The Documents in the Case

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Dear one, you won’t leave me all alone again, will you? We said we would try to forget one another, but I think you knew as well as I did how impossible it was. Well, we have tried, haven’t we, and we’ve found it is no good. You thought it would be better for me, but it isn’t. I feel far, far more miserable than I did, even in the days when we were seeing each other and trying to keep down all the things we were thinking and feeling together. I would rather suffer the awful pain of seeing and wanting you, than feel so dead and empty, as if my heart had been all drained out of me, beloved. And I know now that it is just as bad for you, because you can’t do your work without me, and your work ought to come first, darling, even if you have to mix your paints with my heart’s blood.

  Darling, if you think it’s better we shouldn’t be real lovers don’t leave me altogether. Let us see each other sometimes. It doesn’t matter even if the Gorgon is there and we have to talk the silly meaningless tea-party talk. Our real selves will be saying the real things to one another all the time, and we can look at one another and be a little bit happy. I can feel with my eyes, can’t you, darling? When you met us yesterday and stood there with that absurd top-hat in your hand – it was so funny to see you in that stiff, formal morning dress, but you looked very splendid and it made me so proud to think you were really all mine and no one knew it – well, when I saw you, I could feel in all my fingers, darling, the queer lovely feel of your hair that first day – do you remember – when you put your head on my knees and broke down and said you loved me. Such a dear head, darling, all rough and crisp, and strong, splendid bones under it, full of wonderful thoughts. If I shut my eyes I can feel it – I’m doing it now darling. Shut yours – now, this minute – and see if you can’t feel my hands. Did you, Petra darling – did you feel all the love and life in them? Tell me when you write if you can feel me as I feel you!

  You will write, darling, won’t you? You will spare me that little ray at least from the great fire of your life and love. Don’t leave me all in the dark, Petra, and I’ll be content with whatever you give me. Everything has been so ghastly that I haven’t got it in me to be exacting, dear.

  Always your own, only, for ever,

  Lolo

  39. The Same to the Same

  June 6th, 1929

  Petra, my darling, my dear, dear man darling,

  Oh, my dearest, isn’t it terrible to see the summer coming, and to feel so wintry and lonely. Your letters have been a help, but what wouldn’t I give for you yourself, the real you!

  You will tell me again that I’m not telling the truth. That I don’t really love you because I won’t give up being conventional and respectable and go away with you, but it isn’t that, Petra darling. You think in your dear, impetuous way that it would all be so easy, but it wouldn’t really, darling. You think that because you are a man, and you don’t consider how awful it would be, day after day, all the sordidness and trouble. It wouldn’t really be fair to make you go through all that. Even if He would let me go – which, of course, he wouldn’t, because he is so selfish – it would be a long, drawn-out misery. I know how horrid it is because I know a woman who got her divorce. Of course, her husband took all the blame, but it was a miserable time for everybody, and she and her man friend had to go right away, and he gave up his post, a very good post, and they are living in quite a slummy little place in rooms, and don’t even get enough to eat sometimes.

  Anyway, the Gorgon would never consent to me divorcing him, because he prides himself on being very virtuous and proper, and he would probably have to leave his firm or something. He would never do that. He thinks more of his firm than of anything in the world – far more than he does of me or my happiness, which he has never considered at all from the day he married me.

  Doesn’t it seem too awful that one has to pay so heavily for making a mistake? I keep on thinking, if only I hadn’t married him. If only I were free to come to you, Petra darling – what a wonderful time we could have together! But then I think again that if I hadn’t married him, I should never have lived here, never met you, and oh, darling, what could make up for that? So I suppose, as they say in the nature-books, that He has ‘fulfilled his function’ in bringing us together. I looked at him last night as he sat glooming over the mutton, which wasn’t quite done as he likes it (you would never let a stupid thing like mutton poison the whole beautiful day for you, but he does), and I thought of Mr Munting saying once, ‘All God’s creatures have their uses,’ when Miss Milsom had made me one of her lovely scarves – and I said to myself, ‘If only you could know, my dear Gorgon, what is the one thing in our lives I thank you for!’ That would really have given him something to gloom about, wouldn’t it?

  It is so funny – he is always asking when you are coming to see us again. His Cookery Book is going to be published in a few weeks’ time, and he is ridiculously excited about it. He thinks it is a great work of art, and is going to send you a copy as from one artist to another. Wouldn’t that make a good reason for you to call on us, if you could get over to England? It is clever of you to be able to find so many things to say about his silly little water-colours – you who are a really great painter (I have learnt not to say artist now. Do you remember how impatient you were with me when I called you ‘artistic’? We nearly had a quarrel that day. Fancy us quarrelling about anything – now!).

