Love Again

by Doris Lessing

‘No, Hal, I can’t say I have.’

  ‘You aren’t getting any younger, are you? And it’s time you stopped all this theatre nonsense. We could buy a place together in France or Italy.’

  ‘No, Hal, we could not.’

  There he stood, gazing somewhere in her direction with wide and affronted eyes, his palms held out towards her, his whole body making a statement about how badly he was being treated—he, who was entirely in the right, as always. This big babyish man, with his little tummy, his little double chin, his self-absorbed mouth, making a total demand for the rest of her life, was not seeing her even now. Sarah went close to him, stood about a yard away, so that those eyes that always had so much difficulty actually looking at someone must take her in. She said, ‘No, Hal, no. Did you hear me? No. No. No. No. No. No, Hal—finally, no.’

  His lips worked pitifully. Then he turned sleep-wise around and rolled slowly out of the room, with the cry, ‘What have I done? Just tell me. If someone would just tell me what I’ve done?’

  Anne took a flat, and Joyce went to live with her mother.

  Briony and Nell were outraged and would not speak to Anne or to Joyce. They announced they intended to marry their boyfriends, but their father wept and begged them not to leave him. At last they understood how much their mother had shielded them from, how much they had not noticed. Pride did not allow them immediately to forgive Anne, who, they kept saying, must shortly come to her senses. Meanwhile Sarah was a transmitter of messages.

  ‘What did Mummy say when we said we wouldn’t ever speak to her again?’

  ‘She said, “Oh dear, but when they get over it remind them they have my telephone number.”’

  Briony said angrily, ‘But that’s patronizing.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell your mother so?’

  ‘Sarah, whose side are you on?’

  And Nell, a week or so later: ‘What are they doing over there?’

  ‘You mean, how are they spending their time? Well, your mother’s working as usual. Joyce is cooking for both of them. And she’s trying to learn Spanish.’

  ‘Cooking! She’s never cooked; she can’t even boil an egg.’

  ‘She’s cooking now.’

  ‘And I suppose she thinks she’s going to get a job with Spanish?’

  ‘I said she is trying to learn Spanish.’

  Sarah did not tell them how happy their mother was. She realized she had never seen Anne anything but long-suffering, tired, exasperated. Anne and Joyce were like girls who had left home for the first time, sharing a flat. They made each other little treats, gave each other presents, and giggled.

  Then Briony: ‘Doesn’t Joyce ever actually say anything? I mean, she must be awfully pleased with herself.’

  ‘Well, yes: she says all her dreams have come true.’

  ‘There you are, we knew it!’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘All her dreams have come true. That’s all she ever wanted, just to have mummy all to herself.’

  ‘But, Briony, just a minute…surely you don’t imagine…’

  ‘What?’ demanded Briony, already affronted by the new dose of unpleasant reality announced by her aunt’s tone.

  ‘Well—don’t you see? She’s not going to stay at home, is she?’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  ‘Well, she’s going to get bored, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh no…’

  ‘She’ll be off and back again, it’ll all go on the same.’

  ‘But it just isn’t fair,’ said Briony.

  From Elizabeth came a letter and a package. The letter said that when his divorce came through, she was going to marry a neighbour, Joshua Broughton. Perhaps Stephen had mentioned him? She had known Joshua all her life. It would be nice to run the two farms together. She said that her commitment to the Queen’s Gift Entertainments would continue, but perhaps not as much as when Stephen was there to help. She did not mention Norah.

  The picture she enclosed had hung on the wall in Stephen’s bedroom. There was also a photograph.

