The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [37]
What do you want, Charles? Oh, you are so present to my mind as I write. But you have always been present to my mind ever since I first loved you, you live in my mind. Something about your letter that made me especially glad is that you do not doubt that I still love you. ‘Still’ hardly has meaning here. My love for you exists in a sort of eternal present, it almost is the meaning of time. I don’t protest too much. Such love can live with despair, with quietness, with resignation, with ordinariness and tiredness and silence. I love you, Charles, and I will love you till I die, and you can put that away in your heart and be utterly certain of it.
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