Love Again

by Doris Lessing

  ‘It all fitted in. She was in trouble with money. A complicated will—that sort of thing. And if we married, her problems would be over.’

  ‘And you were happy?’

  ‘We were…content.’

  ‘That is a very big word.’

  ‘I suppose it is. Yes, it is. And then I began to feel…’ He contemplated what he had felt, and for a pretty long time.

  ‘Did you feel there was no conviction in it?’

  ‘That’s it, exactly. I began to feel like a ghost in my own house—no, well, it’s not my house. Better say, in my own home. I tried to…earth myself. I learned to do all kinds of things. I’m a pretty good carpenter now. I can do any kind of electrical work. I can do plumbing and lay drains. I did it all deliberately—do you understand? Yes, of course you do. To make me part of the place. And to stop me…I felt as if I were floating away. Well, it has certainly made all the difference to the estate. We stopped losing money. We never have to call in workmen. Except for a big building job.’

  ‘And all that didn’t help?’

  ‘Yes, it did. To a point. And then…I came to grief. That’s it. I don’t understand it. It was as if there was a hole in my life, and blood was pouring away. I know that is very melodramatic. But that’s how it was.’

  ‘So when did Julie come into it?’

  ‘She slowly took possession. I heard her music at the festival—you know all about that. And then I went in search of everything to do with her. It was enjoyable at first, like a treasure hunt. And then…it was La Belle Dame sans Merci, all right.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it will pass,’ she quoted.

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes. At least, I haven’t experienced anything different.’

  It was at this point she was tempted—and almost began on her confession—to tell him of her state. But she was in a certain role with him: someone strong, to whom he could show his weakness and not be afraid. Would their friendship survive her saying, ‘I am in love to the point of insanity,’ with a young man, and one he didn’t have much time for? No, for him to be in love with Julie was certainly crazy, but for a woman her age to be in love with a beautiful youth…Even if the said youth was in love with her. He was, to a point. In love: there are people who keep a lock of hair or a piece of cloth in an envelope, sometimes come on it, and tenderly smile. In love: a glow of tender lost possibilities, like the light left behind in the sky at moonset. That would be appropriate to her position: in fact people would like it. Ah me, my sweetly fractured heart that aches gently like a rheumatic knee with the approach of bad weather. As for Bill, what he would like probably would be a kiss and a good cuddle. (At this a savage and forgotten sexual pride raised its head and remarked: Yes? I’d show him better!) Apart from anything else—cowardice was the word—it would be unkind to tell this suffering man who relied on her (who had put a desperate hand into hers), ‘I am weaker than you are. Worse, I’m ridiculous,’ and expect him to add this burden to his. He would have to overcome, for a start, some pretty orthodox reactions. Most men and more women—young women afraid for themselves—punish older women with derision, punish them with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality. If men, they are getting their own back for the years they have been subject to the sexual power of women. She consoled herself with: When this business with Bill is forgotten, I shall still be Stephen’s friend.

  He said, ‘I suppose what I feel is, well, if I could spend one night with her, just one night, that’s all, then everything marvellous would be given to me.’

  ‘One night with whom?’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ he said, but he was not conceding an inch to common sense.

  They sat on, for a while, in silence. Rather, in a jubilation of bird sound. Birds, disturbed by their arrival, had forgotten about them. She could actually feel the sounds, loud, shrill, sweet, soft, ringing along her nerves. Surely nothing like this had happened to her before: that sounds, even the sweetest, were dangerous, made her feel over-exposed? She got up, to escape the assault; Stephen did too, and they strolled towards the house. She was telling him, making a humorous thing of it, about the two tiny children and their tree house, about her pain, as a child. It occurred to her she was entertaining Stephen, making funny stories as one does with an acquaintance or somebody one doesn’t want to come too close: the counterfeit offered to most of the people one knows. A glance showed that he was painfully listening, and he remarked, ‘I think one’s early experiences are mostly pretty awful. I don’t like thinking about them myself.’

  She had been rebuked and was glad of it: he wasn’t going to put up with any second best.

