The Sea, the Sea

FOUR

WHAT FOLLOWS THIS, and also what directly precedes it, has been written at a much later date. What I have now written is therefore more deeply reflected and more systematically remembered than it would be if I were continuing to write a diary. Events, as it happened, did not subsequently leave me much time for diary-writing, although what immediately follows has something of the air of an interlude (perhaps a comic one). This novelistic memoir, as it has now become, is however, as far as its facts are concerned (though, as James would say, what indeed are facts?), accurate and truthful. I have in particular, and this may be a professional attribute, an extremely good memory for dialogue, and I am sure that a tape-recording of my candlelit conversation with Hartley would differ but little from what I have transcribed. My account is curtailed, but omits nothing of substance and faithfully narrates the actual words spoken. How very deeply indeed many of the conversations, past and to come, recorded in this book, are engraved upon my mind and my heart!

After my return on the evening described I had had enough and I went to bed and to sleep. (I did not eat the Korean clams; later on I threw them away.) I awoke after nine the next morning and it was raining. The English weather had put on another of its transformation scenes. The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound of pattering. I got up and staggered around in the kitchen making myself tea and lowering my head like a sullen beast against any urgency of reflection. I did not wonder what had happened at Nibletts after I left. All that would soon be past history. Then as I sat in the little red room, with my head still sullenly lowered against the light of the rainy morning, I made it out that perhaps I had achieved something by thrusting the situation on into an area of crisis. Really I need not at present do anything at all but wait. Surely she would come. And… if she did not… there were other plans which I was already quietly making. I would not be without resources. I would wait. And with that I settled into a weird uneasy sort of peace.

A little later, I mean a day or two later in my condition of sursis, like a half-expected apparition Gilbert Opian made his appearance. Why was I not really surprised when a timid brief tinkle of the mid-morning bell revealed a nervously smiling Gilbert, and beyond him at the end of the causeway his yellow car? Oddly enough I had already made a sort of plan which included someone like Gilbert, and he would certainly do. Fate was co-operating for once. ‘Lizzie?’ ‘No.’ Just as well. It was still raining.

I put on a show of surprise and annoyance.

‘What is it then?’

‘May I come in, king of shadows? The rain is running down my neck.’

I led the way back into the kitchen where I had been eating chocolate digestive biscuits and drinking Ovaltine. A feature of my interim condition was that, from ten thirty in the morning onwards, I had to have regular treats and snacks all day long. A wood fire was blazing in the little red room, its lively mobile structures showing bright through the open door, and casting a flickering glow into the rain-curtained kitchen.

Gilbert was dripping.

‘Well?’

‘My dear, Lizzie has left me.’

‘So?’

‘So I decided to come here, I felt the urge. I wanted to tell you about Lizzie, I somehow felt I ought to. She’s sick, you know, I mean in her mind. She’s madly in love with you again, it’s the old disease, I was afraid it would come back. And one of the symptoms is she can’t stand me. Well, I suppose our cohabitation was a sort of precarious miracle. Anyway it’s all over now, our idyll is over, our little house is smashed. I’m bombed out. She’s gone. I don’t even know where she is.’

‘She’s not here, if that’s what you imagine.’

‘Oh I don’t-’

‘I suppose you think it’s my fault, is that what you came to say?’

‘No, no, I accuse no one. Destiny, God perhaps, myself. The battle of life and how to fight it. Whoever conscripted me made a big mistake. Now she’s gone, it seems incredible she could have cared for me and made that house with me, we chose things together like real people. No, I just thought I’d come. You’ve always been a magnet to me, and now I’m getting old I don’t care what people think or how much they snub me, it’s always worth trying, I only wish I’d been more forward when I was young. You know how I feel about you, all right you hate that bit, you despise it, it disgusts you, though actually anybody’s lucky to be loved by anybody and ought to be grateful, well anyway as I haven’t a job at present I thought I’d come and see you and maybe you would let me stay for a while and be useful, I can’t bear being alone at home without her where everything reminds me-’

‘Useful?’

‘Yes, I could cook or clean up, do odd jobs, why not? I’ve always felt I ought to belong to somebody, I mean really legally as a sort of possession, just a chattel, not anything troublesome, not with rights, I mean. I often think I have the soul of a slave. Perhaps I was a Russian house-serf in a previous incarnation, I should like to think I was, all cosy and protected with simple things to do, kissing my master’s shoulder and sleeping on the stove-’

‘Do you want to be my house-serf?’

‘Yes, please, guv’nor. I’ll live in that dog kennel if you like.’

‘OK, you’re engaged.’

Thus began an odd little period of my life to which strangely enough I look back with a certain sad nostalgia, perhaps simply because it was such a dead calm before such a terrible storm. I even became rather fond of Gilbert in his role as serf. In the past, although his servility had inhibited my regard, yet his devotion to me had proved that he had some sound ideas. And he was, even at this stage, useful; later on he was essential. My standard of living rose. Gilbert cleaned the house, he even got the stains off the bath. I let him cook in a style which was a compromise between his own and mine. I could not bring him up to my level of simplicity and it would have been cruelty to attempt it. Grilled sardines on toast and bananas and cream were not Gilbert’s idea of a good lunch, and equally I had no use for his thick over-rich Gallic messes. We ate exquisitely dressed green salads and new potatoes, a favourite dish of mine. (The shop now had lettuces and young spuds.) I let him concoct vegetarian soups and stews and I taught him to make fritters in the Japanese style, which he was at once able to do better than me. I also let him bake cakes. He shopped for me in the village and fetched Spanish wine from the Raven Hotel, where he amused himself by posing as my butler. At night he slept on the big broken-bellied sofa in the middle room downstairs, among the driftwood. The sofa was damp, but I let him have the hot water bottle.

I swam every day, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the rain, and began to feel soaked in the sea as if it were penetrating my skin. When the sun shone I spent time out on the rocks. Gilbert kept watch over the front door and went out to look for letters, only no one called and Hartley did not write. I returned to my obsessive task of collecting stones, picking them out of tide-washed crannies and rock pools and carrying them back to the lawn, where Gilbert helped me with my border round the edge of the grass. The stones, so close-textured, so variously decorated, so individual, so handy, pleased me as if they were a small harmless tribe which I had discovered. Some of them were beautiful with a simple wit beyond that of any artist: light grey with thin pink traceries, black with elaborate white crosses, brown with purple ellipses, spotted and blotched and striped, and their exquisitely smooth forms lightly dinted and creased by the millennial work of the sea. More and more of them now found their way into the house, to lie upon the rosewood table or on my bedroom window ledge.

Gilbert would have liked to collect stones too, and to pick flowers, but as soon as he ventured onto the rocks in his leather-soled London shoes he immediately fell. He bought some plimsolls at the Fishermen’s Stores, but still tumbled. He never, of course, ventured into the sea. However he sawed wood and carried it into the house and this activity, which he felt to be in some way symbolic, gave him much satisfaction. He continued to be busy all day long with self-invented serf activities. He washed the bead curtain with Vim, making it shine and removing the slightly sticky filthy surface to which I had become accustomed. Thus, for a brief time, we lived together, each absorbed in his own illusions, and together we regressed into a life of primal simplicity and almost fetishistic private obsession.

When I grew tired of hunting for stones I used to sit for long periods upon the rocky archway bridge beneath which the angry tide raced in and out of Minn’s cauldron, dangling my bare feet over the edge and letting them bathe in the flying rainbow of the spray. It gave me a gloomy fatalistic pleasure to observe the waves, as they rushed into that deep and mysteriously smooth round hole, destroy themselves in a boiling fury of opposing waters and frenzied creaming foam. Then when the tide was receding the cauldron became an equally furious sucking whirlpool as the water churned itself into a circling froth in its desperate haste to escape through the narrow outlet under the arch, and as it met head-on the whipping power of the sea wind. The wind blew continually during those days and when it was strong the waves slapped the rocks and wailed and sucked in and out of the crannies with a noise which in my tense fretful state I was beginning to find tiring. I would never have imagined that I would dislike the sound of the sea, but sometimes, and especially at night, it was a burden to the spirit.

In the evenings I sat beside the wood fire in the little red room. Sometimes Gilbert sat in the kitchen, enjoying himself being a servant. (I suspect he would have liked to dress as a housemaid, but was right in assuming that this would not please me.) Sometimes he sat with me, in silence like a dog, gazing at me and rolling his eyes about in that disconcerting manner. Sometimes we talked a little. In the lamplight now and then he came to look uncannily like Wilfred Dunning, a resemblance of course created by Gilbert’s unconscious acquisition of his hero’s facial mannerisms. Yet to my vulnerable attentive nerves, it seemed more than that, something more like a real visitation. If so, it did Gilbert credit that he should be the vehicle. We talked about the past, about Wilfred and Clement and the old days. A shared past, that is something. And I thought about Clement. In a way, if there were justice, it was Clement who spanned my life and made me, and about whom this book should be written. But in such matters there is no justice, or rather justice is cruel.

‘Charles, darling.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t mind my asking? Did you really love Clement or was it just that Clement loved you? People often wondered.’

‘Of course I loved Clement.’

Well, I came to love her. Did I love her at first? I loved her beauty, her fame, her talent, her flattery, her help. Would I have found Hartley if I had not become Clement’s possession? Clement stretched over the years, she was the one permanent thing, only removed by death. I had been her boy lover, her creation, her business partner, the nearest thing she ever had to a husband, finally her middle-aged never-estranged son. The transformation of my love for Clement, its metamorphoses, had been one of the main tasks and achievements of my life: that love which so often almost failed but never quite failed. Would I ever sit by the fire with Hartley and tell her about Clement? Would she understand, would she want to know? How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.

‘Charles.’

‘Yes.’

‘I heard something funny in the pub today.’

‘Oh.’

‘That chauffeur you had, Freddie Arkwright, he’s the brother of the pub man, he’s coming to stay at Whitsun.’

‘Oh.’ Shame, guilt, another demon trail.

‘Funny isn’t it, the way people come back into one’s life.’

‘Yes.’

‘Charles, darling.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you lived with Lizzie I could be the butler. Would you like a drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Mind if I do? I wish I could give up drink, it’s a symbol of depravity, a proof that one’s a slave. Being in love, that’s another slavery, stupid when you come to think of it, mad really. You make another person into God. That can’t be right. Thank heavens I’m out of that trap. Real love is free and sane. Obsession, romance, does one grow out of them? Lizzie and I used to talk about that. Real love is like in a marriage when the glamour is gone. Or love when you’re older, like love I feel for you, darling, only you don’t want to know. It’s good to feel how different it is from the old craving. Not exactly that I don’t want anything for myself, but going that way. Love. God, how often we uttered that word in the theatre and how little we ever thought about it.’

‘Freddie’s coming to stay at the pub?’

‘No, at Amorne Farm, that’s where the other Arkwrights live. Such a nice boy. Did you know he was queer?’

‘No.’

‘God, it was such hell being queer when I was young.’

And of course all the time, whether I was talking to Gilbert or remembering Clement or watching the waves destroying themselves in the cauldron, I was thinking about Hartley and waiting for her and wondering how soon my nerve would break. I had already decided in general outline what my next move would be should she make none, but I was superstitiously reluctant to make detailed plans before I felt the time had come to change the world by force. I was continually conscious of Hartley, as of her real presence, and she was with me as Jesus used to be with me when I was a child. And I thought about her intensely, and yet, again superstitiously, deliberately, in a respectfully abstract way. I let memories from the far past come and go as they would. But about the terrible present and the gulf of those suffering years my imagination was squeamish and discreet. I did not want to become simply obsessed with her misery. I did not want to waste my energy on hating that man. It would soon be irrelevant. So I reverted to the past when she was the unspoilt focus of my innocent love, seeing her as she had been when she seemed my future, my whole life, that life which had been taken from me and yet still seemed to exist somewhere as a packaged stolen possibility.

However, in the event, before I had time to decide to move upon my waiting and upon the fact of her silence, something else, quite unexpected and extraordinary, took place.

I may have described the period of my odd quiet tête-à-tête with Gilbert as if it could have covered weeks, but in fact it covered days. Upon the last of these days, the one on which the tête-à-tête came to an abrupt end, I felt, in the morning, an exceptional restlessness. Avoiding Gilbert, I went out onto the rocks with my field glasses hung round my neck, intending to look at birds. I also had it in mind that I might see a seal, since Gilbert said that he thought he had seen one. However, once I was out there, upon the top of my minuscule cliff, I was assailed by a kind of fear which seemed familiar. To begin with I felt giddy, as if the sea were a hundred feet below me, instead of being, at that state of the tide, about twelve feet, and I had to sit down. Then I felt a nervous need to scan the surface of the sea carefully with the glasses: but not looking for seals.

Of course, with every day that passed, I knew that something which frightened me was coming nearer, the need to initiate what I must think of as a rescue; or at any rate to initiate something in response to Hartley’s dreadful silence, the causes of which I did not yet want to reflect upon. When you rush the house to rescue the hostage from the gunman how will the gunman behave, how will the hostage behave? It may have been this fear which had now decided to inhabit the huge empty scene. It was a sunny day, cool, with a certain wind. The sea was a choppy dark blue, the sky pale, with a smooth gleaming buff-coloured cloud just above the horizon like a long tatter of silk. I was wearing Doris’s Irish jersey. I began to study the sea through the glasses. I searched the restless white-flecked surface with an increasing anxiety, realizing that what I was now looking for and expecting momently to behold was my snake-necked sea monster. I put the glasses down and found that my heart was beating fast, thumping with an accelerating sound like that of the hyoshigi which I had last heard in that sombre vaporous gallery in the Wallace Collection.

With deliberation and to calm myself by the discovery that there was of course nothing to see I began again to study the jumping waters. One or two thick darker patches I identified as floating seaweed, there was a piece of wood which kept lifting its end up jerkily, some floating glassy-eyed gulls, a cormorant which passed suddenly through the bright circle of vision. Then, for no particular reason, I shifted so that my charmed and magnified gaze could move from the sea to the land. I could see the waves breaking on the yellow rocks at the foot of the tower, the foaming water spilling back from folds and crevices. The wet rocks, then the dry rocks, then some patches of the fleshy cactus-like grass, then a wind-blown clump of the papery white campion. Then the level grass beside the tower. Then the base of the tower itself, the big cut stones blotched with ochre-coloured lichen, patched with black crannies. Then, part way up the tower, a human foot encased in a shabby gym shoe.

At the sight of that foot I dropped the glasses, and looking with dazzled eyes and shading my brow I could see quite clearly half-way up the tower a figure straddled frog-like against the stones, clawing for handholds, dabbling for footholds, descending. In fact, for an agile person, the tower was not an impossibly difficult climb, but I felt an immediate pang of fear which made me seize the glasses and raise them again. In that interval the climber had descended further and now leapt the remaining distance to the ground, and when I had again focused upon him had turned round, leaning back against the tower, with his hands spread out on either side, and looking straight towards me, reminding me suddenly of a figure caught in the headlights of a car and pinned against a rock. My climbing intruder, now gazing into the lifted glasses, was a boy, or rather a being in the full yet indeterminate efflorescence of earliest manhood. He was wearing brown trousers rolled up almost to the knee, and a white round-necked tee shirt with something written upon it. His face was bony, with a freckled pallor which brought out the rather sugary pinkness of his parted lips. His fairish faintly reddish brown hair, tangled rather than curly, fell to his shoulders, some of it actually spread out upon the rough stone behind him and adhering to it. He was staring back towards me with a marked attention. There was nothing so very unusual about a trespasser on my little promontory. But this was no ordinary trespasser.

I got up hastily and began to move across the rocks. It was somehow clear that I was to come to him, not he to me. The glasses impeded my progress, so I paused to perch them on top of a rock and clambered on, now losing the boy to sight. I crossed Minn’s bridge. The final climb, up from a gully to the level above, required all my strength, and I was breathless when I got up onto the grass and stood there, breathing deeply and resisting an impulse to sit down. The boy had moved and was standing near to the further edge of the grass with the sea behind him.

I spoke first. ‘Is it-by any chance-is your name Titus?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Amid the whole surprise that ‘sir’ was a separate little shock. Then I sat down, and he, approaching me, sat down too, kneeling and looking at me. I could see his quick breathing, the dirty tee shirt with the legend Leeds University, the moist pinkness of his lips, the stubble growing in the scar. He had put one hand, with a gesture of unconscious grace, upon his heart.

‘Are you-Mr Arrowby-Charles Arrowby?’

‘Yes.’

His eyes were long rather than large, narrow, a wet grey-blue, like stones. His freckled mobile brow was puckered with anxiety. I had of course, in the first instant, apprehended a resemblance to Hartley, a ghostly resemblance which hung upon him or about him, as the resemblance to Wilfred Dunning hung upon Gilbert. And I had seen the hare lip.

The next thing he said was, ‘Are you my father?’

I was sitting holding my knees, with my feet tucked sideways. I felt now the desire to leap up again, to beat my breast, to make some absolute declaration of emotion, as if this question should be celebrated rather than answered. I also felt a distinct impulse to say Yes, and a stronger clearer veto on any lie, to this boy, ever. But why had I not thought about just this, this apparition, this question, why had I not expected it? I was confused, taken by surprise, and did not know how to address him.

‘No, I’m not.’ The words were weak and I could see his face unchanged, still frowning. I knew that it was very important to convince him at once. Any muddle here could breed horrors. I moved into a kneeling position so that I faced him level. ‘No. Believe me. No.’

He looked down and his lips pouted and trembled. There was a momentary childish look. He drew his lower lip in and clasped it with his teeth. Then with a quick movement which startled me he stood up, and I stood up too. We were now close to each other. He was slightly taller than me. Enormous vistas of thought were unrolling in my mind.

He was frowning again now, looking stern, his head thrown back, stretching his long thin neck. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, I’m sorry I troubled you.’

‘Oh, Titus, I’m so glad you’ve come!’ This was the most immediate of a great number of things which I wanted to say to him and which I was already inhibiting and placing in order in my mind. I held out my hand to him.

With a little air of dignified surprise he shook my hand rather formally and then took a step backward. ‘I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. And perhaps-impertinent.’

Something about the slight hesitation conveyed, in the odd way that speech so quickly can, an impression of intelligence. I had also noticed his clear almost reflective articulation, although he spoke with the flattened Liverpool-style voice which was now the tribal accent of the young, and which I had found my novice actors so reluctant to abandon.

I said, ‘No, not-at all-’ And then, ‘So you are a student? You are at Leeds University?’

He frowned again, scratching his scar and narrowing his eyes and lips. ‘No, I’m not at any university. I just bought this. You can buy them in shops, you don’t have to be what it says.’ He continued in an explanatory tone, ‘They have American ones too, Florida and-California and-Anyone can buy them.’

‘I see.’ The whirl of my thoughts then brought up the obvious, the uncomfortable, question. ‘You’ve been with them?’

‘Them?’

‘Your father and mother.’

He reddened, his face and neck flushing quickly. ‘You mean Mr and Mrs Fitch?’

‘Yes.’ I was terrified, the awkwardness, the vulnerability, terrified of hurting him as if he were a little helpless bird.

‘They are not my father and mother.’

‘Yes, I know, they adopted you-’

‘I have been looking for my parents. But I was unlucky-there are no records. There should be records, I have a right to know. But there are none. Then I rather hoped that-’

‘That I was your father?’

He said, with a look of sternness and formality, ‘That I could clear the matter up somehow. But I never really imagined-’

‘Have you been with them, over there, at the bungalow, where they live?’

He gave me his cold wet-stone stare, withdrawn and stiff. ‘No. I only came here to see you. I’m going now.’

I kept my head against a wave of panic. The boy could vanish, be lost, never seen again. ‘Aren’t you going to see them, to tell them you’re here? They are very worried about you, they’ll be glad to see you.’

‘No. I’m sorry I bothered you.’

‘How did you know where I lived?’

‘I saw it in a magazine I take-a music magazine.’ He added, ‘You’re famous, people know.’

‘Tell me about yourself. What are you doing now?’

‘Nothing. I’m on the dole. Unemployed. Like everyone else.’

‘But did you finish your training-electricity, was it?’

‘No. The college was closed down. I couldn’t get into another. Well, I didn’t try. I took the dole. Like everyone else.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘Hitch-hike. I’m sorry. I’ve bothered you, taken up your time. I’m going now.’

‘Oh, I hope not. I’ll go with you to the road, it’s easier this way. But first, would you mind fetching my field glasses? They’re over there on that rock.’

