The Sea, the Sea

THREE

‘EVERY PERSISTING MARRIAGE is based on fear,’ said Peregrine Arbelow.

But let me explain. I am writing these pages, as I have written the previous ones (since page 100 in fact), in London, in my peculiar miserable derelict new flat. It has even occurred to me that if I wanted to live as a hermit retired from the world this would be a far better habitat! (Someone said something like this to me lately, Rosina?) So much has been happening, I thought I would write it as a continuous narrative without too many reversions to the present tense. So I am writing my life, after all, as a novel! Why not? It was a matter of finding a form, and somehow history, my history, has found the form for me. There will be plenty of time to reflect and remember as I go along, to digress and philosophize, to inhabit the far past or depict the scarcely formulated present; so my novel can still be a sort of memoir and a sort of diary. The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

I arrived here two days ago and have spent most of the time writing. On the second evening, as I shall shortly recount, I visited Peregrine. Today I shall continue to write; it is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End. I have been able to concentrate; and my God there is plenty to concentrate on. This evening I shall take the train back home. (Home? Home.) I have telephoned to the local taxi to meet me at the station. I am sitting at a rickety table up against a window, from which I can see the unutterably feathery tops of a very bland green plane tree and beyond its lilting leaves a jumble of walls and windows and chimneys, and backs of houses built out of the crusty dung-brown Victorian brick out of which this part of London seems to be constructed. I sold my big airy apartment in Barnes, so near the river, so near the railway, in a fever of haste when I was buying Shruff End. And this little flat was, almost in my intention, a sort of penitential chapel. I have not even yet had time to arrange the furniture. Beside me as I write is an armchair with a television set on top of it. (Thank God for the impossibility of television at Shruff End.) Beyond, a bookcase stands facing the wall, presenting to me its greyish back, draped with cobwebs and pitted with woodworm. Pictures, lamps, books, ornaments and rolled-up rugs cover the floor, together with a sinister scattering of pieces of broken glass and china. I hustled the removal men and they were not at their best. Crates of kitchen ware, not unpacked, fill the tiny kitchen. Even though I sold many things and put some in store (including several trunks full of theatre souvenirs) there is far too much stuff here. The two bedrooms are small, but have an attractive view down a mews where many plants and trees are growing outside the little houses. The kitchen, if you can get in, is satisfactory, with a good gas stove and a refrigerator. Yesterday I lunched on tinned macaroni cheese jazzed up with oil, garlic, basil, and more cheese, and a lovely dish of cold boiled courgettes. (Courgettes should never be fried, in my opinion.) I must remember to buy more courgettes and some green peppers to take back with me. And talking of food, I have just this moment remembered that last night (when I was with Perry) was the night when I was supposed to be dining with Lizzie and Gilbert, and I forgot to cancel it. They will have spent the whole day cooking for me.

What brought me to London was the following. Fundamentally I suppose what brought me away was a sense of a very important interval in the problem of Hartley: an interval for reflection, planning and a certain necessary purging of intent. What more immediately brought me was Rosina and her horrible little red car. Rosina turned up again at Shruff End on the evening of the day when I had that informative encounter with Ben which I have just related; and I amazed her and also got rid of her by asking her if she would drive me to London, leaving early on the following morning. I wanted to come away, as I have said, to think. And I wanted, as I will explain, to find some old photos of Hartley which had been left in London. And the journey was incidentally a good way of brushing Rosina off me, at any rate for the moment. It was not just that this donation of my company and willingness to accept her services as a chauffeur (she drives very well) was likely to placate. I was also able over the journey to indicate half laughingly, and as if the idea had of course never been serious, that there was no question of anything between me and Lizzie. Rosina took this news, as I knew she would, coolly and with an air of wise generosity, which would have enraged me had I been telling her the whole truth. As it was I even hinted that she had helped to ‘bring me to my senses.’ Did she really believe that I had abandoned Lizzie and that her terrorist tactics had influenced me? Or did she suspect that there was something quite else afoot? It was hard to say. After all she is an actress.

We were both surprised at how pleasant the journey turned out to be. We spoke of nothing personal but chattered and gossiped all the way and, in that enclosed time, enjoyed each other’s company as we used to do in the days before Rosina loved me and I was crazed by her. Tactfully she told me only what I wanted to hear about, failures and flops and bankruptcies and personal disaster. Fritzie’s plan to film the Odyssey had run into money trouble, Marcus was suing Al over Nell’s contract, Rita’s third husband had run off with a male dancer, Fabian was back in a mental home. Après moi le déluge. While I amused her with descriptions of my misadventures at the Black Lion. And without seeming in the least preoccupied I managed to think about Hartley all the way to London. After all I am an actor. Rosina dropped me in Notting Hill. We parted with amicable vagueness. She was too intelligent to press me at this point, especially if she believed that she had won some sort of advantage by a successful exercise of power. I had no idea what she thought or what she wanted and I soon forgot her. I gave myself up to that not unpleasing slightly mad feeling that always comes over me when I enter London, the scattering anonymous feeling of returning into oneself in the great tragi-comic metropolis when the bond of society, whether in train or car, is suddenly snapped. I walked to my flat (I would not let Rosina drive me there) and did some shopping on the way. I let myself in in a state of painful excitement. The alien jumbled rooms, still smelling of other lives, greeted me with hostility. I at once began searching for photographs of Hartley. I thought they might have got lost in the move, but all was well. I poured them from an envelope onto the table and spread them out, all brown and faded and curling at the edges. They were almost all snaps I had taken of her. Hartley always smiling or laughing, the wind blowing her hair and her skirt, posed upon a canal bridge, holding her bike, leaning against a five-barred gate, kneeling in buttercups and looking at me with a face blazing with love. I kept trying to trace the similarities, to build connections between the young face and the old, the old face and the new. But the images were too terrible, too agonizing, because of the overwhelming smell of youth and happiness which emanated from them. Prudent, careful of myself, I quickly gathered them all together and put them back into the envelope to take to Shruff End.

I then searched quickly for a picture of my mother, and soon found one, not anxious-looking but broad-faced and grinning with a jocund yet powerful expression that was terribly familiar to me. Her scraped-back hair revealed her bulky rounded brow, and her commanding wide-apart eyes gazed straight at the beholder. She would never have made an intellectual, but there were many careers in which she might have succeeded. She was often merry, but with a merriment almost ostentatiously derived from, or associated with, an ascetic simple blameless life. The jazz age passed my parents by. I also found, though I was not looking for it, a touching (too touching) picture of my father, very young, in the uniform of an infantry officer of the first war. How on earth had he survived that holocaust, and why had I never asked him really detailed questions about it? He too was looking at me, but unsmiling, diffident, with anxious eyes. How soft and young his mouth looked. However had that gentle timid being managed as a soldier? It was my mother who made decisions and argued with the tradesmen. Perhaps it was some of her northern toughness in me which had made me so browbeat the world as to accept me at my own valuation.

Then I saw, peeping out from under some horrible pictures of James on his pony (why ever had I kept those?), a photograph of Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle dancing together. I pulled it out. They were in evening dress and holding each other rather far apart for what was obviously, from the way they were looking at each other, a moment only. The next moment they would be closely embraced. Tango? Waltz? Slow foxtrot? There was something in their attitude which announced not only their happiness but their mutual dependence, their absolutely satisfactory relationship; he so burly, so masterly, so elegant, so protective, she so frail, so graceful, so trustful and submissive, so confidently loving. So bloody beautiful. Poor lucky Aunt Estelle, she never lived to lose those charms. However had I got hold of that photo? I now quite suddenly recalled that I had stolen it from the family album at Ramsdens. I turned the stiff brown photo over, and saw the glue on the back and a little dark brownish fur of the thick page from which I had removed it.

As I had been bowling along the motorway with Rosina in the sunny early morning and chattering about California and the latest row in Equity, I had been composing a letter which I intended to write to Hartley as soon as I got to London. But after I arrived I felt, first of all, a more urgent need to clear my mind and somehow to steady and console myself by writing a full account of what had happened. Then I found other reasons for not, as yet, writing that letter. I was in fact in a terrible ferment, not exactly of indecision, but of anxious impatient frightened emotion. I was still struggling to hold off a frightful crippling mindless jealousy-pain which was waiting just round some corner in my distracted soul. I had to keep that away from me by thinking; and the fruit of my thought was somewhat as follows.

When I left Ben after that rather horrible interview, I felt dark feral glee because I realized that I was now free to detest him; and I was free to do more, oh ever so much more, than that. The crude summary of the matter was that I was now able to think in terms of rescuing Hartley. There was a kind of dreadful violent leaping ahead in this thought, as if I were being powerfully jerked by something which already existed in the far-off future. Hatred, jealousy, fear and fierce yearning love raged together in my mind. Oh my poor girl, oh my poor dear girl. I felt an agony of protective possessive love, and such a deep pain to think how I had failed to defend her from a lifetime of unhappiness. How I would cherish her, how console and perfectly love her now if only… But I still had just enough prudence left to go on thinking.

I reviewed the evidence and I had very little doubt about what it pointed to. Hartley loved me and had long regretted losing me. How could she not? She did not love her husband. How could she? He was mentally undistinguished; there was no wit or spiritual sweetness in that man. He was physically unattractive, with his big unshapely sensual mouth and his look of a cropped school-boy. And he was, it seemed, a barbarian and a bully. He was a tyrant, probably a chronically jealous man, a dull resentful dog, a limited shut-in fellow with no sense of the joy of life. Hartley had been a captive all these years. She may, in the earlier times, have thought of escape; but gradually she fell, as so many bullied isolated women do, into a gradual despair. Better not to fight, not to hope. The shock of seeing me again must have been enormous. Of course she had digested some of it by the time I discovered her. Her frightened negative behaviour was easy to explain. She was probably afraid of her husband; but she was much more afraid of her old love for me, still alive, blazing away there like an underground oil fire: a love which, at the very least, could now utterly destroy her small despairing peace of mind.

About all this, and about how I could and would, if she wished it, take her away, I had intended to write to her in the letter, which I would of course deliver secretly. But reason and reflection, together with fear, suggested a delay. Fear said that if anything were to go terribly badly wrong now I should lose my mind. Reason said that the evidence was not conclusive and could be read in other ways. My anti-Ben persona was perhaps not a very reliable witness. Had Ben revealed himself as so very unpleasant in our meeting, given that my own conduct had been so exasperating? Well, he had, until the end, controlled himself; but I had felt, from the start, a fierce and unreasoning degree of hostility. Then there was the mystery of Titus. Why had he run away? Had he turned out a problem child, perhaps a delinquent? Had the tragedy of his departure, the shared grief, brought them closer together? The shared grief, the shared bed. My thoughts had still to be kept on a leash, and there were long dark passages down which they were straining to run. And of course there was (and this was something huge) the possibility that although he was ugly and charmless and brutal and dull she loved him and had been reasonably contented with him. I had answered, to my satisfaction, a series of questions. This one remained, and it was the last. Did she after all love him? But it was impossible. And yet I must find out. I must find out before I could proceed with the plans and projects which were tugging and tugging at my attention and my will. I must wait, everything must wait, until I had found out the answer to that question.

But how? I dared not simply write and ask her, there was too much at stake, and I realized as I thought carefully about it that her reply was bound to be obscure. Then (and I am speaking of yesterday) I saw the solution, the rather horrible but necessary solution to the problem. And about this, I will write in due course. Meanwhile let there be an interval of rest. In order to start resting I rang up Peregrine and went round last night and got drunk with him, and what we talked about I will now recount, since some of it is relevant to my situation. Indeed, now I come to think of it, nearly everything in the world is relevant to my situation. Of course I did not tell Peregrine anything about Hartley. I have never mentioned her to him, though I may once have dropped a hint about a ‘first love’.

I did some more shopping and brought the ingredients of our supper round to his flat in Hampstead. It has taken me a long time to persuade Perry that it is stupid and immoral to go to expensive crowded restaurants to be served with bad food by contemptuous waiters and turned out before one is ready to go. As it was we had a long relaxed evening, ate a delicious curry (cooked by me, Perry cannot cook) with rice and a green salad, followed by an orgy of fresh fruit, with shortcake biscuits, and drank three bottles of Peregrine’s excellent claret. (I am not a petty purist who refuses to drink wine with curry.) We then went on to coffee and whisky and Turkish delight. Thank God I have always had a good digestion. How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.

I confess I went to Peregrine not only for a drinking bout and a chat with an old friend, but for male company, sheer complicit male company: the complicity of males which is like, indeed is, a kind of complicity in crime, in chauvinism, in getting away with things, in just gluttonously enjoying the present even if hell is all around. In my case, I should however add, this did not include coarse and obscene conversation. I abhor artless bawdy. I had, long ago, to give some rather sharp lessons on this subject to Perry and to some others. Not Wilfred. He was never foul-mouthed.

So, having done my thinking and made my resolution, I had the relaxed sense of an interval, wherein I might rest and gather my strength. Hartley would wait. She would not run away. She could not run away.

‘Every persisting marriage is based on fear,’ said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you put the boot in or whether it makes you cower. As for marriage, people simply settle into positions of domination and submission. Of course they sometimes ‘grow together’ or ‘achieve a harmony’, since you have to deal rationally with a source of terror in your life. I suspect there are awfully few happy marriages really, only people conceal their misery and their disappointment. How many happy couples do we know? All right, Sid and Rosemary, and they’ve got nice children, and they talk to each other, they never stop chattering, it’s a kind of miracle, but do we really know, and how much longer will it last? I can’t think of any others, though I know several that look OK, only I happen to see behind the scenes! God, Charles, you were a wise man never to get married. You stayed free. Like Wilfred Dunning. Never put on a collar and chain. Christ, I loathe women. But I can’t get going on the other tack either. And you needn’t blush and look coy, I never fancied you. I know what you got up to with Fritzie Eitel! No-but I’d have had old Wilfred if he’d asked me. What did old Wilfred do for sex? No one ever knew. Perhaps he didn’t have any, and if so good on him. I still miss Wilfred. He was a sweet man. And he was generous, he liked to be the cause that wit is in other men. God, he inspired me. Getting drunk with old Wilfred was like-hell, what was it like? Did you know Lizzie Scherer was living with Gilbert Opian? I think that’s smart of both of them.’

‘I miss Wilfred too. Yes, I heard about Lizzie.’ One of my minor motives in going to see Peregrine had been to find out if there was really any gossip going round about me and Lizzie, and if so to scotch it. Apparently Perry had heard nothing. ‘So you and Pamela-?’

‘That’s over, really. I mean, she still lives in the house, but we don’t communicate. That’s hell, Charles, hell, like you don’t know. To be tied to someone where all the sources of speech are fouled up and poisoned. Everything you say is wrong or vile. Christ, I’m a rotten picker. First that bitch Rosina, then a friend like Pam. Seen Rosina lately?’

‘No.’

‘Nor have I, but every time I turn on the television there she is, that’s a bloody curse. I suppose I loved her once. Or it was just that she made me feel like Mark Antony. Penché sur elle l’ardent impérator… All I saw in Rosina’s eyes was a reflection of myself. Then I saw the divorce court. The trouble with Rosina is she wants every man: Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, Leonardo, Mozart, Wilamowitz, Mr Gladstone, D. H. Lawrence, Jimmy Carter-you name him, she wants him. I suppose you wouldn’t like to take Pam off my hands too, would you? No? Ah well, I can’t convey to you what it’s like, like a fight with knives, and really it’s still going on-we haven’t either of us got the sheer bloody strength to start arranging the divorce. Divorce proceedings are hell, you’ve got to think, you’ve got to decide, you’ve got to lie. I believe she’s got another chap, I don’t want to know. She goes away a lot, I only wish she didn’t keep coming back, I suppose it’s convenient. The sheer endless destructive bloody spitefulness, the wanton breaking of all the little tentacles of tenderness and joy, all the little spontaneous nonsenses that connect one human being with another. I do try to communicate with her sometimes, and she says the most hurtful thing she can think of in reply. One’s soul becomes numb with the endless blows-and of course one becomes a sort of fiend oneself, that goes without saying, one becomes ingenious in evil. I’ve seen it in other cases, the spouse who feels guilty, even irrationally, is endlessly the victim of the whims of the other, and can take no moral stand. That leads to mutual terrorism. And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one’s only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one’s partner’s head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow! Ah, Charles, Charles, you know nothing of these marital joys. Have some more whisky.’

‘Thanks. And how’s the little girl? What’s her name? Angela.’ This was Pamela’s daughter by her previous marriage to ‘Ginger’ Godwin.

‘She’s not so little now. Oh, she’s at school. At least I suppose she is, she goes somewhere every day. I ignore her, she ignores me, we never got on. I don’t think Pam sees her either. Pam is drunk a lot of the time now. It’s an edifying scene. Oh Charles, you’re so lucky to have escaped bloody scot free from all those frightful wounding traps where one’s blood flows and one yells with pain and watches oneself becoming a devil. You’re so out of it all, God, you’re clever. You’re such a smooth clean bugger, Charles, your face is so clean and so smooth and pink like a girl’s, I bet you only shave once a month, and your hands are so clean and your bloody nails are clean (look at mine) and you’ve got away with everything, scot free, scot bloody free. Yes, yes, I must get on with getting the bloody divorce, but that means communicating with Pamela and I can’t-I can’t face sitting down with her, or trying to sit down, we don’t sit down any more in each other’s presence, and trying to make a rational plan to rid each other of each other. Maybe she doesn’t want it anyway! It may suit her to live here and use this house as a base for whatever she’s doing! I pay a pretty large amount into her bank every month-’

‘Can’t she get a job or-’

‘Fob? Pam? Laissez-moi rire! Pam was never an actress, she was a starlet. She can’t do anything. She’s lived on men all her life. She lived on Ginger and she lived on some other poor American fish before that and God knows who before that. Ginger still pays her fantastic sums in alimony. And of course she’ll only consent to leave me if I agree to do the same. And do you know, I’m still paying alimony to Rosina, though she’s earning five times what I am. Suis-je un homme, ou une omelette? Sometimes I wonder. I was so bloody fed up and anxious to get rid of her I signed everything. God, if you would only remove Pamela too! You’re a lucky dog. Good clean fun every time and then you ditch them. Christ, you even got away from Clement. Why did I never learn?’

‘If you think I had a joy-ride with Clement-’

‘The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not.’

‘I don’t despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare’s heroines before I was twelve.’

‘But they don’t exist, dear man, that’s the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.’

It might seem from this account that Perry was doing all the talking, and indeed by the end of the evening he was. He is endowed with an Irish flow of words, and when thoroughly drunk is difficult to interrupt. I was in any case in a mood to incite him rather than to talk myself. I was soothed by his eloquent lamentations and I must confess rather cheered up by his troubles. I am afraid that I was pleased rather than otherwise that his second marriage had failed; I should have felt a certain chagrin had I been the involuntary cause of his being happy en deuxième noces. Such feelings do me no credit; but they are not uncommon ones.

