The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [36]
Clement Makin was, or was nearly, a great actress. Lizzie Scherer is, at the other end of the scale, very nearly not an actress at all. In so far as Lizzie was ever successful I made her so. I stretched her beyond her limits; and I may as well confess now that I took trouble with Lizzie because, in a way, I loved her. I say ‘in a way’ not only because I have only really loved once (and Lizzie was not it), but also because I found it surprisingly easy to leave her when the time came. I was never ‘mad’ about Lizzie, as I have occasionally been about other women (Rosina, Jeanne). I cared for her in a quiet rather dreamy way which was perhaps unique in my life. But I left her. She loved me far more intensely. For Lizzie I was it.
Lizzie is Scottish, half Sephardi Jew. Although she has the most adorable breasts of any woman I ever made love to, she is not really beautiful, and never was even when she was young, but she has charm. This ‘fetching’ charm, and her youth while it lasted, took her a little way in the theatre. She was a hard worker and had a kind of steady Scottish reliability which always helped. Her appearance is not easy to describe. She has a large wide brow and a strong attractive profile. (One can fall in love with a profile.) The line of her brow runs down in a smooth line curve into a smallish pretty nose which speeds forward at the world without quite turning up. Then there is a straight line to a firm chin wherein there is the faintest dimple. Her lips are firm too, not full but well moulded and sensitively textured. (How different individual lips are.) Nature not art has painted them an attractive terracotta-pink. Her upper lip is long and beautifully indented. (Is there any language in which there is a word for that tender runnel that joins the mouth and the nose?) One would call hers a clever face if it were not for a kind of childish timidity which hangs about it. I suspect that this gentle pleading diffidence is Lizzie’s charm. Her eyes are a light dewy brown; when I kissed her how those pale eyes flashed! She is short-sighted and tends to peer. (As Peregrine once said, very few pretty women can see anything, since vanity precludes glasses.) She has almost invisible orange eyebrows which she never, under my regime, tampered with. Her complexion is healthy, rosy, rather shiny. She wears very little make-up and lacks (perhaps makes a point of lacking) the wonderful artificiality of many theatre ladies, their enamelled lacquered surfaces. This artificiality of course attracts. It attracted me. I like art in a woman’s looks, though I do not necessarily want to see all the working. Lizzie’s hair, now tinted, is a cinnamon brown, of the hyacinthine variety and copious. (It is a bit fuzzy and grows more in screwy tendrills than in curls.) When she is happy her face is conspicuously radiant and merry. (At her best on the stage, her face could make audiences sigh with pleasure.) She is still quite good-looking, though she has allowed herself to become untidy and out of condition. Any drama school teaches physical discipline; acting is a physical discipline. The ladies of the theatre tend to keep themselves sleek and youthful, and this Lizzie has failed to do. Nor was she ever smart. (I am not indifferent to the unique pleasure afforded by a smart woman.) And with advancing years she has, not to put too fine a point upon it, got fat. My God, she must now be getting on for fifty.
Well, here, retrieved from the dog kennel, is Lizzie’s letter, which will be to some extent self-explanatory.
My dear, your beautiful