'I thought, when you went off like that… And Stephen doesn't like it, does he?'
'Yes, he does. He likes it very much.'
'He really does?'
'Yes, really.' And she discarded various sets of words, all to the effect that the play touched Stephen too nearly.
When the time came to go for lunch, she went with Stephen to a restaurant not the same as the company's usual choice. It was obvious he did not want to be with them. There he said he was not hungry. He sat, all dejection, while she trifled with her own food. His breathing wasn't right: he sighed and then sat as if he had forgotten to breathe. He kept shifting his position, leaned forward, leaned back, even unconsciously putting his hand to his forehead in a gesture that was pure theatre: I am suffering. His look at her, when he did at last become conscious of her being there, was a close inspection, apparently hoping to find something in her face, but failing. And there was shame in it, as if he wanted to observe her, though without being observed.
As he parted he said to her, 'All right, but if I'm mad I'm not the only one. I overheard that young jay tell Andrew Stead he was in love with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Well, you, obviously.' And he gave an angry laugh, the first that day. And it was not an accusation of her, but rather on behalf of the lunacy of the world. He went off to catch his train and she went home, dissolved in love. Well, yes, she had known Bill was in love with her. 'In love' — a phrase as you take it, all things to all men. And women. There are as many shades of being in love as there are graduations of colour on cards in the paint shops. All right, then, he had a crush on her. Why not? People had been having crushes on her all her life — or so she seemed to remember. (She added the rider hastily, defensively.) But the interesting thing was her bursting into flame because of hearing it said. Bill had said it knowing it would get back to her. Her body had filled at once with a most horrible desire. A reckless desire. All through that weekend she sat down and jumped up, flung herself on her bed and out of it again, because she would not, would not, succumb, walked around her room for hours, in such a daze and a dream she would not have been able to say at any moment what she had just been dreaming, yet no matter how far gone she was in dreaming, she was stopped again and again by that word impossible. Meaning just that. She was thinking of Aschenbach's passion as an elderly man for the boy in Venice. Is it that we all have to suffer the fate of falling in love, when old, with someone young and beautiful, and if so, why? What was it all about? One falls in love with one's own young self — yes, that was likely: narcissists, all of us, mirror people — but certainly it can have nothing to do with any biological function or need. Then what need? What renewal, what exercise in remembering, is Nature demanding of us?… And so she exclaimed and protested, and quite soon found herself murmuring — tranced, or hypnotized — speaking words she did not take responsibility for, since she did not know what they meant. ' Who? Who is it?' Accepting that she had in fact said or muttered these words, she commented on them that it was not possible she was in love with a handsome youth she had nothing at all in common with except the instant sympathy she owed to his love for his mother. Perhaps when he was seventy, well pickled by life, they might mean the same thing when they used words — yes, possibly then, but she would be dead. He was as innocent as a kitten. What could she possibly mean when she said that? He was horribly calculating. Yes, innocent, for only a man unsure of himself, like an adolescent or someone inexperienced, would need the kind of tricks and seductions he used. (That long, slithering, seductive, calculated caress, innocent?)
Memories she had refused to admit for years now stood around her in beguiling or accusing postures, forcing her to attend to them. She was being forced to remember past loves. And she was remembering her husband. But her memories of him had been put into a series of frames, like photographs, or scenes in a novel — a short novel, since he had died so young, at forty. (Once, and not long ago, to live to be forty in Europe was a great thing, an achievement.) Not a sad novel, not sad photographs. No, for she could scarcely remember the pitiful ending, young widow left with two small children, and those tears — surely she must have shed plenty? — might have been wept by someone else, for all she felt now. And had she ever loved him, her great love, with this burning, craving love? No, that had been a gradual love, leading to the satisfactory marriage that followed. And as a girl, before her husband? More pictures in an album? No, this love was forcing her to feel old loves, making her remember, bringing her face to face with loves she had got into the habit of dismissing with: Oh, adolescent crushes, that's all. But in fact that love, or that, or that, had been intense and terrible, with exactly the same quality of impossibility as this one. And before that? What nonsense that children did not love, did not suffer: it was as bad for them as for their elders. No, she would not think about that, she refused to. She would force herself to recover from this illness. For that is what it was.
She sent Stephen a fax:
'Love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well the dark house and whip as madmen do, and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.'
He sent her one:
'Who so loves believes in the impossible.' Faxes are all very well, but I'd rather hear your voice.
Early on Sunday evening a card was pushed through her door. It was the most charming and guileless card, of a frieze of pink deer, Bambis, rather, nose to nose — kissing. It could not have been in worse taste — for anyone but a small child. The person who sent this card (had asked someone to drop it in?) was a child. (What had he in common with the brutal youth who had slithered that insinuating caress down Molly's back and buttocks?) The card made the statement, I am a little boy. A shock of cold water, but only to her mind. Her emotions were not affected. Her body burned more fiercely, if this were possible. ('I have to tell you how much it means to me, getting to know you. All my love, Bill.') Burn, the word we use, shorthand for such shameful, such agonizing physical symptoms. Quite poetic, really, the word bum.