  Elizabeth and Norah returned very late that night, saying they had had a wonderful time: they had learned useful things about the organization of festivals. Why didn’t they have a festival at Queen’s Gift? They stood at the window in a drawing room, looking out into the glamorous night, which they seemed reluctant to relinquish for bed, as they chatted. Both brown with the summer, full of health and accomplishment, they were two handsome women who seemed to have dropped into that room at all only as a favour to a guest: and Sarah thought that Stephen himself looked rather like a guest. He gave his wife today’s news about the Entertainment that would take place in three days’ time: in French, with French music, and singers who were friends of Elizabeth’s from Paris. Sarah then remarked that they could soon expect trouble from the actors’ and musicians’ unions if foreign performers were used. Elizabeth said that when they had expanded and the new building was in use, their Entertainments would no longer be considered amateur, she knew that. Perhaps Sarah could give them good advice? The two women went off to bed with the look of those who have done a social duty.

  Stephen asked Sarah if she would enjoy a stroll, and they walked for an hour across fields, through woods, while the moon slid away and lengthened the shadows. They did not talk. It occurred to Sarah that she was enjoying the silence. More, she was submitting to it, like a cure. A bird breaking out of a tree as they came under it startled her, the noise painfully loud.

  Sarah stayed three days in the house that had stood there four centuries. She was enjoying the feeling that she was one of the hundreds—thousands?—of people who had passed through it. She did any number of agreeable things in it, looked at its pictures and furniture, read its history. Elizabeth and Norah took her for energetic walks, while she advised them on theatre problems. She liked them both, and, particularly, the exuberance of their plans for the future. It appeared that they planned to invite The Green Bird to put on Julie Vairon here at the end of summer, after the run in France. The facilities might not be ready, but the workmen had been given instructions to hurry up everything. This meant Stephen felt he had a good excuse to work with them in the task of putting up a framework of rafters for the roof. On the last afternoon, observing that Sarah was watching, he came down and took her off to walk in the trees.

  ‘I suppose you think it is pretty ridiculous?’ he enquired, meaning his doing physical work. She was thinking that it suited him, for he looked so much better, the cloud gone from his face. Then he said that Elizabeth was grateful for all the advice. ‘That was what we’ve lacked, really. What you’ve got—all the experience of the business side. I know that Elizabeth can seem pretty offhand, but don’t imagine she isn’t as pleased as she can be.’

  Sarah had not thought of Elizabeth as offhand: she was familiar with this kind of woman, borne along on the energy of her competence, not impatient of others’ lesser efforts so much as oblivious of them. Sonia was going to be the same.

  ‘Do you think Elizabeth and Norah believe we are having an affair?’ she made herself ask, and he at once went red. ‘Well, yes, probably, I suppose so. But don’t mind about it. I’m sure she doesn’t. Perhaps she even likes me better for it.’ And then, in a switch of mood, even of personality, for he was suddenly hard and angry: ‘A very sensible woman, Elizabeth. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone as s
ensible. She doesn’t have much time for weakness of any kind.’ A pause. A long one. It was touch and go, she could see, whether he would go on. Then, deliberately, ‘I think I find that as intolerable as anything in my life, that I can’t talk to a woman I’ve lived with for fifteen years as I can to you.’

  ‘Intolerable,’ she said: she was not used to excessive language from him.

  ‘Yes, that’s the word, I think. Yes, intolerable. I find a good deal intolerable, and that more than anything. You see, I don’t think she knows much about me. If you are thinking, But she doesn’t care about you—well, that’s a different issue. But there’s something about a woman you’ve known since you played on a seesaw together not knowing a damned thing about you—yes, intolerable.’

  When she left, they were separating for only a couple of days, because they would meet on Saturday at Belles Rivières.

  The town’s three hotels had been called Hôtel des Clercs, Hôtel des Pins, and Hôtel Rostand. Now there were l’Hôtel Julie, Hôtel la Belle Julie, and Hôtel Julie Vairon. Any muddles about bookings, letters, and telephone calls were considered by the proprietors unimportant put against the benefits of being associated with the town’s illustrious daughter. The hotels had been booked out a month before the opening of Julie Vairon. To avoid ill-feeling, the company had been disposed equally among the three.

