Love Again (19 page)

Sarah sat observing her anger growing like a fat and unstoppable cancer. She did not know if she was more angry or more desirous. She was thinking that if this young man did not come to her that night she would very likely die, and this did not seem an exaggeration in her feverish state. She knew he would not do this. Not because she was old enough to be his grandmother, but because of the invisible line drawn around him:
Don’t touch
—that sexually haughty look that goes with a much younger state, the late teens, and says, ‘I’m not for you, you shameless people, but if you knew what I
could
do to you if I chose, then…,’ a look that is accompanied by the (silent) raucous jeer of the adolescent, full of sexual aggression, desire and self-doubt. An impure chastity. Was this (his unavailability) why she had not put him not in her own hotel but in the one next door? She had decided this was out of pride or even a sense of honour. But she had put Molly in the same hotel as Stephen, murmuring to herself something like
Fair’s fair
, meaning that Stephen should have the benefit of this sojourn in Julie’s coun
try even if she, Sarah, could not. But if she had done what Molly obviously wanted, the girl would have been put in Bill’s hotel. (She, Sarah, had not allotted rooms, only handed lists of names to the hotels.) Was it out of jealousy she had done this? She believed not. For one thing, there was nothing to stop Molly (or Bill—a likely story!) walking a few yards to the other’s hotel. After all, she had spent the day on his balcony. But Sarah’s ruling thought had been, Stephen wants her a thousand times more than Bill ever could.

While these amorous calculations went on, Sarah chatted and laughed and generally contributed to this amiable occasion, and she watched Stephen, her heart aching for him and for herself, and she knew that she was housing separate blocks or associations of emotions that were contradictory to the point it seemed impossible they could live together inside one skin. Or head. Or heart.

First of all was the fact she was in love. There seems to be a general agreement that being in love is a condition unimportant, and even comic. Yet there are few more painful for the body, the heart, and—worse—the mind, which observes the person it (the mind) is supposed to be governing behaving in a foolish and even shameful way. The fact is, she thought, while she refused to allow her eyes to be drawn to Bill but sat talking to Stephen, who was happy to have this distraction, there is an area of life too terrible even to be acknowledged. For people are often in love, and they are usually not in love equally, or even at the same time. They fall in love with people not in love with them as if there were a law about it, and this leads to…if the condition she was in were not tagged with the innocuous ‘in love’, then her symptoms would be those of a real illness.

From this central thought or area led several paths, and one of them was to the fact that the fate of us all, to get old, or even to grow older, is one so cruel that while we spend every energy in trying to avert or postpone it, we in fact seldom allow the realization to strike home sharp and cold: from being
this
—and she looked
around at the young people—one becomes
this
, a husk without colour, above all without the lustre, the shine. And I, Sarah Durham, sitting here tonight surrounded mostly by the young (or people who seem young to me), am in exactly the same situation as the innumerable people of the world who are ugly, deformed, or crippled, or who have horrible skin disorders. Or who lack that mysterious thing sex appeal. Millions spend their lives behind ugly masks, longing for the simplicities of love known to attractive people. There is now no difference between me and those people barred from love, but this is the first time it has been brought home to me that all my youth I was in a privileged class sexually but never thought about it or what it must mean not to be. Yet no matter how unfeeling or callous one is when young, everyone, but everyone, will learn what it is to be in a desert of deprivation, and it is just as well, travelling so fast towards old age, that we don’t know it.

And yet, if it really is so terrible, so painful, that sitting here I feel like a miserable old ghost at a feast, why is it that for two decades, more, I lived content with a deprivation I only now feel is intolerable? Most of the time I hardly noticed that I was ageing. I did not care. I was too busy. My life is too interesting. With better luck (meaning, if I had not entered Julie’s territory), I could have lived comfortably with something like a light dimming, or a fire dying down almost unnoticed, and arrived at being really old, hardly feeling the transition. And I suppose I can expect soon to be cured of this affliction, when I will look back and laugh. Though at the moment laughing is certainly something hard to imagine. I couldn’t forget how I am suffering now—could I?

