Love, Again

Richard Service, or Philippe, often sat by Sarah. He was a modest man, serious, full of surprises, for since he was unable to make a living entirely in the theatre, he worked as well as a lecturer in an agricultural college: his father, a farmer, had insisted he must not rely on the theatre. Sarah joked that he saw Julie as a farm girl, for he had said Julie had been brought up in one forest and lived to the end of her life in another. Why had she committed suicide? As much that she did not want to live in a town as that she was afraid of domesticity. He argued about this too with Sally, for these two often sat together, talking. Sally said in those days everyone was still close to the land one way or another, and what ailed Julie was that she was a woman. At least, Sally said, the girl had the sense not to become an actress. ‘Look at me. There aren’t so many parts for a fat black woman,’ she announced, laughing and sighing. ‘No, not so many.’ What Richard and Sally talked about most was their children. Both had three. Sally’s eldest daughter looked after the two smaller ones when her mother was working. Sally never mentioned a husband. She had wanted this girl to stick it out at school and then go to college, but she was threatening to leave school and take her chances. ‘She’s a fool,’ said Sally. ‘I tell her, You’re a real fool, girl. In ten years’ time you’ll think it was the worst thing you ever did. But you can’t talk to them at that age. Any more than Julie’s mother could make her listen.’ Richard’s fifteen-year-old had ‘dropped out’ but been persuaded to try again. His ‘dropping out’, on that level of income, was hardly the same as Sally’s daughter’s. It was infinitely touching, the friendship of these two, with their differences. They had for each other a humorous gentleness – a respect? was it curiosity too? – precisely because of these differences.

In that second week, ‘Rémy’s week’, Andrew Stead did not have much time for sitting about. He was busy making himself over from a man you could barely imagine without his horse to Rémy, in one of the heartbreaking transformations one may watch when an actor subdues one personality, using something that looks like a ferocious discipline (though perhaps it is more like a submission, all sensitive patience, a kind of listening?), to another that might very well be the opposite of his own. Andrew remarked that he liked being Rémy, for he was always typecast, and in one film after another he was gangster, crook, cowboy, cop, rancher. And that was because in the very first film he had done he was an outlaw, stealing horses. And so what was he doing here? Ten years ago, he had been at Cannes for the film festival, where a film he was in had won a prize, and he had spent a day in the seductive country behind the coast, visiting the ancient hill towns, and by chance had found himself in a town, Belles Rivières, where there was a music festival. He had heard Julie Vairon’s music and did not think much about it, until later, when he could not get it out of his head. It was the ‘troubadour’ music that had got to him. His agent had sent him Julie Vairon, and he had turned down a film to do it. No, it was very far from his usual line, and perhaps he wasn’t up to it…but there was a side benefit – could he call it a benefit, though? He was being thoroughly unsettled. He was wondering now how much he had become ‘typecast’ in his life as well. Hard to remember now much about what he had been like before the age of nineteen and his first film: he had positively fallen into it, only chance he had become an actor. Yes, he was a Texan, but that didn’t mean he necessarily had to spend his life as a cowboy. ‘“’Orses and dogs is not vittles and drink to me”,’ he quoted, and was pleased that though she guessed Dickens, she did not know it was David Copperfield and he had to tell her. ‘Despite appearances, it ain’t necessarily so.’

He was not a man one could easily imagine needing reassurance, and when he did arrive in the chair beside Sarah, she did not offer it. How differently people did sit in that chair. Bill sat back, balanced, alert, hands palm down on his thighs, chatting to her while that handsome face of his was always ready to offer to anyone looking his way the smiles he was so good at.

Henry could hardly be said ever to sit, if by that word is meant a submission to relaxation.

Sally sat with her large body filling the space allotted to it, calm as a monument.

Molly was not much there, because she was seldom offstage. If she did arrive beside Sarah for a moment, it was to express vigorous disapprobation of Julie, who needed her head examined. ‘She screwed up her whole life for love’ – and the violence here made Sarah follow Molly’s gaze to Bill, a usually limpid, candid, and even innocent gaze, now clouded by self-doubt. Thank God, said Molly McGuire, that she was living now and not then.

