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 think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, ‘Don’t touch each other!’) You kept saying there was this great love when you were young, but I think that was just to console me for your not loving me enough. Anyway you didn’t love me enough, and now-I don’t believe in miracles.
Charles, I’ve been in hell and I’ve come out of it and I don’t want to go there again. Jealousy is hell and I’m not cured. Suppose I come to you, with all that old love-and you smile and stroll away? You’re free, your letter made that clear all right. Forgive me, but you know how people talk, everybody tells everybody everything, and I still keep meeting girls I didn’t even know you knew who say they’ve had romances with you, they may be lying of course. You know you can’t keep your hands off women, and I’m not young and beautiful any more, and you like chasing what isn’t easy to get, you don’t want to stay with anyone, in the end you drop everyone! You once said getting married was like buying a doll, which shows what you think of marriage. And I don’t believe you’ve really retired, Gilbert said it was like God retiring, you’re too restless. You made me act, you made everyone act, you’re like a very good dancer, you make other people dance but it’s got to be with you. You don’t respect people as people, you don’t see them, you’re not really a teacher, you’re a sort of rapacious magician. How can I imagine that all this could stop? Do you want me as a sort of patient friend, a chaperon with knitting, a calm wise older woman, a sort of retired senior wife to whom you can complain about the others? It wouldn’t work, Charles. I’m not calm and wise. I’d want everything. You could still have children. I remember you saying more than once how much you wanted a son. You could still have a son, only I couldn’t bear him. Oh Charles, Charles, why didn’t you marry me long ago, I loved you so much. I love you so much-only I can’t put my head into that noose. My love for you is quiet at last. I don’t want it to become a roaring furnace.
And there is something else I must tell you. I am living with Gilbert Opian. You obviously didn’t know or you’d have mentioned it in the letter. I know you made me promise to let you know if I ever settled down permanently with anyone. (I was so hurt when Rita Gibbons told me you’d made her promise that too. I didn’t tell her about my promise. She says she doesn’t regard hers as binding because it was given under duress.) I didn’t tell you about Gilbert because I’m not living like that with him, I mean we’re not lovers, of course not, Gilbert hasn’t suddenly become heterosexual. We just love each other and care for each other and we share a house and, Charles, I have been happy for the first time in my life. This is the most creative thing I’ve ever done, far more than acting. I was living like this when we met at Sidney’s lunch and I would have told you then if you’d shown any interest and really asked! And, Charles, I’ve left the theatre and I feel so much better. Honestly the theatre was always a torment for me. I only shone for you, and when you left me I faded! (I was never much good anyhow!) When I look back and see what a miserable stupid anxious messy existence I led over years and years I can’t think how I tolerated it. I was perfectly capable of being happy but somehow I always managed not to be! Men were always being beastly to me. Gilbert is so different. Don’t sneer at this. I’ve been bullied by bloody men all my life. Now I have a decent orderly cheerful existence. I’m even useful! I work part time in a hospital office. I’m learning to paint and I write children’s stories (none published yet). You may think this sounds pathetic, but for me it’s happiness and freedom. And Gilbert is happy too. He’s stopped fretting about being unsuccessful and not being a star. He can get some small parts and he works a bit on TV. We’re not rich, but we can earn money and look after each other. Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older. Gilbert’s given up ‘hunting’, he says all he ever wanted was love and he’s got mine. It’s all somehow suddenly simple and innocent. (It seems to me now we were all brainwashed about ‘sex’!) Please understand, dear dear Charles, and do not be angry. You know (and I won’t go on about this because it used to annoy you) how much Gilbert loves you too. Really he worships you. But he’s so frightened now. He says you’ll come with a troika and carry me off to the gipsies. (I suppose that’s a quotation, you always said I read nothing but Shakespeare and then only my own part!) He is frightened of you still, and so am I. The habit of obeying you is strong in both of us! Don’t use your power to hurt us. You could put the most terrible pressure on us, only don’t do it. Be generous, dear heart. You could drive us both mad. We’ve come a long road to solving our problems, and if some people think it’s a funny solution that’s just because they lack imagination and intelligence. And you lack neither.
Charles, I don’t want to see you now, yet. I’d simply succumb. I’ve got to recover from your letter. Please write and say you are not angry. When I am calmer let’s meet, and you must come here and see Gilbert too. There must be a way. Your letter has made an aching emptiness and a need and I shall not be the same. But I am happy here and Gilbert needs me and we have this house (it’s half a house actually) which we have made together, and if I left him it would be a terrible smash-up for both of us, we’d be in pieces. (Anyway I don’t know what you want-and whatever it was you may not want it now. Oh God.) Gilbert says you must in the end receive us as if we were your children. Oh Charles, I am amazed at the strength of those forces which I commanded to sleep. It is all there still, all my old love for you. Somehow, let us not waste love, it is rare enough. You have thought of me, you have written to me, so sweetly, so generously. Can we not love each other and see each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear, now that we are growing old? I do so want us to love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me. I’ve felt so sad for years about you. My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love! You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion! I am crying as I write this. Please write at once, and say that we can meet later, in a little while, and that you won’t stop loving me. Somehow don’t lose that love, the love, whatever it may be, that made you write that letter. And we will look at each other.
Always yours-
Lizzie.
I have been sitting for some time in the little red room, where I have at last lit a successful fire. The chimney seems to have got over its smoking fit. Perhaps it was just that the wood was too wet?
I have read Lizzie’s letter through twice. Of course it is a silly inconsistent woman’s letter, half saying the opposite of what it is trying to say. Lizzie cannot quite refrain from offering herself. And of course she does, in answer to my deliberately cool missive, protest too much. A cleverer woman might have replied coolly and let me read between the lines. A cleverer woman, or a less sincere one. Lizzie’s letter has its own little attempts at ambiguity, but they are transparent. Poor Lizzie. I cannot take the stuff about Gilbert Opian
