Sarah carefully asked, 'Have you never found it all too much of a good thing?' Meaning our old friend life, and so Elizabeth understood her.
'Of course I have. Who doesn't? Who doesn't think it's just a bloody farce sometimes? But you simply don't renege. And he did.' And with this, putting behind her the possibility — at least for this time — of understanding the country where pain is so much a cruel king that his subjects would do anything at all to escape, she jumped up, saying, 'This isn't doing any good. What I wanted to say is that I'll keep on all Stephen's commitments — financial, I mean. I am sure he liked your lot more than the other things we do. I'm not sure his preoccupation with Julie — you know, as a person — was always healthy. I don't know if you knew it, but he was really obsessed with the story. I believe that suicides should simply be ignored, not made a fuss of in operas and plays and all that kind of thing. They are a bad example to everyone. Most people are really very weak-minded. One should remember that.' Here she pulled a comb through her hair and then with both hands tried to push the lank — because soaked with tears — locks into place. She gave up and wiped her face with fresh tissues. This time the tears did not spring forth again. 'Sorry about all this, Sarah. I'll send you Stephen's Julie stuff when I've sorted everything out. I suppose that museum should have it. But you decide. And there's something he left for you. No, I haven't looked at it. I saw the first page and that was enough. I don't have much time for that morbid kind of thing.' She handed Sarah a red exercise book, of the kind children use, and strode purposefully out of the room.
The exercise book had stuck on it a white label, and on that was a pencil scribble: This is for Sarah Durham.
The first entry was the date of the first performance of Julie's music at Queen's Gift in June. Day after day there were entries of single comments, thus: 'I didn't know it was possible to feel like this.' 'This longing is like a poison.' 'I think I must be very ill.' 'My heart is so heavy I can hardly carry it around.' 'Surely the word longing isn't right for this degree of longing.' 'I understand what it means to be ill with love.' 'My heart hurts, it hurts.'
The handwriting grew progressively worse. Some entries were nearly illegible. The last entries were scribbled in formless writing, the end of the words straight lines, like the graphs of brain waves, spiky and full of life, but then, as life runs out, a long line going on and on.
The cries from the country of grief are impersonal. I am lonely. I am so unhappy. I love you. I want you. I am sick with love. I am dying of a broken heart. I can't endure this non-life. I can't endure this desert.
They are like bird calls: this is a blackbird, a gull, a crow, a thrush. Or like the songs of Anon:
An Englishman once loved a girl,
Oh woe, oh woe…
(Or Ob-la-da, ob-la-di!)
He heard her singing, lost his head,
She was a French girl, wild and free,
Oh ob-la-da, oh ob-la-di.
They told him she was dead.
Oh woe. Et cetera.
In November, Benjamin came to London on business, making it clear that he was staying for longer than necessary, so as to see Sarah. This was when she hit the peak, or the gulfs, of grief and did not have much energy for anything but a struggle with an enemy so strong she was tempted to do as Stephen had done, simply because she couldn't stand the pain of it. 'I'm not good at pain,' he had said. Well, she wasn't good at it either. She didn't believe in it. What was it for? She read entries in his red exercise book again, those banal words, because her own diary was too dangerous, and asked, with him: What is it that aches? Why should one's physical heart ache? What is this burden I am carrying? It feels like a heavy stone on my heart. Why does it? Oh God.
The year continuing mild, they walked a good deal around London and the parks, often following paths she had known with Stephen. Sometimes she felt she was walking with two men, not one. Stephen certainly was not dead for her, because she seemed to feel his presence close to her — better be careful, look what it had led to with him: did she really want to be possessed by a ghost, in the same way he was? When Stephen was truly dead for her, would she then begin to grieve for him? Or was she grieving for him now? While preoccupied with these thoughts, she had agreeable if sometimes slow and absent-minded conversations with Benjamin. He was entertaining her still. Some of the 'projects' she was sure he invented there and then, though he presented them to her with an emphatic solemnity which was part of the joke.
'How about a van coming to your home full of materials or samples of materials? You know how they make you a suit in twenty-four hours in Hong Kong or Singapore? Well, you'd choose your material, give them something to copy, and you'd have it back in a day.'