As for Andrew, he sat loosely, his muscular hands relaxed on the chair’s arms, exactly as that lean hard body of his was relaxed, on principle and by training. He watched her calmly, with those pale blue eyes of his that were no longer inflamed by the altitudes of north-west Argentina. He seemed to be waiting for something from her. What? He made her uncomfortable, forced her to examine her role here, in her chair, always ready to provision anyone who needed it with praise and reassurance. Was she being insincere? She believed not. She did think the company very good, and Henry admirable. Her own work was not bad at all. But sometimes Andrew reminded her of Stephen, who had the same way of sitting in judgement. It was a masculine judgement: they were both men who would never dispense themselves in charm or an appeal to be liked. She was also remembering that both of these, by chance, had been at a ten-years-ago festival in the south of France, and both had ‘fallen for’ Julie’s music.

But the music was not here, and its lack was being felt more every hour. Sarah observed how Andrew, in the middle of a scene with Molly, suddenly broke off, asking Henry if he could do the scene again, then doing it again, and finally coming to a stop with a shrug and a shake of the head. Henry and Andrew went to one side to confer. While they talked, the scene was arrested, like a film still, emphasizing the animation of these two men. Henry came to Sarah and explained that Andrew could not get the ‘feel’ of the piece, could not find his pace. And he was not the only one who complained. ‘But no one’s going to get it until we have the music.’ ‘I know, but never mind, just do it, Sarah. Come out and demonstrate.’

Sarah complied. After all, she had been rehearsing plays and ‘entertainments’ for years. As she walked forward to take her place, she caught herself thinking she was pleased she had taken trouble with her appearance that morning. She was wearing a dark blue working outfit, but in a silky-looking material, and had for some reason put on big silver earrings and elegant shoes.

In this scene, words and phrases spoken by the two lovers were taken up by the musicians and sung, almost like a part-song, words said and words sung in counterpoint.

As my lover you must leave me,All the world applauds your choice.

But you’re my friend and you should stay.A friend does not his friend betray.

Giving pain is for the lover,A friend does not a friend betray.

The words had come from Julie’s journals. This man loves me and so it is in order for him to stab me to the heart, and if he actually did stab or shoot me, French law could easily acquit him; it would be a crime passionnel. But he is my friend. My only friend. I have no other friend. Friends are not applauded when they betray each other.

The song would be sung by the three girls, with the counter-tenor holding the words lover and friend in long notes not unlike the groaning shawm, underlining the young high fresh voices in their conventional reproach.

What Julie was saying to Rémy was, ‘You love me, you are my lover, but not a soul in the world will condemn you for obeying your father and abandoning me. But if I were your friend and you betrayed me, you would be condemned by everyone.’

Rémy was saying, ‘But I am your friend. You’ll see that I am your friend. I’ll prove it. You think that I am abandoning you, but I never will.’

Julie says, ‘Ah, but you’re my lover, and that cancels the friend.’

Sarah’s voice was a small one, but it was sweet and true. Long ago when she was a student in Montpellier, there had been talk of training it, but instead she studied music for a year. She was confident she would not disgrace herself. When she began, ‘As my lover you must leave me…’ she felt as if she had stepped out from a shadow into the light, and from her passive role, sitting there, always observing, into performer. Hardly new for her, taking command, showing how parts should be played or songs sung, but she had not done anything of the kind here, with this company. She was conscious of the silence in the hall, and how they all watched her and were surprised at this revelation, Sarah so assured and so accomplished. She felt herself full of strength and of pleasure. Oh yes, she did like it, she was liking it too much, being admired by this particular assembly of people.

When she had finished there was light applause, and Bill called out ‘Bravo’ and stood up to clap, so that he would be noticed. She made a mock curtsey to him, and a general one to everybody. Then she called them to order by lightly clapping her hands.

Henry came forward, because he had understood there was a need.

