The Sea, the Sea

because it would only be possible here.’

‘I’m to be a lure-a kind of-hostage-’

This was dreadfully near the truth, but I had left out something very important which I now saw I ought to have mentioned at the start. ‘No, no. Just listen carefully. I want to tell you something else. Why do you think I persuaded you to stay here instead of letting you go away?’

‘I’m beginning to think it’s because you want my mother to come to you because of me.’

The wording of this went so far that I could scarcely say again: no. It was true in a way, but true in a harmless way, an innocuous way, even a wonderful way. As we stared at each other I hoped that he might suddenly, in this light, see it. But he kept, rather deliberately perhaps, his hard suspicious mask. I said, holding his eyes and frowning with intent, ‘Yes, I do want that. But I want it also because of you, through you, for you, you’re part of it, you’re part of everything now. You’re essential.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I persuaded you to stay here because I like you.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot!’

‘And you stayed because you like me.’

‘And the food. And the swimming. OK!’

‘Put it this way, and for the moment as hypothetically as you please. You are searching for a father. I am searching for a son. Why don’t we make a deal?’

He refused to be impressed or startled. ‘I suspect you’ve just thought of this son idea. Anyway, I’m looking for my real father, and not because I need one or want one, but just to kill a devil of miserable biting curiosity that I’ve lived with all my life.’

No, he was not at all what I had expected, though I could not now think why I had expected a dullard. Something in Hartley’s rather desperate account of him had suggested this perhaps. He was a clever attractive boy and I was going to do my damnedest to get hold of him. To get hold of him and then of his mother.

‘Well, think it over. It’s a proposition, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a deeply serious one. You see-in a curious way-because of my old relation to your mother-I am cast in the role of your father. I know this is nonsense, but you’re clever enough to understand nonsense. You might have been my son. I’m not just anybody. Fate has brought us together. And I could help you a lot-’

‘I don’t want your money or your bloody influence, I didn’t come here for that!’

‘So you said, and we passed that stage some time ago, so shut up about it now. I want to take your mother away, and I want at last to make her happy, which you think is impossible and I don’t. And I want you to be in the picture too. For her sake. For my sake. In the picture. I’m not suggesting more than that. You can work it for as much or as little as you like.’

‘You mean you’d take us both away and we’d all three live together in a villa in the south of France?’

‘Yes. If you’d like! Why not?’

He uttered an explosive yelp, then with a theatrical gesture spread out his hands, which were cleaner now. ‘You love her?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t know her.’

‘The odd thing is, my dear boy, that I do know her.’

‘Well,’ said Titus, and there was at last a look of admiration, ‘let’s just suppose… that you did… ask her to come and see me…’

I was lying in tall luscious green grass which was just coming out into pink feathery flower. The grass was cool and very dry and squeaked slightly as I moved. I was lying on the edge of the wood, on the far side of the footpath, just level with the garden of Nibletts. I was holding a pocket mirror. Hartley had just come out into the garden.

Titus had promised, for the future, nothing. He had treated the matter with an affected cynicism and had allowed me no glimpse of the emotions which were certainly there behind it. He pretended to treat the whole thing almost as a joke, a game, at any rate as something which he was prepared to do simply to oblige me, for the hell of it, to ‘see what happened’. He had agreed to stay on, ‘since he had nothing better to do’, and to ‘say hello’ to his mother. Though he added, with a slightly grimmer note, that he was pretty sure she would not come.

That remained to be seen; and it was also unclear to me how exactly, after all those years during which she ‘went along’ with Ben because she ‘had to’, he felt about her. Where and how did forgiveness figure in that scene? Mercy, loyalty, love? Was I not perhaps meddling with something dreadful? Unpredictable it certainly was. What kept me more boldly on was an optimism which Titus himself had rather crazily engendered with that image of the three of us living together in the south of France! If he would stick to me, and she would come out, there would be, for all of us, some tremendous spiritual release, like the sudden ecstasy which Titus and I had experienced in the sea. I would make her happy, I would. And I would make him happy and successful and free.

Another matter had come up between us after Titus had agreed, as he again cynically put it, to be a ‘hostage’. After he had agreed to stay on, if I wished it, ‘for a while’, I had said casually, boldly, ‘You haven’t anyone waiting for you then anywhere? I mean a girl or anything?’

He said rather stiffly, ‘No. There was somebody. But that’s over.’

I wondered: did he then come to me in loneliness, in desperation? And if so would this not make him all the more ready to accept-my overtures-my love?

It was the evening of the same day. There seemed no point in waiting longer. I had even told Gilbert the outline of the plan, though part of it I still concealed, even from Titus. Gilbert, who was now to play the key part which I had envisaged earlier, was enjoying the whole drama disgracefully. I had waited, hidden in the wood, for nearly an hour when Hartley appeared. There was no sign of the gentleman.

I watched her for a moment quietly. She was wearing the yellow dress with the brown flower pattern, and over it a loose blue overall. She walked a little awkwardly, her shoulders hunched, her head down, her hands deep in the pockets of the overall. She came down to the end of the garden and stood there for a while, like an animal, staring dully at the grass. Then she lifted her head and started looking at the sea, image of an inaccessible freedom. Then she removed one hand from her pocket and touched her face. She must be crying. I could scarcely bear it.

Cautiously I uncovered the pocket mirror and leaning forward tilted it to catch the sun. The little running bright reflection, like a tiny live creature, appeared at once upon the hillside just below the garden. I was careful to keep it well away from the house. I brought the brilliant little patch of light slowly up the hill towards her feet; and in a moment I knew that she had noticed it, and that she realized what it meant. This was a trick which we used to play on each other in summers when we were children. I sent the flash up for a moment to her face, and then began to lead it away, making a line across the grass in the direction of the wood.

Hartley stood staring towards me. I rose to a kneeling position and gently stirred the creamy-flowering branch of an elder bush. Hartley made a gesture, lifting her hand to her throat. Then she turned and moved back towards the house. I nearly called out with vexation, but then realized that she was probably going to check on Ben’s activity and whereabouts. Perhaps he was riveting china. I waited for an anxious minute, and then she came out again, minus the overall, ran to the fence, stooped through the wire, and came running across the grass towards me.

I retreated a bit into a little glade underneath an ash tree. A large branch had been wrenched from the tree by some winter gale, and through the gap the sun shone down upon a wild rose bush in pallid flower and a mass of fading cow parsley and buttercups. I stood beside the ash tree whose dense-textured grey smooth trunk brought back some elusive childhood memory connected with Hartley. I could now see her thrusting aside the big flat flower-heads of the elder. In a moment she had come to me, and I noticed how she instinctively avoided the patch of sunlight.

I put my arms around her and she consented to be held, a little stiff, bowing her head. I drew my hand down her back, pressing her against me, feeling her soft warmth, my knee touching her knee. She sighed and turned her head sideways but her hands still hung limply. The warmth of her body beneath the frail dress made me close my eyes and almost forget my plan and its urgency.

‘Oh, Hartley, my darling, my own.’

‘You shouldn’t have come.’

‘I love you.’ I sat down at the foot of the tree, leaning against it, and drew her down beside me. I wanted her to lie relaxed with her head on my breast. ‘Come. We were often like this, weren’t we. Remember?’ But she would