She had his telephone number, in her capacity as administrator of the theatre. His hotel was not far away. She waited half an hour and telephoned. Exactly as she would have done when 'sexually viable' — a phrase she had found in a sociological article, making her laugh, a dry safe phrase, putting everything in its proper place. (Like bum.) She thanked him for his card and suggested he should come over. It seemed impossible that he would not come over at once, and into her bed. Such are the side products of the physical swellings, wettings, and aches shorthanded in the word bum. She could hear how his voice put guards on itself. She was not too far gone to judge the voice (hearing it like this, without the benefit of his presence) as a trifle vulgar, because of its self- satisfaction, its complacency. She was furious: she had not persuaded him! She had never once gone to sit by him, gone to talk to him, initiated anything. And what did he mean by saying All my love? (Her mind did inform her that she had done this a thousand years ago, finding everything she felt in a phrase or a word: one did this, when in love.) He would drop in, in about an hour. Her body rioted, but her mind, as much under threat as a candle flame in a strong draught, made derisive comments.
She remembered an incident from her childhood, one she had put into a frame long ago, with an appropriate smile. She was six years old. A small boy — he seemed to her a small boy, for he was a year younger than she was — stood with her under a great tree that had in it a tree house and told her that he loved Mary Templeton. He had just embraced her, fat little arms around her neck, a fat wet kiss on her cheek, and an impulsive 'I love you'. Because of the kiss and the arms and the 'I love you' she told him — outraged, self-righteous, dissolved in love for him — that he couldn't love Mary, for she was too old; he must love her. And when he said stubbornly that he really loved Mary, she was full of a conviction of his unfairness. He had kissed her, he had said he loved her, and she could still feel the warm little arms around
her. Mary Templeton was the most glamorous of the small girls, because she went every week to ballet school and was nine years old. (Surely as a female creature she — Sarah — should have known that it was inevitable he must love Mary, because she was out of reach.) Sarah told him that he and she together should set up life in the tree house just above their heads, an arboreal paradise, for she had already in imagination planned the cheese and tinned ham she would take from the pantry, and the old eiderdown from the understairs cupboard. The small boy hesitated, for he did like the tree house, but repeated that he loved Mary..
This incident frozen all those years ago, a baby mammoth in ice, was filling her with the emotions of then. She had adored the plump little boy with his soft dark locks and his wide blue eyes. His wet kiss on her cheek and his 'I love you' had utterly melted her. It was inconceivable he did not adore her. But he had decided to dream of Mary Templeton instead. Long ago, under that tree in a garden since bulldozed to make a housing estate, a desolation of grief had swallowed her. A little child's love. So she had filed it away: a childish love, not to be taken seriously.
When Bill arrived he had with him Molly, Mary Ford, and Sandy Grears, the lighting man. Sarah thought, while hot knives sliced her back, Of course, Bill and Molly are in the same hotel. And Sandy? He was a strong young man, capable, with the good looks of health, a recent addition because of the demands of Julie Vairon, and she had not had time to notice him much. It seemed he had invited the actors to his flat for lunch, and they had all accepted, and some had afterwards gone to Bill's room, and then Sarah had so kindly rung Bill to ask him over. Sarah looked quietly (she hoped) at Bill while he came out with this, but he was only smiling, not looking at her. The four young people were smiling as they came in. In this context Mary Ford was one of them. They were a group she was excluded from as absolutely as if she were dreaming them, and they would vanish when she woke. Meanwhile, in a moment that was short for them but frozen for her in the intensity of observation, she saw them in a frame: Bill standing there in her living room, laughing, his hand on his hip, and the two young women's bodies turned towards him and passive with desire. Their faces were all a hopeful waiting. (Mary Ford too? Interesting.) Sandy broke it, by flinging himself into a chair, saying as he saw Julie's picture pinned there, 'A home from home.'
And now they were all in the camaraderie of the theatre. But only in appearance, for Sarah was on that other shore, excluded, watching. She saw how Bill was dispensing himself in looks and smiles, and how the women suffered. They could not take their eyes off him, any more than she could. He was like a young glossy animal, a deer perhaps? She thought of the biblical scene where all the women, entranced by Joseph, cut their hands with their fruit knives, not knowing what they did, a scene reinterpreted by Thomas Mann — bound to be reset, always, in a thousand contexts, by life. The scene had the same slowed-down underwater quality as an erotic fantasy or an erotic dream.