We were sitting in the rather large and handsome dining room of Peregrine’s flat. A white tablecloth, much stained with wine, covered the table and looked as if it had been there for some time. Perry had moved his divan bed into this room, and had even installed an electric kettle and an electric cooking ring (on which I had cooked the curry) so as to be able to leave the rest of the flat to Pamela. The ring stood on a square of newspaper which was covered with food droppings. The charwoman had left after being insulted by Pam. The room was very dusty and smelt of burnt saucepans and dirty linen. However, as Perry said, the door could be closed and locked.

Peregrine Arbelow has, as I think I said earlier, just about the largest face that I have ever seen on a human being; though when he was young, in his ‘playboy’ days, this did not prevent him from looking handsome. He has a large round face, now rather fat and flabby, framed (with the help of science) by short thick chestnut brown curls. (It was he who advised me about the rescue operation on my own hair.) His large eyes have retained a look of innocence or perhaps simply puzzlement. He is a big stout man, always dressed, even in hot weather, in tweedy suits with waist-coats. He has a watch and chain. He speaks with a light touch of the accent of his native Ulster, which of course disappears absolutely on the stage, unlike Gilbert Opian’s lisp. He is an excellent comic, though not as good as Wilfred, but then nobody is.

I thought it was time to get off the dangerous topic of women. ‘Been to Ireland lately?’ This always set Perry off and was a guaranteed subject-changer.

‘Ireland! There’s another bitch. Christ, the Irish are stupid! As Pushkin said about the Poles, their history is and ought to be a disaster. At least the Poles suffer tragically, the Jews suffer intelligently, even wittily, the Irish suffer stupidly, like a bawling cow in a bog. I can’t think how the English tolerate that island, there ought to have been a final solution years ago, well they did try. Cromwell, where are you now when we really need you? Belfast has been kicked to pieces. Nobody cares. The pain of it, Charles, the pain of it, the bloody suffering, the degradation, the bloody tit for tat. Why can’t they let the thing stop somewhere, like Christ did? Could a hundred saints save that island, could a thousand? And I can’t just forget it, it’s like the shirt of what’s his name, it’s on me, it’s crawling on my flesh. The only thing I get out of it is sometimes, in some moods. I can actually feel pleased that other people are worse off than me, that their beloved husband or son or wife has been shot down before their eyes, or that they’ve got to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of their life. That’s how vile I am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that’s how bloody awful it is being Irish! I think I hate Ireland more than I hate the theatre, and that’s saying something!’

At that moment the door opened and Pamela put her head round it. Then, swinging on the door, she half stepped half fell into the room and gazed at us glassily. She was wearing a coat and had evidently just come in. She was still handsome, with a lot of tumbling wavy grey hair, now rather bedraggled. Her smudged scarlet mouth turned down at the corners in an aggressive unhappy sneer. She stared at me, screwing up her eyes, ignoring Perry. I said, ‘Hello, Pam.’

She turned round laboriously, still holding on to the door, and started to go out, then turned about, with her face wrinkled up in a pout and her lips working, and having assembled enough saliva in her mouth, spat onto the floor, leaned forward to inspect the spit, and reeled away leaving the door open.

Peregrine leapt to his feet, rushed to kick the door violently shut, then picked up his glass and hurled it into the fireplace. It failed to break. He ran round the table literally foaming at the mouth, lifted it high with a cry of ‘Aaaagh!’, a sound like a spitting cat only with the volume of a lion. I rose and took the glass out of his hand and put it on the table. He then walked slowly towards the door, looked at the place where Pamela had spat, tore a piece off one of the filthy newspapers and carefully laid it over the spittle. Then he returned to his seat. ‘Drink up, Charles, dear chap. You aren’t drinking. You’re sober. Drink up.’

‘You were saying about the theatre.’

‘You were so right not to publish your plays, they were nothing, nothing, froth, but at least they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Now you’re offended, vanity, vanity. Yes, I hate the theatre.’ Perry meant the London West End theatre. ‘Lies, lies, almost all art is lies. Hell itself it turns to favour and to prettiness. Muck. Real suffering is-is-Christ, I’m drunk-it’s so-different. Oh Charles, if you could see my native city-And that spitting bitch-How can human beings live like that, how can they do it to each other? If we could only keep our mouths shut. Drama, tragedy, belong to the stage, not to life, that’s the trouble. It’s the soul that’s missing. All art disfigures life, misrepresents it, theatre most of all because it seems so like, you see real walking and talking people. God! How is it when you turn on the radio you can always tell if it’s an actor talking? It’s the vulgarity, the vulgarity, the theatre is the temple of vulgarity. It’s a living proof that we don’t want to talk about serious things and probably can’t. Everything, everything, the saddest, the most sacred, even the funniest, is turned into a vulgar trick. You’re quite right, Charles, I remember your saying about old Shakespeare that he was the-he was the-only one. Him and some Greek chap no one can understand anyway. The rest is a foul stinking sea of complacent vulgarity. Wilfred felt that. Sometimes I remember he looked so sad, after he’d had them laughing themselves sick. Oh Charles, if only there was a God, but there isn’t, there isn’t, at all-’ Perry’s big round brown eyes were filling with tears. He fumbled for a handkerchief, then used the tablecloth. After a moment he added, ‘I wish I’d stayed at Queen’s and become a doctor. As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?’

‘No.’

‘No. You still have the joie de vivre of a young man. In your case it is nothing to do with goodness. You are ungood. It is just a natural endowment, a gift of nature, like your figure and your girlish complexion. But remember and beware-there are those who live in hell.’

I said, ‘Do you ever hit Pamela? Did you ever hit Rosina?’ I must have been drunker than Perry thought.

This question seemed to cheer him up a little. ‘Funny you should ask that, Charles, I was thinking about it just today and wondering why I never do, I never did. No. Never raised my hand to anybody. It’s the inanimate world that gets it. Glasses, plates, anything I can kick and smash. I think-you know-that’s something to do with Ireland, something I do for Ireland, in a funny way. Doesn’t help the bitch of course. But-you know-as soon as-anybody hits anybody, instead of screaming or-or spitting or-there’s a barrier passed-perhaps it’s the last barrier of civilization-and after that-it’s machine guns and shooting people’s knee caps off. God, why did I agree to play in that bloody TV series, it’s muck. They hit me of course, Pam and Rosina, no inhibitions there-’

‘A scratched face?’

‘Scratch be damned, they punch. Well, I deserve it. I’m a skunk-a-skunk. Yes. Yes. Drink up.’

As Perry was again applying the tablecloth to his eyes the door opened and a tall thin boy with a crew cut and a black leather jacket clumped in, ignored us, went across to the cupboard, opened it, took out a bottle, and walked out again closing the door.

‘Who on earth was that boy?’

‘Ah that’s no boy, Charles dear, that’s my stepdaughter Angela, she’s sixteen.’

‘God. Last time I saw her she was a little thing with golden ringlets.’

‘She is no longer a little thing with golden ringlets. Do you know that she shaved her head last month? It’s just beginning to grow again. Her father has given her a motor bike. And when I say a motor bike I don’t mean a put-put-put on which you sit as on a chair, I mean a long thick brutal thing which you bestride like a charger and which makes a noise like AAAARRGRR. I remember when you were being sentimental about wanting a son I told you what hell it would be. I think a daughter is worse. Thank God I haven’t got any children of my own. Children-innocence-God! You should hear the language Angie uses, and she’s made herself so ugly, so grotesque-Pamela doesn’t care, she’s-well, you saw Pamela just now, didn’t you-she did come in, didn’t she or did I dream it? Angie, yes. She wears climbing boots and leather everything. And she drinks. They all do. Christ, Charles, you’re lucky. No family. The family, the seat of love. And to think that I not only persuaded myself I loved those two women, I really did love them-that is, if I’m capable of love. Am I? I don’t know. And I loved-oh-earlier-other women-other people-lost now, lost, gone forever-but it would have been no good-skunks and rotters and cads can’t be happy, so there’s some justice in the world after all.’

I had reached the stage where it was very difficult to leave, very difficult to do anything except go on and on drinking whisky; and I was beginning to be stupidly affected by Peregrine’s tears. ‘Perry, who was your first love?’

‘Don’t call me “Perry”, fuck you. Well, I’ll tell you-it’s not what you’d-it was my Uncle Peregrine-yes. Uncle Peregrine. God rest his dear soul, he was a good good man. And if there’s ever a Judgment Day all my fucking family will be kneeling down behind Uncle Peregrine and hoping that he’ll say the good word and save them from the fire. And I’ll be lying on the ground waiting for him to raise me up, and he will raise me up. He was a sweet man. I don’t know why I’m calling him good, what did I know about it, I was a child. He used to hold my hand and hold me on his knee. He loved me, the bugger. My parents never fondled me, they never hugged me and kissed me, I think honestly they didn’t like me much, they liked my bloody sister, not me. But Uncle Peregrine liked me. He used to hug me and kiss me. And do you know, I’ve never had better kisses from women, though it was only-it wasn’t like you think-it was so innocent and sweet-and he only did it when we were alone. That taught me something, I understood. And we talked about everything, as if we were the same age, and I longed for his company, as if he nourished me. Then one day-my parents must have seen, or maybe they decided there was something funny about Uncle Peregrine, and they just banished him. I never saw him again. Never.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know. I heard much later on that he’d committed suicide. When I became an actor I took his name, partly out of piety, partly to spite my family. I was christened William. Well, that was my first love. What was yours?’

‘I forget. Thank you for telling me about your uncle. I liked hearing about him.’

‘I’m sorry I told you already. You’ll start making psychology. And psychology is bunk.’

‘I know psychology is bunk! I must go, Peregrine.’

‘Don’t go. I’ll tell you Freud’s favourite joke, if I can remember it. The king meets his double and says, “Did your mother work in the palace?” and the double says “No, but my father did.” Ha ha ha, that’s a good joke!’

‘I must go.’

‘Charles, you haven’t understood the joke. Listen, the king meets this chap who looks just like him and the king says-’

‘I have understood the joke.’

‘Charles, for Christ’s sake don’t go, there’s another bottle. “No, but my father did”!’

‘I really must go-’

‘That’s right, sod off just when consciousness is becoming bearable, and the light of understanding has dawned. I have got a great deal more to say to you. Oh all right, sod off then! I think I’ll come down to see you at your place by the sea, I’ll come at Whitsun if the weather’s decent, and we’ll get drunk again-’

‘Goodbye, Peregrine. I’m sorry about Ireland.’

‘You’re drunk after all. Fuck off.’ As I went out of the door I heard him murmuring, ‘So clean, so bloody clean’, as his head slowly drooped towards the wine-stained tablecloth.

When I had finished writing the above, which brought my novel-diary up to date, I packed my suitcase and left my muddled awful little London flat, where I had not had the heart to so much as move a chair or unpack a cup. I had had my lunch (I finished up the macaroni cheese) and imagined that a blank uneventful interval now divided me from my evening train home (I was wrong). I decided to spend some of the time at a picture gallery. I am not very knowledgeable about pictures, but they give me a certain calm pleasure, and I like the atmosphere of galleries, whereas I detest the atmosphere of concert halls. I must confess too that I derive a lot of sheer erotic satisfaction from pictures of women. The painters obviously did after all, so why not me?

After some indecision I decided to go to the Wallace Collection, where I had not been for some time. My father, who knew even less about pictures than I do, had taken me there once as a boy to see Frans Hals’s ‘Laughing Cavalier’ on one of our rare visits to London, and I associated the place with him. I think my father liked the gallery because it was so quiet and there was so much furniture as well as pictures, so it seemed like a palatial private house. He was particularly pleased by the many clocks (he liked clocks) which all, not quite at the same time and with varied chimes, struck the hour while we were there. The place, when I arrived, was almost empty, and I started wandering about in a sort of daze, looking at the pictures and thinking about Hartley. I was feeling a bit unreal as a result of the serious hangover which I had been fighting all the morning. The trouble with good wine is that it is very alcoholic but you cannot publicly pour water into it. In spite of aspirins with my lunch I still had a headache. A sort of brown fuzz and some very volatile darting black spots intermittently marred my field of vision. I felt unsteady and somewhat oddly related to the ground, as if I had suddenly become extremely tall.

Then it began to seem that so many of my women were there; only not Hartley. She was a vast absence, a pale partly disembodied being, her face hanging always just above my field of vision like an elusive moon. I had always run to women as to a refuge. What indeed are women but refuges? And sometimes it had seemed that to be held close in a woman’s arms was the only and perfect defence against any horror. Yes, they had, so many of them, been perfect to me, and yet… after a while… one leaves a refuge. Hartley was different, she travelled with me, I had never seen her as a place of safety. She had come inside the circle of myself and was within me, a pure substance of my being, like nerves, like blood. But the others, as I walked about, gliding and blinking and uncertainly related to the ground, they were there: Lizzie by Terborch, Jeanne by Nicolaes Maes, Rita by Domenichino, Rosina by Rubens, a perfectly delightful study by Greuze of Clement as she was when I first met her… Darling beautiful Clement, how she hated growing old. There was even a picture of my mother by Reynolds, a bit flattering but a likeness. Yes, I looked for Hartley. Some could have rendered her, Campin perhaps, Memling or Van Eyck. But she was not there. And then the clocks all began to strike four.

Some workmen were doing something or other downstairs, hammering a lot, flashing lights swarmed and receded, blending with my headache. I found myself searching my mind for something that it was important to remember, to do with that night when I had lain out on the rocks and seen the ultimate cavern of the stars when the universe seemed to be turning inside out, and at the time this had reminded me of something, only I could not make out what; only now, as I seemed to see again that vast slowly changing infinitely deep dome of luminously golden stars, stars behind stars behind stars, did I recall what it was that I had been put in mind of. It was the changing lights in the Odeon cinema where I used to go with Hartley as a child!

I was in the big central gallery where my father had taken me to see the ‘Laughing Cavalier,’ and the light seemed a little hazy and chunky and sort of granulated and brownish, even though the sun was shining outside, or perhaps it was just my hangover. The gallery was empty. Then I noticed something that seemed odd, a sort of resonant coincidence. I was gazing in a dazed way at Titian’s picture of Perseus and Andromeda, and I had been admiring the graceful naked figure of the girl, whose almost dancing pose as she struggles with her chains makes her seem as airborne as her rescuer, when I seemed to notice suddenly, though I had seen it many times before, the terrible fanged open mouth of the sea dragon, upon which Perseus was flying down head first. The sea dragon did not quite resemble my sea monster, but the mouth was very like, and the memory of that hallucination, or whatever it was, was suddenly more disquieting than it had ever been since the first shock of its appearance. I turned quickly away and found myself face to face with, directly opposite, Rembrandt’s picture of Titus. So Titus was here too. Titus and the sea monster and the stars and holding Hartley’s hand in the cinema over forty years ago.

I began to walk away down the long room and as I did so the hammering of the workmen down below seemed to be becoming more rhythmic, clearer, faster, more insistent, like the sound of those wooden clappers, which the Japanese call hyoshigi, and which are used to create suspense or announce doom in the Japanese theatre, and which I often used to use myself in my own plays. I began to walk away down the gallery and as I went my hangover seemed to be turning into a sort of fainting fit. When I reached the door at the end I stopped and turned round. A man had come into the room by the other door at the far end and was standing looking at me through the curiously brownish murky air. I reached out and put one hand on the wall. Of course I recognized him at once. He was my cousin James.

‘Feeling better?’

‘Yes, that stuff has worked a miracle, some old Tibetan hangover remedy no doubt.’

It was five o’clock and I was sitting in James’s flat in Pimlico. James’s flat resembles some chaotic oriental emporium, and I used to despise it accordingly until I realized that a great many of those tall-hatted Buddhas and curvaceous Shivas which I had taken to be made of brass were in fact made of gold. I recalled Toby Ellesmere once telling me that my cousin was a very rich man. (I have often wondered why I never managed to become rich.) He must have inherited plenty from his parents. Probably Ellesmere invested it for him. A lot of the stuff in the flat now does appear to me to be valuable, although as a collector or connoisseur I do not rate cousin James very high. He seems to have no conception of how to sort or arrange his possessions, they are dumped and piled rather than arranged, and elegant objets d’art are juxtaposed with the merest oddments of the bazaar. Sentimentality, unworldliness, despair?

The scene is such that it must be listed rather than described. James’s rooms are full of what I can only call, though I daresay he would dislike the word, fetishes: oddly shaped stones, sticks, shells, to which other things such as feathers have been (why, by whom?) tied or stuck, uneven bits of wood carved with crude faces, large teeth and even bones with strange marks (writing?) upon them. The walls are entirely covered either with books or with embroideries, or rather brilliant blue hangings, upon which have been fixed various far from reassuring masks. A lot of necklaces (rosaries?) lie about, tangled in bowls or hanging down in front of scrolls or mandala-pictures or photos of a place picturesquely called Kumbum. There are also a number of very exquisite have-worthy jade animals which I used to feel tempted to pocket, and plates and bowls of that heavenly Chinese grey sea-green colour wherein, beneath the deep glaze, when you have mopped the dust off with your handkerchief, you can descry lurking lotuses and chrysanthemums. On little lacquer altars, as I presume they are, stand, or sit, the Buddhas, what I take to be prayer wheels, and also miniature pagodas and curious boxes with complicated towers on top of them, some studded with coral and turquoise and other semi-precious stones. There is also, perched upon a bracket, an ornate pagoda-shaped wooden casket which James says is like the ones in which lamas are accustomed to keep demons prisoner. (When I asked if there was a demon in that one James just laughed.) Bejewelled too are the sheaths and handles of daggers, one of which (it is usually on James’s desk) has a long curving golden handle. I once saw it lying on his bed. I sometimes think there is something rather childish about my cousin.

The flat has an odd unique sweetish smell which I attribute to incense, though when I once asked James about it he said ‘mice’, which was I suppose a joke. Odd intermittent tinkling sounds are caused (I think) by pendant glass ornaments hanging in the recesses of the rather long and obscure hallway. These sounds reminded me of the faint clicking of my bead curtain at Shruff End; and it gave me a weird feeling to think of my ‘funny house’ all empty and silent (at least I hope so!) except for the tap-tap of that curtain swaying gently in the moving air. James’s flat is situated in one of those long Pimlico streets leading down to the river, which used to be so shabby but are now becoming so smart. It is a large flat, but unusually dark because of a lot of dusky and rather randomly placed painted screens, and of James’s habit of keeping the curtains half drawn by day and lighting only one lamp in each room. It took me some time to appreciate James’s stuff partly because it was usually too dark to see it. The place is also of course full of books, many in languages which I cannot identify. This has been James’s London base for many years, and as he has been abroad so much it is perhaps no wonder that it looks like a mere cluttered-up dumping ground.