'You'll make a fortune on that one, I promise you.'
'You're sure? Well, how about this. We are thinking about reviving Leamington Spa and Bath and Tunbridge Wells — we would add gyms and health clubs and health farms and this new cold water therapy. All it would need is for some VIP to make them fashionable again. The way your royal family did with the old spas.'
'That and a lot of money. You mean you can afford all that and your Kashmiri lake?'
'I must confess that we have decided the Kashmiri lake was a bit too much for us. Money is a bit tighter than it was.'
'But reviving all the spas in Britain — that's all right?'
'I believe in it,' he said. 'This is a downturn, that's all. I'm sure the markets'11 pick up after Christmas.'
So the money men were talking in 1989, just before the new Slump, or, if you like, the Recession.
He told her, too, about his family. It was clear that between the two of them he and his wife made a good deal of money. His children, male and female, were in university and doing well. He showed photographs of them and of his house and of the Associated and Allied Banks of North California and South Oregon. He did this as if reminding himself, as well as her, of the value and worth of his life. Yet time had passed since he had observed her against the glamorous backdrops of Belles Rivieres and Queen's Gift. So how did he see her now? As glamorous still, and her life here in London, which was humdrum and at the moment unbearably so, seemed to him as sophisticated and worldly as the life depicted in books of memoirs about the theatre. Which he said he was reading. Surely her flat must seem to him small, a poor thing compared to the big house he lived in? But her rooms were full of pictures, books, theatre memorabilia, photographs of people she knew as friends or acquaintances but whom he thought of as famous. How did he see her solitary and chaste way of living? He imagined a lover of many years' standing, and remarked that he envied him.
About Stephen's death he spoke angrily and disapprovingly. He could not understand why anyone who had so much could be willing to leave this world. She tried the word depression but saw that for him it was only a word, not more than when someone exclaims, 'Oh hell, I'm depressed today.' Suppose she told him, 'Stephen was living in despair for years' or 'He was in love with a dead woman'? These accurate statements would not leave her tongue. She could not say them to this sane, sensible, and serious man. Did that mean she did not see Stephen as sensible and serious? Yes, but sane, no. She contemplated the word serious. Whatever Benjamin was or was not, he was certainly serious. To be precise, humour, or the ambiguous, was not his gift. With him she was never on that frontier where attitudes can change themselves into their opposites, good and bad reversing themselves with a laugh. More than once she made the kind of joking remark she could share with Stephen, but had to say quickly, 'Sorry, I was only joking; no, I didn't mean it.'
Benjamin thought over — as was his way — what she had said about Stephen, and next day came back with 'But why did Stephen do that awful thing?'
Suddenly impatient, she said, 'Stephen died of a broken heart. There is such a thing, you know. Why it was broken in the first place — well, that is for the psychiatrists. But not everything is curable. The point is, he had been living with a broken heart and he couldn't stand it any longe
r.'
He could positively be heard thinking that broken hearts were not for serious people. 'I'm sorry, but I can't accept that.'
'That's only because you've never had a broken heart.' She knew he was hearing this as a flippant or frivolous remark.
After a while he said, stumbling over it, 'I believed that you and he… I think I told you I envied him.'
'No. We were friends.' She heard her voice shake. But went on, 'Believe me, that was all.' All.
An acute look: he did not believe her. He thought it was a plucky lie. He put his arms around her. 'Poor Sarah,' he murmured into her hair. He laid his cheek against it and then kissed her cheek. She remembered another kiss and stood back, smiling. Smiling, he let her go. They were standing on a pavement. Early afternoon, but lights were coming on in the houses and talked directly to her heart of intimacy, of love. The trees in the square they stood in were wild and full of noisy wind, and underfoot was a thick layer of sycamore leaves, black-webbed and slippery, like cut-off ducks' feet. She thought, If I were to tell this man, even try to tell him, watering it down, making it less, what I've been feeling all the time since I first met him, he would walk quickly away from the lunatic.
