Ben opened the sitting room door and slipped out. Chuffey was still barking and I could hear his claws clicking on the inside of the door. Ben glanced towards us, then went into the kitchen leaving the door open.
I took a step backward, taking Hartley’s bare arm and trying to pull her after me. She had rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and her arm was soft and warm, like the arm of a young girl, it had not yet grown old. We were both now just outside the door.
‘Hartley, darling, love, my own love, come with me now, now, we’ll run down the hill to the taxi.’
She shook her head, and drew her arm away. She said something that sounded like ‘I can’t’. The damn dog was still barking.
‘You’re not going to Australia, I won’t let you. Let him go, you stay. Look, the taxi’s down beside the church. I’ll be there in the church, I’ll wait an hour, two hours, make an excuse and come down, we can get away at once. It doesn’t matter about packing, just come. Hartley, don’t stay there with that man. Choose happiness, come to me.’ I took her arm again.
She looked at me as if she were about to cry, but there were no tears. She moved a step back and I released her. ‘Hartley, speak to me—’
She said, but I could scarcely hear her, ‘You haven’t understood—’
‘Hartley, darling, come to me. I’ll be waiting for you, I’ll wait two hours in the church. Or I’ll expect you tomorrow. I’m not going away anywhere, I’ll be at home. You love me, you came to me that night, you told me those things. You must come, it isn’t too late, it’s never too late—’
The sun, the roses, dazzled my eyes. Ben had come back into the hall and I could see him in the shadows beyond Hartley’s head. One moment her face seemed a mask of pain, then, but perhaps it had not really changed, it looked empty, blank. Her big tearless eyes were blank.
Ben said loudly, over Chuffey’s barking, ‘Well, cheerio then.’
I stepped backward, then turned and walked to the gate. After I had gone through the gate I looked back. They were both standing at the door waving. I waved too and began to walk down the hill.
I sat in the church for more than two hours but she did not come. I paid off the taxi man and walked home.
So, I had five weeks. I was not beaten yet. What after all could Hartley say to me, with Ben behind her listening in the kitchen? What had she actually said, what had I said? Already it was fading. At any rate she had the letter, and the letter was clear. It would make a focus for her thoughts.
What on earth was the purpose of that invitation to tea? It had obviously been Ben’s idea. Perhaps Ben had more sense and more subtlety than I had credited him with. He had set a scene where Hartley could see me, quietly and in his presence, for the last time and take a dignified and final farewell. The idea was intelligent and could even be considered humane. It was however an irrelevant device. It was plain that Hartley did not want to go to Australia, that was Ben’s plan. When had he made it? When he first knew that I was in the village, or earlier? Anyway, Hartley would not go. She would jump, at the last moment, into the rescue boat.
I had taken to drinking in the evenings. At any rate, four days had passed and I had been drunk four evenings, on wine of course. I sat long long with the bottle in the kitchen, thinking, until the late midsummer daylight had entirely gone. Again, it was a time to wait, to wait and to reflect. Of course nothing had happened, no telephone call, no letter, nothing. But there would be a sign; Hartley or the gods would give me one.
The weather continued warm. The sea had regained its bejewelled purplish look, inlaid with spotted lines of emerald. It glittered at me as it had done on the first day. There were a few clouds, big lazy chryselephantine clouds that loafed around over the water exuding light. I gazed at them and wondered at myself for being too obsessed to be able to admire the marvels that surrounded me. But knowing how blind I was did not make me see. I sometimes looked for seals, but there were none. I had no heart to go swimming and wondered if I would ever swim again.
I tried not to think about Titus. Perhaps it was just this effort that drove me to drinking. I persistently directed my thought away from him, or busily thought of him in other contexts and relations, as part of other and still living problems. I anxiously and meanly thrust him away and let myself hope that if I could only put him off a little longer I would find that, after all, I had reentered the callous world of those who have recovered from bereavement. I had my own troubles and I had to survive. Now was no moment to have my mind laid waste by guilt and the torments of loss. So I did not think of him and that he was dead. There was a sort of grey dripping figure that kept trying to rise up in my mind and which I ruthlessly violently banished. At moments I almost felt afraid as if he were still somewhere, calling my thought, attracting my attention, and resenting my refusal to mourn. I busied my quick thought with other matters. But the dripping figure remained somehow present to me.