We had been drinking tea out of little incredibly frail transparent porcelain bowls, and eating the custard cream biscuits which I remember James liking so much when he was a boy. I had no sensibility about food when I was young, but James was always choosey and faddish. He is of course a vegetarian, but was so even as a child, having made his decision, then a very odd one, entirely by himself. He was now just opening a window (the room was very stuffy and fragrant of ‘mice’), to let out a fly which he had carefully caught with a tumbler and a sheet of paper which I think he kept handy for this purpose. He closed the window. I sneezed. A distant bell tinkled. I wondered how long James had been watching me in the picture gallery before I noticed him, and why indeed he had been there at all on that particular day at that particular hour.

Let me now try once more to describe my cousin’s appearance. His face seems dark though he is not really swarthy. He has to shave twice a day. Sometimes he looks positively dirty. His hair, now a fairly copious untidy ruff around a little bald spot, is dark brown, like Aunt Estelle’s, only very dry and floppy, whereas hers was glossy. His eyes are a murky brown, an indeterminate un-specifiable shade which seems to change, now blackish, now a dark earthy yellow. He has a thin hooked nose and thin clever-looking lips. His face is unmemorable, by which I do not mean dull, it is indeed a rather intense face, but I mean that when I picture it in absence I can only conjure up a set of features, not a coherent whole. Perhaps it is just not a very coherent face. It is as if a fuzzy cloud hangs over it, and this goes with, or perhaps is, my idea that James is rather dark or dirty. At the same time, his inane boyish square-toothed grin can often make him look almost silly. His ‘muddy look’ is not furtive and certainly not sinister, but just somehow occluded. I wondered once again, as I now watched him smiling slightly as he let the fly out of the window, how exactly it was that he managed to resemble Aunt Estelle. Perhaps it was some trick of expression, a glow of concentration which in Aunt Estelle’s case was a kind of joy, but in James’s case was something quite else.

‘So your house stands there by the sea, all alone, on the rocks really?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good, that’s good.’ James’s murky eyes widened and then became for an instant vacant, as if he were voyaging elsewhere. This momentary absence was characteristic too, it never lasted more than seconds. I used to wonder if he took drugs (many of those old eastern hands do) but it may simply have been boredom. How I used to worry when I was young about whether I bored James! ‘But don’t you miss the bustle of the theatre? You never had any hobbies that I can remember. Whatever do you do with yourself all day? Paint the house? I am told that’s what retired people do.’

James did not always, in talking to me, avoid a perhaps instinctive reversion to a slightly patronizing jokey tone which used to madden me when we were boys, especially since he was the younger. The banal phrase ‘the bustle of the theatre’ and the equation of me with ‘retired people’ seemed with an easy gesture to consign my activities past and present to unimportance. Or perhaps I was still being too sensitive.

‘I am writing my memoirs.’

‘Theatre chat? Anecdotes about actresses?’

‘Certainly not! I want to do the deep thing, real analysis, real autobiography-’

‘Not easy to do.’

‘I know it’s not easy to do!’

‘We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus. Vain wars for phantom goods. I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity. People lie so, even we old men do. Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art. Proust is our authority on French aristocrats. Who cares what they were really like? What does it mean even?’

‘I should say it meant something simple and obvious, but then I am no philosopher! And I should say that it mattered too. It matters to the historian, it even matters to the critic.’ Nor did I care for ‘we old men’. Speak for yourself, cousin.

‘Does it signify what really happened to Lawrence at Déraa? If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did? We have to pretend in law courts that such things can be done, but that is just a matter of convenience. Well, well, it doesn’t signify. I must come and see your seaside house and your birds. Are there gannets?’

‘I don’t know what gannets look like.’

James was silent, shocked.

I was beginning to have an old familiar sensation which, oddly enough, I tended to forget in the interim, a feeling of disappointment and frustrated helplessness, as if I had looked forward to talking to James and had then been deliberately excluded from some kind of treat; as if something significant which I wanted to tell him had been, inside my very soul, shrivelled, trivialized by a casual laser beam of his intelligence. James’s mode of thought, his level of abstraction, was entirely unlike mine and he seemed to be sometimes almost frivolously intent upon exhibiting the impossibility of any communication between us. But of course really there was no intent, and indeed no treat, and in many ways my cousin could be seen as a bore, as an eccentric pedant with a kind of world-weariness which was simply tedious. He too after all had had his disappointments and about the most important of these I would doubtless never know. I suppose what I wanted was simply some ordinary amicable converse with James, which never happened, and which I was perhaps wrong in thinking that I could even imagine. After all, he was all that was left of my father and mother and Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle.

‘The sea, the sea, yes,’ James went on. ‘Did you know that Plato was descended from Poseidon on his father’s side? Do you have porpoises, seals?’

‘There are seals, I’m told. I haven’t seen any.’

I put my little fragile tea bowl down with such force that I had to lift it up again to make sure it was not cracked. I held on to the sides of my chair. It had just occurred to me that the weird feeling I had experienced in the gallery, and which James’s potion had cured, was not just a hangover, but the threatened recommencement of the hallucination induced by LSD. I quite suddenly began to have something like the same feeling again, combined with a vivid image of the open mouth of Titian’s sea dragon.

‘What is it, Charles? You’re wrought up about something. You were distressed in the gallery. I was watching you. What is it? Are you ill?’

‘Do you ever remember my mentioning a girl called Mary Hartley Smith?’

I had certainly not intended to talk to James about Hartley, I had not conceived of such a confidence. It was as if I had been driven into some corner or put under some spell where the only efficacious charm was the actual mention of her name.

James, reverting to his bored air, reflected, ‘No, I can’t say that I do.’

In fact I was pretty sure that I had been careful never to mention Hartley to James.

‘Who is she then?’

‘She was the first girl I ever loved, and I don’t think I’ve ever really loved anyone else. She loved me too. We were at school together. Then she went off and married another man and disappeared. I never stopped thinking about her and caring about her, and that’s why I never got married. Well, I’ve just come across her again, she’s there, down there by the sea, living in the village with her husband, I’ve seen her, I’ve talked to her, it’s incredible, and all that old love is still there, stretched out right from the beginning of my life till now-’

‘You relieve my mind,’ said James, ‘I thought you might be sickening for the ’flu, and I’m very anxious not to catch it myself just now.’

‘I’ve met her husband. He’s nothing, a little ignorant bullying fellow. But she-oh she was so glad to see me, she still loves me-I can’t help feeling it’s a sign, a new beginning-’

‘Is it the same man?’

‘How do you mean-oh yes, it’s the same man.’

‘Have they children?’

‘A boy, eighteen or something, he’s adopted, but he’s run away and they don’t know where he is, he’s lost-’

‘Lost-that must be sad for them.’

‘But oh-Hartley, of course she’s changed, and yet she hasn’t changed-and I mean what incredible luck to meet her again like that, it’s the hand of destiny. And she’s had such an unhappy life, it’s as if she has prayed for me and I have come.’

‘And-so-?’

‘Well, so, I shall rescue her and make her happy for whatever time remains to us.’ Yes, it was simple, and nothing less than that great solution would serve. I lay back in my chair.

‘More tea?’

‘No thanks. I think I’d like a drink now. Dry sherry.’

James began fiddling in a cupboard. He poured out a glass for me. He seemed in no hurry to comment on my amazing revelation, as if he had already forgotten it. He continued quietly drinking tea.

‘Well,’ I said after a minute, ‘that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself, James, how is the army treating you these days? Off to Hong Kong or somewhere?’ Two could play at that game.

‘I know you want me to say something’, said James, ‘but I can’t think what to say, I don’t know what it means. This old flame turning up, I don’t know how to react. I have various thoughts-’

‘Tell me a few.’

‘One is that you may be deluding yourself in thinking that you have really loved this woman all these years. What’s the proof? And what is love anyway? Love’s all over the mountains where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it’s something you’ve invented now. Though of course what follows from that is another matter. Another thought I have is that your rescue idea is pure imagination, pure fiction. I feel you cannot be serious. Do you really know what her marriage is like? You say she’s unhappy, most people are. A long marriage is very unifying, even if it’s not ideal, and those old structures must be respected. You may not think much of her husband, but he may suit her, however impressed she is by meeting you again. Has she said she wants to be rescued?’

‘No, but-’

‘What does the husband think of you?’

‘He warned me off.’

‘Well, my advice is stay warned.’

I was not completely surprised by James’s line, his refusal to express a lively interest in my situation. I had noticed in the past that my cousin did not like any discussion of marriage. The subject embarrassed, perhaps depressed him.

I said, ‘The voice of reason.’

‘Of instinct. I feel it could all end in tears. Better to cool down. One should not come too close to what one may intuit as the misery of others.’

‘Thanks for your reactions, cousin. Now tell me about yourself. ’

‘You mustn’t miss your train. But I can order a taxi by telephone, there is quite a reliable firm at Victoria. What is his name?’

‘The husband?’

‘No, sorry, I meant the lost boy, the son.’

‘Titus.’

‘Titus,’ said James thoughtfully. He went on, ‘And have they searched for him? Told the police and so on, whatever one does?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has he been gone long, have they no clue, no theory about where he is? Have they had a letter?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know-’

‘It must be terrible-’

‘Yes, no doubt. Now let’s forget my antics. What about your plans, what’s the latest in army life?’

‘The army-oh-I’ve left the army.’

‘Left the army?’ I was perhaps stupidly surprised and oddly dismayed, as if the army had somehow been keeping James safe, or safely caged up, or innocuously occupied, or something. I suppose I always felt that his soldiering made it happily impossible for us ever to collide or compete. Whereas now… ‘Oh well, you’ve retired, of course, golden handshake and all that. So we are both retired generals!’

‘Not exactly retired, no.’

‘You mean-?’

‘I have, as the expression goes, left the army under a cloud.’

I put my glass down and sat up straight. Now I was really amazed and upset. ‘No! James, you can’t-I mean-’ Speculations, of a not too improbable kind, about what sort of cloud my cousin had left the army under, crowded my mind and reduced me to silence.

I looked at James’s darkened face. He was sitting with his back to the lamp. The evening, through the gap in the curtains, was still brilliantly blue. James was smiling slightly, as he had smiled when he released the fly, and I saw now that he was looking at another fly which was perched on his finger. This fly was washing its front paws, then it was vigorously drawing its paws forward over its head. It stopped washing. James and the fly looked at each other.

‘Not to worry however,’ said James. He moved his finger and the fly flew off. ‘I had effectively come to the end of my career in any case and I shall not lack occupations.’

‘You can paint the house.’

James laughed. ‘Would you like to see a picture of a gannet? Well, another time perhaps. A pity you aren’t here tomorrow, we could go to Lord’s. The Test Match is in an interesting condition. I had better telephone for your taxi. Here, take some of these biscuits, I know you like them, Aunt Marian always used to stuff some secretly into my pocket when I was leaving your place!’

After James had rung for the taxi I said, ‘Who was that old man I saw here last time?’ I had suddenly recalled, and felt that I had entirely forgotten in the interim, that on the last occasion in James’s flat, and just as I was leaving, I had seen, through a half open door, in another room, a little oriental old man with a wispy beard, sitting quietly upon a chair.

James seemed a little surprised. ‘Oh him-no one in particular-he’s gone, I’m glad to say. There now, there’s the bell for your taxi. I hope you’ll get a decent dinner on the train.’

‘But my dear Charles,’ said Rosina, ‘I know you are a most eccentric creature, but you cannot want a woman who looks eighty and has a moustache and beard!’

It was the following day. I had got back very late. The taxi was waiting at the station all right, but the run home was slow because of a thick fog. There was no dinner on the train because of a strike, so I had had to make do with the custard cream biscuits, which I felt annoyed and sad to think of my mother stuffing into James’s pockets long ago. When I reached Shruff End I ate some bread and cheese. (The butter had all gone rancid.) My bed was uninvitingly damp, but I managed to find a hot water bottle and exhaustion sent me to sleep. I awoke late, feeling stiff and cold, and as I sat up my teeth began to chatter. Well might I be frightened of what I was proposing to do that day.

I put on my warmest available clothes, including the thick Irish woollen sweater which poor Doris gave me, but found myself still shuddering. Perhaps James’s suspicion about the ’flu had been right after all? A thick grey-golden mist still covered the land and the sea, bringing with it a terrible blanketed silence. The sea, where it was, when I walked out, just visible, caressing the rocks, was oily-smooth. The air felt damp and chill though I suppose it was not really very cold. A shirt which I had left drying upon the lawn was soaking wet. The interior of the house on the other hand was really icy, tomb-like, with an entirely new smell of mildew, and the insides of the windows were streaming with water. I tried, and failed, to light the new paraffin heater which I had purchased at the Fishermen’s Stores. I made some tea and was beginning to feel a little better when I heard a motor car hooting at the end of the causeway. I guessed rightly that it was Rosina, and felt for a few moments such intense irritation that I wanted to run out at her screaming. I also considered hiding, but I was beginning to feel hungry and did not see why I should abandon my house to a perhaps prolonged invasion. Then I conceived, an intelligent self-protective device, the idea of simply telling her. It was the right move.

We were sitting in the kitchen, with the calor gas stove on, eating dried apricots and cheddar cheese. (Dried apricots eaten with cake should be soaked and simmered first, eaten with cheese they should be aboriginally dry.) I was drinking tea, Rosina was drinking brandy, which she had demanded. The fog was now so thick that the room seemed to be curtained, and I had lit two candles which seemed strangely unable to spread any of their pale little illumination through the opaque brown twilight of the room. An ‘exciting light’, Rosina called it. I had decided to tell her some version of the Hartley story because I could not, in my present mood, with my present terrible plan, abide the prospect of lying and fencing and perhaps having a dangerous row. To tell the truth, I was almost superstitiously afraid of Rosina’s hatred. I wanted to neutralize her for the time, so as not to have to worry about her. I would soon have quite other dangers and decisions; and I had an intuitive conception, which turned out to be correct, of how she would react to my confidences.

She opened hostilities by saying (as I expected) that she had not believed a word of my recent story about having given up Lizzie, and had not believed that I was going to stay in London, and how right she had been, and if I imagined I was going to get rid of her-I cut this short by telling her, briefly and selectively, the story of the ‘old flame’. How very convenient these cliché phrases are, how soothing to the pained mind, and how misleading, how concealing. Here I was, about to make a decisive move, tormented by love and fear and awful incipient jealousy, telling Rosina a bland, even humorous, story about an ‘old flame’ and thus, while telling the truth, deceiving her. Rosina was cool, intrigued, delighted, intelligent. She was a very different auditor from my cousin and a much more satisfactory one. In fact I found a certain relief in telling the edited tale to this clever and, as it turned out, not unsympathetic woman. What I had intuited at the start, seconds perhaps (so swift is the mind) after hearing the maddening impertinent hooting of the little red car, was that Rosina would view ‘the Hartley question’ in quite a different light from ‘the Lizzie question’.

It is an interesting fact about jealousy (and jealousy is no doubt a major topic in this memoir) that although it is in so many respects a totally irrational as well as a totally irresistible emotion, it does show a certain limited reasonableness where temporal priority is concerned. I had taken up with Lizzie after I had met and appreciated Rosina, and it was fixed (quite erroneously) in Rosina’s mind that Lizzie had somehow ‘stolen me away’. Lizzie was moreover still an attractive woman. Such things made up a classical picture and evoked a typical response. But Hartley, under the ‘old flame’ heading, was a different matter altogether, and here Rosina’s sheer intelligence did work on the side of reason. Hartley belonged to my remote past, Hartley was ‘old’ (that is, my age), Hartley was unattractive and undistinguished and (a not unimportant point) thoroughly married. These data quick Rosina had taken in and assembled, I could almost see the computer working behind her sparkling crooked eyes. Rosina had assessed my chances and did not rate them high. Like James, she thought it would end in tears; and my truthful narrative subtly encouraged this belief.

It was soon clear that of course Rosina could not, from any point of view, regard Hartley as a serious rival; so much was this so that she was even able to pity her, not maliciously, but with a kind of interested objectivity. What Rosina had grasped was that the encounter with Hartley had withered my interest in Lizzie. So… when the whole foolish episode had ended in disaster… intelligent sympathetic Rosina would be there to pick up the pieces. Of course Rosina saw my relief at talking, my gratitude for her lively clever responses; and indeed I was, just for this moment, pleased with her. And of course I did not tell her everything, least of all my immediate plans. So dedicatedly Machiavellian did I feel just then that I had no sense of treachery as I thus talked Hartley over with dangerous witty Rosina. I led Rosina, and, where it was necessary to me, her own inventive cleverness conveniently deceived her.

It was interesting that Rosina clearly remembered the occasion when the headlights of her car had revealed Hartley to me pinned against the rock. ‘I thought I was going to squash the old bag like a beetle. Come, Charles, she is an old bag, the poor thing, you can’t deny it.’

‘Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat-’

‘Bats have radar. Yours doesn’t seem to be working.’

‘Use your intelligence, anyone can love anyone, consider Perry’s Uncle Peregrine.’

‘Perry’s what-?’

‘Never mind-’

‘I knew you were fibbing that time I drove you to London. You’re a rotten actor, I can’t think why you ever went into the theatre at all. I knew there was something going on, but I thought it was Lizzie.’

‘I never felt like this about Lizzie.’

‘Well, it had better not be Lizzie.’

‘It isn’t! Hasn’t even this convinced you? I love this woman.’ I love her, I thought, just as if I have been actually married to her all those years and have seen her gradually grow old and lose her beauty.

‘Oh, come, darling, that’s got to be a lie. This sudden move to the sea has unhinged you, and this ghastly pointless house. I think it’s the nastiest house I’ve ever been in. No wonder you’re having delusions.’

‘What delusions do you mean?’

‘I remember your talking about a first love, but these things are imaginary, they are fables. You’re just suffering from the shock of seeing her, give it a fortnight. And she’s got a bourgeois marriage and a son, and, Charles, she’s ordinary, you can’t do it to an ordinary woman just because you fancied her at school, it’s nonsense and she wouldn’t understand! Besides, you wouldn’t be able to, you’re not all-powerful, not in real life you aren’t. You’d simply get yourself into a very unpleasant mess, just the sort of mess which you of all people hate. You’d lose face! Think of that! Have enough self-knowledge to see how you’d hate it, you haven’t any role here, you haven’t any lines. You even admit she doesn’t want to talk to you!’

‘That’s because she’s afraid, she loves me too much, and she doesn’t yet know enough to trust my feelings. She will trust them. And then her love will simply sweep her to me.’ I thought: I must let her know, I must convince her, that I love her absolutely, I must write a long letter and get it to her secretly, and once she really understands…

In my solemn but rather general and undetailed version of the story I had mentioned Titus but had not, for some reason, said anything about his being adopted, or about his having run away. Perhaps I was still reluctant on my own account to reflect on the subject of Titus, and on how he might affect my chances. Nor did I describe my thoroughly unnerving tête-à-tête with Ben. Here the idea of ‘losing face’ could indeed find a foothold! I said that Titus was not at home and that I had had inconclusive meetings with Hartley in the village and polite conversations with her and her husband. I had not conveyed the fear and danger in the situation. Fortunately Rosina was too amused to ask really detailed questions.

