Love Again

by Doris Lessing

  My dust would hear her and beat

  Had I lain for a century dead;

  Would start and tremble under her feet

  And blossom in purple and red.

  He clowned and postured, bending over Molly, who stood limp, wiping off dust and perspiration and fanning herself, trying to smile. Suddenly, instead of the grave and handsome young lieutenant upright in his invisible uniform there was a hooligan, and he ended by shouting the last two lines again up at Sandy, who was standing on the broken wall of the house, but leaning out from it to loop thick black cable over a branch. The young man’s body was like an acrobat’s, and outlined in tight blue cotton. Knowing exactly how he looked, he let out a loud and equally anarchic laugh, in a moment that had the power to make everyone present, and all morality and decency, ridiculous. All of them, the players actually on the stage—rather the space in front of the ruined house—the actors in ‘the wings’ (the trees), musicians, singers, laughed nervously but they were shocked. Bill glanced quickly around. He had not meant to betray himself, though he had meant to shock. He saw that everyone stared at him and at Sandy, who was now balanced on the wall, arms extended, just about to jump off and down to the earth. Henry came forward, and called out, making a joke of it, but with authority, ‘So you’ve decided to do another play Bill, is that it?’ Bill called back prettily, ‘Sorry, don’t know what got into me.’ And he matily hugged Molly. She stepped back, not looking at him.

  Bill then directed beseeching looks at Sarah. What she felt then was unexpected, compassion that was not tenderness but as dry and as abstract as the eye of Time. His face, in full mid-afternoon sunlight, was a mask of fine lines. Anxiety. On that handsome face, if you looked at it not as a lover but with the eyes she had earned by having lived through so many years, was always imminent a faint web of suffering. Conflict. It was costing him a good deal, it was costing him too much, the poor young man, his decision to appear a lover of women, only women. A lover of women as men love women. He loved women, all right, with that instant sympathetic sexiness natural to him; but he knew nothing of the great enjoyable combats, antagonisms, and balances of sex, of the great game. She found on her tongue Julie’s You do not even know the alphabet. Only those new lines under your eyes know how to talk to me. But that sudden, rare, heartbreaking crumpling of his face at moments when he felt threatened—they were no new lines. Compassion of a certain kind is the beginning of a cure for love. That is, love as desire. The compassion she felt was out of all proportion, like all these emotions washing around and about Julie Vairon. And not unmixed either, at least at moments, with cruelty: dote and antidote together. A picture of cruelty, staining pity: you are causing me all this pain, you are as careless as an inexperienced boy with explosives, allowing all the sexuality you do not admit feeling for your mother to slop about over older women—oh yes, I watched you this morning with Sally, and I watched her respond to you. You not only let it happen, but you make sure the fires are well stoked. Well then, I’m glad for the pain that put those lines on that pretty face of yours…. This was ugly, a million miles from the dispassionate eye of compassion. She knew it was ugly but could not help it, any more than she could hold off the compassion that balanced with it, like a need to put one’s arms around a child that for some reason is fated to stand always on the edge of a playground, watching the other children play.

  The coach came to take them all back to town. Then, at the tables, decisions were made about tonight’s concert. Stephen said he would take Benjamin; yes, tomorrow Benjamin would see the play with its music, but Julie’s music by itself was a different thing, and he shouldn’t miss it. Andrew confirmed this, saying that his life had been changed by her music: everyone laughed at the incongruity of this remark from the gaucho. Henry did not have to be there, and he decided to have an early night. So did Sarah. The two sat together in the dusk outside Les Collines Rouges. He said, ‘I’ll tell you the story of my life, because I like making you laugh.’ It was a picaresque tale of an orphan adopted by a family of gangsters. He ran away from them, determined to be poor and honest, and worked in low joints until…he was watching her face to make sure she was laughing. ‘…And then I was rescued by the love of a good woman, and now, hey presto, or rather voilà, I am a famous theatre director.’

  ‘I suppose you aren’t going to tell me the story of your life.’

  ‘Well, I might at that—one day.’