  When Sarah saw what the picture was, she felt she had never known Stephen, even that their friendship had been an illusion. It was of a bold smiling young woman, dressed in a fashionable white dress with a pink sash. She held a straw hat on her knee and sat in a chair under a tree. The picture could have been by Gainsborough. It had been painted, at Stephen’s request, by someone or other from the little photograph, now yellowing and faded, which was of Julie sitting on a rock in half-shade. She wore a white camisole and a white flounced petticoat. Her arms and neck were bare. Her feet were bare. Her dark hair was loose and blowing away from her face. She was offering herself to whoever had taken that photograph, in her posture, her smile, her passionate black eyes. The photograph had been tinted, and the crude boiled-sweet colours had faded. A tree behind the rock had hints of sickly green, and the rock had a rouged side. Around her neck—was that a necklace? Little blobs of red…no, a ribbon. Why had she tied on that ribbon? It was out of character, so much so it shocked. Perhaps the man who took the photograph—Paul? Rémy?—had said to her, ‘Here is one of the new cameras. Yes, I know you were wondering what was in this great case, but no, it isn’t a musical instrument, it’s a camera.’ She was sitting on the edge of her bed, in her camisole, about to slip it off, or having just slipped it on, saying, ‘Oh no, you aren’t going to take me naked.’ Then he said, ‘Come outside. I’ll always think of you in your forest.’ She tied that red ribbon off a chocolate box around her neck. The chocolate had been a present from a pupil or…could it have been the master printer? Boxes of chocolate were much more in his line than Rémy’s, or Paul’s. He probably sold them from his shop. What had she said, tying on that ribbon? Or Rémy had said, ‘Wait, tie that ribbon around your neck. It makes you look…’ No, that was not in Rémy’s character. Or the person who had tinted the picture of the seductress (the studio which developed the photograph could not have been in Belles Rivières, more likely Marseilles or Avignon, for if anyone in Belles Rivières had caught sight of it then…)—had that person painted in the ribbon? Now, when you examined the thing carefully, and even with a magnifying glass (Sarah did this, switching on a strong light), you could not see if the ribbon had been painted in afterwards, the photograph was so dulled, the tinting had been so clumsy. Had Julie painted in the ribbon after being given the photograph? It was easier to imagine it had been done afterwards, because it was hard to connect the young woman dissolved in love sitting half dressed on the rock with the red ribbon that was a statement of such a different kind. Or was she identifying with the doll she had buried in the forest in Martinique, which had a red ribbon around its neck, as a memento of the guillotine? If so, the only word for that was sick.

  Sarah was examining the photograph as if it were a clue in a mystery story, but presumably Stephen had been staring at it for years. It was the picture that he had hung on his wall, though. Where had he found the photograph? It should be in the museum. Stephen had stolen it, and now Sarah stole it. She tacked it beside the Cézanne picture of the haughty young Harlequin and the serious youth who had put on the clown’s costume to accompany his friend to Mardi Gras. She put the portrait of the fashionable beauty into a drawer.

  Andrew wrote:

  Dear Sarah Durham,

  Since I wrote I have been engaged to be married.

  My sister said to me, Why do you always have to act yourself? This on an occasion I will leave you to imagine.

  I said to her: *****! XXXXX!…????

  She said to me, Be your age.

  I said to her, But that’s the trouble.

  So I proposed to Helen. Your compatriot. She said Americans are solemn and don’t know how to have fun. Helen was working as a stable hand at the ranch near here. It is a ranch where people come to ride and eat and have sex. Helen does allow I am a good stud. She says I work at it. ‘Why do Americans always have to work at everything?’ she wants to know. I said, You can’t buck the work ethic. So I
proposed to Bella. She is a Texan like me. For three months Bella and my sister have been discussing the how-to’s. House or apartment? In Tucson—Dallas—San Antonio? Natural childbirth? How many? and how many films shall I be permitted a year? How should I change my image? They say I am stereotyped. They never talk about happiness, and I would not dare to mention joy. Joy? Who she?

  I’ve learned one thing. My image was right from the start. They got my size all right. So I lit out. As you see. It is lonely here.

  Andrew.

  Poste Restante, Córdoba, Argentina.

  Sarah wrote to Córdoba, Argentina, intending a temperate correspondence, but by the time her letter reached Argentina he was in Peru. Her letter was forwarded there, but his letter in reply, a passionate love letter in which he several times called her Betty (his stepmother?), arrived when she was in Stockholm for the opening of Julie Vairon, and by the time she got round to answering, the problems seemed insuperable. Where was she to address the letter? Should she sign the letter, Much love, Betty?