‘Charles, be human. She’s timid, she’s shy, she must feel terribly inadequate and mousy and dull, after her life, meeting you after your life. She probably feels ashamed of her dull husband, and feels protective about him, and resentful against you. Use your imagination! And she’d bore you, darling, she’d bore you into a frenzy, and she knows it, poor old dear. She’s an old-age pensioner, she wants to rest now, she wants to put her feet up and watch television, not to have disturbances and adventures. And then supposing you did carry her off and then felt bored, whatever would you do, with yourself or with her? You’re used to witty unconventional women, and you’re an old bachelor now anyway, you couldn’t really stand living with anybody, unless it was a clever old friend like me. You couldn’t start a new woman, and that’s what she really is for all your touching memories of jaunts on bikes. I think you just want to break up her marriage, like you just wanted to break up mine. I’m pretty tough, but as it is you gave me a lot of misery over a long time, and I’m not going to let you off, you’re going to have to pay for my tears, like people in the sagas pay. You’ve lived in a hedonistic dream all your life, and you’ve got away with behaving like a cad because you always picked on women who could look after themselves. And my God you told us the score, you never committed yourself, you never said you loved us even when you did! A cold fish with clean hands! But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You’re like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer. No, no, but it’s different here, you must respect the poor old thing’s choice, her life, her son, her dear dull old husband, her nice little new house. Leave her alone, Charles. No wonder she runs a mile when she sees you!’

‘You don’t understand.’ How indeed could she? Much of what she said was sensible, more sensible even than she realized. But there was just one thing omitted: the absolute nature of the bond between myself and Hartley, and the certainty which, in spite of Hartley’s behaviour, we both had about the continuity of that bond. Hartley was not a ‘new woman’, she was the oldest strongest longest thing in my life. Nor could I or would I ever try to explain to Rosina how tired I was of ‘witty unconventional women’, and how it was that that ‘old bag’ was for me the dearest of all beings and the most precious and unspoilt creature in the world and the most thrillingly attractive. I had given to Hartley my first and my only completely innocent love, before I became a ‘hedonistic dreamer’ and a ‘cold fish’. Of course these insulting descriptions were the idle product of jealous spite; but in so far as I had been a ‘cad’, that in a way was Hartley’s fault! I had given her my innocence to keep, which could now miraculously be reclaimed. And these ideas somehow composed themselves into a passion of possessive yearning. I felt tenderness, pity, a deep desire to cherish Hartley, to protect her from any more pain or any more harm, to indulge and spoil her, to give her everything that she wanted, and to make her eternally happy. I wanted, in the time that was left to us, to console her as a god consoles. But I also wanted increasingly, and with a violence which almost burnt the tenderness away, to own her, to possess her body and soul.

Ever since the recognition scene, physical passion, roused, disturbed, confused, had twisted and turned in me, my senses in dialogue with my thoughts, because, as I worked and worked to join together her youth and her age, I so much desired to desire her. To achieve this was a crucial test, a trial, a labour undergone for her. Now, I realized, it was done; and my desire was like a river which has forced its channel to the sea. She made me whole as I had never been since she left me. She summoned up my whole being, and I wanted to hold her and to overwhelm her and to lie with her forever, jusqu’à la fin du monde; and, yes, to amaze her humility with the forces of my love, but also to be humble myself and to let her, in the end, console me and give me back my own best self. For she held my virtue in her keeping, she had held it and kept it all these years, she was my alpha and my omega. It was not an illusion.

Rosina, watching me, was now actually chuckling. I was sitting with my arms spread out on the table, still feeling cold in spite of the Irish jersey and the brandy (to which I too had now resorted) and although the calor gas stove was still burning, I had been about to light the fire in the little red room when Rosina interrupted me. She, perched on her chair, with one knee raised, was wearing wide blue cotton trousers, rolled up over blue canvas boots, and a casual blue and purple striped shirt pulled in at the waist by a narrow leather belt. She looked idle, practical, piratical, amazingly young. Her dark piercing crossed eyes regarded me with predatory amusement. Her thick wiry dark hair was now strained back and tied closely with a ribbon, giving her face a harsh animal intensity of expression. She had thrown off her coat, showing no sign of feeling the cold. And I thought, what’s the matter with me, it can’t be cold, after all it’s summer. But I shivered all the same. And was it not equally absurd to have candles burning at eleven o’clock in the morning? The candles seemed to be giving no light so I blew them out. Perhaps the mist was dispersing a little, though the window was still obscured. Rosina was just beginning to reply to me when the door of the kitchen quietly opened and someone came in. It was a woman, and for a crazy moment I thought it must be Hartley, embodied by my thoughts. But no: it was Lizzie Scherer.

Both the women uttered a tiny cry, a sort of suppressed swallowed yelp of shock, when they saw each other. Rosina got up very fast and moved behind her chair. Lizzie stepped towards me, looking at Rosina, and threw her handbag onto the table as if it were a gage of war. I remained seated. Lizzie was wearing a light brown mackintosh and a very long yellow Indian scarf, which she now unwound and carefully folded up and placed on the table beside the bag. She was blushing extremely. (So was I.) Her hair was covered with little drops of water. Perhaps it was now actually raining outside.

Rosina lifted her chair and threw it sideways onto the slate-flagged floor. She said to me, ‘You liar and you traitor!’

I said to Lizzie, ‘Is it raining?’

Lizzie said, ‘I don’t think so.’

I said, ‘Rosina is just leaving.’ Then just in time I got to my feet and moved hastily round the table. Rosina’s vermilion claws, making a slash at my face, just touched my neck as I got out of range. Lizzie retreated to the door. I faced Rosina’s rage across the table. ‘Look, I didn’t lie to you. I haven’t any sort of arrangement with Lizzie, she’s just arrived out of the blue and she doesn’t know.’

‘Does she live here?’ said Lizzie.

‘No! No one lives here except me! She just dropped in, people drop in, you have dropped in. Have some tea, some brandy, some cheese, an apricot.’

‘She doesn’t know?’ said Rosina, glaring at me but mollified. ‘Then hadn’t you better tell her? Or shall I?’

‘Are you going to marry Rosina?’ said Lizzie, stiff, hands in pockets.

‘No!’

‘Charles, can I speak to you alone?’ said Lizzie.

‘No, you can’t,’ said Rosina. ‘My God, if it was only Lizzie and me we could fight for you, with kitchen knives.’

I felt I had another shivering fit coming on and I sat down again at the table. ‘I don’t feel very well.’

‘Can I speak to you alone?’

‘No,’ said Rosina. ‘Charles, I want to hear you tell her what you have just told me, I want to hear you-’

‘Is Gilbert outside?’ I asked Lizzie.

‘No, I drove down by myself. All right then, if she won’t go-’ Lizzie, ignoring Rosina, sat down opposite to me at the table. ‘I wanted to say thank you for your sweet generous letter-’

‘Tell her, tell her!’

‘Thank you for your sweet generous letter. You were being very kind to both of us.’

‘I’m terribly sorry I didn’t turn up for dinner that night, I-’

‘Very kind to both of us. But it isn’t necessary for you to be generous like that. I was a perfect fool. Gilbert doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except that I’m yours on any terms. There’s nothing to argue about. I’m just yours, and you can do what you like, I don’t care if it all goes wrong, I don’t care what happens or how long it lasts, well of course I want it to last forever, but you will do exactly what you want. I’ve come here just to say that, to give myself to you, if you still want me, like you said you did.’

‘How touching!’ said Rosina. ‘What did you say to her, Charles, let’s have the truth about that at last.’ She picked up Lizzie’s handbag and threw it onto the floor and kicked it.

Lizzie paid no attention, she was staring at me, her flushed ardent face blazing with emotion, her lips wet, her eyes bright with the truthfulness of her self-giving submission. I was very moved.

‘Lizzie, dear-dear girl-’

‘You’re too late, Lizzie,’ said Rosina, ‘Charles is going to marry a bearded lady, aren’t you, Charles, aren’t you? And we were just discussing you, and Charles said he never really cared for you at all-’

‘I didn’t say that! Look, I’m going to talk to Lizzie upstairs. You stay here. I’ll come back.’

‘You’d better come back. I’ll give you five minutes. If you two set off for London I’ll follow you and smash you into the ditch.’

‘I promise I’ll come back. And, yes, I’ll tell her. Just please don’t break anything. Come, Lizzie.’

Lizzie picked up her scarf from the table and her handbag from the floor. She did not look at Rosina. I led her out of the kitchen and up the stairs. When we got to the upper landing I hesitated. The bead curtain was immobile and I decided not to pass through it. I led Lizzie into the little middle room and shut the door. The room was dark, since not much light was coming through the long window which gave onto the drawing room, either because of the fog or because I had failed to raise the blinds. It was also empty, since I had removed the table which was still lying in the rocky crevasse where I had dropped it on my way to the tower. There was a square of threadbare carpet. There was also, now suddenly conspicuous and rather sinister, the curly cast-iron lamp bracket rather high up on the wall. The carpet emitted a damp smell when trodden on.

‘I’m so frightened of that woman. Charles, you aren’t tied up with her, are you?’

‘No, no, no, she’s just persecuting me. Lizzie-’

‘I don’t know what she was saying, but it doesn’t matter. Listen, Charles darling, I’m yours, and I must have been mad not to say so at once. I was stupidly frightened, I felt I just couldn’t bear another broken heart, I thought I wanted peace, and I imagined I could check myself from running straight back into that old terrible madness, but it’s no good, I’ve run back, I’m mad again. I felt sorry for Gilbert and I wanted time to think of a compromise but there isn’t any compromise. I don’t care what happens or what you do to me, I don’t care if I die of it. I don’t want you to be unselfish and scrupulous and generous, I want you to be the lord and the king as you’ve always been. I love you, Charles, and I belong to you and I’ll do from this moment on forever whatever you ask of me.’

We stood staring at each other and trembling in that little dark cell-like room underneath the cast-iron lamp bracket. ‘Lizzie, forgive me, it was a mistake. Sweet Lizzie, it’s no use, we cannot ever be together, I can’t take you and keep you like I thought, I can’t be the king any more. I’m sorry I wrote to you. I’m very fond of you, I love you, but not like that. It was just an empty idea, an abstract idea, like you said, you were quite right, it wouldn’t have worked, it wouldn’t have lasted. You see, I’ve met someone else, no, not Rosina, a woman I knew and loved long ago, you remember I told you, the first one. So I can’t ever be yours, little Lizzie, and you can’t be mine. You must go back to Gilbert, make him happy, let things be as they were. Oh please believe me and please forgive me. It was a mistake.’

‘A mistake,’ said Lizzie, looking down at her shiny black high-heeled shoes which were wet from the grass of the causeway. ‘I see.’ She lifted her head and looked at me, her face crimson, her lower lip trembling, her eyes vague and terrible.

‘You do remember about that girl, I told you once, well I met her again, she’s here and-’

‘I’ll say goodbye then.’

‘Lizzie, darling, don’t go like that, we’ll be friends, won’t we, won’t we, like you asked in your first letter. I’ll come and see you and Gilbert-’

‘I don’t think I’ll be with Gilbert any more. Things can’t be as they were. I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

‘Lizzie, just hold my hand for a moment-’

She gave me her limp hand. It felt damp and unresponsive and small and I could not continue the gesture into an embrace. She withdrew her hand and began to fiddle in her handbag. She brought out a fragment of the mirror which had been broken by Rosina’s kick, then a small white handkerchief. As soon as she had the handkerchief in her hand she began very quietly to cry.

I felt so touched and sad, and yet so oddly proudly detached and somehow sentimental, as I seemed to see in a second, all rolled up into a ball and all vanishing, some life that I might have had with Lizzie, my Cherubino, my Ariel, my Puck, my son: some life we might have had together if I had been different, and she had been different. Now it was gone, whatever happened next, and the world was changed. I repeated with a kind of sad self-tormenting pleasure, ‘No, Lizzie, dear heart, little brave Lizzie, it cannot be. I am so grateful to you for your-for your-’

‘It’s funny,’ said Lizzie, speaking almost calmly through her quiet tears, ‘it’s funny. The drive from London, it’s such a long way, I hired a car, I didn’t drive Gilbert’s, all the way I had a sort of marvellous love conversation with you, if only it hadn’t been for that long drive, it all came to a climax, like a coronation, I was thinking how surprised and pleased you’d be to see me, and how perfectly happy we’d both be and we’d laugh and laugh like we used to, and I kept picturing it and I felt such love and such joy-even though I was saying to myself that I might end up with a broken heart and this time it would kill me-but I thought I don’t care how it ends or how much I suffer, so long as he wants me and takes me in his arms-and now it’s ended before it even began, and I never imagined it would all be spoilt and broken at the start-and now I’ve got nothing-except my love for you-all wakened up again and rejected-all wakened up again-forever and ever-’

‘Lizzie, it will be quiet, it will sleep, it did sleep.’

She shook her head, gripping her handkerchief in her teeth.

‘Lizzie, I’ll write to you.’

Her tears had ceased. She put away the handkerchief and the broken mirror and unwound the yellow scarf. ‘Don’t write, Charles, it’s kinder. It’s funny, I thought it was the ending then, and it wasn’t, it’s the ending now. Please don’t write to me if you want to be kind. I don’t want-any more-’

She crumpled up the scarf and stuffed it in her pocket. Then she turned and quickly swung open the door, nearly running into Rosina who was standing just outside. Rosina jumped back, and Lizzie ran away down the stairs, leaning hard on the banister, her high-heeled shoes clattering and slithering. I tried to follow her, but Rosina grasped my arm, exerting quite a lot of force and bracing one of her booted feet against my foot. We reeled against the wall. ‘Let her go.’ The front door banged.

I stood for a moment staring at the bead curtain which was swaying and clicking. Then I walked slowly downstairs. Rosina followed me. We went into the kitchen and sat down again at the table.

‘Don’t worry, Charles, that lusty little animal won’t break its heart.’

I was silent.

‘Now I suppose you want me to discuss poor Lizzie with you?’

‘No.’

‘Poor old Charles, you’re demoted as God.’

‘OK. Please go.’

‘If you ever set up with Lizzie Scherer I’ll kill both of you.’

‘Oh Rosina, don’t be stupid, don’t be vulgar. Just please go away. Well, I suppose you’d better let Lizzie get a start if you’re going back to London.’

‘I’m not, I’m going to the Raven Hotel to have a very good lunch alone. Then I’m going to Manchester to do some filming. I shall leave you to your thoughts and I hope they hurt. I won’t interfere with your caper with the bearded lady on one condition. ’

‘What?’

‘That you promise to tell me everything about it.’

‘OK.’

‘You promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get up, Charles.’

I rose mechanically to my feet. Rosina came round the table and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me. She gave me one of her wet kisses. ‘Well, goodbye, I’ll be back.’

The front door banged again, and a moment later I heard the departing scream of the little red car. For a moment only I hoped that Lizzie might return. Then I thought what luck it was that Lizzie had not come running to me after my first letter.

I went into the next room and tried to light the fire but failed. There was not enough kindling wood. I was feeling thoroughly disturbed by Lizzie’s crying and Rosina’s kiss. I was miserable about Lizzie but in rather a blank way and I was reluctant to think about her. I wanted her sympathy. I was already regretting my thoroughly vulgar conversation with Rosina. It had seemed a smart thing to do at the time, to tell her about Hartley, but now I was filled with forebodings. In effect, I had given Rosina another weapon. Then I began to wonder a little about cousin James and how he had come unstuck. Homosexuality? Or had the army decided that a crazy Buddhist was a bad security risk? My neck was beginning to hurt where Rosina’s red finger nails had reached it. I wanted to take my temperature but could not find the thermometer.

There was no fog now. Twilight had just been overtaken by darkness, and a bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance onto the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees. The sky was a clear blackish-blue, entertaining the abundant light of the moon but unillumined by it. The earth and its objects were a thick fuzzy brown. Shadows were strong, and the brooding identity of everything I passed so powerful that I kept nervously looking back. The silence was vast, different in quality from the foggy silence of the morning, punctured now and then by an owl’s cry or the barking of a distant dog.

I did not go through the village. I walked along the coast road in the direction of the harbour, through the defile which I called ‘the Khyber Pass’, where the big yellow rocks had invaded the land, heaping themselves up against the side of the hill into a lumpy mound in which a narrow cleft had been cut to allow the passage of the road. The rocks in the moonlight were dark brown, but covered with innumerable sparkling points of light where the moon caught the tiny facets of the quartz. I went through the dark cleft and on past the harbour to where, a little way further on, there was a footpath which led up the hill, skirting a wood, and joined the tarmac road where it petered out just beyond the bungalows. All this I had checked in a daylight reconnaissance, when I had also worked out how to get into the garden of Nibletts. This was not difficult, since the lower end of the garden was separated only by a line of posts, joined by slack wire, from the long sloping field, full of gorse bushes and outcrops of rock, which bordered the mounting footpath on the village side. The main drawback to my expedition, apart from the nightmarish possibility of being discovered, was that when it was late enough for me to get into the garden unobserved, it might also be late enough for the married pair to be in bed. There was also of course the possibility that they might be watching television in silence.

I had earlier rejected the idea of spying on Hartley and Ben, not for moral reasons, but because it made me feel sick with emotion and terror. A marriage is so hideously private. Whoever illicitly draws back that curtain may well be stricken, and in some way that he can least foresee, by an avenging deity. Some horrible and quite unexpected revelation could persecute the miscreant henceforth forever with an almost obscene haunting. And I had to struggle here with my own superstitious horror of the married state, that unimaginable condition of intimacy and mutual bondage. However, the logic of the situation now forced this dangerous and distasteful adventure upon me. It was the next step, the attempt to answer the next question. I had to discover, in so far as I could possibly do so, what this marriage was really like and what these two were for each other.

The moon, shining from the sea, was casting the shadows of the wooden posts onto the sloping lawn of Nibletts. The grass looked as if it was covered with frost. I had already discerned, from below, that the curtained ‘picture window’ of the sitting room was glowing with light. I stepped over the slack wire and began to walk very quietly up the lawn in the direction of the house, listening to my practically noiseless footsteps in the already dewy grass, listening to my deep breathing and to the hurtful beating of my heart. In spite of a little rain earlier, the ground was hard after the sunny weather and I did not think I would leave noticeable footprints. At about fifteen yards from the house I stopped. Except for a small vent at the top, the window was closed. The curtains were unlined, and the light within illumined, like stained glass, a bright design of green parrots in a lemon tree. There was a narrow slit in the centre where the curtains failed to meet. I moved again, then listened. There was a sound of voices. Television? Avoiding the dangerous area of the slit, and feeling as if I were about to hurtle into space, I now nerved myself to move steadily, silently, right up to the window and to kneel, touching the brick wall, and then to sit down with my head just below the level of the low sill.

Anticipating encounters with rose bushes, though not foreseeing the dew, I was wearing a mackintosh. The moonlight had showed me the whereabouts of the various flower beds, but as I approached the house I must have been dazzled by the lighted window, or else become blind with fear, since I seemed to have sat down on a rose bush. There was a faint awful crackling sound and a small sharp spear pierced the calf of my leg. I sat, awkward, frozen, leaning back against the wall, my eyes and my mouth wide open, suddenly staring at the vast moonlit sea below me and waiting with horror for some terrible ‘Who’s there?’

