Love Again (16 page)

For months—no, more, years, at least two years, for it is hard to mark the point where the tone of her journals changed, Julie raved. She was rather mad. This was when they sent her Rémy off to the Ivory Coast as a soldier and her child had died. She was knocked clean off balance:
All our balances are so precarious, a touch can do it, send us spinning, and down we go, into the whirlpool
. Sometimes her pages are so scrambled and scratched only odd phrases are readable.
The devil…the devil…who is the devil, if he has such sweet music
? She scrawled variations of this phrase over many pages: these were clearly verbal equivalents of the music itself.

The name Rémy filled pages.
Rémy, Rémy, Rémy
, she wrote, blotching pages with tears. The pages she wrote about Paul are dry and her tone ironical. But she wrote retrospectively about Paul: thus do we make safe stories about the raw pain of the past. Not all the comments are self-mocking.
When I think of Paul
, she wrote, and this was before she loved Rémy and was still full of pain because Paul had gone,
I feel a smile on my face. I hold the smile and go to the little mirror. I see an angry and even vicious curl to my lips. I don’t know myself in that smile. I remember Maman gave me a doll. It came from the ‘big house’—that is, my so-called father brought it from Paris. She was beautiful. She had long fair ringlets and blue eyes. She wore a dress like those after the Revolution when the rich people returned to
Paris and fashions mocked the guillotine. She had a bright red ribbon around her neck. It was an expensive doll. I broke the doll and buried it. Maman said, What are you doing? I said, I have killed Marie. Maman gave me one of her looks. I can sometimes feel that look on my face. She was not angry. She wanted to understand. She watched me put a little cross on the grave. Then I put a gift of bananas and wine by the cross for the forest spirits and Vaval. I did not know then how in parts of the world the old spirits, and even devils, have become part of Christianity. I said to Maman, ‘I didn’t kill Marie, Vaval killed her.’ Maman didn’t say anything. She was smiling. That is the smile I have on my face when I think of Paul. But it was he who killed me. I believed I would die when they sent him away. I looked at him in his uniform when he came to say goodbye to me. He was crying and so was I. But I thought, When you are killed there will be blood on that beautiful tunic of yours. But he hasn’t been killed. He is having a distinguished career in the army in Indo-China. His father told me when he came to find out how I was getting on. He is a fine man, Paul’s father. He told me he himself had to give up the girl he loved, because his parents made him. I asked if he thought parents were compelled to make sure their children suffer as they had themselves. He said, ‘I am sorry; believe me, I’m sorry.’ He had tears in his eyes. Such tears come cheap
.

In the period when Julie was off balance, the music she wrote sounded, as the Russians put it, like cats scratching the heart. And then she recovered, and wrote about God and the Devil like a true daughter of the Enlightenment. And yet she did believe that she heard voices in the river sounds and in the wind.
No one calls people crazy who enjoy conjuring up faces in the fire
.

Theatrically there was a difficulty, condensing the ‘scratching’ music coming between the ‘troubadour’ music and the ‘second-period’ music so that it was merely suggested. But was it honest to compress the period of rage and despair into a few bars, when she herself said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her? But art
has to be a cheat and a sleight of hand, we all know that. Using time as a measure, it was honest, for there were years to come before the friendship with Philippe and his sensible proposal for her future, the years when she wrote the music that was all pure cool sound, and painted her charming pictures. There was another difficulty too. After all, the Master Printer had a son Robert, met just once but with such a potential for reviving everything she had renounced. In the play he was not mentioned at all. There was too much of everything: too many ragged ends, false starts, possibilities rejected—too much life, in short, so it all had to be tidied up. Julie’s journal, where she imagined her married life with Philippe, which would suffocate her, was not in the play. Instead her rejection of him was in a song:
Good man, you are not for me, good man, you don’t know who sings to me at night among the rocks
…These words were in her journals.

Act Three, then, was the Master Printer’s Act. It will be seen that the shape of this play had after all turned out to be Act One: Paul. Act Two: Rémy. Act Three: Philippe.