  Sarah’s window overlooked a main square composed of houses left to merge into a palette of pastel colours, chalky white and cream, gentle greys, and the palest of terra-cottas, so sympathetically worked on by time (from the look of things, many decades) that only a freshly painted wall, the end wall of Hôtel la Belle Julie, glared white, explanation enough why the town authorities preferred this graceful fading. Sarah’s room was on the corner of l’Hôtel Julie, and from it she could see the windows of a room in Hôtel la Belle Julie, also on the second floor, which had a balcony, with white and pink oleanders in pots. There Bill Collins lay in bathing trunks all Sunday, and from there he had waved to Sarah before sinking back, arms behind his head, in his chair. His eyes hid themselves behind dark glasses. Between Sarah and the young man stood an umbrella pine with a rough reddish bark, and this thick trunk absorbed into itself such a charge of erotic longing she could not bear to look at it, but directed her eyes at an ancient plane tree, with a bench under it, where children were playing. She tried not to look at all at that dangerous balcony once she saw that Bill had been joined by Molly, who lay on a parallel chair. She was not half nude, for her milky Irish skin could not be safely submitted to this sunlight. She lolled in loose blue pyjamas, her arms behind her head. Her eyes were invisible, like his. The two had the luxurious show-off charm of young cats who know they are being admired. Sarah admired them with abandon, while pain sliced through her. Knives had nothing on this: red-hot skewers were more like it, or waves of fire. She had not felt physical jealousy for so long, she had had at first to wonder, What is wrong with me? Have I got a temperature?

  She was poisoned. A fierce poison ate her up, wrapped her in a garment of fire, like the robes used in antiquity to enwrap rivals, who were then unable to pull the cloth from their flesh. Not only the sight of Molly—Bill’s equal, being young—and the hot rough trunk of the tree, but the grainy texture of her curtain, which held hairy light like sunlight on skin, the solid curves of cloud shot with golden evening light, the sound of a young laugh—all or any of these squeezed air from her, leaving her eyes dark and her head dizzy. Certainly she was ill; if this was not illness, then what could you call it? She felt, in fact, that she was dying, but she must put a good face on everything and pretend nothing was happening. No use to pretend to Bill himself, though. When they met that evening as the company assembled outside Les Collines Rouges, his close hold of her did not lack information that he was responding to her condition and wanted her to know it. He let his mouth brush her cheek and murmured, ‘Sarah…’

  They all sat in a crowd on the pavement, tables pushed close, while the sky lost colour and the sound of the cicadas became loud when the roar and grind of the cars and motorcycles abated because there was not one inch left anywhere to park. Thirty or so of the company, English, French, American, and combinations of these peoples, they were united by Julie, and did not want to separate. They ordered food to be served there, on the pavement, and when that was consumed, sat on drinking in the southern dusk that smelled of petrol, dust, urine, perfumed sun-oil and cosmetics, garlic, and the oil used for frites. A hundred years ago, the smell would have been made up of the aromatics released by sun from foliage, and dust and food being cooked in these houses. This evening there was, too, a smell of freshly watered dust: a hose-pipe had begun to spin out arcs of spray under the plane tree.

  It was entertaining to see how they had all disposed themselves: she was sharing with Mary Ford glances that were the equivalent of gossip. She, Mary Ford, had next to her Jean-Pierre, not only because so much was depending on her publicity, but because he fancied her. Opposite Bill sat Patrick. There was nothing for him to do in France, and he was at work on Hedda Gabler, but he had insisted he wanted to see what they were all up to. He sat dramatically sulking because of Bill’s popularity, and because Sandy Grears had no eye for Patrick himself. These three made a triangle drawn in invisible ink on this map of the emotions. On the edge of the crowd sat Sally and Richard, the handsome black woman, the quiet and diffident Englishman, quietly conversing. Sarah had been careful to sit not near Bill but beside Stephen, who was where he could watch Molly. That he had not sat near Molly was an acceptance of his situation that brought tears to Sarah’s eyes, but she knew she was weeping for herself. Tears stood far too often in eyes that until Julie Vairon had seldom to accommodate them. Stephen was gazing at the solid, creamy-fleshed, lightly freckled girl with her hazy Irish eyes, no doubt trying to understand the secret that would transform her—had on occasions already transformed her—into the lithe and fiery Julie. As for Molly, she could hardly be unaware he was attracted to her, but had no idea of the dark lunacies possessing him. When for some reason his eyes were not on her, she stole thoughtful looks at him. Well, Stephen was an attractive man. Handsome. Only when sitting here among so many vivid young people did he have to suffer comparisons. In fact Molly did rather fancy Stephen, or would if she were not besotted by Bill. Probably in his ordinary life Bill was a young man no more conceited than was inevitable, with such looks. Tonight he was absorbing hot rays of desire like a solar panel and was positively shining with complacent self-consciousness, intolerable if underneath had not lived an anxious small boy who sometimes peeped out through those lovely eyes. Meanwhile the company were aware that people strolling past on the pavement looked twice to make sure the young man was as handsome as their eyes told them he was.

  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 country 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.