They said goodbye, and she said, 'Next year in Belles Rivieres.' When he did not react, she asked, 'Did you ever see the film Last Year in Marienbad? It was about people who remembered different things about what happened the year before, and they were remembering possibilities, different parallel possibilities, too.'
He at once said, 'Believe me, Sarah, I shall never forget one single minute of anything that has happened when I've been with you — with you all.' He added, 'It's certainly an interesting idea. I'll get the video.'
'It's the same idea as the song "I remember it well."' Here she was relieved when he laughed and said that he remembered it well.
It was about then that she got a letter from Andrew.
Dear Sarah,
I am in Arizona, making a film about a screwed-up cop but he has a heart of gold. What screwed him up? His childhood. I never told you about my childhood. It would be taking unfair advantage. Do I have a heart of gold? I have a heart.
I am living with my sister Sandra. She is my real sister from my real mother. She has left her husband, my good friend Hank. She says they have nothing in common. That's after twenty years. She is nearly fifty. She is starting life again. I like her kids. She's got three. We are in a house twelve miles from Tucson among all the sand and the cactuses. Coyotes howl at night. If the TV goes wrong a man arrives from Tucson to mend it within the hour. I did not think this strange until my girlfriend Helen from Wiltshire England said we take too much for granted. But she thinks it's cute. Rather, fascinating. When I said girlfriend, she's one of the women I lay. My sister wants me to marry one of them. Why is it people who were unhappily married are so keen on others doing it? I'd rather marry her. I say this and she laughs at the jest.
I do not think I will achieve marriage. It took me far too long to understand that a man with a childhood screwed up as badly as mine (see above) will not be able to achieve the necessary suspension of disbelief.
I heard Stephen died. He was one hell of a good guy.
Belles Rivieres and Queen's Gift seem a long long way off. In time. But most of all in probability. Do you understand that? Yes you do.
Here comes my date for the evening. Her name is Bella. Have you ever wondered why if it's lust it's easy but if it's love, then… something there is that does not love love, sweet love. Are you surprised I said that, Sarah Durham? Yes, I thought you would be. Which proves my point.
If you ever have a moment in your busy and responsible life, I would value a letter.
Andrew
He enclosed two photographs. One was of your authentic skinny little kid, freckles, crew cut, and a scowl. He held a ferocious-looking gun, presumably a toy, since he was about six. The other was of a man about twenty, lean, handsome, bow-legged, with his arm around the shoulders of a rangy blonde, older than he by a good bit. His stepmother? The hand on her shoulder was protective. She had her arm around his waist and gripped his belt.
At Christmas, trouble with Joyce. Hal liked to take the family to a certain famous hotel in Scotland for Christmas. They persuaded Joyce to go with them. After two nights she ran away and hitched south. 'It really is so unfair of her,' said Anne, as Hal's wife; but as herself: 'Good for her. I loathe all that dressing up and having sherry with so-called important people.'
Joyce turned up at Sarah's a week later. What had she been doing in the meantime? Better not ask. She was bedraggled, smelled bad, and her hair was actually muddy. She looked yellow. Jaundice? Hepatitis? If a test were to be done, would she be HIV positive? Pregnant? Sarah made efficient enquiries.
With her usual smiling casuistry, which is how Sarah experienced it, though Joyce would not know what she meant, Joyce assured Sarah that she could not be pregnant. 'I don't like sex,' she confided.
Should Sarah then say, 'Oh good'? Or, 'Never mind, you'll get the hang of it'? What she actually did was cry, wild tears that took her by surprise. They certainly took Joyce by surprise. 'Why, Sarah,' she murmured, and patted Sarah's heaving shoulders. 'What's the matter?' she enquired dolefully. Like Stephen, she did not like to see Sarah overthrown: one should know one's place on the psychological graph and stick to it.
'Can't you really see that we get worried about you?' howled Sarah, furious.