But the voices continued and now I could hear them quite clearly. How easy it is to spy on unsuspecting people. The experience that followed was so weird, and so literally maddening to me, that I will not attempt to describe my feelings. I will simply, as in a play, give you the dialogue. It will be clear who is speaking.

‘Why did he come here then?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You keep saying “I don’t know, I don’t know”, can’t you say anything else, or are you mentally deficient? Of course you know, you must know. Do you think I’m a perfect fool? I’m not that thick.’

‘You don’t believe it-’

‘Don’t believe what?’

‘You don’t believe what you say-’

‘What on earth do you mean, what do you mean, what did I say that you think I don’t believe? Am I supposed to be a liar then?’

‘You say you think I knew, but you can’t think that, it’s insane-’

‘So I’m either mad or a liar. Is that it? Is that it?’

‘No, no-’

‘I don’t understand you, you’re babbling. Why did he come here?’

‘I don’t know, it was an accident, it was a chance-’

‘Funny sort of chance. My God, you’re clever, it’s the one bloody thing that would torment me more than anything else. Sometimes I think you want to drive me out of my mind and make me mad enough to-’

‘Darling, dear heart, dear Binkie, please don’t-I’m so sorry oh I’m so sorry-’

‘It’s no use saying that you’re sorry or that you don’t know, that’s all you say over and over again. I’d like to split open your head and find out what you do know. Why don’t you explain at last? Why don’t you admit at last? It’s been going on long enough. It’d be a relief to me if you’d only tell me-’

‘There’s nothing to tell!’

‘You expect me to believe that?’

‘You did believe it.’

‘I never believed it, I just pretended to, Christ, I wanted to forget, I got tired of living with it all, I got tired of living with your dreams.’

‘There weren’t any dreams.’

‘Oh you bloody-’

‘There weren’t any dreams.’

‘Don’t tell lies and don’t shout at me either. Oh God, the lies you’ve told me! I’ve lived in a sort of soup of lies ever since the start. And then the boy-’

‘No, no-’

‘Well, I was pretty thick about it all, but I just couldn’t credit-’

‘No!’

‘Christ, and when I think of other lucky men with their wives and their families and their simple decent lives and ordinary love and kindness, while here-’

‘We’ve had ordinary love and kindness and-’

‘It’s only been a pretence because we were both tired, it was too exhausting to be honest. We got tired of telling each other the truth about the hellish cage we live in, we had to rest sometimes and pretend things were all right when they weren’t and put up with this sham, this bloody sham you call a marriage. We had to stop stabbing ourselves and each other with the ghastly truth. So now we’re both sunk in lies, your lies, they’re everywhere like a stinking bog, we’re drowning in them. And, Jesus, I thought it might be better when we got away, when we got away to the sea, I thought at least I’d have a garden, I thought-But then lo and behold he’s here! That’s funny, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, darling, don’t-You do like it here, you did like it here-’

‘Well, don’t say that to me now, do you want me to spit in your face? We just pretended to be nice quiet people-’

‘You didn’t pretend much.’

‘Don’t start that again.’

‘Well then, don’t you.’

‘You’d better be careful. Another thing I’ve got against you is that you’ve made me into such a-you’ve made me so bad-oh Christ, why can’t we get out? If only you’d tell the truth for once. I just want to know where I am. Why did that man come here, to this village, here to this very place?’

‘You keep asking the same questions again and again. I don’t know. I didn’t want him here-’

‘Liar. How often have you seen him?’

‘Just that one time.’

‘Liar. I actually saw you with him twice. And God knows how many more times you’ve been with him. Why do you lie to me so stupidly? And you put him up to calling round here.’

‘I didn’t!’

‘Well, you’re not going to see him again.’

‘I don’t want to!’

‘It’s the past, the past, the bloody past-there’s never been anything for us, everything’s spoilt, you’ve spoilt everything, you and your-’

‘Darling, dear dear Binkie, don’t-’

‘And don’t call me pet names, it’s a mockery-’

‘Can’t you just try to be kind to me, to pity me, just try-?’

‘Why can’t you try! Oh God, how can you have been so cruel-’

‘I’m not cruel. You’re mad, you’re MAD-’

‘Don’t scream at me, I’ve had enough screaming. You’ve screamed your way through life, and now we’re nearly at the end of it. God, I wish mine had ended. That’s what you’ve been praying for I expect, that I’ll have a heart attack. Then you can go off with-’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-’

‘Just stop saying that, will you, I’m so tired of it, it means nothing, that parrot cry. Oh God, I’m so tired. It’s all spoilt. It never even got started, because of you. And then that unspeakable deception, and I took it-’

‘There was no deception-!’

‘Oh shut up. I know we’ve said all this a million times before, we’re like clockwork dolls-but, Christ, I’m thinking it all the time, I’ve got to say it now and then! I even accepted that lie because there seemed to be nothing else to do, and I just bloody wanted to be happy, well, not happy, I know that was impossible, but at least I wanted some peace in my rotten failed life and just to rest a bit, but oh no! You wouldn’t even let me rest-’

‘That’s not true-’

‘Be careful, be careful. I thought I hadn’t any alternative but to put up with you and your lies-God, I must have been crazy-I ought to have cleared off and left you with-’

‘No-!’

‘You’d have cheered. And now he turns up as bold as brass and comes and rings my door bell! You must have enjoyed arranging that.’

‘Don’t say what you don’t think.’

‘I do think it, what else can I think? I can see when you’re lying. Do you think you can take me in? Where have you hidden his letters, eh? Where?’

‘There aren’t any letters.’

‘Because you destroyed them. Oh, you’re clever! But listen-I say listen-’

‘I am listening.’

‘Your little plan isn’t going to work.’

‘What little plan?’

‘You want me to say “All right, clear out, I don’t care where you go.” You want to torment me into letting you go. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Take that bloody look off your face or I’ll-Well, it’s not going to be like that, see? I’m not going to let you go, I’m never going to let you go. See? You can stay here and look after me even if we never say another bloody word to each other. See? Even if I have to chain you up-’

‘Forgive me, please, forgive me, don’t be so angry, I can’t bear it, stop being angry, it hurts so much, you frighten me so much-’

‘Oh do stop crying, I’m so fed up with your tears. Why did he come here, what’s it all about, that’s what I want to know, Christ, can’t you tell me the truth at last, I’m tired of living in a bad dream and pretending it’s all right. All this bloody house we took so much trouble with, the bloody furniture, the garden, those fucking roses, pretence, pretence, pretence, I’d like to smash it all to pieces. Why can’t you tell me the truth? Why has he turned up here, what does it mean?’

‘Please, you’re hurting me, please, please, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry-’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Oh stop, I’m so sorry-’

I have written this out as I remember it, with the repetitions. I have not attempted to describe, and will not now, the tones of voice, his strident shout, her whining tearful apologies. I shall never forget it. The eavesdropper had indeed got what he came for.

I wanted to go away much sooner, but I was paralysed, partly by horror, partly by a physical cramp, since I had sat down in an awkward uncomfortable position and had not dared to move since. At last I rolled over and crawled away down the wet shorn moon-grey lawn. I got stiffly to my feet, got clear of the garden, and began to run down the footpath into the face of the sinking moon. I ran most of the way home. I drank some whisky and took a sleeping pill and went to bed and rushed headlong into sleep. I dreamt I found a new secret room at Shruff End, and a woman lying dead in it.

The next day I was like a madman. I rambled, almost ran, round the house, round the lawn, over the rocks, over the causeway, up to the tower. I ran about like a frenzied animal in a cage which batters itself painfully against the bars, executing the same pitiful leaps and turns again and again. There was a golden mist, gradually clearing, it would be a hot day. I looked with amazement on my familiar swimming places, and on the gentle crafty lapping of the calm sea against the yellow rocks. I ran back to the kitchen, but could not even make myself a cup of tea. ‘What am I to do, oh what am I to do?’ I kept saying to myself out loud. And the strange thing was that although I had received, full and complete and running over, exactly the evidence which I wanted, I seemed to be distracted with grief and fear and a kind of nausea now that I had it.

I had not understood the whole of the conversation. At moments I felt that I had hardly understood anything, except for what was so obscenely evident: those terrible tones of voice, and the sense that all this had happened before, again and again. The awful crying of souls in guilt and pain, loathing each other, tied to each other! The inferno of marriage. I could not, and did not try to, work out the meanings and implications of what had been said. Clearly the gentleman (I now suddenly started thinking of him as ‘the gentleman’) was displeased by my appearance on the scene. Well, too bad. I indulged in visions of going up to Nibletts, grabbing him by the collar when he opened the door, and pounding his face. But that would be no use. Besides, he was scarcely the ‘dear dull old husband’ imagined by Rosina. He might have a stiff leg, but he was a tough customer. He was, or perhaps just seemed to be, a dangerous man. He might be the classical bully who is supposed to collapse when threatened; but those who consider threatening bullies may well doubt whether this convenient type really exists. There would be no point in such an experiment. I simply had to get Hartley away and I had to think how to do it. Thought was difficult.

In my earlier reflections I had somehow vaguely taken it for granted that once it was clear, if it should become clear, that Hartley’s marriage was a disaster, it would not be hard for me to break it up and remove her. I did not doubt that, in those circumstances, she would want to come, that to run to me at last would be a blessed joyful escape and the acting out of a long-cherished fantasy. This assumption may seem naïve, but it was not any sense of its naïvety which now set me at a loss. It was simply that, having been pressed up to the point of action, I could not think exactly how to act, and the details mattered terribly. Nibletts, its roses, its horrible new carpets, the brass ornaments, the lurid curtains, the bell, impressed me not at all, these were gauzy, visionary. As he had said, pretences. What impressed me was some quality of that awful conversation itself, some sense of the many many years which had passed, a sense of the strength and texture of the cage. Yet it could still be that I had only to say to Hartley ‘come’ and she would come. Then it remained to decide just how and when to say it, and that decision seemed to raise all the obscure difficulties again. Was it simply perhaps the case that I was afraid of Ben?

About eleven o’clock I stopped running and made some tea. There was an idea which I had received from the conversation, but for some time, although it was there, I could not chisel it out or identify it. It was an idea which the gentleman himself had given me. It was something like, supposing he really were to turn her out, supposing he could be driven to reject her? Would that not solve the problems about that cage, which I had found so hard to formulate? The gentleman had said that he never would drive her away, but the fact that he mentioned it at all showed that it was possible. Let him dement himself with his own foul temper and foul jealousy or whatever it was-for indeed I could not quite see what it was-that he was so enraged about. It was surely not just my appearance, the old school friend, now a celebrity, knocking upon the door, unwelcome as that doubtless was? If he could become sufficiently worked up, if things over there could just collapse and crumble, then she would have no refuge and she would have no cage and she would come running straight into my arms. Yet-if he became mad-if his world began to totter-might he not then maim her or murder her? This was one of the thoughts that sent me skipping round the rocks like a crazed leopard. Her cry at the end: ‘Stop, stop, you’re hurting me.’ How often in those hateful years had that cry rung out? It was unbearable. I leapt up, upsetting my tea cup, chattering aloud, and ran out again onto the grass. What was I to do? So many things were now clear, but I simply could not think out the final tactics, I could not think and I could not think because I could not clear my mind of that ghastly conversation, it obstructed me like thick adhesive scum. I had to rescue Hartley, and ‘rescue’ was indeed now at last plainly the word, the very word that I had longed for. But, now it came to it, how?

Later on it seemed as if Hartley herself had come to my assistance. I saw her gentle pale unhappy face looking at me, and I felt a ghostly calm, as if a waft of her presence had come. I must, I realized, before making any overt move at all, talk to her again, and if possible more than once. My impulse was to go round to that horrible bungalow straightaway and simply remove her, and in the end it might come to that. But of course I must prepare her. If it came to a swoop there must be no bungling, no mistakes. So much had been happening in my mind of which she knew nothing. I must let her know where, in it all, I was. I decided that it was no use, at present, attempting any more meetings in the village, since she would be too upset and frightened to attend properly. The vital explanations must be done by letter. I had assumed that what she feared, not yet knowing what my intentions were, was her own heart. For all she knew, I had other sentimental commitments. She had had, no doubt, enough of remorse and the quiet mourning of an old love, so foolishly rejected. Now however I could glimpse other and more urgent fears, and I felt sick uneasy anger at the idea of that little ‘boyish’ jealous man, sitting up there with his field glasses, and waiting for her to come home. It soon seemed plain, and this further clarification was a relief, that I must simply write her a long letter, then give her time to understand it, to respond to it, and by then… It was a relief to my shocked frightened mind to reflect that there was now no terrible hurry, that I did not have to go up that hill today and decide exactly how to confront the jealous tyrant. There was the problem of conveying the letter to her, but that was not insoluble, and I had in fact already envisaged how it might be done.

I ate some corned beef with red cabbage and pickled walnuts, and the remainder of the apricots and cheddar cheese. I had no bread or butter or milk, as I had been too distracted to do any shopping. After that I rested. After that I wrote some of this diary, bringing it more nearly up-to-date. After that I wrote the letter to Hartley the text of which I will copy out in a little while. After that I washed a lot of clothes and put them out in the sun. After that I went swimming from the tower steps. Then I sat beside the tower and looked at the late afternoon sun making big blotchy shadows behind the spherical rocks of Raven Bay. After that, since I saw some tourists coming and I had nothing on, I got dressed and returned to the house and picked up my washing, which had dried. Then I fetched the snapshots of Hartley which I had brought from London and sat outside on my stone seat, beside my stone trough, and brooded on them slowly and intently.

Some of the snaps showed us both together. Who had taken those? I could not remember. From the browned curled surfaces, out of a sinless world, the bright soft unformed young faces gazed forth. It was an unspoilt world, a world of truly simple and pure pleasures, a happy world, since my trust in her was absolute, and since in our childish old-fashioned chastity we did not yet consider making love. Happier were we in this, I think, than the children of today. The light of pure love and of pure unanxious romance illuminated our days together, our nights apart. This is no absurd idealization of a youthful Arcadia. We were simple children in a simple world, we loved our parents and our teachers and were obedient to them. The pains of the human journey lay in the future, the terrible choices, the unavoidable crimes. We were free to love.

When did it begin to end? Perhaps when I ran off to London. Yet even then our love had still a time to run. And I never doubted her until the last. How long, how much, did she deceive me? Perhaps my selfish need of her was so great that I could not conceive of it not being satisfied. And as I reflected on that need it also occurred to me to think how much, in those years, Hartley had defended me against James. It seemed odd now that they knew practically nothing of each other. I scarcely ever spoke of James to Hartley, and never then of Hartley to James. She never knew how robustly her love defended me against some kind of collapse of my pride.

I shall now transcribe the letter which I wrote to Hartley, and which I had decided to find some way of delivering to her on the following day.

My dearest Hartley, my darling, I love you and I want you to come to me. This is what this letter says. But first there are things which I must tell you, things which I must explain. The chance which has brought you back to me has come like a great storm into my life. There is so much to say, so much to tell. It may seem to you that I belong now to some other world, to some ‘great world’ of which you know nothing, and that I must have in that world many friends, many relationships. It is not so. In many ways my life in the theatre now seems like a dream, the old days with you the only reality. I have few friends and no ‘amorous ties’, I am alone and free. This was what I was not able properly to tell you when we met in the village. I have had a successful career, but an empty life. That is what it comes to. I never conceived of marrying because I knew there was only one woman that I would or could marry. Hartley, think about that, believe it. I have waited for you, although I never dared to hope that I would ever see you again. And now, fleeing from worldly vanities, I have come to the sea, and to you. And I love you as I always did, my old love is there, every little fibre and tentacle and tendril of it intact and sensitive and alive. Of course I am older and it is in that sense a different man’s love, and yet it is the same love. For it has kept its identity, it has travelled with me all this way, it has almost miraculously survived. Oh my dear, how many days and nights there have been, when you knew nothing of it, when perhaps you thought of me as far away in my ‘grand world’, when I have sat alone with an aching heart, thinking of you, remembering you, and wondering where you were. How is it that people can vanish so that we know not where they are? Hartley, I never stopped wanting you-I want you now.

I have come to know-never mind how, but I do know-that you are most unhappily married. I know that you live with a tyrannical perhaps violent man-I wonder how often in the past you may have wished to escape, and have sunk back, defeated and wretched, because there was nowhere to escape to? Hartley, I am offering you, now, my home, my name, my eternal devotion. I am still waiting for you, my only love. Will you not come, will you not escape to me, to be with me inseparably for the years that remain? Oh Hartley, I could make you so happy, I know I could! But let me also say this: if I thought that you were happy already, happy in your marriage, I would not dream of disturbing you with declarations of my persisting love, I would suffer my love silently, even perhaps dissemble it, perhaps go away. I suspect, and forgive me for glancing at this, that you may have suffered more than one hour of remorse as you thought of me living my ‘exciting life’ and how utterly, as it seemed, you had lost me. But if I thought that nevertheless you had even a moderately contented or reasonably endurable life, I would not meddle, I would gaze at you from afar and turn away. But knowing you to be very unhappy I cannot and will not pass by. How could I, loving you as I do, let you go on suffering? Hartley, you must and you will come to me, to the place where you ought always to have been.

Do not be upset or frightened by wondering what to do about this letter. There is no need for you to do anything immediately, even to reply. I wanted simply to tell you of my love and my readiness. It is for you to consider when and how you are to respond. Obviously I am not necessarily expecting you to come running to my house at once. But, when you have reflected, when you have got used to the idea of coming back to me-coming back to me, my dearest girl-then perhaps you will begin to consider how to start to do it. And then-we shall be ready to talk to each other-and we shall find the means to talk. Let us quietly take one step at a time-one step-at a time. When you can give me some sign that you are prepared to let me look after you forever, then I will think what we are to do, and I will, when you desire it, take charge. Do not worry, my Hartley, all will be well, you will see, all will be well.

For a day or two, or a few days, as you will, just think about what I have told you. Then-when you will-write me a letter and send it by post. That is, for the present, best. Do not worry, do not fear. I will find means of communicating with you. I will love you and cherish you and do my most devoted best to make you happy at last. Yours always, as once now, and in all the years,

Your faithful,

Charles.

P.S. Come to me anyway, of course there are no conditions, just let me help you and serve you, you can then decide freely and in peace where and how you want to live.

I wrote this letter quickly and passionately and without corrections. When I read it through I was at first tempted to alter it because it sounded, well, at moments a bit self-important: a little pompous, a little histrionic, perhaps? Then I thought, no, this is my voice, let her hear it. She will hardly be, as she reads this letter, in a critical mood. If I were to amend and polish it, it might sound insincere and lose its force. And as for self-centred, of course I am self-centred. Let her indeed be sure that I am pursuing my own interests here and not just altruistically hers! Let her know that she can give me happiness by giving herself freedom.

