![]() When we met, Lytton brought with him several large files bulging with four years' correspondence, mainly email printouts, to and from Rita. The two biggest mistakes I made were deluding myself that I could become all-important in her life, a brother and a surrogate lover, even though she didn't desire me, and then believing I could control and resolve the problem by myself." Even in front of my wife, I made no attempt to hide my adoration, I just buzzed whenever she was around. "I didn't choose to fall in love with her, or expect to feel sexual desire. "I knew Rita was my sister," he says now. The 1998 party at which they met had been organised by Lytton, with the help of his wife and children, as a celebratory reunion after he had tracked down his 60-year-old sister in Durban. Although Meadows had no idea she had a brother, Lytton, who was raised by his stepmother after his father's death during the second world war, had always known of her existence, but waited until 1995 to begin searching for her. She is his younger sister, adopted as a baby shortly after the death of their mother from an illness contracted after the birth, when Lytton was two. Instead, his love for Meadows represents society's most abhorrent taboo. The story might be relatively straightforward, and there may even have been a happy ending of sorts had he merely fallen for a woman half his age or abandoned his family to start a new life in another country. He is a married man of 66, semi-retired, with grown-up children and grandchildren. ![]() In the circumstances, Lytton's new-found love was doomed to be a nonstarter. But that is as far as the Mills & Boon scenario goes. Unable to reconcile himself to her indifference, Lytton's subsequent depression and sense of rejection, and the continuing compulsion to declare his feelings, are no different from the irrational fixation and emotions that mark any young adult's first major infatuation. Irritated and, at times, angry with his outpourings of affection, she recently emailed him curtly to think of her as "just a casual friend". Despite forming a warm friendship with Lytton, and meeting him several times a year either abroad or in Britain, Meadows, a divorcee, has never shared his feelings. ![]() The situation is far worse than that." On the surface, his ordeal seems a classic case of unrequited love. "To say that I have been to hell and back wouldn't be accurate. What Lytton didn't know was that the consequences of that love would plunge him into the most devastating crisis of his life. She put a smile in my heart and a spring in my step." Each October for the past four years, he has sent her a card to commemorate the date of their meeting. As I got to know her, I felt she had given me a life transmission. "From the moment we met, I was smitten, and continued to be drawn to her like a magnet. Describing their meeting, Lytton's words overflow with sentiment. Rita Meadows, who lives in South Africa, was on holiday in Scotland. The meeting took place at a dinner party at a fashionable country inn. On Sunday October 4 1998, Lytton, an Edinburgh public relations consultant, met the love of his life. At first, Ivor Lytton's emotional predicament seems unremarkable, no different from the woes that make up any agony aunt's weekly column.
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