How could I have been so callous? When I was young—and not so young—men were always falling in love with me and I took it for granted, exactly like Mary Ford sitting smiling kindly at Jean-Pierre, exactly like Molly
being sweet
to Stephen, and like Bill, sitting there with his hands behind his head and looking up at those stars (not as bright as they might be, with so much pollution—Julie’s stars were
certainly much brighter), knowing that we are looking at him, our eyes dragged towards him while he is (apparently) unaware of it. When a man looked at me in that particular way, the burning accusing eyes, the aggression, the body that made the single flagrant assertion,
I want you
, did I then give him a single compassionate thought? Yet I knew what a terrible thing love is, and there is no excuse. There is a terrible arrogance that goes with physical attractiveness, and far from criticizing it, we even admire it.

It was late. The square’s load of cars was dispersing. It actually seemed, as the vehicles left, that the pavements and cafés and hotels stood higher in relation to the hills, the stars, the trees. People were dispersing, if reluctantly, saying they must go to bed, they must get their beauty sleep.

From a hotel car, arriving late from the airport, there alighted on an empty pavement Henry, with Benjamin Greenfield, the American who had flown in to take a look at his, or his bank’s, investment. Sarah was already on her way to her hotel (her beauty sleep) when Henry came fast up to her, saying, ‘I’m starving. The plane was late. I’ve got to eat. Will you join me?’ She was saying she had eaten, as Benjamin Greenfield came to join them. He and she had spoken often and at length over the telephone, and now felt they knew each other. He too invited her for a late supper, but she converted the supper into a possible breakfast. Henry stood by while this went on, and then she found Bill beside her. He embraced her with ‘Good night Sarah. I do so want to talk over a problem with my uniform tomorrow.’ She introduced him, as he had intended, to Benjamin. ‘Our American sponsor, and this is one of the stars of
Julie Vairon
.’ Benjamin was led back to the pavement outside the café and its spread of tables, now mostly empty. Sarah watched how Bill deferentially pulled out a chair for the older man and sat down, leaning forward. Sarah did not allow her eyes to meet Henry’s: she knew that he was thinking, as she was, Well, it’s a cruel profession. Henry now decided that after all he would do without supper.
Stephen came up with Molly. The four walked together to the hotel. There Sarah stood in the foyer with Henry and they watched Stephen take Molly by the arm and lead her to a display case showing photographs of the real Julie, who could now be bought not only as her own self-portraits but as scarves, lockets, and various types of T-shirt. Stephen and Molly had their backs to them. Henry smiled, ironic, at Sarah. She smiled, ironic, back. This exchange was balm and butter on open wounds. ‘Show business,’ said Henry briskly, and then, ‘And now I’m going to telephone my wife. An exercise in relativity, this time business. She is just putting my son to bed.’ With another smile at Sarah, he ran lightly up the stairs, disdaining the lift, while Sarah chose the lift, not looking back down at the foyer, where she knew Stephen made excuses to stretch his moment alone with Molly.

It was a night of truly atrocious suffering. To be in love—always bad enough, unless kisses match imagined kisses. But to hate oneself for it: she kept seeing Bill come modestly up, then embracing her, with one eye on ‘our American Croesus’.

Suppose Bill did turn up at her door now. He would not. But…patience. Years ago, left a widow, she had gone through months, years, believing that if she could not have him, her dear and familiar husband, beside her at night, there was no point in living. This soon converted to: if she could not sleep enfolded with a man, then…Soon, and expectedly, she arrived at a state where to sleep alone was a gift, and a grace, and she could not believe that so recently she had wept and suffered for the sake of a man’s body companioning hers. After that—years of equanimity. Sexlessness? Well, no, for she sometimes masturbated, but not because she longed for a particular partner. She had perfected the little activity so that it was briefly accomplished, a relief from tension but without pleasure, rather with irritation because of the gracelessness of it. Self-divisive too, because the narcissism which is so much part of eroticism now could not be fed by thoughts of how she was—was now: images of her own charms could
not fuel eroticism as, she only now understood, they once had, when she had been almost as much intoxicated with herself as with the male body that loved hers. Nor could she dare to admit memories of how she had been, because they had latent in them a dry anguish of loss—dangerous, for did she really want to live accompanied with multiple ghosts of herself, as old people often set around their rooms photographs of themselves when young? Now, in carefully controlled fantasies, she was voyeur, because some kind of pride, expressed as an aesthetic choice, forbade her participation in scenes of young bodies, male and female—or, at any rate, female and male bodies as central figures, the main actors, even if assisted by others in supporting roles, ambiguously sexed. The figures she imagined were never people she knew: she did not care to make use of them. This sexual landscape had about it something ritual, permitted, as part of the life of some people, or tribe, from the past (or the future?), in a place set apart for love-making. But she could almost think of this sex as impersonal, partly because of her own non-participation in it. Certainly it had as much to do with real eroticism and its multifarious submissions to pleasure, its celebration of male and female, as chewing gum has to do with eating.

