The Sea, the Sea

‘No, at Amorne Farm, that’s where the other Arkwrights live. Such a nice boy. Did you know he was queer?’

‘No.’

‘God, it was such hell being queer when I was young.’

And of course all the time, whether I was talking to Gilbert or remembering Clement or watching the waves destroying themselves in the cauldron, I was thinking about Hartley and waiting for her and wondering how soon my nerve would break. I had already decided in general outline what my next move would be should she make none, but I was superstitiously reluctant to make detailed plans before I felt the time had come to change the world by force. I was continually conscious of Hartley, as of her real presence, and she was with me as Jesus used to be with me when I was a child. And I thought about her intensely, and yet, again superstitiously, deliberately, in a respectfully abstract way. I let memories from the far past come and go as they would. But about the terrible present and the gulf of those suffering years my imagination was squeamish and discreet. I did not want to become simply obsessed with her misery. I did not want to waste my energy on hating that man. It would soon be irrelevant. So I reverted to the past when she was the unspoilt focus of my innocent love, seeing her as she had been when she seemed my future, my whole life, that life which had been taken from me and yet still seemed to exist somewhere as a packaged stolen possibility.

However, in the event, before I had time to decide to move upon my waiting and upon the fact of her silence, something else, quite unexpected and extraordinary, took place.

I may have described the period of my odd quiet tete-a-tete with Gilbert as if it could have covered weeks, but in fact it covered days. Upon the last of these days, the one on which the tete-a-tete came to an abrupt end, I felt, in the morning, an exceptional restlessness. Avoiding Gilbert, I went out onto the rocks with my field glasses hung round my neck, intending to look at birds. I also had it in mind that I might see a seal, since Gilbert said that he thought he had seen one. However, once I was out there, upon the top of my minuscule cliff, I was assailed by a kind of fear which seemed familiar. To begin with I felt giddy, as if the sea were a hundred feet below me, instead of being, at that state of the tide, about twelve feet, and I had to sit down. Then I felt a nervous need to scan the surface of the sea carefully with the glasses: but not looking for seals.

Of course, with every day that passed, I knew that something which frightened me was coming nearer, the need to initiate what I must think of as a rescue; or at any rate to initiate something in response to Hartley’s dreadful silence, the causes of which I did not yet want to reflect upon. When you rush the house to rescue the hostage from the gunman how will the gunman behave, how will the hostage behave? It may have been this fear which had now decided to inhabit the huge empty scene. It was a sunny day, cool, with a certain wind. The sea was a choppy dark blue, the sky pale, with a smooth gleaming buff-coloured cloud just above the horizon like a long tatter of silk. I was wearing Doris’s Irish jersey. I began to study the sea through the glasses. I searched the restless white-flecked surface with an increasing anxiety, realizing that what I was now looking for and expecting momently to behold was my snake-necked sea monster. I put the glasses down and found that my heart was beating fast, thumping with an accelerating sound like that of the hyoshigi which I had last heard in that sombre vaporous gallery in the Wallace Collection.

With deliberation and to calm myself by the discovery that there was of course nothing to see I began again to study the jumping waters. One or two thick darker patches I identified as floating seaweed, there was a piece of wood which kept lifting its end up jerkily, some floating glassy-eyed gulls, a cormorant which passed suddenly through the bright circle of vision. Then, for no particular reason, I shifted so that my charmed and magnified gaze could move from the sea to the land. I could see the waves breaking on the yellow rocks at the foot of the tower, the foaming water spilling back from folds and crevices. The wet rocks, then the dry rocks, then some patches of the fleshy cactus-like grass, then a wind-blown clump of the papery white campion. Then the level grass beside the tower. Then the base of the tower itself, the big cut stones blotched with ochre-coloured lichen, patched with black crannies. Then, part way up the tower, a human foot encased in a shabby gym shoe.

At the sight of that foot I dropped the glasses, and looking with dazzled eyes and shading my brow I could see quite clearly half-way up the tower a figure straddled frog-like against the stones, clawing for handholds, dabbling for footholds, descending. In fact, for an agile person, the tower was not an impossibly difficult climb, but I felt an immediate pang of fear which made me seize the glasses and raise them again. In that interval the climber had descended further and now leapt the remaining distance to the ground, and when I had again focused upon him had turned round, leaning back against the tower, with his hands spread out on either side, and looking straight towards me, reminding me suddenly of a figure caught in the headlights of a car and pinned against a rock. My climbing intruder, now gazing into the lifted glasses, was a boy, or rather a being in the full yet indeterminate efflorescence of earliest manhood. He was wearing brown trousers rolled up almost to the knee, and a white round-necked tee shirt with something written upon it. His face was bony, with a freckled pallor which brought out the rather sugary pinkness of his parted lips. His fairish faintly reddish brown hair, tangled rather than curly, fell to his shoulders, some of it actually spread out upon the rough stone behind him and adhering to it. He was staring back towards me with a marked attention. There was nothing so very unusual about a trespasser on my little promontory. But this was no ordinary trespasser.

I got up hastily and began to move across the rocks. It was somehow clear that I was to come to him, not he to me. The glasses impeded my progress, so I paused to perch them on top of a rock and clambered on, now losing the boy to sight. I crossed Minn’s bridge. The final climb, up from a gully to the level above, required all my strength, and I was breathless when I got up onto the grass and stood there, breathing deeply and resisting an impulse to sit down. The boy had moved and was standing near to the further edge of the grass with the sea behind him.

I spoke first. ‘Is it-by any chance-is your name Titus?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Amid the whole surprise that ‘sir’ was a separate little shock. Then I sat down, and he, approaching me, sat down too, kneeling and looking at me. I could see his quick breathing, the dirty tee shirt with the legend Leeds University, the moist pinkness of his lips, the stubble growing in the scar. He had put one hand, with a gesture of unconscious grace, upon his heart.

‘Are you-Mr Arrowby-Charles Arrowby?’

‘Yes.’

His eyes were long rather than large, narrow, a wet grey-blue, like stones. His freckled mobile brow was puckered with anxiety. I had of course, in the first instant, apprehended a resemblance to Hartley, a ghostly resemblance which hung upon him or about him, as the resemblance to Wilfred Dunning hung upon Gilbert. And I had seen the hare lip.

The next thing he said was, ‘Are you my father?’

I was sitting holding my knees, with my feet tucked sideways. I felt now the desire to leap up again, to beat my breast, to make some absolute declaration of emotion, as if this question should be celebrated rather than answered. I also felt a distinct impulse to say Yes, and a stronger clearer veto on any lie, to this boy, ever. But why had I not thought about just this, this apparition, this question, why had I not expected it? I was confused, taken by surprise, and did not know how to address him.

‘No, I’m not.’ The words were weak and I could see his face unchanged, still frowning. I knew that it was very important to convince him at once. Any muddle here could breed horrors. I moved into a kneeling position so that I faced him level. ‘No. Believe me. No.’

He looked down and his lips pouted and trembled. There was a momentary childish look. He drew his lower lip in and clasped it with his teeth. Then with a quick movement which startled me he stood up, and I stood up too. We were now close to each other. He was slightly taller than me. Enormous vistas of thought were unrolling in my mind.

He was frowning again now, looking stern, his head thrown back, stretching his long thin neck. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry I troubled you.’

‘Oh, Titus, I’m so glad you’ve come!’ This was the most immediate of a great number of things which I wanted to say to him and which I was already inhibiting and placing in order in my mind. I held out my hand to him.

With a little air of dignified surprise he shook my hand rather formally and then took a step backward. ‘I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. And perhaps-impertinent.’