Love Again (28 page)

On press night, he had arrived five minutes before the curtain went up, wearing a large curly red beard. He had bought a seat, under a false name, in the front row of the stalls and sat himself down in it, folding his arms and staring belligerently around. Clearly he expected to be evicted. No one took any notice until the first interval, when Sonia, with one of the stagehands, sauntered along to stand just in front of him.

‘Auditioning, do you think?’ enquired Sonia.

The well-briefed stagehand solemnly played his part: ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t really see what we could use him for.’ And she proceeded to describe his attributes as if he were being sold in a slave market, ending by pinching his thigh with a look of distaste. ‘Quite meaty, though. Perhaps we could use him as a stagehand?’ And she strolled on and out, followed by her accomplice. Roger Stent had not moved a muscle under this attack. People who had stayed during the interval spread the tale, and it earned a spiteful (and of course inaccurate) paragraph in the
Evening Standard
. The young man was in what he felt to be a quite tragic dilemma. He had enjoyed
Hedda Gabler
. The fact was, he had hardly ever seen a play in his life, and now he was secretly reading plays, was fascinated by this new world. Meanwhile the group of Young Turks continued to claim, as a main article of faith, that the theatre was ridiculous and, in any case, dead in Britain. What had begun as the spiteful, casual impulse of the young editor of
New Talents
had become a dogma not to be questioned. Roger was still accepted in the group only because of his willingness to despise the theatre. Like all cowardly reviewers, who for one reason or another do not want to commit themselves by saying that a play—or a book—is either good or bad, he used up his five hundred words with a description of the plot, ending ‘This tedious play about a bored housewife whose symptoms would be cured by a good workout was well enough presented, but why put it on at all?’

He was secretly trying to get himself another job, but the world of newspapers and periodicals is a small one. He had booked himself in for two weeks of the Edinburgh Festival, where he could indulge this new interest, so he believed, without his cronies knowing about it.

Sarah was overwhelmed with work, and just as she had decided to telephone Mary Ford and beg her to come home, Mary rang her to say she was on her way.

‘What am I doing here, Sarah? No, don’t bother to answer that.’

When she got back she reported that
Julie Vairon
continued her triumphant progress, and there were already enquiries about tickets for next year.

The two women worked like demons all day, and in the evenings Mary was with her mother, who was pretty ill now, and Sarah found herself buying beauty creams, trying to find in her mirror comfort in this aspect of her face or that, and buying clothes too young for her.

I don’t want to know what I was dreaming last night. I woke this morning flooded with tears. I could weep and weep
. For what?

I have to come back to the same question: how is it I lived comfortably for years and years and then suddenly am made ill with longing—for what? By deprivation—of what? Who is it that lies awake in the dark body and heart and mind, sick with yearning for warmth, a kiss, comfort
?

Sarah, who had not for years thought of marrying, or even of living with a man, had believed herself to be happily solitary, now watched long submerged fantasies surface. She would be on the lookout for a man with whom to share this love she was carrying about with her like a load she had to put into someone’s arms. (But the fevers she suffered from had nothing to do with the affections and satisfactions of connubial living.) Forgotten selves kept appearing like bubbles in boiling liquid, exploding in words: Here I am—remember me? She told herself she was like one of those chrysalides attached to a branch, outwardly dry and dead, but inside the case the substance loses form, seethes and churns, without apparent aim, yet this formless soup will shape itself into an insect: a butterfly. She was obviously dissolving into some kind of boiling soup, but presumably would reshape at some point. Never mind about butterfly-hood: she would settle for as-you-were.

Henry flew in from Pittsburgh and
Salomé
for a weekend of auditions for a new Paul and a new Julie.

Meeting Henry again was like that deep involuntary sigh of a child finding itself lifted into longed-for arms. Henry greeted Sarah with his cry of
Sarah
! and a smile both passionate and ironical, and she fell in love there and then. An interesting moment, when you observe one man sliding out of your heart while another slides in. But did it matter? The sufferings she was going through obviously had nothing to do with Bill, or Henry. People carry around with them this weight of longing, usually, thank heavens, well out of sight and ‘latent’—like an internal bruise?—and then, for no obvious reason, just like that, there he was (who?), and onto him is projected this longing, with love. If the patterns don’t match, don’t fit, they slide apart, and the burden finds its way to someone else. If it doesn’t go underground again—become ‘latent’.

It was sweet to be with Henry. There was an innocence about it, a gaiety. Innocent, when sex burned in the air, invisible flames?

Throughout all of a Saturday and a Sunday morning, Henry, herself, and Stephen, with Mary and Roy at their separate table, sat in the dusty church hall and watched Julie and Paul incarnated in a variety of young men and women, all wearing bright sporty clothes and athletes’ shoes and speaking the words that Molly McGuire and Bill Collins had made their own. A girl musician, with a flute, provided enough music to suggest the rest. But while Julie’s music came and went in fragments and snatches, matching the scenes chosen by Henry to try out these players, Sarah could hardly bear it, for every run of notes, or even a single note, was like that piano chord played to indicate a change of key, setting off a song, or a melody, which repeated in Sarah’s head, one that had nothing at all to do with Julie. She was compelled to listen to it, had to hum it: it had taken her mind over. Had she dreamed this song? If you wake with a tune in your head or words on your tongue then you have to let tune, words, wear themselves out, you can’t simply say no to them, or push them away.

