(1978) The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch [Murdoch, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Booker Prize Winner
Published: 2011-05-23T22:09:32+00:00

‘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.

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