I thought about James and Lizzie. Which of those two had decided to tell me and why? I guessed that, especially after the sordid encounter with Toby Ellesmere, Lizzie’s nerve had broken, chiefly because there was by then too much at stake. She had let her old love for me take possession and she had reason to think that the quarry was weary and near to dropping. Her love was impatient, hungry. I would soon turn to her entirely, she thought, and she wanted to be safe. A nagging guilty anxiety made cause with her honesty to make her take the risk of telling. She was, in the long orbit of her love for me, at the nearest point. She wanted, for the great moment that was coming, to be in the clear, to be made by confession pure, to have no haunting revelation left to fear. She was perhaps not to know how searingly destructive was her combination with James. He knew. But by then the curious situation was beyond his control, and he had to play the gentleman, both by denying that it had originally been her idea (which I was inclined to believe) and by, when it came to it, letting her speak. Such can be the awful consequences of a prudent lie. Lizzie had feared to tell about James as Hartley had feared to tell about me; well, the women had all lied, it was their nature: Hartley, Lizzie, Rosina, Rita, Jeanne, Clement . . . God knows how many lies Clement must have told me. I would never know.
And I thought about the far past, sitting there in the kitchen in the warm summer twilight, drinking wine until my head reeled, with no lamp and no candle, and the form of the wine bottle outlined against the faint rectangle of the open door and a sky which was never to become entirely dark. And I heard the voice of Aunt Estelle, and not of Lizzie, singing Roses in Picardy, and I recalled the brilliant radiance of her presence and all the joy and all the pain she caused me once. God, how the young and beautiful vanish and are no more seen.
And I thought of Hartley on her bicycle and of her pure truthful face as it was then, so strangely like and unlike her worn old face which had suffered and sinned away all those years when I was somewhere else with Clement and Rosina and Jeanne and Fritzie. Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off discourteously, for I have loved you so long, delighting in your company. I had invested so much, as the years went by, in my belief in Hartley’s goodness. Yet had I always cherished this icon? The young too are ruthless and must survive. After I had lost all hope of her return, all hope of finding her, I had lived for a time on my resentment, on the relief of: let her go then! And I recalled now, dredged up out of the deep sea caves of memory, a conversation I had had about her with Clement. Yes, I had told Clement about Hartley. And Clement had said, ‘Put her away in your old toy cupboard now, dear boy.’ My God, I could hear Clement’s powerful resonant voice saying those words now, as if she were uttering them in the dark room. And I had put Hartley away, for a time. I had certainly, after those early days, never talked of her to Clement again. It would have been bad form, and Clement did not forgive bad form. Possibly Clement forgot her. But I did not forget, and Hartley lay like a seed in my heart, and grew again, purified as of old.
It was only now clear to me how very much I had made that image, and yet I could no
t feel that it was anything like a fiction. It was more like a special sort of truth, almost a touchstone; as if a thought of mine could become a thing, and at the same time be truth. It was the dismissive resentment, the ‘let her go then’, which was a lie. My odd almost mad faithfulness had become its own reward in the end. I had smoothed Hartley’s brow and unclouded her lovely eyes as the years went by, and the ambiguous tormenting image had become gentle and a source of light.
But what had happened now? I conjured up that weird scene in the sitting room at Nibletts with the scones and the cucumber sandwiches and the iced cake and Ben and Hartley looking so clean and well. (After they had waved me off, did Ben go back and cut himself a large slice of cake?) There had been a kind of creepy peacefulness. It was indeed like a primitive picture, the virtuous and happy couple in their pretty little house complete with collie dog. They were ‘plumped out’ in my memory, as art plumps out its subjects, making them fatter and smoother than life and more absolutely there. They looked better, healthier, handsomer than I had seen them before. Why? What had given them that calm satisfied look? The terrible answer came to me: Titus’s death.