When I had written the letter and satisfied myself that it would serve, I put it in an envelope upon which I typed her name and address. I am a poor typist and I wrote the letter in longhand. I then sat and brooded and allowed myself to be almost hopeful, almost happy. Later on, as recorded above, I swam. The sea was cool about my warm limbs, coating them with its cool scales. The water undulated calmly, smooth and shining upon the surface, like the rind of a fruit. Even without my ‘curtain-rope’, which the playful sea has again untied, I managed to climb out easily. As I write this now it is the next day, and the letter to Hartley in its fat envelope still lies upon my sea-facing table in the drawing room. I have been writing this diary during the morning. Soon I shall have lunch: the remains of the corned beef with plain boiled onions. (Plain boiled onions are another dish fit for a king.) I finished the red cabbage last night with scrambled eggs and drank a lot of the Raven Hotel Spanish white wine. (A mistake.) I must shop soon, I crave for fruit, for buttered toast, for milk in my tea. The shop lady said there might be cherries this week.

Why am I delaying, waiting? Why am I almost pretending that life is ordinary, that it is as it once was? I am still floating in a sense of achievement, of a well-merited interim. I sought and found my crucial evidence. I have decided what to do and how to do it. I have spoken to her eloquently, definitively, although my words have not yet reached her. It is as if they are still winging their way through the air, going to her breast. Am I afraid, is that the real reason why I am waiting? To give her the letter in safety may prove hard, and the results of a bungled failure unthinkable, but it is not this obstacle I fear. The sooner I give her the letter the sooner I shall know her response. What will it be? If she says ‘no’ or if she does not reply I shall of course assume that she is simply inhibited by fear. But what shall I do then and how long can I wait before I move again and what on earth shall I do as I wait? That interim will not be a calm one. Better then to prolong this one. I feel, since I heard that conversation, so much more, and dreadfully, involved with both of them. I have family membership; with this come hatred, jealousy, the familiar demons. And then again, suppose she simply uses me for her freedom, and then leaves me after? Is that conceivable? Could I lose her a second time, could she vanish? I should run mad. I felt bound, after reading the letter, to add that postscript, it seemed honourable to do so. But is it wise? Perhaps I had better delete it. Better that she should assume that in running to me she commits herself.

I must try to see and feel these speculations as premature and pointless. But I understand very well why I sit here and look at the letter and do not want, just yet, to deliver it.

I will now describe what happened next, much of which was entirely unexpected. I delayed in fact, after writing the above, no longer than the evening of that day. The dilatory calm which I described was quite suddenly succeeded by a frenzy of desperate impatient anxiety to know my fate at once. I then set out to put my delivery plan into operation. I put on a light mackintosh and a shabby sun hat, put the letter in my pocket, without deleting the postscript, and slung round my neck a pair of field glasses which James had given me for bird-watching when we were schoolboys. I cannot recall that I ever used them to watch birds. It was a tacit custom of our childhood that James gave me presents, often quite expensive ones, whereas I gave him none. I suppose my parents accepted this as an inescapable aspect of the patronage of the poor by the rich; and it only much later occurred to me that of course the presents were really from Uncle Abel and Aunt Estelle. These glasses were not very powerful, and not to be compared with Ben’s wife-watching pair, but I thought they would serve.

I went by the inland route which I had taken before, through the marsh and round by Amorne Farm and into the village from the other side. My objective was the wood which lay beyond the field which bordered Nibletts’ garden. I saw from the ordnance survey map that a little road leading off to the right at the entrance to the village (just before the church) circled away up the hill and through the upper part of the wood which lay above the bungalows. Thus I could make the whole circuit without at any time coming within viewing range, I climbed the hill, becoming rather hot and tired, and soon found an inviting woodland path which led seawards at a point a little, as I guessed, beyond the end of the Nibletts’ road. In a few minutes I could see the open light of the field, and then was able to peer out through the tree trunks at the now moderately distant bungalow, which I kept under close observation through the glasses.

I waited for quite a long time, feeling cooler, then rather cold, although the sun was still shining. My arms and my eyes were beginning to ache. At last the gentleman came out. My temperature shot up and my heart beat a good deal faster. I was glad to note that he was carrying a garden fork. I could see his long evening shadow moving down the lawn. It gave me a certain pleasure to have Ben, all unsuspecting, in my sights, as he had had me. I have never handled a real gun, but I have handled many a stage gun, and I know what it feels like. Near to the bottom of the garden he started paying attention to one of the fussy flowerbeds, poking about rather aimlessly at first. Then suddenly he started hitting something with the fork. Not digging but hitting. What was he hitting? A slug, a wild flower? What was he thinking about, while with such terrible concentration he destroyed that innocent little thing? I was fascinated but there was no time to lose. I began to move up the hill under cover of the wood, observing him at intervals as I went, until I reached a point opposite the top of the road where a distance of some two hundred yards of open grass separated me from the end of the tarmac, and where Ben was about to disappear from view, divided from me by the bungalow. I reckoned that there would be two or three seconds, after I emerged into the open, during which it would be possible for him to see me. I took a last look at him. He had his back to me, now crouching beside the flowerbed. I walked with long careful fast strides across the first bit of grass, then sprinted to the road and straight through the gate up the path to the front door.

Here I did not ring the bell. That sickly high-pitched ding-dong might well have carried upon the evening air. I tapped upon the door with my knuckles, using an old code which Hartley and I had used as children, when we used to knock softly upon the doors of each other’s houses. After a short moment she opened the door. The shocked response to my tap had been, as I hoped, automatic. We stared at each other, gaping, both terrified. I saw her staring amazed frightened eyes. I thrust the letter towards her, awkwardly. I could not find her hand and it almost fell between us. Then she had it, clutched against her skirt, and I turned and ran, instinctively taking the way down the hill, down the road into the village. I had not in fact planned my retreat, as my thinking had ended with the delivery of the letter, and as I was passing the Black Lion I reflected that it might have been better to have gone back the way I came. However, as I strode along the village street and turned onto the footpath, well in the possible purview of Ben’s glasses, I felt reckless and strong, so that even my recent caution seemed cowardly. Was Ben still bending over his flowerbed, or was he inside the house tearing my letter out of Hartley’s hands? I almost felt I did not care, I almost felt it would be better if he were, at this very moment, reading my words and shaking with jealous rage. His reign of terror was nearing its end.

It was certainly not dark as I came towards the house, but the day had that luminous, gauzy blandness which in the midsummer season celebrates the approach of a twilight which, for a few final days, will never entirely darken. The evening star was just visible, and would now for a long further period of daylight blaze in splendour alone. The sea was as flat as I had ever seen it, quite still and held up brimming as if it were in a bowl, the tide being in. The water was the colour of very light blue enamel. Two sea birds (gannets?) flying low in the middle distance produced a hazy distorted reflection as upon a convex metal surface. As I walked along the road, past the handsome milestone which read Nerodene one mile, a faint air of warmth was wafted from the yellow rocks which had been basking in the sun all day.

The house by contrast felt cold and seemed to be up to some of its tricks. After the brilliant colour-bestowing light outside, the air within seemed grey and a little thick. There were faint sounds, perhaps just the bead curtain clicking in the draught from the opened door. I stood in the hall for a few moments listening. I wondered if the accursed Rosina had come back and was hiding somewhere about to scare me. I felt impelled to make a search, upstairs, downstairs, in the funny middle rooms. No one of course. As I went through the house I opened all the doors and windows wide and let the warm sea-fresh air from the encircling rocks circulate within. I threw off my disguising hat and mackintosh and pulled my shirt out of my trousers. I took a large glass of sweet sherry and bitters out onto the grass and stood there for some time, rising on my toes and falling back on my heels, and watching the bats, and wondering whether Hartley was all right and what she had done with that long letter after she had read it. Burnt it, shoved it down the lavatory, rolled it up in a pair of stockings?

I came inside and filled the large and now empty glass with white wine, and opened a tin of olives and a tin of Korean smoked clams and a packet of dry biscuits. There was no fresh food as of course I had once more omitted to shop. The house was still acting up, but I felt by now that I was getting to know its oddities and I was more friendly towards it. It was not exactly a sinister or menacing effect, but as if the house were a sensitized plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past-or, it now occurred to me for the first time, were going to happen in the future. A premonition? I began to feel cold, and put on the white Irish jersey. It was now more gloomy inside, though it seemed to be getting even brighter outside, and I had to peer carefully as I washed and drained the olives and put them in a bowl and poured olive oil over them. And then someone began knocking very violently upon the front door.

Whoever it was had evidently not noticed the bell, whose brass handle had been painted black. There was also an old tarnished knocker in the form of a dolphin; and now the dolphin’s heavy head was being cracked down onto the door with a force which seemed to shake the whole house. Fear immediately grasped me and jerked me to my feet. Rosina? No. Ben. The outraged husband. He had seen the letter. Oh God, what a fool I had been. I ran out, intending to bolt the door against him, but sheer terror confused me into a desire to confront the worst, and I opened it instead. Hartley flew into the house like a terrified bird. She was alone.

In the first seconds she seemed to be as amazed and confused as I was. Perhaps she was blinded by the sudden dark of the interior. She stood there clutching her face with her hands as if she were about to scream. I, with a crazed clumsiness, left the door wide open, then hurrying to shut it bumped into her. I felt the warmth of her thigh as I blundered past. I got the door shut, then realized that I was saying ‘oh-oh-oh-’ and that she too was uttering some incoherent sound. I put out a grasping searching hand and touched her shoulder. She made a gesture as if she were about to speak, but by then I had grabbed her, clumsily again but effectively enough, in my arms and gathered her into that bear hug that I had for so long been dreaming of. I lifted her off her feet and heard her gasp as almost the whole length of her body was crushed against me. Then, as I slowly let her down in the fuzzy grey-dark of the hall, with the curtain upstairs meditatively clicking, we stood perfectly quiet and silent, I with both my arms wrapped around her, she with her two hands gripping my shirt.

Relaxing at last as she sighed and fluttered her hand against my ribs, I said, ‘Is he outside?’

‘No.’

‘Does he know you’re here?’

‘No.’

‘Did you destroy the letter?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Did you destroy the letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘He didn’t see it?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Come in here and sit down.’ I pulled her into the kitchen and pushed her down into a chair beside the table. Then I went back and locked the front door. I tried to light a lamp in the kitchen but my hands were trembling too much and the wick flared up and went out. I lit a candle and pulled the curtains. Then I drew up a chair and sat close beside her and cradled her more gently in my arms, her knees touching my knees.

‘Oh my darling, you’ve come, oh my precious darling.’

‘Charles-’

‘Don’t say anything yet. I just want to know that you’re here. I’m so happy.’

‘Listen, I-’

‘Please, darling, oh please don’t talk-and please don’t push me away like that.’

‘No, but I must talk-there’s so little time-’

‘There’s plenty of time, all the time. You did read the letter, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, of course-’

‘And that’s why you’re here?’

‘Yes-’

‘Then that’s all that matters. You’re staying here. You’ve come, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, but only to explain-’

‘Hartley, don’t. What is there to explain? Everything is explained already. I love you. You’re here. You love me, you need me. Don’t resist. Let’s go away to London, tomorrow morning, tonight. Never mind about clothes. I’ll buy you clothes. You’re my wife now.’

I held her at arm’s length, gripping her shoulder with one hand, while with the other I moved the candle so that it illuminated her face. The eyes were thickly encased in wrinkles, the eyelids were brown and pitted as if stained, the cheeks were flabby and soft, not rounded, and faintly pink, perhaps with hastily-applied powder. Her short grey undulating hair was dry and brittle-looking, no doubt from years and years of absent-minded visits to inept hairdressers. Now she was past caring about it, and a forgotten slide hung down from the end of one twisted tress. The face was dry, dry, save where her tongue now moistened her unpainted lips, and where her blue eyes, those strangely timeless pools, were moist and now suddenly full of unshed tears. She moved her shoulder, pulling weakly away, and I released her. It was the first time since our reunion that I had really studied her face, and I felt with a deep triumphant joy how really unchanged that dear face was, and how little it mattered to my love that she was old.

Now too I saw in her face, though it looked both anxious and sad, something of the animation of youth. I recognized, and realized how much I had forgotten, the shape of her mouth, so much prettier without the lipstick. I kissed her gently, briefly, on the familiar mouth, as we used to kiss; and there was an intelligence in her quiet negative reception of the kiss which was itself a communication.

She said, ‘I’ve changed so much, I’m a different person, you were so kind in your letter, but it can’t be like that-you care about old times, but that’s not me-’

‘It is you. I recognized you in the kiss.’ It was true. The kiss had transfigured her, like a kiss in a fairy tale. I remembered the feel, the texture, the movement of her mouth; and all that awkwardness was gone, that sense which I had had in the church of the impossibility of holding her. Our bodies were suddenly in tension in the same space, moved by the same forces. When I felt this I wanted to shout with joy, but I kept a quiet tone, wanting to coax her into speech, not wanting to affright her. ‘Hartley, it’s a miracle, I gave up the theatre, I came here to solitude, and I found you-I came here for you, I realize it now-’

‘But you didn’t know I was here-’

‘No, yet I’d been searching for you, I’ve always been searching for you.’

She said, ‘It can’t be like that,’ and lifted up her hand as if to conceal her face. Then she put her hand on the table where I covered it firmly with mine. ‘Charles, listen, I must talk to you, there’s so little time.’ With the back of her other hand she touched her eyes, and caused the unshed tears to fall. Then she said, ‘Oh Charles, my dear, my dear,’ and bowed her head and thrust it towards me with a doglike movement. I stroked the dry brittle hair, I gently undid the hanging slide and put it in the pocket of my trousers.

‘You’ll stay with me forever now, Hartley.’

She raised her head and mopped her eyes again, this time with the sleeve of the green cotton coat which she was wearing over the yellow dress which I had seen before.

‘Hartley, take off your coat, I want to see you, I want to touch you, take it off.’

‘No, it’s cold here.’

I pulled at the coat and she took it off. There was an intense charm in these movements, as if they were the merest innocent spiritual symbol of undressing a woman, something that angels might play at without quite understanding. I touched her breasts where they pressed warmly, firmly against the yellow stuff of the round-necked dress. I was delighted by the absence of any attempt to attract. This was a novelty in my life. The face powder was a careless habit, the dress was sloppy, nothing. The new unpainted lips were, I felt, alone a tribute to me. A woman who has long stopped working on her appearance cannot suddenly become smart and sleek. I was delighted that Hartley, as she was, attracted me. I felt proud, possessive, relieved, as if some life-long terror had been removed. And I thought: I’ll buy her such lovely clothes-not flashy-smart, but just right for her. I’ll look after her.

‘Charles, I must just talk to you quickly, I just came to talk, after your letter, before he comes back-’

‘Where is he?’ I had forgotten his existence.

‘He’s at his woodwork.’

‘Woodwork?’

‘Yes, his woodwork class. It’s a boat-building class really, only they do woodwork, I don’t think he’ll ever build a boat. It’s shelves this week. It’s the only evening he’s out so I had to come now. They go on till quite late, I think they drink beer afterwards. ’

‘I don’t want to talk about him,’ I said. And I thought, if only I had a car and could drive, I’d take her right away now, this instant.

‘Charles, listen, please, I haven’t come to you like you think, like you said in the letter you wanted, that isn’t possible. I’ve just come to tell you some things and-oh Charles-it’s so extraordinary to see you. I thought it could never be, that it was a sort of impossibility of the world, that we two could ever be together again. I never thought I ever would-see you again and touch you-it’s like a dream.’

‘That’s better. Only it’s not a dream. Your life without me has been a dream. You are awaking from a dream, a nightmare. Oh why did you ever leave me, how could you have done, I nearly died of grief-’

‘We can’t talk about that now-’

‘Yes we can, I want to talk about the old days, I want us to remember everything, to understand everything, to relive everything, to establish ourselves together as one being, one being that ought never to have been divided. Why did you leave me, Hartley, why did you run away?’

‘I don’t know, I can’t remember-’

‘You must remember. It’s like a riddle. You’ve got to remember. ’

‘I can’t, I can’t-’

‘Hartley, you’ve got to. You said that I wouldn’t be faithful to you. Was it really that? You can’t have thought that, you knew how much I loved you!’

‘You went to London.’

‘Yes, but I had to, I wasn’t leaving you, I thought about you all the time, you know that, I wrote to you every day. It wasn’t anyone else, was it? It wasn’t him?’ Strangely enough this terrible thought had only just this moment come to me.

‘No.’

‘Hartley, did you know him then, did you know him before you left me?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Of course you can remember!’

‘Please stop, please.’

The way she spoke these words, almost mechanically, with a kind of evasive animal instinct, words so like those which I had overheard her say so recently, made me want to cry out with pain and rage and a sort of awful pity for her.

‘Did you know him then?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter, every little tiny thing matters and must be found again and must be picked up and must be redeemed, we’ve got to relive the past and clarify it and purify it, we’ve got to save each other at last, to make each other whole again, don’t you see-’

‘I didn’t know him then, he was sort of engaged to one of my cousins, to Edna, you remember, well, no, you won’t, and then she dropped him and I felt sorry for him-’

‘But where did you meet him, was it after you ran away?’

‘Yes, I went away to one of my aunties at Stoke-on-Trent, where Edna was. I didn’t know him when we were together. It wasn’t that, it wasn’t anything, I didn’t want you to be an actor, it wasn’t anything, please don’t.’

‘But, Hartley, do be calm and answer my questions, I’m not angry with you and it is important. You didn’t want me to be an actor! You never said so.’

‘I did, I wanted you to go to the university.’

‘But, Hartley, it can’t have been just that.’

‘It wasn’t just anything, oh don’t upset me so, we were too much like brother and sister and you were so sort of bossy and I decided I didn’t want to.’ Some tears spilled again. ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’

I brought her a clean tea towel and she wearily wiped her eyes, her face, her neck. A button had come off the tight yellow dress at her breast. I had an impulse to grab her and tear the dress.

I sat down again. ‘Hartley, if you had all these misgivings why didn’t you utter them? We could have done something about it. It was so terrible to go away without a word, it was wicked.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I had to go like that, it was the only way, it wasn’t easy. Oh it’s cold, it’s so cold, I must put my coat on again.’ She put it on and pulled it round her, turning up the collar.

‘How can it have happened, you can’t simply have decided, there must be something else, something you haven’t told me. Do you remember that day-’

‘Charles, there isn’t time, and I really can’t remember. It’s so long ago, it’s a lifetime ago.’

‘To me it’s yesterday. I’ve been living with it ever since, reliving it and recalling it and going over and over it and wondering what went wrong and what happened to you and where you were. I think I’ve wondered where you were every day of my life. And I’ve been alone all this time, I’ve stayed in freedom, because of you. It’s yesterday, Hartley. That was the only real time I ever lived through.’

‘Alone. I’m sorry.’

It took me a moment to realize that she was not being sarcastic. Alone? Well, yes. Her tone suggested that she had not imagined, not speculated.

