i DESPISED the robert infedility plotline. hugh bonneville is a fantastic actor, absolutely brilliant - had anyone else played him, i would have loathed that character even after he dismissed jane.
XXX
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
There are times when he thinks of her, of her smiles and her tears, of her touch and her absence and the boy he'd hoped to meet. He often wonders if his attraction to her was a manifestation of wishful thinking, for the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes how similar she and his wife are in coloring: same soft, dark hair, same light eyes, same wide pink mouth. They could be sisters, but for the difference in station. And but for the boy.
He thinks of the son more than the mother. If he's healthy. If he's strong. He had a son, too. Small. Shriveled. Dead. And, guiltily, painfully, he wonders if that wasn't part of it. The idea, the obsession that this woman, who so resembled his wife had borne a living son - what if his fascination stemmed from a sicker, shakier place?
He loves his wife. He does. He hadn't at first, to be sure, but now the idea of living without her is unfathomable and bewildering - a place his mind teeters at daily, between the black and white. He had almost lost her. He should not dwell on the other, with whom he had almost forsaken thirty-one years of marriage. Cora is his wife. Cora is the woman he loves.
It's funny, really. He watches his eldest daughter and Matthew dance around each other warily, circling closer and closer, unable to resist the urge to be near, to want, and how it reminds him of the younger days of his marriage. It had been a long, cautious process, falling in love with Cora, as unsettling for her as it was for him. He'd felt wrong-footed, inarticulate, bumbling - not at all the Earl he had wanted to be. Cora managed it far better, somehow; perhaps fretting over the proper way to do things (as dictated by his mother) gave her an outlet for the nervous energy charging between them.
And now it is as if they have been transported back to that time of uncertainty and stumbling. He is just as clumsy with Cora now as Matthew is with Mary, which is quite a feat to say the least. He doesn't know what to say, what to do; years of a steady rhythm and routine have been thrown off by one stupid mistake and finding their balance seems harder than when they were just discovering it.
Does she want to be alone, or would she prefer to talk in the mornings, as they used to? Should he compliment her on her dress or her hair, or would she think him a fool? He asks Carson to tell Mrs. Patmore to fix her favorite tart. He buys her a new necklace. How to engage her interest, to converse - this is worse than courtship. He is a man of nearly fifty years of age. He should not be acting like a gangly boy of nineteen.
He wonders sometimes if she has guessed what he almost did, if she knows of his indiscretion and is hurt by it.
And somehow his mistakes make him love her all the more.
XXX
poem by t. s. eliot, from "the love song of j. alfred prufrock."