Love Again

by Doris Lessing

  She stood at her window, looking down at the company, and knew that this loss, the desolation of being excluded from happiness, could only refer back to something she had forgotten. Had she too been that child who had stood on the edge of a playground, watching the others? She had forgotten. Fortunately.

  And soon all this would have put itself into the past. Julie Vairon would never take shape in this way again, in this setting, with these people. Well, it was not the first time—rather perhaps the hundredth—that she had been part of some play or piece, and it had always been sad to see the end of something that could never happen again. The theatre, in short, was just like life (but in a condensed and brightly illuminated form, forcing one into the comparison), always whirling people and events into improbable associations and then—that’s it. The end. Basta! But this event, Julie’s, was not anything she had known before. For one thing, she had not been ‘in love’—why the inverted commas? She was not going to make it all harmless with quote marks. No, there was something in this particular mix of people—that must be it—and of course the music…So Sarah talked aloud to herself, walking about her room, returning often to the window, where she could see how Stephen sat next to Molly, while Bill—but enough. She went to her mirror several times during the course of this excursion around and about her room, for an inspection that deserved to be called scientific. That a woman’s interaction with her mirror is likely to go through some changes during the decades goes without saying but…someone should bottle this, she announced aloud to the empty room, visible over her reflection’s shoulder (Woman Gazing Curiously into Her Mirror)…. Yes, someone should bottle these substances flooding me now. They probably did bottle them. Probably potions were on sale in beauty shops and chemists: if so, they should have on the label the warning POISON—in brightest red. It is not merely that I feel twenty years younger, I look it…

  Meanwhile she wrote:

  Dear Stephen,

  I simply have to write this letter, though letters being the tricky things they are and so easily misunderstood, I am afraid. Look, I really am not in love with you. Loving someone is one thing, but being in love another. As I wrote that it occurs to me that ‘loving’ can mean anything. But I really do love you. It is awful that I should have to spell this out. If it makes us both easier, I can say,

  Affectionately,

  Sarah

  P.S. I really cannot bear to think of our friendship being spoiled by misunderstandings as silly as this.

  This was not the letter she slid under Stephen’s door on the floor above hers, for she thought, One can’t say ‘I love you’ to an Englishman. Stephen would take to his heels and run. She tore up that letter and wrote:

  Dear Stephen,

  I simply have to write this letter, though letters being the tricky things they are and so easily misunderstood, I can’t help feeling nervous. Look, I really am not in love with you. I know you think I am. I am very very fond of you—but you know that. It is awful that I should have to spell this out. If it makes us both easier, I can say,

  Affectionately,

  Sarah

  This was the letter she took upstairs, hoping she would not run into him.

  Next morning, very early, she woke to see an envelope sliding under her door.

  Dearest Sarah,

  I’m off. Unexpectedly got myself on an early flight, so won’t see you today. But see you soon in London.

  With all love,

  Henry

  As she stood reading this, another envelope slid towards her feet from under the door. She cautiously opened the door, but it was too late: the corridor was empty, though she heard the lift descending.

  Dearest Sarah,

  I am so unhappy you are going and I may never see you again. You are a very special friend and I feel I have known you all my life. I shall never forget our time together in Belles Rivières and I shall always think of you with true affection. Perhaps next year? I can’t wait!!!

  Gratefully,

  Bill

  P.S. Please feel free to let me know if other productions of Julie are projected anywhere in Europe or the States????????? Why shouldn’t Julie conquer New York? That is a lovely thought, isn’t it?

  While she was drinking coffee at her window, the porter brought two letters.

  Dear Sarah,

  Before leaving the beguiling atmospheres and influences of Julie Vairon, but I am happy to say only temporarily, I feel I must tell you how much it has meant to me to be with you all, but particularly with you. The financial aspects of this enterprise will I am sure prove more rewarding than we ever anticipated, but it is not this that prompts me to write to you. You will, I am sure, find it improbable that I never even suspected the theatre could offer such rewards, though when I think about it, I enjoyed acting in a minor role in Death of a Salesman in the school theatrical group when I was a youngster. When I reflect that all this has been going on ever since and that I have had no part in it, I really can’t forgive myself. And so, my dear Sarah—I hope I may call you that—I look forward to seeing you at Julie’s first night in Oxfordshire.