  ‘And where is your mother in all this?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes. There it is. How did you know?’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘There are mothers and mothers. I have a mother. And you are a witch. Like Julie.’ He was actually on his feet, to escape.

  ‘Then witches come easily. There isn’t a woman in the world who wouldn’t have diagnosed a mother.’

  He leaned forward, his eyes on hers, and crooned, ‘Ob-la-di, ob-la-da’. Then, full of aggression, ‘Wouldn’t you say most of us have them? How about Bill, wouldn’t you say he had a mother?’

  ‘More than anyone here, I would say.’

  ‘And Stephen?’

  She was really taken aback. ‘Funny, I never until this moment thought about it.’

  ‘Hmmm. Yes, very funny. A real laugh, that one.’ And he laughed. ‘It takes one to know one.’

  ‘Why didn’t I think of it? Of course. He was almost certainly sent to a boarding school when he was seven. You know, all the dormitories full of little boys calling out for mummy and crying in their sleep.’

  ‘Strange tribal ways, a mystery to the rest of us.’

  ‘By the time they are ten or eleven, mummy is a stranger.’

  ‘Love with a stranger,’ he sang. Then he leaped up and said, ‘But I’m glad you’re here. Did you know that? Yes, you did. I don’t know what I’d do without you. And now I’m going to ring home.’

  When the lights of the theatre coach came dazzling across the square, she went up to her room. She did not want to see Bill. Nor Stephen with Molly, for this mirror of her situation was becoming too painful. She sat unobserved at her window, her light off, and watched the comings and goings in the square, and the company sitting at the tables below, laughing, talking…young voices. Stephen and Molly were not there. Nor was Bill, or Sandy. Benjamin was being dined and wined by Jean-Pierre. She went to bed.

  She woke, probably because the music had at last been switched off. Silence. Not quite; the cicadas still made their noise…no, it was not cicadas. The spray had been left to circle its rays of water all night on the dusty grass under the pine tree, and its click, click, clicking sounded like a cicada. The moon was a small yellow slice low over the town roofs. Dusty stars, the smell of watered dust. Down on the pavement outside the now closed café, two figures stretched out side by side in chairs brought close together. Low voices, then Bill’s loud young laugh. From that laugh she knew it was not a girl with him: he would not laugh like that with Molly, with Mary—with any woman.

  Sarah went back to her bed and lay awake, tormented, on the top of the sheet. The breath of the night was hot, for the water being flung about down there was not doing much to cool things off. It occurred to her she was feeling more than desire: she could easily weep. What for?

  Sarah dreamed. Love is hot and wet, but it does not scald and sting. She woke as a phantom body—a body occupying the same space as hers—slid away and separated, becoming small. This baby body had been soaked in a stinging hot wetness and was filled with a longing so violent the pain of it fed back into her own body. She turned and bit the pillow. The taste of dry cotton embittered her tongue.

  She lay flat on her back and saw that a street light made patterns on her ceiling. A late car’s headlights plunged the ceiling into day and left it modelled with shadow. There were voices outside in the corridor. One was Stephen’s, the other a girl’s, very low. If that was Molly, well then, good luck to them both: this blessing, she knew, was well over the top.

  Her eyes were not, it seemed, entirely b
ound by this room but were still attending to the dream, or to another, for a world of dreams lay around her and she was immersed in them, and yet could observe her immersion. Very close was that region where the baby in her lived. She could feel its desperation. She could feel the presence of other entities. She saw a head, young, beautiful, Bill’s (or Paul’s), smiling in self-love, gazing into a mirror, but it turned with a proud and seductive slowness, and the head was not a man’s but a girl’s, a fresh good-looking girl whose immediately striking quality was animal vitality. This girl turned away her confident smile, and she dissolved back into a young man. Sarah put her hands up to her own face, but what her fingers lingered over was her face now. Beneath that (so temporary) mask were the faces she had had as a young woman, as a girl, and as a baby. She wanted to get up and go to the glass to make certain of what was there, but felt held to the bed by a weight of phantom bodies that did not want to be flushed out and exposed. At last she did get herself out of bed and to the window. The chairs on the pavement were empty. The square was empty. The hard little moon had gone behind black roofs. The forgotten water spray swung around, click, click, click.

