The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

  Your letter is so cool, purposely cool and full of jokes. (All that about wanting a ‘nurse’!) All right, you would like to see me, why not, we are old friends. But these two particular old friends cannot just say ‘hello’, at least this one cannot. I look at your letter and I try to read between the lines. What is between the lines? I feel I am supposed to guess your mood. Oh God, your mood. Do you want me to drop in for a short love affair? Please excuse these awful words, but you have put me in an awful situation. Perhaps your letter means very little and I am imagining things. Perhaps you yourself do not know what you mean, and don’t care. That would be like you too. Forgive me.

  Listen, Charles. I have said I am grateful and I am. For years and years, as you know, I would have married you if you had crooked your finger. And I proposed to you every day when we were together! I know this letter of yours now is of course not about marriage. But what is it about? A weekend visit? You don’t say that you love me. Do you want to experiment now that you have time on your hands? Charles, I want to live, I want to survive, I don’t want to be driven mad a second time. When I consider it all now I’m just afraid to come near you. You would have to convince me and I suspect you can’t. You once said yourself, how much A loves B shows, like your slip showing. We haven’t met for more than a year, the last time was that luncheon for Sidney Ashe and how intensely I looked forward to it and you scarcely spoke to me! Then I wanted to leave with you in that taxi and you suddenly asked Nell Pickering to come too. (You’ve probably forgotten.) You haven’t communicated with me since. You haven’t telephoned or sent a line although you know I would be wild with joy to hear from you. You don’t even know where I live, you had to send the letter care of my agent! All this is evidence, Charles. And now suddenly, you write this funny ambiguous letter. It’s just an idea you’ve had, there’s something sort of abstract about it. You’ve probably thought better of it already.

  If I came to see you like you want, just coming because you feel in the mood to see me, to sort of try my company again, I would fall straight back into the old madness. I don’t mean that I ever really got over it, but I’ve lived, I’ve managed, I’ve even put some sort of order into my life at last. I’ve had long enough, after all, since you left me! You never fully knew how mad I was in those days. I didn’t want to hurt you by showing you my pain by way of revenge. All the time we were together I knew every minute, every second, that it would end. You told me often enough! But somehow (I was that mad) I embraced the suffering, if I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. I wonder if you’ve ever loved anyone like that? Maybe you only understood it on the stage. (I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, ‘Don’t touch each other!’) You kept saying there was this great love when you were young, but I think that was just to console me for your not loving me enough. Anyway you didn’t love me enough, and now—I don’t believe in miracles.

  Charles, I’ve been in hell and I’ve come out of it and I don’t want to go there again. Jealousy is hell and I’m not cured. Suppose I come to you, with all that old love—and you smile and stroll away? You’re free, your letter made that clear all right. Forgive me, but you know how people talk, everybody tells everybody everything, and I still keep meeting girls I didn’t even know you knew who say they’ve had romances with you, they may be lying of course. You know you can’t keep your hands off women, and I’m not young and beautiful any more, and you like chasing what isn’t easy to get, you don’t want to stay with anyone, in the end you drop everyone! You once said getting married was like buying a doll, which shows what you think of marriage. And I don’t believe you’ve really retired, Gilbert said it was like God retiring, you’re too restless. You made me act, you made everyone act, you’re like a very good dancer, you make other people dance but it’s got to be with you. You don’t respect people as people, you don’t see them, you’re not really a teacher, you’re a sort of rapacious magician. How can I imagine that all this could stop? Do you want me as a sort of patient friend, a chaperon with knitting, a calm wise older woman, a sort of retired senior wife to whom you can complain about the others? It wouldn’t work, Charles. I’m not calm and wise. I’d want everything. You could still have children. I remember you saying more than once how much you wanted a son. You could still have a son, only I couldn’t bear him. Oh Charles, Charles, why didn’t you marry me long ago, I loved you so much. I love you so much—only I can’t put my head into that noose. My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace.

