I Want is a lovely collaboration between the Liverpool poet Adrian Henri and the novelist/playwright Nell Dunn about the forty-some year affair. Upper-class Dolly Argyll and Albert Hodgkin, a Merseyside lad taking a first step up the social ladder by attending a red-brick university, meet through friends, or friends of friends, in the 1930s. She is attracted by Albert’s raw “authenticity” and he by her passion and perfection, and soon they have their first tryst in the shade of the great forest on her family’s estate — a tryst whose secrecy and subterfuge comes to symbolize their relationship.
We know from the outset that their paths will soon diverge. The story is told through a series of letters, Albert’s written by Henri and Dolly’s by Dunn, and in the first Albert complains about being frustrated and exhausted from taking care of his second wife, who is now bedridden. Dolly is living comfortably in what we can guess is a quaint but well-furnished country cottage.
They have kept up a correspondence over the years, though Albert has had to hide Dolly’s letters from both wives. And, we learn, they have met from time to time, usually in some modest seaside hotel outside Liverpool, for an afternoon. For Albert, these are escapes. Having taken his degree, he ended his climb up the ladder one rung up by joining the engineering staff at the same factory where his father worked, a post he remains in for the next thirty-five years. Although happily married to his first wife, Albert knows his occasional rendezvous with Dolly are his only chance to leave the life he has signed onto.
Dolly’s motivations for continuing their relationship aren’t as clear. She doesn’t see Albert as her one great love. But it’s clear that she’s also not comfortable with surrendering completely to a way of life that’s so thoroughly bound up with appearances, customs, and property. As their correspondence develops, Albert becomes less lover and more confidante.
Henri and Dunn do a marvelous job of portraying a lifelong, if melancholy, relationship. But there is more going on her. For while Albert and Dolly do more than “stay in touch” through the years, there are suggestions that theirs is a relationship built on illusions. Dolly sends Albert and his first wife an expensive basket of good from Fortnum and Mason, not realizing that it raises questions he will struggle to answer or that they have little interest in champagne and pâté. He wonders if he hasn’t simply used Dolly as an outlet for sympathy and sex. They meet for the last time at the funeral for Albert’s second wife, Joan. Surrounded by family and friends, Albert can barely acknowledge the strange woman among the mourners.
One wonders if Albert and Dolly were alter egos for Henri and Dunn. Henri was stubbornly and proudly bound to his Liverpool working class roots, while Dunn, daughter of a baronet, granddaughter of an earl, has been strongly associated with working class situations and characters, despite her upbringing. In their collaboration, they managed in barely 100 pages to create a picture of a relationship with enough shades and suggestions to fill a much longer novel.