‘We’re close, we know each other.’
‘Yes, it’s strange, but in a way I do know you, and there isn’t anyone else who’s near me like that. I suppose it’s just because we were young, and later you can’t know people, or I couldn’t.’
‘You know me. I know you.’
‘I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was my fault.’
‘I can see you, Hartley, you exist, you’re here. I love you, Titus loves you. We’ll all be together.’
‘Titus stopped loving me long ago.’
‘Don’t cry. He loves you, I know he does, he told me so. All will be well now that you’ve got away from that hateful man.’
I kept touching the quiet tears upon her cheek, and at last, half thrusting me away, she began to caress my face. ‘Oh, Charles-Charles-so strange.’
‘We’re like we used to be, lying in the woods-Hartley, will you be with me tonight please at last, just to be together quietly? We don’t have to lie here like this all night, do we?’
She became rigid, then sat up. ‘It’s the wine-I’m not used to it-I must be drunk-drunk-’
‘Well, don’t ask me to take you back now! It’s much too late, from every possible point of view!’
She got to her knees, then stiffly to her feet. I rose and faced her, gently touching her elbows with my fingertips.
‘Charles, you don’t know what you’ve done. Of course I shall go back tomorrow. I must sleep now, I just want to sleep now, by myself, I wish I could die in my sleep, I wish I could run out and fall into the sea.’
‘What rubbish. Can you swim?’
‘No.’
‘Let’s go upstairs, promise me you won’t run away in the night.’
‘Tomorrow I must go back there. This is just more of my stupidity, oh I am so stupid, always stupid, I should never have left the house. I’m not angry with you. It’s my fault, everything is my fault. Yes, I suppose I love you, I’ve never forgotten you, and when I saw you I felt it all again, but it’s something childish, it isn’t part of the real world. There was never any place for our love in the world. If there had been it would have won and we wouldn’t have parted. It wasn’t just me, it was you, you went away, you can’t remember how it was-and there isn’t any place for this love in the world now, it’s pointless, it’s irrelevant, it’s a dream, we’re in a dream place and tomorrow we must leave it. You say it was fated, perhaps it is but not like you think. It’s an evil fate, it’s
I recalled Titus’s words, ‘She’s a bit of a fantasist.’ And no doubt she was indeed quite drunk. There was certainly no point in arguing now with the madness of her words. I hugged her hard. ‘Stop it, old thing, darling little Hartley. I did not go away from you, not like that, you know you’re only making excuses! Our love will make its place in the world, you’ll see, now that you’re here, it’s all very simple really. Just wait till the morning and the daylight and then you’ll feel brave. Come along upstairs with me and you shall sleep where you like.’
I led her out through the kitchen, carrying the candle. As we came to the stairs I saw a faint light under the door of the front room where Titus was sleeping, and I heard the murmur of voices. At the thought of Titus and Gilbert sitting on the floor on those cushions by candlelight I felt a quick spasm of jealousy. Hartley and I went upstairs.
I showed her the bathroom. I waited for her. I led her up and into my bedroom, but it was quite clear that she would not sleep with me. It was in any case better now to leave her alone. A kind of superstitious terror had taken hold of her, which took the form of a frenzied desire for unconsciousness. ‘I want to sleep, I must sleep, only sleep matters, sleep, I will sleep.’ I had had the sense to anticipate this situation and had made up a bed on the floor of the little centre room upstairs, with the mattress off my divan. I had also provided a candle, matches, even a chamber pot. I offered her a pair of pyjamas, but she lay down at once in her dress and pulled the blanket up over her head as if she were a corpse covering itself. And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.
I withdrew and left her. I closed the door and quietly locked it on the outside. I would never now lose that nightmare image of a distraught woman rushing to drown herself in the sea. I went to my room and kicked my shoes off and crawled into bed. I was completely exhausted, but imagined I would be too excited to sleep. I was wrong. I was fast asleep in seconds.
The next morning I woke to a sense of an utterly changed and perhaps dreadful world, like on the first day of a war. Joy, hope, came too, but fear first, and a black sense of confusion as if the deep logic of the universe had suddenly gone wrong. What was it that I had been so certain of, so confident about? What exactly was I up to? Had I done something mad and frightful yesterday, like a crime committed when drunk, remembered sober? There was also, to be expected, a visit from Ben.
The presence of Hartley in the house was itself like a dream, her sheer survival overnight now something urgently in question. I felt like a child who rushes to the cage of its new pet fearing to find only a lifeless body. With a sick stomach and a pounding heart I ran out into the corridor, beat my way through the bead curtain, softly unlocked her door and tapped. No response. Had she died in the night like a captured animal, had she somehow escaped and drowned herself? I opened the door and peered in. She was there and awake. She had pushed the pillows up against the wall and lay upon the mattress with her head propped, the blanket pulled up over her mouth. Her eyes stared at me under drooped lids. Her head kept moving slightly and I saw she was shivering.
‘Hartley, darling, are you all right, did you sleep? Were you warm enough?’
She lowered the blanket a little and her mouth moved.
‘Hartley, you’re going to stay with me forever. This is the first day of our new world-isn’t it? Oh, Hartley-’
She began very awkwardly to pull herself up, leaning her back against the wall, still hiding behind the blanket.
She said in a mumbling, gabbling tone, not looking at me, ‘I must go home.’
‘Don’t start that again.’
‘I came without my bag, without anything, I’ve got no make-up or anything.’
‘God, as if that mattered!’
I could see that, for her, it might matter however. In the bleak drained morning light which filtered in from the window which gave onto the drawing room she looked terrible. Her face was puffy and greasy, her brow corrugated, lines of haggardness outlined her mouth. Her tangled hair, dry and frizzy, looked like an old wig. As I gazed at her I felt a kind of new strength composed of pity and tenderness. And as I thought to show her how little I minded her shabby helplessness, my titanic love could even have wished for greater odds.
‘Come on, old thing,’ I said, ‘get up. Come on down and we’ll have breakfast. Then I’ll send Gilbert over to Nibletts for all your things. It’s perfectly simple.’ Or at least I hoped it would seem so to her.
She pulled herself up slowly, and then got onto all fours and rose laboriously to her feet. Her yellow dress was horribly hopelessly crumpled and she pulled at it ineffectually. Her whole body expressed the slightly ashamed awkwardness of the very afflicted person.
‘Look, I’ll lend you my dressing gown, I’ve got such a nice one.’ I ran to my bedroom and brought her my best black silk dressing gown with the red rosettes. She stood at the door of her room staring at the bead curtain.
‘What’s that?’
‘Well may you ask. A bead curtain. Now put this on. There’s the bathroom, you remember.’
She let me help her into the dressing gown, then walked slowly down to the bathroom. I waited, sitting on the stairs. When she emerged she climbed back up towards her room, moving heavily like an old woman.
‘Wait then, I’ll get you a comb, or you can come and use the mirror in my room, would you like, it’s brighter in there.’
She went on back into her own room. I fetched the comb and a hand mirror. She combed her hair, not looking into the glass, then sat down again on the mattress. There was indeed no other furniture, since the table which Titus had retrieved from the rocks was still downstairs.
‘Won’t you come down?’
‘No, I’ll stay here.’
