The Sea, the Sea

and-my plan had succeeded so well that it had trapped me also. I did now look at my watch. It was twenty-five past nine.

I took her hands and put them neatly one on top of the other, and my hand above them. Then I turned her face round to look at me. She had not been crying. To my unspeakable relief I received, not the harsh anxious glare that I so much dreaded, but a new quiet look, gentle and reflective; and although she looked so sad yet she seemed younger, more like her old self, and also more alive, less apathetic, more intelligent. My confidence returned. Perhaps, after all, her freedom was stirring. Perhaps my plan had been right. It was a question of a cure, a psychological cure. And in the instant I decided that it would now be fatal to show any weakness. I must be absolute, I must be to the full the being who had made Titus breathless with admiration.

‘I’m not going to let you go, Hartley. Not tonight, not ever. You can’t go back tonight anyway. It’s too late to get that letter. He’s got it now. Let him think what he pleases. Why should you fear him and lie to him? That hurts me so. I can’t bear it, Titus can’t bear it. Titus wants you, but he doesn’t want him. Doesn’t that suggest anything to your mind? I like Titus, Titus likes me. Why shouldn’t Titus be my son, why shouldn’t you be my wife? It’s fate, Hartley, it’s fate. Why should Titus turn up just now, why should he come to me? Why should I be here at all? You must see how extraordinarily it’s all worked out. Titus so much wanted to be with you, but he would never have gone over there, never. And you were glad to see him, weren’t you? And you were able to talk to him. What did you talk about?’

‘The dogs-’

‘The dogs?’

‘He was remembering the dogs we had when he was little, he likes animals.’

‘Oh-good. Hartley, just relax, let it go, let it drop.’

‘Let what drop?’

‘You know-this burden, this useless fruitless loyalty, this pointless sacrifice. You’re making his life a misery too, let it go, let him go. You’re like a half-dead person.’

‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve felt half dead-yes-often. I think quite a lot of people do. But you can live on half dead and even have pleasures in your life.’

The reflective tone of her voice made me want to sing out with joy. I was reaching her. She was speaking of it, of it. I was waking up my sleeping princess. ‘You must be hungry. Have some wine. Have some kedgeree, there’s a bit left.’

‘I’ll just have some wine. And some of that bread.’

‘And cheese. And olives.’

‘I don’t like olives, I told you before.’

She ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese, then thrust it aside. She drank some wine. I drank a little too. I could not eat.

‘Hartley, do you know, I think you’ve crossed the Rubicon. And what’s on the other side? Freedom, happiness.’

‘Something has certainly happened,’ she said, and she gave me her calmer face, deliberately smoothing out her brow with her hand. Then she smoothed her cheeks, moulding her face and making it calm and open. There was a capability, a capacity there which heartened me. I saw again the way her ‘wildness’ was also a kind of serenity. ‘But it’s not what you think. It isn’t anything to do with happiness. I’m not going to struggle with you, dear Charles, I mean to struggle physically, to try to rush away, and to weep and scream when I can’t, though that is just what I am doing now in my mind, weeping and screaming. There are moments, I’ve learnt, when one has to fold one’s hands. I can see what you want to do and why. You want to make my marriage crash, explode. But it won’t. It’s indestructible.’

‘You speak as if it were a prison.’

‘People live in prisons.’

‘Not if they can get out.’

‘Then too, sometimes. But-oh you don’t understand. You can only make things worse. And you have done so tonight.’

Her words, her tone, now sounded terrible, like a calm judge pronouncing a fatal sentence. Yet I thought, if she desperately, absolutely wanted to go she would weep and scream, and could reasonably believe that this would make me give in. So, since she was, though tragically, calm she must be a little bit glad to be forced to stay. No doubt her feelings were wretchedly mixed, positively minced up.

It was getting a little darker in the kitchen now. Titus came in through the outside door and went over to the stove. He did not look at us. He found the plate with the remains of the kedgeree. I was suddenly reminded of Gilbert who would still be at his post outside. I called after Titus, who was disappearing into the hall with the kedgeree, ‘Go and tell Gilbert to come in. He’s up by the tower with the car. Then lock the front door.’

I gave her some more wine. There was now something almost alarming about her resigned quietness. Did she expect I would suddenly take her home after all? Perhaps it was her dread of just this prospect which made her so quiet?

I did not immediately follow up what she said. I got up and locked the outside door and pocketed the key. I was faintly sure Ben would not turn up tonight. I was feeling so strong now that I hardly cared whether he did or not. I heard Gilbert coming in, complaining loudly to Titus, and I heard the key turn in the front door. I lit a candle and pulled the curtains although it was still light outside with a huge dull moon the colour of Wensleydale cheese. It was the first time I had been with Hartley without an urgent time limit. The sense of solitude with her, of the extension of time, was uncanny. I felt both exultant and unreal. I drank some more wine.

‘Hartley, I don’t think I’ve been perfectly happy-at all-since you went away. You can’t conceive how I suffered then. But we were happy, weren’t we? When we were on our bikes. That was youth, like it ought to be, joyous, perfect. I’ve never loved anybody else. That is why, really, you must excuse me if I now go to some lengths-’ I adopted a light tone, hoping to entice her into some gentleness of response. And I thought, oh God, if only I’d found her during the war, if only I’d run into her in the street in Leicester! And with the speed of the cinema-reeling imagination I saw how I might have met her, how she would have told me her marriage was a failure, or better still Ben would already have met a hero’s death, and… I even got as far as composing my explanation to Clement before Hartley spoke again.

‘You think it odd I’m so quiet. It’s like a sort of peace. Sometimes I feel I haven’t much further to go.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Sometimes I wish he would-’

‘Would what? Has he threatened you?’

‘No, no-that wasn’t what I was going to say.’

‘What do you mean then? Look, you can’t go back to him, I won’t let you, even if you don’t want to stay with me.’ But what did I think I would do then, set her up in a flower shop?

‘Hartley, you’ve got to stay with me and Titus, it’s your place. Apart from anything else, Titus having come to me will confirm Ben’s idea that he is my son.’

‘Have you only just thought of that?’

‘Oh, Hartley, darling, be gentle with me, don’t be so sort of remote. Admit it, say it, you’ve never really loved anybody but me, you’ve come home at last. That night when I saw you in the car headlights you had come here, you had to come. Say that you love me, say that it will be all right, that we’ll be happy. Christ, don’t you want to be happy at last and live with a man who loves you and is kind to you and believes what you say? Hartley, look at me. No, come in here, I don’t know why we’re sitting at this stupid table.’

I picked up the candle and pulled her into the little red room and drew the curtains. I sat in the armchair and wanted to take her on my knee, but she slipped to the floor at my feet and held on to my hand. I began very slowly and carefully to kiss her, then to caress her breasts. We were like children, adolescents. I felt for her a desire which was marvellously indistinguishable from pure love, reverent, strong, consumingly protective. And my desire was also that of a boy, incompetent, unskilled and humble. I did not know how to hold her or how to make her dry lips respond. Finally I got down on the floor too, man?uvred her to lie full length beside me, and clasped her, peering awkwardly into her face.

‘Hartley, you love me, don’t you, don’t you?’

‘Oh-yes-but what does it mean?’