  There were words on her tongue. She was saying, ‘…passing the stages of her age and youth, entering the whirlpool…yes, that’s it, the whirlpool,’ said Sarah, not sure whether she was awake or asleep. Was she really sitting by the window? Yes, she was fully awake, but her tongue kept offering her, ‘…stages of my age and youth, entering the whirlpool.’

  She was dissolved in longing. She could not remember ever feeling the rage of want that possessed her now. Surely never in her times of being in love had she felt this absolute, this peremptory need, an emptiness that hollowed out her body, as if life itself was being withheld from her.

  Who is it that feels this degree of need, of dependence, and who has to lie helpless waiting for the warm arms and the moment of being lifted up into love?

  It was four o’clock. The light would come into the square in an hour or so. She showered. She dressed, taking her time, and, ready for her day, went back to the window. The tops of the trees went pink, and light poured over the still unpeopled town. An old woman came down Rue Julie Vairon and into the square. She wore a long-sleeved cotton dress, white, with a pattern of small mauve bouquets, and black collar and cuffs. Her white hair was in a bun. She walked slowly, careful where she put her feet. She sat herself on the bench underneath the plane tree, first brushing the dust off carefully with a large white handkerchief. She sat listening to the sound of the sprayer, and to the cicadas when they started. When the birds began, she smiled. She liked being alone in the square. She did not know Sarah watched her from her window. Her mother had probably sat there on that bench, alone in the early morning. Her grandmother too, thinking cruel thoughts about Julie.

  Sarah let herself out of her room, went down the stairs. No one yet at reception. She slid back the bolt on the hotel’s main door and was on the pavement. As she went past, she sent a smile to the old woman, who nodded and smiled at her. ‘Bonjour, Madame.’ ‘Bonjour, Madame.’

  Julie’s house in the hills was about three miles away. Sarah took her time, because it was already hot. Pink dust lay along the edges of the tarmac, reddened the tree trunks and the foliage. Leaves drooped, made soft by a long absence of rain. The sun stood up over the hills and filled the rough pine trunks with red light and laid shadow under the bushes. Julie’s landscape was an ungiving one, dry and austere, nothing like the forests of her Martinique where the flowers’ perfumes were heavy, narcotic. Here there were the brisk scents of thyme and oregano and pine. The tarmac had ended. Sarah walked where Julie had, thinking of all that separated her from the woman who had died over eighty years before. By the time she reached the house, hot air was dragging at her skin. Already two young men were at work setting chairs to rights and picking up the detritus of last night’s concert. This empty place, surrounded by old trees, seemed the proper stage for ancient and inexorable dramas, as if onto it would walk a masked player to announce the commencement of a tale where the Fates pursued their victims, and where gods bargained with each other over favours for their protégés. Interesting to imagine Julie’s little tale being discussed by Aphrodite and Athene. Sarah walked past Julie’s house, now burdened with cables and loudspeakers, thinking about why one could only imagine these two goddesses like bossy headmistresses discussing a girl with a propensity for disorder. (‘She could do much better if she tried.’) Yet if Julie was not a ‘love woman’, then what was she? She had embodied that quality, recognizable by every woman at first glance, and at once felt by men, of the seductive and ruthless femininity that at once makes arguments about morality irrelevant—surely that should be Aphrodite’s argument? But the woman who had written the journals, whose daughter was she?

  I tell you, Julie, had said Julie to herself, something like ninety years before Sarah walked slowly in the hot morning away from her house towards the river, if you let yourself love this man then it will be worse for you than it was with Paul. For this one is not a handsome boy who could only see himself when he was reflected in your eyes. Rémy is a man, even if he is younger than I am. With him it will be all my possibilities as a woman, for a woman’s life, brought to life. And then, Julie? A broken heart is one thing, and you have lived through that. But a broken life is another, and you can choose to say no. She did not say no. And who was it, which Julie, who said to the other, Well, my dear, you must not imagine if you choose love you won’t have to pay for it? But it was not Athene’s daughter who said, Write your music. Paint your pictures. But if that is what you choose, you will not be living as women live. I can’t endure this non-life. I can’t endure this desert.