I recalled what Hartley had said on the day that she ran to me and told me of her unhappiness, and so much filled me with the hope of delivering her, the day which I had told her was ‘evidence’. She had said that she was broken, her inner structure cracked, her integrity destroyed, by having through the years been forced to side with Ben against Titus. And I had wondered, was she a suffering redeemer or just a wreck? ‘Everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one’s bones were broken, all the bones and the little joints were broken, one wasn’t whole any more, one wasn’t a person any more.’ It could be that those awful years had really destroyed her sympathy with Titus. She had suffered too much for him. I recalled her words, ‘Sometimes I felt he hated us . . . sometimes I almost wish he were dead.’ The burden of guilt was too great to sustain without slow deep resentment. Titus, that fatal bundle that she herself had wantonly sought, and carried one day into the house, had ruined her marriage and ruined her life. But now it was as if Titus himself was the redeemer, he had vanished taking her guilt with him. The accusing consciousness was gone. Ben would be quietly relieved, and more secretly still she would join him, secretly, instinctively, blindly joining in his relief. The murder over, they would both feel better. Now the guilt would begin to fade. So in a way the death of Titus was fated; and in a way Ben had really killed him after all.
Of course these were rambling drunken thoughts, but I could not help thinking that I was right to see an awful relief as well as an awful resignation in their acceptance of that death. And of course in trying to see it as so weirdly falling into the pattern of their lives, I knew that I was surreptitiously attempting to ease my own remorse and guilt. How soon we cover up the horror of death and loss, if we can, with almost any sort of explanation, as if we had to justify the very fate which had maimed us.
The flight to Australia could now also be envisaged with a clear conscience. How could Hartley have accepted the idea of leaving England with Titus still lost? Had she accepted it? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was why it had to seem to her ‘like a dream’. I was certain that she had not, in her awkward innocent little conversations with Titus, told him about the Australian plan. After all, she had not told me. This omission now seemed to me a good omen. She had not told me because she was already making up her mind to stay.
Titus had said of her that she was a ‘fantasist’. As I went on thinking, the probable proportion of falsehood in what she had told me seemed to grow. Her structure cracked, like broken bones that would never knit, broken by Ben, by Titus, she had lost her way, her sense of direction to the truth. So where was my ideal now? The strange thing was that there was still a source of light, as if Hartley herself shed light upon Hartley. I could take it all, I could embrace it all, whatever she was like it was her I loved. It had happened so in my life that I had only one place where blameless love was taught and only one teacher. Thus people can be light sources, without ever knowing, for years in the lives of others, while their own lives take different and hidden courses. Equally one can be, and I recalled Peregrine’s words, a monster, a cancer, in the mind of someone whom one has half forgotten or even never met.
But supposing it should turn out in the end that such a love should lose its object, could it, whatever happened, lose its object? Some loves are not defeated by death, although it is not as easy as we think to love the dead. But there are pains and devices which defeat love more ingeniously. Would I at last absolutely lose Hartley because of a treachery or desertion on her part which should turn my love into hate? Could I begin to see her as cold, heartless, uncanny, a witch, a sorceress? I felt that this could never be, and I felt it as an achievement, almost as a mode of possession. As James said, ‘If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light.’ My love for Hartley was very nearly an end in itself. Twist and turn as she might, whatever happened she could not escape me now.