Titus seemed pleased to be asked this. In a second he had slithered down the steep incline which I had so laboriously ascended, and was leaping goat-like from rock to rock in the direction of the bridge. I wanted a short interval in which to think. Oh, he was slippery, slippery, touchy, proud. I must hold him, I must be tactful, careful, gentle, firm, I must understand how. Everything, everything, I felt, now depended on Titus, he was the centre of the world, he was the key. I was filled with painful and joyful emotions and the absolute need to conceal them. I could so easily, here, alarm, offend, disgust.

He was back but too soon, coming up the steep rock in a precarious scrabbling run, handing me the glasses with the first smile I had seen on that reserved suspicious still half-childish face. ‘Here. Did you know there’s quite a good table lying over there in the rocks?’

I had forgotten the table. ‘Oh yes, thanks. Maybe you could help me with it later. Look, don’t go away, I’d like to talk to you. Won’t you stay to lunch? You must be hungry. Aren’t you hungry?’

It was at once evident that he was hungry. I felt a rush of concern and pity, of all those dangerously joyously strong emotions which were biding their luxurious secret moment.

He hesitated. ‘Thank you. Well, OK, I’ll stay for a quick bite. I have to be-somewhere else-’

I did not believe too much in that somewhere else.

By this time, by the easy route, we had almost reached the road. We climbed up the last bit and stood a moment looking out over Raven Bay where the calmer shallower sea was the colour of turquoise.

‘Lovely country, isn’t it. Do you know this part of the world?’

‘No.’ He said, suddenly stretching out his hands, ‘Oh, the sea, the sea-it’s so wonderful.’

‘I know. I feel that too. I grew up in the middle of England. So did you, I think?’

‘Yes.’ He turned to me. ‘Look-’

‘Yes?’

‘Why did you-I mean-did you come here for my mother?’

There was so much to discover, so much to explain, and it must be done so carefully and in the right order. I said, ‘I’m glad you call her your mother. She is, you know, even if you are adopted. There’s a kind of reality, a kind of truth. They are your real parents, it would be unjust to deny it.’

‘Yes, I understand about that. But there are-other things-’

‘Won’t you tell me-?’ This was a mistake, too much, too soon.

He frowned, repeating his question. ‘You came here for my mother, after her, or what?’ The tone was austere, accusing.

I faced him, resisting an urge to take him by the shoulders-

‘No, believe me, I didn’t come, as you put it, after her. My coming here was pure chance. It was the oddest coincidence. I didn’t know she was here. I didn’t know where she was. I lost touch with your mother completely a very long time ago. I was absolutely-stunned, amazed-to meet her again-it was the purest accident.’

‘A funny sort of accident-’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Yes. I think so. Yes. All right. Anyway, it’s none of my business. ’

‘I’ve told you the truth.’

‘OK, OK. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter.’

‘They-?’

‘Ben and Mary. They don’t matter. You very kindly offered me food. Perhaps I could just have some cheese or a sandwich. Then I must push off.’

Ben and Mary was a shock too. We began to walk slowly back towards the house. Titus picked up two plastic bags which were lying on a roadside rock.

‘Your wordly goods?’

‘Not quite all.’

As we turned onto the causeway Gilbert came out of the front door, and stopped in amazement. It occurred to me that I had never mentioned Titus’s existence to either Lizzie or Gilbert. Gilbert knew what Lizzie had told him about the ‘old flame’, but I had checked his eager attempts to pursue the matter. Titus had not appeared to be part of the story; and what a ghost he had seemed in Hartley’s own mentions of him. Whereas now…

As we neared I said to Gilbert in my ringing tones, ‘Oh, hello, this is young Titus Fitch, the son of Mr and Mrs Fitch, you know, my friends in the village. And this is Mr Opian who helps me in the house.’ The tone and the description were designed to establish Gilbert, for the present at any rate, as being beyond some unspecified barrier. Gilbert’s eyes had already taken on a dazed and gauzy look. I did not want any trouble of that sort; and, to tell the truth, I was already feeling rather possessive about Titus.

‘Come along,’ I said. As I hustled Titus through the door I gave Gilbert a kick on the ankle by way of ambiguous warning. ‘Gilbert, could you set lunch for me and Titus in the red room? Titus, a drink?’

He drank beer and I drank white wine while Gilbert, who had now donned his apron, quickly and discreetly laid out and then served luncheon for two on the bamboo table. I think Gilbert would have been glad to serve me thus every day, only he feared to annoy me by suggesting it. His studied and meticulous ‘butler’ would have graced any drawing room comedy. At one point, catching my eye over Titus’s head, he winked. I gazed coldly back. We had ham cooked in brown sugar to a recipe of Gilbert’s, with a salad of Italian tinned tomatoes and herbs. (These excellent tomatoes are best eaten cold. They may be warmed, but never boiled as this destroys the distinctive flavour.) Then cherries with Gilbert’s little lemon sponge cakes. Then double Gloucester cheese with very hard biscuits which Gilbert had rebaked in the oven. Our butler, instructed by telepathy, soon made himself scarce. We drank white wine with the meal. Titus ate ravenously.

I made a little polite conversation by way of introduction, and while Gilbert was still in evidence. ‘I expect you’re very leftwing, like most of the young.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Interested in politics?’

‘Party politics? No.’

‘But some kind of politics?’

He admitted to being interested in the preservation of whales. We discussed that. ‘And I’m against pollution, I think the problem of nuclear waste is terrible.’ We discussed that too.

At the next pause I said, ‘So you didn’t come here to see them?’

‘No, I came to see you.’

‘To ask me that question?’

‘Yes. Thanks for answering it. Needless to say I won’t bother you again.’

‘Oh, don’t say that. But-so-you aren’t going to call on them, to let them know you’re here?’

‘No.’

‘Oughtn’t you to? Of course I quite understand you mightn’t want to. Now I had a very happy relation with my parents, but-’

‘I had a very unhappy one with mine.’

Drink had loosened his tongue. I had been doing a lot of urgent thinking. A plan, the plan, was emerging. ‘With both of them?’

‘Yes. Well, it wasn’t her fault so much. He took against me. She went along with him. I suppose she had to.’

‘She was frightened.’

‘Well, it was a bad scene. He stopped her from talking to me. And she always felt she had to tell him lies, little lies just so as to make life easier. I hated that.’

‘You mustn’t blame her.’ That was important.

‘I suppose he wasn’t a bad chap. But he couldn’t succeed at anything and that was depressing and maybe made him a bit spiteful, and he took it out on us. She couldn’t do a thing. Well, I do exaggerate. There were good times or goodish times, only the bad ones were so-crucial.’ Again the hesitation. Perhaps the tone of someone else’s voice? Whose?

‘I understand.’

‘You never knew when it was going to start again. You had to be careful what you said.’

The bruising and breaking of that child’s pride must have been something appalling, unspeakable. I recalled Hartley’s picture of the white-faced silent boy. Poor Hartley! She was the helpless witness of it all. ‘Your mother must have suffered very much, for you and with you.’

He gave me one of his quick suspicious frowning stares, but did not pursue the point. On closer inspection he seemed less handsome, or perhaps just more dirty and untidy. He had the pale complexion of a redhead, but his long unkempt hair was greasy and in need of a wash. His face was thin and a little wolfish, the cheeks almost sunken. The eyes had a bright cold blue-grey glint (they were a little spotted and mottled like one of my stones) but always narrowed. Perhaps he was short-sighted. He had a small pretty mouth, the lips scarcely disfigured, and a firm straight little nose, such as a girl might have envied. He was decently shaved, his beard showing in bright points of reddish gold, but the unusually dark stubble growing inaccessibly in the scar looked like a tiny lopsided moustache. He was obviously self-conscious about the scar and kept touching it. His hands were very dirty and the nails bitten.

‘And then there was this business about me.’ I did not speak portentously, but I wanted to keep him on the subject.

‘Oh well, yes, it came up now and then. But I don’t want you to get the idea-’

‘I expect you know that I loved your mother very much when we were young. I haven’t seen her since then, till we suddenly met here-’

‘She must have changed a bit!’

‘I still love her. But we never had a love affair.’

‘That’s nothing to me. Sorry, that’s not the phrase I want, I must be getting drunk. I mean, don’t tell me things like that, I’m not-I’m not interested. I believe you that you’re not my father, that’s finished. All the same, I can’t quite understand about your being here. Do you see them, or what?’

‘Oh, occasionally.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather you didn’t tell them-’

‘About you? No, all right. As I say, I’m still very attached to your mother, very concerned about her. I’d like to help her. I don’t think she’s had much of a life.’

‘Well, a life is a life.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It’s only when one’s young one expects otherwise. She’s a bit of an imaginer, a fantasist, I suppose most women are. I must go now. Thanks for the grub.’

‘Oh I’m not going to let you go yet!’ I said, laughing. ‘I want to hear much more about you. You said your college closed down. But what would you like to do if you could choose?’

‘I used to think I’d like to work somehow with animals, I like animals.’

‘You don’t want to go back to electricity?’

‘Oh, that was just to get away from home, I got a grant and cleared out. No, I think if I could choose now I’d like to be an actor.’

Here was a stroke of luck. I could have shouted with joy. ‘An actor? Why then I can help you.’

He said, quickly flushing and with an aggressive precision, ‘I did not come here for that. I did not come for your help or to cadge or anything. I just came to ask. It wasn’t easy. You’re a celebrity. I thought about it for a long time. I hoped I’d solve it the other way, by finding the adoption people, but that didn’t work out. I don’t want your help or to push my way into your life. I wouldn’t want that even if you were my dad.’

He got up with an air of departure and I rose too. I wanted to throw my arms around him. ‘All right. But don’t go yet. Wouldn’t you like to have a swim?’

‘A swim? Oh-yes.’

‘Well, repose for a while, we can swim later, then have some tea-’

‘I’d like to swim now.’

We walked out onto the grass, ignoring Gilbert who rose respectfully as we passed through the kitchen, and then climbed the rocks towards the sea and came out on top of the little cliff. The tide had come in further and the water was now little more than ten feet below us. It was calmer than it had been in the morning and the semi-transparent water was a rich bottle-green in the bright sunlight.

‘Do you swim here? It looks marvellous. And one can dive. I hate not diving in.’

It was not a moment for dreary warnings. I was not going to admit to Titus any difficulties, any fear of the sea. ‘Yes, this is the best place.’

Titus was in a frenzy to get into the water. ‘I haven’t any swimming things.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter, no one can see us, I never wear anything. ’

Titus had already torn off the Leeds University tee shirt, revealing a lot of curly, red-golden hair. He was hopping, dragging off his trousers. Wanting suddenly to laugh with pleasure I began to undress with equal haste, but was still unbuttoning my shirt when the splash of his perfect dive blotted the glittering rock at my feet. In a moment I followed him, gasped at the coldness of the water, and seconds later began to feel warm and wildly elated.

My man Opian had come out bearing towels. He seemed to retire discreetly, but then I could see him peeping over a nearby rock, watching Titus perform. The boy, showing off of course, swam like a dolphin, graceful, playful, a white swift flashing curving form, giving glimpses of sudden hands and heels, active shoulders, pale buttocks, and a wet exuberant laughing face framed in clinging seaweed hair. His sea-darkened hair certainly changed his appearance, became dark and straight, adhering to his neck and shoulders, plastering his face, making him look like a girl. Aware of the effect, he charmingly tossed his head and drew the heavy sopping locks back out of his eyes and off his brow. He had the effortless crawl which I have never mastered, and in his marine joy kept diving vertically under, vanishing and reappearing somewhere else with a triumphant yell. Equal mad delight possessed me, and the sea was joyful and the taste of the salt water was the taste of hope and joy. I kept laughing, gurgling water, spouting, whirling. Meeting my sea-dervish companion I shouted, ‘Now aren’t you glad you came to me?’

‘Yes, yes, yes!’

Of course he had no difficulty climbing up the little steep cliff. After all, had I not first seen him like a fly upon that tower? I had a slight difficulty myself and a bad moment, but concealed it from him. It was rather too early to start losing face and seeming old. I wanted him to accept me as a comrade. After that, in the shade of a rock, he slept. After that we had a substantial tea. And after that he agreed to stay the night, just the night and leave early the next day. I had meanwhile confiscated and hidden his two plastic bags in case he should suddenly take it into his head to slip away. I looked into the bags, there was precious little in them: shaving things, underwear, a decent striped shirt, a tie, shoes, a much creased and folded cotton jacket. Some expensive cuff links in a velvet box. The love poems of Dante, in Italian and English, in a de luxe edition with risqué engravings. The last two items made me think a bit.

Of course Gilbert, now fully aware of our visitor’s identity, was in a scarcely controllable state of excitement and curiosity. ‘What are you going to do with him?’ ‘Wait and see.’ ‘I know what I’d like to do!’ ‘For God’s sake just keep out of our way.’ ‘All right, I know my place!’

At my suggestion Titus had rinsed his hair in fresh water. Dried and combed it became fluffy, a thick mass of spiralling red-brown tendrils, and much improved his appearance. In the evening he put on the cleanish shirt, but not the cuff links. Gilbert surreptitiously washed the Leeds University tee shirt.

We dined, Titus and I, by candlelight. He said suddenly, ‘It’s so romantic!’ We both laughed wildly.

Titus now looked curiously at Gilbert and Gilbert’s too impeccable performance, but asked no questions. I vaguely volunteered, ‘He’s an old actor, down on his luck’ and that seemed to account for him sufficiently for the present.

At dinner we talked of theatre and television. He seemed to have seen a remarkable number of London plays and knew the names of a great many actors. He described how he had directed The Admirable Crichton at school. He was modest, diffident about his ambition. ‘It’s just an idea.’ I did not press him, about this or about anything. We laughed a good deal.

He went to bed early, sleeping on cushions among my books in the front room downstairs. He expressed great interest in the books, but blew his candle out early. (I was watching from the stairs). At breakfast, he agreed to stay to lunch. I allowed the obsequious Gilbert to join us for general conversation at breakfast time. I did not want Gilbert to become an interesting mystery.

After breakfast I turned Titus loose to swim and explore the rocks, indicating that I would be busy with my ‘writing’. I thought it better not to crowd him with my company and in any case I wanted time to think. Titus seemed very happy, playing boyishly by himself. I watched his agile appearances and disappearances from the window with a piercing mixture of affection and envy. He returned at last bearing the errant table ostentatiously raised with one arm above his head. He put the table on the grass, then suggested that we should eat outside, but I vetoed this. (I agree with Mr Knightley about al fresco meals.) Gilbert meanwhile had been out shopping and had made, under my direction, a decent kedgeree with frozen coley.

At lunch, where Titus and I were again tête-à-tête, I decided it was time to speak seriously. I had had enough of gaining his confidence and refraining from scaring him. In any case my nerve was giving out and I wanted to know my fate.

‘Titus, listen, there’s something important I want to say to you.’

He looked alarmed and put one hand flat on the table as if ready to leap up and bolt.

‘I want you to stay here, for a time at any rate. I’ll explain why. I want you to see your mother.’

The eyes narrowed further, the pretty lips almost sneered. ‘I’m not going over there.’

‘I’m not suggesting you should. She will come over here.’

‘So you’ve told them. You said you wouldn’t.’

‘I haven’t told them. I’m just suggesting, asking you. If your mother knows you’re here she’ll come. There’s no need to tell him.’

‘She’ll tell him. She always does.’

‘She won’t this time, I’ll persuade her not to. I just want her to visit you here. Anyway, what can he do, even if he does know? He’s got to pretend to be pleased. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I’m not afraid!’

This was a bad start, I was fumbling and confused, and even as I spoke I imagined Ben snarling at the door.

Titus said thoughtfully, ‘I’m sorry for him in a way. He hasn’t had much of a life either, to use your phrase.’

‘A life is a life, to use yours. If you’re sorry for him you should all the more be sorry for her. She has grieved about you so much. Won’t you see her and make her happy?’

‘Nothing could make her happy. Nothing. Ever.’ The bland finality of the reply was dreadful.

‘Well, you can try!’ I said with exasperation. ‘It can’t be very nice for her not knowing what’s happened to you.’

‘OK then, you can tell her you saw me.’

‘That’s not enough. You must see her yourself. She must come here.’

Titus was looking handsomer again today, his cheeks lightly touched by the sun, his brighter softer hair framing the bony lumpiness of his face. The horrible tee shirt was already dry, but he was again wearing the striped shirt with the collar open.

‘Look, you said you saw them “occasionally”. That sounds odd to me. You were the bogy man for years, the devil himself. I can remember the desperate look in her eyes when your name came up. They can’t have forgiven you? All right, you haven’t done anything, but you know what I mean. Do you go round and play bridge or what?’

‘No, of course not. He still detests me, I imagine, and God knows what he really believes. Maybe he doesn’t know himself. But I’m beginning to think he doesn’t matter much.’

‘Why, pray?’

‘Because I think your mother is going to leave him.’

‘She never would. Never. No way.’

‘I think she would under certain circumstances. I think she would if she could only conceive of it as possible. If she saw it as possible she would see it as easy.’

‘But where would she go to?’

‘To me.’

‘You mean-you want her?’

‘Yes.’

‘And so you want me to persuade my mother to leave my father? You’ve got to be joking! That’s a lot to expect in return for lunch and dinner.’

‘And breakfast and tea.’

‘You’re a cool one.’

I was not feeling cool. Everything in this conversation was going wrong, being crudely, grossly presented. I was anxious not to drive him to any sudden reaction by striking too portentous a note. At the same time he must appreciate my seriousness. The maddening fact was that I now had all the pieces for a solution, but would I be allowed to fit them together? ‘My dear Titus, of course I don’t want you to persuade your mother of anything. I want you to see her because I know this would very profoundly relieve her mind. And I want you to see her here because it would only be possible here.’

‘I’m to be a lure-a kind of-hostage-’

This was dreadfully near the truth, but I had left out something very important which I now saw I ought to have mentioned at the start. ‘No, no. Just listen carefully. I want to tell you something else. Why do you think I persuaded you to stay here instead of letting you go away?’

‘I’m beginning to think it’s because you want my mother to come to you because of me.’

The wording of this went so far that I could scarcely say again: no. It was true in a way, but true in a harmless way, an innocuous way, even a wonderful way. As we stared at each other I hoped that he might suddenly, in this light, see it. But he kept, rather deliberately perhaps, his hard suspicious mask. I said, holding his eyes and frowning with intent, ‘Yes, I do want that. But I want it also because of you, through you, for you, you’re part of it, you’re part of everything now. You’re essential.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I persuaded you to stay here because I like you.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot!’

‘And you stayed because you like me.’

‘And the food. And the swimming. OK!’

‘Put it this way, and for the moment as hypothetically as you please. You are searching for a father. I am searching for a son. Why don’t we make a deal?’

He refused to be impressed or startled. ‘I suspect you’ve just thought of this son idea. Anyway, I’m looking for my real father, and not because I need one or want one, but just to kill a devil of miserable biting curiosity that I’ve lived with all my life.’

No, he was not at all what I had expected, though I could not now think why I had expected a dullard. Something in Hartley’s rather desperate account of him had suggested this perhaps. He was a clever attractive boy and I was going to do my damnedest to get hold of him. To get hold of him and then of his mother.

‘Well, think it over. It’s a proposition, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a deeply serious one. You see-in a curious way-because of my old relation to your mother-I am cast in the role of your father. I know this is nonsense, but you’re clever enough to understand nonsense. You might have been my son. I’m not just anybody. Fate has brought us together. And I could help you a lot-’

‘I don’t want your money or your bloody influence, I didn’t come here for that!’

‘So you said, and we passed that stage some time ago, so shut up about it now. I want to take your mother away, and I want at last to make her happy, which you think is impossible and I don’t. And I want you to be in the picture too. For her sake. For my sake. In the picture. I’m not suggesting more than that. You can work it for as much or as little as you like.’

‘You mean you’d take us both away and we’d all three live together in a villa in the south of France?’

‘Yes. If you’d like! Why not?’

He uttered an explosive yelp, then with a theatrical gesture spread out his hands, which were cleaner now. ‘You love her?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t know her.’

‘The odd thing is, my dear boy, that I do know her.’

‘Well,’ said Titus, and there was at last a look of admiration, ‘let’s just suppose… that you did… ask her to come and see me…’

I was lying in tall luscious green grass which was just coming out into pink feathery flower. The grass was cool and very dry and squeaked slightly as I moved. I was lying on the edge of the wood, on the far side of the footpath, just level with the garden of Nibletts. I was holding a pocket mirror. Hartley had just come out into the garden.

Titus had promised, for the future, nothing. He had treated the matter with an affected cynicism and had allowed me no glimpse of the emotions which were certainly there behind it. He pretended to treat the whole thing almost as a joke, a game, at any rate as something which he was prepared to do simply to oblige me, for the hell of it, to ‘see what happened’. He had agreed to stay on, ‘since he had nothing better to do’, and to ‘say hello’ to his mother. Though he added, with a slightly grimmer note, that he was pretty sure she would not come.

