The Sea, the Sea

Herein I did expect Titus to help me, but he was unwilling to, perhaps unable to. He seemed almost frightened of Hartley, frightened of her situation, her captivity, her awful helplessness, what he imagined of her mind. He hated her humiliation. He did not want to be involved in it. He seemed to feel, about the whole business, my ‘device’ or ‘game’ as he had called it, a mixture of disgust and complicit guilt. And no doubt, at least vicariously, he was afraid of Ben. He complained of the smell in Hartley’s room and said he could not breathe there, and yet he was too embarrassed to exert himself to persuade her to emerge. He begged me to stay with him when he talked to her, and if I left him alone with her he soon ran out. I suppose the difficulty was that they were unable to talk about Ben and there were so few subjects which did not relate to that gentleman. Also, I had already noted that Titus was inclined to be secretive about what he had been doing since he left home; he had been very unwilling to answer questions which I had put to him on the subject, and this evasiveness cut out another possible topic of conversation. In fact Hartley did not show any urgent curiosity about his doings. They talked, indeed, almost politely. At least they did on the first day. After that Titus was increasingly unwilling to see her, and she being more distraught I was more reluctant to ask him to.

I could not get used to hearing him call her ‘Mary’.

‘Mary, why not come out in the sun, it’s cold in here.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Are you feeling better?’ The convention that she was ill had usefully arrived from somewhere. With an appearance of banal complacency they discussed the bungalow. But perhaps they scarcely knew what they were saying.

‘And there’s a nice garden? We didn’t have a proper garden at number thirty-four, did we? More like a yard.’

‘Yes, more like a yard at number thirty-four.’

‘I always remember the old mangle in the shed there. Remember the old mangle?’

‘Yes-’

‘So now you can grow roses. You always wanted that, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, lots of roses, all colours.’

‘And you can see the sea right out of the window like we used to say would be so nice?’

I could not make out what this did for Hartley. I realized I had been naive in imagining that mother and son would clasp each other and at once discover a language of love. Well, perhaps this was a language of love. Love was there, I have no doubt, but the two of them remained amazingly awkward and tongue-tied with each other. The dialogue was forced clumsily along mainly by Titus. They soon exhausted the charms of the bungalow, to my relief. Their most successful conversations then consisted of childishly simple reminiscence concerning pointless details of houses and gardens in Titus’s childhood.

‘Remember the hole in the fence I used to look through when we lived at number sixty-seven?’

‘Yes-’

‘I stood on a box, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, on a box.’

Why could they not talk? Had her sympathy with Titus been really broken in those years, and his with her? A dreadful thought. Later I saw that of course it was the whole situation which made them speechless; and it was I who created and who maintained that situation.

This time of Hartley’s incarceration stretches out in my memory as if it contained a whole history of mental drama, vast developments, changes, checks, surprises, progresses, revulsions, crises. In fact it was a period of only four to five days. History, drama, change it did indeed contain. It is odd that after the first day I stopped worrying terribly about Ben. Of course I did not forget him, of course I expected him. I locked the doors carefully at night. It did occur to me that he might try to set fire to the house, and this haunted me a bit; after all he was a sort of professional fireman. But I ceased being obsessed with him, perhaps because I had by now succeeded in imprisoning myself mentally as well, and the danger of Ben seemed less real. Why did he not move? Was he making an elaborate plan or did he just prefer to torment himself by waiting and thus feed his rage? Was it possible that he was afraid of Titus? I soon ceased to wonder.

As for Titus and Gilbert, as soon as they could get away from Hartley and me they behaved as if they were on holiday. Titus did not want to discuss his mother or his father. He had opted out of these problems. He swam every day, always from the little cliff, sometimes twice or three times a day. He covered himself in suntan lotion and lay about naked on the rocks. Any scruples about ‘cadging’ now seemed to be completely gone. He accepted my hospitality as of right and gave nothing in return, no help, no warmth. Of course this is an unfair judgment. I cannot blame Titus for ‘not wanting to know’ what was going on upstairs. I think he did not even speculate; and indeed it would have been difficult to do so. Moreover, I gave him very little of my time and he may have resented this rather crucial neglect. I had decided by now that Titus was a simpler character than I had imagined at first; or perhaps, faced with horrors, he had chosen simplicity.

Gilbert was a good deal more curious and also good-naturedly anxious to help (he even wanted to put flowers in Hartley’s room), only I kept him well out of it. He remained essential of course. He cooked. He shopped while Titus sunbathed. But I did not let him come to the upper landing. A curious feature of the time and one which can still terribly bring it back to me was that Gilbert and Titus discovered that they were both singers. Gilbert was quite a good baritone, Titus turned out to be a tolerable tenor, and could also sing falsetto. What was more, they seemed to possess an extremely large common repertoire. Until I ordered them fiercely to go out onto the rocks they made the house ring with their noise. Of course they would have liked to have me as an audience to show off to (all singers are vain), and of course they would have liked to sit up half the night carolling and drinking my wine. (They both drank a good deal and I had to send Gilbert to the Raven Hotel for more.) Even from outside and at a distance they were audible, so loud were their voices and so pleased were they with the mutual exhibition of their talents. (Hartley never mentioned the singing; perhaps she was beyond caring or perhaps like her husband she was a bit deaf.) They roared out pieces from operas and musical comedies, madrigals, pop songs, folk songs, rounds, lewd ballads and love ditties in English, French and Italian. I think they became positively drunk with their music during this time; perhaps it was a natural reaction to the tension inside the house.

I have just said that I now found Titus simpler than I had thought at first. This was so in relation to his mother and to my own problems. (Perhaps by ‘simpler’ I just mean ‘vaguer’, ‘less attentive’.) But it was certainly noteworthy, and Gilbert noticed it too, that Titus was in superficial ways more cultivated than one would expect a boy to be who had left school early to ‘do electricity’ at a polytechnic. Where had Titus been during the last year or two? This remained mysterious. I remembered the cuff links and the book of Dante’s love poems. My own hypothesis was that he had been living with an older woman. He was just now about the age which I had been when I was kidnapped by Clement; baby-snatching, as everybody called it. Had someone snatched Titus-and then, and lately, discarded him? Gilbert’s theory, not surprisingly, was that Titus had been living with a man. Titus himself remained, on this subject, silent. (Perhaps this is the place to say that Perry was of course wrong about the nature of my relations with Fritzie Eitel.)

I have spoken of histories and changes. And indeed in a way later on it seemed to me that what I was doing in those days was reliving the whole history of my love for Hartley, not only the old times, but all the intermediate times as well. Every day, every hour, I remembered more. On about the evening of the second day Hartley became for a while more talkative and had the air of having been reflecting, the talk being the fruit of the reflection. This led to a dialogue which had a most distressing conclusion.

We were sitting on the floor, she on the mattress, I on the bare boards, with our legs outstretched, and facing the long high-up window which gave onto the drawing room. The middle room, usually darkish, was now in twilight, though the evening glow communicated a dim warm illumination. I touched Hartley’s hand. I felt from head to foot connected with her.

‘Darling, my silk dressing gown suits you, but won’t you take it off sometimes?’

‘I’m cold.’

‘Aren’t you beginning to feel that you live here?’

‘You think the important thing is that I made a mistake in not marrying you.’

‘There was a mistake. What’s more important is to undo it now.’

‘You just want someone to remember things with.’

‘That’s very unfair, when I want so much to talk of the future, only you won’t!’

‘You feel resentment against me because I went away.’