Now, when she sang the verses again, Henry supplied the counter-tenor’s friend and lover. He could not resist slightly exaggerating, so that his voice was a low yell, like an unknown instrument from an exotic shore, and it was very funny. They had to laugh. The four, Sarah, Henry, Andrew, and Molly laughed staggering into each other’s arms, where they embraced. They sobered as Henry clapped his hands.

This time it ‘worked’. The counterpoint of friend and lover was not funny but added a depth and darkness to the verses.

And now Molly began her speech. ‘You love me, you’re my lover, but not a soul in the world…’ and Henry came in with lover Sarah followed, singing, ‘As my lover you must leave me,’ and when Molly reached, ‘But if I were your friend…’ Henry sang, or perhaps groaned, friend, and Sarah sang the last couplet against Molly’s, ‘Giving pain is for the lover…’ and repeated it while Andrew began, ‘But I am your friend…’ and so on.

Timing. It all fitted. Now Andrew was convinced, but what they all saw coming out in him was a stubbornness they had not seen before, a quite deadly persistence. He needed not only to be convinced but to be sure it could be done again. And again. The four of them took the scene through several times, until Andrew said, ‘Right. And thanks. I’m sorry, but I had to have that.’

And Henry said, ‘Right. Break for lunch.’

On the Friday of Rémy’s week, Stephen came to sit in his chair by Sarah, to watch a run-through of Act Two. Molly had put on a long skirt to help her, and she seemed as if by magic to have become thinner, lithe, wild, vulnerable. It broke the heart to watch her, the brave one, battling with such a destiny. The young aristocrat, son of the Rostand château, was touching in his love for the girl he would never be allowed to marry.

Meanwhile there was still no music, and Molly was speaking the words of her song, which would be sung later by the counter-tenor.

If this song of mine is a sad one,Love, who I hold in my arms,Our joy as wild as a hawk circling,Think that when summer comesThey will send you far from me,Then you will remember these daysAnd my sad song tonight.With you gone I am forever exiled from myself.

Stephen said, ‘I don’t remember that. I suppose you made it up?’

‘I thought it was in the style of a troubadour song.’ She put in front of him what Julie had actually written, in her translation.

It’s all very well! Love, love, love, we say, weeping for joy all night. Next summer we’ll be singing a different tune. I saw how your father looked at me today. Time’s up, that look said.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. He was sitting with his head bowed, not looking at the players. Far from laughing, or even smiling – for she did believe the transmutation of one mode into another merited at least a mild smile – he seemed like a miserable old man. Yet once (once! it was a few weeks ago) the humour they shared had been the best part of their friendship. She was telling herself that she must accept it – must – that a phase of their friendship was over. This was not the man with whom she had those weeks of companionship. And as she thought this, the leaden glove she associated with Joyce threatened to enclose her heart, and she snapped at herself, No, stop it, stop it at once. And she went off and away from the chair by Stephen, to stand with her back to the players, pretending to examine some props, as it happened, brilliant flowers and fruit from Martinique, there to give the ‘feel’ of the place. She was muttering, ‘“No, I’ll not, carrion comfort Despair, not feast on thee; not untwist, slack they may be…”’ And was furious with herself. Melodramatic bloody rubbish! she shouted silently to that part of her memory that had so patly come up with these words, feeding them to her tongue, while her mind refused them. Feeling someone behind her, she composed her face to turn, smiling, at Henry, but she had not composed it sufficiently, for he was thrown back at the sight of her. ‘What’s wrong, Sarah, don’t you like it?’ he half stammered, and she had to remind herself that the most confident of directors needed reassurance, and this was a far from confident one. Over his shoulder she saw Sonia (her successor at The Green Bird – she could not remember seeing this so clearly before) go up to Bill with some letter, or telegram that had come for him. He took it, making a joke, and they stood laughing, the attractive redhead, the handsome boy – no, no, not a boy, he was a man…She said to Henry, ‘Yes, I do like it, very much,’ and saw how his body relaxed out of the tension of anxiety. The traitor memory was offering to her tongue, as she watched Sonia and Bill stroll down the hall, in perfect step, ‘“…keep back beauty, beauty, beauty, from vanishing away…O no, there’s none, there’s none, O no, there’s none…”’ and she put her hand in Henry’s elbow and turned him about with a laugh, out of his posture as a suppliant, for she did not want to feel maternal, and together they stood to watch as Rémy and Julie held each other in an embrace that had in it all the sorrows and disciplines of valediction.