That remained to be seen; and it was also unclear to me how exactly, after all those years during which she ‘went along’ with Ben because she ‘had to’, he felt about her. Where and how did forgiveness figure in that scene? Mercy, loyalty, love? Was I not perhaps meddling with something dreadful? Unpredictable it certainly was. What kept me more boldly on was an optimism which Titus himself had rather crazily engendered with that image of the three of us living together in the south of France! If he would stick to me, and she would come out, there would be, for all of us, some tremendous spiritual release, like the sudden ecstasy which Titus and I had experienced in the sea. I would make her happy, I would. And I would make him happy and successful and free.

Another matter had come up between us after Titus had agreed, as he again cynically put it, to be a ‘hostage’. After he had agreed to stay on, if I wished it, ‘for a while’, I had said casually, boldly, ‘You haven’t anyone waiting for you then anywhere? I mean a girl or anything?’

He said rather stiffly, ‘No. There was somebody. But that’s over.’

I wondered: did he then come to me in loneliness, in desperation? And if so would this not make him all the more ready to accept-my overtures-my love?

It was the evening of the same day. There seemed no point in waiting longer. I had even told Gilbert the outline of the plan, though part of it I still concealed, even from Titus. Gilbert, who was now to play the key part which I had envisaged earlier, was enjoying the whole drama disgracefully. I had waited, hidden in the wood, for nearly an hour when Hartley appeared. There was no sign of the gentleman.

I watched her for a moment quietly. She was wearing the yellow dress with the brown flower pattern, and over it a loose blue overall. She walked a little awkwardly, her shoulders hunched, her head down, her hands deep in the pockets of the overall. She came down to the end of the garden and stood there for a while, like an animal, staring dully at the grass. Then she lifted her head and started looking at the sea, image of an inaccessible freedom. Then she removed one hand from her pocket and touched her face. She must be crying. I could scarcely bear it.

Cautiously I uncovered the pocket mirror and leaning forward tilted it to catch the sun. The little running bright reflection, like a tiny live creature, appeared at once upon the hillside just below the garden. I was careful to keep it well away from the house. I brought the brilliant little patch of light slowly up the hill towards her feet; and in a moment I knew that she had noticed it, and that she realized what it meant. This was a trick which we used to play on each other in summers when we were children. I sent the flash up for a moment to her face, and then began to lead it away, making a line across the grass in the direction of the wood.

Hartley stood staring towards me. I rose to a kneeling position and gently stirred the creamy-flowering branch of an elder bush. Hartley made a gesture, lifting her hand to her throat. Then she turned and moved back towards the house. I nearly called out with vexation, but then realized that she was probably going to check on Ben’s activity and whereabouts. Perhaps he was riveting china. I waited for an anxious minute, and then she came out again, minus the overall, ran to the fence, stooped through the wire, and came running across the grass towards me.

I retreated a bit into a little glade underneath an ash tree. A large branch had been wrenched from the tree by some winter gale, and through the gap the sun shone down upon a wild rose bush in pallid flower and a mass of fading cow parsley and buttercups. I stood beside the ash tree whose dense-textured grey smooth trunk brought back some elusive childhood memory connected with Hartley. I could now see her thrusting aside the big flat flower-heads of the elder. In a moment she had come to me, and I noticed how she instinctively avoided the patch of sunlight.

I put my arms around her and she consented to be held, a little stiff, bowing her head. I drew my hand down her back, pressing her against me, feeling her soft warmth, my knee touching her knee. She sighed and turned her head sideways but her hands still hung limply. The warmth of her body beneath the frail dress made me close my eyes and almost forget my plan and its urgency.

‘Oh, Hartley, my darling, my own.’

‘You shouldn’t have come.’

‘I love you.’ I sat down at the foot of the tree, leaning against it, and drew her down beside me. I wanted her to lie relaxed with her head on my breast. ‘Come. We were often like this, weren’t we. Remember?’ But she would not. I saw her in the sunny shady light, her breasts straining the buttons of her dress, as so much lovelier, so much like her old self, as if some woodland magic had made her young again.

She knelt beside me, clasping one of my hands, and staring at me with her big darkened eyes. Then, suddenly, and tenderly, she lifted my hand and kissed it.

This gesture moved and upset me so much that it actually served to bring me to my senses. The urgent matter was to get the girl away, and I had not even started my argument.

‘Hartley, my little one, you do love me, oh, I’m so glad! But listen, I’ve got something to tell you. Where is he?’

‘He’s out. I just went to make sure. But, oh you shouldn’t have come like this-’

‘Where to, how long?’

‘He’s gone to see a man about a dog. He’ll be some time.’

‘A dog?’

‘Yes. It’s quite a long way, over at Amorne Farm. And as it’s such nice weather he decided to walk.’

‘Walk? I thought he was crippled-had a bad leg-’

‘His leg’s stiff, it slows him down, but he likes walking, and the exercise does him good. You see, there was an advertisement in the shop, they were going to have a dog put down if they couldn’t find an owner, it’s a Welsh collie, a grown-up dog, not a puppy. It’s not good with the sheep. And we thought we’d look at it. We rang up and they sounded very nice, some people called Arkwright. ’

‘Oh-Arkwright. But you didn’t go-you decided to stay here in case I came-’

‘Ben thought I’d better not be there, I would get all excited about the dog and he’d rather decide by himself. It’s always a risk taking a grown-up dog-’

‘Hartley, listen. Titus is back. He’s at my house.’

She toppled sideways into the grass, releasing my hand. ‘No-’

‘Yes. He doesn’t want to see him-only you-he very much wants to see you. Come, come quickly.’

‘Titus-but why did he come to you-? Oh how strange, how awful-’

‘I thought you’d be glad!’

‘But that he should come to you-oh dear, what shall I do, what shall I do-’ She was suddenly a whimpering distracted child.

‘Come and see him, come on, get up.’ I pulled her up. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you want to see your son, isn’t it wonderful that he’s back?’

‘Yes, wonderful-but I must stay here-tell him to come here. He mustn’t say he was with you-’

‘He won’t come here, that’s the point! Come on, Hartley, stop behaving like a sleepwalker, move, act! He’ll never come here, you know that. Come along, he’s waiting for us. There’ll be plenty of time to see him before Ben gets back. I’ve got a car waiting at the bottom of the hill.’ I began to pull her back towards the meadow and the footpath, but she resisted, maddeningly sitting down again on the ground.

‘But tell me, Titus-is he-?’

‘Oh hurry! If you want Titus not to say he saw me you’d better come along and tell him yourself!’

This argument, vague enough, seemed to impress her, at any rate touched her through her panic. ‘All right, but I’ll only stay a few minutes, and you must bring me back at once!’

‘Yes, yes, yes’-I pulled her to her feet again.

‘And we must stay in the wood, someone might see us-’

‘I thought you didn’t know anybody here! Now do hurry-’

We went down by the woodland path. It was overgrown in places and rather dark and we stumbled along, whipped by twigs, clung to by brambles, and constantly impeded by little saplings growing in the middle of the pathway. The sheer stupid awkwardness of our progress made me want to scream. Hartley’s body moving beside me was jerky and clumsy, it was like conducting a log of wood.

We came out bedraggled and panting, onto the coast road. Gilbert had drawn the Volkswagen up onto the grass verge. When he saw us emerging he started the engine and backed towards us.

A few days of seaside holiday had transformed Gilbert. He looked younger, fitter, even his white curls were looser and more natural. He had been to the Fishermen’s Stores and kitted himself out with plimsolls and light canvas trousers and a big loose cotton jersey which he now wore over a white shirt. He had left off the deplorable make-up. These were fine times for Gilbert. He was a necessary man. He was helping me to acquire a woman other than Lizzie, and he was engaged in an adventure which featured a charming boy. His eyes blazed with vitality and curiosity. I handed Hartley into the back of the car and got in after, suddenly trying to see each of them through the eyes the other. Gilbert appeared as a handsome well-fed rather wealthy-looking holiday gentleman. The butler act was switched off. Now he was playing a man who owned a yacht. But no, I could not imagine how Gilbert saw my darling, or what he had expected the ‘one love’ to be like.

‘This is my friend Mr Opian. Mrs Fitch. Step on it, Gilbert.’

Hartley turned to me as the car sped along the coast road, but she said nothing. She clutched, perhaps unconsciously, the sleeve of my jacket with one hand. I sat relaxed, content to feel the touch of her fingers and of her knee. Her eyes had their violet tint and her face the strained fey expression which when she was young had made her look so desirably wild. Now it made her look almost mad. I found myself smiling with joy at the enclosed safe feeling of the car, at its speed. The sense of a successful escape was overwhelming. I smiled at her crazily.

When the car stopped at the causeway she was reluctant to get out. ‘Does he know I’m coming? Couldn’t he come out here to the car?’

‘Hartley, darling, do what you’re told!’

When I had got her out Gilbert, as instructed, drove the car on. It disappeared round the corner in the direction of the Raven Hotel.

I had told Titus to stay in the kitchen, but when we were half-way across the causeway he opened the front door.

I had been so absorbed in my mind with the mechanical detail of my plan that I had not really reflected upon what this meeting would be like. My intentions had far overleapt it and my hopes were assembling a much less awkward future. Now however I was jerked back into the present and an alarmed confused sense of what I had brought about.

As soon as she saw Titus, Hartley stopped and an almost terrible change came over her face. Her mouth opened and drooped in an ugly way as if she might cry and her eyes half closed and her forehead had the ‘pitted’ appearance which I had seen before; only what all this expressed was not shock or some sad overwhelming joy, but guilt and supplication. At the same time she quite unconsciously spread out her hands wide on either side of her, again not for an embrace but as a petition.

I took all this in quickly and was so instantly hurt by it I wanted to cry out, stop, stop! I wanted to interfere mercifully as between two unequal combatants. But I was already excluded from the scene. Titus came forward, frowning, manly, with screwed-up eyes, determined to be hard and calm and display no emotion. He could not however conceal, for it showed in his every gesture, even in the way he walked, that he was bent on raising a suppliant. He came to Hartley and somehow gruffly gathered her, hustling her towards the door. I saw him push her in through the doorway, his hands in the middle of her back. I hastened to follow.

When I got in they were already conversing, standing in the hall, and I felt: it’s not like mother and son. And yet why not? Family relations are all awkward, funny. Or had Hartley never managed to become his mother, never been allowed to? What would they say?

‘We didn’t know where you were, where you’d gone, we tried and tried to find out, we did try, we did ask-’ This as if Titus were accusing her of having failed to find him.

‘Yes, yes, I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right, I’m fine,’ answering a question not put yet.

‘And you are well and have your work or are you still-where are you living?’

‘I’m unemployed and I’m not living anywhere.’

‘We left our address with the people in case you’d lost it, in case you came back. And I wrote a letter-’

‘It’s all right, Mary, it’s all right-’

To check this conversation which I found somehow awful (I could not bear to hear him reassuring her and calling her ‘Mary’) I said, ‘Why don’t you go through to the kitchen? Would you like a drink?’ I needed one, and in their situation I would have been frantic for one, but neither of them seemed to feel the necessity and in fact they ignored the question.

Titus went through into the kitchen and Hartley followed and they stood beside the table, holding on to it, and looking at each other with stricken glaring faces. Hartley’s look expressed timid supplication and fear, his a kind of shamed disgusted pity. There was so much pain in the room, it was like a physical barrier. I stood watching them, wanting to help, to interrupt. ‘Won’t you have some supper? Let’s have some supper, shall we? Let’s talk-’

Titus said, ‘Of course I never lost your address.’

Hartley said, ‘I mustn’t stay. Would you like to come over to our place? But you mustn’t say you’ve been here. Would you like-?’

Titus shook his head.

She went on, ‘Ben doesn’t know you’ve come, he’s gone out, walked over to a farm to ask about a dog.’

‘About a dog?’ said Titus.

‘Yes, we’re thinking of having a dog.’

‘What kind?’

‘A Welsh collie.’

‘Will he bring the dog back with him?’

‘I don’t know.’

At least this was something like a topic of conversation.

I was tired of being invisible and inaudible, so I shouted, ‘Have a drink, have some supper!’

Titus, without looking at me, waggled his hand in my direction, then said to Hartley, ‘Come in here.’ She followed him into the little red room and he shut the door in my face.

I now decided, none too soon, that I had better leave them alone. Besides, now that Hartley was here, I had to work out in more detail the dangerous and decisive next steps. I stood for a moment thinking in the hall. Then I ran upstairs to the drawing room and pulled out some writing paper. I had found in a drawer some embossed Shruff End paper which must have belonged to Mrs Chorney, and on a glossy sheet of this stuff I wrote:

Dear Mr Fitch,

Just to say that Mary is over here with me, and Titus too.

Yours sincerely,

Charles Arrowby.

I pushed this into an envelope and ran out of the house.

I was somewhat surprised to find a warm summer evening in progress. Perhaps the house was cold, perhaps I had been feeling cold, perhaps I felt that ordinary time ought to have stopped. The grass on the other side of the road was a pullulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds. The warm air met me in a wave, thick with land smells of earth and growth and flowers.

I ran across the causeway and then along the road in the tower and Raven direction, and then around the corner to where the bay was visible. Here, obedient to my orders, Gilbert had parked the car. I wanted it out of sight in case I had to tell Hartley some lie about it later.

Gilbert was sitting on a rock, looking at the brilliantly lit blue water. He jumped up and ran to me.

‘Gilbert, could you take this letter now and deliver it at Nibletts, at the bungalow, you know, it’s the last one in the road.’

‘OK, boss. How are things in there?’

‘All right. Go now, there’s a good chap. And then come back again and wait here.’

‘What about my supper? Can’t I come into the house?’ Gilbert, bursting with curiosity, was longing to busybody around.

I would not have it. ‘No, not yet. You’d better buy yourself a sandwich at the Black Lion, and then come back here. I don’t quite know what’s going to happen.’

‘Nothing violent, I hope?’

‘So do I. Hurry, now.’

‘But, guv’nor-’

‘Go.’

‘I can stay for a drink at the pub, can’t I, I’m dying for a drink-’

‘Yes, but not long, four minutes.’

Looking at Gilbert’s disgruntled face I was unpleasantly reminded of Freddie Arkwright. And now there were Arkwrights everywhere, and they had got hold of Ben.

I ran back, and the car passed me at the causeway. I went into the house (which was cold) and on into the kitchen and poured myself out half a tumbler of dry sherry. I did not listen at the door of the red room. I went out onto the grass and climbed a little way up onto one of the rocks whence I could see the sea and began to sip the sherry.

So far so good. But how would Hartley behave when I began to put the screw on? And what would Ben do when he got my note? When would he get it? If he walked both ways to Amorne Farm and back, and allowing half an hour for the dog, he should be back at Nibletts about nine thirty. It was now a little after eight. I remembered that I was hungry. The sherry was making me light-headed. However if the bloody Arkwrights ran him home in the car he might be back soon after eight thirty. On the other hand, if he walked back with the dog he might not be there till nearer ten. What did he suddenly want a dog for anyway? Did he want to programme the animal to attack me?

I decided on reflection that it did not too much matter what time Ben got back, as he would probably make no move tonight. He would wait, at first expecting Hartley and Titus to turn up, and then grinding his teeth. I imagined him even finding a dark satisfaction in his own mounting rage. Not a nice man.

I finished the sherry and went inside. The murmur of voices in the little red room continued. I thought then that really the longer they talked the better. Every minute that passed could bind them closer to each other, and also would use up more of the dangerous time. When they got hungry they might come out. But more likely they were too agitated to feel hunger.

In spite of my fears I was not. I sat for a while eating biscuits and olives, then I scraped the remains of the kedgeree onto a plate and took it outside again, together with a glass of white wine, and resumed my sea view. I felt very odd, excited, nervous, a bit drunk, but clear in the head.

Almost at once however I heard Titus shouting. He evidently could not bring himself to shout either ‘Charles!’ or ‘Mr Arrowby! ’ but called out several times, ‘Hello there!’ followed by various urgent owl hoots.

I considered ignoring these cries, but decided I had better not, even though it was far too early to expect Ben. I returned precariously to the lawn with my plate and glass.

Titus and Hartley were standing outside by the door, she wearing that distraught frightened look which I now knew so well.

Titus said, ‘Look, Mary thinks she’d better go. I’ve told her there’s lots of time but she wants to go now, OK?’

Hartley said, ‘Could I have the car at once, please?’ She spoke in a hard almost angry tone.

Titus said, ‘I looked out the front, I couldn’t see it. She’s getting very bothered.’

‘Nothing to bother about,’ I said. I went into the kitchen and they followed me. ‘Won’t you have some supper?’

‘I must go,’ said Hartley. Her moment, whatever it had been, with Titus, was now over, and the cruel husband-dominated time whose slave she was had driven even Titus out of her head. The old panic was back. How I detested that fierce almost relentless look of fear upon her face. It made her ugly. While in the wood, when she kissed my hand, she had looked beautiful.

Titus said, ‘Come on, where’s the car, she’s got to go home.’

Titus had evidently forgotten that his task was to keep Hartley at Shruff End. Or more likely, he had been infected by her fear. I had been too tactful in my explanations to Titus, too vague. I had not told him everything that I had in mind, partly because I did not know how he would react. I had told him that my idea was that Hartley would want to stay, and that he should add his persuasions. But I now saw that I ought to have been more explicit.

‘There’s no need to go,’ I said.

‘I’ve stayed much longer than I meant to already,’ said Hartley. ‘He said he’d be back about half past nine, but he could be sooner. So please I must go now, this very minute.’

‘There’s no need to. I’ve sent Opian round with a note saying you’re here with Titus, so he won’t worry, he’ll come here. Then Gilbert can run you all back.’

Titus whistled. He saw at once the enormity of what I had done.

Hartley was a moment taking it in. ‘You mean-you mean you’ve told him, deliberately told him-oh, you wicked-oh, you fool-you don’t know-you don’t know-’ Tears of rage and despair sprang into her eyes and her face blazed at me. I stepped back.

I said, pursuing the role that I had adopted, but also speaking sincerely, ‘Hartley, you mustn’t be so frightened of him! I’m absolutely fed up with your attitude to that bloody man. Why should you feel you have to lie to him all the time? Why the hell shouldn’t you be here with Titus, it’s perfectly natural and proper!’

Titus looked at Hartley with interested concern and at me quizzically. ‘And did you invite him here? Jesus!’ He added, ‘Of course he won’t have seen the letter yet because he won’t be home.’

Hartley, looking at her watch, had just realized this too. ‘Oh yes, he mustn’t see it, he mustn’t see it! If we go at once there’ll be time to get it before he sees it. Then everything will be all right. He just mustn’t see the letter. Please, we must go at once, the car, the car!’

I said, with a maddening air of calm, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but the car isn’t there. It’s gone on to the garage by the Raven Hotel, there’s a fault in the engine.’

‘When will it be back?’ said Titus.

‘I don’t know, oh soon, I daresay.’

‘We could ring them up.’

‘I haven’t got a telephone.’

Hartley cried, ‘I must go, I must go, I must go, if I run I can get there in time-’

‘I’ll run for you,’ said Titus.

‘No, you won’t,’ I said, glaring at him. ‘Now, Hartley, just sit down here at the table and stop behaving like a mad person. The car will probably be back any moment. But listen, I don’t want you to go back there, back to him, back to his house. I want you to stay here, to stay here with Titus and me.’ I gave Titus another meaningful look. I felt as if I were sifting the sense into her head.

Hartley sat down. She looked from me to Titus and back like a frightened animal. I sat down beside her. She was trembling, and I saw some dawning of understanding in her terrified eyes. There was a sudden atmosphere of crisis.

Titus said, ‘She wants to go back. And I’ll go back with her. I’ve decided to.’

I said, still trying to gain time, ‘No, no, both of you stay here. Hartley, my dear, he’ll know where you are, he won’t think you’ve drowned. He can come and see Titus here. Titus stays here, he lives here. Titus, you don’t really want to go over there, do you?’

Titus, visibly distressed, said again, ‘She wants to go back. She doesn’t want him to see the letter. There’s still time. I could run over there in twenty minutes. It’s just beyond the village, isn’t it?’

‘Oh go, please, please,’ cried Hartley, ‘go now, the door isn’t locked, you can just-’

‘Or should I run to the hotel? Which is nearer?’

I said to Titus, ‘I want him to see the letter. And you are both to stay here. Are we that man’s slaves? I want to let your mother out of that cage.’

Hartley gave a cry of woe.

‘Why do you want him to see the letter?’ said Titus. ‘I don’t understand all this, it’s like some sort of plot. I know you said you hoped she’d want to see me here, and that. But I didn’t think you meant to pull the whole bag of tricks down on her head.’