‘You say you just decided you didn’t want me, but that isn’t an explanation, I want to know-’

‘Oh stop-it just didn’t happen. If I’d loved you enough I would have married you, if you’d loved me enough you would have married me. There aren’t any reasons.’

‘You say if I’d loved you enough-Don’t drive me mad! I loved you to the limit, I still do, I tried to the limit, I didn’t run away, I didn’t marry anyone else, it was all your fault, you’ll drive me crazy if you start-’

‘We mustn’t talk of these things-we’re just sort of-plunging about-and it doesn’t mean anything now. Look, I must tell you certain things only you won’t listen-’

I thought, I mustn’t go mad with emotion, I must stop questioning her now, though I will find out, I will. ‘Hartley, have some wine.’ I poured out a glass of the Spanish wine and she began mechanically to sip it. ‘Have an olive.’

‘I don’t like olives, they’re sour. Please listen to me-’

‘I’m sorry it’s so cold here, this house manages to be cold even when-All right, you tell me things. But just remember, you’re here and you stay-whatever happened or didn’t happen in the past you belong to me now. But tell me one thing, that night when you were on the road here and that car shone its lights on you, were you coming to see me then, that night?’

‘No-but I-I just wanted to look at your house. It was a woodwork night, you see.’

‘You wanted to look at my house. To stand in the road and look at the lighted windows. Oh my dear, you do love me, you can’t help it.’

‘Charles, it doesn’t matter-’

‘What do you mean, you’ll make me mad again!’

‘There isn’t any place, any possibility, any sort of-structure-everything’s broken down, you’ll understand when I’ve told you-what I came to tell you-’

‘All right, I’ll listen now, but first let me kiss you. Then everything will be well. The kiss of peace.’ I leaned over and very gently but persistingly let my dry lips touch her wet lips. How different different kisses are. This was a sort of holy kiss. We both closed our eyes. ‘OK, now go on.’ I filled up her wine glass. My hand was shaking and the wine splashed on the table.

She said again, ‘There’s so little time, and we’ve spent some of it.’ Then she said, ‘Oh God, I haven’t got my watch with me, what time is it?’

I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten. I said, ‘It’s ten past nine.’

‘Charles, it’s about Titus.’

‘Titus?’ Titus? I had given no serious thought to Titus, and I felt dismayed.

‘Yes, now I want to tell you. Oh God I feel drunk already, I’m not used to wine. I must tell you. I’ve sometimes thought, since I saw you in the village, that perhaps you could help somehow, but really you can only help by keeping away, by keeping right away-’

‘That’s nonsense-’

‘You see, I told you Titus was adopted-’

‘Yes, yes-’

‘We hoped for a child, Ben wanted one, so did I, and we waited. And then I wanted to adopt and he didn’t, he kept hoping. And I began to be so anxious because of the time limit, they only let you adopt if you’re under a certain age, even then I had to lie about my age. Ben’s younger than me and with him it was-’

‘Is he? I thought he was in the war.’

‘He was, but only in the later part-’

‘What did he do in the war?’

‘He was in the infantry. He doesn’t talk about it much. He was captured, he was in a prisoner of war camp.’

‘I was in ENSA-’

‘I think he quite enjoyed the war, he saw himself as a soldier. He kept his army revolver, he was so fond of it, he wasn’t supposed to. He never really settled down in civilian life. Sometimes he says, “Roll on the next war.” ’

‘But you were married then, when he was a prisoner? Where were you?’

‘I was living in Leicester, on a housing estate. I worked as a clerk in the ration book office. It was a lonely time.’

It was a lonely time. So when I was frigging around with Clement and travelling the counties in a bus to bring theatre to the war effort, Hartley was unhappy and alone. Christ, I even went to Leicester. ‘Oh my God-’

‘But listen, about Titus-you see, I did at last, at the last moment as it were, persuade Ben that we should adopt. He didn’t really want to, but he did it because, I suppose, he saw what a state I was in-I was nearly-I was nearly-I was very upset-and really I arranged it all, I did it all, all the formalities, all the papers and so on, and Ben just signed the things without looking, he did it in a dream, he didn’t want to know. I could see he was unhappy about it, but I thought that-when the little baby was there-he’d love it-everything would be different-and we’d all be happy-’

‘Don’t cry, Hartley darling, here, let me hold your hand, I’ll look after you now-’

‘Titus was such a poor little mite, with a hare lip, they had to operate-’

‘Yes, yes, stop crying and get on with the story, if you must tell it.’

‘Now I made a great mistake-’

‘Hartley, don’t grieve so, I can’t bear it, have some more wine-’

‘I made a terrible terrible mistake-and I have paid for it terribly-I ought to have known better-’

‘Well, what was it?’

‘I never told Ben about you. I mean, I didn’t at the start tell him, and then later on it seemed more and more impossible to tell him-’

‘Never told him how we’d grown up together, loving each other-?’

‘Never told him how things were. When he asked had there been anybody, I said no. And of course he didn’t know anything about it, my cousins didn’t know, you remember how we were so sort of secretive, when we were children-’

‘Yes. It was so precious, Hartley. Of course we were secretive. It was precious and secret and holy.’

‘So there was really no danger that anyone else would tell him-’

‘Danger? But why did it matter? After all you’d left me.’

‘Ben was so jealous, he’s such a terribly jealous person-and at first I didn’t understand about jealousy, I mean I didn’t understand it could be like madness.’

Yes, like madness. I understood that all right.

‘And before we got married he used-almost to threaten me. If I annoyed him he’d say, “I’ll pay you out when we’re married!”, and I was never sure if it was a joke. And it was usually about jealousy things. If I looked at another man, I mean just literally looked, he got so angry-and that went on and on after we got married-And then at last I just got frightened and lost my head and told him.’

‘Told him you had loved me, and I had loved you?’

‘Told him, sort of. I didn’t want to make it seem important, but of course the fact I hadn’t told him earlier made it look so terribly serious-’

‘It was important, it was serious!’

‘If only I had had the sense and the nerve either to tell him at the start or never to tell him at all. But you see, when I saw how jealous Ben was, what an angry jealous man he was, I began to be terrified in case one day-you would turn up-’

‘And I have!’

‘And I had to protect myself by at least having mentioned you before. You see, I was afraid someone might say something or that you’d find out where I was-I tried so hard not to let anyone know, anyone who could tell you, I cut off all the connections, and my parents had moved, I thought you might try to find me and-’

‘You cut the connections all right! But, Hartley, if you were so frightened of him at the very start, why did you marry the blighter?’

‘I always thought it would get better later on.’

‘You were never frightened of me, were you?’

‘No, no. But I was afraid that you would find out where I was and write to me. He always looked at my letters. For years and years I always got up first and ran down every morning so as to find the post first in case there was a letter from you.’

‘Oh God.’

‘I did this after I told him too, I was always terrified of the post, in case there was anything he could pick on and misunderstand. Anyway I felt it was too awful living with the risk of his finding out, so I did tell him-and it was-terrible.’

‘He was furious, jealous?’

‘It was terrible. You see, he couldn’t believe it was innocent.’

‘Hartley,’ I said, ‘it was innocent, but it was serious, something happened to us forever in those years. So in a way Ben was right to be impressed, you were telling him something which made everything different. I can understand that.’

‘He wouldn’t believe we hadn’t been lovers, he thought I’d lied when I said I was a virgin. It was so especially terrible because what he thought wasn’t true and I could never convince him, though I told him again and again. Sometimes he’d try to trap me by saying he’d forgive me if only I’d admit it, but I knew he wouldn’t. He kept asking and pressing me and asking again and again and again, he just couldn’t believe it.’

‘My darling, we were lovers, though not in that sense-’

‘He kept asking and asking, every day, sometimes every hour. And he’d ask the same question in the same words over and over and over, whatever answer I gave him. And of course the more angry he got the more clumsy and stupid and wretched I got so that it must have sounded as if I was lying-’

‘I’d like to kill that man.’

She had drunk some more wine and was now sitting shivering, no longer crying, her wide eyes darkened, the pupils expanded, staring at the candle, with the tea towel unconsciously held up to her face, pressing it against her cheekbone like a veil. Her large brow, which looked white in the candlelight, was puckered and pitted with little shadows, but the way she had turned up the collar of her green cotton coat behind her hair gave her a girlish look. Perhaps that was what she used to do with her mackintosh collar in the days when we went bicycling. And even as I was listening intently to her words I was all the time gazing with a kind of creative passion at her candlelit face, like some god reassembling her beauty for my own purposes.

‘Wait, Hartley, it’s all right,’ for she had suddenly looked up in alarm, ‘I’m just going to light more candles, I want to look at you.’ It was getting darker outside. I rattled out a box of candles and lit four more, dripping the wax into tea cups and standing them upright. I ranged them round her like lights at an altar. Then I went and sat opposite to her, not near but looking. I so much wanted to see her smile. That would help the process of re-creation.

‘Hartley, take away that veil. Won’t you smile at me?’

She lowered the tea towel and I saw the wet drooping wretchedness of her mouth. ‘Charles, what’s the time?’

It was twenty-five past ten. ‘Oh, half past nine, earlier. Look, Hartley, dearest, none of this matters, it’s all over, don’t you see? All right, he was a jealous stupid man, a horrible man who deserves to be punished, only it doesn’t matter now, you don’t have to go back into that hell. But what has all this got to do with Titus? You were going to tell me something about Titus.’

‘He thinks Titus is your son.’

‘What?’

‘He thinks Titus is your son.’

Hartley had laid her hands flat on the table. Brightly lit by the candles she looked now like an interrogated prisoner.

I sat up very straight, blushing with amazement and shock, and found that I had put my hands flat on the table too. We stared at each other. ‘Hartley, you can’t be serious, he can’t be serious! How could Titus be my son? Your husband isn’t insane, is he? He knew Titus was adopted, he knew where he came from-’

‘No, that’s the point-he didn’t know where Titus came from. I was the one who brought Titus into our lives, it was my idea, I arranged it all. Ben was in a state of shock throughout the whole business, he never did anything but sign papers without reading them. Once, somebody from the adoption people came to the house and saw Ben, but I did all the talking. Ben was like a zombie.’

‘But Hartley, wait a minute, he knew I was a thing of the past, you didn’t adopt Titus until years and years after you left me.’

‘He thought we’d kept up. He thought we met secretly.’ Hartley, tearless and staring-eyed, was almost, with her glare of misery and her pale pitted forehead, accusing.

‘Hartley, darling, people can’t believe things which are totally crazy and for which there is absolutely no evidence. He must have known you hadn’t been seeing me.’

‘How could he know? I was alone all day, sometimes all night. He had to go away travelling.’

‘All right-let’s stay sane about this-let’s say it was extremely improbable! Besides-oh, how could he not believe you, how could he torture you with such mad imagined invented things!’

‘It didn’t happen all at once,’ said Hartley. She gulped some more wine. ‘He took against Titus from the start, perhaps because the adoption was the only thing I’d ever forced him to do against his will and he resented it and somehow deeply wanted it to fail. You see, he’d gone on and on up to that time saying that of course you had been my lover and you probably still were, and I’d gone on and on denying it till I was tired, I think we were both tired, I used to try to think about something else when he was talking about you. I thought at first he didn’t really believe I’d kept up with you but only said it to spite me, and perhaps at first he didn’t believe that, but I’m sure he thought we’d been lovers. And of course we couldn’t forget you because you were always in the papers and then later on we saw you on telly-’

‘God-’

‘And this had gone on sort of festering in his mind, and then suddenly, it was as if he had worked it out, it was like a sort of revelation, he connected you with Titus. There were two bad things in his life and he went on brooding on them until he felt they must connect, they must connect, and they were both my fault.’

‘But how old was Titus then and what sort of evidence-?’

‘I can’t remember how old Titus was, and perhaps it didn’t happen all that suddenly. He was always harsh with Titus even when he was a tiny child, and later on it was worse. He may have said it just as a crazy thing to hurt me, and then when I was so upset he began to think about it and to see everything I said as a proof of guilt.’

‘But, Hartley, this is madness, he must be mad, clinically mad-’

‘He isn’t mad.’

‘That’s what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe.’

‘He says that Titus resembles you-’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘And the funny thing is that he does look a bit like you.’

‘He looks like you because you brought him up, and you look like me because we gazed and gazed at each other for so many years. Loving couples come to resemble each other.’

‘Really? Perhaps you’re right. It did seem odd, uncanny almost. ’ This idea seemed to strike Hartley more than anything I had said, even for a moment to please her.

‘Besides, there must have been independent proof of Titus’s birth and his parentage.’

‘That was part of the trouble. You see, when I got Titus I simply didn’t want to know who his parents were, I didn’t want to think he was not entirely mine. The adoption society gave me a lot of stuff, they even gave me a letter from his mother, but I didn’t read any of it, I destroyed it at once. I didn’t want to give any part of my thoughts to his real parents. I didn’t want to remember anything connected with Titus before I carried him home with me, and I didn’t remember, I blotted it out of my mind. So when Ben became so interested and so suspicious and began to question me I didn’t know how to answer, at first I couldn’t even properly remember the name of the adoption society. It must all have sounded so bad, so like a lie-’

‘But there are records, aren’t there, official records?’

‘There are now, but things were less formal then, and there wasn’t any law about children having the right to know who their parents were. Of course there must have been records I suppose, but by the time Ben wanted to know the details the adoption society had ceased to exist, and I think a lot of papers had been destroyed in a fire, so someone said anyway. Ben never believed any of it, and no one would answer letters. I did try to find out, I went to London, he wouldn’t come, and I stayed in a hotel-’

‘Oh Hartley, Hartley-’ I was picturing this journey, and the return home.

‘I did try, but I couldn’t find out, and somehow even then I didn’t want to.’

‘But I still don’t understand, what did he think had happened? What did he think we’d been doing?’

‘He thought we’d been going on seeing each other, perhaps not all the time, but on and off, secretly. He thought I’d become pregnant and-’

‘But he was living with you!’

‘That was another odd thing. Just before the adoption was finally fixed up I was away for quite a long time, it was about the only time I was away. I went to my father who was ill, he died then-and in this time away Ben thought the baby had come. I wasn’t slim any more at all, I could have been pregnant, you see it all fitted in. And he thought I had invented all the adoption business so as to bring your child into his house.’

‘But he saw the papers-’

‘Well, I could have got hold of the papers somehow, he didn’t read them anyway. And the visitor from the society could have been an accomplice.’

‘Your husband is a most ingenious man. A vile hateful cruel half-mad ingenious torturer.’

Hartley, staring now at the candle flames, simply shook her head.

‘But Titus himself, he didn’t know, I suppose, I mean what Ben thought?’

‘Well, he did know,’ she said, ‘later on, I mean when he was about nine or ten. Of course we’d always told him that he was an adopted child, like you’re supposed to. But then Ben started telling him that he was the child of his mother’s lover and that his mother was a whore.’

‘What perfectly monstrous wickedness-’

‘Ben did go through a phase of knocking Titus about. Some neighbours called the prevention of cruelty people. I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t defend him, I had to sort of take Ben’s side, it was an awful time, everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one’s bones were broken, all the bones and the little joints were broken, one wasn’t whole any more, one wasn’t a person any more.’ Slow tears came and still staring at the candles she blindly felt about on the table for the towel. I pushed it towards her.

‘But why couldn’t you defend him-oh, stupid question. Hartley, I can’t bear this-’

‘He felt it was all my fault, and it was all my fault, I ought to have told him at the start, he asked me if there had ever been anyone else, and I lied really because there had been you although we weren’t lovers, and later on when I told it, it sounded so mysterious and big. And I married him because I was sorry for him and I wanted to make him happy-and then-and then-’

‘Oh Hartley, stop.’

‘And I somehow got into a kind of fatal way of getting everything wrong, doing everything wrong, and hurting him, as if I were doing exactly the thing that would make him angry. One night when he was out at an evening class I accidentally put the chain on the door and went to bed and slept and he couldn’t get in till I woke up at three and it was raining and then he started hitting me and wouldn’t let me go to sleep-’

‘Hartley, don’t tell me any more of these horrors please. I don’t want to hear them and anyway it’s all over.’

‘Oh I’ve been so stupid, so stupid, and of course Titus never settled down at school and everything went wrong, everything, and I’m not even sure that Ben believed it all at the start or that he always really believed it later, only everything I did seemed to make things worse, it was as if he hypnotized me into acting as if I was guilty. And I’m not sure what Titus believed or what he believes. Titus used to sit there hearing Ben saying one thing and me saying the other, it was like a sort of litany, an awful poem-and I don’t know whether he knew what the truth was or whether there was any truth, it was all a kind of fog of awful senseless argument and row. It all got ravelled up into a nightmare and in the end he blamed me for it and in a way he was right, sometimes I think he blamed me and resented me more than he did Ben. Of course when Titus was small he was frightened all the time and he kept quiet and he’d sit all the evening on his little chair against the wall, all white and tense and quiet, dreadfully quiet. Later on when he was about fifteen he used to pretend sometimes that he was your child, and once or twice he told Ben that I’d told him he was. But I think he did this just to spite Ben when Titus was too big for Ben to hit him any more.’

‘Hartley, stop. Just tell me more about Titus now. When did he go away? Where do you think he is?’

‘When he left school he went into the poly, you know, the polytechnic, where we used to live, he had a student grant, he was studying electricity. He lived at home, but he sort of ignored us, he sent us to Coventry. I sometimes felt he really hated us, both of us. And he could never forgive me for not protecting him when he was small. Then just before we moved down here he went into digs, and then he just vanished. He left the digs and never let us know or sent an address. I went round there and asked about him but no one seemed to know or care where he’d gone, and he never wrote. He knew we were coming here. I think he went to look for his real parents, he always said he would. He went on and on about them sometimes and how perhaps they were rich. Anyway, he’s gone now. Gone.’

‘Don’t be so tragic, Hartley, he’ll turn up again. He knows where you live, doesn’t he? He’ll turn up. He’ll come home when he’s short of money, they always do.’

She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I don’t want him to come back. Sometimes I believe he’s dead. Sometimes I almost wish he were dead, and that I could hear that he was dead, so that the anguish of the hope and the fear and the dread could just stop, and we could be at peace. If he came back-it could be-terrible-’

‘You mean?’

‘Terrible.’ The slow tears were coming and she kept drooping her eyelids to make them slide down her cheeks. She said, ‘I wish we’d never adopted a child, it was my fault, Ben was quite right, we were better without. I could have managed then and Ben would have been-like I wanted-’

In spite of the pain and horror of her story my mind was leaping ahead into a bright land, into all sorts of almost detailed vistas of sudden hope. I would take Hartley away and together we would find Titus. In some strange metaphysical sense it was true, I would make it true: Titus was my son, the offspring of our old love!

‘Hartley, my little one, stop crying, you’ve had your orgy of horrors, now stop it. You’re mine now and I’m going to look after you and protect you-’

She began shaking her head again. ‘And I married him to make him happy! But you mustn’t think it’s been all bad, it hasn’t. What I’ve told you is the bad part, but I’ve probably given you a quite wrong impression.’