  And there is something else I must tell you. I am living with Gilbert Opian. You obviously didn’t know or you’d have mentioned it in the letter. I know you made me promise to let you know if I ever settled down permanently with anyone. (I was so hurt when Rita Gibbons told me you’d made her promise that too. I didn’t tell her about my promise. She says she doesn’t regard hers as binding because it was given under duress.) I didn’t tell you about Gilbert because I’m not living like that with him, I mean we’re not lovers, of course not, Gilbert hasn’t suddenly become heterosexual. We just love each other and care for each other and we share a house and, Charles, I have been happy for the first time in my life. This is the most creative thing I’ve ever done, far more than acting. I was living like this when we met at Sidney’s lunch and I would have told you then if you’d shown any interest and really asked! And, Charles, I’ve left the theatre and I feel so much better. Honestly the theatre was always a torment for me. I only shone for you, and when you left me I faded! (I was never much good anyhow!) When I look back and see what a miserable stupid anxious messy existence I led over years and years I can’t think how I tolerated it. I was perfectly capable of being happy but somehow I always managed not to be! Men were always being beastly to me. Gilbert is so different. Don’t sneer at this. I’ve been bullied by bloody men all my life. Now I have a decent orderly cheerful existence. I’m even useful! I work part time in a hospital office. I’m learning to paint and I write children’s stories (none published yet). You may think this sounds pathetic, but for me it’s happiness and freedom. And Gilbert is happy too. He’s stopped fretting about being unsuccessful and not being a star. He can get some small parts and he works a bit on TV. We’re not rich, but we can earn money and look after each other. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older. Gilbert’s given up ‘hunting’, he says all he ever wanted was love and he’s got mine. It’s all somehow suddenly simple and innocent. (It seems to me now we were all brainwashed about ‘sex’!) Please understand, dear dear Charles, and do not be angry. You know (and I won’t go on about this because it used to annoy you) how much Gilbert loves you too. Really he worships you. But he’s so frightened now. He says you’ll come with a troika and carry me off to the gipsies. (I suppose that’s a quotation, you always said I read nothing but Shakespeare and then only my own part!) He is frightened of you still, and so am I. The habit of obeying you is strong in both of us! Don’t use your power to hurt us. You could put the most terrible pressure on us, only don’t do it. Be generous, dear heart. You could drive us both mad. We’ve come a long road to solving our problems, and if some people think it’s a funny solution that’s just because they lack imagination and intelligence. And you lack neither.

  Charles, I don’t want to see you now, yet. I’d simply succumb. I’ve got to recover from your letter. Please write and say you are not angry. When I am calmer let’s meet, and you must come here and see Gilbert too. There must be a way. Your letter has made an aching emptiness and a need and I shall not be the same. But I am happy here and Gilbert needs me and we have this house (it’s half a house actually) which we have made together, and if I left him it would be a terrible smash-up for both of us, we’d be in pieces. (Anyway I don’t know what you want—and whatever it was you may not want it now. Oh God.) Gilbert says you must in the end receive us as if we were your children. Oh Charles, I am amazed at th
e strength of those forces which I commanded to sleep. It is all there still, all my old love for you. Somehow, let us not waste love, it is rare enough. You have thought of me, you have written to me, so sweetly, so generously. Can we not love each other and see each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear, now that we are growing old? I do so want us to love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me. I’ve felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love! You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion! I am crying as I write this. Please write at once, and say that we can meet later, in a little while, and that you won’t stop loving me. Somehow don’t lose that love, the love, whatever it may be, that made you write that letter. And we will look at each other.

  Always yours—

  Lizzie.

  I have been sitting for some time in the little red room, where I have at last lit a successful fire. The chimney seems to have got over its smoking fit. Perhaps it was just that the wood was too wet?