‘I thought, when you went off like that…And Stephen doesn’t like it, does he?’

‘Yes, he does. He likes it very much.’

‘He really does?’

‘Yes, really.’ And she discarded various sets of words, all to the effect that the play touched Stephen too nearly.

When the time came to go for lunch, she went with Stephen to a restaurant not the same as the company’s usual choice. It was obvious he did not want to be with them. There he said he was not hungry. He sat, all dejection, while she trifled with her own food. His breathing wasn’t right: he sighed and then sat as if he had forgotten to breathe. He kept shifting his position, leaned forward, leaned back, even unconsciously putting his hand to his forehead in a gesture that was pure theatre: I am suffering. His look at her, when he did at last become conscious of her being there, was a close inspection, apparently hoping to find something in her face, but failing. And there was shame in it, as if he wanted to observe her, though without being observed.

As he parted he said to her, ‘All right, but if I’m mad I’m not the only one. I overheard that young jay tell Andrew Stead he was in love with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Well, you, obviously.’ And he gave an angry laugh, the first that day. And it was not an accusation of her, but rather on behalf of the lunacy of the world. He went off to catch his train and she went home, dissolved in love. Well, yes, she had known Bill was in love with her. ‘In love’ – a phrase as you take it, all things to all men. And women. There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shops. All right, then, he had a crush on her. Why not? People had been having crushes on her all her life – or so she seemed to remember. (She added the rider hastily, defensively.) But the interesting thing was her bursting into flame because of hearing it said. Bill had said it knowing it would get back to her. Her body had filled at once with a most horrible desire. A reckless desire. All through that weekend she sat down and jumped up, flung herself on her bed and out of it again, because she would not, would not, succumb, walked around her room for hours, in such a daze and a dream she would not have been able to say at any moment what she had just been dreaming, yet no matter how far gone she was in dreaming, she was stopped again and again by that word impossible. Meaning just that. She was thinking of Aschenbach’s passion as an elderly man for the boy in Venice. Is it that we all have to suffer the fate of falling in love, when old, with someone young and beautiful, and if so, why? What was it all about? One falls in love with one’s own young self – yes, that was likely: narcissists, all of us, mirror people – but certainly it can have nothing to do with any biological function or need. Then what need? What renewal, what exercise in remembering, is Nature demanding of us?… And so she exclaimed and protested, and quite soon found herself murmuring – tranced, or hypnotized – speaking words she did not take responsibility for, since she did not know what they meant. ‘Who? Who is it?’ Accepting that she had in fact said or muttered these words, she commented on them that it was not possible she was in love with a handsome youth she had nothing at all in common with except the instant sympathy she owed to his love for his mother. Perhaps when he was seventy, well pickled by life, they might mean the same thing when they used words – yes, possibly then, but she would be dead. He was as innocent as a kitten. What could she possibly mean when she said that? He was horribly calculating. Yes, innocent, for only a man unsure of himself, like an adolescent or someone inexperienced, would need the kind of tricks and seductions he used. (That long, slithering, seductive, calculated caress, innocent?)

Memories she had refused to admit for years now stood around her in beguiling or accusing postures, forcing her to attend to them. She was being forced to remember past loves. And she was remembering her husband. But her memories of him had been put into a series of frames, like photographs, or scenes in a novel – a short novel, since he had died so young, at forty. (Once, and not long ago, to live to be forty in Europe was a great thing, an achievement.) Not a sad novel, not sad photographs. No, for she could scarcely remember the pitiful ending, young widow left with two small children, and those tears – surely she must have shed plenty? – might have been wept by someone else, for all she felt now. And had she ever loved him, her great love, with this burning, craving love? No, that had been a gradual love, leading to the satisfactory marriage that followed. And as a girl, before her husband? More pictures in an album? No, this love was forcing her to feel old loves, making her remember, bringing her face to face with loves she had got into the habit of dismissing with: Oh, adolescent crushes, that’s all. But in fact that love, or that, or that, had been intense and terrible, with exactly the same quality of impossibility as this one. And before that? What nonsense that children did not love, did not suffer: it was as bad for them as for their elders. No, she would not think about that, she refused to. She would force herself to recover from this illness. For that is what it was.