A lot of chat went on, badinage. Messages were being sent out in that other language that so often accompanies the ostensible exchange. Bill was telling a long humorous tale of how in New York there had been a goodish interval between one engagement and another. 'I was weeks out of work. The telephone didn't ring for me once. Then, suddenly, it didn't stop. I was offered four parts in a week. I didn't know myself.' He was looking not at the women but at Sandy as he spoke. Switching into cockney: 'Reely I di'n't, oo'd'v thort it, me, Bill Collins.' And then in BBC standard, 'The cynosure of all eyes.' Mary Ford murmured, 'Oh dear, I do wonder why.' At once he despatched her a genuinely wounded glance, went red, laughed with pleasure, and at once recovered himself with 'Four! All at once! Too much!' And who was the fourth, Sonia? He tilted back his head and laughed, exposing his strong and perhaps too full throat, and from that position — arrogant, touch-me-not — defended himself with a diagnostic inspection of them all. 'I chose this one, of course. I chose Julie. I couldn't resist her. Besides, I've never been in France, let alone worked there. From dearth to plenty,' he drawled, an American, malicious, and very far from the dear little boy. Molly listened to the real message here, and smiled. It was a small, tight smile. Mary Ford even nodded as she smiled. Sarah could feel that same smile on her own face. Then Bill smiled at Sandy and understanding sliced into Sarah and at the same time — surely? — into the other two women. Of course. This excessively beautiful young man… the theatre… New York. And yes, he had a girlfriend, he had said so. All young men have girlfriends and even wives, if feeling sufficiently threatened. These thoughts careered through Sarah's head while she shouted silently at herself, For God's sake, stop it!
The telephone rang. It was Stephen. He had been crying. He probably still was, for his voice was unsteady. 'I want you to talk to me. Don't say anything sensible, just talk. I'm going mad, Sarah.'
This was not an occasion when one might say, I'll call you back. She told the young people (nearly middle-aged Mary still included with them?) that it was a call from New York about Abélard and Héloïse. She knew that Mary Ford knew this was untrue. Mary at once got up, and the others followed suit — Bill, she saw, and felt a quite excessive pleasure, with obvious reluctance. 'We'll leave you,' said Mary. 'I hope it's not bad news. Not our American sponsor?'
'No, it's not our American sponsor.'
Mary Ford went off down the stairs, that solid young woman like a milkmaid in jeans — her joke. Sandy asked to use the bathroom. Molly went to the door, with Bill just behind her. Sarah, returning from showing Sandy to the bathroom, saw that Bill, unable to resist the waves of longing from Molly, had bestowed himself in an embrace. Molly was dissolved in it, eyes closed. Over Molly's head Bill saw Sarah. He put Molly away from him; she went blindly off. Bill came to Sarah, slid his hand down her back, and kissed her. On the mouth. Nothing at all brotherly about this kiss. He breathed in her ear, 'See you, Sarah,' and slid a hot cheek against hers. Sandy could be heard coming from the bathroom, and before he appeared, Bill had quickly stepped back from the embrace and was going out. Sarah watched the two young men depart down the stairs.
She returned to her bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed and listened to Stephen. He was talking in broken sentences. 'What is this all about, Sarah? What is it? I don't understand. If only I could understand it… ' He was on the other end of that line for perhaps half an hour. Silences. She could hear him breathe, long, sighing, almost sobbing breaths. Once she thought he had put down the telephone, but when she said, 'Stephen?' he said, 'Don't go, Sarah.'
Later he said, 'I suppose I must go and help Elizabeth. I said I would. She does need me, you know. Sometimes I think I'm just an irrelevance, but then I see she relies on me. That's something, I suppose.' Then, 'Sarah?'
'Yes, I'm here.'
'And I rely on you. I can't imagine what you're thinking. I feel as if something has come up from the depths and grabbed me by the ankle.'
'I understand, absolutely.'
'You do?' He was disquieted: solid and equable Sarah, that was her role.
Act Two ended with Julie's miscarriage of Rémy's baby, theatrically so much easier than the death of a small child, which, they knew, would have take the play over, have had the audience awash with tears. Besides, a child was always a nuisance at rehearsals, and if they took her to France she would need minders and nannies. Interesting, how much discussion went on about this. Some found the decision cynical. Henry particularly did. He said, 'It's much easier to believe that this child didn't mean all that much to her, oh no, it was just one of those things, she was pregnant and then she had a miscarriage, too bad.' Henry had a small son, carried photographs of his family, American-style, showed them to everybody and rang his wife every night. Andrew Stead certainly didn't like it. He protested that his child had been callously disposed of. In life, he pointed out, Rémy had gone to the house in the forest to play with the child, had begged the family to see that the child was a reason for marriage. Then Bill reminded them that Julie had had a real miscarriage, of his child. Everyone forgo
t that, he complained. He was sure Paul minded about that miscarriage. Julie had said he did. The journals were consulted. Everyone was reading them. Sarah took her stand on what would 'work'. The point was the effect on the townspeople. They said that Julie had killed her child. But in the play they say Julie induced a miscarriage by swimming in the forest pool's icy water. The essential thing was that she must be blamed for the loss of the child. 'And we can't have two miscarriages — two deaths.' Attempting an echo, from Oscar Wilde, she said, 'To lose one child is sad, to lose two simply careless.' She noted that the Americans did not laugh but the English did. The English in this context included Bill Collins. Sandy and Bill broke, on a single inspiration, into a recital of 'Ruthless Rhymes', an exuberant performance.
Love, Again Page 12
