More tears. Then she told me, in two longish, earnest installments: one then and there, the other this morning, both punctuated with the good womanly embraces aforementioned. Ah, the Italians! Only her suicide convinces me that Carthaginian Dido was of Phoenician and not Italian Catholic origins. God damn me if I go that route! Which, Kleenexed and synopsised, appears to have been this: In 1967, when their marriage was officially kaput, Marsha ran off to Niagara Falls with the lover whose subsequent early rejection of her had fetched her to the Remobilisation Farm and the sexual-clerical employ of “Monsieur Casteene”/Cook. Ambrose, at Peter’s urging, had reluctantly moved back into Mensch’s Castle with his daughter; he had finished the conversion of the Lighthouse into a camera obscura, and — not at his own particular initiative, I gather — had become party to a tacitly acknowledged ménage à trois, the guilty background whereof we have had hints in an earlier letter. Look it up: as Ambrose says, that’s what print’s for.
Magda again, then. But with a difference! At a Ambrose had been a callow, adoring amateur; there’d been no sex till the end, 1947, when in Peter’s absence Magda had bemusedly (and fatefully) accommodated the boy’s ardours as the stone house rose up about them. At c—1949 and after — their feelings had been reciprocal but for the most part unspoken; they did not couple, nor did Magda question her heart’s commitment to Peter and their newborn twins. This time ’round (1967), worse luck for her, Ambrose was passive, aloof, still shaken by the wreck of his marriage; whereas Magda found herself possessed, for the first time in her 38 years, by unreserved, overriding, self-transcending (and self-amazing) passion: a possession so complete as to make her wonder whether, after all, the man Ambrose was not as much its occasion as its cause and object. She knew him thoroughly; she saw and did not admire his faults; she found altogether more to respect in her husband; her contempt for mere adventurous adultery, Marsha-style, was profound — and none of those considerations mattered. She was Swept Away!
I was impressed with the woman’s understanding of what had happened to her; how judiciously she assessed the contributions of Peter, Ambrose, and herself to the experience. She’d been near forty, heavier than at c (and than she is now); it turns out that Peter — despite his being an affectionate, strong, and devoted husband — was, no doubt still is, an indifferent lover: perfunctory, unskillful, often impotent though decidedly fertile, withal Not Very Interested in That. Magda had never managed orgasm, except solo. Of this she’d been aware, in a general way: a more vigorous erotic life, like a larger income, she could imagine to be agreeable if it didn’t bring problems with it. But she’d felt content, sufficient, and had not thitherto been tempted to infidelity.
Even so, it had unquestionably been a factor in her overwhelmment that, however it was they got together again at e, Ambrose revealed himself this time around to be an amateur no longer in the sexual way. I abbreviate: at age 38 she learned from him how to fuck, and by her own admission the experience set her a little crazy. It also inspired in her — focussed, channelled, whatever — a passion for him which, alas, he scarcely measured up to and but feebly reciprocated. This part was painful: for Magda especially, of course, but for Ambrose too (and for me to hear). Early on in our own connexion he had mentioned “a Dido whose Aeneas can neither return her love nor leave her palace…” She had no wish to divorce Peter and marry Ambrose; she had not really expected him to love her as she loved him, though hope was hope; neither did she think their affair would last long. On the other hand she could not imagine — it would have appalled her to imagine — an experience so important to her as being without consequences. She begged him to “run off” with her; she was ready to put by the family she genuinely prized and give herself exclusively to her lover for the vague “year or two” she could imagine them together, in Italy… More than anything else she prayed he might make her pregnant, before he left her, with
a little Aeneas to play in the palace
And, in spite of all this, to remind me of you by his looks…
Then she would return to Cambridge and take the consequences, whatever they were.
But that’s not our Ambrose, what? He was moved; she believed his testimony that if he had taught her what sex was all about, she had taught him, just as belatedly and more considerably, what love was all about; made him realise that he’d never truly been loved before. Surely that tuition was what kept him from cutting his anchor cables: it was a remarkable, new, and of course very flattering business, to be loved like that! And he did both admire and love Magda, though not quite so much as at c and at a…