‘That is exactly what I do want to do,’ I said, ‘to pull the whole bag of tricks down on her head.’

‘No, no!’ Hartley leapt up and made a dash for the door.

I blundered after her, and reaching for her shoulder grabbed the neck of the dress, which tore a little. When she felt it tear she stopped. Then she came back to the table and sat down with her face in her hands.

Titus said, ‘Look, I don’t like this. You can’t keep her here against her will.’

‘I want her to be able to decide freely.’

‘Freely? She can’t,’ said Titus. ‘She’s forgotten about freedom long ago. Besides, if you keep her here she’ll be far too frightened to think. You don’t know what this is like, she might go mad. I’m afraid I misunderstood. You didn’t say so, but I thought you had some sort of understanding with her. I thought she was sort of prepared. But you can’t suddenly make someone leave someone they’ve lived with for years.’

‘Why not? When people do leave people they’ve lived with for years they usually do it suddenly because that’s the only possible way. I’m helping her to do what she really wants to do but without help can’t. Isn’t that clear?’

‘Not awfully.’

‘She’ll calm down, she’ll be able to think, soon, tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re going to keep her all night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Suppose he comes?’

‘I don’t think he will. To answer your earlier question, I did not invite him.’

‘Oh, Jesus. What’ll he think?’

‘I don’t care a fuck what he thinks,’ I said, ‘in fact, the worse he thinks the better. Let him think anything his foul imagination can beget.’

‘That’s part of-pulling everything down?’

‘Yes.’

‘My God,’ said Titus. Then he said, ‘I think it’s obscene. And I don’t like this talking about her as if she were a child or mental patient. I’m going to swim.’

‘Titus-don’t think too ill of me-you see-’

‘Oh I don’t think ill of you, in a way I’m quite breathless with admiration. I just couldn’t do it myself.’

‘You’re not going to run over there for the letter?’

‘No. I expect it’s too late anyway.’

‘And you won’t run away from me?’

‘I won’t run away from you.’

He went out of the back door.

Outside it was a hazier later evening and the shadows of the rocks were long, long on the grass. I did not look at my watch. I sat down beside Hartley.

She had taken her hands from her face and was sitting limp, staring at the table. Where I had dragged at her dress there was a little triangular tear. I could see the deep reddish streak of sunburn that led downward from her throat. I could see her brassière and the roundness of her contained breasts. The quick almost panting movement of her breath.

It was indeed obscene. I had, from the inception of this plan in my mind, intended to keep Hartley here, by force if necessary; but I had not imagined the details, and I had somehow hoped that as soon as she saw Titus in my house she would make the great mental leap, the intuition, the necessary conjecture: she would see her freedom and the possibility of living with Titus and me. And once she had grasped her freedom I had the strong and reasonable hope that she would come to me, even though Titus was an unknown quantity and had his own freedom to dispose of. But perhaps I had indeed, inspired by the boy’s providential appearance, tried to move too fast. The horrors of the last half hour had shaken my resolution so that I nearly conceived of, after all, taking her home. Yet could I, now? He was almost certainly back and had read that letter and-my plan had succeeded so well that it had trapped me also. I did now look at my watch. It was twenty-five past nine.

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

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

‘The dogs-’

‘The dogs?’

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

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

‘Let what drop?’

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

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

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

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

‘And cheese. And olives.’

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

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

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

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

‘You speak as if it were a prison.’

‘People live in prisons.’

‘Not if they can get out.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Sometimes I wish he would-’

‘Would what? Has he threatened you?’

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

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

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

‘Have you only just thought of that?’

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

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

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

‘Oh-yes-but what does it mean?’

‘We’re close, we know each other.’

‘Yes, it’s strange, but in a way I do know you, and there isn’t anyone else who’s near me like that. I suppose it’s just because we were young, and later you can’t know people, or I couldn’t.’

‘You know me. I know you.’

‘I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was my fault.’

‘I can see you, Hartley, you exist, you’re here. I love you, Titus loves you. We’ll all be together.’

‘Titus stopped loving me long ago.’

‘Don’t cry. He loves you, I know he does, he told me so. All will be well now that you’ve got away from that hateful man.’

I kept touching the quiet tears upon her cheek, and at last, half thrusting me away, she began to caress my face. ‘Oh, Charles-Charles-so strange.’

‘We’re like we used to be, lying in the woods-Hartley, will you be with me tonight please at last, just to be together quietly? We don’t have to lie here like this all night, do we?’

She became rigid, then sat up. ‘It’s the wine-I’m not used to it-I must be drunk-drunk-’

‘Well, don’t ask me to take you back now! It’s much too late, from every possible point of view!’

She got to her knees, then stiffly to her feet. I rose and faced her, gently touching her elbows with my fingertips.

‘Charles, you don’t know what you’ve done. Of course I shall go back tomorrow. I must sleep now, I just want to sleep now, by myself, I wish I could die in my sleep, I wish I could run out and fall into the sea.’

‘What rubbish. Can you swim?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s go upstairs, promise me you won’t run away in the night.’

‘Tomorrow I must go back there. This is just more of my stupidity, oh I am so stupid, always stupid, I should never have left the house. I’m not angry with you. It’s my fault, everything is my fault. Yes, I suppose I love you, I’ve never forgotten you, and when I saw you I felt it all again, but it’s something childish, it isn’t part of the real world. There was never any place for our love in the world. If there had been it would have won and we wouldn’t have parted. It wasn’t just me, it was you, you went away, you can’t remember how it was-and there isn’t any place for this love in the world now, it’s pointless, it’s irrelevant, it’s a dream, we’re in a dream place and tomorrow we must leave it. You say it was fated, perhaps it is but not like you think. It’s an evil fate, it’s my fate, I made it happen somehow, this muddle, this horror. Why did you come here? I somehow made you come, like people are lured to destruction, not for any good but just for disaster and death. That’s what I’ve been making all my life, not a home, not a child, but just horrors.’

I recalled Titus’s words, ‘She’s a bit of a fantasist.’ And no doubt she was indeed quite drunk. There was certainly no point in arguing now with the madness of her words. I hugged her hard. ‘Stop it, old thing, darling little Hartley. I did not go away from you, not like that, you know you’re only making excuses! Our love will make its place in the world, you’ll see, now that you’re here, it’s all very simple really. Just wait till the morning and the daylight and then you’ll feel brave. Come along upstairs with me and you shall sleep where you like.’

I led her out through the kitchen, carrying the candle. As we came to the stairs I saw a faint light under the door of the front room where Titus was sleeping, and I heard the murmur of voices. At the thought of Titus and Gilbert sitting on the floor on those cushions by candlelight I felt a quick spasm of jealousy. Hartley and I went upstairs.

I showed her the bathroom. I waited for her. I led her up and into my bedroom, but it was quite clear that she would not sleep with me. It was in any case better now to leave her alone. A kind of superstitious terror had taken hold of her, which took the form of a frenzied desire for unconsciousness. ‘I want to sleep, I must sleep, only sleep matters, sleep, I will sleep.’ I had had the sense to anticipate this situation and had made up a bed on the floor of the little centre room upstairs, with the mattress off my divan. I had also provided a candle, matches, even a chamber pot. I offered her a pair of pyjamas, but she lay down at once in her dress and pulled the blanket up over her head as if she were a corpse covering itself. And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.

I withdrew and left her. I closed the door and quietly locked it on the outside. I would never now lose that nightmare image of a distraught woman rushing to drown herself in the sea. I went to my room and kicked my shoes off and crawled into bed. I was completely exhausted, but imagined I would be too excited to sleep. I was wrong. I was fast asleep in seconds.

The next morning I woke to a sense of an utterly changed and perhaps dreadful world, like on the first day of a war. Joy, hope, came too, but fear first, and a black sense of confusion as if the deep logic of the universe had suddenly gone wrong. What was it that I had been so certain of, so confident about? What exactly was I up to? Had I done something mad and frightful yesterday, like a crime committed when drunk, remembered sober? There was also, to be expected, a visit from Ben.

The presence of Hartley in the house was itself like a dream, her sheer survival overnight now something urgently in question. I felt like a child who rushes to the cage of its new pet fearing to find only a lifeless body. With a sick stomach and a pounding heart I ran out into the corridor, beat my way through the bead curtain, softly unlocked her door and tapped. No response. Had she died in the night like a captured animal, had she somehow escaped and drowned herself? I opened the door and peered in. She was there and awake. She had pushed the pillows up against the wall and lay upon the mattress with her head propped, the blanket pulled up over her mouth. Her eyes stared at me under drooped lids. Her head kept moving slightly and I saw she was shivering.

‘Hartley, darling, are you all right, did you sleep? Were you warm enough?’

She lowered the blanket a little and her mouth moved.

‘Hartley, you’re going to stay with me forever. This is the first day of our new world-isn’t it? Oh, Hartley-’

She began very awkwardly to pull herself up, leaning her back against the wall, still hiding behind the blanket.

She said in a mumbling, gabbling tone, not looking at me, ‘I must go home.’

‘Don’t start that again.’

‘I came without my bag, without anything, I’ve got no make-up or anything.’

‘God, as if that mattered!’

I could see that, for her, it might matter however. In the bleak drained morning light which filtered in from the window which gave onto the drawing room she looked terrible. Her face was puffy and greasy, her brow corrugated, lines of haggardness outlined her mouth. Her tangled hair, dry and frizzy, looked like an old wig. As I gazed at her I felt a kind of new strength composed of pity and tenderness. And as I thought to show her how little I minded her shabby helplessness, my titanic love could even have wished for greater odds.

‘Come on, old thing,’ I said, ‘get up. Come on down and we’ll have breakfast. Then I’ll send Gilbert over to Nibletts for all your things. It’s perfectly simple.’ Or at least I hoped it would seem so to her.

She pulled herself up slowly, and then got onto all fours and rose laboriously to her feet. Her yellow dress was horribly hopelessly crumpled and she pulled at it ineffectually. Her whole body expressed the slightly ashamed awkwardness of the very afflicted person.

‘Look, I’ll lend you my dressing gown, I’ve got such a nice one.’ I ran to my bedroom and brought her my best black silk dressing gown with the red rosettes. She stood at the door of her room staring at the bead curtain.

‘What’s that?’

‘Well may you ask. A bead curtain. Now put this on. There’s the bathroom, you remember.’

She let me help her into the dressing gown, then walked slowly down to the bathroom. I waited, sitting on the stairs. When she emerged she climbed back up towards her room, moving heavily like an old woman.

‘Wait then, I’ll get you a comb, or you can come and use the mirror in my room, would you like, it’s brighter in there.’

She went on back into her own room. I fetched the comb and a hand mirror. She combed her hair, not looking into the glass, then sat down again on the mattress. There was indeed no other furniture, since the table which Titus had retrieved from the rocks was still downstairs.

‘Won’t you come down?’

‘No, I’ll stay here.’

‘I’ll bring you something.’

‘I feel sick, the wine has made me sick.’

‘Would you like tea, coffee?’

‘I feel sick.’ She lay down again and pulled up the blanket.

I looked at her with despair, then went out. I closed and locked the door. I did not exclude the possibility that after this show of apathy she might suddenly run for it, rushing out of the house and disappearing among the rocks, hurling herself into the sea.

I went downstairs and found Gilbert sitting at the kitchen table. He rose respectfully as I entered. Titus was at the stove, which he had mastered, cooking eggs. He seemed now to be completely at home in the house. At this I felt both pleasure and displeasure.

‘Morning, guv’nor,’ said Gilbert.

‘Hello, dad.’

I did not care for this pleasantry from Titus.

‘If you must be familiar, my name is Charles.’

‘Sorry, Mr Arrowby. How is my mother this morning?’

‘Oh, Titus, Titus-’

‘Have a fried egg,’ said Gilbert.

‘I’ll take her up some tea. Does she take milk, sugar?’

‘I can’t remember.’

I made up a little tray with tea, milk and sugar, bread, butter, marmalade. I carried it up, balanced it, unlocked the door. Hartley was still lying under the blanket.

‘Lovely breakfast. Look.’

She stared at me with almost theatrical misery.

‘Wait. I’ll get a table and chair.’ I ran downstairs and came back with the little table and a chair. I unpacked the tray onto the table. ‘Come, darling, don’t let your tea get cold. And look, I’ve brought you such a lovely present, a stone, the most beautiful stone on the shore.’ I laid down beside her plate the elliptical stone, my very first one, the prize of my collection, hand-sized, a mottled pink, irregularly criss-crossed with white bars in a design before which Klee and Mondrian would have bowed to the ground.

Hartley came slowly, crawling then rising, and stood by the table, pulling the dressing gown round her. She did not look at the stone or touch it. I put my arms round her for a moment and kissed her wig-like hair. Then I kissed her warm silk-clad shoulder. Then I left her and locked the door. At any rate she had said no more about going back. No doubt she was afraid; and if she feared to think of returning now, then every hour which kept her here would help to gain my point. But her air of apathetic misery appalled me. Later I was not surprised to find that she had drunk a little tea but eaten nothing.

I looked at my watch. It was still not eight o’clock. I wondered when, and how, Ben would arrive. I remembered uneasily what Hartley had said about his having kept his army revolver. I went down to the kitchen to issue orders.

Gilbert was eating fried eggs, fried bread, grilled tomatoes.

‘Where’s the boy?’

‘He’s gone to swim. How’s Hartley?’

‘Oh-terrible. I mean, all right. Listen, Gilbert, could you go outside and keep watch? All right, finish your breakfast first, you’re doing well, aren’t you!’

‘What do you mean, keep watch?’ said Gilbert suspiciously.

‘Just stand, or if you like sit, on the road, at the end of the causeway, and come in and tell me when you see him coming.’

‘How am I to know him? By his horsewhip?’

‘He’s unmistakable.’ I described Ben minutely.

‘Suppose he creeps up on me or something? He can’t be feeling very pleased. You said he was a tough, a sort of thug. I love you, darling, but I’m not going to fight.’

‘Nobody is going to fight.’ I hope.

‘I don’t mind sitting in the car,’ said Gilbert. ‘I’ll sit in the car with the doors locked and watch the road. Then if I see him I’ll hoot the horn.’

This seemed a good idea. ‘All right, but make it snappy.’

I went out of the back and across the grass and climbed over the rocks as far as the little cliff in time to see Titus’s long pale legs elevated to heaven as he dived under the green water. He reminded me of Breughel’s Icarus. Absit omen.

I had not the heart to swim, and anyway I did not want Ben to find me trouserless; and there was enough of a swell on for me to see that I might have difficulty getting out. Titus would be all right of course. I must remember to fix another ‘rope’ at the steps.

The sun was already high and the sea was a lucid green nearer to the rocks, a glittering azure farther out, shifting and flashing as if large plates of white were floating on the surface. The horizon was a line of gold. A surge of rather large but very smooth slow waves was coming in towards me and silently frothing up among the rocks; there was a quiet menace in the graceful yet machine-like power of their strong regular motions.

I waited rather impatiently for young Titus to finish his swim. He had no business to be diverting himself at a moment of crisis. He saw me, waved, but was clearly in no hurry. He shouted to me to come in but I shook my head.

I urgently wanted Titus on the land, partly because I wanted to efface the rather raw impression of our stupid exchanges in the kitchen. Also I wanted Titus beside me, clothed and efficient and in his right mind, when the gentleman turned up. I did not really imagine that Ben would come round and murder us all, but unless there was some show of strength he might possibly wish to punch my head; and while I am athletic and fairly strong, the arts of aggression have never been among my accomplishments. I often wondered during the war how it was that men were able to face other men and kill them. Training helped and I suppose fear. I was glad that it had not been my lot.

It also then occurred to me, as I dourly watched Titus’s dolphin antics, that I did not really know how he would react. He had fairly indicated that he detested his adoptive father. But the young mind is mysterious. Confronted with him he might be cowed, or else moved by sudden sympathy. Or by old deep resistless filial emotions. Could Titus change sides? Did Titus himself know?

At last he swam back to the steep rock, and clinging with fingers and toes easily levered his naked body up out of the strong rising and falling surge. He crawled up, swung over the edge and lay panting.

‘Titus, dear boy, get dressed, quick, here’s your towel.’

He obeyed, eyeing me. ‘What’s the matter? Are we going somewhere?’

‘No, but I’m afraid your father may arrive any moment.’

‘Looking for my mother. Well, I suppose he may. What will you do?’

‘I don’t know. What will he do? Listen, Titus, and please forgive my clumsy haste, there’s so much I want to say to you. Titus, we must hold on to each other, you and me-’

‘Oh yes, I’m a very important property, I’m the decoy duck, I’m the hostage!’

‘No, this is exactly my point. This is what I came out here to say to you. Not for that. For you. I mean I want you, I want to be your father, I want you to be my son, whatever happens. I mean even if your mother won’t stay with me-but I hope and believe she will-but even if she weren’t to, I still want you to accept me as your father.’

‘It’s a funny action,’ he said, ‘accepting somebody as your father, when you’re grown up. I’m not sure how it’s done.’

‘Time will show us how it’s done. You must just have the will, the intent. Please. I feel there is a real bond between us, it will grow stronger, naturally. Don’t think I’m just using you, I’m not. I feel love for you. Excuse the clumsy awkwardness of what I say, I haven’t time to think of a graceful speech. I feel that fate or God or something has given us to each other. Let us not stupidly miss this chance. Don’t let idiotic pride or suspicion or failure of imagination or failure of hope spoil this thing for us. Let us now and henceforth belong together. Never mind what it means exactly or what it will involve, we can’t see that yet. But will you accept, will you try?’

I had not prepared or anticipated quite such passionate pleading. I stared at him anxiously, hoping I had made some impression.

He was clothed by now, and we stood together on the high rock above the water. He looked at me frowning and screwing up his eyes. Then he looked away. ‘All right-I suppose-yes-OK. I’m in fact, well, a little overwhelmed, actually. I’m glad you said that about wanting me for me. I wasn’t sure. I believe you-I think. It’s funny, I’ve been thinking about you so much of my life, and I always knew I’d have to come and look at you one day, but I kept putting it off because I was afraid. I thought that if you rejected me-I mean, thought I was a sort of lying scrounger, just wanting money and that-and, well, why shouldn’t you have thought so, it’s all so odd-it would have been a sort of crippling blow. I can’t see how I would have recovered, I’d have felt so dishonoured and awful, I’d have been saddled with it somehow forever after. There was so much at stake.’

‘So much, yes, but all is well, here at least. We won’t misunderstand each other. We won’t lose each other.’

‘It’s all happened so fast.’

‘It’s happened fast because it’s right, it’s easy because it’s right.’

‘Well then, I’ll try, as you say God knows what it means, but I accept, at least I’ll try.’

He held out his hand and I grasped it and for a moment we stood there, moved and embarrassed.

Then I heard, from the roadway, the loud urgent hooting of Gilbert’s horn.

‘That’s him!’ I jumped up and began to scramble towards the house. Titus passed me and raced on before me over the grass. When I reached the kitchen door Gilbert was holding on to Titus.

‘He’s here, he came walking along the road, he stopped at the causeway but when he saw me in the car and when I started hooting he walked on.’

‘Walked on past the house?’

‘Yes. Maybe he’s going to come round the back over the rocks.’ Gilbert seemed to be really frightened.

I ran through the hall and out onto the causeway and up to the road. There was no sign of Ben. I noticed that Gilbert, no doubt to secure his own retreat, had parked the car right across the end of the causeway as if it were intended as a barricade. That no doubt was why Ben had walked on. As I was still hesitating and staring about I heard Titus shouting from the other side of the house.

I passed Gilbert, who was gabbling something or other, at the door and rushed out again through the kitchen. Titus was standing up on top of one of the highest rocks, and pointing. ‘He’s there! There! I can see him. He’s coming along from the tower.’

By now I felt no more doubt about whose side Titus was on. Thank goodness for that.

I called to Titus, ‘You wait there, I’ll go and meet him. If I want you I’ll shout.’

I began to climb over the rocks keeping the tower in view, and in a moment I saw Ben, also clambering, with an impressive agility, in the direction of the house.

The place where our two paths converged, and indeed the only fairly easy way from the house to the tower, was Minn’s bridge, the rocky arch under which the sea entered the cauldron. Towards this natural meeting place we both scrambled and slid until we came onto the bridge and faced each other some ten feet apart. I wondered quickly and a bit anxiously whether we were, as I hoped, still within the view of Titus upon his high rock. I looked quickly round. We were not.