  Until then—

  Benjamin

  Sarah!

  You won’t know who this is, I suppose, since you are so obstinately gazing in the wrong direction. I am madly in love with you, Sarah Durham! I have not been so overthrown since I was an adolescent. (Yes, all right.)

  Somebody loves you

  I wonder who

  I wonder who it can be.

  Your secret lover

  P.S. I have always been crazy for older women.

  At first shock, this letter actually seemed to her insulting. She was about to tear it up, her fingers trembling, in order to deposit the fragments in the wastepaper basket, when…Wait a minute. Hold your horses, Sarah Durham. She carefully reread the letter, noting with satirical appreciation for her inconsistency the following reactions: First, the attack of false morality. Second, irritation, because she simply couldn’t attend to it, when she was so beset with emotions. Third, the classic retort to an unwanted declaration of love, faintly patronizing pity: Oh, poor thing: well, never mind, he’ll get over it.

  Who was it? Because of what she had heard last night but had at once said to herself was impossible—‘How about it, Sarah?’—she had to admit it must be Andrew. To whom she had never given a thought not strictly professional.

  She carefully put this letter away, to be read later when not intoxicated. To be accurate, when no longer sick. Bill’s letter she did tear up and she dropped the pieces neatly one by one in the basket as if finally ridding herself of something poisonous.

  It was now eight in the morning. She chose a sensible dress in dark blue cotton, partly because she thought, I will not be accused of mutton dressed as lamb, partly because a dull dress might sober her. The noise outside was already so loud she sat for a few minutes, eyes closed, thinking of that long-ago youth on his hillside—absolute silence, solace, peace. But suddenly into this restoring dream the three war planes from yesterday inserted themselves, streaking across the antique sky and vibrating the air. The boy lifted his dreaming head and stared but did not believe what he saw. His ears were hurting. Sarah went quietly downstairs. She did not want to have to talk. In a side street was a little café she believed was not used by the company. The tables outside Les Collines Rouges were all empty except for Stephen, who sat with his head bent, the picture of a man struck down. He did not see her, and she walked past him to the Rue Daniel Autram. Whoever Daniel Autram was or had been, he did not merit pots of flowers all along his street, though on either side of the café door were tubs of marguerites. This café had a window on the street and, presumably, something like a window seat, for she saw two young sunburned arms, as emphatically male as those of Michelangelo’s young men, lying along the back of it. The forearms rested side by side, hands grasping the elbows of the other. The arms being bare, there was a suggestion of naked bodies. This was as strong a sexual statement as Sarah coul
d remember, out of bed. She was stopped dead there, in the Rue Daniel Autram, as noisy children raced past to a bus waiting for them in the square. I have to go back, go back, breathed Sarah, but she could not move, for the sight had struck her to the heart, as if she had been dealt lies and treachery. (Which was nonsense, because she had not.) Then one young man leaned forward to say something to the other, as the other leaned forward to hear it. Bill and Sandy. This was a Bill Sarah had never seen, nor, she was sure, had any female member of the company. Certainly his first mother had never been allowed a glimpse of this exultantly, triumphantly alive young man, full of a mocking and reckless sexuality. And the charming, winning, affectionate, sympathetic young man they all knew? Well, for one thing, that person had little of the energy she was now looking at: his energy was in bond to caution.

  She forced herself to take two steps back, out of the danger of being seen, and walked like a mechanical toy to the table where Stephen still sat. Now he did lift his head, and stared at Sarah from some place a long way off. He reminded himself that he should smile, and did so. Then he remembered there was something else, and said, ‘Thanks for your letter, I’m glad you wrote it.’ And he was glad, she could see that. ‘I did get it wrong, actually.’

  She sat by him. There was nobody else on the pavement yet. She signalled for coffee, since Stephen had not thought of it.

  ‘I got another letter this morning,’ he said. ‘A day for letters.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  He did not hear this, and then he did and came to himself, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Sarah. I do know I’m selfish. Actually I think I must be ill. I said that before, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘The thing is…I’m simply not this kind of person. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  He produced a letter, written on the paper of l’Hotel Julie, in a large no-nonsense hand.

  Dear Stephen,

  I was so flattered when I read your letter and realized you were kindly asking me to spend a weekend with you in Nice. Of course I did know you were fond of me, but this! I do not feel this could be an ongoing committed relationship where two people could grow together on a basis of shared give-and-take and spiritual growth.

