When Sarah's grandmother was dying in hospital — this was a good twenty years ago — Sarah sat with her through the afternoons and evenings of a dark autumn, sometimes with her mother, the dying woman's daughter. In the next bed was an old woman as small and light as a leaf, who called out hour after hour, 'Help, help, help,' in a soft little voice, like the call of a bird. Sometimes she called, 'Help, Mother' — the word Mother on two notes: 'Help, Mo-ther?' the second note rising. 'Help' — while she waited and listened for a reply that never came. 'Help… Mo-ther?'
Sarah's grandmother did not seem to hear. She did not comment or complain. She lay conscious, eyes open, part drugged, taking no notice of her surroundings or, much, of her daughter and granddaughter. The hours, then the days, went past, and Sarah sat on, noting with approval how stoically her grandmother died, but listening to the calls from behind the white curtains. 'Help… help, Mo-ther?'
When it was over, Sarah's mother said, 'I hope I do it as well as she did, when my time comes.'
Months have passed. Sarah is looking into her mirror, just as on the evening when we first saw her. At first glance she has not much changed, but a closer look says otherwise. She has aged by ten years. For one thing, her hair, which for so long remained like a smooth dulled metal, now has grey bands across the front. She has acquired that slow cautious look of the elderly, as if afraid of what they will see around the next corner. Sarah has changed, and so have the rooms she lives in. When her daughter telephoned to say she was bringing the children for Christmas, she saw her flat through the eyes of sunny and unproblematical California. What had seemed so difficult for years became easy. In came the painters, and soon her walls blazed white. She cleared out all the junk, and window sills stood clean and empty, and so did tables and the tops of bookshelves. She felt as if a weight had been lifted away out of her rooms, leaving her lighter and freer too. The Cezanne reproduction she did not discard, though if she had it would not have made any difference, so much was it part of her emotional history. Nor did she discard the little photograph of Julie. These did not have pride of place near her desk but were part of a wall of photographs and posters in the spare room. There her grandchildren had lived for a couple of weeks. They scribbled a moustache on the touch-me-not young Harlequin and put spectacles on the thoughtful Pierrot.
She was still travelling a good deal for The Green Bird, because both Julie Vairon and Julie were doing well in various parts of the world. In between she was living at a slower pace than she had. She would sit for hours, looking into her past, trying to shine light into the dark places, even though the past had become a much less productive territory, because of her mother's death. The old woman had had her wish, for she had fallen dead one morning when she was out shopping. Was Sarah grieving for her? She believed not. She believed she had used up her allowance of grief for her lifetime. What troubled her was that she had not questioned her mother when she could have done, and at the right time, when she was much younger than when Sarah had reached the point of asking herself questions about her childhood. But perhaps Kate Millgreen would not have been able to answer. She had never been a woman much given to self- examination. Well, Sarah hadn't been either, until what she now privately thought of as The Calamity had overwhelmed her: but could anything be absolutely bad that had led to so much new understanding?
One day the thought had popped whole and fully fledged into her head, as if it had been waiting there for her to recognize it: Am I really to believe that the awful, crushing anguish, the longing so terrible it seems one's heart is being squeezed by cruel fingers — all that is only what a baby feels when it is hungry and wants its mother? Is a baby, even if not much larger than a cat, only an empty bag waiting to be filled with milk and then cuddles? That baby is wanting more: it is longing for something just out of its memory; it is longing for where it came from, and when need starts up in its stomach for milk, that need revives another, grander need, just as a small girl may pause in her play, look up, see a sky aflame with sunset and sadness, and find herself stretching up her arms to that lost magnificence and sobbing because she is so utterly exiled.
To fall in love is to remember one is an exile, and that is why the sufferer does not want to be cured, even while crying, 'I can't endure this non-life, I can't endure this desert.'
Another thought, perhaps of a more practical kind: When Cupid aims arrows (not flowers or kisses) at the elderly and old, and brings them to grief, is this one way of hustling people who are in danger of living too long off the stage, to make way for the new?
And whom did she share these thoughts with? With Stephen, though she knew that the sense of him, making him feel so close, like a presence, or another self, was only the projection of her need. And what she was remembering of him was the sweetness of their friendship, a lightness, even the gaiety, of those weeks before he had become hag-ridden, before the murderous black dog had landed with all its weight so finally on his shoulders.
She did not think about Bill, because she could not be bothered with the anger she felt at herself. Besides, that anguishing passion now seemed an irrelevance. A young man — much younger than his years, as unstable as an adolescent — had been magicked by Julie, just like all of them, and, like them all, had not been himself.
She thought of Henry, all right, but only in that realm behind or beyond ordinary life, full of smiles and ease, where — if they chanced to meet — they would at once go on with an interrupted conversation. Unlikely, though: she was taking good care this would not happen.
That place was where once had lived her little brother Hal, when loving him had seemed the only pledge there was or could be for the hope of love.
Her brother of now, however, was certainly not in any other place, for he had taken to turning up in the evenings, unannounced. 'But, Hal, couldn't you telephone first?'
'But you don't have anything much to do, do you?'
He sat himself plumply in the chair she thought of as her visitors' chair, and emanated a hot uncomprehending resentment against her and against everything.
If she said she was busy, he asked, 'What with?'
She might say — humorously, of course, for he had to be humoured — 'I'm writing letters.' 'I'm reading.' 'I'm thinking out a theatre problem.' If she persisted: 'Then I won't disturb your important concerns,' and he rolled away again.
Sometimes, when he arrived and would not go, she might watch him, her little brother, sitting in his high chair, his little mouth moving wetly, his plump hands waving gently beside him, full of the confidence of the loved child.
'But, Sarah, why don't we go and live in France?'
'But, Hal, I like living in London.'
There was news from Briony and Nell, who were friends again with their mother and with Joyce — when she was at home. Anne had reported that Hal was 'seeing' the head of Physiotherapy at the hospital, and with a bit of luck she might take Hal on.
'It does look promising,' Nell told Sarah. 'He said he was going away for a week, and we think he's taking her.'
'Please don't be too nice to him,' Briony said to Sarah, 'or we'll never get him married again.'
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Love, Again Page 37