Ben was wearing blackish corduroy trousers, rubbed bald at the knees, probably from the Fishermen’s Stores, and a white shirt. No jacket, though the morning was still chilly. Had he donned this stripped gear to assure me he was carrying no weapon, or was he simply dressed for fighting? He looked burly, a bit tight for his trousers, but compact and business-like. He appeared to have shaved, which I had not. He had shaved alone over there in that suddenly empty house with God knows what thoughts in his mind as he faced himself in the mirror. His cropped mousy hair, his big boyish head, broad shoulders and short build were reminiscent of a little ram or other smallish but aggressive male animal. By contrast with his thick heavy look I felt positively willowy, loose, untidy, with uncombed hair and, I suddenly realized, my striped pyjama jacket still on over my trousers.

I advanced a little onto the bridge and so did he. The tide was coming in and the strong large waves were crowding in and washing hungrily round inside the deep smooth space of the cauldron. There was a low sibilant roar, not loud enough to impede a parley. I stood, checking on my pyjama buttons, and waiting for him to begin. The roaring sound comforted me. I hoped it disconcerted Ben. Noise has always been my friend.

I was now seeing Ben’s face closely in a good light for the first time. He was rather better-looking than I had imagined earlier. He had long brown eyes with long lashes, and a large well-formed and, though perhaps only now, slightly sneering and fastidious mouth. His chin receded into his thick neck. I was at once aware that he was, and I was relieved to see it, extremely nervous, though also extremely angry. Was he perhaps a bit frightened of me? Guilt? Guilt makes fear.

‘Where is my wife?’

‘Here, in my house, where she wants to stay. And Titus too, he wasn’t my son, as you perfectly well know, but he is now, I’ve adopted him.’

‘What?’

‘Yes!’

‘What did you say?’

I realized with further satisfaction that Ben was a bit deaf, deafer than me at any rate, and the noise was bothering him. I had rather gabbled my statement it is true. I said, with loud insulting clarity, ‘She is-here. Titus is-here. They stay-here.’

‘I’ve come to take her home.’

‘Look, you don’t really believe that Titus is my son, do you? I assure you he isn’t.’

‘I want my wife.’

‘I’m telling you something that ought to interest you. Titus is not my son.’

‘I don’t care about that story any more, it’s over, I want Mary.’

‘She wants to stay here.’

‘I don’t believe you-you are keeping her by force. You kidnapped her. I know she wouldn’t stay of her own free will, I know.’

‘She came to me, she ran to me, like she did before, that evening when you were at your woodwork class. Do you imagine that I could or would remove her from your house by force?’

‘She left her handbag behind.’

‘You don’t love her, she doesn’t love you, she’s terrified of you, why not admit it to yourselves? Why go on living this horrible lie?’

‘Release Mary, or I shall go to the police.’

‘They’d laugh at you. You know quite well the police wouldn’t interfere in a case of this sort.’

‘I want my wife.’

‘She doesn’t want to go back to you, she’s had enough. I’m going to send the car round for her things.’

‘What lies has she told you?’

‘That’s your line now is it? Vilify her, put the blame on her! How splendidly you give yourself away!’

‘She’s a hysterical person who imagines a lot of things, she isn’t well.’

‘She certainly imagines she’s had enough of your cruelty. Go on, just try the police, see what happens!’

‘You don’t know what you’re meddling with, you don’t understand. She’s my wife and I love her and I’m going to take her back to her home, where she belongs and where she wants to be. Why have you suddenly come interfering in our lives, why did you decide to come and live here and pester us, we didn’t want you, we don’t want you. I know what sort of person you are, I’ve read about you, you’re a rotten man, a shit, a destroyer, you’re filth. Mary isn’t one of your show-business whores, she’s a decent woman, like you aren’t worthy to touch. Leave us alone, if you don’t want to get very hurt. I’m warning you. Leave us alone.’

Ben, incoherently searching for words to match his anger, his big bull head thrust forward, was showing his strong teeth, wet with spittle. The rhythmic hissing roar of the powerful mechanical waves entranced me for a moment, as without looking down I could sense their churning movement in the rocky pit below. I thought to myself quite clearly, with a precision which involved my whole body, I have only to step quickly forward and pitch that hateful thug over the edge. He may be stronger, but I am more agile. He cannot swim; and even a good swimmer would die at once in that boiling cauldron. No one sees us. I can say he attacked me. I have only to push him in and all my troubles are over.

As I thought this I was fixing Ben with my eyes. I felt an embryonic movement of my body, though no doubt in reality I did not visibly stir. My eyes were enough, however, and I had the certainty that he had read my intention, if indeed it could be called an intention, for of course I would never have carried it out. He retreated to the far end of the bridge and I unclenched my hands and lowered my eyes. I retreated too.

‘Bring her back!’ he said, raising his voice, as the din of the water rose like a wall between us. ‘Bring her back this morning. Or else I’ll go every possible way to destroy you. I’m telling you. I mean that.’

I said nothing.

He said, as if suddenly confused and with a catch in his voice, ‘Consider her. She wants to come home. I know she does. You don’t understand. Don’t let this go on. It’s worse for her. She’ll have to come home in the end. Don’t you see?’

I said, inaudibly, ‘Fuck off.’

He began to move away. Then he turned back and called out, ‘Tell her I brought the dog back last night. I thought she’d be so pleased.’

I watched him as, more slowly, and seeming now at last like a cripple, he climbed over the rocks, appearing and disappearing, until he had nearly reached the road. I shook myself out of my trance and began to make my way back to the house as fast as I could. I wanted to be sure he was really going away.

Titus, who was still sitting on his high rock, jumped up and followed. Gilbert was on the lawn. They both immediately started to question me, but I ran past them. They ran after me and we emerged all three onto the causeway and advanced as far as Gilbert’s car, which was still in position. We stood in a row behind the car. Ben was walking along the road towards us. Titus gazed at him for a moment, then turned round and stood there with his back to the road. The gesture was impressive. Ben passed us by, grim-faced, without a word, without a look, and walked onward unhurried in the direction of the village.

‘What happened?’ said Titus, now looking shaken, frightened.

‘Nothing.’

‘How, nothing?’

‘He said what he had to say.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Lies. He said she was hysterical and imagined things.’

‘Hysterical all right,’ said Titus. ‘She could be in hysterics for an hour. It was frightening, it was meant to be.’

‘If you’ve decided he’s your father after all you can go home with him now, I’m not stopping you.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that. I’m just so bloody sorry for her.’

‘Won’t you come up and see her?’

‘No-not while she’s-no.’

‘Oh-!’ I felt violent homicidal exasperation. I ran back into the house and up the stairs and unlocked Hartley’s door.

She was sitting on the mattress with her back against the wall and her knees up, draped in the black dressing gown. She looked at me with heavy swollen eyes and started speaking in a droning voice before I was through the door. ‘Please let me go home, I want to go home, I’ve got to go there, there isn’t anywhere else to go, let me go home, please.’

‘This is home, with me is home, you are home!’

‘Let me go now. How can you be so unkind to me? The longer I stay the worse it will be.’

‘Why do you want to go back to that hateful place? Are you hypnotized or what?’

‘I wish I was dead, I think I’m going to die soon, I feel it. Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I’m still me, that’s hell.’

‘Well, get out of hell then! The gate’s open and I’m holding it!’

‘I can’t. I’m hell, myself.’

‘Oh, Hartley, get up! Come on down and sit in the sun, talk to me, talk to Titus. You’re not a prisoner. Stop being so bloody miserable, you’ll drive me mad! I’m offering you freedom, happiness, I want to take you and Titus to-to Paris, to Athens, to New York, anywhere you want to go!’

‘I want to go home.’

‘What’s the matter with you? You weren’t like this yesterday.’

‘I think I’m going to die, I feel it.’

Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.

There followed some of the strangest days I can ever remember. Hartley refused to come downstairs. She stayed hid in her room like a sick animal. I locked her door in case she should drown herself, I left her no candle and matches in case she should burn herself. I feared for her safety and her well-being at every moment, and yet I did not dare to remain with her all the time or even most of it, indeed I scarcely knew how to be with her at all. I left her alone at night, and the nights were long, as she retired early, and slept soon (I could hear her snoring). She spent a great deal of time sleeping, both in the night and in the afternoon. That oblivion at least was her prompt friend. Meanwhile I watched and waited, calculating upon some deep unstatable theory the right intervals for my appearances. I escorted her in silence to the bathroom. I spent long vigils sitting outside in the corridor. I put some cushions into the empty alcove, the place where I had dreamt there was a secret door through which Mrs Chorney would emerge to reclaim possession of her house. I sat on the cushions watching the door of Hartley’s room and listening. Sometimes as she snored I dozed.

Of course I often sat in the room with her, talking with her or attempting to, or else in silence. I knelt beside her, stroking her hands and her hair and caressing her as one might caress a small bird. Her legs and feet were bare, but she would persist in wearing my dressing gown over her dress. Yet with small contacts I made acquaintance surreptitiously with her body; the weight and mass of it, her magnificent round breasts, her plump shoulders, her thighs; and I would gladly have lain with her, only she resisted, by the slightest of signs, my slightest of efforts to undress her. She fretted about having no make-up and I sent Gilbert to the village to purchase what she wanted, and then in my presence she made up her face. This little concession to vanity seemed to me a hopeful portent. But I remained afraid of her and for her. My quiet relentless refusal to let her go was violence enough. I feared that any further pressure might produce some frenzy of hostility or some more extreme withdrawal which would render me as mad as she was; for I did at moments think of her as mad. Thus we existed together in a sort of crazy mysterious precarious mutual toleration. At intervals she repeated that she wanted to go home, but she accepted my firm refusals passively, and this was encouraging. Of course with every hour that passed her fear of returning must increase, and this in itself gave me hope. Surely a moment must come when the amount of her fear would automatically make her mine?

We did in fact, inconsequentially and at odd intervals, manage to converse. When I tried to remind her of old times she did not always fail to respond; and at moments in my ‘treatment’ of her I felt, loving her and pitying her so intensely, that I was making a little progress. Once, quite out of the blue, she asked, ‘What happened to Aunt Estelle?’ I could not remember having spoken to her about Aunt Estelle, so much had I made my uncle’s family into a taboo subject. Another time she said, ‘Philip never liked you.’ Philip was her brother. ‘What’s Philip doing now?’ ‘He was killed in the war.’ She added, ‘You were my brother really.’ She never asked me anything about my life in the theatre and I did not try to tell her anything. I think she was really without curiosity about it. It had in any case by now dawned on me that she felt little or no regret at having failed to marry a famous man. She did ask once or twice if I had met this or that well-known actor, but she clearly knew very little about the theatre and did not pursue anything that I said. Once she asked, ‘Did you ever know an actress called Clement Makin?’ After a moment’s reflection I said, ‘Yes, I knew her well, she loved me, we lived together for a bit.’ ‘You mean-?’ ‘She was my mistress.’ ‘But she must have been years and years older than you.’ ‘Yes, but that didn’t seem to matter much.’ ‘She must have been an old woman.’ A little while after this Hartley began to cry and let me put my arms round her. She did not speak of Clement again. That was one of the moments when hope itself seemed to come to me out of the pity and the love. And I reflected upon the mystery that Hartley had as large a consciousness and as long a history as I had myself and I would never know, never have access to, that interior being. Of course I was impatient. I had expected her, after despair, to be in such need that she would have to turn to me completely, having no other recourse. It was indeed her failure to break down that now left me so terribly at a loss.

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

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

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

‘No, thank you.’

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

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

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

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

‘Yes-’

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

‘Yes, lots of roses, all colours.’

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

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

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

‘Yes-’

‘I stood on a box, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, on a box.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m cold.’

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

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

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

‘You just want someone to remember things with.’

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

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

‘So you admit you went away?’

‘I suppose so, it’s so long ago.’

‘You said I’d be unfaithful.’

‘Did I? I can’t remember.’ I had lived my life on her words, and now she could not even recall them! ‘I suppose I must have gone away because I can remember feeling guilty.’

‘Guilty about hurting me?’

‘Yes. Really I did always feel guilty and thought you blamed me. And in a funny way I had to protect myself from you by the idea that you hated me.’

‘How on earth would that “protect” you?’

‘When I saw you in the village I thought you had seen me and pretended not to because you hated me.’

‘But I never hated you, darling, never for a second!’

‘I had to think so.’

‘But why?’

‘So that I could be sure that you had really gone, that it was really over. To make it sort of dead in my mind.’

‘Oh, Hartley. For me it was never over, never dead in my mind. So you wanted me, you missed me, you were afraid to think about me? Doesn’t that prove that you love me?’

‘I think you did hate me, though, you feel resentment.’

‘You mean now? You’re dotty.’

‘It’s resentment really, otherwise you wouldn’t be so unkind.’

‘Hartley, don’t torment me, you reason like a mad person.’

‘Or it’s curiosity, like a tourist, you’re visiting me, visiting my life and feeling superior.’

‘Hartley, stop, will you! Or are you just trying to hurt me? You are the one who’s unkind. There is an eternal bond between us, you know there is, it’s the clearest thing in the world, clearer than Jesus. I want you to be my wife at last, I want you to rest in me. I want to look after you forever, until I drop dead.’

‘I wish I could drop dead.’

‘Oh shut up-’

‘I wish it could be all over, I have had my life. I wish someone would kill me-’

‘So he has threatened your life?’

‘No, no, it’s all in my mind-’

‘You can’t go back now, I won’t let you, even if you don’t want me. It’s so simple, only you complicate things so.’

‘You want to make things complicated in your way, you twist and turn, you’re like an eel, I remember that about you.’

‘So now I’m like an eel! I never twisted and turned where you were concerned. I always wanted you and no one else. I am the faithful one. I never got married.’

‘Yes, but you lived with women, you lived with that old actress. ’

‘All right, but I couldn’t find you! You were the one I wanted! I tried and tried to find you, I searched and searched and somehow I never really gave up hope-and perhaps that’s why I’ve found you now.’

‘I’ve been unjust to Ben.’

‘Oh God, can’t we forget Ben, Ben’s over.’

‘He suffered so much about Titus, when Titus disappeared, it was like a penance.’

‘Maybe he did, but he deserved to suffer, he drove Titus away. I expect he was glad really.’

‘No, no, he wasn’t so bad to Titus, not as much as I said. He was severe-’

‘He was violent. And to you. Don’t try to defend him. Oh don’t let’s talk about that bloody man.’

‘The protection of children people never came, I said they did but they didn’t.’

‘Oh damn the protection of children people, what do I care whether they came or not?’

‘But I said they did, and they didn’t.’

‘Even if they didn’t come, they ought to have come.’

‘But it wasn’t true.’

‘Why are you trying to whitewash that vile cruel man? Titus hates him. Isn’t that evidence enough? It is for me.’

‘Ben hasn’t anyone in the world but me. He hasn’t any thing in the world.’

‘He’ll survive. What about me? Why not be sorry for me for a change? I’ve waited long enough. There’s nothing so derelict as an old actor. What have I got now but my memories? I’ve stripped myself of all the power and all the glamour-for something-and the something, although I didn’t know it, was you. You can’t let me down now.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘No.’

‘I think I believe in Jesus Christ. You’ve got to believe in something and hold on to something. People would go mad without God, wouldn’t they. We used to talk about that, didn’t we.’

‘I’m glad you haven’t forgotten those talks. You remember when we were confirmed? It meant a lot, didn’t it? Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire…’

‘I think I believe in the remission of sins.’

‘We all need a spot of that.’

‘Love redeems, that means something, doesn’t it?’

‘Well don’t tell me you propose to redeem Ben by love! I’m getting sick of Ben. What about redeeming me?’

‘No one else will redeem him, no one else will love him.’

‘Jesus will love him.’

‘No, you see, for Ben, I’ve got to be Jesus.’

‘This is mad talk, darling, really mad. Just try to think a bit. Doesn’t it occur to you that Ben would heave a sigh of relief if you left him? Damn it, you’ve left him already. You aren’t all that necessary. He mightn’t want to send you off, but he’ll be jolly pleased now you’ve bolted.’

‘You want to make him unreal, but he’s real.’

‘Real things become unreal when you enter into the truth.’

‘Our love wasn’t real, it was childish, it was like a game, we were like brother and sister, we didn’t know what love was then.’

‘Hartley, you know that we loved each other-’

‘Yes, but we didn’t make love properly, I wish we had.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to, I wanted to all right-Oh, Christ!’

‘We were children. You never became part of my real life.’

‘What you call your real life appears to have been hell on earth! Damn it, you said so yourself. A happy woman doesn’t talk about death.’

‘I wish I hadn’t told you things, I’ll regret having told you things. Of course it’s a muddle, but it’s my muddle, it’s where I live and what I am. I can’t run out of it and leave it behind all jagged and loose like a broken shell.’

‘That’s exactly what you can do! Escape, run, leave it all behind! See that the pain can stop!’

‘Can it? Can the pain stop?’

As she now stared at me, wide-eyed with a sudden pausing puzzlement, I wondered, is she mad, is her mind totally astray, is she just a poor wreck, or has she become some sort of fey spiritual being, refined by suffering? Had that strange wild look of her youthful beauty which I had loved so and worshipped been the first prophetic flush of a weird spirituality? There are secret saints with strange destinies. Yet no, she was a wreck, a poor broken twig, her integrity, her last identity, destroyed by the cruel force which had made her abandon Titus. But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

‘Yes, my darling, my queen, my angel, it can stop.’

Oh if only I could touch and liberate her mind! I wanted to see her hoping, to see some dawn of hope or desire, the desire for cherishing, for a happy life. But she frowned now in her puzzlement and reverted to Ben.

‘I’ve never been good enough to him.’

‘I’m sure you’ve been a saint, a long-suffering saint!’

‘No, I’ve been bad.’

‘Oh all right, call it bad if you want to! Whatever it is, it’s finished.’

I saw her then as innocent, as men in the past used to see cloistered girls and think: ‘We are beasts, but they are angels, pure, not soiled like us.’ I saw her as beautifully innocent, simple-minded, silly, understanding nothing: a reproach to me who had lived my life among vain egoistic men and pert, knowing women. Yet also I saw her guilt as real guilt for real failures. How could it be otherwise? And I remembered Peregrine’s words: the partner who feels guilty, however irrationally, becomes the slave of the other and can take no moral stand. She had taken upon herself, as well as her peccadilloes, his guilt. She felt herself guilty of his sins against her, against Titus. I could see it all. And as she took up the guilt, appropriated it as her own, she revered the guilty one and held him as holy. Oh, if only I could release her from that maiming crippling guilt and from that empty reverence! God, she even felt guilty about me and had to console herself by thinking I hated her! She was spell-bound, bound by a self-protective magic, which she had developed over the years to defend herself against the horrible pain of having married a foul insanely jealous bullying maniac. She had been brainwashed through fear of him, brainwashed by hearing the same things repeated to her again and again and again: that it was her fault, always her fault. No wonder Titus wanted to go and sing on the rocks rather than be reminded of those scenes.

She had cried a little. The tears of age are not the tears of youth. ‘Stop crying, Hartley, you look like the pig-baby in Alice, like you used to.’

‘I know I’m ugly, horrible-’

‘Oh, my dear, come out of it, come right out of it, come out of the nightmare-’

She dabbed her eyes with my handkerchief, let me hold her hand for a moment, began again to reflect.

‘But what makes you think my marriage is so unhappy?’ She was gazing at me now with an almost cunning look, as if she were about to produce a devastating refutation of anything I might say in answer.

‘Hartley, darling, you’re in a muddle. You admitted you were unhappy, you spoke just now about the pain of it!’

‘Pain is different, in any marriage there is pain, life is pain-but perhaps for you-it all just passed you by.’

‘Perhaps it did, thank God.’

‘You know, so many nights quietly at home I used to think of people in labour camps-’

‘If you had to cheer yourself up by thinking that at least you weren’t in a labour camp you can’t have been very happy!’

‘But what makes you think my marriage is so bad, how can you judge? You can’t see, you can’t understand-’

‘I can judge: I know.’

‘But how can you know, it’s just an idea, you don’t understand about marriage, you’ve just lived with women, it’s different, you haven’t any evidence.’

‘About you and him-I have, yes, evidence.’

‘You can’t have. You’ve only just met us, you don’t know anyone who knows us, well, like that, no one knows us, you can’t have evidence.’

‘Yes, I have, I’ve heard you talking to each other; the way you talk to each other-’ I said this in a final burst of exasperation and I have to confess with some desire to hurt. The calm obstinate persistence and now that superior cunning expression was driving me wild.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I listened, I hid outside the window and listened to you and him talking, I heard his coarse voice, his brutal bullying manner, the way he shouted at you, the way he made you say over and over again “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”. I wish I’d broken the window, I wish I’d broken his bloody neck. I’ll kill that man. I wish I’d pushed him into the sea.’