  I have read Lizzie’s letter through twice. Of course it is a silly inconsistent woman’s letter, half saying the opposite of what it is trying to say. Lizzie cannot quite refrain from offering herself. And of course she does, in answer to my deliberately cool missive, protest too much. A cleverer woman might have replied coolly and let me read between the lines. A cleverer woman, or a less sincere one. Lizzie’s letter has its own little attempts at ambiguity, but they are transparent. Poor Lizzie. I cannot take the stuff about Gilbert Opian too seriously, though I do feel cross with her for not having told me and I feel she has broken her promise. Besides, what are their relations? Lizzie’s proximity is surely enough, even now, to convert any man to heterosexuality. (Her breasts are enough.) Do they drink cocoa together in their dressing gowns? The whole thing is rather horrid. Of course Gilbert is nothing, he is a man of twigs, I could crush him with one hand and take Lizzie with the other. I certainly cannot envisage any platonic love trio. From the date of Lizzie’s letter it appears to have been in the dog kennel for well over a week. On reflection this seems to be no bad thing. If I had received it at once I might have been tempted to write an ill-tempered or facetious reply by return of post. As it is, she has had a silence to reflect upon. It may be best to prolong the silence.

  However, to repeat Lizzie’s own perfectly reasonable question, what do I want? Oh why do women take everything so intensely and make such a fuss! Why do they always demand definitions, explanations! There are in fact some quite shrewd guesses in her letter, and the quiet outburst of resentment has not escaped me. Those wounding and not wholly unjust observations have doubtless been stored up for a long time! Perhaps I do want a sort of retired part-time ‘senior wife’ figure, like an ageing ex-concubine in a harem who has become a friend: a companion who is taken for granted, to whom one is close, but not committed except by bonds of friendship? (This need not preclude occasional love-making. In fact the harem situation would suit me down to the ground.) Why can’t Lizzie be intelligent enough to understand? My letter said nothing about time and space, I simply thought of her and wanted to see her. But then she will start asking absolute questions. An ‘experiment’? Yes, why not? She knows how I hate exhibitions of emotion, but she pours it all out all the same. She ‘wants everything’, does she. Well, she can’t have it; and that doubtless is that.

  I feel no jealousy of Gilbert, but I feel a sort of envy of him! He is the clever one. He has got simple Lizzie as his sweet affectionate housekeeper; and meanwhile I very much doubt whether he has given up ‘hunting’. I must confess I still have feelings of ownership about Lizzie. She has ‘lasted’ in my mind. Yet, she is quite right, loving shows like one’s slip showing, as I once said to her when her slip was showing! (How these girls do treasure up one’s words.) I have neglected her, I have even been cruel, though that could be called a sign of love and the neglect a sign of trust. I do in fact recall the business of the taxi after Sidney’s luncheon. I saw that Lizzie was scheming to leave with me. But at the last moment I quite deliberately brought Nell Pickering along too. Nell is the new musical comedy star, with whom I had been flirting all through lunch. Nell is twenty-two. (I wouldn’t mind having her in my harem.) Poor Lizzie. What made me suddenly write that teasing semi-serious letter to her I wonder? Some fear of loneliness and death which has come to me out of the sea?

  Since the subject of Lizzie Scherer has come up I may as well give some further account of her. I began to love Lizzie after I realized how much she loved me. As does sometimes happen, her love impressed me, then attracted me. I was directing a season of Shakespeare. She fell in love with me during Romeo and Juliet, she revealed her love during Twelfth Night, we got to know each other during A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then (but that was later) I began to love her during The Tempest, and (but that was later still) I left her during Measure for Measure (when Aloysius Bull was playing the Duke). I recall very clearly that occasion when I first realized that Lizzie loved me. She was playing Viola. (This was during Lizzie’s brief ‘shining period’, her annus mirabilis.) It was the production in which Wilfred Dunning, who usually played Sir Toby Belch, suddenly insisted on playing Malvolio. At least, he did not insist, I let him. It was a marvel but it wrecked the production. Lizzie and I were alone in a rather draughty church hall which for some reason was all we could get at that moment to rehearse in. It was a winter’s evening and I remember the place as being lit with gas. Lizzie (now in Act two, Scene four) got as far as ‘she never told her love’. Then she stopped and seemed to choke and uttered no more. I thought at first that this was her own extremely effective idea of how to speak the speech, and I waited for her to go on. She gazed at me. Then huge glistening tears rose into her eyes. When I realized what the matter was I began to laugh and laugh and laugh, and after a bit Lizzie laughed, laughing and crying helplessly. And I loved her for that laughter too. She was a good girl. She is a good girl.

