The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [54]
The interval between possession and hell was short though I admit it was wonderful. Rosina was one of those women who believe that ‘a good row clears the air’. In my experience a good row not only does not clear the air but can land you with a lifelong enemy. Rows in the theatre can be terrible and I avoided them. Rosina more than once called me a coward for this. She liked rows, any rows, and she believed in loving by rowing. I began to grow tired. The golden bridge for the departing lover I have always, I hope, provided when it became necessary. Rosina, when she saw me cooling, had no such merciful contraption ready. She clung closer and closer and screamed louder and louder. She was always insanely given to jealousy, even more than I was. How very much jealousy, the spectacle of it, the suffering of it, has been a feature of my whole life. I think now of something so different but equally awful, my mother’s silence after the departures of Aunt Estelle.
In the end we both became half mad. I remember my cousin James quoting some philosopher as saying that ‘it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger’. Rosina and I reached a state (though I would not have described it as a rational one) where we definitely preferred the former. I remember Rosina once hurling herself downstairs in a fit of rage. On several occasions I was quite ready for her to jump out of an upstairs window and rather hoped that she would. I came to feel, perhaps I always felt, again in the words of some Frenchman: elle n’a qu’une faute, elle est insupportable. Sometimes even now I wake up in the middle of the night and think, at any rate thank God that woman has gone out of my life. Of course when I left her she never went back to Peregrine.
I was intensely grateful to Perry, and indeed admired him, for the way he behaved. Cynics said he was glad to have Rosina taken off his hands. I knew better, he suffered. I am sure that he and Rosina had lived in a perpetual state of war, but many not unhappy couples do so. I think he loved her, though he probably came, as I did, to find her simply impossible. So there may well have been an element of profound relief in having the problem removed without his will. Later, he went out of his way to make quite a show of masculine solidarity. He remains very attached to me, and I value this. One result of his truly remarkable generosity and kindness was that although I saw objectively that I had behaved badly, I felt practically no guilt. This was because Perry never reproached me. Just as, on the other hand, I have always felt guilty about my chauffeur Freddie Arkwright because he once flew at me, and not because I had occasioned his resentment by keeping him waiting hungry for hours while I was guzzling at the Connaught Hotel. Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.
I have been out picking flowers upon my rocks! I collected a fine mixed bunch of valerian and thrift and white sea campion. The campion has a very strong sweet smell. I cannot stop collecting stones, and the trough is overflowing even though I have put some of the best ones into my lawn border.