‘You listened-you heard-when?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember, a week ago, two weeks-I’m so upset I’ve lost all count of time-so you see you can’t pretend any more, you can’t whitewash him and tell me you’re happily married, because I know the truth!’

‘The truth-oh, you don’t understand! You listened-how long?’

‘Oh, ages, an hour, no, I can’t remember-you were shouting at each other, it was perfectly horrible, at least he was shouting and you were whining, it was disgusting-’

‘How can you-you don’t know what you’ve done-how could you push in, spy on us like that-it was nothing to do with you-how could you intrude into secret things which you couldn’t possibly understand-it’s the wickedest vilest most hurtful thing anybody’s ever done to me-’

‘Hartley, darling, you know I only did it to help, I mean because I had to know, I had to be sure, to be certain-’

‘As if you could know anything-oh, you’ve hurt me so much, I’ll never forgive you, never, it’s like, it’s like a murder, a killing-you don’t understand-Oh, it hurts so much, so much-’

‘Darling, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t imagine-’

Sitting bolt upright against the wall she was now crying as I have never seen any woman cry (and I have seen many). Tears seemed to shoot out of her eyes in torrents, then her wet mouth opened in a sort of strangled shout, an animal cry of tortured pain. Then she gave a low shuddering wail, and fell over sideways, grasping at her neck, pulling at the dressing gown as if she were suffocating. The wail was followed by a shuddering gasp, and in a moment she was in hysterics.

I jumped up and watched her, appalled. Well then did I understand what Titus had said about it: it is frightening and it is meant to be. I felt that the most violent assault was being made on my spirit, on my sanity. I had witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this. I knelt again and tried to hold her, to shake her, but she seemed suddenly so strong and I so weak, and also to touch her had become terrible. She was shuddering rigidly with a dreadful damaging electricity. Her face was red, wild with tears, her mouth dribbling. Her voice, raucous, piercing, shrieked out, like a terrified angry person shrieking an obscenity, a frenzied panic noise, a prolonged ‘aaah’, which turned into a sobbing wail of quick ‘oh-oh-oh’, with a long descending ‘ooooh’ sound ending almost softly, and then the scream again: this continuing mechanically, automatically, on and on as if the human creature were possessed by an alien demonic machine. I felt horror, fear, a sort of disgusted shame, shame for myself, shame for her. I did not want Titus and Gilbert to hear this ghastly rhythmical noise, this attack of aggressive mourning. I hoped they were far away on the rocks singing their songs. I shouted ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I felt I should go violently mad if it went on for another minute, I felt I wanted to silence her even if it meant killing her, I shook her again and yelled at her, ran to the door, ran back again. I shall never forget the awful image of that face, that mask, and the relentless cruel rhythmical quality of that sound…

It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death. My presence, my cries, had no effect on her, I doubt if, in a sense, she knew I was there, although also, in a sense, the performance was for me, its violence directed at me. She became exhausted, stopped suddenly and fell back as in a faint. I seized her hand. It was cold. I became panic-stricken and would have run out and shouted for a doctor, only I was too frightened to leave her and too exhausted to make any decision. I lay down beside her and embraced her, uttering her name again and again. Her breathing became deep, regular, as if she were sleeping. Then I looked at her and saw her eyes open. She was looking at me again with that strange cunning look, as if now she were actually estimating the effect of her ‘fit’. And when, later on, she began to talk again she sounded quite sane, quite rational, indeed more so than she had been earlier on.

‘Oh, Charles-darling-I’m so sorry-’

‘I’m sorry-I’m a fool, an insensitive idiot.’

‘No, no-I’m sorry I got so upset and made such a nasty noise-I suppose I’m in a state of shock.’

‘I’m very sorry, sweetheart.’

‘That’s all right. Tell me-how long have I been here, in this house?’

‘Two days.’

‘Has he been here, my husband? Or has he written me a letter?’ This was the first time she had asked this.

‘He hasn’t sent a letter, I would have given it to you. He came, on that morning after you arrived.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He wanted you to come home, and-’

‘And what?’

I was feeling so chastened and confused I went stupidly on, ‘He said he’d brought the dog back with him.’

‘Oh-the dog-the dog-I’d forgotten-’ Some more tears welled up and ran over her cheeks which were so bloated with crying that she was almost unrecognizable, but she controlled herself. ‘Oh dear-oh dear-I do wish I’d been there when the dog came.’

‘Look, Hartley,’ I said, ‘you don’t seem to be capable of thinking about this business, so let me think for you. We can’t go on like this. I’m beginning to feel like a terrorist. You’ve put me in a position where I have to play the bully, which is the role I detest most of all. All right, I don’t know what your marriage was like and maybe it wasn’t all that awful and he wasn’t all that awful, but it obviously wasn’t a success and I don’t see why you should put up with a violent and unpleasant man any longer when you don’t have to. You can walk out. I daresay you would have walked out before if you had had anywhere to walk to. Now you have. Let’s go to London. This situation here is driving me mad. I’m letting it go on because I don’t want to force you, I don’t want you to say later that you didn’t decide for yourself. I don’t want to be forced to force you. Have some consideration for me, and for Titus. I’m very fond of Titus, I regard him as my son, yes I do. And he hates that man, and if you go back to him you’ll never see Titus again. You’re not just choosing between me and your ghastly failed marriage-please forgive my language-there’s Titus in the scales as well. Let’s go to London, all three of us, and then away somewhere, anywhere. We’re a family now. What I’ve never had since I left my parents’ home. Let’s go away together anywhere you like and chase after some happiness. Wouldn’t you like to see Titus happy? He wants to be an actor, I can help him. Don’t you want to see him happy?’

She listened to me, but towards the end of the speech began shaking her head. She said, ‘Please, please don’t force me to go anywhere, you’d kill me. I have got to go home. You know I have got to go, and you know I don’t want to stay here. There isn’t going to be any-any-what you want-it would be like a miracle in my mind.’

‘Oh yes, Hartley, my sweetheart, wait for that miracle, wait for it, its name is love.’

‘No, that is not its name, and it hasn’t come and it won’t come. Don’t you see you are working to destroy me? Now he will never believe me, never. And that is your doing, your crime. It’s like a murder. Never, never, never.’

Soon after this she said she was very tired and would sleep, and I left her.

I awoke suddenly. The moon was shining into my bedroom, where I had omitted to pull down the blind. I could hear the splash of the sea and a very faint rattle of the stones which the waves were gently clawing as they withdrew from the cauldron. It must be low tide. I could hear also, or sense, a vast void, a dome of silence, within which my heart was beating exceedingly fast. I felt suffocated and had to sit up abruptly and gasp for breath. I remembered, as I now did whenever I awoke, with a pang of anguish and love and fear, that Hartley was in the house. At the same time I felt the most terrible dread, a premonition of some catastrophe, some horror, or indeed the certainty that it had already occurred. I began to get out of bed, trembling violently, and fumbled for my candle. I lit it and then stood up and listened. The void dark house was ominously quiet. I very quickly opened my bedroom door and looked down the landing. There seemed to be a dim light coming from the alcove, but perhaps it was a trick of the moon. I listened and seemed to hear a beating sound, a heavy noise, deep and accelerating, very very far away. I moved slowly forward, putting each foot down carefully so as not to make the boards creak. I could now see quite clearly Hartley’s door and the key in the lock. I wanted to reach it, to put my hand onto the key, but I was afraid to hurry, afraid to enter that terrible room. I got the key into my hand and turned it and stepped in through the doorway holding my candle. The mattress on the floor, at which I always looked on entering, was empty, the bedclothes disordered. Hartley was gone-I stared about, ready to cry out with panic fear. And then I saw her-she was standing in the corner. I thought, how odd I had forgotten how tall she is. Then I thought she is standing on something, how odd, she must be up on the chair or the table. Then I saw that she was suspended from the lamp bracket. She had hanged herself.

I woke up. The lightning flash of thought which showed me the dream showed me at the same moment that it was a dream. I was lying in my bed. I had not been to Hartley’s room and found her dead, having hanged herself with one of her stockings from the cast-iron lamp bracket, climbing up onto the table and casting herself off. I felt intense violent relief: and then the thought, but supposing it is true? Sick and trembling I got up, lit my candle, and quietly opened my bedroom door. The candlelight illumined the barrier of the bead curtain but nothing beyond. The curtain was clicking softly, no doubt as a result of the draught from the door. I carefully plucked the bead strings apart and glided on to Hartley’s room and turned the key very quietly. I leaned through the doorway and peered in.

There she was, in the light of my candle, lying curled up on the mattress, covered by a blanket, her hand over her face. I watched and heard her steady quiet breathing. Then I silently withdrew and locked the door again. I went back through the bead curtain, trying not to agitate it too much, and in sheer distraction went into the drawing room. I had, since Hartley’s incarceration, kept out of the drawing room, out of a sort of sense of propriety, because of the long window which gave onto Hartley’s room. I went in now, vaguely with the idea of making sure there was no one there, and of course there was not. I stood, holding my candle, and looking at the long inner window which was now like a glossy black mirror; and it occurred to me that I was shunning the drawing room not out of propriety but because of the appalling possibility that I might see Hartley actually looking out. And then I suddenly remembered the face which I had seen looking at me through the dark glass; and I thought, that face was too high up. It could not have been the face of someone standing on the floor. It was just at the level at which Hartley’s face would have been if she had really hanged herself.

Then I thought, my candle is shining into her room, making a faint ghostly light in her room. What dreads and fears did she have, poor captive, if she woke in the night? Did she climb on a chair to peer into the dim empty moonlit drawing room? Did she very quietly try the locked door, hoping and fearing to be able to creep downstairs and run away into the dark night? I hurriedly returned to my bedroom and closed the door. I sat on my bed shuddering and looked at my watch. It was half-past two. What was I doing, or rather what was happening to me? I held my head in my hands. I was totally vulnerable and helpless. I had lost control of my life and of the lives with which I was meddling. I felt dread and a terrible fatalism; and bitter grief, grief such as I had never felt in my life since Hartley had left me so many years ago. I had wakened some sleeping demon, set going some deadly machine; and what would be would be.

The next morning something did happen, which was that Rosina turned up.

I had, after my horrible night interlude, managed to sleep. Perhaps sheer fatalism sent me to sleep. Let Ben come, let him set fire to the house, let him kill me. I deserved to die. I felt a good deal less fatalistic and more anxious when I woke up in the morning. It seemed urgently necessary to make a decision, but there was no material, no data, no evidence on which a decision could be made. I passionately wanted to take Hartley away, to London, to anywhere, or rather I wanted to want it enough to be able to do it now. But against her will, should I, could I? Could I pull a resisting, screaming woman into Gilbert’s car and have her driven off? Could I deceive her into thinking she was going home? Would Gilbert let me? Would Titus let me? If I took her away by force, it might harden her against me, and impede that precious movement of her will for which I was so impatiently waiting.

Yet could the situation go on? And if not what else could possibly come of it? I felt it absolutely unthinkable to let Hartley go back to that man, especially after what she had said yesterday about how he would never, never believe her now. Suppose I let her go back and he killed her? I would have murdered her. Could I imagine myself opening the door and saying, all right, I give up, you can go home? No. The only piece of rational discourse which I could hang on to, and it was of great value, was what Hartley had said about the miracle in her mind which had not come about. If she could even utter such words, did not this indicate that her mind was divided and that she had some grain of hope that was favourable to me, some tiny pure inclination to make herself want what I wanted? But she must want to be free and happy, everybody did. She must, somewhere in her tormented soul, want me to take her away, out of misery, out of servitude. She must be moved by the idea of Titus, and the redemption of her love for him, a new family, a new world. She had only to open her eyes and stretch out her hand and say yes. There were vast liberating forces pent up somewhere which were bound to break out. It was just a matter of waiting and keeping her here and letting time enlighten her will.

I had given her breakfast and tried to talk to her and to explain what I have just written here, only she kept saying that she wanted to go home. Her ringed eyes and puffy face and the unnerving languor of her bearing made me wonder if she were not really ill, and whether I should call a doctor. Then, more exasperated than pitying, I wondered if I could not better serve my cause by being brusque, and I left her rather abruptly, and then was sorry. I was standing beside the bead curtain and touching it, uncertain what to do next, when I heard a sudden loud outburst of laughter from down below, followed by some part-singing with a female voice.

I ran down to the kitchen. Rosina was sitting on the table swinging her legs and being (there is no other word for it) worshipped by Gilbert and Titus. She was wearing a dark grey very fine check, very smart lightweight coat and skirt and a white silk blouse and very long wrinkled white high-heeled boots. Her glossy glowing dark hair had been cut or piled by a clever hairdresser into a rounded segmented composition which looked both complex and casual. (Horace would have liked it.) Her intense animal face was blazing with health and vitality and feral curiosity. She was entirely in control of a situation where the other two, perhaps as a result of prolonged strain, had now broken down into helpless crazy giggling and fou rire. My appearance provoked another outburst of slightly hysterical laughter, and they all spontaneously broke into song again. They sang in round, and showed no sign of stopping, an Italian catch whose words I can remember since Titus and Gilbert had been singing it obsessively in the preceding days. Titus taught it to Gilbert and now Rosina had got it too. It went Eravamo tredici, siamo rimasti dodici, sei facevano rima, e sei facevan’ pima-poma-pima-poma. God knows what it was supposed to be about. Singing is of course a form of aggression. The wet open mouths and glistening teeth of the singers are ardent to devour the victim-hearer. Singers crave hearers as animals crave their prey. Intoxicated by their own voices they now roared it out, round and round, Gilbert’s fruity baritone, Titus’s pseudo-Neapolitan tenor and Rosina’s strong rather harsh contralto. I shouted ‘Stop! Stop! Stop that bloody row!’ But they went on singing at me, their bright eyes, moist with laughter, fixed upon me, waving their arms in time to the tune; until at last they wearied, stopped, and went off into another crazy laughing fit.

I sat on a chair and watched them.

Coherent at last, Rosina said, wiping her eyes, ‘Charles, you’re so funny, you are an endless source of amusement to your friends. I hear you’ve got your lady-love here, hidden away upstairs! You really are priceless!’

‘Why the hell did you have to tell her?’ I said to Gilbert and Titus.

Gilbert, attempting unsuccessfully to erase the laughter wrinkles from his face, avoided my look. He started rolling and swinging his eyes.

Titus said rather sulkily, ‘You didn’t say not to tell.’ Then he caught Rosina’s eye and beamed.

Gilbert had of course met Rosina before and knew her slightly. He had hitherto regarded her with the prudish hostility which some male homosexuals instinctively feel towards very feminine predatory women (whereas with gentle sweet women such as Lizzie they got on very well). However he seemed now to have suffered an instant conversion. Titus was simply a boy absolutely thrilled to see a famous actress in the flesh and to find that she not only noticed him but appreciated the charms of his youth. They kept eyeing each other, he shyly, she with bold amusement. Titus’s appearance had profited, as Gilbert’s had, from sun and sea. His reddish blond hair had been burnished and enlivened into a halo of fine wire, and his shirt, scarcely buttoned, showed the glowing skin and blazing red curls of his chest. His trousers were rolled up to reveal long elegant bronzed legs. He was barefoot. The scarred lip gave a twisted male force to his pretty mouth. Rosina was at her sleekest, delighted and amused by her exercise of power. As she held court, her piercing cross-eyed glance kept moving encouragingly from one of the bemused enthralled men and back again. They seemed to be quite dazed by her attractions. It was certainly a change from the increasingly charnel house atmosphere of Shruff End.

‘What do you want, Rosina?’

‘What do you mean, “What do you want?” What a way to greet a visitor. “What do you want?” ’ She mimicked me. ‘What sort of a question is that?’

The other two roared with laughter. They seemed to find everything Rosina said vastly clever and funny.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Can’t you make an effort to be civil to an old friend?’

‘I’m not in a social mood.’

‘So I see. Yet you already have two charming guests, in fact three guests, including lady-love. All right, I’m not angling for an invitation to stay. I think this is the nastiest meanest most unpleasant house I’ve ever entered.’

‘It has bad vibes,’ said Titus.

‘You can say that again,’ said Gilbert.

They were ganging up against me.

‘But is your funny lady really upstairs? Whatever are you going to do with her? You know, you promised to tell me what was going on in your interesting love life, only of course I ought to know by now that you don’t keep promises. Anyway I decided I’d come and see how you were getting along. I’ve been working hard and I thought I needed a holiday. I’m at the Raven Hotel again, I like it there, I like the bay and those extraordinary boulders. And the food is excellent, not your style.’

‘I hope you have a pleasant stay at the Raven Hotel.’

‘The most amazing rumours about you are circulating in London.’

‘I’m sure everyone is fascinated.’

‘Well, they’re not actually. I had to start a few rumours myself to keep your memory a bit greenish. They’ve forgotten you already. You were pretty old hat when you were still with us, now you’re ancient history. The young people have never heard of you, Charles. You’re exploded, you’re not even a myth. I can see it now, Charles dear, you’re old. Where’s all that charm we used to go on about? It was nothing but power really. Now you’ve lost your power you’ve lost your charm. No wonder you have to make do with a Bearded Lady.’

‘Just buzz off, Rosina, will you?’

‘But what’s happening, Charles? I’m mad with curiosity. I gather from these two that she’s a sort of prisoner here. May I go up and poke her through the bars?’

‘Rosina, please-’

‘But, Charles, what are you up to? There’s a husband in the case, isn’t there, if I remember? Not that husbands ever worried you much. But you can’t be going to carry her off, you can’t want to marry her! Really, you are becoming ridiculous. You were never ridiculous in the old days. You used to have dignity and style.’

Titus and Gilbert, less amused, were looking embarrassed and studying the great slate flagstones of the kitchen floor.

‘I’ll see you to the road, Rosina. Is your car out there?’

‘Oh, I don’t want to go yet. I want to sing some more. Who’s pretty-boy?’ She indicated Titus.

‘That is my son Titus.’

Titus frowned and stroked his scarred lip. Gilbert raised his eyebrows, Rosina changed colour, shot me a quick look of piercing malignancy, then laughed. ‘Well, well-All right, I’ll go. My car’s outside. You may escort me to it. Goodbye, you two, I enjoyed the sing-song.’ She marched out of the kitchen swinging her handbag and I followed.

Rosina walked straight out of the front door and across the causeway without looking back. I followed her as far as her horrible red car.

There she turned on me, her vixen face pointed with rage. ‘Is that boy really your son?’

‘Well, no, I’ve sort of taken him on. I always wanted a son. He’s their son, he’s the adopted son-of-of Hartley and her husband.’

‘I see. I might have known it was a stupid joke. For one moment I thought perhaps-what are you going to do about that woman? You can’t collect a half-crazy female at this stage of her life. You can’t keep her like a mad thing on a chain. Or have I got it all wrong?’

‘She’s not a prisoner. She loves me. She’s just been brainwashed. ’

‘Marriage is brainwashing. Not necessarily a bad thing. Your brain could do with a wash. Oh God, I feel so tired. That bloody long drive-I think your mind’s going, you’re getting senile, you’re living in a dream world, a rather nasty one. Shall I tell you something to wake you up?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘You say you “always wanted a son”. That’s just a sentimental lie, you didn’t want trouble, you didn’t want to know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a real son. Your sons are fantasies, they’re easier to deal with. Do you imagine you could really “take on” that silly uneducated adolescent boy in there? He’ll vanish out of your life like everything else has done, because you can’t grasp the stuff of reality. He’ll turn out to be a dream child too-when you touch him he’ll fade and disappear-you’ll see.’

‘All right, you’ve had your say, now go.’

‘I haven’t started yet. I never told you this at the time, I thought I never would. You made me pregnant. I got rid of the child.’

I drew a circle in the dust on the radiator of the car. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because you weren’t there to tell, you’d gone, gone off with Lizzie or whoever was the next dream girl. God, the sickening casual brutality of men-the women who are left behind to make agonizing decisions alone. I made that decision alone. Christ, how I wish I hadn’t done it. I was crazy. I did it partly out of hatred of you. Why the hell didn’t I keep that child. He’d have been nearly grown up by now.’

‘Rosina-’

‘And I’d have taught him to hate you-that would have been a consolation too.’

‘I’m sorry-’

‘Oh, you’re sorry. And I daresay I wasn’t the only one. You broke up my marriage deliberately, industriously, zealously, you worked at it. Then you walk off and leave me with nothing, with less than nothing, with that horrible crime which I had to commit by myself, I cried for months-for years-about that-I’ve never stopped crying.’ Her dark eyes filled with tears for a second, and then she seemed to magic them away. She opened the door of the car.

