlelit conversation with Hartley would differ but little from what I have transcribed. My account is curtailed, but omits nothing of substance and faithfully narrates the actual words spoken. How very deeply indeed many of the conversations, past and to come, recorded in this book, are engraved upon my mind and my heart!

After my return on the evening described I had had enough and I went to bed and to sleep. (I did not eat the Korean clams; later on I threw them away.) I awoke after nine the next morning and it was raining. The English weather had put on another of its transformation scenes. The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound of pattering. I got up and staggered around in the kitchen making myself tea and lowering my head like a sullen beast against any urgency of reflection. I did not wonder what had happened at Nibletts after I left. All that would soon be past history. Then as I sat in the little red room, with my head still sullenly lowered against the light of the rainy morning, I made it out that perhaps I had achieved something by thrusting the situation on into an area of crisis. Really I need not at present do anything at all but wait. Surely she would come. And… if she did not… there were other plans which I was already quietly making. I would not be without resources. I would wait. And with that I settled into a weird uneasy sort of peace.

A little later, I mean a day or two later in my condition of sursis, like a half-expected apparition Gilbert Opian made his appearance. Why was I not really surprised when a timid brief tinkle of the mid- morning bell revealed a nervously smiling Gilbert, and beyond him at the end of the causeway his yellow car? Oddly enough I had already made a sort of plan which included someone like Gilbert, and he would certainly do. Fate was co-operating for once. ‘Lizzie?’ ‘No.’ Just as well. It was still raining.

I put on a show of surprise and annoyance.

‘What is it then?’

‘May I come in, king of shadows? The rain is running down my neck.’

I led the way back into the kitchen where I had been eating chocolate digestive biscuits and drinking Ovaltine. A feature of my interim condition was that, from ten thirty in the morning onwards, I had to have regular treats and snacks all day long. A wood fire was blazing in the little red room, its lively mobile structures showing bright through the open door, and casting a flickering glow into the rain-curtained kitchen.

Gilbert was dripping.

‘Well?’

‘My dear, Lizzie has left me.’

‘So?’

‘So I decided to come here, I felt the urge. I wanted to tell you about Lizzie, I somehow felt I ought to. She’s sick, you know, I mean in her mind. She’s madly in love with you again, it’s the old disease, I was afraid it would come back. And one of the symptoms is she can’t stand me. Well, I suppose our cohabitation was a sort of precarious miracle. Anyway it’s all over now, our idyll is over, our little house is smashed. I’m bombed out. She’s gone. I don’t even know where she is.’

‘She’s not here, if that’s what you imagine.’

‘Oh I don’t-’

‘I suppose you think it’s my fault, is that what you came to say?’

‘No, no, I accuse no one. Destiny, God perhaps, myself. The battle of life and how to fight it. Whoever conscripted me made a big mistake. Now she’s gone, it seems incredible she could have cared for me and made that house with me, we chose things together like real people. No, I just thought I’d come. You’ve always been a