‘What’s that you keep humming?’ asked Stephen.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I simply cannot get it out of my head.’

But Henry knew, and had known all the time. He sang, not looking at her:

‘Bob Dylan,’ he said, and knowing that she must wish herself invisible, he jumped up and went over to the players.

Stephen said, ‘I’ve got Julie’s music ringing in my head all the time, and I’m surprised you’ve room in yours for anything else.’

His reaction to the Julie chosen by Henry surprised Sarah. The girl was typecast, unlike Molly, who did not look anything like the template. Sarah thought that for Stephen it must be as if Julie had walked into his life, but he only remarked, ‘Well, let’s wait and see.’

And then Henry went off, the bonds of that insidious intimacy the theatre going snap, snap, goodbye—until early August, three weeks away.

Sarah had decided to take three weeks’ leave but changed her mind. She was afraid of her demons. Besides, there was so much work.
Julie Vairon
might come into the West End, if successful at Queen’s Gift: there were already enquiries. There was talk of a musical based on
Tom Jones
, but this was much more ambitious even than
Julie Vairon
; would Sarah like to try her hand at the script? She thought not. She had no energy, though she wasn’t going to say so to her colleagues. Did they not already have enough on their plates?
Hedda
was going to transfer to the West End, and Sonia would occupy herself with that. The rehearsals would soon begin for
Sweet Freedom’s Children
, a play based on the last days in Italy of Shelley, Mary, and their circle.

Again Sonia accused them of being workaholics, and this led to
a family discussion about work. Could they be classified thus if they enjoyed working and never thought of it as work? Sonia said this was just like them, sitting around in the office and chatting theoretically about something when there was a crisis. But what crisis? protested Sarah, Mary, and Roy—Patrick was still away. Sonia said she had a friend, trained in theatre management. Virginia, named after Virginia Woolf. Very well, said they, let’s try her out.

‘Well,’ said Mary, ‘it was all too good to be true, wasn’t it? The four of us working for years and years without so much as a cross word?’

Sarah got herself to the theatre every day. She was able to do this, and it meant everything: meant, specifically, that she was not ‘clinically’ depressed. She was grading her condition according to a private scale. Although grief seemed to get worse every day, she was not anything like as bad as Stephen’s face had told her he was, for instance when he saw the poster of Julie as an Arab girl in his garden, or at the waterfall in France. I’ve never experienced anything like that, she still thought. At least, not as far as I can remember. Of course in a long life there had been miseries…

She wrote:

She wrote:

She thought, If I had been in an earthquake or a fire and every one of my family had been killed, if as a young woman my husband and children had been killed in a car crash, I would have felt some
thing like this. Absolute loss. As if she had been dependent on some emotional food, like impalpable milk, and it had been withdrawn. Her heart ached: she was carrying a ton weight in her chest.

She wrote:

She wrote:

She wrote:

But she was still not in as bad a state as Stephen’s. He rang her most evenings, as the day ended. As the light went—a melancholy time. The hours before dinner were hard for him, he said. It was hard for the animals too: he could swear the horses and the dogs had a bad few minutes when it got dark. ‘Our dog Flossie—you
know, the red setter—she always comes to me when it gets dark so I can make a bit of a fuss over her. We forget that for millions of years every creature on earth was afraid when night came.’

‘And now we don’t feel frightened, we feel sad.’

‘We feel both.’

He would ask her what she had done that day, and tell her what he had, in the careful, meticulous way that she recognized—though she did not want to—as a prophylactic against the absentmindedness of grief. He asked what she had been reading, and told her what books were piled up on his night table, for he was not sleeping much.

They might talk for an hour or more, while he looked from his window over darkening fields. He could hear the horses moving about, he said. As for her, she had a plane tree outside her window, its middle regions at eye level, and through it she watched the lights of the windows opposite.

He came to town and they went to Regent’s Park on a sunny afternoon, when sky, flowers, trees, and sun seemed determined to make a festival for them. They walked through scenes of pleasure, people strolling about, and children and happy dogs, but his eyes were heavy and abstracted. He kept putting his hand into a pocket where there was a book, as people touch talismans, and she asked what it was. He handed her
The Dynamics and Contexts of Grief
. She glanced into it and was about to hand it back, but he insisted, ‘No, it’s useful. For instance, I know now I’ve “internalized” Julie. That explains what happens when you hear God knows what he sees in her.’

‘And therefore is Love painted blind…but I’m afraid I find literature more useful than the…psychological recipe books.’

‘I didn’t say I wasn’t finding literature useful. But it’s come down to Proust. He’s the only one I can keep my attention on. At least now, when I feel like this. Funny thing is, I used to find him self-indulgent.’

‘And I’ve been rereading Stendhal.
Love
. And he’s much shorter than Proust.’

‘But is it any better?’

‘Both could combine being romantically in love with a very cold intelligence.’

‘Like Julie.’

‘You wouldn’t have said that when we first met.’

‘No.’ And he sighed. It was almost a groan. He had come to a stop, apparently in contemplation of swans floating whitely among their reflections. A silence. It went on far too long.

‘Stephen?’ No reply. ‘Shall I lend you
Love
?’

‘Why not?’ he said, but after quite an interval. He was very far away.