During Act Three, Bill Collins and Andrew Stead, Julie’s two former lovers, sat about on the edge of the action, watching. Sometimes they sat on either side of Sarah, and then she was divided. With only Bill there, she allowed herself to submerge in a bath of warm sympathy, not to mention anything else, while Andrew seemed cool and ungiving. But sitting with Andrew, when Bill was not there, seeing Bill through his eyes, then the young man was certainly too much of a good thing, and Sarah felt uneasy. ‘Pretty baby’—she had found the words of the song on her tongue when she woke, not once but several times. It never does to ignore these messages from the depths. Nor the ‘snapshots’—when people you love and have become used to are seen as if for the first time.

Seeing one another in frames or poses was certainly a feature of that week. Mary was taking pictures of Act Three: she had already taken everything possible of Acts One and Two. The cast was photographed together and separately, inside the building and out of it,
in restaurants and by the canal. Hundreds, thousands of photographs. Perhaps thirty or forty of them would be used. The prodigality, the waste, was taken for granted.

A difficulty was that neither Andrew Stead nor Richard Service photographed as well as Bill, who dominated every picture he was in. Mary took pictures where she ‘phased Bill out,’ as she put it. ‘Go on, tone yourself down,’ she said to him, and he went red and lost composure, as he so often did.

‘Photogenic,’ sighed Molly, and Mary echoed, ‘The camera loves him.’ ‘The camera can’t help loving him,’ said Molly. And Mary, ‘It can’t help loving that man.’

Sarah saw the two women clowning and singing, ‘Mad About the Boy’—not caring that Bill had just come into the hall and must see them: he was certainly not stupid. Watching the young women was Sandy Grears, grinning. Every line of his body shouted that he had to stop himself from joining in. Bill hesitated, then stepped lightly across to become part of ‘Mad About the Boy’. This enabled Sandy to become a fourth. There was a wild flinging about of limbs and hair, most inappropriate for the drawling syllables of ‘Mad About the Boy’.

Bill came fast across the hall to where Sarah was sedately in her chair, and dropped into Stephen’s, with a direct laughing look that had nothing to do with the dear little boy who sent pretty Bambi cards but
was
the satirical dancing and singing he had just been involved with, was the swift slither of a brutally cynical caress.

She was raging with desire. (
Rage
: a good word, like
burn
.) But why describe it, since there is no one who has not felt the mix of anguish, incredulity, and—at the height of the illness—a sick sweet submersion in pain because it is inconceivable that anything so terribly desired cannot be given, and if you relinquish the pain, then the hope of bliss is abandoned too.

Sarah could not remember suffering as she did now. Yet she knew she had, for the ‘snapshots’ from her childhood told her so.
She could not match this particular degree of being in love with anything in her adult life, only with childhood loves. After the little boy who had been tempted not by her but by the tree house, she had been in love a good part of the time with one boy after another. Adolescent, she fantasized kisses: she could not believe that this happiness would be hers soon, ‘when she was grown up’. (This was the euphemism everyone used then for ‘when you have breasts.’) The point was, no matter how wonderful, apt, satisfying, kisses had been when she was grown up, none had had the magic ascribed to them in her imagination when too young for kisses. And so, now, ‘If you kissed me, it would be my first time ever…,’ said Sarah to herself. Satirically: and told herself that if she could still laugh she must be all right. Poor Stephen could not laugh. The Green Bird was laughing its head off, and so was the company rehearsing
Julie Vairon
. Roger Stent had sent Sonia a fax: ‘I take it you are not going to bar me from
Hedda Gabler
? If you do I’ll make sure everyone knows your theatre bars critics on the strength of one bad review.’

Sonia to Roger Stent: ‘You’ve never written a good review, or even a halfhearted one, in your life. You don’t like the theatre. You know nothing about it. Get something into your little head: The Green Bird doesn’t need you or
New Talents
. Fuck off.’

The rehearsals in the fourth week were run-throughs of the whole play, but still without musicians, who would arrive on the Friday.