‘Oh-Rosina-’

‘I hate you, I loathe you, you’ve been a devil in my mind ever after-’

‘Look, all right, I left you, but you drove me to it, you were responsible too. Women’s Lib hasn’t stopped women from putting all the blame on us when it suits them. You tell me this terrible story now to-’

‘Oh shut up. What’s the name of that female?’

‘You mean-Hartley-?’

‘Is that her surname?’

‘No, her surname is Fitch.’

‘Fitch, OK. Mr Fitch, here I come.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘He lives here, doesn’t he? I shall find out where he lives and I shall go and console him. It’ll do him good to meet a real live woman instead of an old rag-bag. He’s probably forgotten what women are like. I won’t hurt him, I’ll just cheer him up, I’ll do him less harm than you’re doing her. I’ve got to have some amusement on my holiday. I thought of seducing pretty-boy, but it would be too easy. The father would be a far more interesting project. After all, life is full of surprises. The only thing that’s become absolutely dull, dull, dull is you, Charles. Dull. Goodbye.’

She got into the car and slammed the door. The car shot off like a red rocket in the direction of the village.

I stared after her. Soon there was nothing on the road but a cloud of dust and above it the pale blue sky. For a short while I felt that I should go mad if I reflected too much on what Rosina had told me about what happened in the past.

The rest of the day (before something else happened in the evening) passed like a feverish dream. The weather, sensing my mood, infected by it perhaps, became hotter but with that sinister breathless heat that betokens a thunderstorm. The light was darkened although the sun blazed from a cloudless sky. I felt weak and shivery as if I were developing the ’flu. My impression increased that perhaps Hartley was ill. Her eyes glittered, her hands were hot. Her stuffy smelly room had become that of an invalid. She was rational, not frenzied, she actually argued with me. I begged her to come downstairs, to come outside into the sun and air, but she lay back as if exhausted at the very thought. Even her rationality had something unnerving about it, as if it were the reasoning of a quiet maniac or an exercise undertaken simply for its own sake. She constantly said she wanted to go home, that there was no alternative, and so on and so on, but she seemed to me to lack the final real will to go. I kept on trying to regard this absence of will as a hopeful factor, but somehow now it was beginning to frighten me.

And Ben’s silence was getting me down. What did it mean? Had he decided on reflection that he did not want Hartley back? Was he settling down to a happy bachelor life with the dog? Or had he some secret girl friend to whom in relief he had now run away? Was he making complex plans either to rescue her or to take some terrible revenge on me? Had he summoned some roughs, old army friends perhaps, who would arrive any moment to beat me up? Had he gone to a lawyer? Or was he just playing a subtle game, waiting for my nerve to break, waiting for me to come to him? Or perhaps he too had fallen into some kind of entranced nervous apathy, unsure of what he wanted, unsure of what to do? I myself felt at some moment that to be forced to act, even by the police, would be preferable to this empty echoing space of attentive possibilities.

I was now trying very hard to steel myself to take Hartley to London, to drag her to the car, to delude her by telling her she was going home. I felt the time had come to do this, although I was far from sure that it was the right move. Shruff End might have ‘bad vibes’ as Titus put it, but it was my home, I was used to it. And here I could communicate quietly with Hartley, there was a thin pure stream of communication, especially when we talked about the past. In an odd way we were at ease together. Surely there must soon be some break-through, some dialectical change. What on earth would I do in London with a distraught weeping Hartley in that awful little flat with the chairs piled on the table and the china not unpacked? To whom could we go in London? I did not want to exhibit Hartley to people who, however helpful, would secretly mock her. The fact was I wanted, perhaps we both wanted, someone to look after us, at least someone to be there as a sort of protection and guarantee of ordinariness. Titus and Gilbert might be of little use but simply their presence made the situation more bearable.

However, since Rosina’s visit, Titus and Gilbert had been in a state of subdued revolt, they were mutinous. I think Ben’s silence was upsetting them too, in different ways. They wanted a showdown, a dénouement. They wanted an end to the situation which would relieve their minds. Gilbert was simply frightened of Ben, afraid of fights and thuggery. What Titus felt I was unsure. Sometimes I felt terrified of what Titus might be thinking. Since Hartley’s arrival I had not talked to him properly. I ought to have done, I wanted to do so, but I had not. It was possible that Titus was in an agony of tension and indecision, wanting and yet not wanting to run to his father, to be reconciled, or even to suffer punishment, to escape from his mother, to escape from me. The possibility of anything so awful in the boy’s state of mind made me afraid to probe him when I had so much else to envisage and decide. Meanwhile he had withdrawn, a little sulky, wanting to be wooed. I would woo him, but at present had not the wit or the strength. And I was disappointed in him. I needed his help, his loving support, with Hartley, his ingenuity, his commitment. But he showed plainly that he had, at any rate in this weird context, given up the problem of his mother. He preferred not to reflect upon the obscene embarrassment of her incarceration. He did not want to associate himself with me as a fellow gaoler. This was understandable. But he annoyed me by seeming to enjoy himself. He swam, he sang, he sat on the rocks with Gilbert drinking white wine and blackcurrant juice (their latest drink). He behaved like the scrounger he had so proudly denied himself to be. As Gilbert now declared that he was afraid to go shopping by himself, Titus went with him and they bought quantities of expensive food and drink with my money. They did not run into Ben. Perhaps Ben had gone away? Where to? Whom to? These mysteries did me no good.

One form taken by the mutiny of Gilbert and Titus was that they began to suggest that I should do something about Ben. At least Gilbert made the suggestions, but Titus was certainly associated with them. What I was to do was not so clear, but they wanted an initiative. There was by now a little less singing, a little more sitting in the kitchen and plotting; and even in the midst of my other preoccupations and miseries I felt jealousy, stupid blank jealousy, when I saw those two heads together, and they fell nervously silent as I came in. They ran out all the time to look for letters. Gilbert even bought a large square basket which he mounted on stones inside the dog kennel to be sure that any letters which came would not get wet or blow away. I avoided discussion, since I so much feared to hear Titus announce that he would go over to Nibletts to spy out the land. What if Titus went to Nibletts and did not return? Of course I did not tell the others about Rosina’s crazy boast, which I decided on reflection was intended simply to annoy me. Nor had I stopped thinking about what else she had told me, although I was trying hard to dismiss her from my mind. I hoped she had gone back to London.

Towards the evening of that day I got as far as concluding that if Ben made no move I would do something on the next day: something clarificatory, something decisive; although I could not yet see quite what this liberating move would be. Most probably I would take Hartley and Titus to London. I had waited long enough upon Hartley’s will, and I was beginning to believe that she wanted me to force her. When I felt that I was nearly desperate enough to decide, I felt some relief. But the tomorrow upon which I was to make my decision never, in the form in which I had envisaged it, arrived.

Towards six thirty in the evening the thick blue air seemed to be getting darker and more stifling, although the sun was bravely shining and the sky was unflecked. It was as if the sun were shining through a mist, but a mist made out of the dark blue globules of the sky itself. I remember the lurid impression of that evening, the vivid dark light, the brilliant vibrating colours of the rocks, of the grass on the other side of the road, of Gilbert’s yellow car. There was no breath of wind, not the softest breeze. The sea was menacingly quiet, utterly smooth, glassy, glossy, oily, a uniform azure. Then there were silent flashes, extraordinary lightings up of the whole horizon, like vast distant fireworks or some weird atomic experiment. Not a cloud, not a sound of thunder, just these huge displays of quick silent yellowish-white light.

I had been talking to Hartley, talking about the past, enjoying that thin pure line of easy communication with her which I could persuade myself was becoming deeper and wider. It was true that, so far as we did communicate, the ease of it was exceptional, the flavour unique. Here I could post the banner of my love, hope gradually to convince. Loving her took at this time so intensely the form of pity, compassion, an absolute desire to cherish, to cure; to stir the desire for happiness and to make it grow where it had not been before. To this end I tried cunningly to exclude the idea of a return home, picturing it casually as something now impossible; and meanwhile let Hartley continue to calm herself by an illusion of a return which she would soon see as unthinkable and as something which she no longer wanted. Surreptitiously I increased the pressure and the emphasis. My policy of gradualism had been right and would shortly be confirmed as successful. Hartley went on saying that she must go back to her husband, but she said it fairly calmly and it seemed to me less often and the words sounded emptier.

I left her at last. I did not now bother to lock her door during the day. Her desire to hide, to hide from Gilbert and above all from Titus would keep her effectively enclosed by day. In any case, how far could she run undiscovered? The night despairs were another matter. The front door bell rang. As I came down into the hall I saw the wire quivering just before I heard the bland clangour of the bell in the kitchen. I thought: Ben. And I wondered: alone? I moved to the door quickly and incautiously to forestall my fear. I did not put the door on the chain but opened it wide at once. The man standing outside was my cousin James.

James was smiling, with the calm inane self-satisfied smile which he sometimes put on. He was carrying a suitcase. I could see his Bentley on the road parked next to Gilbert’s Volkswagen.

‘James! What on earth are you doing here!’

‘Have you forgotten? It’s Whit weekend. You invited me.’

‘You invited yourself. And of course I’ve forgotten.’

‘Do you want me to go away?’

‘No-no-come in-for a moment anyway.’

I felt confused, exasperated, profoundly startled. My cousin was always an unnerving portent. His presence in the house would change everything, even the kettle. I could not tolerate or manage James here, I could not continue to run my life with him upon the scene.

He walked in and put down his suitcase, looking around him with curiosity. ‘I like your situation. And that bay with the spherical boulders is quite extraordinary. I came by the coast road of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘That huge rock out in the sea covered with guillemots-you know where I mean?’

‘No.’

‘Haven’t you seen it? It’s-Well, never mind. I see there’s a martello tower. Does that belong to you too?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see the point of this place. What’s the date of the house?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, nineteen hundred, earlier, later. Oh God.’

‘What’s the matter? Look, I’m sorry, I ought to have written to warn you. I tried to ring up but I gather you’re not on the ’phone. I don’t have to stay here, I passed quite a nice-looking hotel a mile or two back-Are you all right, Charles?’

‘Come into the kitchen.’

Because of the weird light it was rather dark in the kitchen. Just as we entered, Gilbert and Titus came in from outside, the strange silent midsummer lightning signalling behind them.

Introductions were inescapable. ‘Oh hello. This is my cousin James who’s just dropped by. Gilbert Opian. And this is a young friend of mine, Titus. There’s no one else here, this is our complement. ’ As I said this I laid my finger as if by accident upon my lips. I hoped it was not too dark for them to see.

‘Titus,’ said James, ‘so you’ve come, good.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said to James. ‘You don’t know him, do you?’

I saw that Titus was staring at James almost as if he recognized him.

‘No, but you mentioned his name to me-remember?’

‘Oh yes-Well, have a drink, James? Before you go.’

‘Thanks, anything. That white wine that’s open.’

‘We drink it with blackcurrant,’ said Titus.

‘Are you his maternal cousin or his paternal cousin?’ asked Gilbert, who liked to get such things straight.

‘Our fathers were brothers.’

‘Charles always pretends to have no family. He’s so secretive.’

Gilbert, affably rolling his eyes, poured out four glasses of wine. He seemed to have lost some weight climbing about on the rocks in his new plimsolls. He looked younger and more relaxed. Titus added the dash of blackcurrant. He was smiling. It was clear that both of them were glad of this diversion, glad to have another person, an untainted outsider, present to talk to, to dilute the atmosphere; glad too perhaps to have an extra fighting man.

‘Yes, you’ve got a very odd and interesting house,’ said James.

‘You don’t feel any bad vibrations?’

James looked at me. ‘Who owned it before?’

‘A Mrs Chorney. I don’t know anything about her.’

‘Can you see the sea from the upper windows?’

‘Yes, but the view’s better from the rocks. I’ll show you if you can spare a minute. What sort of shoes have you got on? It’s a great place for breaking your ankle.’

I wanted to get James out of the house. I hustled him quickly out onto the grass and he followed me a short way over the rocks until we could sit on a warm summit with the sea view. The sea had now changed colour and was a slightly greyish glittering pale azure, crepitating with little movements.

‘How stuffy it is. James, I hope you don’t mind going to that hotel, it’s called the Raven Hotel, and it’s got a lovely outlook over that bay you liked. And you could drive down the coast and look at those seagulls and things. The fact is, I can’t have you because there isn’t another bed. We’re full up. As it is, Titus is sleeping on the floor.’

‘I quite understand the situation.’

You don’t, old cock, thank God, I thought. And I thought, in a minute I’ll take him back to his car.

I looked at my cousin, now vividly revealed in the bright dark light which delineated everything with a fearful clarity. James had carried his glass of wine with him over the rocks and was sipping it with a maddening air of contented repose, looking out over the sea. He was wearing lightweight black trousers with an open-necked mauve shirt and a white summer jacket. He was a careless dresser but could be foppish in his own way. His hawk-nosed face was dark with the irrepressible beard and with the curious cloud, perhaps the effect of his obscure brown eyes, which always seemed to hang over it. His brown hair was jaggedly untidy.

I suddenly thought, if he’s no longer in the army, why does he have to come and see me at a holiday weekend when the roads are full of traffic?

‘Are you doing anything?’ I said. ‘I mean, have you got another job or anything?’

‘No, gentleman of leisure.’

That was odd. It then came to me in a flash that of course James had not really left the army at all. He had gone underground. He was preparing for some top-secret mission, perhaps involving a return to Tibet. Why had he seemed so annoyed that I had seen that strange oriental figure in his rooms? My cousin had become a secret agent!

I was trying to think of some subtle tactful way of letting him know that I had guessed when he spoke again.

‘And what has happened about Mary Hartley Smith?’

‘Mary Hartley Smith?’

‘Yes. Your first love. You told me she was living here with her husband. That boy is her son. I asked you his name. Titus. Have you forgotten that too?’

The strange thing was that I had forgotten, I had completely forgotten telling James that story. Why had James wanted to know Titus’s name? ‘I must be mad,’ I said, ‘I had forgotten, but I remember now. You gave me some good advice.’

‘Did you take it?’

‘Yes. You were right of course. I was just imagining things. The shock of seeing her set off a lot of old memories. I’ve recovered now and of course I’m not in love with her, it wouldn’t make sense. Anyway she’s just a boring old hag now. The boy drops in occasionally. He’s a bit of a bore too.’

‘I see. So all’s well that ends well.’

‘Have you got a tie?’

‘A tie? Yes.’

‘You’ll need one to get into the dining room at the Raven Hotel. I’ll just see you to your car.’

I escorted him round by the side of the house so as to avoid further conversation in the kitchen.

‘Nice car. New one?’

‘Yes, it goes well. Where can I turn?’

‘Just beyond that rock. How dark it is. You almost need headlights. ’

‘Yes, it’s a funny day. Looks like a storm. Well, thanks for the drink, look after yourself.’ He handed me his empty wine glass.

‘Goodbye, drive carefully.’

The black Bentley moved, swung round, then shot off down the road. James waved, vanished round the corner. Would he come back? I did not think so.

I walked slowly across the causeway and into the house and shut the door. How odd that I had forgotten telling him those things. I must have been drunk. Well, tomorrow was destiny day. I was going to act tomorrow. I thought, I will take Hartley to London. This place is bedevilled somehow.

I stood in the hall for a while. I wanted to be by myself. I put Jame’s wine glass down on the stairs. I could hear the low conspiratorial voices of Gilbert and Titus who were talking in the kitchen. Tomorrow I would speak to Titus. Titus and Hartley and I would be alone together, in another place. My act, my will would create a new family.

I heard a faint straining scraping sound. I looked up and saw the wire from the front door bell quivering. Then I heard the resonant incoherent clamour. Ben? I turned round quickly and flung the door open.

Peregrine Arbelow was standing outside holding a suitcase.

‘Hello, Charles, what a funny place.’

‘Perry!’

‘I wish you’d call me “Peregrine”. How many times have I said that to you? A thousand?’

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘What on earth am I doing here, he says. You issued an invitation, I accepted it. It’s Whit weekend, remember? I have had a very long and tiring drive. I have been looking forward to open arms and cries of joy for the last hundred miles.’

I could now see Peregrine’s white Alfa Romeo parked where James’s Bentley had lately stood.

‘Peregrine, I’m terribly sorry, you can’t stay here, there aren’t any beds and-’

‘Look, may I just push my way in?’ He did so.

Peregrine’s loud voice had alerted the conspirators in the kitchen.

‘Peregrine!’

‘Gilbert! What a pleasant surprise. Charles, I can have Gilbert’s bed.’

‘You bloody won’t, I shall defend my sofa.’

‘Introduce your charming boy friend, Gilbert.’

‘This is Titus Fitch. Not my property alas.’

‘Hello, Titus. I am Peregrine Arbelow. Gilbert, get me a drink, will you, there’s a good fellow.’

‘OK, but there’s nothing but wine and sherry here, you know. Charles doesn’t drink spirits.’

‘Oh, fuck, I’d forgotten, I should have brought a bottle.’

‘Peregrine,’ I said, ‘you won’t be happy here. There’s nothing for you to drink and nowhere for you to sleep. I’m sorry I forgot the date and I don’t actually think I invited you at all. There’s an excellent hotel just down the road-’

At that moment the front doorbell ran again. Peregrine turned to open the door and over his shoulder I could see my cousin James.

‘Hello,’ said Peregrine, ‘welcome to Hospitality Hall, proprietor Charles Arrowby, there’s nothing to drink and nowhere to sleep but-’

‘Hello,’ said James. ‘I’m sorry to come back, Charles, but the Raven Hotel is full up, and I wondered-’

‘I imagine that’s the place where he wanted to park me,’ said Peregrine.

‘Let’s go into the kitchen,’ said Gilbert.

Gilbert went first, then Titus, then Perry, then James. I stood for a moment, then picked up the wine glass from the stairs and followed.

‘I am Peregrine Arbelow.’

‘I think I’ve heard of you,’ said James.

‘Oh goodie-’

‘This is my cousin, General Arrowby,’ I said.

‘You never said he was a general,’ said Gilbert.

‘I never knew you had a cousin,’ said Peregrine. ‘Hello, sir.’

I took James by the sleeve of his immaculate white coat and pulled him back into the hall. ‘Look, you can’t stay here, I suggest you-’

At that moment I saw James’s eyes widen, looking behind me, and I realized that Hartley was standing on the stairs.

At our sudden silence the other three emerged. We all stood there looking up at Hartley.

She was still wearing my black silk dressing gown with the red rosettes. It reached to her feet and with the collar turned up to frame her hair it had something of the effect of an evening dress. Her eyes, startled and large, had their violet tint; and although, with her disordered grey hair she looked old and mad, she seemed in that arrested moment like a queen.

I recovered in a second or two and made for the stairs. As she saw me move Hartley turned and fled. I saw the flash of a bare ankle, a bare foot. I caught her at the curve of the stairs and hurried her towards the upper landing.

We almost ran together along the landing and I pushed her in through the door of her room. She went at once and sat down on the mattress, like an obedient dog. I do not think that in the whole period of her incarceration I ever saw her sit upon the chair.

‘Hartley, darling, where were you going? Were you coming down to look for me? Or did you think that Ben had come? Or were you going to run away?’

She pulled the dressing gown closer about her and simply shook her head several times. She was breathless with agitation. Then she peered up at me with a sad timid sweet look which suddenly reminded me of my father.

‘Oh, Hartley, I love you so much!’ I sat down on the chair and lifted my hands to my face. I grimaced into my hands. I felt so helplessly, vulnerably close to my childhood. ‘Hartley, don’t leave me. I don’t know what I’d do if you went away.’

Hartley said, ‘Who was that man?’

‘What man?’

‘The man you were with when I was on the stairs?’

‘My cousin James.’

‘Oh yes-Aunt Estelle’s son.’

This unexpected exhibition of memory made me sick with shock.

Down below in the kitchen I could hear a lively murmur of voices. Gilbert and Titus, feeling released by Hartley’s apparition from any necessity to be discreet, were doubtless telling all they knew and more to James and Peregrine.

I groaned into my hands.

That night we slept as follows: I slept in my bedroom, Hartley slept in the middle room, Gilbert slept on his sofa, Peregrine slept on the cushions in the bookroom, James slept on a couple of chairs in the little red room, and Titus slept out on the lawn. It was a very hot night but there was no storm.

