‘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 cal
l 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.’