He was secretly trying to get himself another job, but the world of newspapers and periodicals is a small one. He had booked himself in for two weeks of the Edinburgh Festival, where he could indulge this new interest, so he believed, without his cronies knowing about it.
Sarah was overwhelmed with work, and just as she had decided to telephone Mary Ford and beg her to come home, Mary rang her to say she was on her way.
'What am I doing here, Sarah? No, don't bother to answer that.'
When she got back she reported that Julie Vairon continued her triumphant progress, and there were already enquiries about tickets for next year.
The two women worked like demons all day, and in the evenings Mary was with her mother, who was pretty ill now, and Sarah found herself buying beauty creams, trying to find in her mirror comfort in this aspect of her face or that, and buying clothes too young for her.
I don't want to know what I was dreaming last night. I woke this morning flooded with tears. I could weep and weep. For what?
I have to come back to the same question: how is it I lived comfortably for years and years and then suddenly am made ill with longing — for what? By deprivation — of what? Who is it that lies awake in the dark body and heart and mind, sick with yearning for warmth, a kiss, comfort?
Sarah, who had not for years thought of marrying, or even of living with a man, had believed herself to be happily solitary, now watched long submerged fantasies surface. She would be on the lookout for a man with whom to share this love she was carrying about with her like a load she had to put into someone's arms. (But the fevers she suffered from had nothing to do with the affections and satisfactions of connubial living.) Forgotten selves kept appearing like bubbles in boiling liquid, exploding in words: Here I am — remember me? She told herself she was like one of those chrysalides attached to a branch, outwardly dry and dead, but inside the case the substance loses form, seethes and churns, without apparent aim, yet this formless soup will shape itself into an insect: a butterfly. She was obviously dissolving into some kind of boiling soup, but presumably would reshape at some point. Never mind about butterflyhood: she would settle for as-you-were.
Henry flew in from Pittsburgh and Salome for a weekend of auditions for a new Paul and a new Julie.
Meeting Henry again was like that deep involuntary sigh of a child finding itself lifted into longed-for arms. Henry greeted Sarah with his cry of Sarah! and a smile both passionate and ironical, and she fell in love there and then. An interesting moment, when you observe one man sliding out of your heart while another slides in. But did it matter? The sufferings she was going through obviously had nothing to do with Bill, or Henry. People carry around with them this weight of longing, usually, thank heavens, well out of sight and 'latent' — like an internal bruise? — and then, for no obvious reason, just like that, there he was (who?), and onto him is projected this longing, with love. If the patterns don't match, don't fit, they slide apart, and the burden finds its way to someone else. If it doesn't go underground again — become 'latent'.
It was sweet to be with Henry. There was an innocence about it, a gaiety. Innocent, when sex burned in the air, invisible flames?
Throughout all of a Saturday and a Sunday morning, Henry, herself, and Stephen, with Mary and Roy at their separate table, sat in the dusty church hall and watched Julie and Paul incarnated in a variety of young men and women, all wearing bright sporty clothes and athletes' shoes and speaking the words that Molly McGuire and Bill Collins had made their own. A girl musician, with a flute, provided enough music to suggest the rest. But while Julie's music came and went in fragments and snatches, matching the scenes chosen by Henry to try out these players, Sarah could hardly bear it, for every run of notes, or even a single note, was like that piano chord played to indicate a change of key, setting off a song, or a melody, which repeated in Sarah's head, one that had nothing at all to do with Julie. She was compelled to listen to it, had to hum it: it had taken her mind over. Had she dreamed this song? If you wake with a tune in your head or words on your tongue then you have to let tune, words, wear themselves out, you can't simply say no to them, or push them away.
'What's that you keep humming?' asked Stephen.
'I don't know,' she said. 'I simply cannot get it out of my head.'
But Henry knew, and had known all the time. He sang, not looking at her:
She takes just like a woman, yes, she does,
She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does,
She aches just like a woman,
But she breaks just like a little girl.
'Bob Dylan,' he said, and knowing that she must wish herself invisible, he jumped up and went over to the players.
Stephen said, 'I've got Julie's music ringing in my head all the time, and I'm surprised you've room in yours for anything else.'
His reaction to the Julie chosen by Henry surprised Sarah. The girl was typecast, unlike Molly, who did not look anything like the template. Sarah thought that for Stephen it must be as if Julie had walked into his life, but he only remarked, 'Well, let's wait and see.'
And then Henry went off, the bonds of that insidious intimacy the theatre going snap, snap, goodbye — until early August, three weeks away.
Sarah had decided to take three weeks' leave but changed her mind. She was afraid of her demons. Besides, there was so much work. Julie Vairon might come into the West End, if successful at Queen's Gift: there were already enquiries. There was talk of a musical based on Tom Jones, but this was much more ambitious even than Julie Vairon; would Sarah like to try her hand at the script? She thought not. She had no energy, though she wasn't going to say so to her colleagues. Did they not already have enough on their plates? Hedda was going to transfer to the West End, and Sonia would occupy herself with that. The rehearsals would soon begin for Sweet Freedom's Children, a play based on the last days in Italy of Shelley, Mary, and their circle.