The next morning there was a holiday atmosphere among my guests. Titus swam from the cliff as usual. James, after exploring the tower and uttering various historical conjectures about it, swam from the tower steps. (I had still forgotten to fix a rope, but it was high tide.) Peregrine, a great white blob, lay half-naked sun-bathing upon the grass and got thoroughly burnt. Gilbert drove into the village and came back with a mass of foodstuffs and several bottles of whisky which he put down to my account at the shop. Later James drove to the village to get The Times and failed. There was general amazement at my ability to live without ‘news’. ‘Who’s dead, who’s hijacked, who’s on strike,’ as Perry summed it up. He had brought a transistor set with him, but I told him to keep it out of my way. James pioneered a popular plan to go to the Raven Hotel to watch the Test Match on television, only Gilbert, again despatched to shop, this time for sunburn lotion for Peregrine, reported that electrical disturbances had put the local TV out of order. Gilbert and Titus, hoping to find recruits for their choir, succeeded with Perry who sang a gruff and shaggy bass, but failed with James, who could not sing a note. I had managed on the previous evening to warn Titus and Gilbert not to tell Peregrine about Rosina’s visit. This was just as well, since in the morning I was almost incapable of rational thought. I felt as if something had snapped inside my head, a brain tumour had burst or something.

My desperate state was caused partly by the presence of James, who seemed to be a centre of magnetic attraction to the other three. Each of them separately told me how much he liked James. No doubt they expected to please me by this information. Titus said, ‘It’s funny, I feel as if I’d met him before, and yet I know I haven’t. Perhaps I saw him in a dream.’ The other thing which drove me half mad was a sudden change in Hartley’s tone. She had been saying that she must go home, but she had lately said it almost listlessly as if she knew it was becoming impossible. Now she began to say it as if she meant it, and to back it up with almost-rational arguments.

‘I know that you think you’re being kind to me-’

‘Kind! I love you.’

‘I know you think it’s for the best and I’m grateful-’

‘Grateful! Oh good!’

‘But it’s all a nonsense, an accident, an incident-we can’t stay together, it doesn’t make sense.’

‘I love you. You love me.’

‘I do care for you-’

‘Don’t use that whimsy language. You love me.’

‘All right, but in an unreal way, in a dream, in a might-have-been. Really, all this was over long ago and we’re dreaming it.’

‘Hartley, have you no sense of the present tense, can’t you live in the present? Wake up and try it!’

‘I live in long-times, not in sudden present moments, don’t you see-I’m married, I’ve got to go back to where I am. If you took me to London like you just said I’d have to run away from you. You make everything worse and worse, you won’t understand-’

‘OK, you’re married, so what? You haven’t been happy.’

‘It doesn’t matter-’

‘I should say it matters a lot. I can’t think of anything that matters more.’

‘I can-’

‘You admit you love me.’

‘One can love a dream. You think that makes a sort of push to action-’

‘A motive, yes!’

‘No, because it is a dream. It’s made of lies.’

‘Hartley, we have futures. That means we can make things true.’

‘I have to go back.’

‘He’ll kill you.’

‘I have to go through that door, it’s the only way for me.’

‘I won’t let you.’

‘Please-’

‘What about Titus? He’ll be with me. Don’t you want to be with Titus?’

‘Charles, I must go home.’

‘Oh stop, can’t you just think of something better and want it?’

‘One can’t do that to one’s mind. You don’t understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You’re like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don’t look-’

‘Hartley, trust me, come with me, ride on my back. You too can move about and look at things-’

‘I want to go home.’

I left her and locked the door and rushed out of the house. I climbed over a rock or two and saw my cousin standing on the bridge over the cauldron. He waved and called to me and I went to join him.

‘Charles, just look at the force of that water, isn’t it fantastic, isn’t it terrifying?’ I could just hear his voice above the roar of the outgoing tide.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s sublime, yes, in the strict sense, sublime. Kant would love it. Leonardo would love it. Hokusai would love it.’

‘I daresay.’

‘And the birds-just look at those shags-’

‘I thought they were cormorants.’

‘They’re shags. And I saw some choughs, and oyster-catchers. And I heard a curlew round in the bay.’

‘When are you leaving?’

‘I say, I like your friends.’

‘They like you.’

‘The boy seems good.’

‘Yes-’

‘My hat, look at that water, what it’s doing now!’

We began to walk back towards the house. It was nearly time for lunch, if such conventions still existed.

James, who had evidently brought his seaside holiday outfit, had on some very old cotton khaki trousers, rolled up, and a clean but ancient blue shirt which he wore loose and unbuttoned, revealing the upper part of his thin scantily-haired pink body. He was also wearing sandals which exposed his skinny white feet with long prehensile bony toes which used to appal me when I was young. (‘James has feet like hands’ I told my mother, as if discovering a secret deformity.)

As we neared the house, he said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘About what?’

‘About her.’

‘I don’t know. When are you leaving?’

‘May I stay till tomorrow?’

‘All right.’

We came into the kitchen and I automatically picked up the tray which Gilbert had put out for Hartley. I carried it upstairs, unlocked the door, and went in and put the tray on the table as usual.

She was crying and would say nothing to me.

‘Oh, Hartley, don’t destroy me with this grief, you don’t know what you’re doing to me.’

She said nothing and made no sign, just continued to cry, leaning back against the wall and gazing in front of her, mopping the slow tears occasionally with the back of her hand.

I sat with her for a little while in silence. I sat on the chair and looked about me as if so ordinary an occupation could bring her comfort. I noted a damp patch on the ceiling, a crack in one of the panes of the long window. Purple fluff on the floor, doubtless from Mrs Chorney’s furniture. At last I got up, touched her shoulder gently and went away. I never stayed to see her eat. I locked the door.

When I came back to the kitchen I found all four of them there, standing round the table where Gilbert had laid out a lunch of ham and tongue with green salad and new potatoes, and hard-boiled eggs for James. By now of course I took no interest in their food and very little in my own. Two open bottles of white wine were cooling in the sink. Peregrine, improved by being clothed, was drinking whisky and listening to the cricket on his transistor. They fell silent when I entered. Perry switched off the radio. There was an air of expectancy.

I poured myself out a glass of wine and picked up a slice of ham. ‘You carry on. I’m going to eat outside.’

‘Don’t rush away, we want to talk to you,’ said Peregrine.

‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘We want to help you,’ said Gilbert.

‘Oh, fuck off.’

‘Please stay a minute,’ said James. ‘Titus has something to say to you. Haven’t you, Titus?’

Titus, red in the face, not looking at me, mumbled, ‘I think you ought to let my mother go home.’

‘This is her home.’

‘But seriously, old man-’ said Peregrine.

‘I don’t want your advice. I didn’t ask you to come here, any of you.’

James sat down, and the other three followed suit. I remained standing.

‘We don’t want to intrude-’ said James.

‘Don’t then.’

‘And we don’t in fact want to force any advice on you. We can’t see what this situation is, how could we? My impression is that you hardly understand it yourself. We don’t want to persuade you-’

‘Then why did you put Titus up to saying what he just said?’

‘Because it’s part of the evidence. It’s something that Titus thinks, but which he was afraid to tell you.’

‘Oh bosh.’

‘You have got a difficult and, as far as I can see, fairly urgent decision to make and if you would only consent to talk to us we could help you to make it in a rational way, and we could also help you to carry it out in a rational way. You must see that you need help, you need it.’

‘I need a chauffeur. Nothing else.’

‘You need support. I am your only relation. Gilbert and Peregrine are your close friends.’

‘They aren’t.’

‘Titus says he regards you as his father.’

‘You all seem to have had a jolly good talk about me.’

‘Don’t be angry, Charles,’ said Peregrine. ‘We didn’t expect to be landed in this soup. We came here for a holiday. But we see you in trouble and we want to back you up.’

‘There’s nothing you can do for me.’

‘There is,’ said James. ‘I think it would help you a great deal to discuss the whole business with us, not necessarily the details, but the sort of strategy of it. You could do this without disloyalty. Now roughly there are two possible courses of action: you keep her or you return her. OK? Well, let’s consider first what happens if you return her-’

‘I’m not going to return her, as you put it. She’s not a bottle.’

‘I gather from Titus that one of your reasons for not taking her back, even if she wants to go-’

‘She doesn’t.’

‘Is that you fear that her husband may be violent to her.’

‘That’s one reason, there are about a hundred others.’

‘But supposing his violence depended on a misunderstanding, and supposing that that misunderstanding could be removed-’

‘James, don’t be a fool, you know perfectly well that there isn’t any explanation or any excuse for what I have done, whatever it may be. And I advise you to be careful what you say to me.’

‘Look,’ said James, ‘I’m saying two things. First, that if you are going to take her back it must be done intelligently. We should all go with you, as a show of force, but also to back up your statement. ’

‘My statement?!’

‘And secondly, that if fear of violence is one of your reasons for not returning her, and if that fear can be reduced, this could be relevant to what you decide to do.’

‘Do you see what he means?’ said Peregrine.

‘Yes! But as James admits, you cannot understand the situation! You speak of explaining or making statements-you might as well try to explain to a bison. In any case this whole argument is beside the point since there are not two possibilities. I do not admit her return to her husband as possible.’

‘Well, then let us consider the other course-’ said James.

‘We will consider nothing! I don’t want you lot tramping around over this problem. You are being impertinent, and I resent it extremely! But since the matter has come up I should like to ask Titus why he thinks I ought to let his mother go home.’

Titus, who had been staring at the ham (perhaps he was hungry) all this time, seemed reluctant to answer, blushed and would not look up. He said, ‘Well-you see-I feel I may be to blame-’

‘Why on earth?’

‘It’s so difficult, one has so many sort of-emotions, and sort of-prejudices, about fathers and mothers. I feel I may have made you think it was awfuller than it was, though it was awful. And she does exaggerate, she has fantasies and ideas in her head. I don’t know. Maybe she does prefer to be with him, and I’m against forcing people, I think they should be free. You’re in a hurry to fix it all at once. But if she wants to come to you she can come better later on when she’s had time to think it over.’

‘Well said, Titus,’ said James.

Titus gave James a look which stirred my ever-vigilant jealousy.

Peregrine said, ‘You don’t understand marriage, Charles, you’ve never been in it, it’s deep. You think a tiff means shipwreck, the end, it’s not so.’

I said, ‘To begin with, “free” doesn’t apply here, we’re dealing with a frightened person, a prisoner. She has to be pulled out, she’ll never walk. So it’s got to be fixed now. If she goes back she’ll never leave him, she’ll never escape.’

James said, ‘Well, isn’t that significant too? Isn’t that to admit that she ought to go back? That she’ll choose to stay there? Oftener than you might think what human beings actually do is what they want to do.’

‘She may stay. But “choose”? This isn’t a matter of a “tiff”, to use Perry’s ludicrous word which shows that he has no idea what this is all about. She’s a bullied terrorized woman who has never been happy with that man, she told me so herself.’

‘Her marriage may not have been happy, but it has survived a long time. You think too much about happiness, Charles. It’s not all that important.’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘There you are.’

‘Titus,’ I said, ‘is happiness important?’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ he said, and looked at me at last.

‘There you are,’ I said to James.

‘A young man’s reply,’ said James. ‘Now let me make a further point-’

‘Your trouble, Charles,’ said Peregrine, who was still drinking whisky, ‘as I said before, is that you despise women, you regard them as chattels. You regard this woman as a chattel-’

‘A further point. This drama has been developing very fast and it’s a whirling mass of emotions and ideas. You say you’ve kept this image of a pure first love beside you all these years. You may even have come to think of it as a supreme value, a standard by which all other loves have failed-’

‘Yes.’

‘But should you not criticize this guiding idea? I won’t call it a fiction. Let us call it a dream. Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one’s aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You’ve made it into a story, and stories are false.’

(At this point Titus, who could bear it no longer, surreptitiously seized a piece of ham and some bread.)

‘And you are using this thing from the far past as a guide to important and irrevocable moves which you propose to make in the future. You are making a dangerous induction, and induction is shaky at the best of times, consider Russell’s chicken-’

‘Russell’s chicken?’

‘The farmer’s wife comes out every day and feeds the chicken, but one day she comes out and wrings its neck.’

‘I don’t understand, let’s leave this chicken out.’

‘I mean, you are assuming on as far as I can see very insubstantial evidence, your memory of some idyllic times at school and so on, that if you were to carry her off you would be able to love her and make her happy, and she would be able to love you and make you happy. Such situations are in fact fairly rare and hard of achievement. Further, as a matter inseparable from the happiness you prize so much, you assume that it is morally right thus to rescue her, even in the apparent absence of her consent. Now should you not-’

‘James, please just stop insulting me with your pompous speculations will you? I wonder if you realize how insupportable you are? As you said, this business has developed fast and it’s a first-class muddle. And, all right, I made the muddle. But inside it there isn’t any perfect morality any more. That’s what ordinary human life is like. Perhaps cloistered soldiers don’t know about such things.’

James smiled. ‘I like “cloistered soldiers”. So you admit you aren’t sure that this rescue would be a good thing?’

‘I’m not sure, how can I be? But you’re trying to force me to have an argument which isn’t the argument of the situation. What you are saying is all at the side, it’s a sort of abstract commentary. You’re the one who’s “telling a story”. I’m in the place where the real things happen.’

‘Well, what is the argument of the situation?’

‘That I love her. She loves me. She says so. And love doesn’t rely on “evidence” and “induction”. Love knows. She’s been very unhappy and I’m not going to let her return to a bully who will henceforth be even more cruel to her. It will be worse. OK, I made it so, but the fact remains. For his cruelty we have a witness here, though the witness seems unwilling to testify.’

‘That’s not an argument,’ said James. ‘It’s a rather confused statement of intention.’

‘Well, it’s what I propose to act upon. I can’t think why I let myself be drawn into this perfectly ridiculous discussion at all.’

‘All right. What I personally think has probably emerged already, and of course needn’t be a matter of any interest to you. But I’d like to add this: that if you do decide, unwisely in my view, to take her away, we would all want to help you as much as we can. That’s so, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Peregrine.

‘I think I agree with Charles in some ways,’ said Gilbert.

‘For instance, where will you take her? The details have to be considered. What will she do all day?’

‘That question alone,’ said Peregrine, ‘is enough to deter any man from getting married.’

‘Charles, please don’t think me impertinent and above all don’t think me unkind. I can’t just stand by and see you make a mucker of this business. It calls for a joint operation. I wonder if you’d let me talk to her, just once very briefly?’

‘You? Talk to her? You must be mad!’

At that moment I heard a terrible sound, a sound which in fact I had been dreading ever since I embarked upon my perilous adventure. Hartley upstairs had suddenly started screaming and banging the door. ‘Let me out, let me out!’

I ran out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind me, and up the stairs. When I reached Hartley’s door she was still screaming and kicking at the panels. She had never done anything like this before. ‘Let me out! Let me out!’

I wanted to scream myself. I pounded the door frenziedly with my fist. ‘Oh stop it! Stop it! Shut up! Stop shouting, will you?’

Silence.

I ran downstairs again. There was silence in the kitchen too. I ran out of the front door and across the causeway and started walking along the road towards the tower.

Later on that day, towards evening, sitting on the rocks with James, I had begun to agree to things which had by now begun to seem inevitable.

‘Charles, it’s a terrible situation. That’s one reason why you’ve got to end it. And there is only one way to end it. You do see that now?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ll write the letter?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think the letter is important. You can explain things clearly in the letter.’

‘He won’t read it. He’ll tear it up and stamp on it.’

‘Well-or may keep it as evidence against you, but I think that risk is worth taking. I believe he’ll read it out of curiosity.’

‘He’s below the level of curiosity.’

‘And you agree that we should come?’

‘I agree that you should come.’

‘I think the more the better.’

‘But not Titus of course.’

‘Yes, Titus too. It might help her, and it could help Titus, if he could be polite to his father for five minutes.’

‘Polite? It sounds like a tea party.’

‘The liker it is to a tea party the better.’

‘Titus wouldn’t agree.’

‘He has agreed.’

‘Oh.’

‘Then it’s OK that Peregrine can go into the village now and make that telephone call?’

I hesitated. It was the last moment. If I said yes now the whole situation would slide out of my control. I would be sanctioning a totally new and unpredictable future. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. You stay here, I’ll go and brief Peregrine.’

In the afternoon I had talked with Hartley. I did not admit it to James, but his ‘discussion’ had helped me to see certain things more clearly, or had battered certain ideas into my head; or else I had in any case reached a certain decisive point of despair. That terrible ‘let me out, let me out’ had cracked my faith and my hope. I asked her if she really wanted to go home. She said she did. I said all right. I did not make any more appeals or offer any more arguments. And as we looked at each other, silently, neither venturing to add to the words firmly spoken, I felt a fresh barrier rise between us. Before, I had thought our communication difficult. Now I realized how close we had been.

The plan was that Peregrine should go to the village and telephone Ben and say that Mr Arrowby and his friends would be bringing ‘Mary’ back. Would Ben say, ‘Go to hell, I don’t want her now’? No. Very unlikely. Whatever he ultimately wanted he would not oblige me by that move. But perhaps he would be away, perhaps he would have disappeared, perhaps when it came to it Hartley would change her mind… But by now anything was better than hope.

James was re-appearing, leaping over the rocks.

My heart beat violently, sadly.

‘It’s all right, he says bring her round, but he says tomorrow morning, not tonight.’

‘That’s odd. Why not tonight?’ His woodwork class perhaps!

‘He wants to pretend he doesn’t care. It’s an available insult. He wants to make it clear we come at his convenience. It’s just as well. It gives you more time to write that letter. It might be as well to deliver the letter before we all arrive, he’ll be more likely to read it.’

‘Oh, James-’

‘Not to worry. Sic biscuitus disintegrat.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the way the cookie crumbles.’

Dear Mr Fitch,

This is not a very easy letter to write. I just want to make a number of things quite clear. The main thing is that I brought your wife to my house and kept her there against her will. The fact that she did not even take her handbag with her is proof, if proof be needed, that she was not ‘running away’. (Forgive me if I say the obvious, I want this letter to be a final and definitive account of what has happened.) I decoyed her into my car by telling her that Titus was at my house, which he was. When she arrived I locked her up. So you were right to charge me with having ‘kidnapped’ her. She has not ceased to ask to go home. It goes without saying that I have had no ‘relations’ with her. She has throughout resolutely resisted all my proposals and plans and has desired simply to be allowed to return to you. She is therefore totally blameless in this matter. My friends Mr Opian and Mr Arbelow, and my cousin General Arrowby, who have been here with me in the house throughout, will vouch for the truth of what I say.

There is no point in apologies and little point in further explanations. I have been in a state of illusion and caused much fruitless distress to your wife and to yourself, which I regret. I did not act out of malice, but out of the promptings of an old romantic affection which I now see to have nothing to do with what exists at present. And perhaps at this point I should add (again something obvious) that of course I have not seen or communicated with your wife in any way since she was a young girl, and our recent meeting was completely accidental.

I trust and assume that since you are a reasonable and just man you will take no reprisal against your wife who is completely innocent. This is a matter of deep concern to me, my cousin and my friends. She has been perfectly loyal to you in word and deed and deserves your respect and gratitude. As for myself, I trust you will feel that I have suffered enough humiliation, not least in consciousness of my folly,

Yours truly,

Charles Arrowby.

It was just as well that I had the extra time since it took me all the evening to compose this letter. It was indeed a difficult letter to write and I was far from satisfied with the final result. My first version was considerably more bellicose, but as James, to whom I showed it, pointed out, if I accused Ben of being a bully and a tyrant this would at once suggest that Hartley had said so. I could not justify my proceedings on that ground without casting an aspersion upon the ‘perfect loyalty’ which I had perjured myself by swearing that Hartley had exhibited. This omission of course left my self-defence almost non-existent, and I was well aware, without having it mentioned to me by James, that in another age both Ben and I would have been forced by convention and our own honourable consciences to fight each other to the death. In another age, and, in the case of a man like Ben, perhaps in this one too. My slender ‘apologies’ were also difficult to word, since I had to crawl sufficiently to propitiate, should Ben be disposed to forgive, but not so much as to seem negligible should he prefer to fight. I could only hope that Ben’s own sense of guilt would weaken his aggressive instincts. The pompous reference to ‘my cousin and my friends’ was James’s idea, though the false assertion that they had been present ‘throughout’ Hartley’s sojourn was mine. James thought that the vague presence of a more disinterested, more formidable, group of persons might make Ben feel that his proceedings had an audience, and might thus temper the violence of his reactions. I did not believe this. His behaviour might be a matter of ‘deep concern’ to all sorts of worthy persons other than myself, but once the front door was closed upon the married pair Ben would do as he pleased. James did not repeat his request to be allowed to talk to Hartley. It was in any case too late. Gilbert dropped my missive through the letter box at Nibletts at about ten o’clock that evening.

I spent a little time with Hartley. It was very odd. I told her that she was going home tomorrow. She nodded, blinking her eyes intelligently. I asked her if she wanted to come down and have supper with the others. She declined, to my relief. I did not ask her again if she was content to go. We sat on the floor and played cards, a form of ‘snap’ which we had invented for ourselves when we were children. Everyone in the house went to bed early.

History