Charles’s eavesdropping outside the Nibletts window raises the issue of Jealousy as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, as he uses an overheard conversation to justify all his following actions. He has gone there explicitly to gather evidence, and the conversation he overhears does contain what he was hoping to find: Ben’s bullying voice, Hartley’s whimpering apologies, the long-rehearsed feel of a fight that “had happened before, again and again” (198). However, the scene also reveals Ben’s own jealous certainty that Hartley has been seeing Charles for years and that Titus is Charles’s child. Jealousy governs both men in this passage, as Ben asks, “Why did he come here?” the same way Charles asks himself whether Hartley loves Ben (193); each is searching for evidence of a story they’ve already decided is true. Charles registers Ben’s accusations as madness (“That’s what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe” [221]), without noticing that he himself has been doing the same thing. Charles purports that his eavesdropping is meant to settle a question about Hartley’s happiness, but in reality, he reveals that it is about justifying what he wants to believe; the rationality he loses is exactly the rationality he has just diagnosed as missing in Ben.

James’s perspective becomes the novel’s quiet counter-argument in these chapters, but Charles hears it without absorbing it, too wrapped up in his competitive feelings about James to actually listen. James suggests that the Hartley Charles fought for might be “a phantom Helen,” and Charles may be “deluding [himself] in thinking that [he has] really loved this woman all these years” (176). Charles, however, is unable to heed his advice, still overcome with The Nostalgic Power of First Love. He has organized his whole adulthood around Hartley’s absence (“I never conceived of marrying because I knew there was only one woman that I would or could marry” [202]), and the long letter he then writes her presents this private mythology as evidence of fidelity. When he later admits in his diary that the letter sounds “a little pompous, a little histrionic,” he decides not to amend it because “this is my voice, let her hear it” (203). With this statement, Charles obliquely admits to his tendency toward the dramatic, contributing to the theme of The Futility of Renouncing One’s Nature.

Titus’s arrival reorganizes the action by giving Charles a second object on which to project the same constructed love. He meets Titus on the rocks, denies paternity honestly, and then, within minutes, is offering “you are searching for a father. I am searching for a son. Why don’t we make a deal?” (258). The boy’s wary reply, “I suspect you’ve just thought of this son idea” (258), is accurate; Charles had not thought about Titus until Titus climbed his tower. With this new connection, the nostalgic power of first love extends into a fantasy of family: Hartley, Titus and Charles in “a villa in the south of France,” the life “that had been taken from me and yet still seemed to exist somewhere as a packaged stolen possibility” (242). That phrase exposes the true nature of Charles’s feelings here. The future Charles wants is not something he is building with the people in front of him; it is a parcel he believes was once owed to him, which Titus’s appearance now lets him claim. Titus, sharp enough to see this, names the role accurately (“I’m the decoy duck, I’m the hostage” [284]) and stays anyway, half because the swimming is good and half because being wanted by someone is its own kind of luck.

With Hartley’s imprisonment at Shruff End, Charles’s opening statement about leaving his theater past and his power as director behind is exposed as hollow. He came to the sea “to abjure magic,” to live simply, to give up power. Now he locks Hartley’s door at night, removes her candle and matches in case she should burn herself, hides her plastic bag of belongings, and sits in the alcove watching her sleep. The futility of renouncing one’s nature is exposed by Charles’s continuing impulse to control the action and lives around him: He still stages, still casts, still blocks scenes. He notes with satisfaction that Gilbert’s “butler” act “would have graced any drawing room comedy” (250); he ranges candles around Hartley “like lights at an altar” (219); and he rehearses what Ben must be feeling in the empty bungalow with the dog. His project of giving up power and moving into isolation has become a domestic drama production, with the woman he loves locked upstairs in his dressing gown. When Hartley finally emotionally collapses—“a frenzied panic noise, a prolonged ‘aaah’”—what breaks her is the discovery that he listened outside her window (303). The piece of evidence Charles considered most decisive is, to her, “the wickedest vilest most hurtful thing anybody’s ever done to me” (302), a betrayal of her privacy and an intrusion into her marriage.

The arrival of James, Peregrine, and Charles’s other friend finally shows Charles’s actions as they appear from the outside, but he resists James’s articulation of the situation. James’s chicken parable—the farmer’s wife who feeds the bird every day until she wrings its neck—is offered as a warning against treating “some idyllic times at school” as evidence about a possible future (332). Like jealousy, nostalgia is a distorting lens, and James names it directly: “[Y]ou’ve made it into a story, and stories are false” (332). Charles’s reply, “I’m in the place where the real things happen”(333), indicates that he has confused the intensity of his feelings with knowledge. What finally cracks his resolve is not James’s argument but Hartley’s screaming and pounding on the locked door, which punctures the reality he has been enacting on her. The letter he then composes to Ben, with its careful insistence that Hartley is “totally blameless” and has been “perfectly loyal,” is a document of belated honesty about the kidnapping and a continuation of the old habit: Even his capitulation is staged, drafted with James’s edits, and delivered by Gilbert. Charles renounces Hartley the way he renounced the theatre, with an audience and an exit speech, without really noticing that he has reverted to his directorial nature.