Again Sonia accused them of being workaholics, and this led to a family discussion about work. Could they be classified thus if they enjoyed working and never thought of it as work? Sonia said this was just like them, sitting around in the office and chatting theoretically about something when there was a crisis. But what crisis? protested Sarah, Mary, and Roy — Patrick was still away. Sonia said she had a friend, trained in theatre management. Virginia, named after Virginia Woolf. Very well, said they, let's try her out.
'Well,' said Mary, 'it was all too good to be true, wasn't it? The four of us working for years and years without so much as a cross word?'
Sarah got herself to the theatre every day. She was able to do this, and it meant everything: meant, specifically, that she was not 'clinically' depressed. She was grading her condition according to a private scale. Although her grief seemed to get worse every day, she was not anything like as bad as Stephen's face had told her he was, for instance when he saw the poster of julie as an Arab girl in his garden, or at the waterfall in France. I've never experienced anything like that, she still thought. At least, not as far as I can remember. Of course in a long life there had been miseries… She wrote:
Something else is going on, something I don't understand. I could not be more bereft if I had lost someone by death, been separated from someone I love absolutely.
She wrote:
I think I am really ill. I am sick — with love. I know this has nothing to do with Henry or that boy.
She thought, If I had been in an earthquake or a fire and every one of my family had been killed, if as a young woman my husband and children had been killed in a car crash, I would have felt something like this. Absolute loss. As if she had been dependent on some emotional food, like impalpable milk, and it had been withdrawn. Her heart ached: she was carrying a ton weight in her chest. She wrote:
Physical longing. I have been poisoned, I swear it. In Stendhal's Love a young woman unexpectedly in love believes she is poisoned. But she was. I am. A doctor in the States will cure you of being in love. It is c
hemical, he says.
She wrote:
If a doctor said to me, You have an illness, and you will have to live for the rest of your life with a pain in your chest, I would get on with it. I would say, Very well, I will have to put up with a pain in my chest. People live with withered arms or crippled from the waist down. So why am I making such a fuss about heartache?
She wrote:
I could easily jump off a cliff or the top of a block of fiats to end it. People killing themselves for love do it because they can't stand the pain. Physical pain. I have never understood that before. The broken heart. But why should an emotional hurt manifest itself as a physical anguish? Surely that is a very strange thing.
But she was still not in as bad a state as Stephen's. He rang her most evenings, as the day ended. As the light went — a melancholy time. The hours before dinner were hard for him, he said. It was hard for the animals too: he could swear the horses and the dogs had a bad few minutes when it got dark. 'Our dog Flossie — you know, the red setter — she always comes to me when it gets dark so I can make a bit of a fuss over her. We forget that for millions of years every creature on earth was afraid when night came.' 'And now we don't feel frightened, we feel sad.' 'We feel both.'
He would ask her what she had done that day, and tell her what he had, in the careful, meticulous way that she recognized — though she did not want to — as a prophylactic against the absent-mindedness of grief. He asked what she had been reading, and told her what books were piled up on his night table, for he was not sleeping much.
They might talk for an hour or more, while he looked from his window over darkening fields. He could hear the horses moving about, he said. As for her, she had a plane tree outside her window, its middle regions at eye level, and through it she watched the lights of the windows opposite.
He came to town and they went to Regent's Park on a sunny afternoon, when sky, flowers, trees, and sun seemed determined to make a festival for them. They walked through scenes of pleasure, people strolling about, and children and happy dogs, but his eyes were heavy and abstracted. He kept putting his hand into a pocket where there was a book, as people touch talismans, and she asked what it was. He handed her The Dynamics and Contexts of Grief She glanced into it and was about to hand it back, but he insisted, 'No, it's useful. For instance, I know now I've "internalized" Julie. That explains what happens when you hear God knows what he sees in her.'
'And therefore is Love painted blind… but I'm afraid I find literature more useful than the… psychological recipe books.'
'I didn't say I wasn't finding literature useful. But it's come down to Proust. He's the only one I can keep my attention on. At least now, when I feel like this. Funny thing is, I used to find him self-indulgent.'
'And I've been rereading Stendhal. Love. And he's much shorter than Proust.'
'But is it any better?'
'Both could combine being romantically in love with a very cold intelligence.'
'Like Julie.'
'You wouldn't have said that when we first met.'
'No.' And he sighed. It was almost a groan. He had come to a stop, apparently in contemplation of swans floating whitely among their reflections. A silence. It went on far too long.
'Stephen?' No reply. 'Shall I lend you Love?'
'Why not?' he said, but after quite an interval. He was very far away.