‘Now you’re going to tell me you’ve had a happy marriage!’

‘No, but it’s not been all bad, Ben wasn’t always awful with Titus. Ben’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, perhaps all men are. It was just that you kept cropping up and that always set him off, and we couldn’t just forget you because you were so famous, but we’ve had better times too-’

‘What were they like?’

‘Oh just ordinary times, you might think it was dull, we had a quiet life-’

‘A quiet life!’

‘Ben didn’t much like his job but he liked doing things about the house, he likes DIY.’

‘DIY?’

‘Do It Yourself. We went to London once to the exhibition at Olympia. He used to go to evening classes.’

‘What was he learning at the class on that quiet evening when you left the chain on the door?’

‘He was learning to rivet china.’

‘Oh-Lord-! Hartley, what did you do all the time? Did you entertain, have friends?’

‘Well, Ben didn’t like social life. I didn’t mind. We don’t really know anybody here either.’

‘And did you go to evening classes too?’

‘I once started German, but he didn’t like me to go out in the evening and the classes were different nights.’

‘Oh-Hartley-And in all those years was he faithful to you, did he ever have anyone else?’

For a moment she seemed not to understand. ‘No, of course not!’

‘I wonder how you can be so sure. And you, did you ever have anyone else?’

‘No, of course I didn’t!’

‘Well, I suppose it would have been as much as your life would have been worth.’

‘You see really we were very wrapped up in each other, we are very-’

‘Wrapped up! Yes! I can see it all.’

‘No, you can’t see it all,’ she said, suddenly turning towards me, blinking and drawing her fingers across her eyes and her mouth. ‘You can’t see it, nobody can understand a marriage. I’ve prayed and prayed to go on loving Ben-’

‘It’s a travesty, Hartley. Don’t you see now at last that the situation is intolerable, impossible? Stop playing Jesus Christ to that torturer, if that’s what you’re doing.’

‘He suffers too and I can be-oh so unkind. It’s not his fault, and it was my fault in the beginning.’

‘You gorge me full of these awful stories and then expect me to sympathize with him! Why did you come here, why did you come to me, why did you tell me these things at all?’

Hartley, still staring at me, seemed to reflect. She said slowly, ‘Perhaps because I had sometime, and I’ve always known this, to tell someone, to say it, to say these blasphemies, what you call these horrors to someone. And, as I told you, I’ve never really had any friends, Ben and I have lived so much together, so much on our own, so sort of secretly, a kind of hidden life, like criminals. I never had anyone to talk to, even if I had wanted to talk.’

‘So it turns out I’m your only friend!’

‘Yes, I suppose you are the only person I could inflict this on-’

‘Inflict it-you want me to share the pain-’

‘Well, in a way you were responsible-’

‘For your ruined life? Just as you were responsible for mine! So this is your revenge? No, no, I’m not serious-’

‘I didn’t mean that, just that Ben’s ideas about you have been like-like demons in our lives. But of course it wasn’t just wanting to tell someone. You know, when I saw you in the village for the first time I nearly fainted. I had just come round the corner from the bungalows and you were just going into the pub, and my knees gave way and I had to go a bit up the hill and sit on the grass. Then I thought I must be dreaming, I thought I must be mad, I didn’t know what to do. Then the next day I heard somebody talking about you in the shop, saying you’d retired and come here to live. And I wondered for a bit whether I’d tell Ben, because he mightn’t have been able to recognize you, you don’t look quite like your pictures, but then I thought he’s bound to hear anyway, someone at the boat-building class will know, so I told him I’d seen you and he was in a frenzy and said we must sell the house at once and go away, and of course he believed, or said he believed, that you’d come on purpose because of me, and of course it was very odd-’

‘But is he selling the house?’

‘I don’t know, he said he’d see the house agent, he may have done, I didn’t ask. But really I came here tonight because I wanted to tell you about Titus and about what Ben imagines and to ask your help-’

‘My help! My dearest girl, I’ve been telling you, I am all help! Let’s go, let’s just go, we can go to London tomorrow, even tonight if there’s a train-’

‘No, no, no. You see, I can’t decide, I’ve kept swinging to and fro. I thought first I’d simply ask you to go away, to sell your house and go away. If once you understood how much it mattered to me and Ben, how awful, what a nightmare it was that you’re here, you would go at once.’

‘Hartley, we are going, you and I are going, that is the answer.’

‘I thought I’d write you a letter asking you to go, but it would have been so hard to explain it all in a letter.’

‘Hartley, will you come, tonight, tomorrow? You will?’

‘And then I thought-but perhaps this really is mad-that you could somehow persuade Ben, make him see, that I’ve been telling the truth all these years, impress him somehow-’

‘How?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, swear on something sacred or with a notary or-’

The word ‘notary’ seemed to gather round it some of the sheer insanity of what she was saying. So now we were to be involved with notaries! I could imagine how much that would impress Ben. At the same time, in the swift way of thought, I was making realistic plans. Of course I still hoped that, when it came to it, Hartley would decide to stay with me now, tonight. However it was possible that she would not, and even if she did there might be some terrible revulsion of feeling afterwards. Such shock tactics might do more harm than good. Better perhaps to let her reflect quietly upon her reunion with me and draw her own conclusions. She seemed to me to be still in a dream, a woman locked up inside her own nightmare. She would emerge, but it might be slowly. I might even have a long work to do, to give her back hope and life and stir in her the instinct of freedom, which it still seemed to me was so natural to her. Meanwhile I must find ways of keeping contact with her and of making her plan, making her construct futures which contained me. Surely, once she conceived of happiness she would spring towards it. But for the moment it might be wise to humour her lunatic idea that I might ‘persuade’ Ben. If she just, bleakly, blankly, asked me to go away my task would be much harder, though it was still certain to be successful in the end. Hartley was a sick woman.

I said, ‘I think your idea about Ben is a good one, I might be able to solve that problem anyway, to make him see and believe the truth about what happened or rather didn’t happen in the old days, we must consult about how it could be done. But, Hartley, listen, the important thing is this. You are going to leave Ben and come to me, for good, forever-’

Hartley, who had been sitting entranced, absorbed in her own unusual eloquence, looked suddenly terrified. She jerked back her head and began to stare about the room. ‘Charles, what is the time?’

It was nearly eleven o’clock. I said, ‘Oh, it’s about ten to ten. Darling, why not stay here now, please?’

‘It can’t be as early as that. It will take me thirty-five minutes to get home, and Ben usually gets back about eleven.’ She got up and said, ‘I feel drunk, I’m not used to wine, I must go.’ She turned, then made a sudden pounce towards my hand and peered at my watch, then uttered a high-pitched wailing cry. ‘It’s eleven, it’s eleven! Oh why did you do it! Why did I believe you! Why didn’t I bring my watch! What shall I do, oh what shall I do! What shall I tell him, he’s sure to know where I’ve been! Oh I’ve been so careful and I haven’t told him lies and now he’ll think-It’s as bad as can be, oh I am stupid, stupid, whatever can I do?’

‘Stay here, you don’t have to go back!’

I was shaken and a bit ashamed when I saw her grief and terror, but I also thought: let there be disaster upon disaster, crisis on crisis, let it all break down quickly into a shambles. That will benefit me. And then I thought too: unless he kills her. And then I thought: I must keep her here. That settles it, it must all be achieved now. I must not let her go home.

‘I can’t go back, I can’t stay. I shall have to tell him I’ve been with you, but how can I, it’ll be like those nights, oh I shall die, I shall die, I want to be dead, why do I have to suffer and suffer like this. Oh what can I do, what can I do?’

‘Hartley, stop being hysterical. Just make up your mind to stay here.’

‘I can’t stay, I must run, run. But it’s no good. He must be home now, and he’ll be so worried and so angry. I can’t do it, I can’t go back, oh why have I been so thoughtless and so foolish, it’s like what I always do, making things worse and worse, I should have known the time-’

‘Don’t blame yourself, think of it this way, you left your watch behind on purpose so as to commit yourself to me and if you’ve now made it impossible to go back, so much the better!’

‘I shouldn’t have come here, I shouldn’t have told you those things, he’ll know I’ve told you, he’ll make me tell him everything I said.’

‘You came here to see an old friend, there’s nothing wrong in that, and I am your friend, you said so, and I’m so glad you did, and friends help each other-’

‘Oh if only I’d gone an hour ago everything would have been all right! I must run, I must get out of here-’

‘Hartley, be calm! If you insist on going I will walk along with you-’

‘No, you must leave me alone, we must never meet again! Oh how I wish I were dead!’

‘Stop this wailing, I can’t stand it!’

As she was crying out Hartley had been running to and fro in the kitchen like a demented animal, taking a few little rushing steps towards the door, then a few steps back to the table. In her agitation she even picked up the tea towel and stuffed it into her pocket. The spectacle of this frightened anguish was beginning to appal me and I was now feeling frightened too. To allay my own fear I ran to her and seized her in my arms. ‘Oh my darling, don’t be so afraid, stop it, stay here, I love you, I’ll look after you-’

She then began to fight me, silently, violently, and with a surprising strength, kicking my ankles, writhing her body about, one hand pinching my arm, the other pressed hard against my neck. I caught a glimpse of her open mouth and of her glistening frothy teeth. I tried to lift her and to capture one of her hands, and then it became too dreadful and too hard to attempt to crush this pinching, kicking animal into submission and I abruptly let her go, and with the impetus staggered backwards, banged into the table and upset the candles. In that instant Hartley was gone, rushing out of the kitchen, not towards the front door but out of the back door straight onto the grass and onto the rocks.

I ought to have rushed after her like a flash, like a faithful dog. I ought to have dragged her back and kept her in the house by force. Instead some stupid instinct made me pause to pick up the candles. Then, leaving them fallen awry in their tea cups, I ran out into the blue almost-darkness and the silent emptiness of the rocky shore. After looking at the bright candles I could at first see nothing, and it struck me in an odd way that while I was talking to Hartley I had forgotten about the sea, forgotten it was there and now felt confounded and at a loss to find myself half blind among those terrible rocks.

There was no sign of Hartley, she must immediately have clambered and sprung with the agility of a girl somewhere over the ring of rocks which surrounded my small lawn. I called out ‘Hartley! ’ and the sound was dreadful, dangerous. Which way had she gone? There was no easy way back to the road in either direction, either on the village side or on the tower side. There was nothing in that blue dimness all round about but wrinkled, folded rocks and slippery pools and deep sudden crevasses. I stood there and listened, hoping to hear her call me or to hear the sound of her scrambling.

What had seemed to be silence now revealed itself as a medley of small sounds, though no sound could tell me which way Hartley had gone. There was a faint lapping and sucking of the wavelets touching the foot of the little cliff, and then retreating and then touching again. There was the very distant murmur of a car on the road near the Raven Hotel. There was a scarcely audible humming which was perhaps, as a result of the wine I had drunk, inside my head. And there was a rhythmical hissing noise followed by a muted echoing report which was the sound produced by the water retreating from Minn’s cauldron.

The thought of the cauldron now shocked me into another awful fear: could Hartley swim? I had not till now formulated the thought that she might have run straight out of the house to hurl herself into the sea. She had cried out, ‘I want to die.’ Had she, in those years, contemplated suicide, indeed how could she not? A strong swimmer would scarcely cast himself into a calm sea hoping for death, but to a non-swimmer the sea might be the very image of restful death itself. Could she swim? She had never learnt in the old days, when the sea was for both of us a far-off dream. It had never occurred to us to venture together into the black canal, although I had become a diffident swimmer at the age of fourteen, when I went to Wales with Mr McDowell. In our first talk at the bungalow she had said Ben could not swim, but had said nothing about herself. Had she now run straight from my arms and from my deception into the easeful peace of the drowning sea?

As I was thinking this I was climbing over the rocks towards the right, in the direction of the village, since if she was running home she would instinctively turn in this direction. The easier way back to the road was by way of the tower, because of a deep gulley between the road and the rocks on the village side, not too hard to negotiate by daylight, but very hazardous in the dark. Hartley might not know this however. I clambered and slithered, now calling again and able to see a little more in the diffused half-darkness. The evening star was present, perhaps other stars, a blanched moon. I thought and I prayed: let her just fall and sprain her ankle and I will carry her back to the house and keep her and let that devil do what he will.

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me. I kept trying to get near to the edge of the sea but the rocks kept defeating me, not by malign interest but by sheer muddle, and I kept slipping down slopes into seaweedy pools and confronting black clefts and holes and smooth unclimbable surfaces. I had an intuition of light over the sea and I wanted to be able to look there and be sure there was not somewhere the dark head of a drowning woman and her desperate arms breaking the calm surface. I moaned softly as I clutched and skipped, hallooing her name at intervals like an owl’s call, and at last I came unexpectedly over the smooth dome of a tall rock and found myself just above the water. I stood up on the highest point of the dome and looked out to sea. There was nothing upon the luminous faintly-wrinkled expanse except wavery yellow replicas of the evening star and the low crouching moon. The sky was still a dimmed glowing blue, not yet sunk into the blackish blue of night. One or two pin-point stars were just visible beyond the big jagged lamp of the evening star. I turned to look inland. I was conscious now of the warm air, the warm rocks, after the strange chill of my house. The rocks stretched away, visible as almost colourless lumps above black hollows. Beyond was the road, and some scattered distant lights of the village and of Amorne Farm. I shouted out more loudly now, ‘Hartley! Hartley! Call to me and I’ll come to you.’ Call and I’ll come: that was it indeed. But there was no answer, only the silence made up of little noises.

I wondered what to do next. Had Hartley managed to get across the gulley onto the road? Possibly she knew those rocks better than I did. Possibly she and Ben used to come and have picnics here. It was true that marriages were secret places. What was it like in there, and were Hartley’s out-pourings the exaggerated half-dreams of a hysterical woman? What did Ben really believe? I decided to get back onto the road and return towards the tower. It took me about five minutes of cautious scrambling to cross the gulley, and then I ran back, calling out, until I had passed the house and reached the turn in the road from which I could see the lights of the Raven Hotel. Nothing, no one. By now it was getting really dark and it seemed pointless to do any more rock scrambling. Was Hartley home by now-or was she lying unconscious in one of those dark clefts in the rocks-or worse? What was I to do next? One thing I clearly could not do was to go back to Shruff End and blow out the candles and go to bed.

It was obvious by now that I would have to go to Nibletts, either to assure myself by eavesdropping that Hartley was back there, or-I was not sure what the alternative was. I set off briskly walking back again towards the village. I realized I was still wearing the Irish jersey and by now felt very hot, so I pulled the jersey off and stuffed it down behind the Nerodene milestone and went on, almost running, and tucking my shirt in. I had intended at first to go the longer, safer way round by the harbour and up beside the wood, approaching the house by the back way, but my anxiety was too extreme and I took the usual diagonal path towards the village. Three yellow street lamps shone upon an empty scene as I ran past the silent darkened shop and under the hanging sign of the rampant Black Lion. The pub too was shut, few windows were lit, the villagers were early bedders. My running footsteps echoed the sound of urgency and fear. I reached the church and turned panting up the hill. There were no lights here and the road lay dark under the shadow of the hanging woodland beyond. I slowed to a walk and realized that I had almost reached my objective. There were the lights of Nibletts, the door of the bungalow wide open, and there, standing at the gate and gazing down the road towards me, was Ben.

It was too late to hide and in any case I now had no desire to do so. The pettiness of concealment seemed out of place and was, I suddenly hoped, now in any case a thing of the past. I hurried on towards Ben, who had come out of the gate to peer at me. Perhaps in the dark he thought that the approaching figure might be his wife.

‘Is Hartley back?’

Ben stared at me and I thought, how idiotic, he calls her Mary, he has probably never heard her real name.

I said, ‘Is Mary back?’

‘No. Where is she?’

The light from the front window and from the open door showed Ben’s cropped boyish bullet head and the blue colour of the military style jacket of blue denim which he was wearing. He looked worried and young and for a second I saw him, not as the ‘devil’ of Hartley’s awful stories, but as an anxious young husband wondering if his wife has met with an accident.

‘I met her in the village and asked her back for a drink, but she only stayed a short while and then she said she’d take a short cut home across the rocks and after she’d gone I suddenly wondered if she might have fallen and sprained her ankle.’ It sounded so feeble and false.

‘A short cut across the rocks?’ This was an almost senseless conception, but Ben seemed too worried to challenge it or even to exhibit hostility. ‘You mean the rocks near your house? She could have fallen there. We’d better go and look, or-I’ll get a torch-’

As he went into the house I turned from the window and the lighted path and looked away down the road. After a moment I saw a dark figure. It was Hartley, slowly coming towards me up the hill.

I had a large number of instant thoughts. One was that it had been crazy of me to come here as now I had ruined whatever lying excuse for her absence Hartley might meanwhile have invented. I also thought that I must instantly warn her that I had told Ben of her visit. I also thought that I must somehow now stay with them so as to protect her against him. I also thought with anguish that this was impossible. I also thought, well why not just run down the hill, seize her by the hand, and pull her away with me, run away, anywhere, through the village, out into the fields. Spend the night at Amorne Farm and go to London by train tomorrow. Or get a lift on a lorry going anywhere: Manchester, York, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Carlisle. This seemed impossible too, for reasons which I could not quite work out. (I had no money, Ben would follow us, she would be too frightened to come etc. etc.) I also thought, let it crash, let them have the awfullest beastliest row they’ve ever had. She ran to me once. She will run to me again. I have only to wait.

By the time I had thought all this in about four seconds I had run down the hill as fast as I could and met Hartley. I did not touch her; I said very quickly, but distinctly, in a low voice, ‘I’m sorry, I got worried, I told him we met accidentally in the village and I asked you for a drink, and then you set off home over the rocks. I can’t stay now, but come to me soon. Come soon and come forever. You must not continue your life here. I shall be waiting for you every day.’

I could not see Hartley’s face, but her whole figure expressed not fear so much as a total dejected resigned misery which had passed beyond fear. She had an air of being dripping wet as if she had in truth been drowned and this was her ghost.

Ben was back at the gate now, and I called to him, ‘She’s here!’ and Hartley and I walked on to meet him.

Ben came out onto the pavement. As we approached he said ‘OK then. OK. Goodnight.’ Then he turned and went back into the house, not waiting to see if Hartley would follow. I held the gate open. She passed me with her blind dripping drowned head.

I had an impulse to follow, to push after her into the house, to sit down, make conversation, demand coffee. But it was impossible, it would only make things worse for her. Everything had gone amiss. The door banged.

I had no wish now to eavesdrop, indeed I had almost no curiosity left, so strongly did my mind shy away in horror from the interior of that house and of that marriage. I felt disgust with myself, with him, even with her.

I walked home, neither fast nor slowly. I remembered to pick up my jersey, which was now wet with dew. I found the house in darkness. The candles had fallen over again and burnt themselves out on the wooden top of the table, making long dark burns which remained there ever after to remind me of that terrible night.

History