'Oh dear, oh dear,' said Joyce. She hung about while Sarah wept. Then, in order to do something to please her aunt, she had a bath. When she came back, her hair was washed, and she sat (for the hundredth time?) in Sarah's dressing gown, drying her hair with the hair dryer. Sarah was no longer crying. She watched that hair lose its heavy wetness and, as Joyce combed and combed, become soft sheaves of glittering gold. There sat Sarah, as so often these days, eye to eye with Nature. 'What for? Why? Why bother to give her that hair when you've done her in from the start?' A pretty basic question, really, an all-purpose multidirectional question. An ur-question.
Spring.
Sarah realized that instead of being in pain for every moment of her waking time, instead of coming out of sleep several times a night in tears, instead of the drudge of grief, she was experiencing periods of pain, very bad in the late afternoon and early evening for two to three hours, less in the hours after waking, though they were bad enough. Twice a day, like a tide rolling in. She was actually taking aspirin for the physical pain of grief. In between were long grey flat times when she felt nothing at all. A dead, dry world. At least she was not in pain then, her heart did not feel so heavy that she had to keep moving, or shifting her position to ease the weight of it. In these bleak and empty times she behaved towards herself as people do who suffer from a disability or a disease that causes them sudden attacks of pain: she was wary of anything that might 'bring it on': lines of emotional verse, a glimpse of a black tree against a starry sky, a sentimental tune — she could not bear to listen to the theme song from The Lucky Piece — or, worst of all, turning unexpectedly into a street where she had been with Henry or with Stephen. When the yearning returned, it was impossible to believe that Henry would not walk into her room or telephone her, because he must be needing her as much as she did him. She no longer bothered to tell herself this was lunacy. Anyway, it was passing. Through attacks of pain she held on to that. In the flat calm times, it was not possible to imagine the intensity of grief she had just experienced and would feel again. She knew that quite soon she would not remember, except as a fact, how terrible a time it had been. The pains of childbirth cannot be imagined in between pangs, let alone an hour, a day, a year afterward. One could see that there might be a reason for Nature not wanting the pains of childbirth to be remembered, but why grief pains? Why grief at all? What is it for?
She went back to visit her mother, in another attempt to get answers to questions, but failed. When her daughter — that is, Sarah's — telephoned from California, Sarah asked, 'Were you homesi
ck as a child? When you went off for your summer holidays?' 'I don't remember. Yes, I think I was a bit.' 'Please try to remember.' 'Mother, it wasn't your fault you had to work, was it? Sometimes I did feel sorry for myself because I had a mother who worked. But now I work, don't I?'
In April, Sarah and Mary Ford flew to Montpellier, were met by Jean-Pierre and driven to Belles Rivieres. The weather was not good, that is, it was not good compared to the expectations we unreasonably have for the south of France, where in our imaginations Cezanne's and Van Gogh's suns forever pour down an incomparable light. The sky was a cool pale blue, and a wind flung random cold drops against their faces as they stepped from the car into the new town car park, which was large enough for several coaches and a thousand cars. The charming old market had been demolished to make room for the car park. They had a meal inside Les Collines Rouges, for it was too chilly to sit on the pavement, and drove slowly up through the woods on a new wide road that had been built for the lorries transporting wood for the stadium and would turn out useful for the new hotel to be built half-way up the road, with its car park. This hotel had been, was still, controversial. Jean-Pierre was nervous, with a morose tension gripping his forehead, and he had not been comfortable meeting their eyes since greeting them in the airport building. He had a headache, he said, and joked that everything to do with Julie was a headache now. The town authorities had created a committee to deal with these problems, and his — Jean-Pierre's — wishes seldom coincided with those of the majority. He thought the new big hotel — visible now only as a devastated place full of lorries, cranes, cement slabs, excavators, and the wreckage of oaks and olives and pines — was a mistake, and the car park was a mistake too, for it would be enormous, destined not only for the hotel's visitors. As for the stadium, they would see for themselves. They could already see it as a raw yellow-red wood structure towering enormously above the trees. They murmured that it would look better when it had weathered, but he did not reply, only led them through a gap in the structure to the centre of the amphitheatre. Julie's house had gone, and there was a great round of dull red concrete. No trees were visible over the top of the stadium. A cold wind that made them wish they had on warmer clothes shook the boughs outside.
Love, Again Page 34