  Now just ahead was the river, with its pools and its shallow falls, and the bench the town authorities had thoughtfully provided for people who wanted to contemplate Julie’s sad end. Someone was already on the bench. It was Henry. The curve of his body suggested discouragement. He stared ahead of him, and it was not because he was deaf that he did not hear her approach. His ears were plugged with sound. He had a Walkman in his pocket. The music he was listening to was sure to be as far as it could be from Julie’s. Sarah could hear a frantic tiny niggling, then a small savage howling, as she sat down and smiled at him. He tore off the headphones, and as the music, no longer directed into his brain, swirled about them, he switched the machine off, looking embarrassed. He sang at her, ‘Tell me what love means to you before you ask me to love you’—Julie’s words, but it was a tune she did not know, since she was not an inhabitant of the world he entered when he clamped his headphones on.

  Then he put back his head and howled like a wolf.

  She suggested, ‘I am baying at the moon, for ’tis a night in June, and I’m thinking of you…of who? Of you—hoo.’

  ‘Not bad. Not far off.’

  ‘Have you been here all night?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘But you know it’s going to be all right.’

  He sang, ‘Have you been here all night, but you know it’s going to be all right.’ He said, ‘Yes, I know, but do I believe it?’ He abruptly flung his legs apart, and his arms, then, finding this position intolerable, he threw the left leg over the right, then the right over the left, and folded his arms tight. A bright blowing spray set a bloom of cool damp on their faces. The river ran fast through the forest trees, past reddish and orange rocks, making baby whirlpools and eddies, leaving stains of pinkish foam on the weeds that oscillated at the river’s edge. Above the fall was a wide pool where the water was dark and still, except where the main stream ran through it, betraying itself in a swift turbulence that gathered the whole body of water into itself at the rocky edge, flinging up spray as it fell into another pool, where it seethed like boiling sugar syrup among black rocks. This was not a deep pool, though it was the famous whirlpool that had drowned Julie and—so some of the townspeople said—had drowned Julie’s child. (How could they have said it? Had there not been a doctor an
d the doctor’s certificate? But if people want to believe something, they will.) Below this treacherous pool, past a mild descent among rocks, was another, large, dark, and quiet except where the water poured deeply into it. It was this pool where Julie came to swim, but only at night, when, she said, she could cheat the Peeping Toms.

  ‘To drown herself there must have needed a real strength of mind,’ said Sarah.

  ‘She was probably stoned.’

  ‘She never mentioned drinking or drugs in her journals.’

  ‘Did she say everything in her journals?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then I’ll go back to my first interpretation. When I read the script I didn’t believe in the suicide.’

  ‘You mean, you agree with the townspeople? They thought she was murdered.’

  ‘Perhaps they murdered her.’

  ‘But she was just about to become a respectable woman.’

  ‘That’s just the point. Suppose they didn’t like the idea of this witch becoming Madame Master Printer.’

  ‘A witch, you keep saying.’

  ‘Do you know what, Sarah? I dream about her. If I dreamed of some sugarplum all tits and bum, then that would be something, but I don’t. I dream of her when she’s—well, getting over the hill. Well over.’

  She turned her head to see his smile, sour, a bit angry, and close to her face.

  ‘Sex appeal isn’t all bum and tits,’ said she, returning his vulgarity to him.

  He sat back, gave her an appreciative but still angry smile, and said, ‘Well, yes, I’d say there was some truth in that. Of course, as a good American boy, I should only be admitting to nymphets, but yes, you’re right.’ He sprang to his feet, grabbed up her hand, kissed it. Her hand was wet with spray. ‘Sarah…what can I say? I’m off to get some sleep. If I can. I’ve got a technical rehearsal at eleven. Roy is rehearsing the townspeople. And I’ve got the singers this afternoon. Will you be there? But why should you be?’