  I somehow always picture Lizzie in breeches. She first won a little fame as principal boy in small provincial pantomimes. She was very slim in those days and rather boyish in appearance and used to stride around in boots and cut her hair very short. Her great ambition, never realized, was to play Peter Pan. She was (briefly) quite serviceable as Shakespeare’s transvestite girls. (Sidney later directed her as Rosalind.) I made her into an adorable Viola, but her greatest success in that historic season was as Puck. (In Romeo and Juliet she was a mute lady. I forget who played Juliet, except that she was no good.) I was touched by her love and by her superb obedience, but I was tied up with Rosina at the time and I saw Lizzie as a wispish enchanting rather infantile sprite. Every time I met her I laughed and then she laughed too. We used to laugh at each other across restaurants and suddenly and mysteriously during rehearsals. I did not need to be told how much she loved me, though she never, even on the first occasion, said anything about it. I thought that was stylish of her. Throughout the Dream her radiant gaze rested on me, her will touched my will and trembled. She understood and obeyed, and although (as she told me later) she knew about Rosina, she existed in a sort of heaven of suffering which I must confess gave me some gratification. Perhaps this gratification was a prophetic gleam from the love I was later to feel for her. And by then I was getting thoroughly tired of Rosina. In that production of the Dream Al Bull (a most uneven actor) played Oberon rather boorishly, and I regretted not taking the part myself. Lizzie’s cup would then have been full and running over! It was at the end of that season that I went to America, and there followed the horrible interlude in Hollywood and the first debacle with Fritzie Eitel. I think I went to Hollywood partly to escape from Rosina: in any case I escaped. Rosina thought I left her because of Lizzie, but this was not so.

  When I came back to England again there was suddenly an interval of peace and an atmosphere of restored innocence and joy. It was summer. I was on good terms with Clement who had one of her silly young men at the time. I felt, after the h
orrors of California, free and happy. I wanted to get back to Shakespeare after the muck I had been wading through in America. A fly-by-night American director called Isaiah Mommsen let me play Prospero. It was the last substantial part I ever played. Lizzie was Ariel. She was the most spiritual, most curiously accurate Ariel I ever saw. Her love for me made her so, and in the midst of all that magic made me love her. Oddly, I felt then, and the feeling remains with me, that I loved her as if she were my son. She often called herself my page. She had a pretty little singing voice and I can still hear the thin true tone of her Full Fathom Five. How now, after all these years, my tricksy spirit. I remember that she once played Cherubino in an amateur production of Figaro, and I think this tiny success was one of the things she valued most. Damn, it has just occurred to me that Gilbert Opian probably regards her as a boy!

  My love for Lizzie was somehow an innocent love. (God, what messes I got into with Rita and Rosina and Jeanne and Doris and the rest.) The innocence was Lizzie’s pure gift. Her love was so scrupulous, so intelligent. She never used her power to lay upon me the lightest of moral bonds. The reader will say, but the bonds were there! Well, yes, and yet some grace born of Lizzie’s selflessness seemed almost to abolish them and we lived in the golden world. Of course she never reproached me. It was as if she positively did not want me to feel any sense of duty towards her, but wanted me simply to use her for my happiness. Written so, this sounds crude. But as we lived it, it was the profoundest humblest tact on her part, and on mine a love that was composed of gentle gratitude. We were gentle with each other.