  It makes me sad, Petra darling, to think of my poor lonely Man so far away, wanting his Lolo. And I’m a little frightened, too, when I think of all the beautiful ladies in Paris. I expect they think a lot of you, don’t they? Do you go to a great many fashionable parties? Or do you live the student-life I used to read about and think how gay and jolly it must be? You don’t tell me very much about the people you see and the places you go to. I wish you weren’t a portrait-painter – you must have so many opportunities to find someone more beautiful than your poor Lolo and so much cleverer. Don’t say they aren’t more beautiful than I am, because I shall know you aren’t telling the truth. I’m not really beautiful at all – only when I had been with you I sometimes used to look in the glass and think that happiness made me almost beautiful, sometimes. I have been reading in a book about the real Laura and Petrarch – did you know, she was really only a little girl and that he hardly saw her at all? Perhaps she was only beautiful in his imagination, too. But that didn’t prevent her from being his inspiration, did it? I wonder if you are the same. Perhaps I inspire you better from a distance. I don’t think a woman could feel like that. She wants her Man always, close to her. Darling, do say you want me to like that, too.

  I must stop now. The Gorgon will be wanting its tea. I am living just like a hermit now. I never go anywhere and I try to do all I can to keep him in good temper, for fear he should get the idea that there is Somebody Else in my life. How dreadful it would be if he suspected anything. He is fairly reasonable now, except when his food isn’t quite right. But oh! I am so lonely.

  Darling, I love you so much I don’t know what to do with myself. I have kissed the paper twenty times where your dear, darling name is. You must kiss it, too, and think you are kissing your own, your absolutely owned own.

  Lolo

  40. The Same to the Same

  14th June, 1929

  Darling,

  Your letter hurt me so dreadfully, I cried and cried. Oh, Petra, you can’t love me at all, or you wouldn’t say such awful things. You can’t really think that if I love you I ought to let him divorce me. Darling, do think how horrible it would be! How could I go through all that terrible shame in public, and all my friends looking on and thinking hateful things about our beautiful love! At least, I suppose I could go through with it – one can go through all kinds of agonies and still live – but that you should want me to do it – that you could think of your Lolo in such a sordid way – that’s what hurts me, darling. You used to say you wanted to stand between me and trouble, and couldn’t bear to think of anything ugly touching our pure and lovely passion. And yet now you
want to smirch me with the stain of the divorce courts and see my name in the papers for people to snigger at. Oh Petra, it’s absolutely clear you don’t really love me one bit.

  You couldn’t feel the same to me, Petra, I know that, if I came to you all dirtied and draggled from an ordeal like that. Just think of having to stand up in the witness-box and tell the judge all about our love. It would all sound so different to their worldly, coarse, horrible minds, and our love would seem just a vulgar, nasty – I don’t like to write the word they would call it, even to you – instead of the pure, clean, divine thing it really is.

  Darling, I’m not thinking of myself – I’m thinking of you and our love. I don’t want a single spot to touch it. It would be better to suffer all our lives as we are suffering now – as I am suffering, for sometimes, Petra, I don’t think you suffer at all – rather than to look at each other with the shadow of an ugly scandal between us. You don’t understand. You don’t realise what a difference these things make to a woman. It does not make any difference to a man, but even you would see the stain on me for ever afterwards, and would turn against me.

  Tell me you don’t really mean it, darling. There must be some other way out. Let us think very hard and find out. Or if you really think so little of me, tell me so, and we will say good-bye again – for always, this time. I expect I was wrong to stick to our agreement before. You wanted to be released then, and you wouldn’t have asked it if you hadn’t been tired of me already in your heart. Let’s end it all, Petra. Perhaps I shall die, and then you will be free. I feel unhappy enough to die – and if I’m too strong for wretchedness to kill me, there are always easy ways out of it all.

  Your heart-broken

  Lolo

  41. The Same to the Same

  15, Whittington Terrace

  30th June, 1929

  Darling, dear Petra, my dearest,

  Of course I do forgive you. It’s you really that must forgive me for saying such awful things. I didn’t mean them. I knew really, deep down in my heart, that you loved me all the time. Of course I couldn’t say good-bye – it would kill me – Yes, I meant that part of it.

  But you do see now, don’t you, that we can’t take that way out. For my sake, you say, darling, but, indeed, I could bear anything for myself – only I don’t want to spoil the lovely thing we have made. We will do just as you say, wait for a year and see if anything happens. It may, if we only want it enough. God might make a miracle to help us. Such things have happened before now. He might even die – ‘in him Nature’s copy’s not eterne’ – doesn’t somebody say that in a play somewhere? We used to go and see Shakespeare sometimes when I was at school, and do the plays in class, though I didn’t pay much attention to them then. I didn’t understand what a difference art and poetry make to one’s life. I was waiting for you to come and teach me, my dear.

