The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [40]
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