She sent Stephen a fax:

‘Love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well the dark house and whip as madmen do, and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippets are in love too.’

He sent her one:

‘Who so loves believes in the impossible.’ Faxes are all very well, but I’d rather hear your voice.

Early on Sunday evening a card was pushed through her door. It was the most charming and guileless card, of a frieze of pink deer, Bambis, rather, nose to nose – kissing. It could not have been in worse taste – for anyone but a small child. The person who sent this card (had asked someone to drop it in?) was a child. (What had he in common with the brutal youth who had slithered that insinuating caress down Molly’s back and buttocks?) The card made the statement, I am a little boy. A shock of cold water, but only to her mind. Her emotions were not affected. Her body burned more fiercely, if this were possible. (‘I have to tell you how much it means to me, getting to know you. All my love, Bill.’) Burn, the word we use, shorthand for such shameful, such agonizing physical symptoms. Quite poetic, really, the word burn.

She had his telephone number, in her capacity as administrator of the theatre. His hotel was not far away. She waited half an hour and telephoned. Exactly as she would have done when ‘sexually viable’ – a phrase she had found in a sociological article, making her laugh, a dry safe phrase, putting everything in its proper place. (Like burn.) She thanked him for his card and suggested he should come over. It seemed impossible that he would not come over at once, and into her bed. Such are the side products of the physical swellings, wettings, and aches shorthanded in the word burn. She could hear how his voice put guards on itself. She was not too far gone to judge the voice (hearing it like this, without the benefit of his presence) as a trifle vulgar, because of its self-satisfaction, its complacency. She was furious: she had not persuaded him! She had never once gone to sit by him, gone to talk to him, initiated anything. And what did he mean by saying All my love? (Her mind did inform her that she had done this a thousand years ago, finding everything she felt in a phrase or a word: one did this, when in love.) He would drop in, in about an hour. Her body rioted, but her mind, as much under threat as a candle flame in a strong draught, made derisive comments.

She remembered an incident from her childhood, one she had put into a frame long ago, with an appropriate smile. She was six years old. A small boy – he seemed to her a small boy, for he was a year younger than she was – stood with her under a great tree that had in it a tree house and told her that he loved Mary Templeton. He had just embraced her, fat little arms around her neck, a fat wet kiss on her cheek, and an impulsive ‘I love you’. Because of the kiss and the arms and the ‘I love you’ she told him – outraged, self-righteous, dissolved in love for him – that he couldn’t love Mary, for she was too old; he must love her. And when he said stubbornly that he really loved Mary, she was full of a conviction of his unfairness. He had kissed her, he had said he loved her, and she could still feel the warm little arms around her. Mary Templeton was the most glamorous of the small girls, because she went every week to ballet school and was nine years old. (Surely as a female creature she – Sarah – should have known that it was inevitable he must love Mary, because she was out of reach.) Sarah told him that he and she together should set up life in the tree house just above their heads, an arboreal paradise, for she had already in imagination planned the cheese and tinned ham she would take from the pantry, and the old eiderdown from the understairs cupboard. The small boy hesitated, for he did like the tree house, but repeated that he loved Mary.

This incident frozen all those years ago, a baby mammoth in ice, was filling her with the emotions of then. She had adored the plump little boy with his soft dark locks and his wide blue eyes. His wet kiss on her cheek and his ‘I love you’ had utterly melted her. It was inconceivable he did not adore her. But he had decided to dream of Mary Templeton instead. Long ago, under that tree in a garden since bulldozed to make a housing estate, a desolation of grief had swallowed her. A little child’s love. So she had filed it away: a childish love, not to be taken seriously.