In this last week something new happened. The main characters—Julie and her mother, Sylvie, the three lovers and the two fathers—were not starkly set in scene after scene showing confrontations, mostly two by two, but were absorbed into a setting of minor characters who, hardly noticed during the first weeks of rehearsals, now showed how much they determined destinies. As in life. In Madame Sylvie Vairon’s house had been many young offi
cers, suggested here by one, George White. In the programme notes—already with them in draft—it was said that the two women every evening entertained a crowd of young officers. This gave George White an importance that showed in how he carried himself and in an exaggeration of his attitude towards the two women, for the correct young officer did not approve of Paul’s romantic love. Later there was not only Paul’s father to contend with (George White again) but his mother, who, though never an actual presence, was always just offstage, a rock of rectitude and disapproval. When it came to Act Two, there was Rémy’s mother (she spoke precisely two words,
No
—twice), Rémy’s father (Oscar Friend, who, however forceful he was onstage, in life was a shy man, usually in a corner with a book), and also Rémy’s brother, George White. In life there were four brothers, all older than Rémy, and very likely it was that weight of seniority crushing him down that made loving Julie essential to him. Theatre economics dictated one brother. This meant that Rémy’s love seemed less determined by Destiny (the family) than in life, more of a romantic choice (the puppet strings invisible), though since George White had read the journals and knew about the four brothers, he did try to suggest forceful sibling pressure. In Philippe’s establishment there had been twenty or so printers, apprentices, and sales people, and it was not possible that their various reactions did not affect Julie. The interior of the print shop was only mentioned in the programme notes. Philippe and Julie conducted their courtship in the public square (a park bench). Once only was the attitude of Philippe’s employees shown, and that was when his manager (George White) came with a message from the shop, which enabled his frigid attitude to Julie, and her correct politeness to him, to suggest all the rest.

It was when it came to the townspeople that the audience would have to use their imaginations most. Julie’s life had been cursed by the suspicious surveillance of the citizens. They stared at her in the streets and muttered imprecations if they came on her by chance
(or design) in the forest. George White represented these invisible people. (He complained that all his parts were of disapproving people, but he adored Julie.) It would all go better in France, because Jean-Pierre had promised a crowd of extras.

On Friday the music arrived, in the shape of a counter-tenor and three girls and the musicians. The instruments were a guitar, a flute, a lute, a shawm, and a viola—the vielle of other times. The play, which without the music had been ‘too much’, ‘over the top’, ‘pastiche,’ and ‘a weepy’—this last was Bill, when thoughtfully passing Kleenex to Molly—changed, distancing itself from tears. The story told on this stage, or rather in this dull church hall, where the thick beam of sunlight picked out a scene or a character, became an aspect of the music. In the drawing room in Martinique, the conventional ballad, whose function was to show off Julie’s charms to the young officers, when accompanied by the music which had in counterpoint phrases from Julie’s ‘second period’, now commented, and even cruelly, on the period itself and made it as remote as Elizabethan players dancing the minuet at Queen’s Gift. The company was disconcerted by this shift from the personal, and even dismayed. Molly McGuire—as Molly—actually burst into tears. ‘What was it all for, then?’ she demanded. ‘What was the point of them going through all that? What for?’

‘A good question,’ said Bill quietly, showing—as he often did—how far he could be from the ‘young jay’ of Stephen’s criticism. And he put his arm around Molly to comfort her, nicely, like a brother.

As the story moved on, more and more did it seem that the sufferings and heartbreaks were a rather conventional accompaniment to her troubadour songs and, then, the late music, when angels or devils chanted of impermanence.

‘A very good question,’ said Henry to Sarah, at the end of the rehearsal, as if Molly had only just that moment wept and questioned. ‘Well, did you know all that was going to happen?’

‘Yes, but not that it would happen so well.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He was sitting, for once, in the chair near hers, leaning back, conditionally at rest, and he regarded her with those intelligent dark eyes that so often seemed prepared to see much worse than what in fact they were seeing. Now, however, they were wet.

‘I didn’t write the music,’ said Sarah.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said lightly, jumping up and away. ‘I don’t know about that at all. All I know is, the old black magic’s got me by the throat.’