The Sea, the Sea

not. I saw her in the sunny shady light, her breasts straining the buttons of her dress, as so much lovelier, so much like her old self, as if some woodland magic had made her young again.

She knelt beside me, clasping one of my hands, and staring at me with her big darkened eyes. Then, suddenly, and tenderly, she lifted my hand and kissed it.

This gesture moved and upset me so much that it actually served to bring me to my senses. The urgent matter was to get the girl away, and I had not even started my argument.

‘Hartley, my little one, you do love me, oh, I’m so glad! But listen, I’ve got something to tell you. Where is he?’

‘He’s out. I just went to make sure. But, oh you shouldn’t have come like this-’

‘Where to, how long?’

‘He’s gone to see a man about a dog. He’ll be some time.’

‘A dog?’

‘Yes. It’s quite a long way, over at Amorne Farm. And as it’s such nice weather he decided to walk.’

‘Walk? I thought he was crippled-had a bad leg-’

‘His leg’s stiff, it slows him down, but he likes walking, and the exercise does him good. You see, there was an advertisement in the shop, they were going to have a dog put down if they couldn’t find an owner, it’s a Welsh collie, a grown-up dog, not a puppy. It’s not good with the sheep. And we thought we’d look at it. We rang up and they sounded very nice, some people called Arkwright. ’

‘Oh-Arkwright. But you didn’t go-you decided to stay here in case I came-’

‘Ben thought I’d better not be there, I would get all excited about the dog and he’d rather decide by himself. It’s always a risk taking a grown-up dog-’

‘Hartley, listen. Titus is back. He’s at my house.’

She toppled sideways into the grass, releasing my hand. ‘No-’

‘Yes. He doesn’t want to see him-only you-he very much wants to see you. Come, come quickly.’

‘Titus-but why did he come to you-? Oh how strange, how awful-’

‘I thought you’d be glad!’

‘But that he should come to you-oh dear, what shall I do, what shall I do-’ She was suddenly a whimpering distracted child.

‘Come and see him, come on, get up.’ I pulled her up. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you want to see your son, isn’t it wonderful that he’s back?’

‘Yes, wonderful-but I must stay here-tell him to come here. He mustn’t say he was with you-’

‘He won’t come here, that’s the point! Come on, Hartley, stop behaving like a sleepwalker, move, act! He’ll never come here, you know that. Come along, he’s waiting for us. There’ll be plenty of time to see him before Ben gets back. I’ve got a car waiting at the bottom of the hill.’ I began to pull her back towards the meadow and the footpath, but she resisted, maddeningly sitting down again on the ground.

‘But tell me, Titus-is he-?’

‘Oh hurry! If you want Titus not to say he saw me you’d better come along and tell him yourself!’

This argument, vague enough, seemed to impress her, at any rate touched her through her panic. ‘All right, but I’ll only stay a few minutes, and you must bring me back at once!’

‘Yes, yes, yes’-I pulled her to her feet again.

‘And we must stay in the wood, someone might see us-’

‘I thought you didn’t know anybody here! Now do hurry-’

We went down by the woodland path. It was overgrown in places and rather dark and we stumbled along, whipped by twigs, clung to by brambles, and constantly impeded by little saplings growing in the middle of the pathway. The sheer stupid awkwardness of our progress made me want to scream. Hartley’s body moving beside me was jerky and clumsy, it was like conducting a log of wood.

We came out bedraggled and panting, onto the coast road. Gilbert had drawn the Volkswagen up onto the grass verge. When he saw us emerging he started the engine and backed towards us.

A few days of seaside holiday had transformed Gilbert. He looked younger, fitter, even his white curls were looser and more natural. He had been to the Fishermen’s Stores and kitted himself out with plimsolls and light canvas trousers and a big loose cotton jersey which he now wore over a white shirt. He had left off the deplorable make-up. These were fine times for Gilbert. He was a necessary man. He was helping me to acquire a woman other than Lizzie, and he was engaged in an adventure which featured a charming boy. His eyes blazed with vitality and curiosity. I handed Hartley into the back of the car and got in after, suddenly trying to see each of them through the eyes the other. Gilbert appeared as a handsome well-fed rather wealthy-looking holiday gentleman. The butler act was switched off. Now he was playing a man who owned a yacht. But no, I could not imagine how Gilbert saw my darling, or what he had expected the ‘one love’ to be like.

‘This is my friend Mr Opian. Mrs Fitch. Step on it, Gilbert.’

Hartley turned to me as the car sped along the coast road, but she said nothing. She clutched, perhaps unconsciously, the sleeve of my jacket with one hand. I sat relaxed, content to feel the touch of her fingers and of her knee. Her eyes had their violet tint and her face the strained fey expression which when she was young had made her look so desirably wild. Now it made her look almost mad. I found myself smiling with joy at the enclosed safe feeling of the car, at its speed. The sense of a successful escape was overwhelming. I smiled at her crazily.

When the car stopped at the causeway she was reluctant to get out. ‘Does he know I’m coming? Couldn’t he come out here to the car?’

‘Hartley, darling, do what you’re told!’

When I had got her out Gilbert, as instructed, drove the car on. It disappeared round the corner in the direction of the Raven Hotel.

I had told Titus to stay in the kitchen, but when we were half-way across the causeway he opened the front door.

I had been so absorbed in my mind with the mechanical detail of my plan that I had not really reflected upon what this meeting would be like. My intentions had far overleapt it and my hopes were assembling a much less awkward future. Now however I was jerked back into the present and an alarmed confused sense of what I had brought about.

As soon as she saw Titus, Hartley stopped and an almost terrible change came over her face. Her mouth opened and drooped in an ugly way as if she might cry and her eyes half closed and her forehead had the ‘pitted’ appearance which I had seen before; only what all this expressed was not shock or some sad overwhelming joy, but guilt and supplication. At the same time she quite unconsciously spread out her hands wide on either side of her, again not for an embrace but as a petition.

I took all this in quickly and was so instantly hurt by it I wanted to cry out, stop, stop! I wanted to interfere mercifully as between two unequal combatants. But I was already excluded from the scene. Titus came forward, frowning, manly, with screwed-up eyes, determined to be hard and calm and display no emotion. He could not however conceal, for it showed in his every gesture, even in the way he walked, that he was bent on raising a suppliant. He came to Hartley and somehow gruffly gathered her, hustling her towards the door. I saw him push her in through the doorway, his hands in the middle of her back. I hastened to follow.

When I got in they were already conversing, standing in the hall, and I felt: it’s not like mother and son. And yet why not? Family relations are all awkward, funny. Or had Hartley never managed to become his mother, never been allowed to? What would they say?

‘We didn’t know where you were, where you’d gone, we tried and tried to find out, we did try, we did ask-’ This as if Titus were accusing her of having failed to find him.

‘Yes, yes, I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right, I’m fine,’ answering a question not put yet.

‘And you are well and have your work or are you still-where are you living?’

‘I’m unemployed and I’m not living anywhere.’

‘We left our address with the people in case you’d lost it, in case you came back. And I wrote a letter-’

‘It’s all right, Mary, it’s all right-’

To check this conversation which I found somehow awful (I could not bear to hear him reassuring her and