The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [271]
My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace. If I could have suffered more I would have suffered more. Receive us now as if we were your children. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, Charles, love me enough.
There is no doubt that Lizzie and Gilbert are indeed happy together as she said, and I did not believe, in her first letter. ‘It’s all suddenly simple and innocent.’ His fame makes no difference to that. It creates chances for me to see her alone and I think this pleases him. His TV success has led to other triumphs. He was away for some time in September at the Edinburgh Festival, where Al Bull directed him in a new play. Buoyed up by the love of the British public he is a good deal less frightened of me than he used to be. So is Lizzie. Is the Lion becoming old and clawless? However that may be, I notice that without any effort, without anything being said, without personal discussion of any kind, without there being any question of sexual relations, Lizzie has become what she once was and what she said she desired to be, my child, my page, my son. So at least one person in this story has got what she wanted.
Lizzie was terrified to come back to me in case her love should make her my slave. She was afraid of that dreadful tormenting dependence of one human consciousness upon another. Am I sorry that that fear has left her? There is a wicked tyrant in me that is. How did Lizzie manage it? Perhaps she too had to re-enact her love, to suffer it all over again, in order to transform it. Only she seems to have succeeded whereas I have failed; she has perfected her love, I have simply destroyed mine. Was I the destined trial that was to purify her power to love? The speculation is rather too sublime! Perhaps the horrors of the summer simply snapped some thread, Lizzie grew tired. We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate. My relation with Lizzie seems to have been so saved, by some grace, without my merit, without my will. I think we are both tired, and glad to rest in each other’s company.
We touch and kiss, there is no urge for more. As I said at the start, I am, unlike the modern hero, not highly sexed! I can do without it, I am doing without it, I feel fine without it. Looking back, I must make a confession which would indeed shame the modern hero. I have not had all that many love affairs, and the women I pursued successfully did not always please me in bed. Of course there have been exceptions: Clement, who taught me. Jeanne. What would it have been like with Hartley?
Lizzie and I never speak of James and somehow this does not seem to matter. It is as if the fact that he knew her had been blotted out of both our memories. All the same, and in a sense which is perhaps harmless, James has divided me from Lizzie, he has castrated our relationship. Perhaps this is precisely the unmerited grace, the source of our peace? The demons detailed to disturb our friendship have all been killed. I do not miss them. Sometimes when Lizzie and I smile quietly at each other I wonder if she is thinking just the same thing.
I have had a recurrence of the chest pain which I first experienced on the day when I tried to have a bath in the kitchen at Shruff End. I saw my doctor but he says it is simply caused by ‘viruses’.
Sometimes I sit and wonder whom I should leave my money to. Perhaps I had better start giving it away now. I have sent a cheque to the Buddhist Society and another to the Arbelow Peace Foundation,