My reflections did not always maintain this high level. A passing thought of Rosina brought me back to the image of Ben looking so curiously prosperous, as Fritzie Eitel would say so ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’. Was that only the result of an awful death endured and accepted as a way to freedom, the prospect of the opera house reflected in the waves? Where had Rosina spent the night before that hideous day when we took Hartley back? I recalled what Gilbert had said about hearing a woman talking in the house, when he came to deliver the letter. Rosina had declared she was going to ‘console’ Ben. This could have been just a spiteful jest. On the other hand, Rosina was capable de tout. If something had ‘happened’ between Ben and Rosina this might account not only for his curious air of satisfaction but also for his more liberal attitude to Hartley, his tolerance of my visit, of a doorstep discussion lasting almost a minute and so on. Perhaps Rosina had done Hartley a good turn, either by giving Ben a little something to conceal and feel guilty about, or by making him realize how much his funny old wife was to be preferred to a flashy show-business bitch. These were, in fact, however I turned them about, unsavoury thoughts. But at the level of a vulgar curiosity they were at times a relief from the intensity of higher longings.
It then occurred to me that Rosina might still be at the Raven Hotel and that I could simply walk along and ask her, and even if she lied I might learn something.
I was of course reluctant to leave the house because I was, from one moment to the next, expecting Hartley or her ‘sign’, but I decided to risk it, and left a note on the door saying H. Wait. Back very soon. I decided not to telephone the hotel beforehand, as I wanted a little advantage from surprise. If I rang, Rosina would have time to invent an elaborate falsehood. I also wanted the tiny consolation of seeing her sudden pleasure at seeing me. For I had to admit that I wanted from Rosina not only information relative to my case, but also some touch of the comfort which an affectionate woman can give, even if she is a bitch. The walk, the objective, was in itself a distraction, a task, in a period of time when inactive waiting and thinking were already becoming a burden. If Hartley gave no sign I would soon act again. Meanwhile the investigation of Rosina might even turn out to be useful.
It was a warm cloudy day and a little wind was tossing bits of white foam off the many-capped wavelets in Raven Bay. The sea was in a restless fussy mood, dark blue in colour, that grim cold northern blue which even in summertime can convey a wintry menace. The sky too had its northern look, a pallid cool blue between compact and very white fast-moving clouds. The sunlight came and went as I walked along the familiar road, and the big round boulders of the bay leapt out into a surprising variety of grotesque stony shapes, pitted with shadows and blotched with old seaweed stains and eyes of brilliant yellow lichen, then quietly faded again as the light was dipped.
I reached the hotel. I had not been there since the day when I was expelled from the dining room for not wearing a tie. The sun was shining into t
he cheerful comfortably furnished front hall as I went in, and it occurred to me how clean and tidy and pleasant it was after the filth and squalor of Shruff End, where I had no heart to embellish any more. There were bright chintzy armchairs and a huge vase full of wild buddleia and fuchsia and willow-herb and some of the mauve mallow which was growing among the rocks. A not too sneering servitor came forward to enquire my business. I was wearing dirty cotton trousers slightly rolled up and straying blue shirt, but this could pass muster in the morning, even in the presence of chintz armchairs.
I said, ‘Excuse me, but is Miss Vamburgh still staying in the hotel?’
The man gave me a slightly funny look and replied, ‘Mr and Mrs Arbelow are in the lounge, sir.’
My God! I walked to the door he indicated. The big lounge, with a huge view of the bay, was empty except for two people seated by the window and looking out. They turned as I came in.
‘Charles!’
‘Why it’s our favourite fun person! Charles, old man, we were just hoping you’d come, weren’t we, Rose?’
Two faces were turned towards me, blazing with amused malice.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘How nice to see you two together again. May I buy you a drink?’
‘No, no,’ cried Peregrine, ‘drinks are on us! Waiter, waiter! A bottle of that champagne we had yesterday, please, and three glasses.’
‘Did you go back to London,’ I asked Peregrine, ‘or did you come straight here?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I just stopped to drown my sorrow and there the old cross-eyed bitch was.’
‘And you fell into each other’s arms.’
‘Not at once,’ said Rosina. ‘We had a sort of jolly row to begin with. Peregrine was rather aggressive. He seemed to be chiefly annoyed about his windscreen.’