Where now was the cautious woman? Her erotic self had been restored as if the door had never been slammed shut. Above all, she was no longer divided. Her fantasies were as romantic now as when she was adolescent, and as erotic as when she had been a ‘love woman’, and were of herself, herself now, and this was because, embraced by Bill, she had felt his desire for her so strongly announce itself. She lay mouth to mouth with Bill, and his thick red penis was inside her as far up as her throbbing heart. Lust and anger beat through her in waves, and tenderness absorbed both.

She could feel him there with her so strongly she could hardly believe he was not there, would not knock at her door. This was how the myths and legends of the incubi and succubi had emerged: born
of this powerful longing. A couple of hundred years ago, she would easily have been persuaded that a sensual demon was in her bed, a demon all vitality…. That animal vitality of Bill’s, what did it remind her of? Of photographs of herself, young, when she had exactly this robust attractiveness, an animal and glistening physicality, arrogant and even cruel in its demands on whoever looked—and desired. If people fall in love with their own likenesses (and you can watch them doing it, every day), then she had now, at least in part, fallen in love with that girl whose calm but proud set of the head, eyes looking straight back at the photographer, had made the statement: Yes, I know, but hands off.

It goes without saying her sleep was full of erotic dreams. The alarm woke her at eight, and almost at once, his alarm having woken him, Stephen rang from the room just above hers to say he had scarcely slept but had taken a sleeping pill in the early hours and at last felt sleepy, would she wake him later, say at eleven? ‘After all, I don’t really have to see this American chap, do I?’ ‘We thought you’d like to know your fellow sponsor.’ ‘I am sure I would, but another time, Sarah.’

She dressed carefully. Women of a certain age (and older) have to do this. What she wore became her, certainly. In the glass she saw a handsome woman in white linen who had about her a dewy look far from the competent asperities appropriate to her real age. This was because of the elixirs romping in her blood. Her whole body ached, but this did not show. ‘Amazing,’ she said aloud, and descended the stairs at a brisk rate, because her condition made it impossible for her to move slowly. Henry was in the foyer. He gave her a glance, but his eyes returned to her for a slow look, all approval. They exchanged the smiles of comrades-in-arms: if thoughts of Bill were shame, anger, and poison, then Henry and the healthful complicities of being with him were their antidote. He watched her walk out: she could feel his eyes on her.

Benjamin was waiting for her at the café table. She sat, making
apologies for Stephen. She was amused that everything about this agreeable man, who was good-looking in a calm and sensible way, repudiated the casual ways of the theatre, and even the holiday airs of Belle-Rivières. He wore expensive white trousers and a white linen shirt, and filled them accurately, in the way that says, This one has to watch what he eats. His hair—greying, he must be fifty—was appropriate to his sober station in life. There was not a hint about that immaculate personage of the sartorial eccentricities allowable in Europe, and particularly in Britain. He sat at his ease, aware of everything going on around them: not much yet, for there were still only a few people on the café pavement. One was Andrew, apparently contemplating the cars already creeping around the square looking for crevices to fit themselves into. His pale blue jeans and shirt were no different from what any other member of the company might wear, but on him they suggested horizons. He was a lonely and austere figure: as she thought this he was brought a great plate of ham and eggs, and he began eating with gusto. He had not seen her and Benjamin, or did not want to see them. If it is interesting, who sits next to whom in a company of people working together, then even more so are the moments when one of them chooses solitude. As she turned her attention back to Benjamin, Andrew raised his hand in greeting, without looking at her.