The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [87]
Be well, little Lizzie, and remember me.
Your old friend,
Charles.
This was the letter, partly disingenuous, partly sincere, which I wrote to Lizzie on the afternoon of the day when I saw Hartley in the church for the second time. I returned home in a frenzy of misery and indecision, and after a while spent fruitlessly wondering what to do next, I decided that one sensible thing at least which I could do to pass the time would be to get rid of Lizzie. This involved no mental struggle and no problem except the labour of writing a suitable letter and concentrating upon Lizzie long enough to complete it. How totally in every atom I had been changed was shown by the fact that my ‘idea’ about Lizzie now seemed to me an insane fancy from whose consequences I had been mercifully saved by Lizzie’s own common sense; and for this I blessed her. A flame had licked out of the past and burnt up that structure of intentions completely. What had been made clear in the last two days (which seemed like months) was how far I had been right in thinking that there was only one real love in my life. It was as if I had in some spiritual sense actually married Hartley long ago and was simply not free to look elsewhere. Of course I had really known this all along. But on seeing her again the sense of absolute belongingness had been overwhelming; in the teeth of our fates’ most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.
I did in fact manage to think quite intensely about Lizzie while I was writing the letter, and to think of her with a kind of generous resigned affection. I saw her laughing radiant face as it had been when she was younger, when we used to laugh so much about her loving me. In spite of the incredible gaucherie of my ‘idea’ it was possible that I had, quite accidentally, acquired Lizzie as a friend whose affection and loyalty might even one day be of value. But now the decks must be cleared. There must be absolutely no problem, no ‘interesting connection’ involving discussions or letters or visits. I had no time and no strength for any such muddle and it would be criminal to risk one. My hint about coming to London was of course simply a ploy to keep Lizzie there. I could not have endured the arrival of an emotional Lizzie on my doorstep now. There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained. So let little Lizzie remain safely in storage with Gilbert; I could now even feel benevolent towards him. Was this new detached generosity, I wondered in passing, a first symptom of that changed and purified form of being which the return of Hartley was going to create in me? Was Hartley, seen not touched, loved not possessed, destined to make me a saint? How strange and significant that I had come precisely here to repent of my egoism! Was this perhaps the final sense of my mystical marriage with my only love? It was an extreme idea, but it had its own deep logic, and flourished somewhat upon the absence of alternatives. There was, for me, surely no other move?
I was of course aware that one point of the ‘extreme idea’ was that it consoled me with an offer of happiness, though of an extremely refined and attenuated sort. Other prospects, more closely related to the horror of recent events, were