  I am going to do some really solid reading now, to try and be more worthy of my darling when the happy time comes. (I must believe there will be a happy time, or I should go mad.) This year of waiting shall be a year of self- development. That will make the desolate days pass more quickly. Goodness knows I shall have time enough, for He never lets me go out anywhere or have any of my own friends to see me. The only people I ever have to talk to are his friends from the office. They talk about bridges and electrical plant interminably. I don’t know how people can live with such petty, dull things taking up all their minds. Sometimes one or two of them have the graciousness to ask me if I have seen the latest play or film, but I never have, and I just have to sit and smile while He says, ‘We’re quiet, domestic people, my wife and I; we don’t care about this night life.’ And if I ever suggest going out, he pretends that I want to be ‘gadding round’ in night-clubs at all hours. I am ashamed of being so ignorant of the things everybody is talking about. Other husbands take their wives out. But no – if I want to stir out of doors, I’m a bad woman – ‘one of these modern wives who don’t care for their homes’. What kind of place is my home, that I should care about it?

  I have got that book you were talking about, Women in Love. It is very queer and coarse in parts, don’t you think, and rather bewildering, but some of the descriptions are very beautiful. I don’t understand it at all, but it is thrilling, like music. That bit about the horse, for instance. I can’t quite make out what he means, but it is terribly exciting. What funny people Lawrence’s characters are! They don’t seem to have any ordinary lives, or have to make money or run households or anything. That woman who is a schoolmistress – she never seems to have to bother about her work, one would think it was all holidays at her school. I suppose the author means that the humdrum things don’t really count in one’s life at all, and I expect that is true, only in actual life they do seem to make a lot of difference.

  Oh, I do hate this cramping life – always telling lies and smothering up one’s feelings. But tyrants make liars. It is what somebody I read about in the papers calls ‘slave-psychology’. I feel myself turning into a cringing slave, lying and crawling to get one little scrap of precious freedom – a book, a letter, a thought even – and carrying it off into a corner to gloat over it in secret. That is the way in which I am learning to build up an inner life for myself, a lovely, secret freedom, so that the things He says and does can’t really hurt me any longer. The real Me is free and happy, worshipping in my hidden temple with my darling Idol, my own dear Petra darling.

  How I do love you! My starved life is full when I think of you – brimmed with joy and inward laughter. And one day, perhaps, we shall come out of the dark catacombs and build our temple of Love in the glorious sunlight, with the golden gates wide open for all the world to see and marvel at our happiness.

  Yours, beloved, yours utterly and completely,

  Lolo

  I love to write the name you call me by – the name that is only yours. Such a silly name it would sound to people who didn’t know what it meant. He uses the name other people use – just like an uncle or something. That’s all he is – a sort of Wicked Uncle in a fairy-tale. I can bear him better if I think of him just as that.

  42. The Same to the Same

  15, Whittington Terrace

  18th July, 1929

  Darling, darling,

  I hardly know how to breathe for joy! To know that I shall see you, hear your dear voice, hold your hand again! He heard me singing in the kitchen this morning and asked what I was yowling about. I should have liked to tell him. Think of his face if I had said: ‘My lover is coming home and I am singing for joy!’ I said meekly that I was sorry if it disturbed him, and he said in his courteous way that it didn’t matter to him if I liked to hear the sound of my own voice, but the girl would probably think I was mad. I said I didn’t care what the girl thought of me, and he answered: ‘That’s just the trouble with you. You don’t care. You’re right up in the air.’ So I am – so I am! Right above the clouds, Petra darling, up in the golden sunlight, where nothing can touch me. He’s quite right for once, if he did but know it.

  Darling, we must be very careful when you come. I don’t know how I shall manage to keep the happiness out of my eyes and voice. But he won’t notice – he never notices how I’m feeling. Besides, he will monopolise you with his precious book. It’s really out at last, and he’s clucking over it like a hen that’s laid an egg. People say to me: ‘So your husband has written a book, Mrs Harrison. So clever of him. Fancy a man knowing such a lot about cooking! What exciting meals you must have. Aren’t you afraid he’ll poison himself sometimes with those queer toadstools and things?’ And I smile and say, ‘Oh, but my husband would never make a stupid mistake. He knows so much about them, you see.’ That’s quite true, too. He doesn’t make mistakes about things – only about people. He never gets anything right about me – not one single thing. But then he really cares about mushrooms and takes trouble to study them.

  I wonder how his first wife put up with him. She was a homely sort of person, from all accounts – the sor
t that are good housekeepers and mothers and all that. I think, if I’d ever had a child I could have been happier, but he has never given me one, and doesn’t seem to want to. I’m glad of that now – since I met you. It would be terrible to have his child now – it would seem like a sort of treason to you, beloved. Don’t be afraid, dearest. He never touches me – you know what I mean – and I wouldn’t let him. I don’t let him even give me his usual morning peck if I can help it. I don’t refuse, of course – that would make him suspicious at once. I just happen to be busy and keep out of his way. He’s glad, I think, because he always used to grumble at any demonstration and say, ‘That’ll do, that’ll do’ – though he’ll let the cat swarm all over him and knead bread on his chest for hours together. I suppose he thinks a woman’s feelings don’t matter as much as a cat’s!