  By the end of the year, this was the situation in The Green Bird: Meetings were no longer held in the upstairs office but in a rehearsal room large enough to accommodate everyone, for now the theatre seemed full of talented and attractive young people, one of whom had been heard asking, ‘Who is she?’—meaning Mary Ford. ‘I think she was one of the people who started The Green Bird.’

  Sonia dominated everything. She was incandescent with accomplishment, with the discovery of her own cleverness. Her impatient confident young voice and her bright bush of hair, now in an Afro (she wanted to identify with black people and their sufferings), seemed to be in every part of the theatre at once. Virginia, known as ‘Sonia’s shadow’, was always near her. None of the Founding Four had been much in the theatre. Roy’s wife had returned to him on condition that he ‘worked on’ their marriage, and this had meant a family holiday. She was pregnant. He was thinking of accepting a job in another theatre. He said it was bad enough being married to a militant feminist, without having to spend his working days with another. Mary had taken weeks off to spend time with her mother, who was, as a result, better again. If Mary spent all her time at home, the old lady would have a new lease on life. Mary could not afford to do this but might do part time at the theatre and find work to do at home. She was in fact adapting Meredith’s The Egoist for the stage, which novel Sonia had read with approval, saying it was a useful addition to feminist propaganda. Sarah was travelling a good deal, to discuss Julie Vairon and, even more, The Lucky Piece, which out of Britain was called, simply, Julie. Already Julie was playing triumphantly in a dozen cities in Europe and—the demand for beautiful but doomed or damaged girls being gluttonous and insatiable—she would soon be in a dozen more and was about to conquer the United States, as the advance bookings showed. Julie Vairon was certainly being appreciated, but by smaller and more discriminating audiences and in fewer places. In short, Julie had become, like Miss Saigon, the latest in the long list of gratifying female fatalities, and it was easy for people hearing the two stories, Julie Vairon’s and Julie’s, to believe that from Martinique had come two interesting and beautiful girls to try their chances in France. Sisters, perhaps?

  Sarah was pleased she was kept on the move. She needed to move, did not want to start yet on the new and better translation of Julie’s journals, for which she had a contract. The time was not yet, it would be too dangerous, she must recover completely first.

  Often she and Patrick travelled together, and this new phase of their friendship was the pleasantest part of the new regime in The Green Bird. Patrick was as full of newly acquired confidence as Sonia. He was no longer an enfant terrible and had given up his outrageous and gallant clothes because of Sonia’s criticisms. ‘You are middle-aged, for God’s sake,’ she had said. ‘Grow up.’ Sonia had furiously attacked Sarah, Mary, and Roy for babying him. ‘Why did you?’ she accused. Patrick defended them, saying he had enjoyed being babied, but Sonia wouldn’t have it. Enjoyable conversations had taken place between the Four, where Patrick had said his musical was his adolescent act of defiance, enabling him to grow up and become emotionally independent of them, but these had gone on behind Sonia’s back. A good deal did go on behind her back and, they agreed, probably always would. Unless her style—her character—changed, surely unlikely. She would never understand why. She was the chief provider of gossip in The Green Bird, particularly her war with Roger Stent. He had confessed he adored her. Would she live with him? She had replied that while she quite fancied his body, the problem was his mind. ‘I couldn’t face waking up beside you in the mornings.’ What could he do to change her opinion of him? he asked, like a knight of old prepared to overcome obstacles for his lady. ‘You could stop being a theatre critic for a start. You are as ignorant as a toad.’ He confessed his dilemma to her. If he didn’t write negative theatre criticism he would lose his job. That was why he had rubbished Julie Vairon. In fact he had enjoyed it. ‘How do you know? You never even saw the third act.’ She refused to see his difficulties: she had been immediately successful in the first job she had after leaving university. But though pure chance had made him one of the Young Turks, without them what would he be? Merely one of the hundreds of literary hopefuls in London. He was full of conflict. The raucous jeering tone of the Young Turks had now become how people recognized him, but in fact he was a good-natured young man who longed to be a serious critic. Should he write a novel? He was now well known enough to be sure the thing would be reviewed. But how could he write a novel when all his evenings were spent seeing plays? All Sonia said was, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, just get another job.’ He asked if he could come and work at The Green Bird. What qualifications did he have? she demanded, and suggested a course in theatre history. His pride would not let him do this. Besides, it would certainly lose him his job. Sonia told him to grow up—as she had Patrick. Meanwhile everyone waited for the next instalment of the drama, confident that Virginia would keep them informed.

