The Sea, the Sea

dream. I was lying on the floor, underneath a pile of blankets, alone, seeing the room by the flickering light of the fire. I had the urgent feeling that there was something I must do quickly before someone came back, and especially before I should forget some fact of the utmost importance which was about to vanish from my mind. I had to record this important thing, to catch it and hold it before it disappeared. I got up on my knees and reached a pen and paper from the table where I sometimes worked, and I wrote down what it was that I absolutely had to remember. What I wrote covered perhaps half a page or less. I wrote quickly but even then was not sure that I had remembered everything. I carefully folded up the paper and hid it somewhere in the room. All this, that I had written something and hidden it, I recalled rather dreamily upon the following morning. But-I could not remember what the thing was which I had thought so important or what I had written about it, and I could not, though I searched the room minutely, find the writing. An atmosphere of extreme and crucial emotion surrounded ‘the thing’; but although I constantly peered at it in my mind I could not discern what it was. And of the paper there was no trace. Possibly I had dreamt the whole episode. I had, of course, little doubt what the writing, if it existed, must concern: it concerned the identity of my would-be assassin.

‘But how on earth did I get out?’ I asked Lizzie. I was sitting up in an armchair in the little red room drinking tea and eating anchovy toast.

A rather exasperated doctor had arrived about two o’clock in the morning and woken me up and pulled me about and pronounced me sound. He said I had no broken bones and was suffering concussion and shock. I was to rest, keep warm and in future not wander about the rocks at night when I had had too much to drink. This was the first point at which it entered my confused mind that of course no one, except the assassin and me, knew that it was not an accident.

It was now about ten o’clock in the morning. It was very hot again with sounds of thunder, louder, nearer. The lightning flashes came like scarcely visible shocks. I had been visited, asked how I was, congratulated on my narrow escape. There was a slightly brusque air about these felicitations, perhaps because my friends felt they had been quite emotional enough about me last night and now felt more curt, or because they shared the doctor’s view of the matter. There was in fact a slight feeling that I had caused a lot of trouble by my stupidity. An instinct which I had not yet had time to examine advised me not, or not yet, to reveal that my fall was not accidental.

In a little while I would have to decide what to do. I was sorry I could not find my precious piece of paper. But of course I had no doubt about the identity of the murderer.

‘James thinks a freak wave lifted you up,’ said Lizzie.

Lizzie was looking radiant, her long frizzy hair tangled and bushy, growing like a healthy plant. She was wearing a striped shirt and lineny pants roughly cut off at the knee. Even after slimming she was a little too plump for this gear, but I did not object. Her skin shone with health. Only the tiny tight wrinkles round her eyes would have enabled one to guess her age. She shared none of the vague annoyance of the male contingent at my exploit. She was prepared to enjoy the drama in retrospect, since it had had a happy ending, and my survival had in some way increased her sense of owning me.

‘It can’t have done,’ I said, ‘the hole is too deep. Who actually pulled me out?’

‘Oh everybody did. When we heard you shout we all converged, only I got there last. By then Titus and James were pulling you off the bridge towards that flat rock, and Gilbert and Peregrine were helping.’

‘I can imagine how helpful they were. Funny, I can’t remember shouting.’

‘The doctor said you might not remember things which happened just before and just after the accident. It’s an effect of concussion. The brain doesn’t process it or something.’

‘Will the memory come back?’

‘I don’t know, he didn’t say.’

‘I remember being carried back to the house. I think I got as many bruises then as in the water. God, I’m bruised!’

‘Yes, that was awful, you were like a great dark dripping sack, so heavy, and we nearly dropped you down a crevasse. But that was much later.’

‘How, later?’

‘You don’t remember James giving you the kiss of life?’

‘Ah-well-sort of-’

‘You see, we thought you were drowned. He had to go on for about twenty minutes before you began to breathe properly. It was terrible-’

‘Poor Lizzie. Anyway, here I still am, ready to make more trouble for all concerned. Where did you all sleep last night? This place is getting like the Raven Hotel.’

‘I slept on the sofa in the middle room here, James has got your bed, Perry is in the book room and Gilbert is in the dining room and Titus slept outside. There’s just enough cushions and things to go round!’

‘Fancy old James bagging my bed.’

‘They felt they couldn’t get you up the stairs, and anyway the fire could be lit here-’

‘James hasn’t been to see me yet.’

‘I think he’s still asleep, he was rather knocked out.’

‘Well, I’m sorry my misadventure spoilt the party. I can remember you singing Voi che sapete.’

‘I hoped you’d be able to hear it. Oh Charles-’

‘Now, Lizzie, don’t please-’

‘Will you marry me?’

‘Lizzie, do stop-’

‘I can cook and drive a car and I love you and I’m very good-tempered and not a bit neurotic and if you want a nurse I’ll be a nurse-’

‘That was a joke.’

‘You did care about me when you wrote-’

‘I was dreaming. I told you, I love somebody else.’

‘Isn’t that the dream?’

‘No.’

‘She’s gone.’

‘Yes-but now-Lizzie-I’ve just been given a strange marvellous sign-and the way is suddenly-open.’

‘Look, it’s beginning to rain.’

‘Let us just love each other in a free way like I was saying yesterday.’

‘If you go to her, you will never want to see me again.’

It suddenly came home to me that this was true. If I came to possess Hartley I would take her right away. I would hide her, I would hide with her.

We would not go away together, not to Paris or Rome or New York, these were unreal visions. I could not introduce Hartley to Sidney Ashe or Fritzie Eitel or smart Jeanne who now styled herself a princess. I could not even take her out to dinner with Lizzie or Peregrine or Gilbert. She was in this splendid sense insortable. Hartley and I would live alone, secretly, incognito, somewhere in England, in the country, in a little house by the sea. And she would sew and go shopping and I would do the garden and paint the hall and have all the things which I had missed in my life. And we would gently cherish each other and there would be a vast plain goodness and a sort of space and quiet, unspoilt and uncorrupted. And I would join the ordinary people and be an ordinary person, and rest, my God how much I wanted to rest; and this would connect my end with my beginning in a way that was destined and proper. This, just this, was what all my instincts were seeking when I amazed everybody by giving up my work and coming here, here. Hartley and I would be alone together and see almost nobody and our faithfulness to each other would be remade and the old early innocent world would quietly reassemble itself round about us.

Lizzie, to whom I uttered none of the above, went away at last. I could see that she was sustained by hope; whatever I said she could not altogether believe in Hartley. The others looked in, at least Peregrine, Gilbert and Titus did. No one now talked of departure. It looked as if the holiday was to continue. What other joys would it provide? I asked for James but Gilbert told me that James was still resting upstairs, in my bed, suffering from total