  I do believe I can look forward to this kind of relationship with someone I got to know in Baltimore in spring when we were both working on The Lady with a Little Dog.

  So wish me luck!

  I shall never forget you and the days we have all spent together. I can only say I profoundly regret the commitments which make it impossible for me to be Julie in Oxfordshire. Because there is something special about this piece. We all feel it.

  With sincere good wishes,

  Molly McGuire

  Sarah tried not to laugh, but had to. Stephen sat with lowered head, looking across at her, sombre and even sullen. ‘I suppose it is funny,’ he conceded. Then he did, unexpectedly, sit up and laugh. A real laugh. ‘Well, all right,’ he said. ‘A culture clash.’

  ‘Don’t forget they have to divorce and remarry every time they fall in love.’

  ‘Yes, with the Yanks there is always an invisible contract somewhere.’ As she shrugged: ‘Am I being unfair?’

  ‘Of course you’re being unfair.’

  ‘I don’t care if I am. But they must go to bed sometimes just for love’s sake. Of course, I do keep forgetting, she was writing to the old man, didn’t want to hurt his feelings.’

  ‘I believe she might easily have gone with you to Nice…all things being equal.’

  ‘You mean, if she hadn’t been in love with that…I wonder? But if she had gone to bed with Bill—or rather if Bill had kindly gone to bed with her’—here she noted an altogether disproportionate spurt of malice in herself, to match his—‘then she would have been hinting about weddings by the morning. Anyway, one has really to be in love to think that kind of thing is worth it. I mean, Nice and all that. So I was a fool to ask. Otherwise it is just a dirty weekend.’

  She remembered Andrew’s letter and wondered if he was in love. Because to imagine him suffering from lust, that was one thing, and fair enough—but in love, oh no, she wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And she didn’t want to think about it. Too much of everything: she was drowning in too-muchness.

  The coffee arrived. As Stephen lifted his cup, he—and she—noted that his hand shook. No joke, love, she attempted to joke, to herself. He set the cup down again, looking with critical dislike at his hand.

  ‘Believe it or not, a good many women fall for me.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I believe it? Anyway, you don’t have to make a final assessment of your attractiveness or lack of it just because one girl turns you down.’

  ‘Yes, and she’s only a stand-in after all,’ he remarked, in one of his moments of calm throw-away callousness. ‘Perhaps she feels that.’

  ‘As you said that it was as if two different Stephens slid together and one said something the other could never say. Oh, don’t worry, I know the condition well.’

  ‘Obviously people fall in love with you. I’m not exactly blind, though I’m sure you think I am.’ He hesitated, and his reluctance to go on made him sound grumpy. ‘I wanted to say something…If it’s the gaucho you’re…’ He could not make himself say it. ‘I should watch it, if I were you. He’s a pretty tough customer.’ As she did not reply, not knowing how to, he went on. ‘Anyway, it’s not my business. And I don’t really care. That’s what is intolerable. I don’t care about anything but myself. Perhaps I will go to a psychiatrist after all. But what can they tell me I don’t know already? I know what I’m suffering from—De Cleremont’s syndrome. I found it described in an article. It means you are convinced the person is in love with you, even when she is not. The article didn’t say anything about being convinced she would be in love with you if she wasn’t dead.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’ She noted that he had been able to say, apparently easily, that Julie was dead.

  ‘I would say there is a pretty narrow dividing line between sanity and lunacy.’

  ‘A grey area perhaps?’

  This exchange had cheered them both up—her disproportionately. She was wildly happy. Soon she left him to go to Jean-Pierre’s office. She had not been there half an hour before Stephen rang from the hotel to say he was getting on an afternoon flight from Marseilles and he would ring her from home.

  She was busy all day. The performance that night drew an even larger crowd. At the end of the first act—that is, the end of Bill being Paul for that evening, he came to sit by her, but she found herself wanting only to get away. She was missing Henry. Bill’s attentive sympathy cloyed. She preferred the raw, unscrupulously sexual and vital young man she had glimpsed that morning. In fact she could truthfully say that this winning young man bored her, so things were looking up.