  The Founding Four met sometimes in ‘their’ café, which had been taken over by ‘the children’. Not that they would have dreamed of using this pet name to their faces. For one thing, they had to discuss why it was that Julie Vairon—or Julie—had put an end to the old Green Bird. ‘Before Julie’ and ‘after Julie’—that was how they talked. But they could not come to a conclusion and at last agreed they had been fortunate to have had those years of wonderful comradeship; perhaps, while they were living through them, they had not sufficiently understood how wonderful they were. But now it was all over, and what better could they have done than relinquish the reins to Sonia? It was obvious to everyone else, though not to her, that she was destined to become that recurrent figure in the theatre a clever, competent woman, impatient of other people’s slowness, abrasive, tactless, ‘impossible’, and as salutary as a thunderstorm. She would always have passionate friends and as passionate enemies.

  By early summer Sarah’s anguish had lessened to the point that she would say it had gone. That is to say, what remained was mild low spirits of a kind she could match easily with this or that bad patch in her life, but they were as far removed from the country of grief as they were distant from happiness. She stood in a landscape like that before the sun comes up, one suffused with a quiet, flat, truthful light where people, buildings, trees, stand about waiting to become defined by shadow and by sunlight. This is the landscape recommended for adults. Over the horizon, somewhere else, was a place, a world, of tenderness and trust, and she was removed from it not by distance but because it was in another dimension. This was right, was as things should be…but the parallel line continued, of feeling. For if she was removed from grief, she was removed too (her emotions insisted) from that intimacy which is like putting your hand into another hand, while currents of love flow between them.

  A strange thing, that when in love or in lust the afflicted ones want most of all to be shut up together in some fastness or solitude, just me and you, only you and me, for
at least a year or for twenty, but quite soon, or at any rate after a salutary dose of time, these once so terribly and exclusively desired ones are released into a landscape populated by loving friends and lovers, all bound to each other because they recognize the claims of invisible and secret affinities: if we have loved, or love, the same person, then we must love each other. This improbable state of affairs can only exist in a realm or region removed from ordinary life, like a dream or a legend, a land all smiles. One could almost believe that falling in love was ordained to introduce us to this loving land and its paradise kisses.

  She could look now not only at Stephen’s notes but at her own. They were words on paper, like Julie’s My heart is aching so badly I wish I could put it out of its misery the way you put an old dog to sleep. I simply cannot endure this pain. Words on a page, that’s all.

  She was delivered, she was over the illness and would not go into danger again. She was not going to Belles Rivières for the rehearsals, or even the first night, but would try—she promised—to manage the last night. That is, when Henry was safely gone. Jean-Pierre thought she did not want to go because of missing Stephen. Perhaps he was right.

  Before Julie and being turned inside out, she thought the country of love was so remote from her seasoned and well-balanced self that she could be likened to someone standing outside great iron gates behind which a dog flounced its hindquarters about, not unattractively, a foolish harmless dog no one could be afraid of. But now she knew that the gates separating her from that place were flimsy, no more than hastily tacked up pieces of thin wood, and behind them was a dog of the kind they breed now for murder. She could see the dog clearly. It was the size of a calf. It wore a muzzle. Or was it a mask?—the theatre mask that changes from a laugh to the grimace of grief, and back again.