And now she deliberately made conversation. 'Have you read The Sorrows of Werther recently?' No response. 'Now, that's an interesting case. Goethe was first in love with Lotte and then with Maximiliane Von La Roche. He said himself of Lotte that she was a woman more likely to inspire contentment than violent passions, but it was Lotte he made the heroine.' Stephen was still staring at the same patch of water. Moorhens had replaced the swans. They were energetically propelling themselves about. He sighed again. Hard to tell whether he was listening. 'Obviously it was Maximiliane who inspired the violent passion, but that is not what he wrote.'
She thought he had not heard, but after a time he said, 'Are you saying he was dishonest?'
'It was a novel, after all. I would say he was circumspect. Suppose he had written a novel where young Werther was madly in love with Lotte and then passionately in love with Maximiliane. I don't think the readers would have liked it.'
She found herself counting, waiting for his response. It seemed to take him fifteen seconds to hear, or at least to frame a response.
'I dare say they wouldn't like it now.'
'But Romeo was madly in love with Rosalind and then with Juliet.'
One, two, three… she reached twenty. 'I suppose we've got used to that.'
She was wondering, Am I like this too? In the theatre, are they having to wait half a minute to get some kind of response from me?
'Stephen, I want to ask you something… no, wait.' He was beginning to walk away from her, his face clenched up. 'You said you were in love with someone before you were in love with Julie. Do you see that now as a sort of trial run for the real thing?'
She thought he was not going to answer, but at last he said, 'But that was quite different.'
'Suppose Goethe had described two passions, both strong, one after another, the first for the maternal woman, a mother figure, and the second the real thing, the grown-up passion? He didn't, so now one of the European archetypes for romantic love is an insipid Anglo-Saxon hausfrau, but the real truth was a fiery passion with Maximiliane. After all, we've all had the experience of saying, I'm in love with So-and-so, because we don't want anyone to know we are in love with someone else.'
It would be easy to believe he had not been listening, but now he said, without an interval, 'They were ready to kill themselves for Lotte. Young Germans. Dozens of them. They threw themselves over cliffs and under horses' hooves.'
'Was that because Lotte was a mother figure?'
'I wonder if my lady was a mother figure,' he remarked, at once, looking straight at her and as if he really wanted her to say yes, or no. As she said neither, he remarked, and he sounded almost cheerful, 'Well, I suppose she was, now I come to think of it. Well, what's the matter with that? She was… Sarah, you'd have liked her, she was… If she had married me then… ' And now he actually laughed, if gruffly, and said, 'I wouldn't have been boring you with all my nonsense all this time.' He put a hand on her arm and began directing her towards the rose garden. He was a man strolling with a friend on a path between rose beds on a sunny afternoon. He was even smiling. She realized just how worried she was about him by the way a weight had lifted off her heart, leaving her feeling positively buoyant.
'I wonder what the Goethe buffs would make of your theory?'
'But he said himself, "It's very pleasant if a new passion awakes with us before the old one has quite faded way." In this case the old faded and the new one arose in a matter of days.'
'Pleasant,' he said.
'He also said, "The greatest happiness is to be found in longing.'"
'Good Lord.'
'And Stendhal would not have disagreed. A pleasure for superior souls, he thought.'
'Barmy,' said Stephen. He came to a stop in the middle of Queen Mary's rose garden, with people all around them admiring the roses. He took his book from his pocket and read to her: ' "The self-image of the sufferer becomes identified with the image of the beloved. Previous failures in love, common in this psychological type, reinforce the present condition because each surrender to the illness adds all past hopes to the present. The sufferer values pain as a guarantee of success this time. And remember that Cupid directs arrows and not roses to his victims.'" They walked on, he holding the book in his hand like a priest with a breviary or a schoolboy swotting for an exam. 'And that isn't so far from Proust,' he added.
'I think Proust's pleasure in self-analysis was stronger than his sufferings over love. As for Stendhal, I think the analysis was a way of surviving the suffering.'
'Like Julie,' he said, and at once, not after fifteen or twenty seconds' delay.
'Whereas Goethe was thoroughly enjoying the drama of it all.'
'Well, he was very young.'
'I wasn't capable of all that when I was very young. Being young was bad enough.' But Sarah was thinking of herself as a child, not as a young woman.
'I do my best never to think of being young. I have a feeling I wouldn't like what I'd remember if I did.'
'Did you know you never mention your parents?'
'Don't I? Well… I don't think I saw much of them. Anyway, they broke up when I was fifteen. I get along with all four of them. When we meet, that is. My father and his wife live in Italy. She's a bit of a lightweight. I've often thought he must regret swapping my mother for her. But I don't think my mother has had regrets. She and her — he's a good chap, actually. They're in Scotland. He's a farmer. He's younger than she is a good bit. By fifteen years or so. They get along all right.'
They were at the gates. When she said she would walk with him to his club, it turned out he was not in his club but at a hotel.
'Can't cope,' he said. 'Conversations, you know. No one expects anything of one at a hotel. The only person I want to talk to is you. You know, Sarah, it's a funny thing: I used to talk a lot to Julie, but now I seem to talk to you.'
Love, Again Page 23