  She left farewell notes for Bill and Molly and went to her room. She sat by the window and watched the crowd on the pavement thin. This being the second night, and the tension fast diminishing, people went off to bed early. Soon there was no one down there, and the café’s doors were locked. It was very hot in her room. Airless. Sultry. A dark night, for that acid little moon was blacked out behind what everyone must be hoping was a rain cloud. She would go down and sit on the pavement, alone. She crept down through the hotel, feeling it to be empty because Stephen was gone, and Henry too. As she was about to pull a chair out from under a table, she heard voices and retreated to sit under the plane tree. She would not be seen in the deep shadow.

  A group of young people. American voices. Bill’s, Jack’s. Some girls. They sat down, complaining that the café had shut.

  ‘I just love it, love it…it’s…you know…’ A girl’s voice.

  ‘Er…er…you know, yah, it’s right on.’ Bill. This articulate young man’s tongue had been struck by paralysis?

  ‘It’s just beautiful, know what I mean? It’s sort of…mmm, yeah, I mean to say…’

  ‘Sort of…kind
a…actually, you know, as I saw it…very…’ Jack.

  Another girl. ‘To me it was…er…yeah, it was just…it was actually…’

  ‘Just wonderful, yeah.’

  ‘It makes me feel like…I don’t know…’

  They all went on like this, the educated and infinitely privileged young of their great country, for some minutes. Then there was a clap of thunder, and some drops. They rose in a flock and scattered into the hotels.

  Bill went last, with his pal Jack. Bill said, just as if he had not been conversing in Neanderthal, ‘Yes, I do think we have the last act in balance now.’

  Jack: ‘I still think there should be another four or five minutes of Philippe. It’s slightly underplayed there, for me.’

  Rain swept across the square. She ran through it to her hotel, up the stairs, into her room, and to her window, which was blanked out by a flash flood, gravelly streams that silted up in heaps along the sill and were washed off and piled up again, showing greyish white when the lightning flickered, like the dirty heaps of snow along wintry roads. She sat approaching—cautiously—depths in herself she did not often choose to remember. Few people can reach even middle age without knowing there are doors they might have opened and could open still. Even that sensible marriage of hers had begun sensually enough, and there had been a moment when they had decided not to open these doors. What had since been christened S-M, a jaunty little name for a fashionable pastime (sado-masochism sounded, and was, real, something to be taken seriously), had appeared as a possibility. Her husband had in fact gone in for it with an earlier lover but found that love became hate…rather sooner, he joked, than it might otherwise have done: the two were not suited. She, Sarah, had noticed that women friends ‘enjoying’ S-M had come to grief. People might claim these practices were all as harmless as a game of golf, but it was not what the couple had observed separately. Together, the smallest approaches had aroused in both strong reactions, as if a door were being opened onto a pornographic hell. Enthusiastic practitioners presented a picture something like this: A couple ‘respecting each other’—this was important—permitted carefully regulated cruelties, to the pleasure of both, but these were never permitted to go beyond limits. A likely story. Was it possible that the emotions of two people in any case always on the verge of exaggeration, in sex, or in love, never got out of control in S-M? (Or sado-masochism?) And surely these were not practices for parents? One could too easily imagine scenes of a rosy little bottom (mama’s) and her cries of pleasure, or lethal black shiny straps and her cries of pain, while the children listened. Or papa, trussed like a roasting chicken. ‘Just a minute, dear, I just want to see if Penelope is awake.’ Or, ‘Oh damn it, there’s the baby.’ Or even a childless couple. She has taken the washing out of the drier, he has parked the car, they eat a supper cooked by microwave. ‘How about a little S-M darling?’ No, surely these delights could only be for houses of pleasure, or for brief affairs. Too dangerous—even in sexual relationships of the ordinary kind (boring, so it was suggested by the proselytizers), hidden depths so easily upwelled and flooded both partners with every kind of dark emotion. It was at the time when she and her husband had actually played with the idea (not the practice) that she had found within herself, at first appearing in a dream and then presenting itself as a probable memory, the image of a small girl sitting alone in a room locked from the outside, a small girl with a doll she held between her knees and stabbed again and again with scissors while blood spurted from it…no, the spurting blood was the dream, but the little girl stabbing the doll, that was memory. The child went on and on stabbing the doll, her face lifted, eyes shut, mouth open in a dismal hopeless wail.